It’s freedom (from frost) season

Here in the North Country, we have definitely left Spring behind and entered Summer mode. Temperatures over 80; thunderstorms in the forecast Tuesday through Friday; and it’s still almost a month until Summer solstice. One of my favorite singers, Janice Joplin, had a great hit with a song titled Get It While You Can. The lyrics and the attitude Janis lived seem at least as needed today as they were when she recorded them five decades plus ago.

it’s swallowtail and monarch season

Photo by J. Harrington

I was doing a few outside chores this afternoon and the bugs and the heat were wearing on my nerves. It turned out that, if I shifted my attention to the beauty of different flowers that were blooming around me, and kept my eyes open so that I could, and did, see the first monarch butterfly of the season, the bugs and the heat were less troublesome than if I continued to focus only on the annoyances and excluded the good parts of the day. Don’t tell our dogs, but I think I’m picking up this attitude adjustment from them. They’re always ready to enjoy food, or a walk, even if they just had a tick pulled from an ear.

We’ll spend part of tomorrow fondly remembering and reminiscing about my father and father-in-law and their service in the armed forces during the last century. It’s sad that the war to end all wars wasn’t; that the Civil War continues to be fought in a very uncivil manner; and that the freedoms the Second World War was fought to protect are threatened in our country by the same kind of attitudes that helped the Nazis gain power. We’ll also celebrate the fact that we will officially be beyond the threat of frost season after tomorrow.

May we all have a holiday full of better memories.

So Much Happiness

Naomi Shihab Nye - 1952-

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.