As January prepares to leave....

 A (late) January thaw is on its way. The combination of days of bitter cold and a barrage of Executive Orders has put a major crimp in my sunny personality. I confess to spending entirely too much time sitting and brooding and bitching. Several days of even mild melting may also help thaw my grumpiness, I hope. The fact that Minnesota’s legislature is a dysfunctional mess doesn’t really improve one’s outlook on the state of the state, the country, or the world.

pileated woodpecker at suet feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

Backyard sightings of deer or turkeys have been slim to none, although there are deer tracks in the snow behind the house where they’ve been searching for acorns under the snow at night. So far, no pileated woodpeckers have visited the suet feeder, at least while we were watching. 

On to more pleasant themes: my forced bulb garden is developing nicely. The dogs appreciate the slight improvement in temperatures. My sourdough bread is improving as I get back to baking more frequently. We’re approaching Valentine’s season. The Vikings didn’t tease us along only to break our hearts again. The best parts of the year are still ahead of us and I’ve lots of good books to read to get through the rest of winter. (Spring Equinox is 52 days away. Meteorological Spring begins March 1.)

Joy Harjo’s poem seems to capture only too well the times and the season we’re living through. Pllease be kind to each other.

Grace

Joy Harjo
1951 – 

                                    For Darlene Wind and James Welch

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn't stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. 

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. 

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn't; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it. 

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Please be kind to each other while you can.