Canada or Siberia that's slapping us?

Judging by the way they look this morning, the Better Half's three amaryllis (amaryllises?), from Christmas of 2017, this year will bloom to celebrate Imbolc (February 2), Valentine's Day (February 14) or Spring Equinox (March 20). We're amazed that they regrew at all. A pair of cardinals has started showing up at one of the feeders. We're still waiting for the chickadees to cheer us with their Spring calls. The sun is shining, but... Well, today we did it.

Winter: cardinal pair

Photo by J. Harrington

Our first local subzero temperatures of this Winter occurred early this morning. It's not clear if the official temperature at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport dropped that low. Up until now we've been setting records for lack of snow and cold. There may be something to those rumors about global warming.

last day of March snow

Photo by J. Harrington

By the end of next month, about ten days after Valentine's, average daily temperatures start reaching above freezing and climb from there. Late February, all of March, and early April can deliver brutal blizzards, but, with luck, melting then occurs fairly quickly after snowfall ends. We're sharing this with you not because we think you may not know about it, but because we're trying to raise our spirits by driving home the realization that, no matter how it feels today, Winter doesn't last forever. I know at least two dogs and one dog owner who are very grateful for that. (The Better Half seems more immune to the cold than we are.)

Good-by and Keep Cold

By Robert Frost

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark

And cold to an orchard so young in the bark

Reminds me of all that can happen to harm

An orchard away at the end of the farm

All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.

I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,

I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse

By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.

(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call

I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall

And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)

I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.

(We made it secure against being, I hope,

By setting it out on a northerly slope.)

No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;

But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.

"How often already you've had to be told,

Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.

Dread fifty above more than fifty below."

I have to be gone for a season or so.

My business awhile is with different trees,

Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,

And such as is done to their wood with an axe—

Maples and birches and tamaracks.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night

And think of an orchard's arboreal plight

When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)

Its heart sinks lower under the sod.

But something has to be left to God.

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

Mary Oliver, requiescat in pace

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has Mark Anthony say “The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.” (Act 3, Scene 2?) Mary Oliver, who yesterday walked on, is an exception that proves Anthony's rule. Her good lives on not only in the memories of those who knew her, but also in the hearts of those who read her poetry and loved it and her through it. We were among the latter. We will miss her good words, her good insights, her good heart, her good instructions in how to write good poetry, her goodness.

days and lives arise

Photo by J. Harrington

and they set

Photo by J. Harrington

Oliver lived much of her adult life in one of our favorite places, Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. Many of the places and creatures she wrote of in her poems are familiar to us since we lived near and visited the Cape often. She depicted the place and its inhabitants and visitors accurately. Unfortunately, her ability to experience an awe awakened by encounters with such places and creatures is all too rare. Many, too many, of us take for granted or, worse, find beneath our notice, the aspects of nature that enabled her to enthrall us. Her simple language is available to each of us. Her appreciation of life shared with nonhuman peoples isn't. More's the pity. She will be missed. She is as much a national treasure as the Cape Cod Seashore. We expect her poems will be as long-lived and resilient as the places she wrote about, cared for, and will always be part of. May she always rest in peace, embraced by the world she so loved. The following link will take you to a list of her published works. If you've not read her, do yourself a favor and pick up any one of them at a book store or library. Learn to see, pay attention, and live.

Some Things The World Gave

by Mary Oliver

1
Times in the morning early
when it rained and the long gray
buildings came forward from darkness
offering their windows for light.

2
Evenings out there on the plains
when sunset donated farms
that yearned so far to the west that the world
centered there and bowed down.

3
A teacher at a country school
walking home past a great marsh
where ducks came gliding in --
she saw the boy out hunting and waved.

4
Silence on a hill where the path ended
and then the forest below
moving in one long whisper
as evening touched the leaves.

5
Shelter in winter that day --
a storm coming, but in the lee
of an island in a cover with friends --
oh, little bright cup of sun.

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