at last the blessed
darkness comes and covers us
in its warm embrace
Early December Haiku
cold enough for coats
big round moon in the pale sky
I trudge up the hill
Winter Sun Haiku
winter sun blinds me
and winter sun nurtures me
here, atop this hill
Snow Days
To break a new path through the wordless white
To be alive, heart pumping in the season of death
To be outside and free when others cower indoors
To see and feel and hear and smell what cannot be captured by a camera
The gifts of winter are like the gifts of madness: solitary, irreplaceable, precious in their rarity.
Polar Vortex Haiku
outside the wind blows
beyond wait friends and hot soup
but home’s so cozy
The Lesson of Winter is Perseverance
against bare branches
and the crust of snow
red berries still hang,
saying, “persevere”
the wind stops burning
I feel sun on the face
one moment, then another
Cold Snap Haiku
wind sears the skin
on the hillside in the sun
no way out but through
the cold doesn’t burn
when the sun’s eight fingers high
and the wind is still
waited all year for
this white pine, this blue sky
this empty street
Gratitude List
- warm floors in the morning (radiant heat on the second floor of our townhouse)
- a cat who comes when called
- a cat who’s always willing to purr for you
- that most intimate of moments when you are half-asleep next to your partner of years while the dim winter morning light filters in through the window
- the discomfort that comes from trying new things
- friends to call when winter blues set in
- austere winter landscapes, with bare tree branches and empty skies
- winter sunlight
- walking into a heated building from a wind so cold you have to take off your glasses
Tiny Gratitudes
- Sunflowers painted on the ceiling of an ultrasound exam room
- Getting to an appointment 10 minutes early so I can sit in the car and stop rushing
- Living in a place where the trees are taller than the buildings
- Mentholated cough drops: bits of eucalyptus trees born thousands of miles away, soothing my throat and my lungs
- A tiny white pill that keeps me from breaking into tears every 15 minutes
- Miracle cures that ease cold symptoms, even if they do need to be taken again and again again
- The rain washing down the windshield of the car, softening edges and smearing lights
- The Fort Point Post Office, open 24/7/365, even at 7pm on the Sunday before Christmas
- Working in an industry where skills matter as much as connections
Gratitude Day 15: Moment in the Sun
This morning on my daily walk, the woods were bare, barren, still in disarray after Sandy. Branches and whole trees strewn across the trails, the trails themselves obscured under a carpet of rust-colored oak and beech leaves. I’m fortunate enough to live next to not one but two different pieces of conservation land. On the opposite end of our townhouse complex, past a grove of eastern hemlock, is a circuit through a wetlands, boardwalk in spots, bare earth, rock, and mud in others. Closer to our house are the woods. Maintained by a different municipality, they’re the local stomping grounds of all the discontented youth in the area. We regularly come across the vestiges of bonfires and parties: carcasses of beer cases, crushed and empty cans, glass sparkling among the mica on the granite outcroppings. Once, an entire couch, or rather what remained after most of it was consumed by flame.
This morning, the woods were fully Novembered, bare branches and trunks rising over that russet-brown carpet, and the sky above marshallowed with clouds. The cold nipped along the edges of my fleece and I was glad I’d thought to bring gloves. Underneath though, legs swinging through the empty crunch of the bare woods, I felt myself opening, enlivening, made vital in the way that only the cold air can make one vital. Sweat ran down my stomach, cooled when I stopped to stretch against a boulder at the top of the hill, drove me on to greater exertion to bring my body temperature up again.
On the way back, I picked around the edges of a red oak, its entire crown fallen over a pathway as wide as a street. Someone had already visited the swamp’s pathway, taken a chainsaw to the trunks that had fallen. Who will come to tidy these woods, one small island of wildness in the city of Boston?
Later today, I drove from an off-site meeting to my office under skies still glowering and chill, skies that seemed to promise snow. Instead, at 11:00am, just as I pulled up to parking spot, the sun came slanting through my sun roof. I opened it, and basked for a moment in the November sun.
Garden of Words 