The Gathering

There are two times of the year, the spring and the fall, when Gary and I take pilgrimages over to the 480 acre swamp at Van Patten Road west of Shiocton.  In the spring, the swamp serves as a resting spot for migrating waterfowl.  In the fall, it is a gathering spot for several species of birds preparing for the journey south.

This evening, we threw our cameras and binoculars into the van and took a drive to see what was happening out there.  The cold nights and sunny days bring on those instincts that the birds have survived with for centuries.  Sure enough, thousands of blackbirds were raising their voices in the reeds until in a sudden spasm of excitement, they rose up, swirling around in huge masses, yet never ever running into each other.  It's an aerodynamic miracle.  Then they settled into the grasses and began to sing again.

Mallards flew by quacking and from time to time, duck hunters' rifles popped.  So far as we could see from the observation deck, none of them managed to shoot anything.

As the sun was setting, we spotted the great blue herons, also gathering for their flight south.  In one flock, Gary counted 42 and gave up.  We had never seen so many great blues in one spot.

In final glory, the sun went down and we called it a night.

We came home tired and bedazzled.  Forget yesterday's nothingness.  This was really something!

Nothing

I'm mostly an upbeat person but today was one of those off days. Gray, gloomy, and cold, the winds of winter setting upon me and sinking into my soul. The days are getting shorter and shorter. I couldn't get to sleep last night and wound up watching television to the wee hours. That left me tired and grumpy all day. These are the days I obsess about the declining political, social, and environmental climates.

Tonight I suddenly thought of a group from the 1960's, a hangover from the Beat Era, the Village Fugs. (Still performing, they have a website: www.thefugs.com ) I had their first album, but the only song I remember was a precursor to hip hop, shouted out rather than sung. It was “Nothing”.

“Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing, Wednesday and Thursday nothing, Friday for a change, a little more nothing, Saturday once more nothing.”

Then they went on to chant about everything that was meaningless.
“Poetry nothing, music nothing, thinking and dancing nothing. The world’s great books, a great set of nothing.”

And then the political figures of the day: “Stevenson nothing, Humphrey nothing, Averell Harriman nothing. John Stuart Mill nill-nill, Franklin Delano Nothing. Carlos Marx nothing, Engels nothing, Bakunin Kropotkin — nyuthing! Leon Trotsky, lots of nothing. Stalin less than nothing!”

“Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, a whole lot of, a whole lot of nothing. Nothing, lots and lots of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

It's been a long time since the 1960's, but you, know, there's still a lot of nothing around.

I think it's time to start taking St. John's wort again.

You can listen to "Nothing" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HmJX11_AQE

Tomato Harvest

With frost warnings out for Northeast and Central Wisconsin, I picked every tomato that looked like it was getting ripe and put all of them on the kitchen window ledge.

There are green tomatoes out there yet and my garden is usually protected from the worst, so there might be more to come.  If these are the last, they go into salsa or spaghetti sauce.

The green beans and zucchini have been gathered and dealt with.

I still have to collect some oregano and dry it.  We'll pick apples later this month with grandson Evan and Those People He Lives With, as his parents are known. He'll help with the apple corer and slicer so we can dehydrate and have some apple chips for the winter. I'll bake apple scones, muffins and bread for the freezer.

I almost feel Amish on these harvest days!

Sound of Silence

I didn't watch the 9-11 memorial service on television, I was at church for most of it, plus I don't usually watch such things.

However, friends have been sending me the link to Paul Simon's performance of the "Sound of Silence" with the comment that it brought them to tears.  Yet certainly when Simon wrote the song in 1964 it had nothing to do with such a tragedy and could hardly speak to the audience he had on Sunday.

"And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the signs said the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence."

In the 1960's, the song spoke to me about conformity, sterility and the sadness of life, akin to T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland."

The real question in my mind is why Simon decided to sing this particular song.  Was it because of the nation torn apart we've become since 2011?  That saddens me as much as the loss of life on that day.

"Silence like a cancer grows."

What do you think?  

Home Again

Gary finally returned from the national forest after almost six weeks of camping.   Like me, he has to adjust to his bed.

Rascal is in heaven with both of his people home.  "Two laps, no waiting," he happily purrs.  Even better, he knows that we will lose track of which of us has fed him, so he will get extra servings. The nosh situation has improved.

The weather is turning cold.  By tomorrow night, we may well have frost.  I'll pick all the tomatoes that are just beginning to turn red and put them on the ledge of the kitchen window to finish ripening.  The last of the green beans are in the freezer. I want to dry some oregano tomorrow.

Now is the time to organize my winter writing projects.  I am writing a book about my trip west.  There's that novel to finish, too.  I'm at the end of the second draft.

Getting back into the swing of writing is not all that easy.  This blog has been good that way.  It kept me at the keyboard over the summer, even when the sunniest days called me away.

Now it's time to get serious.

Bargains and Books

It's been a summer of bargains, mostly at thrift shops. In the past month, I've bought three swimsuits for 10 cents, a Columbia summer raincoat for 50 cents, a leather purse perfect for my needs for $1.50, shorts, sweaters, and tee-shirts, usually for 25 cents each.

This past week I found a photo scrapbook at a St. Vincent de Paul in Bessemer, Michigan. It's the same kind I've used for the past 35 years to document my life.  I fill one each New Year's Eve. (This year there will be two with all the traveling I've done.)  There are 41 of these scrapbooks so far.. But now the places I used to purchase them no longer carry them as we enter the digital age.   People store their photos on CDs, not in scrapbooks.  I still like turning pages with photos neatly labeled, so two dollars was a good price.

On Saturday, Chris, Tisha and Evan came to Seymour for our citywide rummage sale.  One would expect to find more bargains when there were over 100 sales going on, but these vendors were out to make money, so the prices were higher than I was willing to pay.   I came home with only one good purchase, a sleeveless shirt.

We had fun looking though, and Tisha found dozens of good books for Evan. That little boy has two overflowing bookcases. His mommy reads to him every night and now he is moving from picture books to chapter books.   He is reading for himself these days, too.

That makes his grandmother happier than any bargains she can find.

Forever? Never?

Today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks in New York City and Washington...and the crash in Pennsylvania.  Once again, we are told we will never forget, that we will remember forever.  I doubt it.  If there is one thing that Americans do best it is to forget and get on with things.

A couple of decades ago, I was at a dinner in Scotland. There was a bowl of water in the center of the table and when the host or one of his friends made a toast, they waved their glasses "over the water".  They were royalists still waiting for the return of the Stuarts, their "rightful rulers", the last of whom lived "over the water" in France and remembering the battle of Culloden, that took place in 1746. There, the last Stuart to set foot on the island, Bonnie Prince Charlie, lost and fled.  Over two hundred years later, these Scots were still obsessing about it. I suppose they continued that way until the last of the Stuarts, the Count of Paris, died.

The deadly Bosnian War with its ethnic cleansing, fought between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia during 1991-1996, was caused by a hatred that dated back to a battle a thousand years before. These were people who excelled at remembering, at never forgetting.   A good thing?  I think not.

In contrast, the Japanese and Germans are today American allies.  We can buy products in our stores manufactured in Vietnam. We somehow managed to make friends of former enemies.

The Oklahoma City bombing is remembered only to those who lost family members or tourists who visit the memorial. So it will be in time in NYC and Washington, DC when the monuments are built and the anniversaries no longer celebrated.

Today, I asked a young woman at the aquatic center if she could tell me what happened on December 7, 1941, and she didn't have a clue.  Even older people I talk to have no idea how many were killed at Pearl Harbor.  Our history recedes.  We forget.  We move on.

That is as it should be.