Tag: nature

As the birds fly south

November 14th, 2015

It’s time to start cooking winter foods: chili, soups, casseroles. Hearty meals that warm you from the inside. As the birds fly south, it’s time to invest in hot cocoa and Baileys.

I wonder what it’s like up there for those birds on the long, autumn journeys south. Do they talk? How do they know where they’re going, and do they revisit the same place every year?

Think of it way up there. Ahead: sky, clouds, the curvature of the earth. Cragged mountains on the horizon — snow-capped in the western United States, domes of skeleton trees in the east. If the birds fly before the leaves drop, then in the east they would see domes of harvest colors: orange, gold, scarlet, brown.

Below, the birds would see patchworks of farm land: green, yellow, and brown quilts. They’d see the squiggles of rivers, the the density of trees in a park surrounded by roads and development; they’d see the world at a scale we rarely see as humans, unless we travel in airplanes a lot.

What a way to be. To travel great distances every year, seeking a climate that suits the season, covering vast expanses of of earth and sky, watching it all, unencumbered by the shield of a car and a seatbelt, or the encasement of an airplane, or even the chin strap of a helmet.

Thank you to Grumpy Axolotl for the prompt “As the birds fly south.”

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Sand

November 10th, 2015

I grew up on Tybee Island, Georgia, where we spent nearly every summer weekend at the beach, on sand. I love sand under my bare feet, especially underwater. I love how sand is golden in the shallows of southern east coast beaches. It sparkles in morning and evening sunlight, and it’s firm under my feet but soft between my toes.

At low tide, when the Atlantic is calm and flat, you can shuffle your feet in the sand off the beach to feel for the hard disks of sand dollars. I used to love finding sand dollars, to lift them above the green water and watch their hundreds of bristle legs glisten in the sunlight.

Later we moved to Florida’s Gulf coast, where the sand is white and fine. The sand there contains limestone and bleached seashells in addition to the quartz grains that dominates both Gulf and East coast sand — quartz from the Appalachian mountains we now live in.

This is my favorite thing about sand: its origins. I remember learning about sand in elementary school, or maybe in earth science in 8th grade — about how the sand on our beaches at Tybee Island used to be stone at the top of Appalachian mountains. How it is old. So old thtat it was once solid rock, but eroded into smaller stones, then got pummeled into smaller and smaller bits as it worked its way down rivers, until eventually it was ground to the tan quartz sand of our beaches. When you hold a handful in the light, you can see sparkling bits of mica, and the orange tint of iron in the glittering quartz.

I’ve heard the Appalachians mocked by folks in western states. They laugh, “Those are hills, not mountains.” The sight of them may not stagger, but the the Appalachians are mountains. They are old mountains. So old they’ve rounded off in their age. So old they’ve worn down. So old that they are subtle, not imposing; they are soft not jagged. The are old enough that they span solid earth to fine grains of sand, and have spread, from mountaintop to coastal plain.

Photo credit: Sand Structures by fdecomite

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Ice

November 8th, 2015

I am ready for winter. Glittering palaces of ice where waterfalls once flowed. Crystal ornaments in trees, where dew drops froze. A smooth flat of ice on puddles and ponds — skating rinks for the right sized feet.

One of my favorite books is The Snow Child. Much of my love for that book is for the delicate descriptions of winter, snow, and ice. The Snow Child is set in interior Alaska, and the author Eowyn Ivey makes me want to disappear into her shimmering snowscape.

Unlike most fantasy, where the villain occupies any icy peak and threatens to kill with cold — as if eternal winter were a more exacting hell than eternal fire — The Snow Child is stunning in its portrayal of the tundra beauty. Beryl glaciers. Glowing blue spires of ice. White snow with berries like rubies poking through. Ivey’s prose sparkles like snow in moonlight.

Here in Blacksburg, the ice is like silver. I don’t remember many wet storms during our winters in Minnesota — it was too cold for much besides dry powdery snow — but Appalachia knows how to throw an ice storm. Limbs droop under the weight of shining crusts, leaves drip with streams of water frozen mid-drop, roofs and roods glisten with sheets of slick black ice, and when the sun comes up, the whole world glitters as if encrusted in diamonds.

Ice can be treacherous — when the power goes out and you don’t have a backup heat source, or when you have to drive somewhere and you fear for your life — but if you remove those annoyances, if you bundle up and take a walk out in the frozen, silent world, ice can be one of life’s great glories.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Wildflowers

November 7th, 2015

Waving in the wind, white faces of daisies, pink petals of cosmos. On the ground, sprinkles of periwinkle, or the white stars of asters at the mossy bases of shady trees. Trillium in the understory of a mountaiside forest. Masses of yellow dandelions and white clover and purple thistle and all their weedy green leaves on the open prairie.

I love them all.

Butter yellow daffodils on the Georgia roadsides between Savannah and Athens. Pink lady slippers on Old Rag in Shenendoah. The white peep of dogwood flowers in spring, when all the forest branches are brown and bare and you can see through to the interior of the woods to glimpse sprays of white on the dogwoods, the first of spring bloomers.

In Virginia, the magenta of redbuds along the interstate: so bright, so intense, so crazy beautiful you think they must have been planted. But their placement is irregular. There are seven trees in an uneven clump, a couple scattered behind at the edge of the forest. Another two over there, a thicket up the road.

They are wild.

I don’t know that there are many things that delight me more than finding flowers out in nature. They still surprise me, after all this time. “This beautiful thing just grows here. Nobody planted it. It exists without our interference or initiation.”

On hikes, I spend frame after frame on photographing flowers. Even if they are the little junk flowers that are everywhere in the world. They are magical. They are designed to attract. To attract pollinators who will ensure their survival.

And to attract me, who merely admires them.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Rocks

April 27th, 2015

It’s funny, the word rocks is much harsher to me than the word stones. I don’t know why I seeded my prompt box with rocks when I prefer stones. Rocks are jagged and rough, while stones are smooth and round. Is that true or is that just the way I see them?

When I think of rocks I see dsuty gravel, grey granite shards with glints of quartz or mica, the rocks themselves planed and angular, bumpy with unclean breaks. Triangles protrude from a pile looking jagged and dangerous. Unwelcoming.

Jetties are rocks. Rocks are young. They haven’t been exposed long enough to be worn smooth by weather or water.

Stones, though. Stones are smooth and rounded. Domes of shiny grey on a Maine beach. They are welcoming. They fit in the palm of your hand and are comforting in their age and smoothness. They are old. They have clinked together on the shore for thousands of years. Each time a wave washes over them, then sucks back out to sea, they chink together as they roll with the surf, rubbing bits of each other off, grain by grain, until there are no rough edges left. Despite their hardness, despite their heaviness, they are soft to the touch — soft on the surface like fabric, like velvet or suede when you rub your thumb across their faces. Except they aren’t really soft. They are hard. Sturdy and grounding.

We have stones from Maine scattered around our house. Our daughter uses one as a doorstop. Others lay atop a book shelf in the basement. They comfort me. Pieces of earth. Unglamorous. They aren’t gemstones. They aren’t crystals. They are basic granite stones that have been worn smooth by the passage of time. By existence. Yet in their age and smoothness they are still solid. Still strong.
All those feathers

April 20th, 2015

All those feathers in our down comforter, in our pillows, in all the pillows and feather beds and nests of the world. They are hidden away in those places, but I think of them bursting out and flying free and floating, drifting on air pockets like little boats till they land softly, silently, onto the skin of a lake, like those insects — water gliders? Water skiers? What are those those things called with the long legs and they skate on the surface of the water? It doesn’t matter.

All those feathers on the surface of lakes, drawing your eye to their softness, making the water look hard, like sliver glass that would cut you like the sharp edges of a mirror, but if you dip your hand to catch the feather, your hand goes in smoothly, the water cool and soft, not sharp or hard-edged at all. And if you pull the feather out it’s no longer fluffy and downy like a soft-edged boat, like a fur-lined coat. It is scraggly and bedraggled, bony and dark, weighted down and dripping, skeletal and heavy in air where only moments before it was light and wispy in water.

What would fish see from below of those feathers sailing on the surface? A tiny rib? How much would break the surface, if any, and how much would the fish see that is out of the water? Probably not much, unless it is a flounder or a walleye lying on the bottom with both eyes up because all the other fishes’ eyes are on the sides of their heads looking sideways not up, and a flounder wouldn’t be in a lake anyway because it’s a saltwater fish. So forget the fish and the feathers and just think about the birds and their down, and how warm it might be in the pit of a bird wing, where geese slip their bills on cold days – for warmth?

I know nothing about birds except that blue is not always blue. I saw a bluebird with a friend and she said there’s a blue bird and I said but it’s not blue (it was red) and she said, oh but it is, just not at the angle you’re looking right now. Their feathers refract light differently at different angles and it’s blue though you may not see it that way.

Photo Credit: Feather from a swan, floating on Hatchet Pond by Jim Champion

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just trying to get back into the writing habit.

Tag: nature

As the birds fly south

Sand

Ice

Wildflowers

Rocks

All those feathers