i ran into an artist today
i never met before
he passed away
some years back
but left a little video,
an old man at work
en plein air
in the rice fields
a steel bucket of water
at his side

in my room
i watch the artist
on his video
he washes the paint
from his hands
the sunlight from the rice field
flickers on my screen
the artist speaks
i look at the steel bucket
by my closet door

Although I lived in Texas, the first time I heard Jimmie Dale Gilmore's voice and sweet Texas guitar was riding among friends after a hike near Mount Baker in the state of Washington. 'You gotta hear this' we were told as we bounced around the vehicle and here was this distinctive, pure and sweet whining voice that seemed to fit right in the beauty of the vistas of the Cascade Mountains. There he was, singing 'My Mind's Got a Mind of Its Own'. What was this? It was new, and it was very old, taking us back to early Texas music. We got home, and had to get some of our own - a cassette tape whose title was the same as his name. It got played over and over and over.

We managed to hear him perform a couple of times, once at the University of Texas Cactus Cafe, and once at Deep Eddy, an Austin spring-fed swimming pool just off the Colorado River, shaded by great cottonwood trees. Here was a musician characterized by a deep-rooted calm; he seemed no more egotistical than the trees.

the needle pierces the fabric
and slides through
bearing thread of gold
or black
blue or rust
be it embroidery
for a queen's stole
or darning a hole
in the surplice of a priest -
a meditative pleasure
the tiny knot of stitches
the little rose

Nearly a year ago, I picked up my dad, who was 87 at the time, and brought him home to Louisiana where he had lived all his life before he moved to a 'retirement home' in another state four years previously. It was possible for me, a divorcee with grown children, to move from Texas to do this. He and I now live together in a rental home. He can have his gumbo and boudin when he wishes, and has final say over the options in his life.

I haven't written about this because it is just him and I here (and a stream of invaluable caregivers). Blogging about the one person who is sharing your home life can be risky for a relationship! But though there are some concerns about our living situation, I have no regrets about the decision to be with Dad at this time. The evening mealtime we share daily now is something I hold dear. Sometimes we step out of the usual flow of our lives to partake in an opportunity to live in the slow lane, to see and experience what we flew by in the past, to learn the stuff life is made of, to know the full cycle of love.

surfing

I've been surfing the web in the wee hours of the morning, hoping for something to go, aha! here's a word, thought, experience that will trigger a bit of writing for the blog.

I started by researching the term Newsweek. The first magazine I ever subscribed to once I was living away from my childhood home was Newsweek. Coming from a family that subscribed to US News and World Report, Newsweek was a visual and visceral delight. For a while in the 1970s, I saved many of the issues in my little grad school dorm room until I realized how impractical it was weight-wise for someone who had yet to settle down to try moving boxes of Newsweeks around with me. Today, it occurred to me I haven't read a Newsweek in awhile, and that I'm curious about things like what's coming up on Broadway, which I used to like to read about even though I've never been within a stone's throw of Broadway.

After reading on Wiki about Newsweek's peculiar last years as a print magazine, I looked up rooster, but came first across a video of Haystack Rock on the Pacific coast with the tide going out. After I watched the video of a beach without waves, I read up on roosters. That lead to a search regarding Easter chicks - as the only rooster I ever owned had his start in life as a tiny fluffy gift from the Easter Bunny. Were all Easter chicks male, with farmers keeping the females who had an egg-laying future? After finding links to confections and movies with the word 'Chicks' in it, I've come to realize life has become way too surreal to confidently and comfortably read, much less write, about anything tonight.

Today I saw a long-ago image of a very small boy playing a carved flute who looked to be suffering some true misery. This bothered me, and I looked at it several times, even though, as I said, whatever was going on happened long ago, so long ago that it's unlikely he's still among the living. Finally, in my mind I leaned toward him, and whispered some words, and offered him drink, and gently swabbed his face with a warm damp cloth.

The dog across the street - he turns his back to me when I come out the door, and freezes. He doesn't bark. That's how he acknowledges my presence. Sweetie knows it's me. He doesn't care if my hair is combed, or my shoes are worn. He barks at passersby, but not at my abrupt appearance. In the past, friendly neighbor dogs used to run up to greet me, lick my hand, sniff my shoes to see where I'd been, and what other dogs had come my way. Sometimes they'd jump and let their forepaws rest against my legs or waist. But Sweetie just turns as though to say, I trust you. I don't have to watch where you're going or sniff where you been. You're cool. I can feel his inner salute.

Last year, I went to the Juneteenth Parade in Austin, Texas. There were lots of people and activity, folks sitting on chairs, fanning themselves in the heat, kids running up to the floats to catch a handful of candy and bubble gum. But the person I remember most was standing completely still. She wasn't even close or looking my way, but she caught my attention. She was small, crinkled with the years, and dressed like the Statue of Liberty, and I tell you what - she was vibrating with a kind of fury and strength, holding her cardboard torch high.

Piku, I believe, are an American invention, a spinoff from the Japanese poetry form known as haiku. Instead of the 17 syllable structure of haiku, piku are based on the infinite number 'pi' (rounded off to 3.14 in the most simple piku format). The first line has 3 syllables, the second line has 1 syllable, and the third has 4. Below is an experimental attempt at a piku, which I wrote on 'Pi Day', 3-14-2012.


were we two
thou
sand years apart?

My first post on 'grandfather's shirt' occurred on the winter solstice of 2012. Today is the summer solstice, 2013, the longest day. I've come upon a poem I wrote near the winter solstice but at the time, it seemed too unfinished to post.

winter solstice and the end of the world
12-21-12


the radio's playing
from Dripping Springs, Texas
the candle's on fire

and that's all.
sitting in a folding chair
knitting under a folding sky

running the pleated mile
tomorrow or yesterday,
I'm wearing grandfather's shirt.

'i just can't let the world end
without hearing the king
one more time,'

the dj says,
diving into the longest night
to greet the shortest day.

First through third grade in the early 1960s, we learned arithmetic with the aid of an abacus our parents purchased in September at the beginning of the school year. Now, plastic is not my favorite material for tools and equipment, but I acknowledge the plastic abacus was a thing of beauty. Smaller than the one illustrated above, it had a dark colored frame with four spindles, each divided into a lower and an upper level. There were five beads on each lower level (for single units), and two on top (for fives). The first spindle (onesies) on the far right had translucent green beads, like candy Life Savers. The second column (tensies) had transparent red beads. Not sure, but the beads on the third spindle for hundreds may have been yellow, and perhaps the fourth, for thousands, were in blue. You counted out a number below, and traded five below for a bead on top. When you reached ten, you traded the two beads on top for a bead on the next column.

The new abacus was colorful, gleaming, more like a toy gift under a Christmas tree than a work aid. But it was very useful. Instead of just memorizing addition and subtraction tables, we could visualize and touch the numbers, and experience what 2 plus 9 meant, the logical process of adding, rather than just learning verbal labels for the answers. I can still see the colorful beads of my very own abacus, twinkling on the top of my school desk, so thrilling.


(I found the above image via Google images. The URL is http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/abacus.gif
I found no information about conditions for use, but I suspect it's ok to share it in this way. The number on the abacus above, by the way, would be 123,456)

on poop

If words like 'poop', or discussions of body functions, make you anxious, then WARNING! WARNING! You may not wish to read any further.

But if you're feeling curious, please feel free to read on.

As far as I know, everybody poops. People, cats, dogs, anteaters, frogs, deer, and cute little bunnies. You take food in, your body digests it. Digestion permits the distribution of fuel and nutrients to the body. What's left over comes out the other end. The roughage etc (that helped everything pass through yards of intestine) is no longer needed. Those remnants pass through. The excreted substances and bacteria replenish the soil to help grow more food.

Poop (also known as shit, crap, BM [bowel movement]) is used by nature in other ways. For example, some insects house their eggs in animal poop. This provides insulation from the harsh weather, and protection from being eaten by other creatures. (One of my favorite most fascinating insects is the dung beetle [dung being another poop synonym].)

Some thirty years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the employee library at Crater Lake National Park. The library had a number of reference books so that rangers (who were like apprentice naturalists, learning from the more experienced rangers) could study up and identify the different trees, wildflowers, birds, butterflies, and mammals that were part of the park.

The only book that remains in my memory, though, was an old reference book (1930s?) on animal footprints and scat ('scat' being another synonym for poop). The book listed the many mammals that lived in the park - grizzlies and black bears, foxes, marmots, chipmunks, golden mantled ground squirrels, porcupines, etc, etc. For each mammal, there was a brief description and two photos: fox footprints here, fox scat there. (Scat for every animal looks different because different animals eat different foods, and because the body aperture for the release of the scat varies in size and design for different species. Rabbit poop looks like little grassy pellets. Bear poop comes in large pie-shaped plops.)

The book was fascinating and very very useful because when walking on the park trails, you could tell what creatures were currently in the same area with you, and how recently they had come through. It's interesting to know which animals inhabit the different habitats in the park, and its important to know if you're thinking of picnicking in a favorite grizzly bear hangout. The scat on the trail is like a calling card from the grizzly: 'yep, we're here too, so mind your manners.' It's good to know the difference between the calling card of a raccoon, and that of a bobcat.

As a kid, I grew up in a rural area in south central Louisiana, and we always had a few goats or chickens, or a pony. City people would pay us a call sometimes in spring, offering to shovel out the barn and carry off the animal manure (another synonym for poop) to fertilize their vegetable and flower gardens. When I lived in Austin, Texas - a popular gardening product was bagged Mexican Free-Tailed Bat guano or droppings (two more synonyms!) which was collected locally and considered an especially valuable garden enhancer. (I wonder if someday they'll be selling bags of dog poop - would that be a fertilizer equal to that produced by chickens and cows?)

We're taught to fear poop in western cultures because, depending on what you like to eat (meat diet producing more stink than vegetable diets), the smell can be unpleasant, and there are concerns about bacteria that cause diseases. It's helpful to realize that except for humans who leave their droppings in sanitized porcelain plumbing, the excretions of the other creatures in the wild are deposited directly back to the earth where it is promptly recycled by numberless plants, insects, and wildlife. So, yes, I'm glad we wash our hands, but we can relax a bit, too. This is something we all have in common, and it is an integral part of the cycle of life on our dear planet earth.

Musicians & Whales

'Sittin on the Dock of the Bay' - Otis Redding
'Papa Was a Rolling Stone' - The Temptations
'Thick as a Brick' - Jethro Tull
'Only Living Boy in New York' - Simon and Garfunkel
'Listening Wind' - Talking Heads
'Overload' - Talking Heads

Several times a week, I go exploring on YouTube.com. Today, I listened to the above songs.

Some days I listen better than others, and today it seemed I could hear the whole of the recording, and simultaneously, I could hear each separate instrument and voice that went into the recording. Sometimes, like many people do these days, I'll listen to the same song several times over. I have a past history of doing that with the last three on this list.

Listening today then lead to a search to hear the vocalizations of whales, which I found on YouTube and also via Wikipedia. Perhaps a year ago, whales started surfacing in my art work without conscious intention on my part, and i came to understand that in some way whales permeate our existence. Today, I could hear their call filtering through the music these musicians made.

Though a glass of wine often accompanies my meal at supper, I don't know much about wines. So please give me wide berth as I introduce a topic I admit I only just now read about. It's called 'solera'.

I'm especially fond of sherry - and once had a glass of port that was divine. One sip moves your soul to heavenly times and places. The process of solera (or 'fractional blending') is used in the production of both of these. As I understand it from my brief research tonight (using sources that may be reliable or not so reliable), solera requires the use of multiple barrels to age these special wines. Imagine the barrels in a row, from oldest to youngest. Wine is taken from the first barrel, the oldest barrel, and corked in a bottle. That same amount is now removed from the second barrel and added to the first barrel, which thus becomes full again. Wine is now removed from the third barrel into the second, the fourth barrel into the third, the fifth into the sixth, sixth into seventh and so on, until at the last barrel, new wine is added.

No barrel is ever emptied or cleaned. In this way, every bottle of wine corked has aged together with some of the very first batch, which could be from centuries ago, and every bottle contains product from every wine added since. This connects each sip to earth, seasons, and people of long ago, to grapes and berries harvested under many moons, across many cycles around the sun.

If this is accurate, I now understand and appreciate what gives fragrant sherry and port their reach and mystery.

We lived in Pullman, Washington and, young students, we had a little hand-me-down black and white Zenith TV set. One year in the late 1970s a local TV station played a different Bette Davis movie every weekend. At that time, many of her movies were already 30 to 40 years old, and they took the viewer back to the early history of film making. Most were in black and white, so we didn't miss anything by watching them on our TV (a portable in a wheeled metal wire cart). The settings and plots hinted at the nature of the decades before I was born, and were fascinating from a somewhat Hollywoodized historical perspective. A number were period pieces (the old south - still raw from the effects of the Civil War - was popular) and addressed the history of the times. But what intrigued me is what our parents' generation had considered entertaining, and what social mores were evident in these productions. (Ahem - they didn't exactly match what was being reported at that time about the righteous life before rock and roll!)

Bette Davis was an extraordinary, versatile actress, playing a range of interesting characters. There were cruel, domineering vixens, and those that were softer and fragile. She wasn't beautiful in a classical Miss America way, but, with flashing, bulging eyes, was visually arresting. The energy of her personality was arresting. In interviews, she was clever, amusing and sometimes caustic. I had formerly thought of her as a Hollywood creation - a human being that was kind of dressed up for show. But once I saw a few of her movies ('Dark Victory' is the only one I recall at the moment) I understood. Her depth and presence captivated the audience, and carried them on unexpected journeys of human experience. She was an actress of high caliber.

At that time, the concept of rental movies was in its infancy. Movie rental was not yet available in Pullman. We had no home equipment to play videos! So to see this series on locally broadcast TV was a special treat, entertaining and educational, an inspired offering from the small town station.

celestial whales
sail by
beyond the surface
of the sky
and so we rest

the candle flickers
near the glass
dimly lit
by streetlights
and the moon sets


it was such a hot day
and on this
not quite summer night
of silent whales
and candlelight
we dream

The educational activities of first through third grades in the early 1960s included singing together. The songs of those first three years are anchored in my memory:

'There once was an Indian maid, a shy little prairie maid ...'

'I have a mule, her name is Sal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal ...'

'Around the world I searched for you ...'

'Bells are ringing, hearts are singing...'

There were Christmas carols, even in Latin, like 'Adeste Fidelis', and Month of May songs praising Mary.

The songs we sang on the playground at recess were more lively. With our parents having come out of the military life of WWII, we knew gems like 'Oh, I don't wanna go to war no more; Gee, Ma, I wanna go home...'.

There were traditional schoolyard favorites like 'Did you ever think that you would die and see the hearses as they pass by...'. There was one about a meatball rolling away down the hall, and one about a racehorse named Stewball. There were the popular songs on the radio like 'Que Sera' and 'Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini' and the 'One-eyed, One-horned Flying Purple People Eater'.

Makes me wonder, how our brains are wired that a bunch of kids might erupt into melody about finding a peanut on the ground, and take great pleasure in the singing. And did it bring pleasure to those within earshot?

What if there were a single plant that would shower down nourishing, tasty food nearly every autumn for over a couple hundred years? Food that humans, and a number of mammals, insects and birds, can thrive on? What if that food came pre-sealed in such a way that it had a shelf life of over a year, possibly over five years, so you could enjoy it all winter, or next summer? Now that would be a gift, a plant to protect, nurture and write songs about!

Well, there happens to be such a treasure: the pecan tree. This gorgeous tree lives long, grows way high, is a source of shade, oxygen, and attractive wood. The nutmeat is well preserved within handsome, hard shells. The trees have such a lifespan that they could easily feed one's great-grandchildren, and they did so for the native Americans who lived here across the centuries past.

(A thank you to the two great pecans that graced our front yard the many years my parents lived there: 1961 to 2008.)

a nod to the old moon

You hear people speak of the 'new moon', that slender crescent that appears just after sunset every lunar month. But it's less common to hear of the 'old moon'. That's because most of us are asleep when it shows up, rising in the east just before dawn.

The old moon (waning crescent) looks little different from the new, a silvery sliver of a fingernail. But it appears in the east rather than the west, in the early morning rather than the early evening, and it seems to lead the sun up over the horizon, while the new moon seems to follow the sun down below the horizon.

I've suffered writer's block tonight, but I've waited it out.

When I was in high school, we were supposed to write a paper on Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The night before it was due came around, and I had nothing! Could think of nothing to write. So I played with words and and started writing a poem while I waited the writer's block out. Well, I became very taken by this poem-writing, and before long, had a verse of many stanzas about Huck Finn, with a refrain that communicated in words the rhythm of the unending flow of the Mississippi river. By the time it was done, I was emptied, and couldn't write a paper too, and wondered if the teacher would accept a poem instead. (I have to say, I thought it was cheating because it had been so pleasurable it couldn't be home-WORK, right?)

To my surprise, the teacher expressed pleasure and gave me a good grade. I wish I still had the poem. Huckleberry Finn is not just a dried up piece of American folklore. It's a book with great life, and, even with the long journey on the river, it's a book with a storyline, and colorful side stories. It's strongly anchored in the times and the natural characteristics of the river, but also strikes a universal chord. One thing that's sad is that the strong relationship between the motherless white boy and a man who is a runaway slave crumbles as they return to society at the end of the journey. Life on the raft is one world; life on land is another with its imbedded cruelties, deceptions, and expectations.

A couple of questions come to mind: Could a person today take a raft trip from Missouri to the mouth of the Mississippi? I don't know. And, where might one find huckleberries?

There was a Montessori School near where we lived in the 1990s. Kids were very happy there. The teachers, at times consciously, at times intuitively, made learning materials available, and the kids were permitted to discover on their own timing fundamentals of reading and math and geography through these puzzles and games that served as building blocks.. The kids learned so much, as though without effort but with pleasure and enthusiasm.

The approach did not confine itself to academics, but embraced the whole of life. The kids wiped down their tables after an exercise, they had access to kid-sized brooms and mops, and they made snacks of celery, peanut butter, and raisins. These were known as 'ants on a log'. They had a vegetable garden, and took pleasure in the lady bugs they used to balance out the numbers of aphids.

Each child brought his or her own face towel to school. They had their names embroidered or tagged on it, and their own peg on which to hang it. The towels were used instead of paper to dry their hands. The teachers generously laundered them each week, along with the school cloths used for cleanups. As a parent, I enjoyed helping the kids pick a towel to bring, and helping them label it. I thought the consciousness of the school regarding paper (for another example, they often used discarded office paper for kids to draw on and write their stories), as well as self-reliance and responsibility, was admirable.

Maria Montessori developed the program a century ago. I read one of her books - the school was originally designed to reach children with special needs. She came up with numerous ways to learn using multi-sensory activities. Thus a child with hearing problems might use visual stimuli, and tactile materials such as blocks and puzzles to learn. These methods proved to be excellent for educating not only those with special needs, but any kids, and maybe grown-ups too.

butterflies and frogs

This morning, butterflies and frogs surfaced in the same thought.

I'd never thought about them having much in common, but here we are, two formerly common backyard creatures who in their youth are completely different lifeforms than in their adulthood.

Butterflies and Frogs. Now, step back a week or two and consider Caterpillars and Tadpoles.

There is some kind of true magic that occurs in the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. Here you have the caterpillar, with this huge appetite, spending days walking up and down stems and leaves, walking and munching, walking and munching. As long as there are plenty of leaves and not so much bad weather as to get washed away, the caterpillar has the good life. Then, one day, caterpillar, much larger and very healthy, looks a little sluggish, body moving more slowly. It's almost like - well, this is good, but what else is there? Munching slows down, slows down until caterpillar stops eating. Then, I don't know how it happens. Maybe the biologists know but I don't. Because there it is, a caterpillar hanging onto a stem, and then, with no added ingredients, and you can watch it happen, there's no longer a caterpillar there but a chrysalis, like a colorful piece of luggage dangling on a stem; no face, legs or anything like that is evident. Then, a few days later, a fabulous creature unfolds, a butterfly. The air dries its wings a bit, and it takes flight, like an expert pilot who has already put in his 200 hours of training flight. No practice hours at being a butterfly. There's no such thing as a baby butterfly.

Given how plentiful butterflies have been on earth, its surprising how few humans have ever watched this take place. We have to remind ourselves when these wormy-looking bugs are eating all the leaves off our tomato plants that to kill a caterpillar is to also kill the butterfly or moth.

Years back, a friend gave me this gorgeous plant that grew and grew and flowered into double trumpets, the blooms purple on the exterior and white on the interior. The blooms were a good six or seven inches long, or maybe even longer. The plant thrived in a large pot on the deck.

One day, these caterpillars show up, and they're doing the main caterpillar thing which is, as stated above, walk and munch, walk and munch. I figure nervously, well, there are lots of leaves here, this is ok. But the leaves start disappearing, and the caterpillars are growing huge, and they look more like enemy than co-inhabitant. So I try moving them elsewhere, but I feel bad because I know the elsewhere doesn't have the special leaves this particular type of caterpillar requires to become this particular type of butterfly or moth and I don't know whether the caterpillars will survive.

The next spring, the same thing happens. Same kind of caterpillar on the same plant (whose name I may remember before finishing typing this story). But this time, I'm not going to take the caterpillars away. I figure nature must have an answer here, otherwise, either the plants or the caterpillars wouldn't survive into the future.

The caterpillars eat every cotton-pickin leaf off that plant.

Oh no! I must have been wrong, very very wrong. The huge plant that had such gorgeous foliage and was soon to bloom was now - well - a nude stick.

The caterpillars, more exposed now walking on the bare branches, are picked off one by one by a local mockingbird. Oy!

Time passes. A couple of weeks later, I see the plant is covered again with fresh foliage, more dense and lush than ever before. The huge blooms come about, with their frilled edges, inviting large pollinators.

The next year, year three, caterpillars - the same kind - show up again. Maybe some of the previous caterpillars were not devoured by birds, and made it to the chrysalis state. And the datura (I said I'd remember its name) foliage is consumed again. It leafs out again.

I wish I knew what kind of moth or butterfly emerges - something big, to judge by the size of these caterpillars when full grown. I didn't remember the part about the mockingbirds until the last minute, and thought I'd leave it out, since the mockingbird certainly complicates the story. But that's how nature is, a complicated story with lots of characters and their appetites and habits interwoven into the big picture.

The kids watched the transformation process more closely at Montessori preschool with milkweed, and with caterpillars that emerge as Monarch butterflies. And it was my oldest son, who was four or five at the time, who pointed out milkweed growing in the wild on a walk one day, and found a tiny caterpillar to show me, and told me what it would turn into. And at some later date, like at their school, we watched it happen in a jar at home.

I have to admit, I get rather attached to the caterpillar, who is there every morning, walk and munch, and who fleshes out so impressively. There's a bit of grieving when it slows to a halt and melts into something so different. The butterfly that emerges is beautiful, and such a flyer, but does not remain but a few hours before flying away. Monarch butterflies are migratory, and do a kind of relay thousands of miles long that carries them deep into Mexico at winter.

When I was a kid, it was popular to do the same sort of project at school, only watching tadpoles (which swim in ponds, streams and ditches like fish) grow legs and turn into frogs (which jump on land).

The butterflies mate in the air, the frogs at the water's edge. The females lay eggs which hatch into caterpillars and tadpoles, respectively. As long as no part of the process is interfered with, the cycle goes on and on, year after year, decade after decade, century after century.

Day before yesterday, I saw a large yellow butterfly flying in the backyard here in central Louisiana - so fast I couldn't tell what kind it was. It was beautiful, the first butterfly I've seen this spring.

Early one balmy spring morning in the late 1990s, west of Austin, Texas, I was driving into town. It was the day before Easter, and I was out to search for books. The Easter Bunny left a basket of books amidst the chocolate rabbits and sweet jelly beans in our house each year, and we helped make this happen.

I turned onto busy Highway 290. I noticed large birds flying low overhead and craned my neck to get a better view. It was a great flock, wings slowly beating as the birds spiraled above and beyond the road. I then saw a second dark wave to the right, large numbers, cresting over the juniper covered hills in a winding ribbon. The way their wings flashed white in one direction and black in the other made them look like an Escher print, such fascinating patterns, and I knew they were American White Pelicans.

I was so moved, I pulled the car to the side of the road so that I could watch. Another flock wended its way over, low and magnificent with their big wings and heavy beaks. They were weaving above and past the highway, and the car was rocking as each heavy vehicle flew by. I was stuck in the middle of a paradox, between an industrial phenomenon and a natural phenomenon happening simultaneously. Fast mechanical vehicles around me and tremendous, slow wild birds overhead. Why wasn't everybody stopping for this?

The last band of pelicans rhythmically flocked north, gaining altitude as they spiraled for the migration they were undertaking. They faded from view and I drove into town, undone with wonder.

Soup

Thanksgiving Soup is always better the second day.

1/4 medium onion, chopped
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 can of black beans
1 can of cream-style corn
a bit of water
a bit of flaked red pepper

Saute onion in a little olive oil in a soup pot. Add other ingredients. Simmer for 40 minutes, give or take. Some folks enjoy a garnish of sour cream, or shredded Romano cheese, atop each bowl or cup of soup before serving.

ode to the first tomato, June 2, 2013

among the shining green globes
still waiting their turn,
there you were
the first in red,
dangling gracefully
on the vine

(you let go
so easily)

inside the house,
a sharp clean knife
pared wedges for four.
we tasted
the warm,
tart spark
of your sun
your rain
your earth
your early blooming
among fragrant leaves
your summer
not yet come

Clams and elephants and opossums -

When I think of clams I remember a visit to a friend's family on Whidbey Island in Washington State around 1975. It was there on a stony beach that I was introduced to clamming. You brought a bucket and a shovel and walked along the shore. When you saw a thin geyser of water shooting up out of the beach (indicating a clam burrowing down into the sand), you dug as fast as you could. If you were faster than the clam, you could plop it into the bucket.

They kept the catch in a pail of fresh water for a day or two, which they said helped get rid of the gritty sand. Some have used cornmeal to fatten clams before they are cooked.

The family could tell I was not a true clammer because I was not interested in drinking the clam nectar that they all enjoyed, the liquid that remained after steaming the clams. But I am glad that I joined their family to learn about this way of obtaining food from the sea. I've read that clams were a mainstay in the diets of the indigenous peoples of the American Northwest Pacific coasts.

When I think of elephants, a couple of stories I read from National Geographic and from Smithsonian years back come to mind. One was of a domesticated elephant who painted - the brush held with her trunk. Her works included a credible red blur of urgency after a firetruck flew by, sirens screaming. She had a history of erratic behavior, and her human caretaker had given her the opportunity to paint as a way of relieving frustration and expressing herself.

The other story was of how at certain times in Africa, clans of elephants in the wild will travel long distances to one spot - was it an elephant graveyard? - meeting at the same time and place, as though for a preplanned gathering or reunion. (Perhaps they traverse the land in a line, with each elephant holding the tail of the elephant in front, as pictures sometimes show.) In the night, they dance beneath the moon, in a large circle, a kind of joyful thundering and stomping. The next day, they return to their distant homes.

I don't have many memories of possums - mostly of one rushing out of the carport when we drove in at night with the car headlights on. But, as with the elephants and clams, of late the possums have been insistently surfacing here and there - in magazines, on the net, from the primal memories of the mind.