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NaHaiWriMo

NaHaiWriMo – National Haiku Writers Month — the shortest month of the year, for the shortest form of poetry. I learned this from A Woodland Rose, who is writing a haiku every day in February.  A Woodland Rose and I connected through my Twin Sistah (no, I don’t have a twin, this is a friend and colleague who shares the same birthday as me and who has such an enthusiastic embrace of life and the path of feminist justice that she calls her colleagues in the movement to end violence against women, the movement for greater peace and centered awareness in the world, “sistahs!”, thus we are Twin Sistahs) who directed A Woodland Rose to my blog.  So we’re BloHaiSis’s, or Blogging Haiku Sistahs.  Today’s NaHaiWriMo entry:

Early grey softens
Ice cushioning running feet
Spinning globe turns south.

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Haiku LIII

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Valentine’s Day cake
Blood orange and olive oil
Rich sweet moist heart red.

Olive oil cake? With blood oranges, red as a Valentine heart? Perfect. As nuanced and complex as a cake gets. From Smitten Kitchen, one of the great cooking blogs.

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Nest

All week I have been thinking about this nest.  It’s in the Korean Lilac bush planted next to the walkway into the house.  The top branches are sticking up through the deep snow packed on either side of the narrow path we’ve kept shoveled through this snowy winter, and there among the jumble of bush is this tiny nest.  My guess is sparrows built it, based on their fluttering in and out of the bush last summer.  The memory of last summer’s birds and this nest now make me think of the summer after Eric died, when there was a nest in the yews that border the driveway.  I spent many hours that summer sitting on the porch, watching the adult sparrows and listening to the chirping of the chicks and the frenetic squabble when one of the parents would fly into the yew branches and disappear.  A few times I pulled back the branches to see the scraggly feathered heads stretching up towards whatever was coming.  Then the sparrow traffic stopped and the nest was empty.

I’ve been meaning to take a photograph of this nest every day this week, and then write a haiku.  But it’s been a week when taking a moment to stop and snap a picture has felt impossible, one of those weeks when breathing feels like it takes too much time.  I’ve had early morning meetings and evening meetings, meetings after meetings after meetings, which means I can’t get any work done, much less pay attention to the creative channel in my brain.  The whole idea of a haiku a day was to have at least a few syllables of space and time in my brain for creativity.

Well this week the creativity channel has been blocked.  I didn’t get to my poetry group, I only wrote a haiku on Tuesday, and that only happened because the snow sticking to every surface in the outside world was so stunningly gorgeous it stopped me long enough to take a photo and start the haiku machine whirring.

Now it’s Saturday, I’ve stopped long enough to breathe, get some wood into the house so we can have a fire, and think about something other than some work deadline that has to be met in the next minute.  On today’s list is loading wood into the barn, digging it out of the drifts and plowed bank of snow from the last few weeks.  As I carry the wood up onto the porch, through the kitchen, and into the barn I’ll be walking on the shoveled path, right past the nest, hatching its image and metaphor and memories into my brain.  Voila!

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Trained Tree

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I found it.  Three weeks ago, when I was staying on Long Island with Adrienne and Matt after Emilio was born, one morning I ran past a house that explained the strange, drooping evergreens I saw in many yards.  The running here is on grids of suburban streets, and the trees are mostly lovely — tall maples with full and even crowns, large hollies bearing slick, deep green leaves, conical spruces dominating a lawn.  But I couldn’t figure out the attraction of the evergreens I saw in many yards,  scraggly pines of some sort, draping down across themselves, ragged  and limp, often a single trunk or branch draping five or six feet like a hunched over old man.  What’s the point, I thought.

Then I ran past this house, that had trained the tree’s trunk and branches into swooping arches across the yard, over the driveway, in a peak over the front door.  Now I got it.  This was stunning.  But then I couldn’t remember where the house with the fabulous trees was.  I knew it was on a corner, I knew it was deep in the criss-cross grid of houses lined with streets, but I couldn’t find it again.

Today I did.  Now I know how to find the house and I now know the trees are Weeping Blue Cedars.  They only grow a foot to a foot and a half a year, so this amazing lace work of cedar gracing the house and yard must have taken decades.  Such patient beauty.

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Haiku L

So, I’ve been writing the Roman Numerials of my haikus wrong since 40.  40 is XL, as in 10 less than 50, which is L.  Here’s Number 50.

Paw prints on the trail
Tracks on tracks crossing fresh snow
A wing left to show.

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Storm Skiing

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Two storms in two days, and in preparation for the second storm and the predicted dump of another foot of snow, the state more or less shut down.  David and I decided early to get out into the storm for a ski, then come home to get our work for the day done.  The snow was falling thick as we set out on the trail to the west of the house, blowing into us across the open fields, making the world a hazy grey.  It was hard to get any sense of depth or direction as snow swirled around us.  Our skis were lost under the deep snow.  Our hats and neck warmers crusted as snow melted from our body heat, then froze again.  

Once the trail headed into the woods, the black of wet pine trunks and the green needles showing dark against their loads of snow provided contrast that gave the world around us depth.  The snowmobile trail had been tracked through the woods, probably last night after the first storm, and our skis started to appear again out from under the snow.  The trail took us across several roads, up the power lines, then up over a ridge draped with hemlocks and tall white and red pines.  We crossed the stream pouring out of Durgin Pond, rocks capped with great domes of white against the black water. 

The storm was cold and glorious and windy and wild and we skied right through it.  Lovely.  We came home and were able to catch our neighbor before he finished plowing, moving our cars out of the way so he could pile up the snow from the whole driveway.  Facing the five foot wall of snow between the driveway and the house, all that was left was figuring out how to get to the door.