TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

(Trees through the blue glass on my kitchen window sill}

To blog or not to blog, that is the question several of my facebook friends' posts.  Blogging uses up a lot of time, and in the midst of a busy life, not to mention in the midst of late middle age, I feel the urge to blog less than before.

  

Still, here it is, a clear sunny morning at the end of 2012, and I'm sitting in my easy chair looking out at the mountains.  And the trees.  The trees I watch every morning, noon, and evening as they settle into darkness, which now that the solstice has passed, will be shorter and shorter until in July I can look out my bedroom window at trees I dream of climbing, winding my soul around, as I drift off to an early bedtime.

    

 I've tried to write poems about this, the mountains and the trees framed by my windows.  "The magic of windows and doors," as my novelist friend Vicki Lane calls it.  The magic is in the calling. Come here, come here, our windows and doors beckon. Here is darkness falling, here is light rising up, here is your own face in the glass after dark has taken hold.  Your own face through which what is left of outside flows through just enough to haunt, to beckon to you.  Come inside yourself.

       

At the year's turn, we do that, whether we want or not.  Resolutions, what are they but an inner journey into what we believe we desire.  Fewer pounds, more friends, less moralizing and judging each other, including ourselves.  "Help me not to be so mean," a Flannery O'Connor character prays.  I pray the same, that the meanness that so easily seeps into everyday can be kept at bay.

       

Meanwhile the sun journeys across the clear sky, the bare trees shine like silver, and I sit here blogging my way through the short while before noon.
    
       Another lunch to prepare.  Butternut soup,
        turkey sandwiches.
       A glass of wine.

(Winter dawn through my bedroom window)

       Another year's window about to open.
  

We Hear the Leaves Call Our Names

Every noontime when the weather is good, my husband and I sit under our tree. When we moved to this house 33 years ago, the former owner had thrown a pile of old wood out by the side of the driveway. A few sprouts began to push their way out and after we'd cleared the rotting wood, the sprouts began to grow. Now, as you can see from the photo, they are joined at the base and branch into two beautiful trunks laden with shapely poplar leaves. Sometimes we drink a glass of wine under our tree, sometimes, like today, it's iced tea. When the wind comes calling, the lower branches stroke our heads.
The Appalachian mountains are the vegetation cradle of North America. More species of trees and plants can be found here than anywhere else in the country. We can look through the canopy of leaves beyond us and see the distant ridges, always waiting and lately reminding me of a passage from A Doorway in Time, by Herbert O'Driscoll: "To see the woods on the high ridges of the hills, dark green against the sky... was to think of the legendary warriors called the Fianna and the baying of their wolfhounds as they crashed through the forest in pursuit of deer." He was speaking of the Irish countryside, of course, but there is enough Irish lore lingering in this hills to make the Fianna sound a wee bit familiar.
Instead of wolfhouds, we have our five dogs of various DNA. Three of them are fine howlers, and while we sit under our tree, there will often come the wail of sirens that resonate all the way down to their wolfish cores. They lift their heads and sing.
Tomorrow we will be sitting under our tree, celebrating the 4th of July. We will open a bottle of wine, fire up the grill, and be grateful that we live in this cradle of green, forgetting for one day, at least, the threats to its survival, what the late poet Charles B. Dickson wrote in "Blue Ridge Moments: Nine Haiku" ( Southern Appalachian Poetry--www.mcfarfandpub.com)
acid rain
growth rings thinner and thinner
on the new-felled pine