52 weeks – Page 5

52 Weeks ~ In the circle

I made him a pie for his birthday. Because he prefers pie to cake. And can you blame him? He who was born at the tail end of September in the Northern Hemisphere and all around are perfect apples begging to become pie.

The best apples for pie, in our opinion, are Golden Russets, but those weren’t to be had this year for lowly pie (being coveted for hard cider), and our old Golden Russet tree bit the dust, and our new Golden Russet tree is not yet bearing.

But I found a substitute in a mixture of Pomme Gris, 20-ounce Pippins, and Ginger Golds that I hope will do.

* * * *

Tonight, we went out to feed the goats in the Autumn dark. It took awhile for our eyes to adjust, but we know the way after all these years.

The goats were waiting, impatient but quiet.

The stars popped out, and there was the comforting Milky Way, encircling us, as we orbit. Another year. Another happy birthday, my dear.

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ In my hands

I don’t look at faces. I make eye contact with hands. I see their shape, their texture, their color, their size. Their wrinkles, freckles, knuckles, nails.

I’m wary of hands, but attracted to hands.

My own hands never measure up to the hands I wish I had. When I was a little girl, I tried to make my thumbs longer and more elegant by pulling on each with the other hand. This did not work.

There’s not a single long, lithe bone in my body.

I stared at my parents’ hands. They had nothing to do with mine. They did things that mine couldn’t do, and were unrelated to mine in size and shape.

My father’s hands. He spreads his square-tipped fingers as he walks, as if combing the air like water, as if preparing to grab the world by its collar.

My mother’s hands. Tapered, short fingers. As short as the cigar butts her father left in the ashtray next to his habitual end of the chesterfield. The fingers are a mark of the family.

When she was born, our daughter’s fingers seemed freakishly long. I mean, in proportion to a baby’s hand. She’s grown into them.

The other day, I held up my own hand as if to take a picture, thinking I might take a picture, deciding not to take a picture.

I saw my parents’ hands in my hands.

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52 Photos ~ Bright

This week’s photo theme was “Bright” and, wouldn’t you know it, it was a dark week.

Cloudy, stormy, rainy, with a power outage thrown in for good measure. The night the lights went out, we lit the stove by match, talked by candlelight, and carried battery-powered lanterns up to bed. It was a cozy feeling.

So, yes. A dark week.

But, as you know well, you can still find bright when you look for it, and I was bound to look.

This time of year, when bright appears, it’s slanted, angled, precise. It’s not extravagant the way summer bright is, splashed over everything you see.

The autumn sun is concentrated, rich, specific, like a jam that’s cooked down from watery juice to a sticky, puddle of flavor. You can’t gulp it down. You lick it off the back of a spoon, tasting a handful of fruits in one drop.

You can be walking along under a grey felted sky and then, from under the clouds, a beam streams out, as if pointing a finger: look at that hillside, that specific tree, that mottled leaf-strewn path.

That one-and-only late-budding rose bush.

Today bright Phoebus she smiled down on me for the very first time;
For the very first time she smiled on me.
Today bright Phoebus she smiled down on me for the very first time;
For the very first time she smiled on me.

No more clouds, no more rain, gone the clouds, she smiled again.
Today bright Phoebus she smiled down on me for the very first time;
For the very first time she smiled on me.

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These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ At the end of the day

http://youtu.be/Hk1CDlv-WnE

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52 Photos ~ On the line

http://youtu.be/wppll7UYFVs

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52 Photos ~ Light and dark

The Forest at the Edge of the World

Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson
and tried to haul, up toward my block,
a cross section of a maple grown too large,
chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso,
Super for All Buildings east of the projects,
stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom
against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe.
“Nothing to do but roll it,” he said, hands
deep in his pockets. I nodded,
barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt,
transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs
as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it
against his shoulder like a man who bears
a handmade cross for miles on his penitent back.
I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood
the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark.
I stood on the side and righted the thing
and together we rolled this boulder of tree
past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair,
the Caribbean bakery. “You can smell the forest,”
he said, as we reached my stoop, wood
in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat.
And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping
only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour
it was filling the whole of my apartment—
the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence—
light brown rings so perfect my whole life
fell right down inside them, concentric circles,
tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself—
suddenly it was thirty-five years ago:
I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate,
and looked up into the branches of my first
true and majestic tree, in the first real forest—trees
instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs—
after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby,
to see through branches to the sun—I believed
the world was mine, there was sap in my veins,
the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree,
the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline,
which goes on to the edge of the known world.

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Unusual and uncommon

http://youtu.be/Obo_Fbdt9OU

52 Photos ~ Childhood games

They don’t play games so much anymore, but, gosh, do they know how to laugh and have a blast.

And when the sun goes down, they still play a version of hide and seek called “Sardines”, which goes something like this: One person hides. And the group fans out to look for the person. And when you find the hider, you don’t reveal her or his location; you hide with the hider, silently. And the rest of the group keeps looking, as their numbers dwindle. Until, maybe, you’re the only one still looking. Everyone else is crammed together in a hiding spot, crammed like sardines.

It’s down to just you, alone in the darkening yard. But your friends are out there, and they can’t help but giggle, and you follow that sound. And what a hoot when you find each other.

No one is too old for that sort of fun.

52 Photos ~ Fresh

This summer hasn’t been the summer I expected.

I’m not talking about the weather for the first six weeks or so, which, let’s face it, left a little to be desired.

It’s just… well, I haven’t been basking in the happy summer glow I inhabit most years from June to August. I don’t know what this is. Mid-life woes? Trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up? Realizing that we have only three more summers like this with H at home?

Sigh.

Maybe I need a sports car. Or a horse. Or a trip around the world.

Or lunch with a friend.

Here’s what I do know: the nights lately are hard. They’re filled with restless and even very bad dreams. I’m late. I’m lost. I’m trying to get in touch with family and I can’t. I’m in trouble. I’m cast aside. I’ve lost my shoes and the road is wet. I meet my mother in an abandoned train station and she tells me that she’s sick, and scared. And I can’t help.

I wake up most mornings frazzled and not at all relieved. In spite of the gorgeous weather we’re having. In spite of the sun. In spite of M by my side. In spite of everything I have and hold, and health and (relative) youth, in this peaceful and green valley.

I’m unsettled.

But here’s what calms me: I go down to the kitchen, and quietly, methodically gather the milk pail, the tote, the clean bottles, the funnel and its filter paper, the strip screen, the udder wash. I step out on the porch and Wellesley spots me and nickers. Then her babies start to cry, because they’ve been separated from her all night so that we can have the milk that’s collected overnight. And they want their mother. Now.

But the crying doesn’t bother me now the way it did at first because I know they’ll calm down as soon as I get Wellesley on the milking stand where they can see her.

And then I milk. I press my forehead against Wellelsely’s flank, while she’s grunting with happiness over her morning grain. Her milk comes easily and she never kicks. She’s a pleasure to milk. The babies watch through the slats in the gate of their stall. Quiet. Bright eyed.

For these ten minutes, I’m complete and competent. I know what I’m doing and things… work. The animal smells are sweet. The foam on the top of the milk fizzles as the minuscule bubbles pop. Nothing more is asked for.

The day and the milk are fresh, and unspoiled.