Night is peaceful for the four older barn residents now that Ivy's taken Merrel back to town. The heavy reminder of buck will scent the farm for months to come but the shaggy little fellow infused the entire valley, one doe at a time, with limitless potential for milk and kids.

Tonight, her sleeping bag lies stretched across the rug next to the triple glass door. Ragged white peaks beyond are domed, vast, jetblack, alive with the Geminid meteor shower.

From The Blue Room

Light from the stove sparks and crackles along with a vision of next year.

She's goat packing up the steep terrain. Someone who'll keep the embers stirred for morning coffee is laughing and telling great stories. The heat of summer and heavy exertion demands an evening swim. The kid-like pleasure of shared company has made them both drunk and daring; happy.

The four-leggeds browse through the endless twilight.

December Boost: On Creativity and Perseverance

This is wonderful.

A Talk With Alice Munro

Find time to read this recent interview by Lisa Dickler Awano with Alice Munro in the Virginia Quarterly.

Awano takes us into a candid discussion with the author about writing and Munro's recent canon, Too Much Happiness, which is newly out in paperback. A provocative 2009 review of the book at the N.Y.Times, by Leah Hager Cohen can be found here.

I'd also like to ante-up fresh links to The Poetry Foundation, a constant source of entertainment and my ongoing appreciation for The Writer's Almanac, introducing it's readers to great writing daily.

The Taste of Place

In mid-October, I step

outdoors. A tang hangs

thick in the air. High-bush

cranberry presses past

ripe, beyond sour. Ash

and willow leaves yellow

on mud. Saturday's snow

soaked by rain. Chill from

the forest heard asking ~ How

do I bottle October? How

will it taste?

Scanty Dancing

From The Blue Room

dappled delight
we lay on turf and lichen
bathed in a blue penetration
of bottomless sky, a brilliant
open consumption after which
we could only surrender
to napping

Catching The Updrafts

From The Blue Room

There are days that being with others is preferred over the richness of time spent alone.
Take the fair, for instance. The days spent at the fair are expected to be full on people-time, often late into the night; dancing and visiting, listening to good music and cheering until you're hoarse.
Twilight gives up around midnight, here in the North, for a brief hour or so of semi-darkness. I'd return to the cozy barn after dancing and it was then that I'd walk Jacquie-goat through-out the abandoned fairgrounds. She'd browse among the alder and I'd feel the glow of my tired body looking forward to the camper and sleeping bag.
Our movable feast proved to be highly mobile. The first two milking sessions away from home were without a stanchion, mama-goat tied to the stall. Visions of us camping along the trail kept me excited the whole weekend.
The crowds loved her. She was quiet and attentive, drawing in even the youngest who were asking questions and holding fireweed for her munch.

Then, there was performing Sam Clemens'Mountain Goat for Geppetto's Junkyard Puppet Show.

More on that tomorrow...

My best birthday wishes to Garrison Keillor and may
The Summer Love Tour be a great success.

(I love and live by what Mrs. Sundberg had to say last week.)

From The Blue Room

Gathering

From The Blue Room

An auspicious cluster

Tracks Back

We're traveling to Bakersfield to pay tribute
from all points across the continent

Family by relation
Family by choice
Family by happenstance - as much one as the other

We're her six adult children
who's subsequent offspring range
from children and early adolescents through
forty-somethings, each curious

Enough to put our lives on hold,
we'll get together
for a week

We're adoptees
from forty years ago plus
Significant others, new loves and old

We're continuing devotion
to a lady whose home was acceptance
Multiple time zones traveled,
to the little bungalow's front yard

The San Joaquin Valley in July

All are welcome

Always were

Damp morning urge ~ my senses startle in such calm


New delights, discovered ~
Blackbird ~ Foreward

Summertime ~ Haines, Alaska

From dawn's whispering in the doon

Swollen Klehini by Micah

From dawn's whispering in the doon

Klehini Dawn by Micah

Whisperings

I wandered for many years
After leaving the dusty world,
Then built a cozy home
On the blue mountain.
Loving fidelity, I plant a
Thousand bamboos
And a hundred foot pine
As symbols of my integrity.
I plant mums around the wall,
I'm comfortably secluded;
I recite poems in the moonlight;
The sound is crisp and clean.
There's no pleasure like growing
Old on the mountain.
Why should I go crazy
When the road is blocked?

- Buhyu Sunsoo (1543-1615)

From The Blue Room

Morning ~ by Micah

Mother's Day ~ 2010

Aboard The Yonder on Glassy Waters

A Young Wet Visitor

From The Blue Room

Beached for Dinner

From The Blue Room

Merrick-girl at the Oars

From The Blue Room

Jeff Takes a Turn

From The Blue Room

Captain Joe

From The Blue Room

What a day!

Old Woman, what do you do, alone in the woods each day?

Yesterday, a feathered throat of red, surrendered between my cupped palms.
It felt like trust.

Today, Raven is a Girl and She's Singing Love Songs

We starved for the tenderness she found so difficult to share or accept.

Later, lavished in sporty affection and the gentle handling required by an elder, we watch as feminine preference glimmers past the toughened edge; legs coyly cross beneath the sheets; elegant tapering hands reaching, curious, communicative.

Encapsulate the tenderness she opened to, that her sons and daughters so gladly gave. Finish with a gulp; a simple rush through the crown. Feed this seasonal yen. It's cream colored in the mid-afternoon sun, moving toward moments of chartreuse and eggplant to peak with just a glimmer of rusty peach for tone, warmth and shape.

Stand open; belly, throat, nose and cap. And then, let go.

From The Blue Room

A Dark British Columbia Sky

From The Blue Room

Our Love ~via~ Mic

From On Her Way

A Nightly Croon

It's late. It's very late. I step out into the night and hear the dogs barking through out the city.

Many dogs; large and small. From all the odd and differing neighborhoods. Each dog with a yard. Each yard with a fence. Each fence with a sign - "Beware of Dog".

And I'm wondering, "What are they barking about?"

It's quiet, but for their voices. Do they know about one another's lives from the nightly reports they give?

Of their people and their people's frustrations or anger, or sadness, or indifference, unexpressed, or badly expressed.

Of their worries about whether they'll eat enough, or get to sniff enough trail?

Or tail?

And I think of my beauty, Mason.

Steve Mason, who spends his long, cold nights under the primodial stars, the only other kindred voices coming to him are on the rare occasions when the wolf packs sing, over the ridge lines, they, thrilled at the Northern Lights and the sounds of a distant, different pack.

Singing the news of tomorrow's promise.

And he's quiet. At peace amidst the night and it's sounds

her moment ~ i breathe

over the side
across from now
you hang gently

the last thumbtack
holding you
keeps loosening

I sit within
view and smile

Watch or Listen, and Make Glad the Heart ~

From The Blue Room

The live cinecast of A Prairie Home Companion will be shown Feb. 4th and again in an encore performance, Feb. 9th at a theater near you ~ or someone you know. Hope you can catch it.

Or, you can join me listening to the radio airing, or any time from the archives online.

Ahhh, lovely.

Friday, Towards Next September

So, tell me a story.

Tell me the one about that terribly hot day. The one back in 1963.

Or let's say it was an unforgiving summer that rode on past fall and well into winter. You're still young. All there is, is possibility. That, and the fear that your individual ambitions are beginning to tear at you.

Your love affair, after fifteen years is heat in bed, still warm at the dinner table.

Supper demands complete attention. Not in its preparation, just getting it on to the table. Prep has been reduced to the lowest common denominator. Food groups and quantity. Enough to feed five hungry kids and two tired adults.

A system of rotating frozen vegetables with fresh ones and switching fruit salads (jello again...?) with cottage cheese. Add a loaf of bread, (on a plate) and margarine and you're almost there.

Depending on the time of the month and how lucrative the month has been decides the main course; spaghetti or hamburger gravy. Spanish rice or fish sticks. His famous every-owl stew reheated? Apples for dessert.

If its a flush month, top-round is being grilled out by the pool.

Saved generally for weekends so the kids can stay wet late, you turn on the underwater light and offer lamps down low and fresh towels in each of the cabanas. Even the little kids are pretty well water-proofed now and can climb out, get dry and jammy up by themselves.

The smell of the browning meat, mushrooms, garlic and onion sizzling above the gas broiler mingles faintly with chlorine. Geranium and mint at the back door grow thick beneath the dripping faucet that keeps Riley's bowl filled.

California's baked grasslands are swishing this evening while up in the mountains a distant wildfire sends the fragrance of moonlight across the valley floor. The sky is tea house blue.

Once the kids are all are tucked in, the older ones happy with books and their privacy, you stroll out to the field, blanket in tow. Just the two of you.

Lying in the waist high grass brings on laughter. Stories of camping trips back before you'd met. Parodies on last week's election debacle. You're both great story tellers and now the tears just roll along with a delicious melt of tension. Any fear of snakes is sternly forbidden.

A feather intently drawn across your belly triggers all the right responses.

Screeching plunge of nighthawk. Has the field begun to quiver?

Somewhere across the tops of yellow grass lies tomorrow and the city, but not now.