mumma yaga

Oct. 27 Now and then the wind picks up the leaves for a little dance. They swirl like the snow devils to come. (Wallace Stevens) * It was when I said, "I will not be afraid any more." that the pain got worse! For two days I was much worse again. That's why the poem came to mind. "It was when I said" kept knocking. I didn't know that I was afraid. I am not sure if I can say what I was afraid of, and I suspect that I am afraid again. The way the nerve pain returned for those days without any abatement, the way pains come and go randomly in random places: it is all so unpredictable. There is so much I want to be doing and should be doing; I don't know when I will be able to or even perhaps if. There, that's a scary one. It is also clear to me now that we can't go home again to 48, not the way things are, and this is not our permanent home, yet if ever. Yes, that's a scare. I don't remember feeling so uncertain of my future that I was afraid....

 Oct. 26 The turkeys didn't notice me on the porch and decided to sneak across the lawn from the sisters, the apple trees by the barn, to the wise witch, also an apple tree. Almost every apple on the sisters was eaten. The turkeys and even a deer or two ate every one that fell, except the few that I was able to gather. We might have eaten two dozen. The witch was the same: only a few apples are left. The blue jays seem to spend lots of time in the apple trees as well. I suspect they are eating all the bugs that live in the apples. A lot of the apples have evidence of habitation by some larva so perhaps these bugs are on the trees (and in some of the apples still!). There are a group ? of blue jays that live here. They fly back and forth over the meadow all day long to hang out in the maple or the apple trees or they stop on the lawn and forage for bugs. Even in the spring blue jays have a variety of songs and calls, only one of them really annoying, but in the past few weeks I have...

 Oct. 12 October: Thanksgiving. It was usually the last time we would go to the Hideaway, for the season. If we were lucky we went up Friday night, arriving in the dark, driving along the long, up-and-down, dirt road in from #6 to the coast, to be ferried across the bay to the cottage, in Hob's boat and ours, a weekend's worth of clothes, food, fishing rods, and a family of seven, unload the boats onto the dock. Then finding our way up the sand path in the starlight, between the furry black cedars, to the clearing and the dark cabin. Our hearts are perhaps always there. October: Halloween, pumpkins, raking leaves. Here, these leaves. They are falling now - one can see naked limbs. And yet the sun shines and the sky is blue and this is still not winter. It felt to me this morning as if I never before stopped to breathe October. It always was leaving summer, heading into winter.  That paradise is lost. as surely as Prine's, gone in time. *  Gone with all that was our family...