mumma yaga

Mar. 27  This morning, spring snow, won't stay, but it's a bit cold for rain...  Trickster beech in the snow.      Rocky and the camp road. The second pond, today: Ponds on the ridge. They have formed among tree roots and stones. It is Sunday so there is no business to see to. I am making baked beans, baked for real, in the oven. It seems to make a difference, but I am also tweaking the recipe in other places. I now fry the salt pork and onions before I add them to the beans.  Rocky and I have walked up the hill twice today. I cut through the woods for a while and that was heavier going. There are places where nothing has been and the snow, still two feet deep in spots, is soft through from the warmer temperatures - every few steps the snow is up over my boots. I often follow Rocky's paw prints to help with safe footing. I am also stopping, as I go about the house, at my work-table, to look at a piece in progress. I wonder if it helps to do art work in des...

 Mar. 24 The first sunrise of spring: I should have accepted this as a good sign for the week; I will accept it now as an omen of a good spring. I am thankful for a safe end to a stressful week. On Thursday we were double-booked: Rain had an errand in Magog, forty-five minutes east, that was a twist of maybe and changes, and my appointment with a vet, in Lac-Brome, forty-five minutes in the other direction, had been tweaked, by fate, to a worse time conflict. In the days before, we fussed back and forth about cancelling one or the other, and I think we were tangled in each other's emotional prickles, as we tried to firm up a plan. Doggedly, (offence, Rocky? or good?) we made plans that would work, with two cars, instead of one. Amid threats of freezing rain we set off, Rain east and Rocky and I west. By the time Rock and I were on the highway the drizzle had ceased and the drive to the vet was easy. By mid-afternoon, Rain, baby, Rocky and I, were safe at home. It felt like we had b...

 Mar. 17 Spring is coming, the ridge stream is running. I have been old and walked with a cane. I was in pain, and on pain medicines, not able to function. For the first time since I was a child, I needed to be looked after, even my medicine regime was done for me by K. Between illness and medicines, my brain function was way below par as well. But I am getting stronger, able at last to function at my usual level. It takes more effort: things I once did while my mind was juggling a dozen other ideas now require mindful deliberation, my hand will not just now perform without my concentrating some focus on it. I hope that free ability will return, but mindfulness is a good thing, and if I am working with my hands my focus should be on that work. I have a health app on my phone which records my steps each day and the data from that is a clear breakdown of my wellness over the past months. August, 2021, when I was at my worst, I registered 300 steps (rounded to nearest 100), September ...

 Mar. 11 The Cooper's Hawk, who lived on our street with her family in 2020.  April 15, 2020 Poor Rizzo!  Highway 427, Northbound, March 19, 2020, 11:50 a.m. The world changed almost overnight. Two years, since W.H.O. declared Covid 19 a pandemic on this date, 2020. I suspected it was the real thing on March 4. I did not foresee it lasting this long. I was wearing a mask and gloves in public then, because I was working at my mother-in-law's caregiving residence at the time and extended the practices from there.  It has been a silly fiasco since, with governments all over the world making poor choices, to satisfy the meta-economy, while sacrificing the poor but "essential" workers to continued poverty and illness. The billionaires and corporations went on making millions and billions while many poor people lost their jobs, or worked through covid and hardship to keep the world running. Corporations took covid relief funds and used it to line rich pockets instead of pa...

Mar. 10 Rocky and I were out early this morning; the walk was easy, the snow a hard walkable crust. Creatures' paw prints are everywhere: rabbits, little mice and a very little set, vole, perhaps, and coyotes or bobcats. It feels like a "waiting day", with clouds, disorganized, straggling east on a slow wind, pale sunshine intermittent, and a storm from Texas forecast for the weekend. Rocky and I went along the west trail today because the going was easy, and came down through the old saw meadow. (There is an old rusted saw left there for eternity.) Yesterday I saw the first vulture of the spring! It seems early: my calendar says first vulture seen April second and fifth on different years, in Toronto. The ridge stream is not to be stopped again, now that it is running free. It continues to collect melt as it travels between its snowbanks and it draws the sun's heat with its darkness, beneath the naked trees.  These two trees grew up together and formed a pairing. Les...