mumma yaga

 March 18, 2025 Rocky woke me about 1:30 am on the 14th of the month (the Ides of March!), and I caught the blood moon high in a clear, starry, sky. The blood moon is an eclipse, with the moon passing through the earth's shadow. It seems like such an astronomically (excuse the pun!) small window of opportunity that one wonders that it ever happens. ***** A friend of Rain does maple - that is, her family has trees and buckets and a big square kettle in an open maple shed, and each year they make syrup. The maple woman says that she does not run lines from the trees, because there is importance in the carrying of the full pails of "water" - the french is "l'eau" - from the forest down to the maple shed. There is magic in the process. It is a ritual, ephemeral, lasting only one or two weeks. It is only in these few days when the temperature fluctuates between frost and warmth, that the sap is good for cooking. Fire helps the magic, boiling the water in wide squ...

 March 11, 2024 Snow ghosts walk east like pilgrims, phantoms whirl in fury, rise cloudy into the frozen wind, sentient, smoke over the snow like Tash through the Narnia woods. the wind roars up the ridge, a furious ghost highway.  winter returned pretending it had never abated. melting, dripping, the snow lay old and done in heavy drifts and piles. rain fell to dispel as much of winter as it could, knowing spring was not come, laying plans. ***** This house is a ship in a sea of snow. The snow laps at the porch, snow fathoms deep, or only two feet, yet it keeps us from going to the ridge, or up the hill into the woods. The windows are portholes with the snow splashing like ocean waves.  Wind ripples the snow into waves, blue as water. ***** Yesterday, Rocky got me up at 5, Today it was 4! Yesterday, I thought he was going to be sick, but today I suspect mating season. Most of the winter he has kept off the fields because the snow is so deep, but now he can walk on the st...