mumma yaga

 it was the imposter syndrome - * i felt unreal, unworthy, pretending  but this is real - there is only me.  I live on a hill and my dog is dead  buried on the hill. clothes that i have acquired blind esoteric garments once bought for a minor persona "rags and feathers from salvation army counters" ** find their purpose on this wintry hill seems trite but the clothes make the man, as they say, or the old woman and I put on make-up ! which I never did. witch I never did.  turquoise eyes and too much blush like old women  who wear purple and rattle their stick along the fence *** I am the crone all bent I walk with a stick (harbinger of the witch's broom) I watch the valley and the clouds.  I am at home. ***** so I google harbinger and this happens: I was talking to Elf about gingerbread; she thinks of doing a gingerbread carousel for Christmas, and hadn't I done one? On a different train, I went looking for a picture of Indre at a few weeks old and spun...

 nov. 28 Snow, and a blue sky this morning. The plow guy even came before we arrived yesterday. ***** Yesterday: We went in the ditch. Drove home from Toronto, left early to be sure and arrive in the daylight; the traffic was light and the drive was uneventful until we stopped to check the mailbox on the road. K pulled over onto the verge and went past the edge of the road - the snow, several inches have fallen here, had been plowed across the edge of the ditch and hid it. We were caught in the snow on the steep slope of the ditch, which is about five feet down. The car came to a stop but we couldn't recover safe traction back onto the road and the car teetered as if it might tip over at any moment. Foresters are know to be high and tippy. We didn't know that before we purchased it, though we love it still. I crawled out the driver's side after K, not to get stuck in the ditch and perhaps have the car come over on me, and we pulled our winter coats out of the back seat. The...

 Nov. 8 A cord of firewood was delivered last week and K stacked it over the next two days, "In case it rained", he said, though we had a tarp for that eventuality. Zen and the art of perfectly stacked firewood! We were supposed to leave the stacking for Tal to do, but when he came on Sunday, there was (were?) only the shavings to rake up. * (Does "zen and the art of" need a footnote?) ***** We have achieved laundry! You may remember that we have had no washer or dryer (more on that...) since we came here in December, 2020. I washed things by hand and hung them to dry. I did one run to a laundromat in Magog. (A very long way away!) Then my vaccine reaction (or whatever it is) hit and since July 20 things have just piled up. Once our plan to stay another year was settled we sprang for a washing machine. Then it didn't fit through the washroom door. Then our land agent and her father-in-law, a carpenter something, came and installed it. Then she showed me how to w...

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...