mumma yaga

  Jan. 1, 2022 an artist once told K about the colours one can see - the painter's colours, group of seven purples and oranges - not just the greens and blues that are more blatant. thank you, to that artist. you have taught us see more colour, even in grey january. the old barn and the black raspberry cane. hayscented fern now hay-coloured, and silver birch: A very small cave by the stream: fungi: and lichen and moss the beech and the grapes silver birch, and grapes: Jan. 2 it snowed. a way through the brambles. Mumma Yaga

 Dec. 31 " - covid-19 is out there and we need to continue with the sticks and stones of masks and isolation to keep it at bay. " mumma yaga, 201231 A year ago...  ** This is the upper pond, running, though it's shallow. There are only a few hours left. I listen to a new year's eve playlist from 2019. "It's been so long you've been wanting a cabin and a back-woods trail" * I have been grateful this week. It has filled my heart and mind. How have I come to this place? It is a magic beyond believing, just as the magic is that seems to blaze on the hills, as if it might catch fire.  Today it is above zero and everything is melting. Great avalanches fall from the roof with a cloudy thump, but most of the water evaporates directly into a mist that rises along the ridges, like smoke.     Up the camp road where beech leaves wait for the later winds. Blackie came out to see me as I neared his house. I walked across from the camp road to climb up through the ...

 Dec. 26 https://youtu.be/WhJ1MDfvix4   A little song about handedness in plants, by Flanders and Swann. even yo-yos...  Are you left-handed? Try spending the day right-handed. Door knobs, lamp switches, can openers, everything, is so easy to work! If you are right-handed, and curious, try spending the day left-handed. It is no wonder left-handed people check locks, stove knobs and switches several times and turn every handle twice - we are not OCD, we are just left-handed! (OCD = Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) We don't get the turn direction right on things that turn - pun. Always, with the puns, right and left, left out in the rain, right you are. Or do I have something else? Do other left-handed people have these issues?  How do we even know our right from our left? Dogs can learn (or already know, somewhere in their unverbal minds) apparently. I have always had difficulty with this. You say turn right, my brain, even thinking about it, still turns me to the left....

Dec. 23  Covid Day 653   These are the days of covid, and I realized that I have no idea what K and I would "normally" be doing at this time of the year. He is happy to be here, and I am, too. Only I wonder if I would have wanted to be together with the children and grandchildren, and my cousins at Christmas. I wonder if we'd be here at all if it weren't for covid. I can't imagine what non-covid would look like in 2021; the notion of something different is simply not there. Now it is the days of Omicron, sounds like sci-fi, life imitating art.  I am almost as apprehensive as I was in March of 2020, when I had a bad feeling about pre-variant covid. We have stocked up as if for a siege and we won't need to go anywhere for a few weeks, except for K's vaccine booster. It has been snowing and I am happy to be "hibernating" for a little while, hiding out. I may be over-reacting, but then I thought the same 653 days ago. We will be fine here, warm and s...

 Dec. 20 Christmas - I like the creche, nativity scene. manger scene - this last was what we called it at home. I love the romance of the wise people, the shepherds who showed up, the animals in the stable, the yellow hay and the yellow star and the angel. I love the poem, The Oxen, by Hardy, its childish magic. * They don't go to the barn and see, because that would break the magic of their imagining.  " Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then. So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, “Come; see the oxen kneel, “In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,” I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so. " ***** I love to do the stockings too, fi...

Dec. 10 Long, long ago, when my children were quite little, I explained something important to them: " You can always come to me and tell me anything and I will help you as best as I can. Just come and tell me,", I said, " but, if it's bad news, preface it by saying, 'mummy - don't yell - okay?...' " That warning was to give me a chance to prepare myself and not freak out. I reminded them about it a lot. So this became a thing that they could, and did, do. On rare occasions she would say to me, mummy don't yell, and tell me what trouble had happened. And we'd get through it together. And I told them, too, that they could always come home, any time for any reason, and we would welcome them, and find a bed for them.  My parents never told us this, in fact they seldom (or never!) told us they loved us, but we sure knew it. I remember the first time I told my father I loved him, he was surprised and a little embarrassed and said, "I love you...

 Dec. 7 Last night the wind howled around the house, and roared down the ridge like an aeroplane coming down to land. The Adirondack chairs were blown right off the porch. ***** When I lived in Edmonton, I had my own office in a small business, a few of us did, my boss and two or three other staffers. Three of us smoked, upstairs, and of course in the coffee room. Sometimes, recently, after forty years of smoking on the porch if I was smoking that year, I long for my own office, where I can smoke. Just sometimes, when I am working. Ashtrays are a lost art - they came in all shapes and materials, sometimes with animals or souvenir paintings. I  always had my favorites, the same way I have favorite mugs for coffee, they have to be just the right size and shape and feel... It is not a thing everyone has, I have found. (I wonder if they have just abdicated the "right" they could grant themselves, to have such a pleasurable thing.) A fancy ashtray was part of the decor in the fift...