45

Forty-five is how old I was when we moved to America.

Our driveway became a luge in the night, so I was very happy that Tim had worked so hard on it yesterday evening, and that I had then gingerly slid through the slushy mess with my car and parked next to the empty house at the bottom of the Hill.  (In winter it becomes the Hill, because it commands deep respect and sacrifice.) Then I walked back up in the pelting frozen rain, drenched to the chilled bone after shovelling the deck and clearing the cars of wet heavy snush (a new descriptive word for snow-slush).

Because I was going straight to the airport from school, it was quite a feat to lug all my baggage and school bags down to the car, over the ice without falling. We walked gingerly even with our special snow-spikes attached to our shoes, and I felt a strong desire to rejoice and sing out a few hallelujahs once we arrived at the car.  Next minute the kids next door came running happily down the hill with their schoolbags, ready to catch the bus, no snow-spikes or anything, just like any normal day!  The confidence of the strong-boned young!

So today is Valentine's Day, and I am leaving on a plane bound for England tonight.  It is such a commercialized day, and some people feel sad, some ecstatic.  I have loved the same man for a very long time now, and am happy that he is still my Valentine.  So another poem, because I have been teaching all day and now have to be on my way!  This was the poem for twenty-five years together.  The first letter of each line spells our names and the anniversary.

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Silver

Today we have twenty-five years together, our roots

In another country.  Here in

Massachusetts, dislodged, but growing together,

& happy with one another.

A long time, half a lifetime of moments

Not untinged with sadness, but

Nearly all good and worthwhile.

Each of us has changed

Slowly, sometimes unknowingly.

In discord and in harmony.  We are

Linked like the sign for “connected”, my

Vagabond soul with your more

Even temper.

Remember always our purity

An alliance, an affinity,

Not wavering

Never unravelling .

I  am still lucky, my

Vivid friend, my lover,

Electricity still shocks my heart

Reaching for you,

Seeing you come in at the doorway,

A man who still chooses me, every day.

Riding  through this night, this life,

You are my silver moon shining in the darkness…

44th day

Small snowflakes greeted us this morning, a soft dusting, yay!
Huge snowflakes the size of cheese puffs by midday, oh no!
Wet slush falling from the sky by 5pm, oh god (or goddess)!
Heavy stuff to move, this snowy sludge.  Tim did the lion's share, because he is the lion, after all!

Dogs, to continue where I left off yesterday, have all these wonderful qualities.  There are many books and sayings and memes and whatnot telling us that these are the ways of being to which we should aspire, so I won't do that.  The characteristic I most admire in dogs is their supreme cheerfulness, at the drop of a hat they will do a happy leap, a delighted dance.  We should all do a happy leap and a delighted dance every day. 

My first dog was a mongrel who followed my sister home from school, or that was the story she told.  I'm sure there was some persuasive patting and dog-whispering going on there too.  He was desperately thin and his paws were worn through when he arrived, and the vet reckoned he was about three years old, which was also my age at the time.  He just stayed with us for the rest of his life, in a very independent way.  Dogs in those days had free reign, but of course there were not so many cars then, and no gates to lock them in or out.  My dad guessed the dog's background when he observed Timmy (my brother's name was Timothy, so I really can't understand why my family decided that the best name for this dog was Timmy!) observing the horse and cart of a vegetable-seller and then falling in to run behind the cart for a while, before he seemed to realise what he was doing and let the cart clop off into the distance. (No, I'm not that old, but when I was little, we did have people who drove their horse-drawn carts around selling vegetables off the back of them.)

When my sister left home to study nursing two years later, Timmy became my dog, and followed me everywhere, my protector. 

Anne with Timmy the mutt.

The other dog with a huge character was Sasha, the crazy Lab/English Setter cross.  I got this dog when I was a first-year student at university, such a stupid act.  My mother and father scratched their heads at my shortsightedness.  How would I pay for her food, her vet bills, etc.?  But of course I was utterly in love with her by the time they heard about it and would not consider giving her up.  My daughter did a similar thing, history repeating itself, with her dog Onyx. 

Sasha was incredibly smart and independent, could open doors going inward or outward, knew every store in Grahamstown and was even welcomed by some of the store-holders each day.  The only foolish thing she did was chase seagulls on the beach, but then perhaps she just wanted to run for the joy of it, knew she would never catch them, just wanted to rush them to see them take off into flight.  Sasha could find her way home even if she had been driven 50 km away and sequestered in an enclosure with 3 meter high fences designed to keep deer from leaping out.

As she aged, she developed a horrible allergy to fleas, bearing the skin of the long-haired setter but the short hair of the lab, so she suffered from sunburn and an awful skin condition on her back, which just grew progressively worse until it smelt so bad and she was suffering so much that I had to make the decision to put her down, when she was just ten years old, and I was almost nine months pregnant with my second daughter.  She had lived a huge life, with many adventures, and been loyal and gentle and sweet and wonderful, because she was a dog, and that is who dogs are.

The beauteous Sasha

  So another poem for another death, written three years after she had died.

    Sasha
Fingers of my mind
Picking bones of the past.
The narrow skeleton of a white dog,
Skull - near perfect -
Sockets of fine smoothness.

Listen - the wind shrills -
The bones click and sing -
And almost remember
A seagull's cry - the flowing rush of limbs
In chase along an endless beach.

And almost I remember
Her brown eyes like a cow,
How carefully we watched each other,
Her head pressing my big belly,
As she plunged into the sky.

Day 43

I have given up gym for the next two days as I have no time, too much to do.  Priorities. 

I saw today on Boston.com, which I mainly look at for the weather (because there is ANOTHER snow-storm bringing wet snow, sleet, rain and then more wet snow tomorrow into Friday), that Sky, a wire-haired terrier, has just won best in show at the Westminster Show, meaning she is the top dog in America.  Such a strange thing, dog shows, quite awful really, because dogs are interbred so much that they end up having terrible health issues like labradors with epilepsy, and bulldogs who can't breathe.  

Toffee the bulldog - etching by Jess 2008

A film was made exposing these health issues which really count as cruelty to animals, and the BBC has since refused to broadcast Crufts Dog Show.  They have also lost all support from the RSPCA and other dog charities.  Crufts have pledged to put an end to the type of breeding where these things occur.

Our Molly was a case in point.  I would never have bought a pedigreed dog, but she just happened to "have papers", when we got her, in the roundabout way in which that happened.  Her full name was Midnight Molly for Mrs Martin, and we received her pedigree sheet showing her family tree.  But she suffered from horrible seizures and ADHD, if dogs can be diagnosed with that, poor thing.  She needed to run every day, as well as gallop and canter and bound and sprint and fly!

Mad Molly, as wild as a snowstorm.

She was so different from our Skye, our dear black lab in South Africa, whom we had to leave when we came to America.  Skye was the most mellow dog you could imagine.  The sweetest dog I have ever had, I think.  Our friend found her a home with a lovely artist in Zeekoevlei in Cape Town, which was the perfect place for her in every way.  Zeekoe means hippo in Dutch, and vlei is a shallow lake.  She was rather like a hippo, a little round thing who never lost her puppy fat, who loved swimming in any water, especially lakes, and for whom wallowing was a speciality. 

She once won Dogs: Best Trick, at a show for mongrels at the Village Green in Grahamstown.  Tim, taking into account her natural ability to pick things up and carry them about (she was constantly bringing us presents of stray socks or soft toys), had somehow taught her to fight with one of the boys' wooden swords.  When he picked up a sword and shouted "Hiyaaa!" she would excitedly grab the other one which had been left conveniently on the ground in front of her, and brandish it as skillfullly as a muskateer!   Only Tim wasn't there with us that day at the Village Green, so it was I who wielded the sword shouting "HIYAAAA!" for her to perform the trick, thus embarrassing all my children. 

Skye a.k.a. Spud-dog, on the beach.

When we came to America our first friends were the Taylors, who had a beautiful Irish setter named Mr Furley.  There were days when they worked long hours and couldn't let him out, so we ended up looking after him and then for a few days each week, virtually sharing him.  The boys were paid to walk him, which was a wonderful job for them! 

Mr Furley lying on the carpet - etching by Matthew 2005

When Mr Furley died we were almost as devastated as his real family.  I wrote a poem in his honour, and will end with it, because dogs are both natural and man-made, and a huge topic, so I will continue with dogs tomorrow. 

Requiem (for Mr Furley)

               

Easing our passage into this strange land,

You were gentle-natured, always happy

To be with us, sitting quietly or loping off for walks

To the winter Faun Bar, our beach

Where in summer we all swam together

You swimming alongside those you loved

Patient and sociable, sharing time and love

So equitably with your two families

Everyone always gladder for seeing you.

But today we weep, we mourn

Eyes suffering with such a grief

Heavy hearted, shards of memories reflecting.

For you, beautiful red dog

Have carried your last stone

Along the beach.

You’ve smiled your last dog-smile

Wagged your feathery tail

Spread your dignified gaze upon us all.

As you bound forth to greet Sirius

Your fiery coat is sleek 

And swift your bounteous long-legged grace

Forty-two

"Forty-two is a pronic number and an abundant number; its prime factorization  2 · 3 · 7 makes it the second sphenic number and also the second of the form { 2 · 3 · r }. As with all sphenic numbers of this form, the aliquot sum is  by 12. 42 is also the second sphenic number to be bracketed by twin primes; 30 is also a pronic number and also rests between two primes. 42 has a 14 member aliquot sequence  42, 54, 66, 78, 90, 144, 259, 45, 33, 15, 9, 4, 3, 1, 0 and is itself part of the aliquot sequence commencing with the first sphenic number 30. Further, 42 is the 10th member of the 3-aliquot tree. "   - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_%28number%29

And bats love aliquot trees!

The aliquot tree.

Matthew told me about the baobabs in Senegal.  Some of them are more than a thousand years old, and have ancient names and have been used in ritual and celebrations for generations.  He said that the people believe the trees to be immortal and have a custom wherein they lay new babies in the baobab's embrace in order for them to be assured of a long life.  

Giant old baobab

  The bark is capable of rapid regeneration after striping, even after the trunk has been completely ring barked. The bast fibres are still widely used for making strong and durable cordage. Indeed, in Bengal it has given rise to the saying “As secure as an elephant bound with a baobab rope”. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the sun-dried bast fibre and wood was imported to Europe for the manufacture of a strong wrapping paper. Fortunately this practice is no longer - See more at: http://www.baobabfruitco.com/TheBaobabTree.html#sthash.VdsyN7Yc.dpuf

Baobabs are quite miraculous.  The people who live near them use every part of them.  Their hollows are good places to store things.  Their fruit is used for nutrition and the bark is used in medicine.  They do seem to have some extraordinary powers, compared to other trees.  For instance, a baobab can regenerate its bark even if it has been completed ring-barked.  

I love the fact that it is extremely difficult to chop down a baobab.  The wood is sort of spongy, and so if you strike it with an axe, as one would a normal tree, the axe is likely to become stuck and difficult to extract.  This characteristic of the baobab is like a natural deterrent that the tree has to stupid humans.   

These trees are often the only real vegetation for miles around, so of course the people living nearby are grateful for the shade and often congregate at a particular tree.  The more isolated trees have entire ecosystems living inside and on top of them.  Wild animals will use the holes as lairs, birds nest in the branches, and insects burrow in the nooks and crannies of the bark.  (I keep wanting to use the world "skin" instead of bark.)

Last night I had such a vivid dream about Evvie, our old domestic worker in South Africa, who came to work for us when Jess was four, and then was the boys' nanny when I went back to work.  Evelyn was a unique soul, bossy and loving, independent and proud.  She came to me in my dream to tell me that Matthew was sick.  When I woke up I thought that she knew about him because she was on the same continent and that she had somehow managed to communicate with me by entering my dream (yes, I have some odd ideas sometimes) and so we texted Matt but he replied that he is fine, fully recovered from his bout of illness.

And 42 is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams' wondrous five-book 'trilogy'. (Ah Douglas Adams, you died too young!)  A super-computer has spent millions of years working out this answer but apparently no one can remember the question.  So a huge computer the size of a small planet was composed of organic materials to find out what the question was, and it was called "Earth".  

The amazing Douglas Adams

Tim turned 42 the year we came to America, which is quite old to emigrate.  We were brave pioneers, leaping into the unknown!  The scary, possibility-of-disaster-filled future in another country where we knew one other family!  It is madness when you think of it, analyse it, but luckily we didn't, then.   

And now it is 11.42 and I must go to bed!

  The bark is capable of rapid regeneration after striping, even after the trunk has been completely ring barked. The bast fibres are still widely used for making strong and durable cordage. Indeed, in Bengal it has given rise to the saying “As secure as an elephant bound with a baobab rope”. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the sun-dried bast fibre and wood was imported to Europe for the manufacture of a strong wrapping paper. Fortunately this practice is no longer - See more at: http://www.baobabfruitco.com/TheBaobabTree.html#sthash.VdsyN7Yc.dpuf

  The bark is capable of rapid regeneration after striping, even after the trunk has been completely ring barked. The bast fibres are still widely used for making strong and durable cordage. Indeed, in Bengal it has given rise to the saying “As secure as an elephant bound with a baobab rope”. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the sun-dried bast fibre and wood was imported to Europe for the manufacture of a strong wrapping paper. Fortunately this practice is no longer - See more at: http://www.baobabfruitco.com/TheBaobabTree.html#sthash.VdsyN7Yc.dpuf

Day 41

Snow again so shovelling for an hour was my exercise.  For some reason I was careful of the snow mermaid and shovelled meticulously around her and so she lies there still, yearning for the sea, wondering if she will ever see it again.  I want to reassure her, because after all she is a version of water, and the snow-melt all plunges into the river around the corner, which flows lazily to ebb and flow with its mother, the vast Atlantic ocean.

Every morning I wake up, realise who I am and where I am, get my bearings.  Some days this is easy and virtually instantaneous and other mornings it is like crawling out of a foggy sheer-walled pit.   I think it is dreams which do this, because you are so far away in another world that you have to give your mind and your body time to come to terms with reality, you have to realise you are in your bed with the elephants marching over the blue and white duvet cover, that there is the soft beginning of light through the orange kikoi curtain, and yes, there is your husband lying with his arm flung over you, your fellow sailor on this nightly trip across the sea of dreams.

So once I know who I am I think of all my children, and wonder what they are doing right now.  I can picture them all, Nick walking through the dawn light of the city, past mounds of snow, going to work in the flower-shop, where he will arrange flowers, and fold paper around small bouquets, and be very charming, and smile his big friendly smile.  Matthew far away in Senegal, probably at the Research Centre trying to make his mind help his fingers write as well as he speaks French, absorbing all these new experiences, revelling in them.  Jess getting ready for work, dragging herself away from her darling babe, looking elegant and lovely and a little harrassed.  Emma having lunch with the other mothers and babies, keeping her busy baby in check, looking gorgeous, laughing with her eyes.

So when I have done all this wondering, I can get up out of the bed, and begin my day.

Wonder is what makes education happen, what makes experiments eventually work, or prove something.  It is why we explore continents and our brains, why fossils were discovered and why they proved how life began all those eons ago.

When we meet someone, we wonder what they are like, what they think of us, whether they read books, love dogs, play music, know about history, whether they are good in bed, whether they are creative, if they are faithful, promiscuous, cruel or kind.

When we are little we wonder about everything, and ask many questions until we find out what we wanted to know.  And sometimes it is what we wish we didn't know, because once you know something you can't un-know it.  And if it is shocking, like the Nazi concentration camps, or the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or how they make paté de foie gras, there are images burned indelibly into your brain, damaging it forever.  

Tim brought me a beautiful pot of tulips, which are slowly opening their crimson petals, standing straight and tall on their stems, rooted in the pretty ceramic container with a Delft pattern.   And then about a week later he brought me flowers, cut flowers, which I put in my exquisite elephant vase which my daughters gave me many years ago.  They have ended up together on the table, almost touching, and I wonder if the flowers are jealous of the tulips.  Perhaps the tulips mock them, saying, look at us, we will be alive when you are dead and thrown on the ash-heap!  Or perhaps the flowers stand sadly in their vase of water, and the tulips, feeling sorry for them, tell them they look lovely. 

My plants are all inside for the winter, where they have to endure cold and spider-webs and the occasional infestation of some weird house-plant pest or other.  In the summer they go out on to the deck where the chickadees fly to them with greetings, and the rain wafts gently over them, and the summer sun beats down relentlessly, and all about them is life and air.  I wonder if they miss the world on the other side of the glass, and long for the little birds. 

I wonder how my little granddaughter will react to me in a few days time, where I will be suddenly three-dimensional, instead of the flat granny she knows who sings and claps with her on Skype and Facetime.  She is almost a year old now, but this is how young she was when she came to stay with us last summer.

then

and now.

 And I will probably only see my other little grandie when she is nearly a year old. 

then

and now.

I will choose a work of art for today, because I am too tired to investigate something else now, late at night, so here is a piece from a long long time ago, before writing and farming and cities and all the other things we call civilization.  It is a beautiful painting of a bison, from the cave of Altamira, in Spain, about 40 000 years old. The artist is unknown, the purpose is unknown, only supposition tells why the people of this time made these images.  But Art made the world, after all.

Forty!

I carried heavy things this morning for my exercise, helping my son move furniture into and out of  his apartment.

We live moments at a time.  Usually the moments go swiftly by without us noticing them, until something happens to slow time down and we become more aware of a moment, or moments.  It's like when you are in a car and it is crashing, an accident is taking place and you are right there, and all your senses are working overtime, and it really does seem as though time becomes sluggish, and everything happens in slow motion, heavy moments. 

The Zen Buddhists belief is all about living in the moment, mindfulness.  Zen masters have two tasks: sitting zazen (meditating) and sweeping or raking.  It is a quiet, slow life.  They believe that there are 65 moments in a finger-snap.

It is rather difficult to define a moment.  Dictionary.com does it like this:
" moment:
1  an indefinitely short period of time; instant: I'll be with you in a moment. (me: indefinitely short?  Isn't that an oxymoron?)
2  the present time or any other particular time (usually preceded by the): He is busy at the moment. (me: the present is another problematic area of definition.)
3  a definite period or stage, as in a course of events; juncture: at this moment in history.
4  importance or consequence: a decision of great moment.
5  a particular time or period of success, excellence, fame, etc. : His big moment came in the final game."

The funny embarrassed moment when you discover in the morning, just before you about to leave to visit your son, that your dress is on back to front.
The ecstatic moment in bed yesterday morning.
The miserable moment remembering someone you love who has died.
The tearful moment in a book.
The heart-full moment of pride in your child.
The agonised moment at the airport when your person finally disappears behind the security barrier.
The heady moment at the top of the hill just before you let go.
The overwhelming moment when you behold beauty, be it in nature, art, music, dance, theatre, or a movie.
The angry moment when someone hoots at you because you have been dreaming and haven't noticed that the traffic light has changed from red to green.
The awful disappointed moment when you realise your child has lied to you/done something terrible.
The surge of happiness moment when you see your husband open the door and come into the light from the dark and stormy night through which he has been driving home.

Perhaps we hold all the moments we have had in our heads and our bodies.  They are all stored somewhere in our memories, like droplets in a vast lake, and sometimes a bead bubbles to the surface, led there by a line in a song, sunlight on the garden, a person entering the room.  Others stay hidden at the bottom of the lake forever. 

I love photographs but these days it seems that too many photographs are taken of too many moments.  Some people document their entire lives, the meals they eat, concerts they go to, their pink and silver gumboots on the sidewalk, so many images every day, everything snapped by a smartphone.  What you are doing is creating a likeness of the moment.  It is wonderful to have a photograph of a particularly beautifully set-out meal, with all the colours represented on the plate, and perfect presentation, something unique.  But it is not important to take a picture each time you eat out.  Sometimes you really do have to wake up and smell the coffee, not take a picture of it.

Having said that, I was looking through some old photographs and I'm so glad that these moments were captured.  That I can savour them again and again, remember and honour the people pictured in them.

My nephew and his pretty wife on their wedding day

And sixty or so years before, my mum and dad getting married.  They had no thoughts in their minds of their grandchildren having weddings of their own!

I love this photograph because of the head in the front, it seems to me to demonstrate the excitement of a wedding, and everyone wanting to see, and stepping in front in order to do that!  But the focus is still on the bride and groom who are the most important, while the guest stepping in front is blurry, unrecognisable.

And here is my mum with two of her granddaughters and her honorary grandson, who called her Grauntie.  These darling little things are all grown up and each have a delightful baby of their own.

Ben came to visit us for a week when he was ten years old and Emma was just a small baby.  He was always an interesting person, even as a ten-year old.  And finding this made me remember so much about that visit, the way that house sat on its corner, the strange place that was King William's Town, the new baby I wore outside my body, the sweet boy curious about nature and everything else too.  

Isak and Elaine, Tim's parents, before they had any of the four babies they produced, or any of the ups and downs of life.. They were in love and happy in this moment.

My dad telling Jess a secret.  The perfect composition, a triangle, the sweetest of serious-eyed toddlers, and my old young dad.

And lastly how these two small grinning urchins turned into my aunt and my mother, holding their grandchildren, so many years later.

Nora and Joan, circa 1925

Nora and Joan with grandchildren 1980

We wouldn't be able to compare these moments without photographs.  We wouldn't be able to hold images so easily in our heads without photographs to inform them.  These photographs are our icons.  We sort through them from time to time, remembering all the moments of our days.

The snow mermaid has little delicate footprints of birds and squirrels stepping so lightly over her, and even a rabbit crossed her head.  There are little remains of a bird's feast on her belly, and the leaves of the rhododendron brush past her face sometimes, blown by the breeze.  But she slumbers on in the way of snow mermaids, who have been brought into being by a woman who walks carefully by, even though she knows the mermaid is not really sleeping.  

Thirty-nine

Tim had something else to do today and as I couldn't bear the gym on my own I decided to tramp through the snowy meadow with my ghost dog instead.   This field belongs to someone else, but it is MY meadow, well mine and Molly's really.  Molly could not wait to get there every day.  I learned to run in the meadow.  It has heard all my joys and sorrows, comforted me when my mother died, and later my father.  I tell the bees and then the meadow when something momentous happens.  I know all its seasons, all its moods.  It is a beautiful piece of open land in the middle of the forest, a refuge I have been visiting almost every day for nearly nine years now.

I planned on a brisk half-hour trudge through the deep snow, but arrived back an hour and a half later.

This is some of what kept me there for so long:

The wispiest of soft clouds in a wide blue sky with a sun you could feel.

A little plump mourning dove, one of the most successful birds ever.  20 million are shot as game birds each year in the US and yet they continue to thrive.  The mourning dove is Wisconsin's state symbol of peace, and yet I am sure that Wisconsin has dove-hunters too.   Shooting the symbol of peace doesn't seem like such a great idea.   

Mouse footprints like handwriting in the snow.  Footwriting.

Pattern in the snow, but I have no idea what made it.  An aspiring mouse artist?

I love to inspect all the tracks to see if I can guess what they are.  I can see when a deer has just been ambling along, or when it galloped.  I love to see the small prints of fisher and coyote, and where the little squirrels with their beautiful long feet have scurried across the snow, when they are not streaming along the canopy highways overhead.

patterns

My camera battery died just before I saw a horde of bluejays land in the tree nearby.  Then a red-tailed hawk took flight just ahead of me, and a little black-capped chickadee sang her song almost in my ear!  I was so sad that my battery had died, but then consoled myself with the whole 'living in the moment' thing, and how you don't really do that if you are always framing the experience through a lens.  But then I thought, well, sometimes you want to preserve the moment. You are still living it, only with a photograph you can re-live it again and again. 

At one stage there was blood all over the snow and I fully believed a massacre had taken place and that pretty soon I would find the grizzly remains.  But there was nothing, and eventually I realized that I was standing under a group of sumac trees, which have as their fruit (called drupes :-)) a brownish-crimson triangular mass which is apparently ground and used as a lemony spice in Arab countries.  The birds and deer obviously eat this as a last resort and someone had had a sumac feast in the snow!

I am somewhat obsessed with the panorama function on my phone's camera.  So brilliant, so easy, and you can show much more of your perception of the experience, rather than a narrow view.  I suppose it can also be a metaphor, the importance of seeing the BIG picture, instead of focusing on a more limited perspective.

Meadow entrance

Bothways farm

Singing beach under snow

Essex river and sky

And our lovely messy jungle this morning.