Mined from the notebooks, Friday morning, September 11, 2020. Posted Friday morning, September 18.
Friday. 6:27 a.m. 57 degrees. Crow giving this morning’s wake up call. Taking the job very seriously. Flying up and down the street, as if he’s going door to door. “Up!”...”Up!”...”Up!” “Now!” ...“Now!”...”Now!”...
Posted Friday morning, June 26, 2020.
One hundred and fifty-one years ago, the soon to be eleven-year-old Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and father took him and his sisters and brother on a grand tour of Europe. In September of 1869, they were in Switzerland, having, David McCullough reports in “Mornings on Horseback,” his chronicle of Roosevelt’s boyhood, youth, and young manhood, “the best time for everyone.” But when they reached Lucerne, Theodore and his sister Ellie were both sick, Theodore “depressed and homesick, but then the trip to the heights of the Rigi rapidly restored all spirits.” Mittie, by the way, was Roosevelt’s mother Martha….
Known as the “island mountain,” the Rigi stands by itself above Lakes Lucerne and Zug, and to many thousand “sensitive souls” of the day the spectacle of sunset and sunrise from its summit, the Rigi-Klum, was the climax of a visit to Switzerland. The “incredible horizon,” as Victor Hugo called it, takes in nearly three hundred miles, an utterly dazzling panorama of Alps on one side (to the southeast) and on the other, beyond the lakes, the lovely Zurich countryside reaching to the Juras. Traditionally one went to the top in time for sunset, as the Roosevelts did, then stayed the night at the hotel to be awakened before dawn by an alpine horn, which the morning of September 4 sounded at quarter to five.
Rose immediately [Mittie wrote], but did not get out in time to see the first pink lights before the sun rising. All the high Alpine peaks visible...Litlis and its glaciers, Finisterahorn, Schreckhorn, Wetterhorn, Jungfrau, and Silverhorn and Blumis Alps. The Wetterhorn was beautifully peaked and covered with snow. A mass of thick clouds laid at the same level all around. The Rigi in the early morning, looking something as a glacier, with its rifts of gray color, completely hiding the lower world.
---from “Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt ” by David McCullough.
Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday, April 28, 2020. Posted Friday morning.
Friday. 4:54 p.m. 63 degrees. Bright, sunny, and warm. Today’s afternoon drive: north to Rexford, east to the Northway, south all the way to Western Ave, up on 155 into Niskayuna and back home. People out everywhere, taking advantage of the nice weather. Joggers, powerwalkers, strollers, stroller-pushers, bikers---including a train of three junior high school age boys, brothers, it looks like, all three have the same wild bushes of curly hair in need of cutting---scooterers, at least one skateboarder---a little girl out with her dad who is on foot, and not in the hurry she is. At one point, she has to stop and wait with an exasperated expression for him to catch up. Couples of various ages. No handholders or arm-in-armers. They’re maintaining physical social distance but not the emotional kind.
Adapted from the Twitter feed and posted Friday morning, April 10, 2020.
[Another one for National Poetry Month.]
6:52 a.m. Another fine morning at the Old Mannion Homestead. Too chilly to sit out on the porch, though. 48 degrees, but the weather app says it *feels* like 36. So I'm watching the day begin at an angle from the kitchen, looking out through the doorway and out on through the porch's sliding door at a corner of the backyard
Can't hear the birds, or see any. But they're out there.
The view out the kitchen window is more straight on from where I'm sitting, but there's less to see, just a patch of woods and some trees "straight up and down", but it makes for a prettier picture, I think.
Those trees "straight up and down"? I'm cribbing from Robert Frost's "The Wood-Pile" there...
The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by…
Frost is my favorite dead American poet. “The Wood-Pile”’s one of my favorite poems of his, and one I can recite almost in full. The last four lines have always “pithed me right through the occiput”, as my favorite living American poet Steve Kuusisto has been heard to say when describing his happily startled reaction to a work of art, written, sung, recited, painted, sculpted, orchestrated, or danced. Here's the whole poem...
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.'
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.---“The Wood-Pile” by Robert Frost.
Filed under Morning Song.
Posted Monday morning, February 10, 2020.
Monday: 7:01 a.m. 32 degrees. No wind. Snow overnight. Weather app says it’s turning to rain but I don’t see it and the patter of drops on the back deck sounds like melt off the roof. Supposed to get up to 45 degrees today and tomorrow so it won’t stick. But for now it’s prettying things up, covering the grass and the rooftops in the neighborhood, settling in the branches. With Santa in the window, the view outside looks more like Christmas than Christmas Day did. The tree’s long down but we still haven’t completely de-Christmased. Nor, as you can see, de-Eastered. The calico bunny is a gift from Mom Mannion and isn’t going anywhere. The deer stays in the window all year and has every year since 2004, the then eight-year-old Oliver's Mother's Day present to Mrs M the first Mother’s Day we celebrated here. The other remaining decorations will go into their boxes this week, probably today. The schools have called a two-hour delay, but I’ve declared a full snow day for us and we're not leaving the house. None of us have to be anywhere anyway. So we’ll get to work this afternoon. But Mrs M has asked us to leave Santa right there. Her favorite chair is right next to the window and she likes to look up from her reading and look out and see Santa standing sentinel there, on the watch for approaching emotional storms and other bad weather for her soul.
Filed under How the Weather Was.
Mined from the notebooks, Sunday morning, December 8, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, December 29, 2019.
Sunday: 8 a.m. 7 degrees! Correction: 9 degrees. Much better. Productive day so far. 1 mug of hot chocolate, 2 cups of coffee downed. 1 bowl of oatmeal, raisins and spice. 2 stories about last night’s Knicks game read. Knicks lost a heartbreaker to the Pacers, 104-103. Knicks could have tied it up and sent the game into overtime but Julius Randle missed a free throw with 0.1 seconds left on the clock. 3 poems by Charles Wright read---”Deep Measure”, “Thinking of Winter at the Beginning of Summer”, “Jesuit Graves”. “Jesuit Graves” begins with a weather report from the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Ireland, July 3, 1995:
Midsummer. Irish overcast. Oatmeal-colored sky. …
Glasnevin is the final resting place of many long-dead Jesuits, including the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The poem ends with what I took as a reference to one of Hopkins’ poems…
Whatever rises comes together, they say. They say.
The they that say are paraphrasing the line "Everything that rises must converge" and I took them to include Flannery O’Connor and I thought, “That’s where she got it. Of course.” O’Connor was a fiercely devout Catholic with a contrarian bent that sometimes bent toward the border of the heretical. She’d have made a good Jesuit. Hopkins would have been a source of inspiration. Turns out the title of her story and the collection that contains it were taken from “The Phenomenon of Man” by the Jesuit priest, philosopher, and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard’s writings helped persuade the Catholic Church to come around on the theory of evolution. I read “The Phenomenon of Man” when I was in college and understood about every third word. I still can’t tell you what the noosphere is exactly. I think his Omega Point, the point towards which everything that rises converges, is kind of like entropy but with intelligence. I think. He took the word from the Book of Revelation: "I am the Alpha and the Omega." Flannery O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s one of the reasons I went there. So Wright’s they includes Teilhard and O’Connor. And himself, and, I guess, me.
Teilhard reached his Omega Point in 1955. O’Connor reached hers in 1964. She died of lupus. She’s buried in Memory Hill Cemetery in her hometown of Midgeville, Georgia. Teilhard’s Jesuit grave is not far from here in Hyde Park. It’s on the grounds of what was St Andrew’s-on-Hudson Jesuit novitiate. The Jesuits closed shop there in 1968 and sold the property in 1972 to...the Culinary Institute of America. If you go there and ask they’ll give you the key to the cemetery and you can visit Father Teilhard’s grave. Next time we’re in Hyde Park, I’ll stop and ask.
Somewhere in the house is a copy of “The Phenomenon of Man”. On a nearby shelf is “Everything That Rises Must Converge”. On another shelf is "The Oxford Book of English Verse". I should dig one or the other or all three out and do some reading. But weather reports shouldn’t require that sort of homework. I’m just going to have another cup of coffee and re-read Wright’s poem. Here it is...
Midsummer. Irish overcast. Oatmeal-colored sky.
The Jesuit pit. Last mass
For hundreds whose names are incised on the marble wall
Above the gravel and grassless dirt.
Just dirt and the small stones---
how strict, how self-effacing.
Not suited for you, however, Father Bird-of-Paradise,
Whose plumage of far wonder is not formless and not faceless,
Whatever you might have hoped for once.
Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, 3 July 1995.
For those who would rise to meet their work,
that work is scaffolding.
Sacrifice is the cause of ruin.
The absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin.
Thus the legends instruct us,
North wind through the flat-leaved limbs of the sheltering trees,
Three desperate mounds in the small, square enclosure,
souls God-gulped and heaven-hidden.
P. Gerardus Hopkins, 28 July 1844-8 June 1889, Age 44.
And then the next name. And then the next,
Soldiers of misfortune, lock-step into a star-colored tight dissolve,
History's hand-me-ons. But you, Father Candescence,
You, Father Fire?
Whatever rises comes together, they say. They say.
---"Jesuit Graves" by Charles Wright, collected in "Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright".
Filed under How the Weather Was.
Posted Sunday morning, December 15, 2019.
Sunday: 4:15 a.m. 40 degrees. Wind from the WSW in gusts up to 10 mph. Gust earlier moved the wreath on the front door, wire backing scraping against the portal. Calm now. Furnace roaring. Hot chocolate by the light of the tree.
Posted Wednesday morning, December 4, 2019.
Wednesday: 6;56 a.m. 26 degrees. Wind out of the SW at 6 mph with gusts up to 9 mpn. Cloudy day ahead with a chance of a snow flurry this afternoon. 24 hours ago the scene out the window was tinted blue. This morning it’s silver outside. The weather on any given day isn’t just temperature, precipitation, clouds, and wind. It’s color and light. Not a snow day. No 2 hour delay. Errands to run and no excuse to avoid them. Another day on the road until after dark. But for the moment I get to sit here and enjoy the weather. How’s it by you? What color are you having?
Filed under How the Weather Was.
Posted Tuesday morning, December 3, 2019.
Tuesday: 6:42 a.m. 26 degrees. Wind 4 mph out the North. More snow overnight. Still hasn’t let up. Flurries now. The view out the window is all in blue, the last of the moonlight and the first rays of the sun bouncing off the fallen snow. Mrs M having a slice of her breakfast favorite peanut butter toast. “Lance, there are worse addictions.” Mannion guys still asleep. Schools are on a two-hour delay. Means Oliver gets to sleep in but will get paid for a full day’s work. Ken doesn’t have class today. Mrs M and I feel relieved too, even though we have no place we have to be today. We treat snow days and school delays as if we've been given permission to stay inside and do nothing but relax and enjoy the warmth and comfort of home. A two-hour day isn’t as good as a full snow day, but it’s nice to feel the world isn’t pushing us out the door.
Posted Wednesday morning, November 26, 2019.
Tuesday: 8:00 a.m. 32 degrees. Bright and sunny. No clouds. Strong shadows on the neighbor’s roof. Wind 3 mph out of the SE. Supposed to get up to 57 degrees later. Now there’s still frost. Frost on the car windows. Frost in the grass. Frost on the fallen outlining the edges and veins of the fallen leaves in white.
Filed under How the Weather Was.
Posted Monday morning, November 11, 2019.
Monday. Mom Mannion's back porch at the old Mannion Homestead. 6:46 a.m. 40 degrees. No wind. Not even a hint of a breeze. Out on the porch waking myself up by having coffee in the chilled air. Expected the cold to drive me in before I finished my first cup. Now finishing my second and considering a third. A light jacket and I’m fine. Sun not yet fully up. There’s a squirrel making its way along the top of the wire fence in the far back of the yard, the squirrel making its presence almost visible by a squirrel shaped shifting of the shadows and the fence by inspiring the question “What else can be holding that squirrel shape up?” But the leaves on the ground nearer in are as bright as copper and shine in the grass that’s as green as summer’s, and there’s just enough light to make these notes by. Chickadees buzz in the neighbor’s pines. Now there’s the sound of light rain falling on the leaves and rustling among the leaves on the ground at the foot of the invisible fence that might be two squirrels making their way in the opposite direction as the first shadowy one. The windows are misting over. I think I will have that third cup.
Filed under How the Weather Was.
Posted Wednesday morning, October 23, 2019.
Sunday. Tantillos Farm Market. 12:26 p.m. 54 degrees. Wind NNW 1 mph. Cloudy, gray, fog over the orchards in the distance. Mist turning to rain turning to mist turning back to rain. Day started off a beautiful fall day, perfect morning for picking apples and pumpkins. But we were slow to get going and by the time we got to Tantillos it wasn’t the best weather for tramping out into the fields. But it was good weather for staying warm and dry inside the stand and breathing in the aroma of pies and apple cider donuts baking in the kitchen in back. “Life’s Short, Eat Cookies” the sign over the kitchen window says but we gave the cookies a pass and took home a dozen donuts fresh out of the oven, along with a half gallon of local cider and a cheerful-looking pumpkin picked off a table out front. Carving’s next weekend. The donuts and cider are already gone.
Filed under How the Weather Was.
Posted Tuesday morning, October 15, 2019.
Tuesday. 7:10 a.m. 34 degrees. At the moment there’s no wind. Supposed to get blustery. 15 mph from SSE with gusts up to 24 mph. Clear sky fully light although according to the app it is only now sunrise. Moon’s still up, above the neighbor’s roof, white and nearly full, framed between the two large maples on her front lawn. Going to get up into the mid-60s later but it’s barely above freezing right now. No frost but when I go outside barefoot and in my pajamas to try---and fail---to get a better picture than the one I took out the front window and step out onto the lawn the dew-drenched grass is ice cold underfoot. A cardinal cheeper-cheeper-cheepers a ringing good morning. He’s answered by a louder blue jay screeching rustily as she flies between the trees, “Can it, Mr Cheerful!”. She’s late for work and the kids need to get up and ready for school.
Posted Saturday morning, October 5, 2019.
Mount Beacon, Dutchess County, New York, seen from the west side of the Hudson River. (We were traveling on the east side.) Copyrighted photo by Vijai Kalathur from his book Hudson Valley Illustrated.
Friday. 12 p.m. 61 degrees. Heading south along Route 9 after dropping Ken off at school. Approaching Fishkill, aiming to cross the river at Beacon. Leaves in the air over the road blowing straight at us but none slapping the windshield. Air we're pushing ahead of us lift them over the hood and roof or force them to veer off to the sides. The turnoff to the bridge is going to come up before we’ll be able to see Mount Beacon, but the Hudson Highlands are coming into view to the southeast. Think we’re looking at Quaker Ridge. Low gray clouds overhead and apparently stretching to New York City, but the sun’s breaking through to the east and shines on the ridge, lighting up the leaves on the trees on the hillsides bright scarlet and orange-red. Mrs M observes “There’s a sight that screams fall.” She re-thinks her word choice. Scream doesn’t connote how peaceful and comforting the scene is. “Maybe it whispers it.” I split the difference. “I think it just says it, matter of factly. ‘Hello, it’s fall. Do you know where your rake it?’”
Posted Tuesday morning, August 26, 2019.
Tuesday. 7:49 a.m. 51 degrees. Supposed to get up to 72 by this afternoon. Wind from the SSE at 5 mph. Cloudy but the clouds are high so it’s gray but not gloomy. No rain in the forecast. Thunderstorms tomorrow. Weather app predicts what I consider perfect summer weather for the end of the week. Sunny. Highs near 80 during the day, lows in the 50s at night. But fall’s coming on. Our flowers are showing signs. The blackeyed susans are doing fine. The coneflowers, though, are having a hard time keeping their heads up, and a few have toppled. The hydrangeas have blown. The few petals left on their withered blossoms have turned an ugly and burnt-looking pale pink draining to a lifeless white. But they were beautiful while they lasted. Bluer and fuller and heartier and happier-looking than I remember they’re having been in many years. Must be due to Mrs M’s tending. At the beginning of the summer I read that hydrangeas do best in acidic soil and that an environmentally friendly way to acidify the soil is to spread coffee grounds around their roots. Mrs M liked this idea and all season she’s been diligently following the advice. This has been good for her as well as the hydrangeas. One of the symptoms of her tumor and hydrocephalus that I missed was that she lost interest in her gardening, which she enjoyed almost as much as her cooking.. I attributed it to her work schedule making her too tired and keeping her too busy. She’s not back to form, yet. Maybe next spring. But tending the hydrangeas has made her happy, and the coffee grounds may have done the trick, although, like I said, I give the credit to Mrs M.
Here’s what the blossoms looked like at their bluest in the middle of July…
Filed under How the Weather Was and Diary of Her Recovery.
Saturday night, August 24, 2019.
Saturday. 8:24 p.m. 67 degrees. Passing clouds. Breeze from the northeast, 3 mph.. Late evening grocery run. Twilight when I went into the supermarket. Near dark when I came out. Fully night by the time I was halfway home. Summer waning.
File under How the Weather Was.
Mined from the notebooks Sunday morning, July 28, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, August 4.
Sunday. 7:36 a.m. 76 degrees. Feels warmer. Real Feel 69 says the weather app but it feels even warmer than that. Probably the humidity. 96 percent. And that there’s no breeze. Wind at 0 mph. Catbirds are feeling as chatty as usual. Heat doesn’t seem to be cramping their style. Like I would know. Maybe they’re complaining about it. Would be hard to tell even if I was more fluent in catbird. They always sound as if they’re complaining about something. In fact, it’s not taking to much of a poetic license to transliterate their rusty gate call as “Kvetch! Kvetch!”
Filed under How the Weather Was.
The Old Mannion Homestead. Sunday 2:09 a.m. 66 degrees. Wind SSW. 3 mph. Up late working out on the porch. Peepers peepering nonstop.From inside the house, the musical drip of the faucet in the kitchen sink, drops hitting a knife and making it ring on a plate that won't get washed until morning, sounding like a bird piping contentedly in its sleep. Very light breeze bringing a chill through the open jalousies. Thinking I need a sweatshirt. Knowing I need fortification. Wheaties may be the breakfast of champions, but Cheerios with blueberries is the preferred late-night snack of bloggers.
Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, July 17, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, July 28.
Wednesday. 6:55 a.m. 74 degrees---already! No wind. 88 percent humidity. Supposed to get up to 90 by midaftertoon. Goldfinch on telephone wire. Flies towards the house. Lands on a thistle in front of the window. The thistle bounces under his weight. Decides he doesn’t like it. Flies back up onto the wire, back to me now, surveying the neighborhood for a more stable perch near food. This has been a summer for goldfinches, not just in the neighborhood, but in the area. See them at the ends of low branches and at the top of tall bushes wherever we go. Bird populations fluctuate from year to year. Some years there are more of a species than others. Been a summer for cardinals too. Usually their peak is winter and early spring. Rosalie---Uncle Merlin’s mom who still seems to make her presence felt even though she’s been gone 27 years now---loved goldfinches. Called them butter birds. The first time I visited her gravesite in the memorial garden behind the Episcopal church in Chatham her name hadn’t been put on the plaque inside the door yet. There were no markers in the garden. So I just took a seat on the bench and let myself miss her. I wasn’t alone there though. There was a bird perched on the overhang over the door into the church from the garden. One of her butter birds.
Adapted from the Twitter feed and posted Friday morning, July 5, 2019.
Friday. 7:36 a.m. 61 degrees. High light gray sky. No wind. Weather app says 96% humidity. Can that be right? Not yet uncomfortable out on the porch but can feel the heat building. High of 87 predicted. Goldfinch just made an attempt to land in our bushes. He couldn't get a good purchase and flew off. Closest one has come to the house in a long time which means it's the closest I've been to one in a long time. Probably he was looking to get at the thistles. All About Birds recommends planting native thistles to attract them. Most years we pull them before they bloom, thinking of them as weeds. This year I left them alone and they’re now several feet tall and looking like flowers instead of weeds. Goldfinches seem to come and go year to year around here. Some years we have a lot of them in the neighborhood. Some years it seems there are hardly any. This year is a bounty year. Good to see an old familiar face.
Filed under How the Weather Was.
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