Monday. 7:40 a.m. 51 degrees. Sun up just high enough to turn the sky blue to the horizon but the light is still soft and shadows long. Light wind from the north. 5 mph. Can see it in the tops of the neighbor’s maples. Out on the porch, of course, called out here by my friends the blue jays. Mrs M, bundled up in my barn coat, has joined me for coffee and coffee cake. I told her about how I think of the blue jays as my friends. That’s them whistling, I pointed out. Blue jays don’t just cluck and cackle and scream. They’re truly sociable birds. They’re talking to each other. Not flirting. Not marking territory. Just saying hello and exchanging news. I know Ms M loves me because she puts up so patiently with my bird lore lectures.
When she woke up I suggested we run away. I was already feeling oppressed by the length of my to-do list.
“Where to?” she asked.
“No place special,” I said. “Someplace safe and comforting.”
“Ok,” she said agreeably.
So here we are.
Tuesday. 12;07 p.m. 67 degrees. On Route 9, heading south, taking Mrs M to her appointment with her surgeon in Westchester. Low hanging mist chopping the tops off the wooded hills to the west. Last time I made this trip was June 5. Three months and six days. Seems like no more than a week ago. Then there were still flowers on the locusts and ash trees. Today there’s yellow in the birches and poplars, rust in the maples.
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Photo "Autumn birch" by James Jordan, courtesy of Mecklenburgh Square Garden.
Wednesday. 6:22 a.m. 66 degrees. Out on the porch. Sun up but sky clouded over. Pale gray. Thing patch of fog in the air I can see only against the background of the far, large maple just beyond our neighbor’s fence at the corner of her driveway across the street. The dawn chorus right now is a frenzy of crickets or peepers---can never tell---humming and chirping allegro. Only bird singing yet is a mourning dove somewhere behind our house cooing sorrowfully in counterpoint, the heartbroken call of woe that gives mourning doves their name. And I’m thinking, “You and me both, pal. You and me both.”
Posted Monday night, January 1, 2017.
One of Dickens’ great talents was that no matter how bad the weather really was, he could make it feel so much worse. He could also make it funny. Here’s poor Toby Veck, whose job as a ticket-porter keeps him outside all day in all weather, dealing with a winter wind:
And a breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed, tooth-chattering place it was, to wait in, in the winter-time, as Toby Veck well knew. The wind came tearing round the corner—especially the east wind—as if it had sallied forth, express, from the confines of the earth, to have a blow at Toby. And oftentimes it seemed to come upon him sooner than it had expected, for bouncing round the corner, and passing Toby, it would suddenly wheel round again, as if it cried ‘Why, here he is!’ Incontinently his little white apron would be caught up over his head like a naughty boy’s garments, and his feeble little cane would be seen to wrestle and struggle unavailingly in his hand, and his legs would undergo tremendous agitation, and Toby himself all aslant, and facing now in this direction, now in that, would be so banged and buffeted, and touzled, and worried, and hustled, and lifted off his feet, as to render it a state of things but one degree removed from a positive miracle, that he wasn’t carried up bodily into the air as a colony of frogs or snails or other very portable creatures sometimes are, and rained down again, to the great astonishment of the natives, on some strange corner of the world where ticket-porters are unknown.
---from The Chimes by Charles Dickens.
By the way, The Chimes is usually collected with Dickens' Christmas stories, but it's a New Year's story. (With goblins.) So from Charles Dickens, Toby Veck, the goblins, and all of us here in Mannionville---:Mrs M, Ken, Oliver, and myself---Happy New Year!
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