Between Holidays

Another of my favorite times:  the week between X-mas and the New Year.  All is so quiet.  As if the world were breathing a deep sigh and snuggling up with some hot cider beside a fire.  All the frantic pre-holiday rushing about is over (mostly; witness the brawl in the Mall of the Americas [so aptly named] the day after Christmas) and folks can relax.  Even those working are on light duty this one week of the year.  Lovely.

The fog has been back intermittently over the past week.  There’s a forecast of rain (no kidding, in late December!) for the next couple days and that should open up our visibility a bit.  As it is now, I can barely discern the houses across the street.  Very Currier and Ives.

My sister sent us a couple of amaryllis for the holidays.  Once I figured out there was something under the dirt in the planter and got some water on them, they sent large shoots up, very quickly.  I’m looking forward to their giant flowers.  I’ve never had amaryllis, but love really big gaudy blossoms, so I’m impatient for these to bloom.  In spring the bazillion irises we have all over our yard erupt in deep, flashy colors, but in the winter we’ve had to go without.  Now we’ll have some color in the house for a while.  Such a treat!

There’s an odd bird that just showed up on my office window trellis.  Don’t have the bird book out and this one is totally new to me.  Larger than the usual sparrows and finches and darker.  A solitary visitor, seemingly uninterested in the seeds in the feeder.  As quickly as it arrived, it’s gone.  Have to get the book and try to id this guy. 

Well, that’s all for now. 

The Solstice

I guess I’m not so good at this blog thing.  It’s been a few weeks since I’ve last posted.  I don’t see the sense in diary blogging.  Posting the quotidian details of my repetitive daily routines.  So, I’ll post when I feel like writing something other than the clipping of toe nails, going out to eat or taking a shower.

On the eve of the official start day of winter, the snow is coming down with enough volume our snow shoveling neighbor may actually have to make a visit to our driveway.  Until today the snow has been easily swept off the sidewalks and driveway with a broom, but on this solstice eve, accumulation may actually occur.

We’ve had at a couple weeks of foggy days.  Occasionally, the fog would burn off in the late afternoon, giving us an hour or so of much-needed sunshine.  But on most days it’s been with us all day long.  I’m hopeful this snow will leave us with some sunny days behind it, ridding the valley of the fog.  Our area has lots of ancient volcanoes, inactive for ages, but there’s still enough magma close to the surface to provide numerous hot springs.  One source of our winter fog.  The wetlands surrounding town also add to the winter mists.  Low pressure that brings the snow also lets steam around us evaporate more efficiently, thus scouring out the valley’s air.  At least that’s my hope this morning.

This is the time of year when I most miss Hawaii.  My partner and I lived there for five years, more than a quarter-century ago.  When the holidays come around I am reminded of the Makahiki season in Hawaii.  There, before European and American colonization, the four months from November through February were a time when all the usually strictly enforced oligarchic taboos were lifted and there was extensive partying.  The violently imposed hierarchy was diminished and everyone was allowed to relax their usual guardedness with one another.  While I don’t admire the old Hawaiian monarchy at all, nor its sexism and racism, I enjoy the idea of extending the holidays over a whole third of the year. 

In the US it’s only the rich who are afforded the luxury of real rest, relaxation and recreation.  Working for all but two weeks a year is the norm for most folks, with millions having no time off at all.  Many who have their precious two weeks usually lack the resources to travel or recreate.  And so often those two weeks disappear one day at a time into doctor’s appointments, staying home with a sick child, etc.  In my job I talk to dozens of women every work day.  Most of them seem so tired and depressed.  Worn out with worry, work and loss of dreams.  At this ‘happiest’ time of the year (or so the seasonal songs proclaim) they’re really dragging.  Worried about everybody else:  the spouse, the kids, their elderly parents.  They tell me about their illnesses, colds, joint pain, ‘fibromyalgia’, depression and how it all gets worse this time of year.  Some comment on the fact that Christmas falls on a weekend this year, so no time off.   I wish I had a magic wand.  To grant them some respite from the ‘holidays’. 

On that sour seasonal note, I’ll end this post.

        

Big Winds

Big winds, some type 2 hurricane strength, swept across most of the state late last week, uprooting decades old conifers and other trees and leaving much devastation in their wake.  We were fortunate they didn’t make it all the way up to our northeastern edge of the Great Salt Lake.  But, just 15 miles to our south in Ogden, roofs were de-shingled, and cars and houses squashed by trees other flying debris. 

The winds ushered in frigid temperatures, but cleared out the usually gray, polluted winter air along the Wasatch Front south of here.  Our northern sky is a wedgewood blue with not a single cloud in sight.  The winds are still with us, but not in force, just enough to bend the treetops westerly, away from the canyon’s mouth.

My life partner will have completed 72 years on the planet next week.  Seems impossible that he’s accumulated so much time.  He’s so active and remains so young looking.  In any event, I’m trying to think of some way of celebrating this milestone.  For him, a good meal out with friends and family is a favorite, so that’ll probably be the best thing to do. 

Another work day is getting underway, so I’ll sign off.

Almost winter

It’s been a while since my last post.  Not sure why.  And not really sure why I keep posting.  It’s like having a diary unlocked and lying out on the counter for everyone to see.  Hmmmm.  There’s something Freudian about that.

Anyway, the winter is creeping in slowly.  Not officially winter yet, but it sure feels it.  Twenties at night and barely scraping the underside of 50 during the day.  We got in a supply of bird seed for the season this weekend and filled the feeders.  Not seeing many finches, but the scrub jays and our local species of woodpecker, the flicker, are showing themselves more frequently these days, along with the ubiquitous sparrows.  We like to make sure they’ll have plenty to fill their bellies as it gets colder.

My hats were evidently a hit with a friend’s son and his buddy.  Also with some folks here in town.   I might actually make more on them than just the yarn cost this holiday season.  We’ll see.  I love crocheting them.  My mate is my color consultant and his eye has been unerring this far into the venture.  He favors bright, deep colors and those are pretty popular right now.  He and I are collaborating on a couple of wall hangings; my crochet and his beading and other adorning.  The first one looks pretty good.  We might take this one with us to a friend’s Holiday Boutique in Salt Lake this weekend.  I’m taking hats, so the ‘mandala’ might be a good addition.  We’ll see.

Well, my work day is about to begin.  So, that’s all for now.

The end of another week

The week is ending with a big storm pushing in from our northwest.  We’ve had clouds since yesterday and the wind has been howling all day today.  About an hour ago the wind quieted a bit and snow started falling.  Now the wind is back driving the snow sideways.  It was about 50 degrees this morning when I woke up, but now it’s down to 35 and feels a whole lot colder with the wind.

All day the sparrows have been mobbing the bower in the trellis, in spite if how bare it is.  The few scraggly hops that remain are dry and they rustle, creating a sound like paper crinkling, when they get blown about.  The birds had been quite agitated, but once the snow started, they completely disappeared.  Where do they go?  Maybe into the evergreens around the neighborhood; taking shelter there now that the deciduous trees have become skeletal, leafless sticks against the winter sky. 

My life mate and I are gonna venture out this evening for dinner at a local downtown restaurant, unless we have a complete white out when I end my work day.  We need to get out of the house after a week of being closed in against the cold.  My partner is a very active sort, who’s always in his garden, weather permitting, and this week the weather hasn’t permitted, so he’s going a bit stir crazy.  Time for an outing.     

The week begins

Another snowy weekend, but just like last weekend, the snow mostly melted within hours of its falling.  Today is wintry though.  The sky is a bright white, not threatening more snow, but looking decidedly chilly.  The sparrows form what my friend Annie calls a ‘flash mob’ and sail across the yard to the now denuded bower on the trellis at my office window.  The trumpet vine has only a few leaves left and the hops vine that shares the trellis has dry tan flowers hanging on here and there.  During the green summer and fall months, the hops are swamped entirely by the trumpet vine and only now in the cold beginnings of winter is their tenacity made manifest.  The sparrows don’t linger on the trellis, just grab some seeds from the feeder and hurriedly mob off to god knows where.  The next feeder, I suppose.    

I’ve had a mild cold this week.  Just some sniffles and a low-grade fever.  So, no venturing out into the inclement weather.  Spent most of it in my chair with my crocheting.  I’m working on some hats for a friend’s son.  He’s away at grad school in Hawaii.  I don’t see how he’ll need my hats over there in the sunshine and humidity, but his mom saw pics of them and says he’ll love one, so……….

As I slide slowly into retirement (still work a couple days a week), I’m finding the crocheting I learned as a girl coming in handy.  My arthritic fingers need movement, something they’ve had plenty of in my working years at the computer.  Now that they have 4 or 5 idle days a week, they had started to freeze up on me.  So, I took up the hook and yarn and started making small rugs, antimacassars and armrest covers at first.  Then a beret or two for my mate, then more and more hats for unsuspecting family members and friends and then there were just too many to find heads for.  I took some over to a small main street boutique, knowing full well I’d get a polite pat on the head and a smile of regret, but the owner asked me to leave those, told me to get some cards/price tags made and bring her as many as I could make.  With that, Brigham Berets was born.  She’s actually sold more than a dozen so far and I have an outlet for my finger exercises.  In this small town the market could already be saturated, but we’ll see.

Well, time to get back to my ‘tatting’ as my partner refers to my hat making. 

Snow

The snow finally came on Saturday, and while it’s hanging around on the garden beds and deck, it never stuck to the driveway nor roads.  Just an inch or two.  The clouds have been with us since, but haven’t deposited anything additional.

It was cold this morning when I ventured out to drive over to the pool.  The sky was lighter than usual, with daylight savings time ended for another year.  The kids won’t have to pick their way to school in the dark, stumbling over debris on the sidewalks.  They seemed a much livelier bunch today. 

After my swim, with smoothie in hand watching at the big picture window in our living room, I like to take in the neighborhood.  We live just around the corner from an elementary school, so the kids (and there are a lot of them; my husband refers to our area as a ‘rookery’) walk to and from school each day.  In the morning they go by in small bunches, hauling what looks like tons of stuff in their low-slung backpacks.  The afternoon homeward migration starts when the adult brother of a neighbor marches off to the school, muttering loudly to himself.  He’s autistic.  Then, several minutes later, here he comes again, tromping along ahead of seven or eight kids who peel off one or two at a time into their houses along the way.  He sets a brisk pace, so the littlest ones lag behind.  After the first week or so of school, they don’t even try to keep up.  The last three kids follow him into their home, a few doors up the block from us.  This ritual and his march to church on Sundays are the only times I see him.  A small school bus picks him up in the morning, probably for a ‘sheltered workshop’ or some such thing, then drops him home just after lunch time.  I see the bus, but usually not him.  The only reason I know he’s autistic is that about a year ago we got a solicitation in the mail from his family for donations to the national Autism Foundation.

Later

The day is progressing into evening.  The birds have been especially active today, seemingly hundreds of them startling up from the ground and into the bower.  They swoop and dive, dodge and veer, much like schools of fish in the air.  The wind and the snow make the change to winter more definite for them, I’m sure, and their desperation to bulk up is palpable.  My mate grows seedy plants just for them and they are taking full advantage of his generosity.  There are sunflowers of all sizes and sorghum, parsley, oregano and other late seeding plants.  All for the birds.  So our yard is alive with sparrows, finches, juncos, scrub jays and ravens this time of year.  All shouting at each other, but often feeding side by side, too.  A covey of quail share our backyard.  They are a cautious lot, usually, moving under cover around the perimeter.  Now that the cold is upon us, though, they have discovered that the shortest distance between two points really is a straight line and can be seen racing across the open paths between the beds.  And the occasional squirrel visitation is just a streak of gray-brown out of the corner of the eye.  All this frantic activity among the critters makes me worry this will be a harsh winter season.  Wooly worm predictions and all that.

Well, time to make a cup of tea and think about dinner.

A Quiet Morning

No snow yet, thank heavens.  False alarms from the weather prophets on TV.  Cold though.  The trumpet vine leaves on the trellis outside my window are hanging on, providing some cover against the wind for the sparrows and finches that stay here through the winter.  They burrow among the boughs, puffing themselves up to stay warm, waiting for the sun to come out from behind the eastern mountains.  Being in the foothills at the mouth of the canyon means gorgeous vistas, but also high winds in the morning and evening and a long wait for sunrise, especially during daylight savings time.  So I’m looking forward to the annual switch back to standard time.  Wish we didn’t have to mess with the time and our biologic clocks twice a year.  Seems downright silly to me.

My younger brother and his two grown sons are hunters.  Yearly they participate in both the bow and rifle hunts for deer and elk.  As is often the case, these past two years their hunt was successful, providing some venison for our freezer.  We have some chops and steak this year, which my life partner will marinate and prepare in some delicious form or other.  One of the late fall/early winter rituals we adhere to.  Others include putting up freezer salsa and corn; putting our extensive gardens to bed; making infused olive oil from the last of our herbs; changing to our heavier quilts and bringing our sweaters, sweatshirts and other winter clothes out from the back of the closet.  

Ah, the sun is finally lighting up the eastern horizon.  Not visible yet above the mountain, but suffusing the sky with a purple gold light, announcing its imminent rise.  Sunshine is precious now, lighting our south-facing windows and warming the house; raising our spirits.  It’ll get more dear as winter progresses.  Knowing the sun is on its way, the birds are rousing themselves, flitting in and out of the bower provided by the trellis, diving for seeds in the feeder and showing some life.   

In our dotage, my mate and I find what used to be small pleasures, like observing the birds, have taken on much larger roles in our lives.  We have the time now to spend leisurely hours sitting quietly and watching.  Watching leaves fall, kids push home from school against the wind, cats crouch hopefully below the bird feeders and clouds drift across the sky.  Such luxury we’ve afforded ourselves. 

Fall has fell!

Looks like snow is just over the horizon.  We’ll have some melty stuff tomorrow morning, but by Wednesday, there could be inches sticking to the ground.  I’m gonna miss the fall.  Nothing can bring tears to my eyes as readily as the shimmering yellows on a hillside covered by aspens in autumn.

My father's pursuit of the perfect aspen 'colored' my youth.  Many a weekend in the fall, my dad would grab his camera and his family and drive off in the late afternoon up to the high aspen-rimmed meadows of the Cedar Mountain.  Just to the northeast of Cedar Breaks National Monument we'd park in a meadow and begin our search for the perfect dying aspen.  The tree had to be the absolute epitome of gold and the sky a deep blue above it.  The sky was only right in the direction opposite the sun early in the morning (to the west) or just before sundown (to the east).  We'd all start off in different directions toward one stand of aspen or another.  We'd walk and look and walk some more.  If one of us spotted a possibility, we'd whistle a signal for Dad to come and check it out.  In this way, hours and days of my early life were spent.  Many perfect trees were spotted and photographed; so many that years ago when my mother and I went through old slides to catalogue and store them, there were more than ten carousels of nothing but Cedar Mountain aspens. 

Those early years taught me (without my realizing it, of course) more about light and its effect on color than any of the formal art education I received since.  I also learned to love the variations in light from early morning to night and from season to season.  Perfection is achieved only because of the changes brought about by movement through time.  I'm still trying to gain a better intellectual understanding of this lesson, since I have so visceral a knowledge of its importance.

Now the hillsides above my deck are losing their colors.  The maple reds, oak golds and high aspen yellows are all browning out, leaving drab patches in an otherwise deeply colored tapestry.  I miss them all already.

MONDAY, ALL AT ONCE

Monday came crashing in way too early this morning.  Awake at 4 and unable to get back to sleep, I got up and went over to the high school pool for some laps.  I always feel much better after a swim, but thats really hard to remember at some ungodly hour of the morning, the only time the pool isn’t filled with raucous teens.  From 5 to 6:30 we old folks have it all to ourselves; a group of gray and white-haired women ‘aquacizing’ in the shallow end; several of us using the lap lanes and a passel of old guys paddling listlessly in the deep end.  ‘Oldies’ on a tape player provide some low background ‘ambience’, giving rhythm to the ladies exercises.  All the laughter and gentle joshing is muted to undertone by limbs slapping the water’s surface in the lanes. 

I move slowly up and down my lane; usually sharing with a much better swimmer who I know only as “the woman from Mantua”, a tiny town up the canyon from here.  She’s in before 5 (there’s a cadre of 2 or 3 who are allowed to help open the place) and out not long after I get in, usually at 5:30.  We exchange smiles and nods and go on about our morning rituals.  For her that’s several leisurely laps with the kickboard, then many laps of more seriously vigorous swimming, then back to the kickboard to cool down.  For me, a slow lap or two with the kickboard, then a ‘sociable breast stroke’, so dubbed by an old fellow I swam with as a very young woman.  He called it that because he kept his head above water all the time so as to gossip with all us other swimmers.  So, after some head above water breast stroking, I’m back to the kick board for the duration, usually about 45 minutes in all.  I feel lucky to have access to the pool and lucky I can still get around as easily as I do. 

Coming out into the dark morning, the moon was a huge crescent lying up there on its back.  It’s colder today than it’s been so far this fall.  A hint of winter creeping down from the mountaintops.  There’s been snow up there already, but it hasn’t stayed with us.  To the south, the tallest of the Wasatch peaks have accumulated some feet of snow, but our shorter, less massive mountains aren’t holding onto their’s just yet. 

First Post

It’s autumn.  My favorite time here at the northeastern edge of the Great Salt Lake.  The mountainsides are red, gold, yellow and bronze with dying leaves.  After a very wet spring and summer, the scrub oak and maple on the foothills are perfuse, gaudy even, creating a soft tapestry of colors.  I’m hoping to have the grace to die so beautifully.  With a big splash of jubilance. 

The pinyon pine nuts are showing up at the roadside produce stands along with pumpkins and other squash, as well as cobs of colorful dried ‘Indian’ corn.  I look, in vain so far, for chili ristras.  While there are thousands of Mexican seasonal farmworkers here, the anglo majority does it’s best to ignore them.  So no ristras on offer.  I’d love a string of dried red chilis to brighten up my kitchen, but no dice. 

The birds, sparrows mostly, but some goldfinches and the red-headed house finches as well, are cleaning up the seeds that have spilled from all the plants in our garden.  The wild Italian parsley that covers our front yard is especially seedy this year and sparrows swoop in squads onto it, covering the still bright green foliage with their drab browns and grays.  We also have numerous stands of sunflowers, some still petaled, but most just brown heads, bent by the heavy seeds.  These the gray-blue iridescent scrub jays dive after, screaming their claims to the best of the seeds.  When we had our roof replaced last fall, the workers discovered lots of caches of seeds the jays had made for their winter subsistence.  New, well nailed shingles are harder for them to stash food under.  At least that seems the case, since I’ve not heard them scratching and pounding away up there as is usual at this time of year. 

We’ve lived here almost ten years now.  Both my husband and I moving headlong in to our dotage.  Having spent most of our nearly 40 years together in cities, this small town of 20,000 souls seems a good place to ease into agedness.  Edged to the east by the majestic Wasatch Mountains and to the west by the Great Salt Lake, our town is quite lovely.  In addition, there’s a very large bird refuge on a freshwater bay appended to our inland sea that adds a touch of the exotic.  Avian visitors from South America join us in summer and from the earth’s extreme northern tier in winter.  Pelicans, all kinds of geese, ducks, loons and other water birds are with us year round, as are dozens of varieties of raptors.  But bright-feathered southern immigrants pass by on occasion, a flash of Carmen Miranda brightness against our deep blue northern sky.  Their names remain unknown to me.  I could find out who they are and from whence they come by stopping at the refuge’s visitor’s center, but somehow that would deprive them of their mystery.  Until moving here, I hadn’t realized how fascinating birds’ lives can be. 

My husband built a trellis and bird platform outside my home office window so I can observe the birds.  He put a scarlet-flowered trumpet vine on the trellis, attracting hummingbirds from very early spring to early winter.  They are delightful creatures.  The vine arches over the platform, creating a bower for them to rest in.  Until this trellis view, I’d never seen hummingbirds up close, nor at full stop rest.  They sparkle when they fly or hover, but at rest they lose their spangled iridescence and turn quite dark.  While flying into the trumpet flowers, they provide dashes of brightness against the deep green of the vines.  As do the finches: gold and red streaks across my window. 

Well, that’s all for today.