Tag Archives: neighborhood

Little corner of my world.

nature, water, wildflowers, ,

9-13-img_3252Along these lower creekside paths in my neighborhood, maintenance vehicles may drive when they are taking care of things. Recently I had seen one down there that didn’t look very official, an unmarked white SUV, just parked, with no crew around, and I wondered… who? Yesterday I saw it again, driving slowly along, then stopping, then creeping forward, and then at one pause a man got out, and I backtracked so I could talk to him across the channel, as he was lifting away a dead branch.

He said he worked for the water agency, and that as they clean out out the creek beds in preparation for winter, they want to preserve bird nests. He was marking any he found, so they would be spared.

That explains the desecration I saw a couple of weeks ago, seemingly random messes where it looked like elephants had trampled across the streams in places. Now I’m guessing it was humans with some heavy equipment for cutting trees and carrying them off.

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Looks like pennyroyal.
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This old willow tree is a familiar friend.

These watercourses that flow from the hills are natural parts of the geography, but they also carry groundwater from the neighborhoods on either side, so it is a constant labor to preserve the ecology of the stream and keep it open, while not turning it into a mere drainage ditch. Occasionally they have to dredge out silt, and the stream looks momentarily ravaged, but quickly the willows and horsetail grass and myriad shrubs and vines start to fill in again. The egrets and mallards and frogs don’t get lost.

Darkness hangs on later these days, so I start my walks later in the morning. Today men with chain saws were already down in the dry areas of the creek bed as I walked by. One man was carefully grooming the lower parts of a small tree, getting it prepared for such time as fast waters will flow past. Let there not be any branches on which to hang debris and start the clogging-up again.

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Looking down from a bridge.

It’s been such a gift this summer to walk almost daily on these paths so close to my house. Each morning or evening the views are slightly changed, the birds and flowers presenting new events to witness. As the days shorten and the weather becomes a little less friendly, I hope I can still get myself down there often, and keep learning about this small corner of my world.

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My winding path to the key.

children's books, nature, poetry, quotes, , , , , ,

gl P1050286One thing leads to another. I had the sudden and unusual urge to clean my shower door this morning, and ended up spending hours on the bathroom, the bedroom, the laundry area in the garage…. I made myself stop at six o’clock so I could take a walk, which was more of a chore than some evenings, because I had already been on my feet most of the day.

Even so, I didn’t want to take the shortcut, because the sight of the slant rays through the redwood trees at the park is not to be missed. This is where my children played soccer and softball, and climbed those trees, before they were trimmed of their lower branches. I like experiencing the park this way more than the former version, when we used to stand around shivering on the damp sidelines to watch an hour of soccer.

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But getting back to earlier in the day: Before indulging in the flurry of vacuuming and scrubbing, I had followed other, quieter prompts, in the realm of poetry. I was reading some recommendations for anthologies, when the collection Come Hither showed up on my mental path. This was probably the first book of poetry I ever bought. We were homeschooling and I had borrowed Walter de la Mare’s anthology from the library. But I couldn’t renew it forever, and it was clearly a book that one would like to delve into forever. So I splurged on a copy of our own, and my students would leaf through its pages week by week to find an appealing poem to memorize.

Walter de la Mare
Walter de la Mare

In the last months I had forgotten about this book; I knew it was in the spare bedroom on a shelf full of poetry books, and I made a note to myself to get it down and enjoy it again. After this evening’s walk I did that, but I had to limit myself to reading only the first poem, so that I will get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. I also discovered a wonderful article by David M. Whalen, about the anthology and its editor: “Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither.”

He explains the frontispiece address to the “Young of All Ages”: “Anthologies of children’s verse usually fall into sentimentality. They reflect their editors’ attempts at indulgence in feelings that have become unreal to editors and readers both. Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages is markedly free of this blot as de la Mare, a Twentieth-Century British poet and author, never left behind the numinous sense of mystery that characterizes childhood.”

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British author Alice Thomas Ellis is quoted in the article as saying that if she could have the Bible and Shakespeare and one other book, when stranded on a desert island, the third book would be Come Hither. The copious notes alone I find fascinating; they are obviously written with the older and even oldest Young in mind, and they lead me always to one more musing .

Here is that first poem of the collection. As the turning of the page will reveal a different offering, and another following that, I feel certain that I will have more to share with you in the future. But as Whalen points out, this one poem already contains everything.

THIS IS THE KEY

This is the Key of the Kingdom
In that Kingdom is a city;
In that city is a town;
In that town there is a street;
In that street there winds a lane;
In that lane there is a yard;
In that yard there is a house;
In that house there waits a room;
In that room an empty bed;
And on that bed a basket–
A Basket of Sweet Flowers
Of Flowers, of Flowers;
A Basket of Sweet Flowers.

Flowers in a Basket;
Basket on the bed;
Bed in the chamber;
Chamber in the house;
House in the weedy yard;
Yard in the winding lane;
Lane in the broad street;
Street in the high town;
Town in the city;
City in the Kingdom–
This is the Key of the Kingdom.
Of the Kingdom this is the Key.

A day for a funeral, and great beauty.

church, feasts, nature, , , , , ,

gl8 cloud IMG_3123This morning I had to wait around to take my walk, until the dawn lightened enough. When I went outside the first time to check the visibility, the feeling in the air was thrilling. The combination of the light and the humidity and everything was something you don’t get to experience if you are in the house smelling the coffee.

I’m not usually outdoors before 6:00, though there was one summer when for a few weeks at least Pippin and I would go to the high school track so that she could run, while I walked, in the dark — because it was the only time we had.

When I did start out a little later, the sky was filled with beautiful clouds. All the plants along the path were breathing into the space where my face was coming along with its nose. It was very intimate; I wanted to stand a while in the middle of the path and breathe with them.

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giant eucalyptus tree by the creek

I’ve been walking the same path almost every day, and getting to know some landmarks, or seeing how they have developed in the last 26 years. I feel that I didn’t notice them before…. or I forgot, is more likely. I am not the same person I was, and some of them are also more grown up, if they are still there.

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When my tires were getting rotated the other day I took a walk in that neighborhood and it had its own scents and views. With fennel! I know I am always talking about the wild fennel, but it is everywhere, and giving off that sweet licorice smell as it makes its seeds and dries up. The banks of the creek are full of it — my summer is full of it — and this field is decorated, too.

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fennel in field with fog

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Today I will go to the funeral and burial for the young man who fell asleep in the Lord last week. His casket was brought into the church this week and while we were commemorating the Beheading of John the Baptist yesterday morning it was in the middle of the nave. After the Liturgy we had more prayers for him, and koliva.

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We have sung these prayers as an adjunct to every service that has happened since he died, and this week there has been a service every day. I wasn’t present for every one.

A new icon of the Forerunner of Christ was recently commissioned for the church, showing several scenes from his life. It was finished just in time for this feast.

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Yesterday we heard words from St. Justin Popivic’s homily on this feast, about how St. John the Baptist had been the Forerunner of Christ not just on earth, but also into Hades:

The glorious Forerunner also entered into the kingdom of death as the Forerunner of all of the true Confessors of Christ in the world, all of the true Prophets in the world, to announce to all of the souls in the kingdom of death: Lo, death is defeated, the demons destroyed, the kingdom of death will be destroyed when, in a little while, the Lord appears here, and you will be led out of this horror and into heavenly joy, into the Kingdom On High.
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Thus, for us Christians today is like unto Great Friday. Just as for the Savior, the Resurrection follows Great Friday, so the Forerunner joyously dies and enters into death, for he sees the victory over death, and knows that the Lord has prepared for him as well eternal life and resurrection from the dead on the day of the Great Judgment.

When the Lord was crucified, He descended into the nether regions, into Hades, into the kingdom of death, with His human Soul. His Body lay in the tomb, but His Soul, the fullness of his Divinity, descended into death’s kingdom. And how astonished must have been all of the human souls in Hades, on seeing God in a human soul, shining with ineffable light, light impossible for a human being to imagine. Who would not come to believe in Him? Who, when He appears in the kingdom of death so filled with Eternal Truth, Eternal Life, Eternal Justice?

He appears as conqueror over death. And as death’s kingdom could not hold God Who was in Jesus’ soul, as it could not hold God in its hands, it fell apart because of Christ’s Divinity, because of His Most-holy Soul, in which was the fullness of God. And the Lord led out of death’s kingdom all those who had earlier come to believe the Forerunner, and those who had come to believe in Him, the Lord Jesus Christ, to believe that in truth, He was True God in Heaven and on earth.

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Storyteller by the creek.

friends, nature,

I hadn’t been on the creek path for five minutes this evening when I saw that I was about to overtake a long-legged woman with her hair up in a ball cap. It seemed that she had been looking for blackberries, and was just getting back up to speed, as she glanced back at me and revealed a soft and friendly face. But I was without a doubt gaining on her, and as I came up alongside I said, “I thought you would be speeding ahead of me, because your legs are longer.”

“Oh, I already had my workout for the day…this is just my pleasure walk,” she said, slowly enough that I had to adjust my gait to hear her out. It didn’t seem polite, since I had started the conversation, to rush away. And she continued, “You seem to be going at a good pace.”

“I’m trying to work out the kinks I got from gardening all afternoon,” I answered, and when she went on,

“Oh, I love gardening…I used to do a lot of gardening, and I had a nice garden until….” I think she might have sped up a little, and I stayed a tiny bit slower, just so we could keep chatting.

She began to tell about how she had included catnip in her 12′ x 12′ garden, and after it had grown peacefully for some weeks or months, the neighborhood cats discovered it all together one night and had a riotous party. She could hear their noise through the window, and didn’t know was going on, and when she saw her garden in the morning she was crushed.  Her garden had been devastated by the excited cats, who had smashed plants, scattered cherry tomatoes, and even broken a cantaloupe. Indeed, a neighbor testified that she had found her cat sleeping off the party in the bathroom with cantaloupe seeds stuck to his fur.

After my surprised comments — really, have you heard such a tale? — she easily, but without any hurry, began to talk about how she had found a turtle one time, on the path we were on, and taken it down to the creek where it would be safer, giving it a kiss on its shell to say goodbye and good luck. She described seeing lots of baby turtles in springtime, lined up on a log by the water, and how cute they are.

I have never seen a turtle in all the years we have lived here. That may be because I am walking too fast on the creek path, or I’m over at the gym reading at the treadmill. I wanted to stay with my lanky lady and listen to her, so I changed my route to match hers as long as I could.

She mentioned finding little turtles as a child, and how at that time you could sell them, but then they were found to be carrying salmonella, so that nowadays they have to be a minimum size to be sold. So I asked her where she grew up, and it was Michigan, and she said that though it does get cold here, she likes that better than Michigan where it stayed hot all night in the summer. She was wearing a down vest over her flannel shirt, and I also had on a lumberjack weight flannel shirt, and we talked about the weather. I told her how I wasn’t able to go to sleep the other night until I changed into a flannel nightgown and added leggings and socks to my sleeping outfit, and she said she had had to do the same thing last week.

But she liked to talk about animals. We were passing by an elementary school and she mentioned a puddle that forms near there every winter. I know it well; Mr. Glad and I on our walks used to have to make a wide arc to get around it. She said, “I take a big bucket of water over to that puddle every year and scoop all the polliwogs out of it and into my bucket…they think that is a spacious hotel! And then I take them down and pour them in the creek.”

I had been with my friend only about five minutes, and our paths diverged when she headed toward the apartments where she lives, on the other side of the creek from the school. She didn’t try to keep talking to me; we just said, “See you later!” While I was with her she never gave me the impression that she was desperate for company, though she did like sharing her stories. I had to walk another twenty minutes or more before I got home, and the whole way I was musing on our short but sweet encounter. I stopped at a bridge to look at the wild fennel crowding the banks of the drying-up creek, and I thought about her frogs relaxing in the cool water down there.

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If you had encouraged me to go for a walk after dinner, because I was going to meet a woman who would make my walk more enjoyable by sharing a few minutes of it, I would have stayed home. For me, something like this has to come as a complete, and completely happy, surprise.