Day 16 Jump Jump Jump Away

Temperatures rise

Piles of frogs mate in the ponds.

People post pictures.

One thinks of frogs jumping away. Tree frogs, pond frogs, all try to escape when you approach. Not for them the rabbit approach of complete stillness, don’t move and you won’t be seen. Even though both rabbits and frogs have strong hind legs, and jumping away is surely the best option, their reflexes act differently. This doesn’t count in spring, when all bets are off. The reflexes act on the other primal instinct of mating. Sometimes you just have to pay attention to the matter at hand, despite the dangers that surround you.

I wonder about my own reflexes. Sometimes I jump away, sometimes I hide in stillness. I guess it depends on the sort of attack and my power to evade. If it’s something slower or stupider, I jump away. If it’s more powerful, I go into rabbit mode. Right now, I’m in rabbit mode. I want to escape this country, but the craziness is more powerful than I am, and there’s no place to which I can jump away.

God, I wish I could jump, jump, jump away.

Day 15 It is usual

 It is usual that I’m sitting at the window with my coffee. It is usual that I’m listening to the birds. It is usual that my companion du jour is working while I sit at the window drinking coffee and listening to birds. It is usual that my eyes are fogged and my sinuses clogged. 

What is not usual is that I got up before 9.

I’m looking for glimmers, those things that bring joy. My friend shared the concept with me. It’s the opposite of a trigger. You have to be aware for either thing, I think. Or at least your body does. I spend the days surrounded by glimmers and triggers, and my body reacts to them as does my mood, but my mind is less aware. It is usual for me to get up, feeling vaguely depressed and disinclined to do anything. But it is not usual for me to be aware of what causes that feeling. Is it physical or emotional? Or is it both?

It is usual for me to flounder in my feelings.

Day 14 How Beautiful is the Rain

I’m looking past the bouquet of dying, drying daffodils to the mossy pond, a flat horizontal stripe of green showing through vertical stripes of oaks and Spanish moss. Colors are muted greens, greys, and beige. The Carolina wrens call. A little brown bird flits into the bush. The usual perky cardinal has not appeared, although for a while I mistook the red end of the garden hose for an unusually still bird. The sky is that grey-white that presages possible rain. 

On days like these, I don’t want to do much of anything. It’s not depression, but it’s not far from it. So, I sit at the window, watching and listening and trying not to think about plans or projects. Isn’t that what Zen is about?

I used to lie in bed, listening to the drumming of rain on the roof, looking out through the wall of windows into the green cave of light and leaves. This was in the milk barn on Taylors Ferry Rd. I loved the excuse that rain gave me to read and listen. I still have that feeling about rain. If it’s sunny, I feel like I need to be out and about. At the very least, I need to get out of my jammies. But a rainy day gives me permission to be still and a little sad.

Day 13 Gently

Tapping the egg gently on the counter, carefully pulling the shell apart at the resulting crack, she began the deliberate process of separating egg yolk from egg white. This step was always the most absorbing part of making a lemon meringue pie. You had to be so careful to not let the yolk break along the sharp edge of the shell.  It could not be permitted to ooze out with the strings of white. An errant spot of yolk would irretrievably contaminate the whites, making it impossible to whisk them into peaks of stiff meringue.

Some day she’d have to read up on the chemistry of this. For now, she let herself sink into the careful back and forth of the egg yolk, gently tipping it from shell half to shell half, while the separated white dripped off the shell’s edge into the waiting bowl. This would be done six times, so there had to be an intermediate bowl. Separate the white into that small bowl, then drop the yolk into the pudding bowl, toss the shell into the compost bucket, and pour the white into the meringue bowl. Repeat. If a snippet of yolk got into the white, well it was only one egg that needed to be repurposed. It would be set aside for tomorrow’s omelett, and the bowl of already-separated whites wouldn’t be affected.  It was always a good idea to have some extra eggs for this process.

Really, lemon meringue pies were the perfect dessert. You used the entire egg. Too often when she’d separated eggs for a pudding, the whites sat in the fridge, forgotten until they desiccated. And if she made divinity or meringues, the yolks were similarly wasted.  With a lemon meringue pies, the issue never came up.

Day 12, Four Ducks on a Pond

 ”There are those damn white birds,” he said, pointing them out on the painting.They were egrets, ubiquitous in the Low Country, and no landscape is complete without them. He does get tired of them, but he’ll add them in if the buyer insists. (He runs an art and map gallery, selling four generations worth of his family’s artwork, and his toddler son is bidding fair to join the artistic tribe.) 

Certain birds are iconic. Even if you aren’t a birdwatcher, you can usually identify them. Usually.  I need the Merlin app to help me, and when I went on the Audubon tour at Mt Tabor, I kept asking “What’s that lovely bird call?” It was always a robin. 

Many birds are obvious, though. New Mexico has its roadrunner and every spring we wait for the migratory hummingbirds to arrive. The former has a rattle for its call, and the latter a shrill Doppler whistle. So, like the crow and the jay, they are easy to ID. Robins are another easy bird, and I grew up excitedly spotting the bright red plumage of Illinois’ state bird, the cardinal. (I’ve since discovered that the Northern Cardinal is claimed as the state bird by seven states. Does that make it more or less iconic?)

On my travels, I spend a lot of time listening for birds. The house in Beaufort has dozens of beautiful calls, and I still thrill to the nightly hoots of the barred owls calling back and forth. I fill the feeders in NM, and ID the finches and juncos, who are regular visitors. B feeds the hummers in Portland, and keeps the cat inside on early spring.mornings to save the nesting bird population (although he brought in a wren carcass to her disgust.)

Still, despite not being a birdwatcher per se, I do have some bird-related travel wishes. I want to go back to Lundy Island and watch the puffins nesting on the far promontory. I want to go to the Galapagos and see Galapagos penguins and then go to the South Pole to see the rest of the tribe. (I still remember the time someone called the reference line to settle a bet: are penguins only on the South Pole. That’s when I discovered that there are penguins north of the equator, on Galapagos, but that’s as far north as they go. Sadly the bet was about the poles: and no, there are no penguins on the North Pole. It was a tough sell.) I want to see the storks crossing the Bosporus. I want to go to Iceland for the Night of the Pufflings.

But I don’t really need to travel afar. There are so many bird sanctuaries. One hot summer I saw buzzards roosting in old metal towers at Malheur Wildlife Refuge. One January I saw cranes hanging out at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, although the Javalena racing across the field was more interesting. Even in well-populated areas, one can find sanctuaries. On a trip to New York, I checked out the birdwatching journal at the Central Park boathouse. When I lived in Albuquerque I regularly visited the Rio Grande Nature Center, which attracted the migratory waterfowl and the regular Teal ducks, Canada Geese, and Blue Herons, and the sun-worshiping turtles piled up on the log by the window. When I lived in Portland, I checked out the Osprey nests at Oaks Bottom along the bicycle path. Just a few years ago, Buffleheads floated serenely on the Mt Tabor reservoir. 

In fact, I’ve taken it for granted that birds will always be part of the landscape. It’s hard to believe that this ubiquitous.winged population is at risk. But it is. Mt Tabor reservoir has been emptied and may never be refilled. Climate change and pollution and developments are destroying habitats. Domestic predators make inroads.  And it may be that, some day four ducks on a pond will be an unusual sight, not an iconic one.

Days 10: scattered projects

I think it's time to talk a little bit about the point of this blog.  What am I doing, and why? Well, the idea initially was to use the 100-day project framework to get me back into writing and drawing. I planned to alternate days between visual and written sketches, starting with  the 2-months-worth of prompts I acquired 2 years ago. The prompts came to me at different times and for different reasons, but I thought,  the end of the 100 days, I'll have the habit of practising these arts.

That was the idea.

The 30 visual prompts I had were for photographs, actually. A photographer that I follow on Blipfoto.com posted them. She and a geographically-distant friend inspired each other, using the same prompts for a month. I didn't use her prompts then. Instead I collaborated with A and B: each evening one of us would text a prompt (circle, sky, tree, red, rain....you get the idea). We took it in turns. By the end of the next day, we'd share a sketch based on the prompt. B, being distracted by more obligations, didn't always have a sketch to share, but sometimes she and her grandson both worked on the prompt, and then we got two from her. It was delightful to see the different places the same prompt would take us. The purpose was simple, to encourage each other, to create a habit of drawing.

This was not the first time I’d tried to create this habit. Back when I lived in Portland, I tried to do lessons from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I gave up after the lesson in drawing negative space. I just didn’t get it.

I continued to draw, intermittently, and then I tried a 100-day project of daily sketches. I recently found the sketchbook that I used for that project. I apparently did a lot of traveling then, as my sketches were set in Tijeras, Cerrillos, Taos, Portland, and Ormond Beach. I'm not sure what year it was, but I suspect 2022. The sketches are labeled Day 1, Day 2, etc I didn't start dating them until Day 15, and then it was only month and day. I finished on June 1 with the sketch of a wine glass, but I continued sketching for a few more days.  Then either I switched over to another sketchbook, or I began doing other arts and crafts, only returning to the sketchbook occasionally. 

I didn't really establish a habit. I did the project, never got much better, but did discover that I do like sketching. I like the feel of pen in hand. Contour or gesture drawing is my favorite. It's quick, and it's simple. I don't look at my drawing. I don't try to get proportions and perspective or correct as I go. I look at the subject and my hand tries to draw what my eyes see. It's stream of consciousness made visible. It's meditative. It's a chance to stop and look at things in a more visceral way than my daily photography habit allows.

So, that’s the background for the visual sketching part of the 100-day project. I’m trying again, using the prompts from the Blipfoto person. But I only have 30 prompts, and I also want to do verbal sketches, that being another failed habit.

I tried to resume writing in the Fall of 2023.  NaNoWriMo was approaching. I had participated years ago, and I stalled after the month was up. When I came back to my half-finished sci-fi novel, I didn't recognize it. I hadn't had an outline or a plan, I just wrote. There were two storylines. One was based on my dad's WWII diary. He was radioman on a troop carrier in the Pacific. He mentions the Sullivan brothers and Ernie Pyle, and Okinawa, and Tokyo Rose, but the entries are laconic in the extreme. I was trying to flesh them out through the medium of a time-traveling invisible observer. However, I didn't have the energy to research the history or the science. Of course, I could have added the Alternate Universe concept....

So, I turned to my writerly friend H. I said, I want to finish my NaNoWriMo novel, but I am out of ideas for things to write.  She sent me thirty prompts.  "My go-to for writing prompts is poetry indexes by first line." A friend of hers used the Wordle of the day. I was all set...but I did nothing.

That was one writing project in limbo. And there were others. Years ago I had begun an account of the year with Esther, using photographs and haiku. The collection of family stories was begging to be written. But I lacked something. I lacked several somethings. Energy was one thing, focus another.  But the real lack was the basic habit of writing. I needed to sit down every day and write. I needed to observe. I needed to make lists. I needed to go beyond the stream of consciousness brain drain of the morning pages and write about something, anything, in a coherent manner.

That, as I said, was 2 years ago. A few weeks ago, another Blipper said she was doing the 100-Day project with a difference. She has 100 blank postcards, and she'll fill them with paintings until they are gone. And that galvanized me. I can't commit to 100 consecutive days; there are trips and other projects coming up. But I can get going on these prompts.

And it’s working, I think. In the past, I've had something to say. I was traveling and petsitting. I was thinking about my life, dealing with transitions. I was writing for myself, I was writing for the friends and family who kept asking where I was and what I was doing.  Then, I lost interest even in that sort of writing,  But since starting this project, the interest has returned.

So, Days 1-5 I both wrote and drew, using the prompts.  No, I'm not going to post the drawings. They'll stay in the little sketchbook and maybe I'll look at them in another 3 years. Days 6 and 7 I drew. Days 8 and 9 I wrote in my other blog. I had something to say, and as long as that's the case, I don't need the prompts.

Now I’m up to Day 10. This blog will be where I practice the writing habit using prompts. I hope. And I'll post them as an incentive to myself. It's like dieting or quitting smoking. I need the accountability of telling someone that I'm doing this, and then actually doing it and putting it out there, good, bad, indifferent. I don’t need to post anything, of course. But I’ve told people I’m doing it, so, just in case they are interested, I’ll post my words.