November 11 - November 15 The Last Warm Spell

2010- A stretch of warmish days gives me just the time I need to finish painting the studio.  The crops, except for collards, kale and Brussels sprouts (which benefit from frost, becoming sweeter), are all in and processed.  (Oh, and except for the parsnips that stay in the ground all winter.)  Suddenly I will find myself with free time.  Before I can begin to write I know I will experience that period of restlessness and  ennui, the roaming from room to ruin and accomplishing of nothing that always precedes creative times. But with Thanksgiving coming and then leaving early for Florida, I wonder if I will be able to make that transition this year.
Every morning I listen for the weather report on the radio that tells the sunrise and sunset times, the length of the day and the loss in minutes of daylight from the day before. If I think of it in energy terms it is as if the meteorologist were reporting precisely the daily loss of yang. I almost experience a wave of nostalgia for a lost culture, one where I don’t feel so alien in terms of my sensibility and beliefs, one I never had of course but sense or imagine I sense in the culture of old Japan. In any case, it makes me wonder what it would be like to live in a time and place that resonates and truly feels like home.  Is that just not meant to be our (my)portion in this particular place?
2011-Am I surrounded by insect allies? The fruit fly that comes to sit at the top of the page just as I’m reading that animals and plants are smart? The spiders perhaps are not just busy making cobwebs but cheering me on from the corners, waving their multiple legs.  The fly in the kitchen that is so annoying but perhaps just wants to befriend me?  It is all I can do not to kill it, yet that’s something.

.A praying mantis
Pays a visit, nods hello;
Magic seeping in.

2012- I heard about some memory studies that show that what we remember is changed by the remembering. As some older people move towards spending more and more time recalling long ago events, perhaps they are reshaping the still malleable clay of their being into something more satisfyingly meaningful.  Perhaps there is no such thing as ‘what really happened’, but only what we make of it.
As for the mice, I can’t do the traps anymore. Not with that praying mantis staring at me. Seems there’s so many humane ways to go now, there’s just no excuse.