The butternut chronicle: Nov. 14, 1998
For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. There’s no entry for Nov. 15, and only a couple of observations from the day before – also a Sunday in 1998.
The warm spell continues. It’s fifty-one degrees at 8:00 a.m. A disgustingly late hour for me to be getting up, but I spent a late night with some visiting friends, who are still sleeping.
All five of the nearby resident gray squirrels are in the butternut tree, racing back and forth through its vase-shaped splay of limbs. The sun shines brightly but diffusely through a thin screen of cirrus; the trees don’t cast shadows. There’s a peculiar feel to the air this morning, like Indian Summer gone stale, I write.
Then again, maybe I just need to change my socks.
The origin of the chickadee
Once there was a woman who had a daughter she treated badly. The mother would be boiling corn soup and she would make the girl stir and stir. She would look in the pot and see it there and go hungry. But when she asked for some, the mother always said, “Not yet.” There never seemed to be a time when the corn soup was ready. The poor girl wished she could be a bird and fly away. Her wish was granted, and They turned her into a chickadee. That’s why the chickadee always comes around when people have anything going on. It hopes they will give it corn soup. It follows you through the woods, too, when you go to cut logs or brush, think maybe you’re going to build a fire and make soup.
Seneca Indian story collected by Merle H. Deardorff at the former Cornplanter Grant, NW Pennsylvania (destroyed by the Kinzua reservoir in 1965)
Butternut chronicle: Nov. 13, 1998
For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. The butternut tree that then dominated the view has since fallen over, and I have yet to reconcile myself to its loss – or to the imminent loss of its species, currently being wiped out throughout its range by a disease of unknown origin and poorly understood epidemiology.
3:20 p.m. Fifty-four degrees. A male white-breasted nuthatch inches along the edge of the porch roof, probing under the lip of shingles with his workmanlike bill.
There are four things you need to know about white-breasted nuthatches (Sitta carolinensis): 1) they are basically solitary; 2) their strongest allegiance as a non-migratory, highly territorial species is to place; 3) nuthatch space is defined and delimited by the presence of trees, with which they have a unique and intimate relationship; and 4) they spend must of their waking hours upside-down, finding thereby all the small gleanings overlooked by everyone else.
Guestblogging at the V.B.
Elck started it, Velveteen Rabbi picked it up – soon everyone was doing it; me too. By the time I joined in they added another rule to make it more interesting: not just One Sentence, but No Commas. I do need to acknowledge the influence of the new kid on the block with his post about different sized thoughts. And I must say that trying to shrink a whole thought into a single sentence does feel like downsizing. “Here’s your sentence, little thought. Now do your time.”
Raising hell
I guess I must’ve had some kinda angel on my shoulder back in them days, like that one time when I was sitting out on the porch in that dump I used to live in there on College Avenue working my way through a case of Koch’s, and as I finished them pounder bottles I’d give ’em a good toss so they’d go splat in the middle of the street, which was also Route 26, you know, just for the sound of it I guess, like cymbals at a parade except for having no echo, and to watch them zillion little pieces of glass go skittering and skattering up and down the street. ‘Course the cars all had to slow down as time went on, crunching their way slowly through like they was grinding over a bunch of little bones or something, like them bones you got in your ear maybe, or a bunch of mice. But the thing is I wasn’t out to do no harm, I was just feeling so good, you know, and it was really more like, “Hey! I love everybody,” because you gotta understand it was like the first real warm day in March, real nice afternoon, and you know how that goes. Things get crazy on them kinda days in a college town, you know, I’m sure there was parties breakin’ out all over and the kids up in Beaver Canyon was probly bein’ assholes as usual, throwing keggers out on every balcony, pissing on people down below, getting naked, even screwing out there – that’s how they started that riot that one time, and Penn State ended up expelling the girl that was involved even though it wasn’t on Penn State property – yeah, just her, not her boyfriend nor none of them assholes who came running down from the frats up on the hill and did most of the damage, tearing down lampposts, flipping cars – so all I’m saying is, I guess the cops was otherwise occupied that afternoon. But I didn’t even think about that, I had drunk more’n half that case of pounders when the phone rang and it was my old girlfriend Kate on the line asking me if I could meet her at the Brewery in like fifteen minutes, just to catch up and have a few drinks, you know, so I said “Sure” and got my wallet and started right on over and I was only about one block away when here come a whole gang of cop cars with their lights flashing. “Some poor son of a bitch is about to get fucked,” I said to myself, and then forgot all about it until hours later when I got home and my one roommate Drew, he says, “You know the cops was here right after you left,” and I says “What about?” and he says “What the hell do you think? Someone called in about all the glass in the street, and whoever it was said they seen it coming from our porch, but the only one home was Darren and of course he was all fucked up on pills or whatever and he said he didn’t know nothing about it, but they made him get out there with a broom while they stopped traffic in both directions for about ten minutes, though they never did try and cite him for anything,” and at the thought of that sorry-ass little punk with his falling-down mohawk out there in the middle of College Avenue trying to sweep up a ton of glass with our worn down broom with a busted-off handle, I couldn’t help it, I cracked up. I mean, I was just like, “Well fuck me runnin’!” Darren and me had a good laugh about it after we got sober.
Words on the street
The butternut chronicle: Nov. 11, 1998
For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. The butternut tree that then dominated the view has since fallen over, and I have yet to reconcile myself to its loss – or to the imminent loss of its species, currently being wiped out throughout its range by a disease of unknown origin and poorly understood epidemiology.
I’m a day late on this one, but that’s O.K. because I didn’t include an entry for November 12. I was starting to run out of steam at this point.
Rain, forty-four degrees. It’s Veterans Day, a holiday of no special significance for my family but a somber time nonetheless. I’m out on the porch at 5:40 a.m. with my coffee. When I sneeze, all of a sudden, there’s the sound of two or three dozen hooves running up the hillside through the woods in the drizzly darkness.
“Rain before seven, clear by eleven” actually comes true, for once. I’m out again at a quarter till twelve. I hear the happy croaks of ravens soaring high over Sapsucker Ridge.
A bluejay is making a nuisance of himself in the lilac bush, trying for some reason to chase out all the other birds – juncos and chickadees. He flaps awkwardly through the maze of branches, screaming, no match for the smaller birds who simply turn the tables and start dive-bombing him. He beats a hasty retreat.
1:40 p.m. A series of harsh, throat-clearing noises from the top of the ridge, reminiscent of that strange sound nighthawks make when they dive, only not as loud. Then a few minutes later the resident redtail drops in, landing on the branch of an oak tree some fifty feet up from the edge of the woods. This really sets off all the squirrels. Annoying as their alarm calls are, I always enjoy listening to the way they spread like signal fires from tree to tree, squirrel to squirrel. After half a minute or so the hawk takes off and heads down-hollow, skimming just under the canopy. The chatter of startled squirrels follows him like a wake.
First draft, best draft
The above dictum would hold true only for gravity-fed systems. With forced carbonation, the first draft is of course mostly foam.
*
THE FUTURE ABBESS PICKS SPILLED LENTILS OFF THE COUNTERTOP
This love
is no excuse for clumsiness. I must
start paying better attention. Or is it
simply distraction I’ve been craving?
No, No. Come here, damn you! I want
to make a plain stew with onions,
a porridge with garlic – what Esau
bought so dearly, starved & sweaty,
hot from the hunt. These small red
lentils slip so nimbly from between
forefinger & thumb! Good thing
they don’t roll, too. I picture bracelets,
a little choker with five decades of red.
One tells a rosary, yes? Would drilled
lentils listen better, fall in line?
A wheel of fortune for levelers: no
matter where I stop counting – whether
I stop – the same mellifluous prayer,
half a pair of wings. Easy does it,
sister. Don’t hold your breath. But
why not just lick my finger, forget
the clumsy thumb? Ah, I can pick up
two, three, four at once! I point.
They stick.