Rainbow in Winter

Going out in the winter woods found more birds than one sees in the warmer weather, perhaps because then they are cloaked by summer leaves and now are more visible through the bare branches. Pulling into the parking area of the preserve, there was an immense lot of turkeys that wobbled and bent like old grandpas, over seeds scattered from a bird feeder.  Their winter colors were bright and diverse in patchworks of spotted tan, blacks, reds and blues.  They seemed huge and unafraid, pecking a here and a there for corn and millet on a neighborhood lawn.

The snowy path was bordered by browned, tall growth, stalks of brambles and wild grasses left by passing summer, alive with movement caused by knots of feathers, landing.  The stems would vibrate as  tiny clawed feet plucked strings of the field's grass harp, pizzicato verse in an otherwise still world filled with quivering foxtail, wild rye, fescue, bluestem.  Yellows and browns.  Evergreen pine.

Through the stalks of brambles, a diligent worker by a rotted log poked a flash of blue marbled with white and black daubs of contouring color; a brilliant blue with a crested head and black beak digging through the crumbling cellulose of fallen tree for hidden grubs or insects.  In hibernation they wouldn't know what hit them, a Bluejay who was methodically grabbing dinner in twenty degree weather.  Blue.

Two steps further, there was the unusual: a flock of robins. Robins leave by October for Florida; when living in St. Pete, it was noticeable that the birds were fed by the local group of retired folks, eager to share seed and popcorn with the familiar redbreast.  Northerner me was not used to seeing them in January, so this was a happy confirmation of fact, that birds do go south, not just in cartoons.  Here today was a group of twenty, flitting about a bush with small, hard berries.  The preserve does stock a feeder so they will be alright, for the berries remaining were sparse and hard.  Orange, rust red, underneath.

Flashing about were grey and white juncos, grey and black chickadees, both small birds that endure through snow.  An irritated kee-kee-kee came from a tree long stripped of bark and most of its branches; we were being told the business by a brilliantly capped red-bellied woodpecker, one of the larger species found.  Grey, white, black, dappled, red.

Other birds were clamoring in the eternal search for food: crows, Canadian geese, mourning doves, nuthatches, few sparrows, and of course Cardinalis cardinalis, the Northern cardinal who possibly inspires more people to fill bird feeders than any other.  Vivid red, the cardinal will cheerfully whistle even on the coldest of mornings, staunchly remaining a resident after the others have migrated.  There is one who flits around the city neighborhood, often just as a red, straight-arrow blur going from tree to tree.  It cheers one on to make the best of the day.  Red, black, shades of brown.

We trundled onward down the path in search of the champion beech tree, one of this area's treasures, finding it and a bench marked with a forester's name, a man who battled fervently with his whole heart in the name of trees.  A tree becomes a champion when it is designated as the largest of its species, withstanding years of insects, disease, fires, storms and humans; we have one.  I look up at thee and wonder, tall beech, here before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

So it goes, birds and trees, life and forever; be here before me, be here after.  I sleep a little better knowing of this continuity that will go on for centuries till humans have moved on to the next journey.  Snow lightly falls, temperature drops into the tens, birds huddle in pine branches for the night; books and eyes close for a while under the yellow of a horned crescent moon.  Winter skies, glimmering stars, planets holding steady.  Sleep well.

I, Memory

What if your eyes stored visual memory amid the layers of retinal ganglion cells, like your own miniaturized video camera?  It's said that everything we've experienced is filed in the brain, just not retrievable for most of us; could there be another storehouse residing in the neurons of the eye?  Every flash of vision snapshotted, the light aligning in patterns that could be replayed once the key unlocks the optic door of eye memory, making another subconscious realm of nerve endings, along with that of our intestinal and reflexive hand memories.

Why not just rely on the brain's repository of visual knowledge, necessary as it is to forming memory to begin with?  Imagine if the brain has shortcircuited, gone offline, is floating between worlds and that there was a way to access visual stimulation familiar and recognized, like going to the bank to refresh funds.  Could it ignite cerebral memory into response?  Right now there isn't any discovered mechanism in the body of the eye that goes beyond it being a tool for processing vision, but since other areas of our bodies are capable of non-brain memory, why not the sophisticated eye?

Neurons operating on electrical impulses line the retina, shooting off visual information to appropriate entities, but do they store any of it?  How long does it take for a photo flash to dissolve from a stunned retina? What of images of everyday?  Is information stored as if on film, layered on photoreceptors, not necessarily identified but there?  Say from the time you were little, an infant in the crib to now, everything that you have ever seen still existing in exquisite, microscopic pockets?

Perception plays tricks, some things aren't believed to have been seen or we just don't notice them.  How handy it would be to have an organic camera on board, we would be better witnesses for civilization than any traffic stop monitor.  But of course as with anybody's anything, there are always glitches and missing pieces that could still omit recording significant information.  No two people would see the same event exactly, just as fingerprints differ.

I have been reading overmuch lately; by nightfall, my eyes long to shut against the black squiggles on white paper.  They gratefully close in the dark, while the brain continues shuffling the deck of memory until the the cerebral cupboard door battens the hatches even while the cards still lay on the table.  Sleep is peaceful, perhaps the only time when.  Winter nights, early evenings, good, still night.

Butter

Is it coincidence that the word "butt" hides in the underbrush at the beginning of the word, considering that is just what we worry about if a smidge of fat lies upon our toast and don't eat too much of that anyways, carbs, y'know?  When did a piece of toast become contraband?  And honest to cod's swallop, there are times when I Like Plain White Bread Without Any Frickin' Fiber in it.  I get enough fiber through incidental ingestion from all the cat hair around here as it is, and could possibly yak up a hairball myself.

Thick white toast, buttered; thin Italian white with sesame seeds, toasted crisp and buttered; sandwich white bread toasted, allowed to cool and then buttered but the butter stays on top of the surface and therefore the toast is crisper on the outside, fluffy in it's inner core.  Butter it when hot, and it can turn soggy which is okay, too, especially with eggs.  If you want a small, simple treat, this is what you do with toast, whether is is at breakfast or part of an orchestrated sandwich: butter it right to the corners.  That's all.  Take the knife and glide right into each corner making sure you get it in there.  It will make such a difference for whatever else happens that day, you will remember that you took the extra minute to reveal a secret unknown to most of the cooking world, this thorough buttering.  It makes a difference whether sandwich or toast, I promise you will notice it.

I can't tell you the last time I had toast, the guilt at eating bread makes me shudder amid the other errors of the day.  And buttering anything has to have a hard copy signed affidavit of due causa.  Yet my mother fried everything in butter, slathered it on sandwiches before the mayonnaise, and used it as a salve when I burned myself which is genuine useless folklore.  The slab was never refrigerated neither summer nor winter but slept inside a Tupperware rectangle of translucent white plastic on the counter.  We all lived, and the ones who didn't expired not as a result of bacterial poisoning but of other, more medical causes.  I didn't know butter was usually refrigerated until I was married.

The quarters of butter reside in the special butter compartment of the current refrigerator, if softening is required the microwave newfangles it so.  I use it rarely except as an adjunct to the olive oil, for sometimes a buttery waft of creamery essence lifts the sauteed whatever into a song of happy.  When I bake, it is the only fat used: margarine is a Frankesteinian monster composed of oils, hexane, hydrogen gas, and a final bleaching to rid the product of a dank, greyish cast.  I remember that the margarine we got from the dairy truck came with a tablet of bright orangey coloring to be mixed in so it wasn't so scary.  It ranked right next to Starlac, that economical dried milk of the fifties pushed on modern housewives as a stand-in for fresh, wholesome milk.  Any kid will tell you what that stuff tastes like.

A bowl of popcorn tastes as exciting as church without the golden unctuousness of butter.  I use an air popper, dump the popped kernels into a large bowl and pour a melted half stick of butter in a thin drizzle so that I hit as much of it as I can.  Then you add salt, I use Morton's since reading that because of the sea salt craze, iodine deficiencies are showing again.  Now, laugh away, but I eat it with a spoon like you would cereal; since becoming a computer kid, I like fingers to be clean for the keyboard's sake and therefore like being able to switch back and forth between the two, without washing hands every three minutes.  Not having a television, I watch stuff online, so the laptop becomes my entertainment center while I fuel my inner child with popcorn.  I also use chopsticks to eat potato chips for the same reason.

Butter in a pan will give a grilled cheese a lovely crust, or frizzle the edges of small pancakes into a lacy chewiness amplified by the delicate measure of maple syrup on top.  Rich in vitamin A, butter provides zinc, copper, manganese, and more selenium per gram than wheat germ or herring; the fatty acids in butter assist brain function, skin health, and support the immune system.  So butter that bread, it's good for you; your brain, which basically runs on fat and sugar, will thank you.

The moon was spectacularly bright last evening, all shined up in luminous silver.  It hung in the early morning sky during the commute to work, still alert, a cold blaze of radiance in the ever-lightening blue dawn.  I saw oceans underneath pulled into lunar tides, ropes hauled, nets gathered, and centuries of people walking the dirt of earth; they were toiling, hammering metal, beating the odds just as you and I do each day when we wake and resonate, moving through life.  Waves of torsos, from Ichabods to Utnapishtims, rise and fall through the conundrum of time, coming round again in proof of faith towards eternity.  A little butter can't hurt.  Good night, sleep and dream.

The Lizards, The Coal Age and Us

If you have ever owned a reptile or walked through the snake snake house at the zoo, you were probably amazed by how much odor blossoms from a lizard cage.  These things smell worse than the big cat house to me, but maybe that's because I live with five miniature puddings who are forgiven everything, even though at this point everyone is fastidious.  Would a lion use a litter box?  This is another essay at a later date after further research.  But the lizards, yikes.

Now, multiply that little green bean lizard by a few tons, and put it in a heated, steamy environment and you have a dinosaur.  Other than schmancy CGI and the skeletons remaining, we truly have no idea how these things walked, stomped, were colored, barked, behaved, or responded to dinosaur-sized crickets and mealworms.  Or smelled.  How did the world smell, in light of one brachiosaurus being tall as a four-story building and as long as two school buses, plus the whole herd just sauntered through your fern and gingko yard?  This was the Age of Reptiles, lasting for hundreds of millions of years (like my student loan), and even in the open air, you had to notice the aroma like when you go play cards at Aunt Myrna's house.

Now, plant-based digestion smells better than carnivore or omnivore, so maybe to country gal me who grew up surrounded by dairy farms, it wouldn't be like walking into a wall of solid air.  The trouble is, however, you have your T. rex, cousin Allosaurus, the giant flying seagull Pteranodons, and the smaller Deinonychus, all meat eaters.  In droves.  You tell me about the air, including the gas, the methane swamps, and the output of these giant galoots.  It was just a thought, as interesting to me as my hypothesis that maybe some of the dinosaurs could change colors, like chameleons.  I would love to go back there for a day, in an armored helicopter fitted with grenade launchers or at least a taser gun, just in case.

But let's move on from the natural into the beginning auspices of man as he tried to change the environment to support his family.  There were still the immense animals; ground sloths big as elephants, Baluchitherium, the hornless, eighteen foot high precursor to our rhinoceros, and herds of wooly mammoths.  Not so damp or warm, so maybe the aroma was tamed down a bit.  Once we ate everything and started building cities, industry became the progenitor of how things smelled.  Think of it, medieval aromas ranging from leftover food tossed to the castle floor for the dogs to harry, to the walls of the castle (people used to hang their bottoms out of windows for business) leading down into the moat.  People themselves didn't bathe as it was a symptom of debauchery, they instead carried pomanders and perfumed hankies.  Around the time of the French Revolution, the fashionable white skin was achieved through arsenic and mercury-based makeup; the resulting rot took one out of the social circles pretty fast, even in candlelight.  Let's jump up to the Industrial Revolution.

What did they smell like, these cities belching coal-based smoke, chamber pots still dumped out of windows onto streets?  You pretty much wore the same thing everyday until it was able to stand up on its own, and then soap was used, not for washing people, but for clothing.  But what about the shops, now that serfdom was over and a working paycheck was coming in? People had money to spend.  Candleshops, bakeries, confectionaires, shops for roast meats, smithies, grain mills, perfumeries, gardens; more pleasant smells outshone the rank business of disposal.

We live in the most hygienic time ever, at least in this country.  Microbes have been recognized and are held at arm's length, garbage is contained (except don't get me going on what we are doing to the ocean with our disposal techniques), and sewers have city departments.  We shower several times a week if not in a day, and eliminate as much of our natural smell as possible, and I say thank heavens.  There is still pollution, still toxic industry, still a reptile house at the zoo that will knock you over with one whiff, but you can't expect otherwise with animals.

Some of my most favorite smells come from times past, like when I would bury my face in my grandmother's taffeta skirt when I was three.  She smelled cool, like a garden of roses after rain.   The dry paper smell of the library up in my aunt's attic, found in a house built in the century before; the wooden smell of bannisters and stairs polished with wax in her foyer.  Strawberries picked in the sun and strung on stems of foxtail grass, or in winter, the smell of snow enhanced by the wafting aromas of each house making dinner as I would walk down the street to my own house.  Heavier smells such as the creel that held fish caught in the lake, or the grease that hangs in the air at a roadside hamburger joint, fish fry on Friday.  Try out a dog's neck, a cat's fur, a baby's skin.  A box of crayons or lumberyard.  Biscuits coming out of the oven.  My Mom's Chanel No. 22 (which isn't made anymore), the long hall at the science museum, the wooden trunk holding blankets.  Earth. Water. Sky. Fire.

The sun is lowering even now in late afternoon, the winds are still, the buildings around me are catching the last rays of sunlight and will go from this gold to orange to pink and rose and finally deep lavender until all is dark and the lights go on.  A quiet day, a soup for dinner day.  Sleep well, sleep well.  Goodnight.

Shoes and Books

The past two Saturdays, I have found my way to the Central Library in the downtown of this city.  The emptiness of the streets on a weekend sends hollow, haunted messages through the grey cement corridors that once thronged with life: storefront signs that blinkered in sequence, rococo movie theaters, department stores ponderous as a city block, with tony restaurants squeezed into narrow slots between the larger buildings.  All I saw at that time were pants legs or nyloned calves at my five year old height, while gripping Mom's hand so as not to be washed away by the current of human electricity. The sidewalks were packed with people.  No one wore sneakers for going out, everyone had leather shoes which resulted in a flurry of staccato slap slaps of soles and heels on pavement.  Not a sound you hear these days, it was like rain on a roof, an audience applauding.  Slap slap slap.  They were on their way, and in a hurry to arrive.

There is little to do downtown, only a few stores remain, most of the properties have been converted to office space.  What else could be done, for not only has this place lost half of the population to suburbs, but there is now a little used subway line that tore up the middle of Main Street, eliminating cars, storefront access, and pedestrian foot traffic.  Owners of once burgeoning businesses tried to hang on, but the pedantic politicians of the day did nothing to shore up a dying city economy.  Malls took over, and we lost the sounds and visions of urban commerce.  I won't walk to the library, it has become too deserted a journey for safety's sake on a lonely weekend.

However, when the door to the library is pushed open, it seems as if the world has found its refuge for it is packed with life, living and literature.  I hadn't been here for over three years, and found the trend towards modernity thriving at the hundred computer stations filled with students, writers, perusers, street people reading to stay warm, children, and me.  It still smells like a library in spite of the hum of bodies or the newer sound of keyboard clacks.  Changes: people aren't as quiet as they used to be, children are running, and conversations are at street level sound.  Entries into the paper indexed card catalog ended in 1998, everything else is on the computer.  You want to do research, you enter your library card identification and a PIN.  Many of the older books I went to in the last century have been discarded, and the next slew reflects the social novelties of this one.  You can check your own books by scanning them over a UPC reader.  What made me happiest was that the library was busy, packed; I wondered if these people would love to be able to grab a bite, shop, or be entertained here, in the city, downtown.

The book I wanted was located in the closed stacks as it was published in 1924, aging had yellowed and dried out the paper.  The pages creaked in the book's spine in spite of tender handling, and small crumbs of pages fluttered like dollhouse snowflakes from the rough-trimmed signatures.  It was an astonishing book to hold; cloth bound, title and author stamped into the front cover, and comfortably not over large.  The topic was not as interesting as hoped, the author embellished in ooey-gooey proclamation the determination shown by her family, plus other autocratic blather.  I enjoyed the physical experience more than the content; I confess, it was a brief fling hatched by curiosity. You've been there.

Get thee to a library, you'll see people from all stratifications reading books and therefore not one of them remains the person they were a second ago.  None of us do, even sitting, but reading accelerates growth, reflection doubles it, then acting on the results goes somewhere into the tenth power of who you are, rippling in and out of clarity and further giving you something to think about while standing over that sink of dishes.

Oh, a bedtime story.  A book lain under a pillow.  Ink on paper that pulls our hearts and minds elsewhere through investigation of fiction or fact, well, it's my favorite thing to do before shutting out the last light, traveling in rhythmic slide to quieter pools and depths of consciousness.  Nets pull in dream fish, waters ripple through memory.  Sleep well, sleep knowing that the story will all turn out alright.

Squirrelopolis

This year, windows line one wall from top to bottom of my assigned classroom, allowing a view of a paved walk and grass and trees and rose garden beyond.  At the end of the drive is an immense bulwark of an oak, whose acorns feed and fill the bank accounts of the grey squirrels residing in this part the city.  What happens is that the pavement has become a squirrel runway, with busyness of paws running back and forth, gathering food for winter; this high-tailed operation goes right past my third grade.

You couldn't tell, and I still can't, if there were six squirrels or only one industrious agitation toodling along the windowed way in that curious undulation that makes them look less like rats.  They could care less about being watched, the audience was subpar by squirrel standards, a nonentity of legs from a gathering nuts point of view which originated at the base of the glassed wall.  That is, until I changed the equation by adding a variable.  Enter the store-bought, English walnut, in shell.

I had purchased a bag of walnuts for an activity, until I realized that most of the gluing could only be accomplished with a hot glue gun meaning that I would be the one putting these walnut-bodied turkeys together myself, and where's the fun in that?  Makes no sense, times twenty-five.  So this bag of nuts stayed in the drawer, supplementing my apple for lunch with one or two, smashed open with the heavier business end of a stapler.  I love nuts of all kinds, but a fresh walnut has history that goes back to the Druids.  I get all Stonehedgey when cracking them, so watch it.  Filberts put me in a Hansel and Gretel European fairy tale, and pecans bring up Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" and I am his elderly cousin, dragging young Truman to the woods to gather papershelled pecans for the annual fruitcake bake off.

I miss the small, Turkish pistachios I grew up with, their flavor far, far superior to the fat, bland bastards  now grown in California.  But any pistachio in a storm, y'know.  You have the dichotomous spectrum of the push-you-towards-insanity cracking necessary to open a black walnut, contrasted with the delicate operation of getting through a hickory nut without pulverizing the nutmeat into a paste imbedded with sharp shards of shell.  A croquet mallet works best, and you get the hang of a just right Wham.

Cashews, brazil nuts, and almonds each have a story; this is my Brazil nut tale: when I was a kid, I was enamored of magic but not dexterous enough for sleight of hand, so I investigated magic tricks dependent upon stage props.  A solitary book existed at the local library, seemingly aimed at boys and dreamed up by a sodden this'll-work-if-you-practice sadist.  The trick?  Take a bite out of a burning candle, amaze your audience.  Whoa, if I accomplished this bit of chicanery, I would be well on my way to becoming a Master of the Occult.  Let's get going!

The directions were to first carve a banana into the shape of a candle; never mind that the thing was slippery as hell, glistened with banana oog, and would turn brown before the end of the trick, thus becoming The Amazing Color-Change Smell You Candle.  Okay, I got that part, I am pretty quick with my hands at doing finicky stuff.  The next instruction, printed on real paper with ink in a real book, said to get a Brazil nut, shave off the brown skin, and carve it into the shape of a wick.  The young student was to insert this piece of disguised nut into one end of the candle banana, and Light The Damn Thing with real fire.  This would work, according to the dipsomaniac author, because a Brazil nut contains enough oil to stay lit just long enough for the poor young sap trying this mess to freaking Bite the Lit End Off and swallow.  I am guessing that the publishing house had this Fun To Do Magic For Boys book edited by a German.

There was a drawing of a boy in a cape and top hat, flourishing the Ha! You Thought This Was a Real Candle in one outstretched hand while the other arm gestured mysteriously, but less so than a real Druid. I lit the Brazil nut.  It went out.  I relit the Brazil nut.  It went out.  Apparently I had a dud nut with little oil left.  I had formed more than one nut wick in case of interruption or singular failure, and replaced the toasted one with a fresh load.  By this time the odor of burnt nut with smoke was swirling downwards from my room into the rest of the house.  I heard my father bark, "Dorothy, whaddaya burnin' out there?" yet I went ahead, it was now or never, the preparation of carving fruit and nuts was not going quietly into the desolate Saturday afternoon.  The second wick flamed, blackened, and died.  The banana flopped over, broken in two from less than magical handling, and the end of the hot nut wick hit my hand.  Yeeowch.  What the hell was I thinking?  I looked at the china plate now holding an unattractive fruit salad, and thought, who the hell would tell a kid to bite a lit banana?  Mom knew me well, I heard her footsteps coming up the stairs.  I told her it was a science experiment, she told me to take the matches outside before the house caught fire.

In all fairness, there was a warning in the book.  Bite the banana quickly, closing the mouth to cut off oxygen to the flame; this must be done correctly or you may burn yourself; this trick has been accomplished many times onstage using the Oriental Breathing Technique (not inhaling while closing your mouth so you don't set your tonsils or esophagus on fire).  There was a cutaway diagram of a boy's mouth, showing position of the tongue and the broken off, extinguished but still smoldering Brazil nut inside.  Amaze your friends with your stupidity, and you will provide them with plenty of story material.  Being brought up by Depression parents, I ate the remains of fruit and burnt nut, and had one of my first revelations that even a book from the sanctified library can be concocted by fools.  But remember, this was the era when a sample of real uranium was included in Geiger counter play sets.  For Boys.  It's a wonder we had any boys left after the fifties.

It was this shared love of nuts which began my leaving a walnut out to see if the squirrel would be interested.  I wanted the audience to appreciate caring for our wild friends.  They thought it was a hoot, and warned me about rabies.  But each day, we now have a squirrel visitor coming up to the window and looking in, paws on sill, nose to glass.  He waits for a walnut, the emblem of squirrel riches.  The group watches the ritual of him turning the nut round and round until the right grip is found to carry it off in its mouth; taking a new interest in squirrels, they wish to name it.  I stress that it is still a wild animal, regardless of cute and little, and would rip their noses off if it thought a pine nut was up in their sinus cavities.  But I like their caring, their curiosity, and their new found interest in this urban science project.  I have to buy walnuts this weekend.

The snowstorm that wasn't has passed by, granting the critters that struggle to live outside a reprieve.  How hard must it be to find enough food to keep a metabolism going that maintains body temperature,  we wouldn't last a whole day outside in our skins.  The animals that stay have their tricks, including semi-hibernation for smaller mammals, or restricting blood flow so that tiny bird legs don't freeze.
They may sleep in bundles during the coldest weather, piles of squirrel entwined in a leaf nest that they won't leave for days, but dispersing once the siege is over.

Sleep squirrel, and remember where you buried your store for the dark days of winter.  I stir my soup, saving some aside for future suppers: squash, mushroom, cauliflower, beef barley, chicken rivel.  It is good knowing there is something put away for a thoughtful, cold day.  Sleep deep, relax into the old rhythms before centuries were ever thought of, dream of life going on, time non-existent.  Good night.