forecast: sunny day
bits of noticing
The sun is out today. The temperature was finally in the double digits this morning (just barely) when I took the dog out for his walk. The sun, the sun, and blue sky.
I look through my camera roll for a picture of blue sky. January, December, November, October, no blue sky. Has it been so long? But today there something like blue sky and the patch that is my parking space looks warm and wet, no longer a sheet of dark ice.
We’re entering that part of winter when I can forget that there ever was a time before winter. I thought I had been handling the cold, the snow, the ice relatively well until suddenly on Feb 1st I felt done. Tired of being cold, tired of the dizzy, sweaty ritual of wrapping and unwrapping four, five . . . a dozen times a day. Realizing that I will never be warm ever again, that there will never be green grass again. Everything will be closed up, bundled up, and frozen in place forever.
But then there is always a moment in spring, when I feel the sun on my skin and the air smells earthy, and I remember: oh this isn’t forever. So today I am imagining when it will be so warm I can walk about with bare feet, bare legs, I can stretch out in the balmy shade, and tree blossoms will blow down the street. How grateful and luxurious I will feel, vaguely remembering the grey-brown lumpy figure from February stomping grit and salt off her boots in the doorway with a hat falling down over her eyes.
-
bits of noticing
a brown creeper
tiny and creeping
up the bare magnolia
tree
a blue jay
a downy woodpecker
pecking at the grey
bark
puffy puffy juncos
hop the tiny hillocks
of snow
and investigate
with the brown sparrow
the frozen snapdragons
still green
in my flowerpots
the sun shines
even if the world is cold
the sun shines
and when I rise
I move slowly and gently -
Rebecca’s recent piece reminded me of the art of noticing. In a time so overwhelming, how the little practice of noticing— so central to the life of the nature lover— has been present in my life lately. Looking at only the big things, the ginormous things, and not the little things, the daily things that make up the minute to minute of regular life. "A poetic life is found in the details,” she writes. She notices her mother having pity on the deer, she notices the shy shopboy and her own acceptance of him, she notices the joy of butter, salt and cream in her cookies. I notice the birds and their movements, finding the flax seeds I’ve thrown in the snow. I notice the glint of the sun melting the ice. And I am centered again.