We quiver inside our shocked fur

I've seen a half dozen hummingbirds in the last two weeks, enticed by my prolific red bee balm, one of which hovered in the air like a little AI creation, 18 inches from my face, and I swear looked me in the eye.

Oh the dinosaur blue jays, a crow mama and teenage baby calling for peanuts, dozens of sparrows startled out of the rain-dampened grass when I open the screen door, little goldfinches with their shockingly bright feather jackets, a woodpecker diligently working on the remains of the suet (previously ravaged, loudly, by starlings). 

When I look at the garden I see the holes where we need to plant more flowers (tis the season of yellow and red — I need more blue! more purple and pink! more white!). But if I list everything in bloom I'm stunned by it all. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Especially this past (long) weekend, when Stella and Ben visited and indulged us on an arduous canoe paddle and a wild and stormy boat ride out to Eastern Egg Rock to get a really good look at the puffins nesting there. We also spotted seals, porpoises, and many seabirds. In return, we indulged them with a perfect Red's Dairy Freeze score (4 for 4 nights). Plus there were lobster rolls, bocce, board games, an Eastern Prom food truck picnic, bubble tea, and used bookstores. And the back garden fauna was satisfying too: a rabbit* (first rabbit we've seen in our yard in 25 years); two skunks, flaunting their white-striped tails at twilight (we all yelled SKUNK!!); lots of squirrels.

Seen, but not captured on film, no matter how hard I tried:

Flashing sign at the corner of State and Congress: SNOW HAULING

Alarming the tourists since 1999:

Mark, to Ben and Stella, in line for the puffin cruise: "Did you hear about that humpback whale that flipped a boat over the other day?"

Up top we saw so many puffins!

Below deck there were bodies on the floor.

*I think it's a New England Cottontail

Rabbit rabbit!

 

All the luck, all year long.

As smoke is in the world

It's Friday, or as I like to think of it, Gentleman's Saturday.* Specifically, it's Friday the 13th, always a lucky day for me, a person who missed being born on Friday the 13th by a mere ~19 hours. 

It's been a month of birds-of-prey sightings: just this morning I saw another Deering Oaks hawk, a smallish brown one drying its wings while perched in a tree, holding them wide and letting the wind blow through the feathers. 

Everything is eerily green for January. It's 50 degrees and raining. There are teeny buds on the lilac.

We started out the week eating Chinese food and playing? solving? a mystery-in-a-box with Adam and Jeannette's wonderful upstairs neighbor, Dani. We were successful, but we required many hints.

Sleuths, sleuthing

*To be perfectly honest, I think of Thursday as Gentleman's Friday. Today is actually just normal Friday.

It was evening all afternoon

Don't you love when you're walking at night and the people in the houses have lights on, and they're moving around, doing things that you can see in glimpses?

I still can't quite believe my luck: I get to live on this pretty planet, within driving distance of this ocean.

4

Four, fourteen, forty-four, all my lucky numbers. I have a friend who's deeply superstitious of the number four, and many cultures consider it bad luck. I searched far and wide for a contrasting superstition, with no luck (no pun intended). So it's mine, all mine, lucky number four.

The word of the day is heuristic.

The first book I finished in 2020 was Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, and I enjoyed it so much that I didn't rate it three stars (my usual appraisal of almost all books) but (wait for it) FOUR.

Mom recommended this article by Heidi Julavits, and I agree, it's wonderful.

Whatever you see and love

Gus was diagnosed with lymphoma last Monday, and it will give you more insight into my Magical Thinking Brain* than you need when I tell you that on that day I neglected to set my alarm and woke up around 7:30. On a Monday morning. No alarm, no 6:30 wake up call so I could make my coffee and sit there and get my week off to a proper and auspicious start. I know.

USS Intrepid

His shaved arm looks so cold in the snow, such a naked dog-arm bone. I have a striped fingerless arm glove that may work as an arm warmer, but I'm afraid it's a bit too loose. Maybe I'll felt it in the washing machine. Update: I have located a polar fleece garment in the Goodwill pile and have Plans for it.




*Lucky: using the silver spoons to fish out tea bags, rather than the stainless steel. Setting the timer for an even number rather than odd. This doesn't mean I have a panic attack** if I can't do the lucky thing, by the way. I even broke a mirror a few weeks ago, and thought, "Huh. Well. Oh well!"

**I don't think I've ever had an actual panic attack, although I may have had very quiet ones on airplanes. And once I broke out in hives while giving an oral report in college.

Road Trip

Mark and Gus and I drove fourteen* hours south of here, and there we found spring! We spent a deluxe long weekend with David, Ellen, Stella, Ben, and their good dog Miles. The day we arrived, it was actually hot, hot enough to wipe Gus The Furry out after short walks, hot enough to make us strip off our jackets and scarves and remember what it feels like to sweat a little bit, hot enough for David to present us with the first iced coffee of the year on their sweet front porch. There is a huge pink cherry tree in their back yard, and as you drive along the highway, there are pink and purple and floaty white blossoms mixed in with the pines.

Our host.

I got to spend a whole day with Ben, taking walks and eating snacks and visiting a coffee shop and a comic book store.

Blue skies, grass, trees, Ben.

Ellen and David treated us to live music, too--Sylvan Esso outdoors under a starry sky on a night that felt like August in Maine, and The Mountain Goats--both hometown bands, and great shows.

We ate amazing food, including food truck crêpes outdoors on Easter, tapas with David and Ellen at Glass Half Full before The Mountain Goats, biscuits with eggplant "bacon" and incredible donuts at Rise, more donuts (also incredible) at Monuts, handmade chocolate at Videri, homemade Indian food at Vimala's, and so much more.

We came home knowing it wouldn't actually feel like spring yet, but still it was surreal to drive northeast watching the landscape get increasingly brown and gray, patches of snow start to show through the trees, to get out of the car at a rest area and remember suddenly what it's like to feel freezing (and this happened in Baltimore, not to mention Massachusetts).

I said it on The Book of Faces, and I'll say it again: this is what April 10th, also known as February 69th, looks like in beautiful Portland, Maine.

Ahh, home. I brought a miserable cold/cough home with me, the cough tubercular-sounding enough that Mark dropped me off at the Urgent Care place as soon as we pulled into town yesterday. They did not cure me of this stupid cough (they prescribed some useless medicine, in fact, I say after a sleepless night of croupy coughing), but I did get to have my very first chest X-ray, which didn't reveal anything fishy. And so I cough.







*my lucky number

Rabbit rabbit!

"I am lighter:

in front of strangers I sing."

from "Night Ray" by Paul Celan

here there is no place that does not see you

on new year's day i made hoppin' john, southern greens, and skillet cornbread for lunch. just think of all the good luck i'm going to have this year, with my rabbit rabbits and black eyed peas! also, it was delicious, and we ate it cozily in front of the pellet stove, so wintery. i am loving having zoë and isaac both home and relaxed (isaac is skiing for the second time today), sleeping in, staying up late, watching movies with mark, wearing my new bean boots, and even cleaning and organizing post-holidays. although if i had my way, i'd pack up half of the stuff in this house and take it to goodwill. another lovely thing is not throwing up anymore.



archaic torso of apollo by rainer maria rilke

fourteen

(Unknown photographer, Portrait of three women, 19th century)



14 is my lucky number.
yesterday, on day 13, my sewing machine broke and my dog threw up all night.
i am looking forward to some excellent luck today!