Not ex nihilo
A blue bottle fly, so indolent that I vacuumed it off a mirror with a dustbuster, arrived with the roast chicken. When chicken bones go in the trash, a fly or two appears out of nowhere, even in my home reasonably screened against intruders large and small. The toad on my lanai didn't appear to eat flies. Or anything else that I could see. How it got here, two stories up, and not a pond in sight, was another unknown. It sat nestled in the moss of an orchid where it slept most of the time, when it wasn't napping.
Sounds so dreamy and restful at your place. St Francis would agree I'm sure that critters are attracted to such. They don't just simply appear ex nihilo. Life happens. All the time. All willy nilly, and all in earnest. Just have to slow down a bit sometimes to keep up.
ReplyDeleteThanks for jarring up these sweet little moments here and letting us have a peek.
Dear Joe,
ReplyDeleteLove the photos. You still remain artisticly gifted (remember 12th grade art?).
Don't forget, you do not need tinsel, you do not need carols, you don't even need cookies. Christmas is born in the heart and remains there lovingly, forever, if you allow it.
Ricky! Thanks for inspiring me to blog up and for stopping by...
ReplyDeleteMy Gotham adventure is bookended by those two jars, where I keep my fireflies, pine cones, old postcards, new periwinkle shells, feathers, and hugs. My mother's parakeet Francis, named after her favorite saint, is buried under a palm tree just below my Lanai, along with my own sweet Serene, a green singing finch who traveled with me in my station wagon, camping along the way, all the way from New York. She lived on that lanai, a free-roaming songster, another ten years.
Thank you Nancy. Yes, Christmas is imperishable in spite of it all. Thanks for reminding me where it lives, in golden ponder, for all time. The live trees Christmas arrived at the supermarket yesterday. As I walk past them, their perfume "comes crying to my heart," as Buffy used to sing... I was in charge of Christmas, stylistically, back home. One year I did a tree with nothing but hidden lightlettes (that rose up at night) that was heavily flocked with snow; that's it, no decorations, as if it were standing in a wood. Pretty rad for the time. My dad got it. You would have too.
Nancy, Rick and I met online - in the old AOL forums years ago, where we connected immediately, and took up a quietly resonating friendship in the virtual commons, half a continent apart. Only to find, months later, that he grew up in our own neck of the woods!
Rickster, Nancy was my doppleganger in high school, where we together ruled the arts and style scene, for the enduring benefit of our less informed and grateful classmates. She knows what Christmas is all about.
Mike, another online bud, who first welcomed me here, is a dear witty soul who still lives in our own beautiful, Euchre-playing, and rockin' home state. Welcome all. I was just wondering last night whether you only get one tribe in life, and does it stay lost and departed? Not. :o
ah, the regrettable spaces in between that aren't so...
ReplyDeletePlease don't get me started...
No... do. Please do. It hurts so good.
Pleased to meet you, Nancy & Mike. Delighted. I'm sure.
ReplyDeleteStart you up, Ricky! We have nachos... I'm looking for a way revisit some of my old digs once in a while, and retrieve some snapshots. Maybe I'll use italics, or a beautiful seafoam-green text.
ReplyDeletewaydaminnit
ReplyDeletewhose neck? what woods? grow up?
You mean we went to separate schools together, right?
You mean Florida? My dad lives there, but he moved to Panacea from Flint, Michigan back in the late seventies. My own first taste of Florida tropical was back in... (wow , it's been twenty years) '87.
Me, I'm a North Woods guy. I'm out in the PacNW now, but I was born in Michigan, and after a short stay at Buffalo, NY settled in Minnesota. The Great Lakes are my inner geographical referent point, with Lake Superior as True North. But since you and my dad live there my heart's GPS is configured just so that it frequently pings south and eastward.
Speaking of pings, my sister is all gung ho to get us both down there for one last visit. I thought our March trip was supposed to be that. Found out yesterday she bought the tickets already. Fly out out next Thursday and back on Monday. But I can't find a sitter for the two young 'uns. Everything about this so far is short. Short notice, short (and not too sweet I can't imagine) stay. That last trip was more for me and Karen than for my dad. I'm more a one-on-one kind of guy. Quality time for me is time alone together. So I'm trying to figure out how to break it to her that I ain't goin'. I'm thinking she needs one-on-one time with him. Dad and I are at peace. She's not. This is her deal. But then my dad is getting the results of Tuesday's catscan today, and if I don't get a call from him by 8:00pm tonight I might be changing my tune. Or maybe not. I'll get to see the extent of my denial at any rate. If I had my druthers and the bucks to back it up I'd fly down there by myself and take my own luxurious time. Rent my own set of wheels to carry my own sagging butt whither I wouldest. Novel thought, that. There is at least one more trip to come where you're to - he's not having any funeral or memorial service of any kind. So I'll be making my own at some point. The BCP is handy for just such an occasion. Probably invite my half-sister Suzie to participate. It's about time we met.
So. Ping ping ping. PPPoE is connected. I'm here. This is me. Is that you? Where are you? Just like birds talk. Peep peep peep.
Euchre? Waydanotherminnit... are you from Michigan?! Really? I forgot! Second thing to go...
ReplyDeleteWell that's pretty neat!
Funny, I remember "neat".
Sorry - when I said "grow up", I guess I went a little too far. I know I haven't! But , yeah. Motown, Redford, Livonia, in that order, with summers as far back as I can remember in Stockbridge -from whence the smell of pine "comes crying to my heart", along with the milkweeds and moss-dappled docks. Not that I often wishagain that I was in michigan... I've grown subject to ague, and entranced with Florida's endless, if sometimes tempestuous, summer... the true north of my soul.
ReplyDeleteMy parents are both gone, and my brother and I have settled our major differences. I wake up each morning more aware than ever that this is another of the diminishing handful of days I have left of my fourscore years and ten, give or take. In Nabakov's novel Pnin, the title character makes the mistake of having calculated the number of heartbeats he has left, the pondering of which only hastens the pace at which the beats accrue - though I'm sure he put it more elegantly, and alarmingly, than that.
Whoa. That is rather alarming, isn't it. Carries the same kind of cargo as that quip about the spider's query to the centipede, but with a bit more freight. I suppose if one insists on figuring it all out it's best to stay away from the mere ratio.
ReplyDeleteFunny you should mention Nabakov - bumped into him again just this morning in Auden's still prescient piece, Sept. 1, 1939. Funny too how the signs seem to line up just so some days. That's a little alarming, too. In a different way. Tho the cardio-vascular effects seem indistinguishable at the moment.
Nabokov? No, that was Najinski. That I would make that connection is even more alarming. :/
ReplyDeleteNajinski, Nabokov, Nureyev, Natasha... I like them all.
ReplyDeleteNice to read tidbits of MI memories, but I am stuck up here in the Tundra of the US of A! Minnesota. I think MN must have the record for the highest no. of grey days in the country. Not too mention the horrible wind which is a constant. I went to art school in Chicago and these plain states make the Chicago area seem like a gentle breeze. I don't miss MI but I do the East coast.....EASTWARD HO. Last month I was in Dallas..too hot most of the yr. The heat does me in. Month before that, I was in San Diego. It was grey and dreary most of the week I was there. And what's with all the 1950's houses perched on the side of the mountain? It looked like a mountainside trailor park. I did like the Del Coronado tho.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite section of the country is the middle. Give me the Carolinas VA. KY. TN. Lush green forests, sippin' Julips or Marts on the veranda; wish I had one, a veranda. So, as I keep putting off writing my Christmas cards, it is, as we speak, -14 degrees with gusts of 26 mi./hr. No snow tho, I am ready for a little show of snow. That is the only redeeming factor for MN. The past few years we've had brown winters (makes me miss Philly) which are welcomed.
So, as for all of you who are enjoying mild climates at this time of year, say a prayer for me. Now I am counting down the days until we head to Scottsdale in Jan.
Joe, keep posting those gorgeous photos of warm things. You're my only hope of keeping me sane, while I endure 6 months of winter.
Love ya,
Nan
Lordy, Nanakins, 14 degrees would make me put off writing my Christmas cards too, and everything else for that matter. The strategy in homesteads of old would have been to close down all but a couple of rooms and keep butts resolutely aimed at the fireplace. I drove through the eastern south on my way to Florida - Virginia and south Carolina and Savannah - juleps and verandas and spanish moss and romantic old cemetaries. I was sorely tempted to linger, but was afraid I'd never leave. But I take it you mean the hill country a little to the north of that. Haven't had the pleasure. Kentucky and its neighbors remain as exotic as any other I haven't seen. Yes, temperate and forested and fabled is how I imagine it. And somehow undisclosed. What's more appealing than that?
ReplyDelete