Turtle crossing update: eggs were laid…close to the road!!!!! That’s one risk-loving reptile. Waiting for an update. Will keep you posted.
But looks like…I saved a mama!!!
a bushel of gumption, an ounce of grace
Turtle crossing update: eggs were laid…close to the road!!!!! That’s one risk-loving reptile. Waiting for an update. Will keep you posted.
But looks like…I saved a mama!!!
This morning I drove the car over to my genius mechanic for the annual inspection. I love my mechanic, his family, and the way they run the business. His daughter, who is my son’s age, is just amazing: I wish I could adopt her on a part-time basis. She just became engaged; I felt happy all day at the news. And I’m no way a crazy-into-weddings/marriage person, for sure.
On the way back, coming out of a turn down a hill on a rural access road, I spotted the turtle: a pretty big one, on the left side of the road about to cross. …
There’s a lot of car time out here in these rural parts. I don’t mind, as for a long time, even before I lived up here, my best thinking usually happened in the car. Sometimes it was the only alone, quiet time I got so I took it.
But I also really like to listen to the radio. And sometimes I get lucky. Today on Radio Woodstock I got to hear, for the second time in as many weeks, a song I love and hadn’t heard in years. Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler’s just-this-side-of-Tom Waits growl and poetry with their rendering of Romeo and Juliet. If you don’t know it, watch the 1980 video and listen here.
When I was 22 and wandering London I had at least a half dozen Dire Straits cassettes I played on a loop in my Walkman (yeah I know, flashback).
One in particular grabs my poetic sense of time and space and love:
And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be/All I do is keep the beat, the bad company/All I do is kiss you, through the bars of a rhyme/Julie, I’d do the stars with you, any time
Language is so supple, and surprising, and endlessly able to express our humanness if we let it. Combined with this level of music and crying guitar, there’s no match. It jumps right out of the radio, shakes us up, and puts us back down, a little better off to go on down the road, thinking and listening.
The weather has finally warmed, the wind has finally subsided to a point where you actually want to be outside for more than five minutes. It is full speed ahead with the garden, trying to make up for, like, three lost weeks.
Then, it hits. …
I wonder if anyone else is a little weary of how busy we all seem to be. We’re all stressed, hectic, over scheduled, crazy, don’t know where the time goes….can’t respond to mail, return a call, be civilized. I’m as guilty as the next person, feeling overwhelmed and underfed….
The grace of hard work. Today, at the beautiful High Lawn Farm in Lee, Massachusetts. Good people doing the hard hard work of dairy farming, carrying on the vision of the Wilde family.
The weather, more Cape Breton than Berkshires end of May. A day-old calf, gorgeous Jersey caramel colored and twice as big as his much older neighbors, bucking and raring to go. A heifer being milked by the new automated milker.
Can’t help but wonder if the spectacular surroundings, the continual breezes and Berkshires magic don’t add something extra to the already exceptional milk from these Jerseys.
Drove home drinking High Lawn chocolate milk, ruminating on it all.
Just finished reading Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her. I’d read the extracts in The New Yorker two years ago (ok, yes, am a little slow to get to things sometimes. Life’s been a bit, ah, jammed).
Raw, hilarious, excruciatingly piquant stories of relationships lost. Díaz’s prose is so damn alive.
The last story ends with Yunior, Díaz’s alter ego, throwing himself into his work, just trying to move on.
That is all we can do, often as not. Tuck our heads down. Work, hard. And push forward. Or what feels like forward. It is in this pure effort when all seems lost and stripped away that a space for grace may, just may, open.
But there is no formula. We have no control. No checklist of stuff to do in order to get from A to B to C to Grace. Just have got to bow to it.