12 April 2024 (the sound of rain)

the drum of rain

while taking a shower . . .

my body’s curves

13 October 2023 (whitewater)

whitewater

the decibel level

of falling leaves

27 March 2023 (states of water)

the three states of water

an eagle pair shores up

their lakeside nest

11 September 2022 (whorled)

whorled aster

the shallow stream’s unseen

current

10 April 2022 (flooding)

spring flooding

the river the color

of money

9 July 2021 (rain)

answering back to the rain the river

30 May 2021 (rain)

more than sixty-percent water island rain

January 13: Wet enough for a duck

The view from inside looked bleak, foggy. As he stepped out the front door, my husband mused, "I wonder how wet it is out here." We had barely talken two steps on our walk into town for brunch when we both laughed. A drake Mallard stood there right in front of us, about to make his way across the street, hundreds of yards away from the river. On this day that felt more like mid-March than January, I guess it was wet enough for him to take a little stroll away from the water.

Why did the duck cross the road?

When we got to town, we had brunch at a restaurant on the waterfront. The inner harbor was brimming full, a just-past-new-moon high tide, the waters still and calm. Curtis Island in the outer harbor was muted by fog and looked farther away than it really was. As we ate, we watched a single coot meander among the empty floats and cocooned windjammers. A loon surfaced with a sea urchin in its bill. Along the public landing, the very air felt laden with moisture, our wet breath making clouds each time we exhaled.

Morning of mist, tides,
ducks pacing wet streets.
Our bodies contain oceans.

August 30: Finding water

Family legend has it that my great-great-aunt Gladys (no longer with us but whom I remember fondly from childhood) was a dowser. She was one of those people who used a split branch of (usually) witch-hazel to find water. If you needed to dig a well, Aunt Glad was the one to call. She had the inner sense--one might even call it a power--to divine where the water was. I was always a bit disappointed that I didn't inherit the ability.

I was thinking of this when I heard the osprey keening this morning. We live on a river and often hear an osprey as it's following the water's course between lake and harbor. I realized that while I might not be able to help anyone plan where to drill their well, I do know how to tell when I'm close to a larger body of surface water: I just listen for the osprey.

Around here that's a no-brainer, but once years ago, hiking in the Cascades of Oregon, I remember being startled to hear an osprey crying overhead. I was surrounded by forest of Douglas firs on a trail that seemed to wind endlessly through the mountains. The shining white bird seemed so out of place in the setting that I worried I had heatstroke and was hallucinating an angel. But sure enough, the trail very soon began to follow the shore of a small lake--I should have realized the osprey was there for a reason.

There's a river out here,
reminds the osprey.
Come outside.

June 21: Leeches

Some days I really love my job. This afternoon I got to join my director and some volunteers on a site visit by canoe to a property along a pond in Waldo County. We paddled across the pond and up a narrowing, winding inlet, enjoying the birds and other wildlife along the way.

Dragonflies and butterflies dipped in the reeds and cattails. Marsh wrens chattered from shrubs, while swamp sparrows trilled unseen and blackbirds flashed their red epaulettes. A great blue heron flew in and perched on a nearby tree as we paddled past. Along the pond's edges, bullhead lilies and water arum bloomed.

Water Arum

Green frogs croaked like banjos from within the reeds, and in the shallower water, we could see foot-long small-mouth bass lurking in the shadows. Along the inlet, we startled a deer getting a drink, a buck in velvet, and where he'd been, we noticed a beaver trail over which beavers had been dragging trees to enhance their lodge. 

At one point we had to make a short portage over a pile of rocks augmented by beavers--not the hop over sticks pictured above--and it was there I noticed the leeches. They were several inches long, with red bellies, and moved through the water like pieces of ribbon unfurling. I'm not normally a fan of leeches, but today I found them worth watching. Perhaps it was the influence of the landscape around me on this beautiful afternoon. On another day, in another setting, they'd have undoubtedly been creepy--or if one had attached to my foot while I was standing in the shallow water, hauling on the canoe. But today, I found them fascinating. 

See the leech, above the white thing in the lower left?

Even a leech has
its good points: grace in water,
a rouge-red belly.

July 4: Baptism

This morning my husband and I drove to Scarborough to attend the baptism of our niece and nephew; Paul had been asked to be the godfather of his sister's son. As a non-Catholic with no sense of the sequence of events at a mass, let alone knowledge of the responses, I spent most of the service keeping an eye on our active niece (though I did take a long moment to say a non-denominational prayer for my best friend's father, who's critically ill). Undaunted by the silence of dozens of people in the pews around her, she grabbed a hymnal and began "reading" from it aloud. Then she tossed the hymnal aside and began perusing "Spot Bakes a Cake" and a Sesame Street ABC book with the same intensity. For some reason this struck me as a wonderful juxtaposition--images of Grover and Big Bird alongside the reading of the day's homily and the singing of "America the Beautiful." And all being taken in by an angelic-looking two-year-old with wild curly dark hair wearing a long white fancy baptism dress. The only point in the service in which she got at all upset was when she was dunked into the baptismal font, but even that passed quickly.

After lunch and family time, my husband and I decided to stop at Scarborough Marsh for a little birding. The tide was high and the humid air clung to our skin. Throughout the marsh, willets--large sandpipers that breed there--flew back and forth, white wing patches flashing, crying, "Pe-will-willet, pe-will-willet!" Their noise seemed rather alarmist, as the marsh was otherwise placid: slack tide brimming at the edges, still air humming with insects, little other bird activity. I'm not sure how this connects at all to the morning's baptism, except that both experiences involved water, and I did briefly give thought to what it must feel like for a young willet to step into the water for the first time, committing itself to a life of marsh mud, tidal waters, and salt-fragrant air. I bet it cries out in alarm too, before acceptance.

Life-giving water
baptizes both bird and child--
high tide, blessed font.