what a difference a day makes....

Yesterday it began to snow --

seriously, that is. There have been a few flakes in the air--ushered in on Hallowe'en--but yesterday the snow came in with a slam.

By yesterday afternoon all streets were a slippery danger zone.


"NO ONE should go out with the car today!" shouted my daughter as soon as she came in through the door, back from school.

Later, my husband came home with cold hands because "SOMEONE took the snow scraper out of the car and never returned it!"

This morning on my walk, my neighbour and I saw that yes, indeed, the roads had been very treacherous--someone's car tire marks left the road halfway down Dawson St. hill and veered into the front (what used to be) flower garden of a house at the bottom of the hill. Drove right over the bedraggled bed of flowers past their prime.

Oh dear. That didn't look like it had been fun.

These 2 photos were taken this morning less than 15 minutes apart. I snapped the first photo from the overpass, the second photo from in front of the train station.

We stopped to admire the birch tree--actually, the tree thrust its yellow arms before our eyes. All the other birch trees in the stand are stripped of their leaves. Every golden one dropped to the ground and well on its way to decay. But not this golden lady. She's still resplendent in her foliage.

It's her proximity to water. She thrives by it. Can't live without it. Perhaps having her roots so close to the water, weaving underneath the shore, she's able to persist long past the due date.

What a difference the water makes....

the sun on her back...

well, she didn't care if it was -10 c. this morning, she still went out. Actually, it turns out she doesn't mind the ice-cold at all!

Here's the muskrat I saw swimming in the harbour this morning. She was making her way from the pond (lagoon? the water by the memorial), swam under the footpath, and headed northeast.

The morning sun had just come up over the clouds hanging low over the horizon, casting a dabble of gold on her back. The sky was almost completely grey, as you can see from its reflection.

When the ice finally covers the lake (it's beginning its slow creep along some edges), she'll be busy swimming under a meter of ice, foraging for her greens, never mind the cold, never mind the darkness. Muskrats can see in almost total darkness, underneath the ice.

I often see this muskrat perched on the shore by the lagoon, having dragged its morning vegetation onto a rock. She sits there, calm as can be, munching.

The other day I saw 4 muskrats. I think I know where the expression "to bite his/her head off" comes from. It has muskrat origins. One of the muskrats swam up behind the other, but the big one in front simply snapped its head back and bit the upstart in the snout.

Off she went, back to her own munching grounds.

She has to keep an eye out for the mink, though. Mink hunt muskrats. I saw the mink (or should I say the mink saw me?) 2 weeks ago scurrying through those same rocks. She poked her head out and, extending her long neck like the periscope of a submarine (or is that only in 50s movies and cartoons?), stood stock still and stared me right in the eye. She did that a few times, weaving invisibly through the rocks and then, in a guessing game, craning her neck and peering straight at me.

I was on the footpath. I did not get a photo of her. She wouldn't cooperate.

And that is the story of my mink moment (or her person surprise, depending on p.o.v.) .

Old Rose

I couldn't believe it! Early November and Old Rose in bloom!

Facing East, no less!

I call her Old Rose because she's the biggest and strongest rose bush in our yard. She was planted years ago in the front, streetside. Next year our house will be 100 yrs. old. Old Rose has got be at least half of that.

I'm sure she's been harshly cut back many times over the years. I'm sure many a resident over the years has looked her unwieldiness over up and down and set to work to try and dress her down with garden shears.

Probably went out and had those shears sharpened first.

But, she paid them no mind.

She's gnarly and obstinate. Tough old unwieldy branches with a mind all their own. She definitely has her own shape and not shy to show it. Reaches out in her very own asymmetry.

I, too, took the pruning shears to her the summer we moved in, but she defied me.

She'd have no part of me taming her. I wasn't the first.

Despite her obstinacy, Old Rose blooms magnificently and profusely. And now, as I see this windswept November day with wet snow in sight...she's enduring.

Doesn't give up the ghost so easily. Turns a tender pink face to the East, regardless.

She has a lot to teach the other more tender Roses.

Kekri aamu / morning

November enters the colours of darkness to the northshore of Lake Superior. Here is the cloak I found over the sky and water early this a.m. while out for my walk. Often, the sky/lake that greets me when I come up along the overpass to the lake shore is like....

a 60s velvet painting.

I never did get those velvet paintings, but now, after so many early morning walks along Nanabijou harbour, I have a sense of what those painters were trying to "get." Of course, it was an impossible task. The paintings--one of a pirate ship still hangs in my mother's laundry room, a yard sale find of my dad's that we all groaned about when he brought it home--come off as tacky kitsch.

Yet the vista, the vanishing point of sky and water that finds its way through my third eye? my heart? is velvet rich, beyond any palette or human imagination. A tactile feeling of the earth/water reaching in to touch your soul. A stroking. A tenderness so dear. So beloved.

Kekri is an old pre-Christian Finnish seasonal marker. It comes around Hallowe'en. Today it is called Pyhainpaiva (dots over the 'a'). It is celebrated the first Saturday after Oct. 31 and before Nov. 6. That would be today. People go to cemeteries to visit their beloved dead. They bring candles to burn far into the night sky. The vision of hundreds of flickering flames in the dark night sky, dotted among gravestones, is lovely.

Kekri was the end of the year in the old calendar, before Gregorian and Julian time colonization. It was the time when the kummit ja vainajat visited (the ghosts and beloved dead). The time when the cloak between worlds dematerialized and one could see clearly what was before one all along.

Kekri signaled the end of work. The harvest was done, field chores had ceased, the harvest was in storage. Preparation for the long long, dark dark winter was well under way. It was a transition that signaled a turn to a waiting time. Waiting for the darkness. Who knew what it would bring this winter? Who knew what sorrow would come knocking? Whose death one would have to grieve.

To survive the winter....that is the question.

No wonder winter was the time of stringing words together, through story-telling, song, runes, melodies. When women wove their stories into tapestries to tack on the wall and sung sorrows into lamentations.

There is lots more to Kekri, but guess what? I live inside Gregorian time and my work is never finished! I've got to get back to work ...

Blue gold

This is a photo of Lake Superior that I took early one Saturday morning in late October. Our lake is amazing. Anyone who lives by its shores knows that its magic is beyond description. The cloths of beauty that it dons are beyond the wildest imaginings, more awesome than the most opulent brocades, silks, damasks, or satins. It can also appear more serene than the most elegant linens, tweeds, or polished cottons....

and that is all in one day.

The reason why I have posted this blue gold shimmering mirror is because of what I heard on CBC radio yesterday morning. Jelly fish blooms and dead zones.

Apparently there are 200 dead zones in waters around the world, from oceans to lakes. The bottom of Lake Erie is a dead zone. It used to be dead as a corpse, then like a zombie come back to life; it was slightly improved, but now again, thanks to our carelessness it is returning to the dead.

My sister and I thought last night about dead zones. Appropriately, it was Halloween. A dead zone is a body of water where the oxygen level is either gone or too low to support any life, except perhaps some bacteria. It's water that has no oxgyen.

So, my sister said, I guess it can't be H2O anymore.

What would it be, then? I asked. Just "H"?

...yes, like H for hell, said my neighbour this morning on our walk.

Trying to imagine what water without oxygen would actually be is ....spooky. Scary. Sounds like some creepy science fiction movie. Who ever heard about water without oxygen?

If we drank it would there be any benefit to us? Would it quench our thirst? Perhaps not as no fish can live in it. No life at all. In some places, like the huge dead zone in the Caribbean Sea, jelly fish colonize the borders, amassing gigantic jelly fields in this dead-to-other-sea-life zones. The giant turtles are all gone, so too many of the large fish that used to feed on jellyfish.

I wonder if tourists on cruise ships sail right through this dead zone and notice this lifelessness below them?

The mouth of the Mississippi is another huge dead zone, but I believe the largest one is off of the coast of Africa. While the Dead Sea is a natural ....dead sea, our "new" dead zones are a result of...you guessed it: progress. development. civilization. (somehow those words stare out that they actually mean the opposite. Like water without oxygen. It looks like water, but it's not because it can't be H2O, as it has no oxygen. It's a chimera. An illusion. A simulacrum of what it's supposed to be. A false representation.)

Now, at the root of the massive deadening of water that is occurring is our use of fertilizers. While oceans and lakes can repair and heal some damage, we are piling it on without reprieve or rest. The waters can't keep up to our abuse, to the sheer amount of our abuse, to the cumulative damage we keep ignoring. The Mississippi delta, for example, is full of fertilizer effluent from farms all the way north up to Minnesota. The waters collect fertilizer and animal waste runoff from states along its banks and by the time the waters reach the sea, the river is a churning mess of manmade madness.

Last night, while we were talking and thinking about and trying to imagine dead water, my sister and I were looking through a stack of books that I had recently picked up. Interestingly, one of the books I cracked open had a section on how the fertilizers we use today were developed from the leftovers of World War 1. That after the war there were huge stocks of nitrate (essential for the making of explosives) lying around, but there wasn't a market for explosives. So, let's develop a new market! said industry. So, industry decided to push nitrogen fertilizers onto agriculture.

...You're kidding! said my neighbour. Well, now it makes sense! After the Oklahoma bombing I was always trying to figure out what fertilizers had to do with making bombs. ...

who the person or persons were who came up with this original brainstorm of war chemicals to farming and food.... I can't imagine what sort of headspace they live in. I would imagine that whole areas of their brain that should contain justice, compassion and responsibilities to 7 generations is simply....missing. Dead zones.

Then, the 2nd World War added a boost to this renewed use of war chemicals. This time phosphoric acid esters were re-invented as insecticides. Quote from the book "After the war they had large production capacities and stocks and they decided that what kills people should also kill insects. They made new formulations of the stuff and sold it as insecticide" (Jose A. Lutzenberger cited in Hungry Corporations. Helena Paul & Ricarda Steinbrecher, pg 13).

Now these very same re-fashioned death chemicals are standard agribusiness and farming "aids" that we call fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides. I believe some of that is based on gyphosates which is the same #$%@ chemical they carpet bomb blueberries with in the forests around northwestern Ontario where I go to pick blueberries. (next post: my blueberry time bomb story..also found in your cereal...)

So, when we look into the dead zone, into the dead waters multiplying today at an alarming rate, we look into the mirror of war.

It is a mirror not made of blue gold. It is not even made of gold or even of cash...i.e. hard cash. It's that invisible commerce jetting about the stock market casino of cyberspace, fueled by engines of the military-industrial complex.