poetry & prose – Page 6

2021-05-192021-05-26

Spring Snow

It’s the latter half of May and after weeks of sitting in the backyard sun, cooking out on the campfire grill, starting the garden work, and contemplating the birds, bugs, and flowers, it snowed last night.

It snowed a heap.

So much for spring. Well, for today, at least.

Of course, I stepped out into the yard and checked my trees. The apple tree was covered (no, COVERED) in blossoms and while snow does not equal freezing or frost (mind = blown?) the chill temperatures are not great for those delicate little flowers-soon-to-be-apples.

The dog on the other hand was in her glory.

Born in September, our eight month old puppy spent the first couple months of her life with her litter inside, in a heated garage, cuddled up with her siblings.

Then we adopted her, and brought her home in a minor blizzard, and set her in the backyard to do her puppy-business in a hand-depth of powder.

The first four months of her life here were bound in snow, covered in ice, and braced in chill winds. In short, she grew up in the snow covered city and will likely forever be a snow dog.

It’s probably not surprising then, that when I opened the back door and let her into the yard as the flakes began to fall, her reaction was…

Nostalgia?

Elation?

Unfiltered puppy excitement?

I didn’t think I could express this any other way than to share a bit of art with you: she ran in circles for nearly ten minutes, chased snowflakes and leapt through the patches of accumulation settling into the greening grass. She shook and jumped and played, and in the end I had to coax her inside with a treat to dry off and warm up.

At least one local was excited about the temporary change in the weather, I guess.

2021-05-122021-05-22

Backyard: Clean-Up

In recognition of yet-another-local-lockdown due to the ongoing pandemic, I'm doing a week of feature blog posts about living in the backyard. From May 10th through 16th, my posts will be themed around life outdoors but as close to home as possible, a few steps out the back door.

It’s always striking to me that we live in a deeply seasonal place.

I’m sure that other parts of the planet go through their own share of seasonal variation, but living in one of the more northern capital cities on the Earth also makes places us in a group where vast differences exist between the heart of winter and the edges of summer.

Today I sit in my backyard in spring and enjoy a mild temperature, barefoot kinda day.

Four months ago I hardly dared open the door to the brutal cold.

Four months from now I’ll be picking fruit and veg from trees that at the moment seem barely alive and from soil that is little more than a crusty brown patch in the corner of my backyard.

I’ve been busy spring cleaning for the last couple weeks.

Grass to be raked. Leftover leaves that didn’t get sorted out before the snow last fall were starting to rot on the lawn. Flowerpots are full of crusty dried remains of last year’s greenery. Weeds are emerging and poking through the lawn and garden beds. Winter dust and the bits of residue from the long-melted snow needs to be wiped down. And that’s not even to mention the various bits of fence, deck or furniture that need a touch of paint or a tightened screw.

My lawnmower died as well, and neither wanting to see it dropped into the landfill nor having the patience or skill to repair it myself I hunted down a guy online who takes them as donations, fixes them up, and gives them a new life. But of course that meant a big clean-up of the shed, and rearranging all the various things I’d stored in there over winter, all to extract a broken tool and roll it out to the curb.

Spring cleaning is a real thing here, not because it’s a good time to get it done but simply because the season ticks over and that it needs done becomes obvious.

The trees are budding with their baby leaves and blossoms.

The grass is turning from a pale yellowish-brown to a vibrant green.

The bees are buzzing through the air and investigating the spring-waking world.

A few weeks from now it will all be just another summer, but for the moment spring is in clean-up mode, as am I, and the passing of winter feels like a barefoot kinda day in the backyard.

2021-05-052021-05-05

Misinformed

the moment
a tree
falls in the forest
crashes
breaking branches
thrashing limbs
cracking wood
makes a sound
heard by just one
witness
who tells the story
to friends
who were not there
an audience
unable to confirm
the moment
the noise
the disruption to
the peace of the forest
exaggerated
amplified
by words
feelings
hunches
fears
misrepresenting and
unable to precisely
articulate
the moment
– bardo

I have reserved some space on this blog each week to be creative, and to post some fiction, poetry, art or prose. Writing a daily blog could easily get repetitive and turn into driveling updates. Instead, Wordy Wednesdays give me a bit of a creative nudge when inspiration strikes.

2021-04-212021-05-04

firewood

the fate of a tree brings a curious twist
starting as seed
on wind, through mist
tucked into the soil
spattered with rain
sprouting and growing new heights to attain
shrugging snow, budding leaf
basking summers often brief
sunlit evenings casting long shadows
brilliant colours before even more snows
year after year, decades pass, seasons withdraw
until fate arrives
as a wind
or a flame
or a saw
to be hewn and moved
lugged, logged and planed
milled into geometrically linear grained
lumber.
or not.
maybe nothing more than a log for a fire
split
axed
set hot
aflame and a flame to admire
to warm hands
hearts
and cook sizzling food
a curious twisting fate
from tree to fire wood.
– bardo

A cubic meter of firewood landed on my front lawn yesterday and I spent well over an hour carting and stacking it while feeling a bit bittersweet on the fate of these trees to become fuel for my future backyard fires rather than, say, lumber for the doghouse that I built a couple weeks ago.