Monthly Archives: March 2009

Responding to a picture:
 
 

I’m enjoying the past couple of days since the clocks were changed.  The evening is longer, not just for me but also for the birds and the squirrels.  Across from my study window there’s a line of trees, busy on any mild or warm day and especially so when a mild day follows a cold snap.  The tree branches are alive with a mad dash of squirrels.

I’ve sat here for at least an hour, watching the fun, gasping as a near miss from one branch tip to another is turned into an acrobatic triumph.

Graham put his pasting brush down and came in to see what all my ooh-ing and aah-ing was about, and joined in.  

“They never quite miss, never quite fall,” he said.

“Could be that they know there’s no National Health Service for squirrels,” I said.

“There might be something quantum about that.”

“There’s a little of the quantum in just about everything if you poke hard enough.”

“True.  Very true.”

The rain has gone and the sun has returned, along with blue skies.

Blue skies smilin’ at me
Nothin’ but blue skies do I see
Bluebirds singin’ a song
Nothin’ but bluebirds all day long

Today, the bluebirds are staying firmly out of the weather.  It’s still cold, cold enough to penetrate an old man’s chest with chill fingers, leaching energy and leaving emptiness behind.  I’m fine, and recovering well enough to feel that I may have had the last bout of the sickness but many are still languishing.  Some old folks have gone over to pneumonia–the “old man’s friend”–which is not good.  We’ve had the pneumonia jab now for some years and, while I still regard it with some misgivings, immunity to this one is available free, with one quick jab.

My head’s been filled with Parthenoid dreams and, today especially, with Japanese traditional responses to nature.  I’d like to visit Japan one day.  And re-visit Athens, and Rome.  No urge to go on to see for myself just how big the pyramids are–I’m perfectly happy to take other peoples’ word for it.

Hey ho.  Perhaps tomorrow there will be bluebirds.

A small, sudden poem:

Broken by a heavy squall
a single daffodil, face down.

Rescued, trimmed, propped
upright on my windowsill

it smiled as if in sunny relief;
I recovered a reason to shave

 

–John Bailey
  March 2009, Wales 

A rescued daffodil