Juvenile Bald Eagles playing at Jordan Lake. Photo by Doc Ellen, DVM *** Shadows Twenty-Eight. October 14, 2018 Are people like eagles? Sometimes. They can be larger in their spirits than those around them and see to the heart with a kindly but relentless eye. Left by themselves they find the world constantly entertaining. Some people avoid them–afraid or contemptuous? A few are drawn and want to be taught and influenced. Those give an ineffable joy, a glimpse of something eternal which not even a savage hurricane can destroy. They build nests high and in unlikely places–often messy and yet comfortable. At maturity they don’t actually compete. The tend to outgrow that impulse, but their goal is to be the best that they can be. We might envy their high-ranging flights. Sky per se doesn’t frighten them. It feels like home. They willingly go it alone, but companionship at those heights is their chief reward and birthright when all is said and done.
Photo by Ellen Tinsley, DVM Judy and Wag coming out of the fog. *** Shadows Twenty-SevenOctober 7, 2018 For Ellen How to tell it? I have a new friend in the midst of my aging, when new friends are rare. She’s a bird-watcher. I’m a people-watcher. What I learn, I scarcely know until I put it in my books. Some mistrust other people first and foremost. I attend to them with my mind open. She talked to my dog, and Wag listened. Wag is tolerant now of other people but skeptical, too. It takes time for her to trust, but the bird-watcher turned out to be a dog-whisperer and spoke Wag’s language, baffling to me. Mind over matter maybe. Wag would stop, hesitate, and then touch her nose to the outstretched hand. Me she pulled in, too, to tell of the sixteen eagle nests around our Jordan Lake. I asked how they would have fared during our hurricane. She said they have favorite places to hunker down during storms, but we had four days of wind and rain, so she’s checking on them. She watches for them to fly by, way up there and catches them in her camera the way she caught Wag and me as we walked
My figs back in 2011, after Hurricane Irene. No figs this year. *** Shadows Twenty-FourSeptember 16, 2018 During Hurricane Florence This monster hurricane has shaken our assumptions. Wind and rain, if intense, can’t be stopped. People are begged to leave their homes, but many refuse. So streets, cars, houses, stores are flooded. Rescue work is unleashed. Here we had wind and rain, but in bearable amounts. We were safe. We had electricity. Tim watched the hurricane news. I worked proofing my novels, written, but not yet published. We could still cook our food, heat tea, make coffee. At the coast, some died, and many lost everything. We can expect more and more storms like Florence because we pollute the air, and the earth warms. Scientists tell us that we’re already at the tipping point of climate change. Do we remember to value our human connections, our friends wherever they live and those we love whether we understand why or not? This twenty- first century challenges the human spirit even more than the twentieth did and threatens us with the vengeance the earth itself wreaks, and no human mind controls.
Shadows Twenty-FiveSeptember 23, 2018 I slowed down, did easy work, nothing strenuous. The hurricane left us to mop up and dry out. Sun came back, the better to see the devastation. Here, where we escaped the worst, life was almost normal despite rivers that flowed upstream, the milk we couldn’t buy, the flooded roads we couldn’t pass. I wanted more work. I made a list I’m crossing off. Something in me wants serious work, to tell some story more than poetry tells or my diary. A new book then about aging and adapting. There is more to tell than I have admitted so far. At eighty-one, how many women tell what it’s like, to lose the capabilities we always assumed, to have gates closed, but the mind still open, still able to articulate paradox and justice, when everything in the human being or in the state works easily and smoothly together, each part doing its own work? Mine has been to write, tell my mind’s story. I’ve written many books, but there is still more to tell. I will.
