Curiosity

Curiosity has arrived safely on Mars.  I still feel like jumping up and down.  I have always been in love with the Red Planet, ever since sneaking Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books into class in middle school. 

I know there are no civilizations on Mars, lost or extant.  I believe, all the same, that there was life there.  It is even possible that life may still be there.  After all, Mars is the most Earth-like of the planets, our sister planet. There was water on Mars.  If there is life on Mars, presumably in microbial form, I hope nothing from Earth contaminates it.

Curiosity is well named.  Humans, members of our genus, have been pushing the boundaries of exploration for hundreds of thousands of years.  Despite its drawbacks, the curiosity of the human race has served us well.  May Curiosity serve us well on the Red Planet.  And I can't wait for all the pictures!

Snakes alive

Snakes.  Yes, snakes.  I was complaining to someone that I never had anything to write about for a blog and then I was reminded of the snakes.  

I rather like snakes, the non-poisonous, non-constrictor types.  I especially like them if they don't live in my house, but more on that later.  Most of the snakes I have here are garden snakes.  They eat mosquitoes in the garden and more power to 'em.  I see them fairly frequently and sometimes they leave their shed skins around.  I have collected a few of these to admire.  I even left out a small, old, plastic tarp that they very much like to live under.  Well, okay, I left it out by mistake, and then discovered that the garden snakes liked it, so it became officially theirs.

Those are the garden snakes.  Then there are the snakes in the house.  Well, as I said before, I really don't like them in the house.  I know they have sometimes been in the attic.  How do I know this?  I've had several experiences.  One of them came one evening as I was in the kitchen.  I heard something overhead and looked up.  There was a small hole in the ceiling and there was an inquisitive visitor looking down from the attic. (This is an old farmhouse that dates back maybe 175 years.  There are always things that need fixing.)

"Honey," I said to my husband, "there's a little hole in the ceiling in the kitchen.  It seriously needs fixing.  Right now.  There's a big problem here."

"I'll look at it later," he responded.  "It can't be that urgent."

"Yes, it is.  There's a big snake hanging out of the hole."

It was, I later found out, a milk snake, a nonpoisonous native snake that eats insects and rodents.  They can live into their early 20s and can become accustomed to and friendly with people.  Would it eat my cats?  Probably not but we are not going to find that out.   This was the same snake, or one like it,  that I found in the closet one very hot day a few years ago.  It had wrapped itself around the closet bar, somehow weaving itself through the hanger hooks.  It had gone in there to escape the heat.  

I took one look at this snake.  "Yikes!"  I said.

The snake looked at me and probably said the same thing because the next second it was gone.  We hired a contractor to fix the holes in the attic and anywhere else to try to keep the wildlife out.  Will it work?  I don't know, but we had to do something, for goodness snakes.

Leopards on the grass alas

I have a new book out, "Hurricane Warning".  It's poetry.  Some people have been bugging me for more fiction and trust me, it's coming, but poetry has always held a distinct attraction for me.  

When I was a little girl I wanted to be a poet when I grew up.  No one warned me that you can't make a living as a poet; I had to find that out for myself.  I found out that it was even difficult to get your stuff published in magazines.  Some magazines were happy to publish your poetry but they didn't want to pay for it, except in copies.  All the same I kept writing poetry . 

I am more than a little convinced that poetry is part of the original language form of our species.  Poetry ties our thoughts and experiences together.  Imagine a scene on the African plain two hundred thousand years ago.  A small band of early humans is foraging peacefully.  Then there is a ripple in the tall grass.

"Look out; a leopard!" one of them cries.

All of the band jump up and scream and shriek.  The leopard, upset by the commotion and shaking its head over the weirdness of humanity, runs away.  Later, another of this band of early humans tries to recapture the experience.

"Leopards on the grass alas!" she says.

Well, okay, maybe not.  But it could have happened. No one was there to publish it.  Anyway, you can imagine how I am delighted to have another book of poetry published.  The title is "Hurricane Warning".  There's a leopard in there somewhere.  Look out!

Earth Day

It's Earth Day again, April 22, a day when many people stop to think , however briefly, about our environment and our planet.  My experience with Earth Day goes all the way back to the first one.  In fact, it goes back even farther.  

I grew up in the times before the modern environmental movement.  That didn't mean that I lacked the interest and impetus of an environmentalist, though; I just didn't know that's what it was. I had no support.  I remember complaining to my parents that people were destroying woods and fields and "where the animals need to live" for houses and factories.  My parents laughed and told me not to worry.  I remember when the town trucks drove by, spraying a fog of DDT to kill mosquitoes.  Kids would run out to play hide-and-seek in the fog.  I did, too, but even then I wondered if it was really safe,

And then Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring".  I read the book as soon as it came out.  It took my breath away.  I wrote a letter to the local newspaper on the topic and I was annoyingly persistent in trying to get my teachers and friends to read the book and talk about it.  My feelings and thoughts were vindicated by an adult, a scientist.  I knew what I was: an environmentalist.

It's decades later and it's Earth Day again.  Usually I would go down the road picking up trash.  Today it's pouring rain.  I'm not collecting trash today.  It doesn't matter.  I pick up roadside trash a lot and then sort it for recycling.  Every day is Earth Day, after all.

The First Flower of Spring

I live in a part of the country, southern New England, where this was The Winter That Wasn't.  We had two storms that gave us any snow to speak of, and only one of those storms required any serious shoveling.  I hate shoveling, so I was grateful.  Mostly.  But I worried about the environment in general and in particular, about the wood patches and marshes near me.  Would the warm winter destroy the spring? I went looking for spring.

There were signs of deer everywhere in the woods, signs which I almost stepped in more than once. Ticks were everywhere, too, all species of them.  The winter never got harsh enough to send them into hibernation or whatever it is those vile creatures do when it gets cold.  It takes a lot to stun a tick, I guess, and this winter just didn't have what it takes.  The ticks are back now stronger than ever, but I don't consider them a sign of spring.  

In February the daffodil shoots appeared.  They came toward the end of the month, pushing up through the leaves back in the secret places in the woods.  The ones beside my driveway were more courageous, or at least the recipients of more warmth, reflected from the driveway.  They are almost ready to bloom now, while the ones in the woods are still gathering strength.  I love daffodils and narcissus; they always mean spring.  But there is another plant means spring just as much as the daffodil.  I'm referring to the skunk cabbage.

Yes, I did just write "skunk cabbage".  The eastern skunk cabbage in particular,  that wonderful, smelly harbinger of spring.  Actually, they only smell if you hurt a leaf, and it's not *that* bad.  Skunk cabbage can create its own little warm mini-climate through thermogenesis, raising its temperature above that of the air.  It's a chemical process, of course, but to me it seems like magic.  And skunk cabbage is beautiful, pushing through the soil in mottled purple before the leaves open out in green.  Skunk cabbage was considered to have medicinal value in the past, and it's edible when cooked.  I've never eaten it, although a character in a book I'm  working on  has. Yesterday I found skunk cabbage in the woods and it made me happy.  Spring is here.

Look! Up in the sky!

Look! Up in the sky!

No, it wasn't a bird.  It wasn't a plane, although at first I thought it was.  It wasn't Superman, either.  Here's what happened.

A few days ago I went out in the evening to do an errand.  On my way to my car, I paused to admire the evening sky.  Two planets were burning brightly, Venus, and, I think, Jupiter.  The waxing crescent moon added to the beauty.  It was cold and serene, a beautiful winter evening.  And then I saw it.  At first I did think it was a plane because it was that bright.  It was moving, a bright transient star, and then it it burned orange and was extinguished.  I blinked and looked again.  Following in the path of the now vanished bright thing was a smaller, fainter light.  It, too, suddenly vanished.

I stood staring for a while, trying to make up my mind about what I had seen.  Had I witnessed a natural meteorite doing what  meteorites so often do in our planetary atmosphere?  Or had I been privileged to see the fiery demise of space junk, flaming out, with any luck, before whacking into someone's roof? 

I still don't know, of course, but I'm leaning toward the space junk theory.  Space junk has been in the news a lot lately.  And there is so much of it.  We humans don't seem to care where we toss our garbage.  If that was a piece of human made debris, though, it had one attribute I don't normally associate with garbage.  It was beautiful.  Meteors and space junk: beautiful if you aren't right where they land.

A New Year

It's a New Year  (capitalization intentional), a good excuse for a blog entry.  A New Year is typically supposed to be a time for profundities.  Unfortunately, or probably fortunately, I have nothing profound to say.  I don't even have a New Year's resolution to share.  I don't make New Year's resolutions.  I have nothing against resolutions; I make them whenever they are called for, just not necessarily at the new year.   

So why am I writing this?  I'm writing it because of wishes.  New Year's wishes.  I wish a lot of things for us.  I wish us all the traditional health and happiness but I wish for more than that.  I wish us connection, with one another and the planet.   Just imagine what such a connection would bring!  And I wish us all joy. I believe wishes can come true, usually when backed up by, well, resolution.  Happy New Year to us all!