The Twilight Forest

The dim interior of the forever
twilight forest casts an eerie glow
of semi-light and a mood of gloom
might prevail were it not for the
bright, cheery note of a thrush,
comfortable in the landscape it
knows best. Random shafts of
subdued sunlight penetrate now
and again to accentuate the
bright orange of wind-fresh
needles cast from resident spruce,
fir, pine and hemlock, contrasting
the raw green of new foliage
on oak, birch and beech; the
heart-shaped leaves of dogwood
understory. Above the replenished
canopy, a pair of vultures soar
and coast on the bellowing wind,
gathering and directing clouds
toward the encircling mountain
peaks where white plumes of
vapour screen the mountain slopes.

 

Mountain Rain

An eerie glow of light 
settles over the forest 
interior wrapped in rain 
from the dark clouds
speared by the summits. 
Forest giants, their trunks 
green with moss and lichen, 
shield the forest floor 
from rain, but the earth, 
aeons of seasonal detritus
enriching its soil, remains 
damp and fertile with 
unfurling ferns and the 
understory of dogwood,
moose maple and secretive
mysterious unseen trolls.

 

The Mountain Lake

The glacier-fed mountain lake
the colour of fresh chlorophyll
gleams scant light from an
overcast sky, clouds above
pierced by surrounding summits,
weepingly dimpling the surface
of the lake in a pattern of heavy
droplets leaving crystalline pearls
resting on the newly-sprung
foliage of the proud new canopy
of the forest whose moss-covered
trunks of ancient lineage bespeak
a forest rich in time and presence,
exuding the fragrance of rebirth,
its flora and fauna rediscovering
their place in eternal existence.

The Master Race

An entomologist might take issue
with me, but of a certainty I have
unwittingly discovered a new species 
of ants. When we think ants, we 
visualize regimented pools of workers 
in an insect society where all sacrifice 
their individuality for the greater social
good; the purest kind of altruism.
Preservation of the majority personified
sacrifice of each for the advance of the 
whole. Absent, we assume, a selfish gene.
I've met their opposite. Who even 
knew they exist? Think a breed of 
Goliath ants. Imagine big bruisers 
whose presence is so dominating they
cannot be mistaken for their meeker 
cousins. Oh yes, I've heard of fire ants 
and Army ants and the devastation they
are capable of, but they still serve a 
common purpose, the preservation of 
the entire unit. These ants of which 
I have made acquaintance on the other 
hand are arrogant, entitled, belligerent 
and downright scary. They march with 
a swagger within this cottage kitchen 
set in the midst of a pine forest, each 
among them convinced he is a match 
for my height, weight and determination. 
The sad thing is, they're likely right, as
my husband can attest, his ears ringing 
with my shrieks of awe and fear each time
one of those brutes, black and feisty,
confronts me and gives chase.

To The Summit

The mountain range whose 
reputation for adventure, 
endurance, alpine treasures
and immense vistas compel
the hardy to set foot with
backpacks and expectations
of discovering the inner pioneer
in them all, beckons. The trails
are well laddered with the
agonized twisting roots of
stunted trees coping with the
hostility of the height and the
atmosphere that welcomes the
harshest of weather conditions.
The mountain slopes are well
littered with offcast rocks and
boulders, silent on the lower
reaches with the dark coolness 
of the forest canopy and fragrant 
with the fullness of damp pine scent. 
A Northern thrush, sensing a 
rainstorm approaching, throats its 
paean to life's cycles. And soon an
oven bird begins its metronomic
beat of high notes of supreme
purity, the audible portion of
nature's self-fulfillment whose
visual counterpart is displayed in 
the forest floor's lilies-of-the-valley
carpeting of sublime essence, its
dogwood and bracken understory,
its massive oak, hemlock, pine
and yellow birch sentinels
standing watch for the struggling
lesser botanics of the treeline
where stunted oak, laurel and 
azalea play host alongside
mountain sorrel and the steeply
welcoming paths to the summit.

 

Those Beckoning Heights

The enduring elements of
Nature's primeval timelessness
present their raw dominance
on a landscape of mountains,
rockslides, treeline, granite
slopes and alpine specimens
among the dwarf, struggling
oak and pine bared to surviving
those hostile elements of an
atmosphere inimical to life
at those dizzying heights when
wind shears through the summits
and sleet under low-slung clouds
of dark dimension treat the
landscape to its allotment of
nature unadorned and threatening.
Yet, there eagles and vultures
soar, riding the power of the
wind. And when the season is
benign by relative measures of
hope and anticipation, people for
whom the allure of those heights
remain a sustaining fascination,
ascend the slopes, scrambling
their way over boulders, between
crevices, and balance their lives
on the satisfaction of meeting
nature in her very own preserves.

Antiques

His hair is sparse to vanishing,
his eyes a watery blue, deeply
wrinkled his face, and his
moustache a long droop of
yellowed grey, but he crinkles
his mouth wide in a smile of
recognition as he counts us
and finds one little dog missing.
Two years ago we tell him. 
Last year we informed him
it was one year ago we'd lost
her and he's forgotten. Why not,
after all, still a prodigious feat
of memory for an old codger
like ourselves, seeing one
another so briefly, a 20-minute
chat every spring as we, ever
hopeful, peruse the offerings 
in the group antique shop meant
to attract the notice of summer
tourists, adding interest and a
group co-operative approach, a
shared business venture to the
small town's superannuated
contingent serving the hoped-for
needs of other retired seniors 
just passing through randomly,
part of their leisure time plans
for rummaging and foraging among
other people's off-loaded trash.

Welcome...to my Garden

The Three Graces

Peonies in bloom

Container gardens

The Great Daibutsu view

Bird sanctuary

Our quiet sanctuary

I Command Thee

She had no idea why, other than that she was a creature of habit whose body rebelled when habit was out of alignment. It was a downright nuisance, a real bother, an inconvenience of fairly important dimensions. After all, regularity of elimination of body waste is an important yardstick of health. To feel at one's physical optimum such matters are vital. Yet, year after year the same thing happened.

She refused to "take" anything to speed the process, preferring to wait out her body's rebellion in a belated return to normalcy. Call her stubborn; her husband certainly did from time to time, urging various types of remedies on her. One year she stuck a bottle of prune juice on their vacation shopping list when they settled into the rented cottage and stocked up at the local supermarket. Happened it was a hot week in late June, and they had done more than the usual mountain hikes. After two days of gulping down cold prune juice her bowels had rebelled furiously and painfully. Causing them to lose out on a day of hiking. Besides which, she was too fearful of getting caught out on a remote peak, eliminating waste.

That was 'way back then, when they still climbed mountains. Now, they manage relatively tame hikes with not too much of an ascending gradient. So, this year, as with all others, she faced the usual struggle, hoping her alimentary system would grumpily decide to function before the week was entirely out. And she waited.

Her husband, anxious for her well-being and comfort, insisted on a daily progress report. Nothing to report. They ran through their old familiar beloved treks day by day, until only the Basin Cascades trail at the Notch was left. They parked their Ontario-licensed truck among a sea of New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts licenses, exited the parking lot to amble through the damp concrete tunnel under the highway bridge leading to the Basin entrance.

When their now-fifty-plus-year-old children were young pre-teens they used to shout, clap, chant, growl and cheer, to hear the deep echoes the tunnel would creepily throw back at them, sending them into howls of side-splitting laughter. Hanna turned in mock surprise as she heard her husband's baritone try out a few vowels for effect, each one magnified, bouncing off the old, damply cold

walls of the tunnel.

And then, she heard in a rich full tone of authority (omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent) a sentence that convulsed her with appreciation for her husband's wit.

"Han-nah!", the aas rolling deep and thunderously magnificent: "This is the voice of God. I command you to poop!"

At Home In The Forest

The forest opens wide its welcome
to us, as towering pines, oaks and
hemlock release their green
exhalation and the wind bends
curtsying saplings at our presence.
From its observer's perch, a
Northern Thrush raises its peerless
voice to ring through the cloistered
air, thrilling us with the purity
of sound. The brook rushing down
from the mountain raising the 
drama of water unleashed from
tameness, hurls in its downward
spiral over boulders littering its bed,
fallen from the mountainside aeons
ago. Yellow Swallowtails wing into
and without the understory of
dogwood and maple, silently
drifting on the wind, their colour
mirroring the brilliance of the sun
filtering through boughs and needles
to illuminate bracken and micro-ponds
littering the forest floor, catching
shades of white petals ornamenting
wild strawberry, bunchberry,
raspberry and the pink of the queen
of forest flora, Ladies Slippers with
their sumptuous hanging lanterns 
among the straw lilies and lilies of
the valley, snuggling about soil 
mounded beside yellow birch and 
beech. We are cooled by the wind,
our feet coddled by the soft cushion
of generations of desiccated leaves
and needles; the fragrance of the
forest surrounding us with the green
fresh wholesomeness of nature
restoring to us a state of contentment.

 

Mountain Forest

The stillness of the forest is
broken by the random joyous peals
of a Northern thrush, unseen
high on a hemlock bough under a
leaden-clouded sky where the
sun still emits bright rays through
random cracks in the cloud cover.
This is a forest of mixed hardwood
and conifers lush in a new spring
canopy, a cool wind threading 
through oak and maple, yellow birch
and hemlock; and giant pines whose
masts remain green with needles,
their massive trunks stippled with
dead branches where sun cannot
penetrate. The mountain stream
glistens, roars and churns in its
tumbling rush over rockfalls 
littering its brash descent. Frogs and
salamanders spurt across moss-banked
shallow ponds bespeaking an
incorrigibly high water table, a bog 
where caddisfly larvae and damselflies 
share the space of emergence. The 
supreme elegance of the natural 
world balancing the future.

Urban Hauteur

They are young, healthy, athletic
and wonderfully privileged, these
young women, parking their SUVs
emerging outfitted in the most
casual of leisure wear, expensive
and suited to the occasion of an
afternoon outing. Each removes
from her vehicle a well-designed
backpack to carry a child, one
an infant, the other a child old
enough to exercise his own strong
limbs, but content enough to be
hauled for hours through a long
forested trail circling the foot of a
mountain, following a swiftly
running mountain stream. No
country girls, these, but fit
health-and-exercise urban dwellers
leaving the city for a break in
routine to test their endurance
and their children's passive tolerance.
Their conceit is that they are closely
watched and envied for their youth,
beauty, health and fecund proof
in tow disdaining the presence of
others whose purpose beyond hiking
the forest path is to peruse the path
and growing natural treasures of
the land the exercise exposes them
to, the butterflies and songbirds, 
the glowing petalled orbs of orchids,
blushing trilliums and starlike white
bunchberry along with bright-faced
violets. None of which are noticed by
the vigorously advancing Bostonian
mothers, overtly ignoring the cheerful
presence of rural country folk from
New Hampshire, hiking and herding
their dogs; beneath the notice of the
vastly superior visitors who clearly
spurn the friendly greetings of strangers
offending their sense of extraordinary
cool, by their unstudied lack of
admiration for these urban exemplars.

The Drenched Range

Wrapped in the wraith-like filaments
of white mist, the mountains hide
their slopes, rockfalls and valleys.
The grandeur of the summits
invisible behind the gathering of
fog under clouds sheathing the
granite giants, reaching down from
a sky unable to maintain the
burden of holding them aloft,
heavy with water vapour which
suddenly burst their confines as
sheets of rain pummel the peaks
and their treed slopes, drenching
the landscape with the magical
intensity of colour that only rain
can muster, piercing the still
rising mists and the fog with
shades of white and ivory, grey
and purple moved by the wind in
fantastical shapes imagining
themselves as dragons of the heights
and sea monsters of the lake that
lies beneath; all comrades of the
trolls manipulating the theatrical
draperies hovering over, around
and throughout the range, this day.

 

Elemental Survival

The enduring elements of Nature's 
primeval presence gather their raw 
dominance on a landscape of mountains,
rockslides, treeline, granite slopes
and alpine specimens among the
dwarf struggling oak and pine bared 
to surviving those hostile elements 
of an atmosphere inimical to life. 
Yet there eagles and vultures soar, 
riding the power of the wind hurling 
dark clouds of bruised hue littering the
summits with snow and hail, freezing 
the azure ponds left by the summer-melt 
of glaciers dripping under the influence 
of sun, until the calendar returns to its 
allotted seasonal exchange of the 
elements, gearing themselves to the 
timeless inevitable of Nature's 
implacably divine master plan.

 

Command Performance

The cascading mountain stream
clear and buoyant, chattering
and applauding our reappearance
after a year's absence, delivers
its approval of our presence,
admiring its crystalline gush
and melodic communication.
The tumble of rocks and boulders
that litter the course of the stream,
making its familiar descent around
and along the mountainside add
to the clamour and the fine dramatic
flair of the dominance of granite
rising high out of Earth's crust,
in a march of summits reaching
beyond the gaze of a wide-eyed
focus off into the distant horizon
where clouds meet the peaks and
their attraction so profound their
bond is formed, mountaintop and
cloud in a sacred covenant that
only another tandem, of wind and
sun may at times prevail to
briefly sunder after the downpour.

 

The Different Familiar

How different can it be? It has,
after all, assumed a routine of its
own, albeit confronted one week
of every year for decades, and so
while randomly different from the
everyday encounters and practised
expectations that occur fifty-one
weeks of each year, there remains
yet an aura of the distance of
recollection, a hazy, yet distinct
nudge of memory. One embarked
upon and accosted what has become
a venture that once was quite an
adventure, takes on the role of habit.
So then, we rent the same cottage
from the same proprietors, pack
the same belongings, set out on
the same journey, seek out familiar
exposure to the natural world,
take the same hiking paths,
identify the same flora less fauna,
then reminisce and take deep pleasure
in the flood of comfort our emotions
endow us with. When we drive a
recalled direction, stop at remembered
sources of interest, the proprietors
enquire how we have been in the
intervening year. Life, as a measure
of satisfying familiarity in leisure.

Grim News

A gruesomely horrific and thankfully 
brief news item. Among the more 
mundane reports of robberies, 
malfeasance among politicians and 
business elites; love triangles gone 
murderously berserk and fatal traffic 
accidents. Are these news items, or 
do they qualify as urban gossip? Difficult,
sometimes, to distinguish. But this one 
is a breath-stopper, the kind that should 
keep the vulnerable off late-night streets, 
that should put a crimp in the spontaneity 
of trusting strangers, or, come to think 
of it, friends. Left on a stretch of 
municipal beachfront, a mutilated torso 
strapped to a dolly, its ravished presence 
prissily tarp-covered. Which did not 
stop a curious passerby walking the beach 
from poking and prodding and finally
lifting the tarp to reveal the horror it 
wrapped. Sans arms, sans legs, sans head, 
just the torso of some once-living, formerly 
breathing, thinking, feeling, reacting 
human being whose reactions failed the test.

Forest Delights

The woods are cool, dark and
inviting to the intrepid souls who
enter on impulse seeking to find
peace and solace within the confines
of nature's raw bosom; relief from
life's pressures, the incessant
movement and roaring bustle of
the urban setting people are confined
within throughout their endless
working days. Within, the wind
soughs through the forest canopy,
boughs sway in a lazy dance of
courtesy, and foliage whispers, a
pastoral symphony accentuated
by birdcalls and melodic songs,
while forest streams rush over
flotsam fallen into their beds and
the sun, glancing between narrow
passages illuminates bright faces
of wildflowers; daisies and henbane,
dogwood and buttercups, as bees and
dragonflies, butterflies and damselflies
flit among them. Pausing too long 
in peaceful admiration is not, 
however, generally advised for also 
lurking there are the fierce warriors
of the underbrush, venomous and
cunning, sensing warm blood as 
they ferociously swarm and attack
the unwary unfortunates, their
bloodlust never unforgivingly sated.

The Rainburst Garden

What a sight! A garden that a
cloudburst has left behind,
drenched its foliage, bedraggled
and downcast from the sheer,
unrelenting weight of the downpour
under a leaden sky whose clouds
the great master gardener tipped
over the landscape, merely plays
a teasing game, as though quite
overwhelmed by the fountain
from above. Soon enough, the
soaking reveals depths of colour
tones, scintillatingly brilliant,
the envy of any painterly muse,
glowing in the intensity of a
palette known only to Nature,
flower petals brimming with
sparkling liquid jewels, exquisite
rivulets of silver like mercury
trailing foliage, to sink finally
into the thirsty soil, the landscape
of the brimming, textured garden
radiant with expectation the sun
will soon emerge, complemented
sublimely by a robin pealing joy.

 

Storied Legends

Freeing a child's mind to
explore an internal landscape
of the imagination through
chance encounters with the
great, wide world beckoning
a child's curiosity to explore,
experience, exult in the arcana
of little-understood phenomena,
natural and abnormal, expands
the mind leading to creative
interpretations of the ordinary,
transforming its landscape
and inhabitants beyond
recognition, imbuing both
with mystery, and the allure of
fascination. And then, sometimes
comes along a mind that wanders
strange corridors of compulsive
rejection of reality named
normalcy, introducing trusting
children to the entertainment of
the bizarre refuting the standard,
embracing cool madness. A
genius mired in the making of a
legend dropped a little girl,
bright and enquiring, into a
storied rabbit hole writing her
into an adventure bearing odd
resemblance to the chaos of his
mind echoing the blithe and
lively nightmare of living lunacy.
Evermore, did adults thrust upon
children the Alice of Wonderland,
inviting them to witness in their
waking dreams the troubling
vision of something not quite
nice, not quite comfortable,
leering at them through the mirror
in darkly sinister malevolence.

 

Garden Conceit

Their natural home is in
the wilds of Nature's inspired
precincts of choice inclination
and there we chance upon them,
the bright faces of botanical 
beauty whose presence entertains
bees and humans alike. A
practical matter of harvesting
pollen for honey-producing
hive workers and a gardener's
challenge for those who
stealthily conspire to abduction,
claiming Nature's pride for
their own greedy compulsion.
But look here, how the foamflower,
that delicately evanescent bloom
overwhelms my garden in
the pleasure of its transplanted
migration, their spontaneous
spread outstripping the feeble
presence of its natural peers, 
claims the gardener, with
unbecoming pride of theft.