Asakiyume mita

The starlings over the cornfields of Hadley, Massachusetts, sometimes achieve murmuration levels--I saw them do it Saturday, them moving together like a great whale at play. It was breathtaking. I went back yesterday with a camera but came too late in the day, and then again today, and was only a *little* too late, or they weren't in a mood to all rise (ALL RISE) and swoop, and then settle.

Also, maybe if I had turned the phone sideways it would have made a wider video? I am very new to the ways of the smartphone. (Video is 38 seconds)



Although I didn't catch the murmuration yesterday, I did get a photo of the sun like a pearl in the shell of the sky...



And then another of all the many colors sunset sky is heir to...

First, let me tell you what the parking lot at the supermarket was like, around 5:45 pm, on my way home. There was a smell of cinnamon, maybe from someone's discarded gum, and the sun was at the edge of a tide of rain-colored clouds, and there were goldfinches somewhere nearby--you couldn't see them, but you could hear them.

Now let me show you what the sky was like closer to home, about an hour later.

Yesterday afternoon this dramatic sky was up above the Aquavitae portion of what's known as the Great Meadow of Hadley, Massachusetts.



I had always wanted to go down Aqua Vitae road--I remember when last the Connecticut River rose and flooded it. Some of the houses down there are on stilts (wise move).

While I was there, I noticed the narrow fields. You can see them clearly in this satellite shot, courtesy of Google maps:



The whole Great Meadow is laid out that way--a style of farming known as open meadow farming. It was common in eastern England in the 1600s, and the earliest settlers in New England brought it with them, but by and large it disappeared as a land-use pattern in the 1700s. But it survived in Hadley--in 2007, 136 parcels of land in the Great Meadow were farmed or maintained by 87 owners.¹


(Image from Patricia Laurice Ellsworth, Hadley West Street Common and Great Meadow: A Cultural Landscape Study, 2007.)

Just think: 350-plus years, these fields have been tilled. Can you see the different colors of the ground? Those are the different fields.



Back in the earliest days, the Aquavitae area was planted in hay, and other parts of the Great Meadow were planted in wheat, oats, rye, and corn, as well as peas and barley. As you can see from the cut stalks, corn is still grown there. Tobacco, a crop that caught on in the area in the 1800s, is still grown there, too.

These horses haven't been here anywhere near as long. See the Connecticut River behind them? The horses were frisking with each other until I came up.



¹Patricia Laurice Ellsworth, Hadley West Street Common and Great Meadow: A Cultural Landscape Study, 2007, p. 10.

I've decided to walk to work, even though I work at home.

On my walk today, I stepped in all the large potholes on my street. They are the footprints of some creature whose weight affects the asphalt the way mine affects wet sand. A winter-weather beast, a very large dinosaur or lumbering mastodon. Some kids once tried to charge admission to see them--the potholes, I mean--as a way of raising some quick money, but no one would pay because these dinosaurs and mastodons get everywhere. (No, I'm making that up; no kids ever did that, or at least not on my street, or at least not while I was paying attention.)

Up in the sky, wind has unearthed (... un-sky'd) the white vertebrae of an even larger beast that swims up there. Or maybe it's just that its sky is so thin that its bones are visible through it. I didn't catch it on film but you've seen skies like that--large backbones and sometimes ribs laid out across them.

But now I've arrived at work and should begin. Here's a skunk cabbage from last week, consuming its daily meal of sunlight.

Apologies to people who have seen these already; I posted them on Twitter.

.... I don't post identical content in all venues, but things I really like, some version of them, I tend to put everywhere (except Facebook; these days I'm just a passive lurker on Facebook). But don't ever worry about losing out.... not that you probably would? But I used to, when I realized people were posting things in venues I didn't visit. But now I've changed my mind. There's just so much. Catch what you can in the places you feel comfortable, that's what I'm thinking now.

So anyway: furrows in the celestial fields.

Here are some thoughts and pictures I've saved up over the past few days. First, a picture of magnificent skies. Such weighty clouds, such gauze of rain over there in the distance, and such uncanny light:



Influential rain

Some days later, there was a walk alongside a canal. Rain was coming down, not severely, but--and we hadn't expected this--fairly unquittingly. It was watching its influence spread as it hit the canal water. Lots of little circles of influence:



Salamander
And here, in a photo by urbpan, is a magical creature, bred of wetness, despite the fact that the ancients associated its kind with fire. See how his hind quarters melt away? And he sparkles darkly. You can find out all about this salamander, a "leadback," at urbpan's entry here.



Puzzler
The winner of NPR's Sunday puzzler yesterday was a 15-year-old, Arushi Agarwal. Will Shortz asked her if she'd been playing long, and she said she'd been playing for five years: her parents had thought that working on the puzzle each Sunday would be a great way to stretch their minds and spend family time together. I was so charmed by that notion! What a fun family thing to do! ... Only if everyone participates willingly, but Arushi seemed very happy. She has a brother, too, who's part of all this.

"So did you have help solving last week's puzzle?" Will Shortz asked.

"Yes, my brother helped me."

(The puzzle had been, take the name of a major US company, take off its first and last letters, and the remainder of the letters, in order, will spell out the name of a well-known singer.)

She went on, "We figured we probably wouldn't know the singer, so we took a list of the Fortune 500 companies and just went through it. When we got to "Walgreens" and took off the W and the S, we thought, 'Al Green seems like a pretty viable name,' so we went and looked, and yeah, he's a singer."

"So you didn't even know him," Will Shortz remarked with a laugh, and she said no, so he played her a clip of an Al Green song. And then she did the puzzle on air, and acquitted herself admirably.

I fell into a daydream about the Agarwal siblings figuring this out, the parents enjoying their kids working on it... I'd like to draw the picture, but I don't know if I will...

Rock of the month
a_soft_world was visiting. She told me about how she and her brother used to like breaking rocks open, and how they'd display the rock of the month--the one that was most fabulous or interesting inside. On our walk by the canal, in the influential rain, she picked up two, and the next day, we hurled them at a large boulder, and they did shatter! And here is one, split open:



Surely worthy of the title of rock of the month.

It's not foam on the crests of the waves in the sky ocean tonight: it's fire. White-hot fire licking the edge of the long wave as it breaks on . . . what shores do the sky waves break on?

I will have a this-day-in-Pen-Pal post for you later, but first I want to point you to two wonderful posts. One is by mnfaure, and features the work of an amazing poet and spoken-word performer, Anis Mojgani--it is here. And in case you are click-aversive, here is half the wonderment of that post:




But you must go to her post for the link to the other poem, "Shake the Dust," which is equally good.

And the other post is by sovay, and is a description of a truly wonderful-sounding movie. It is here, and I don't have a visual to tempt you with, but consider this:

What it reads most like is a version of Beauty and the Beast in which each of the lovers takes both parts in turn and the story plays fair with them . . . And the film never, not once, claims that love fixes broken people. All it underscores is the importance of loving people for who they are, not who they used to be or who you hope they'll turn into.

Two days ago, Writer's Almanac quoted Marjory Stoneman Douglas, eulogizer of the Everglades, who said of them,

Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness . . . the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the blue heights of space . . . the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose . . . it is a river of grass.

(vast glittering openness
sweet massive winds
blue heights of space
a river of grass)

One day I'll see them. For now, here is my own Everglades, waiting to be reborn.



Nearby a male turkey was displaying for an only moderately interested crowd.



One more picture, this from yesterday--the turbulent sky ocean

It starts when you wander down a desolate road. . .



You look up and find the sky is strange . . .



Ahead, there is a smooth green expanse. . .



Do not put a foot to it. You will slip through, and under. The green will close above you, and be just as still and smooth as it was before. No one will know what has become of you, and no one who passes by the green place will suspect you lie below.