A Tidings of Magpies

"You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."----- from Charlotte's Web I am a soul always drawn and fascinated by the idea of " A Year of...". A Year of Rumi. A Year of Calvin and Hobbes. A year cooking with Julia Child. A project that provides guidance for the year and a ruler we can measure inward growth in the course of our circle around the sun. One year, after an early marriage and an unsurprising--except to me--early divorce, I came across a book by Sue Hubbell titled A Country Year. I didn't plan for it to take a year to read, but it did. I only read it at night before I went t...

Remnants still visible           by  Marge Piercy Robins migrate, all schoolchildren learn but here on the Cape, every winter a flock forms and stays, long frigid months after their compatriots have flown south. They live deep in the woods on hips and berries wizened by cold. Sometimes they appear here among the feeder birds, one or two almost outcasts. Off Alaska when humpback whales leave in fall as the waters freeze and the world turns white, heading for mating grounds off Hawaii and Mexico, certain whales remain. What makes a creature stay when almost all of its kind have moved on? In burned-out areas of Detroit, you’ll notice one house still wears curtains, a bike locked to the porch. Sometimes in the suburbs among tract houses with carpets of grass one farmhouse lurks, maybe even with a barn. I imagine its owner grey and stubborn, still growing the best tomatoes for miles, refusing to plant inedible gr...

by Margaret Widdemer The Poor Old Soul plods down the street,        Contented, and forgetting How Youth was wild, and Spring was wild        And how her life is setting. And you lean out to watch her there,       And pity, nor remember, That Youth is hard, and Life is hard,       And quiet is December.