Today's count

The scent of wine from fallen leaves.  Rescuing a ladybug off the bus. Warm enough to take off socks. Horse feather clouds across the blue.  A girl with purple hair.  A swarm of graceful green robed people crossing the bowl - most likely the Greystone Singers.  The sound of a child outside the library, clearly setting eyes on the T-Rex for the first time. Wooooohooowwoooo.

Today's Count: little red dress

I biked today.  I biked yesterday, the first time this entire year.  That little flavour of normalcy. The sun wanders across a blue deep enough to drown in and turns the stones of the campus buildings honey gold and yellow.  After a cold snap we are enjoying fall.  A real fall, all warm and yellow and blue and breezy like a caress.  And red dresses.  I saw the first one as I rounded out from behind the construction site that has been made of the forest near Arts.  White and red, like a dress from the Wizard of Oz, colour come out of the black and white sequences.  Light on the wind, it swayed.  It was hanging from the tall elms of the avenue of elms that lead to the bowl.  Then I saw another, and another.  The first was the only one with white. All the others were red, bright, deep, black, silk, linen, rayon, cotton, smooth, rough, embroidered, beaded, long, short, wide skirted, slim, open backed, high necked.  All adorning hangers strung with fishing wire from the trees and swaying in the breeze.  What do they mean, asked a young co-worker.  What do you think they mean?  She wasn't sure.  We were at an art gallery last week which displayed and explained its display of paper glued together in blocks.  Left me cold.  But red dresses hanging in the daylight, every variation of women:  red, texture, passion, death, bleeding, restriction, beauty, strength, silent, loud, brilliant, flexible, tethered, but moving.  This has meaning.  And through this meaning walked students and profs, the small colourful people from the daycare, the green velveted university choir.  And me.

Today's Count

Blue, cold, sharp air.  My yellow coat and blue jeans and red laces.  The sun, turning the frosted grass green, but not melting the snow flakes caught in the ice on the man made pond. Leaves race across the surface, clatter into groups to crow their winnings while small aquatic creatures made their singular progress, oblivious beneath the ice: long round, doing the breast stroke and little furry tadpoles look a likes snapping side to side to glide through the water, passing each other unconcerned.

Today's count

Purple, yellow, sage green, orange, blue sky, the rattle of my ancient bicycle on hard ground and the sweep of my feet and pedals though the tall hard prairie grass, then into the rain cool shadows of pines, out again and past the wild wind waving aspen leaves.

Today's Count

A blue sky, a brisk morning, cool enough upon setting out to warrant long pants (not jeans) and a light sweater.  Upon return a desire for shorts and the sweater swinging from my left hand.  A small moccasin complete with beading and bunny fur waiting by the side of the sidewalk for its little owner to come back for it.  Suzie, rescued from somewhere up north and fully recovered from a nasty encounter with a car.  Bright of eye, and keen to have her faced rubbed along her cheek bones and her ears stroked.  A stone path brilliantly laid across the corner of a newly landscaped lawn.  If you can't make them stop cutting across your lawn, build them a path.  A student who studies regularly in my library going to class.  "Morning."  A bird's nest.  Nestled on the cross beam of a walkway arch.

today's count

Geese gone grey in a misted sky, a magpie heard but not seen above me, the heavy comforting silence of student empty paths, the distant call of construction trucks, water bomb droplets from passing elms, a chubby pocked snowman in the bowl, and the silent giants of memorial contemplation planted in 1967.

equniox

According to the powers that be we officially entered my favouite season on September 22nd at 14:49 of someone's time zone.  But I beg to differ with them.  Today I checked the weather report of this stunningly beautiful fall day, blue, warm, not hot, glorious in gold, and dry (oh sweet mysteries of pre climate change I miss you), and there beside the humidity report is the sunrise and sunset.  And I declare today to be the equinox, equal day and night.  Sunrise:  6.58am.  Sunset 6.58pm.

Today's count

A perfect pre-fall day.  Pre-fall I say because fall is my favourite season, unless it is spring, and visa versa, and a sign that the heat and stickiness of this summer may finally be over is a blessing and a bliss to me.  I wore jeans the other day.  Sigh.  Today though it is blue with wispy clouds which send forward messages of distant rain, and a breeze which made a light sweater over my sleeveless shirt quite comfortable.  I walked not to the crabapple grove but down between the buildings in the tree lined avenue to watch the geologist setting up spikes in the bowl where they are doing a sub something on the ground there.  I think she meant under the grass.  There being much under the grass: gophers, plumbing, electrical tunnels, soil, dirt (which I am told are most certainly NOT the same thing), tree roots, and a monstrous, and as far as my brain storage information goes, number of unknown and uncatalogued weeny beasts of all kinds.  (Wow, that was almost a proto Dickensian sentence.*)

*In one of my copies of one of what-his-name's books I found the entire first page was a sentence.  Dicken's blog says he once counted one that was 21 lines long.

15 sleeps

I stand in the crabapple grove, with five magpies arrayed on the branches with the brown apples, all of us enjoying the sunshine of a short afternoon.  I think, two weeks, fifteen sleeps. And when I wake up on the fifteenth day it will the First Longer Day.  The best day of the year for me, perhaps, when viewed that way, the most sacred day of the year.  It is the day that fall, our long fall into darkness, is over, the sun stops and turns, and returns.  Winter begins.  The Light grows, as though in a mother's belly, until in early February, even the sleepiest of us awakens to awareness that the days are getting longer.

S

Yup, the s-word has come.  Not that we are all that surprised it's just we had such a glorious fall.  I have seen since the leaves rolling along the surface of the snow like rushing hordes across the steppes, or the plains.  Tip to tip they turn, propelled by surface wind.  It is completely different from the way they move on the ground.  Or perhaps it is only that because of the snow their movements are so clear to be seen.  I also saw green leaves on snow as I walked home along the lower path by the river.  A whole section where the leaves would not give up summer and are now scattered brightly across the snow in blue shadows and yellow patches made by the setting sun.

Today's count

A hawk flying low to the ground.   A ground covered in leaves, brown with red highlights.  A group of shrubs sporting spring green, burnt orange of late fall, and bright yellow of early fall.  Yesterday I lay down at the end of the crabapple grove and saw the world as blue, with pale white streaks at the edge of my vision, and a green fringe. The unmowed grasses looked as tall as buildings. Behind me a poplar cackled with the wind.  Today a grounds keeper spread noise and air pollution around with the leaves, supposedly in the firm believe that the wind would not whisper by and move them back again.

me vs the ipad: round three

My epiphany.  To interact properly with an ipad one must think like a toddler.  Plunked into a world without language or point of reference just poke and prod ( I actually advise against putting the ipad in your mouth as a method of exploration, or biting it, though I have yet to discount the pleasure of smacking it, it really isn't its fault it is so frustrating to work with) until it does something that pleases you.  Then make it do that again.  If you can, or more to the point, until you can. Repeat. While this learning method is frustrating for an adult (and as the parents of toddlers will attest, the toddler too), it is an excellent exercise for the brain, the determination, and the patience.  Henry is as yet unsmacked, and he came with me today on a refreshing walk through the crabapple grove.  Fall is here in earnest.  The air is sharp, the yellows are bright.  The apples are turning to wine.

Today's count

An October wind, strong and warm, so strong it has raised the leaves from talk to song.  A chipmunk along a high branch of the crabapple trees considering the well ripened fruit.  A class of grade school kids gathered tidily on the bluff above the river, their abandoned bikes laying on the yellowing grass, their attention possibly on their teacher taking about erosion, possibly on the wind, the warmth, the river, the geese gathering in battalions below waiting for final take off.

Friday afternoon in the crapapple grove

Stand at the far end of the crabapple grove, after walking its length in the hot fall afternoon air, over the browning green grass.  Hear the leaves of the poplar, now yellow and lime, rattle against each other in the breeze.  Tip back your head and look up. Above you is a cloud spread across the sky like an enormous feathery wing.  Between you and it the gulls fly, dive, and hang in the air, riding the wind.

Signs of fall

My big blue tarp draped over my potted tomato plants. Street lights at 7:30 pm.  Small patches of condensation on the outer windows in the morning. Socks. The sunlight patch lying wide in the middle of my living room floor instead narrow of over by the window.  A killing frost which has halved the number of wasps banging against the outside of the building begging for a snug winter home.  Not in this wall thanks.  They really are hungry this time of year.  The other day out in the crabapple grove I found two of them licking out the inside of an empty beer bottle.  Yuck. I banged them out and removed the beer bottle.  Who wants one of those in the crabapple grove.  Also, I tend to gather up empty bottles and cans because a  friend of mine uses the money from bottles to buy cows for those in need of such items.  When I check her site I see that she has not updated in in a good long while...or has mooooved it?  But as I know her I don't bother to look at it.  She is, however at cow 50.  So I keep giving her the bottles I find. 

Yes, that really is my great great grandfather's cow.  And yes, he named his cows after his daughters. And yes, Emma there won a prize in 1876 at local Centennial celebrations (that's USA Centennial, Canada is still only counting from 1867, though John Ralston Saul has been known to dispute that). 

And yes, some of the donation cows got named for these ancient and well remembered cows.