A chorus of crickets, katydids, and cicadas sweep along an unceasing, summer breeze. The internal resonance is ever-constant as ear-rending vibrations posit never-ending noise.
Tinnitus drones me to sleep each night and accosts my consciousness each morning. And I yearn to hear a simple flash of a moment’s true silence.
Taking AimHummingbirds guest at my home each spring and summer. Extraordinary beings. They announce themselves with a “bzzzz” produced by their flapping wings. They’re always hungry and I am a serious host: I lay them a fine table with some of their favorite foods. Hanging baskets of red, white and orange impatiens grace my front porch. Pots of purple and lavender flowering mallows stand in front of my house , and my back deck offers begonia, coleus, basil, and peppermint flowers for their pleasure.
Getting CloserThe birds visit several times a day, every day. They feed from the flowers and pollenate the plants and they don’t mind sharing an outdoor presence with me and my family and friends. Indeed, we and the hummers enjoy life together. The birds offer us wonder, serenity, and pleasure and we offer the hummers safety, calm, and quiet as they feed. It’s a remarkable relationship, one I haven’t experienced with any other wildlife. The birds show no anxiety around people, though they’re anti-social among their own species and tend toward territoriality. Thus it’s a fair guess that I see the same birds here each day. And that makes the experience personal and intimate.
Feeding at the FlowersThey arrive at my home, usually one at at time. They flutter around the plants and hover in midair as they devour the nectar inside each of the flowers. The birds don’t dally. As soon as they finish, they fly off in search of nourishment elsewhere, and in the case of the females, to feed their young.
Feasting on NectarThe bird feeding on the coleus flowers in these pictures is a female, ruby-throated hummingbird. Her neck and underbelly are white and her back is greenish. Her male counterpart is a more colorful, showier individual with an actual ruby-colored throat. This lady is my last visitor for this season, I think. I haven’t seen her or any other hummers for days. So I’m honored that she allowed me to get within five feet of her to take these pictures.
Leaving the SceneIt’s migration time and as autumn closes in, plants that were nutritious and lush with leaves and flowers all summer are now spindly and withering. The birds head to Mexico and Central America where they’ll feast at tropical smorgasbords. They”ll be gone by the end of this month and I’ll start preparing for my own northeastern winter. As spring approaches, however, I’ll plan another floral table for the hummers return complete with all their favorites and perhaps, a few surprises.
Scrabble, word searches, acrostics. I’ve played them all. Magnetism exists in letter boards and spaces, clues and calibrated game points. They beckon and I’m compelled to fill in blanks, circle words, rearrange letters, or discover phrases.
Word puzzles stimulate my brain. They cause me to seek existential abstracts and their corresponding resolutions, or they flummox me by taking me to places where nothing makes sense. The games lead me to the edge of leisure’s uppermost atmosphere where all combinations of letters, phrasings, and associations coalesce.
But it’s the crossword puzzle that propels me past all that and into the Valhalla of locution.
So what is about crossword puzzles? What happens when my eye meets the empty grid of black and white squares and the clue list beside it?
Working a crossword puzzle is a solitary endeavor. I work them in the quiet of my home. Or I carve out an inner sanctuary in places filled with other people– airports, waiting rooms, lobbies. This tendency to remove myself from social influence may be construed as anti-social. Perhaps so. It’s difficult to explain why I can sit for hours caught up in filling out little boxes with letters.
Solving crossword puzzles is a mystical experience, an interactive mind-body-paper-pencil meditation that reduces stress in my life. As I begin, I sense the endorphins in my brain releasing their calm. My body relaxes. My mood changes. My breathing slows as I peer across the page. I scan the clues. I concentrate. I start the puzzle.
Across
1. Fred Astaire’s first dancing partner
8. Riga’s country
Down
2. He wrote the Maltese Falcon
Pleasure.
I continue. Seventy clues across, sixty-four down. I don’t know all the answers but I’ll take my time and link letters together until it’s done. Or until I finish as much of it as I can with the knowledge I have.
In essence, there are times I need diversion and ways to cope with the pressures that bog me down and impede the fulfillment of my goals and responsibilities.
Simple concept:
Let go of what stresses me for a bit.
Switch focus.
Engage in an enjoyable or challenging activity for a while.
Emerge refreshed.
Return to original task–job, kids, travel, peace negotiations, national security, etc.
The process is contemplative. I find I can broaden or change my perspectives in ways that are simple, enjoyable, and knowledgeable anytime, anywhere. Puzzle answers are not always obvious. Sometimes I’m forced to think outside the little squares. Is a BMT a Subway sandwich or an old New York City subway line?
Find the correct context and the answer becomes obvious.
Context within a crossword puzzle is the overlapping of letters in two or more words. Thus, in reference to the clues above the answers appear:
ADELE
A
S
H
I
E
L
LATVIA
And so it goes.
My love of crossword puzzles is a commitment. I go nowhere without a puzzle handy. I’ve been known to peruse the puzzle sections of bookstores for the perfect ones. There’s need over preference here. Too easy puzzles bore. Too hard, they erode confidence or cause me to chea– (ahem) learn.
I need puzzles that challenge my cognitive skills, memory, and knowledge all at the same time. And I have an allegiance to specific publications, (e.g., The New York Times) and puzzle masters (e.g., Will Shortz.) This allows me a level of comfort and expectation. Puzzles are not equal in size, scope, situation, or setting.
Puzzles tend to reflect specific locales. I once attempted to solve one in a London newspaper. Disaster. I was unfamiliar with the nuances of the Queen’s English. Perhaps in time I’ll develop a cozier relationship with British vernacular and culture. Good objective for future crossword ventures. International crossword puzzle solver. Sounds pretty cool.
As a crossword puzzler, I admit to sometimes viewing myself as an information reservoir. My intellect is a cistern that catches bits and pieces of details and stores them like rainwater. And when I need it, the information flows –items, issues, descriptions, customs, literary and movie trivia, culture, traditions, colors, shapes.
Free-floating concepts transform into interconnected words, one letter at a time, one space at a time.
Most challenging “cerebrations.”
I grew up in New York City where gridlock reigns and where whirring car ignitions, blaring horns and radios, and revving engines sang me to sleep at night and jolted me awake each morning.
As a child I romped through concrete playgrounds and ran through torrents raging from open fire hydrants. I loved a good game of punch ball in the streets where parked cars served as bases. I played stoop ball against the concrete steps of apartment buildings and jumped rope on the sidewalks.
Trees were few and I remember, at an early age, actually believing that real flowers came from florist shops and only on adult special occasions. Dusty, artificial flowers that decorated our apartments seemed as abundant as the cars on the streets and just as natural as the concrete cityscape.
School and socialization changed all that. Biology fascinated me and interacting with people who grew live plants led to my love of flowers and my current lifestyle.
As I grew up, my appreciation for cars and concrete shifted to the utilitarian. Cars became transportation. And the concrete sidewalks, teeming with apartment houses, stores, and skyscrapers necessary to living and working, provided safety from the traffic beyond their curbs.
I live in upstate New York now. Cars abound, their necessity absolute. Not much in the way of concrete, though. A few sidewalks in the one-traffic-light town near my home. A few single-family houses, stores, a library, and a bank grace their presence but there’s no shortage of trees and flowers.
The child I was would have felt strange and unsettled in this environment.
Though there were cars all over the place in New York City, my family didn’t own one. Few poor families did. Our nature trips, when we left our neighborhood at all, consisted of visits to Central Park by subway and bus.
Quite different from my current lifestyle.
Once a year I visit family in Los Angeles. Though I’m now a seasoned traveller, each time I arrive I find myself as unsettled as my city-child would have been in the mountains.
Indeed, my points of reference have changed.
I’m no longer used to concrete cityscapes and unceasing traffic sounds. I live in a town that has fewer than 3,000 permanent residents and my house rests inside six million acres of protected forest. I awaken to silence in the winters and to birdsong during the other three seasons.
And though I manage to visit my hometown without difficulty–it is home, after all– I admit to anxiety each time my plane lands at LAX.
Of course, the cars and concrete in LA link me to a life I left long ago. Yet there are substantial differences. Where New York City is a compact island connected to outer boroughs by bridges and tunnels, Los Angeles sprawls and doesn’t seem to want to end. And though I’ve been here many times, I’ve yet to master the layout of the city.
I get lost a lot.
Yet each June when I arrive, I find myself so willing to set those stresses aside.
Jacaranda trees are in full bloom. Big purple clusters of cone-shaped flowers rest upon soft fern-like branches. They’re all over the place and they fill the air with fragrance and the streets with spectacular beauty.
A heart-warming delight to this flower-lover.
Though second only to my son who always meets me at the airport, the Jacaranda trees are a wonderful, welcoming sight.
Top photo: Under A Jacaranda
Bottom photo: Jacaranda Tree in full bloom
Photos taken with an IPhone 5 by Joann Pensabene June, 2013
The above picture was scanned from a print.
The original photo was taken by Joann Pensabene in April, 2008.
I drove past this spot on Route 9 hundreds of times and never saw anything other than green shrubs and gray rock formations. Of course, I never actually looked for anything more than that. Especially while driving. The 40 mph road is narrow. It winds and climbs and parallels Lake George in northern New York. And except for a scenic overview here and there along the way there’s no safe place to stop and examine specific geographical configurations.
Yet someone did just that and shared this unique perception.
How and when the outline was made is a mystery as is who did the work. The whitewash was not permanent. The sketch disappeared when the rain washed the paint away. The elephant reappeared one more time that I’m aware of, years after I took the above picture.
So, how can one interpret this modern, human-geological interaction?
Blemish.
Art.
Provocative.
You decide.
photo by Joann Pensabene
Dawn through the trees. Red and orange streaks across Wednesday’s sky.
My reaction, strong, the verse, reflexive:
“Red sky in the morning/sailor take warning. Red sky at night/ sailor’s delight.”
A memory fragment. Children’s voices from my past reaching across time, reciting the rhyme by rote during a grammar school lesson on proverbs. The simple saying, steeped in Western culture, secured me to humanity’s past. Definite assurance here. Sky and verse, together, offered me incontrovertible proof that rain was in my day.
photo by Joann Pensabene
Ancient people studied the natural world and predicted weather patterns based on repeated observations. Their predictions guided their decisions in farming, animal grazing, and sailing.
The “red sky verse,” often thought of as a cute, children’s poem today, was actually a cultural tool, a piece of oral history set into an adage. Repeated across generations it lives in our collective memory. Our ancestors used verse to memorize their interpretations of meteorological events as they organized their world and enhanced their chances of survival.
We humans are a creative lot and our observations across millennia connect us. We’re also an expressive lot. We devise incredible varieties of forms to present our gathered data. The “red sky verse” is only one of many. And, just for the record, the British and Australian version of the poem presents a shepherd as its subject rather than a sailor. I sometimes wonder whether early American pioneers might have thought, “Red sky in the morning/settler take warning…?”
photo by Joann Pensabene
An early written account of the red sky phenomenon can be found in the Bible. Jesus says to the Pharisees:
“…when it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky but you cannot interpret the signs of the times ” (Matthew 6:2-3, New Revised Standard Version.)
A sign of our own times, of course, is the evolution of sophisticated scientific techniques we now use to present our observations of natural occurrences. We’ve replaced our reliance on adages with experts who interpret events in ways our ancestors could never have envisioned. All an ordinary, technologically connected person need do is watch reports on The Weather Channel, listen to predictions on local radio stations, or tap on iPhone Apps to find out conditions in any given part of the world at any given moment. And we can track and view the impact of weather on the physical, psychological, social, and environmental consequences endured by our fellow humans in real time and respond with appropriate support.
photo by Joann Pensabene
Such is a result of living in a global-networked culture. It’s wonderful to have electronic data at our fingertips and to feel confident in the high probability of their veracity. Understanding that red sky phenomena are caused by debris and moisture caught in cloud formations as weather patterns move in specific directions did satisfy my intellectual craving about what I saw out my window the other day.
Yet the red and orange streaks across the sky through the woods behind my house was a heart-stopping moment that culminated in pleasure and wonder. Natural art. A brilliant picture that glowed and faded as the sun rose higher in the sky, beauty I could only partially capture with the camera.
And what about the veracity of the ancient verse?* Though actual studies of it’s accuracy have been done, the science jurists are split. Perhaps someday someone may come up with a statistically stable result.
Finally, what did the weather do on Wednesday? I leave you with my own observations compiled by looking out my window and without benefit of reports from the professionals. The day yielded alternating sun and clouds and late in the afternoon, we had a good, soaking rain.
___________________________
*The links below offer contrasting info re: red sky validity.
http://www.almanac.com/fact/does-the-weather-proverb-red-sky-at
http://www.nbc12.com/story/15740269/can-a-red-sky-warn-you-of-impending-weather
Visited family and friends downstate in Rockland County this week. The county was my home for more than thirty years. I raised my family, worked, and volunteered in the community here. I watched it grow from a small, semi-rural place along the lower Hudson River into a well-developed suburb of New York City.
One of my favorite places down here is the Piermont Pier. It’s a mile-long structure that juts into the Hudson. The pier is located in the village of Piermont and is part of the Hudson River National Estuarine Reserve run by the Dept. of Environmental Conservation. It’s a great place for fishing, birding, and hiking. There are also places through the marshes where one can launch a canoe or kayak.
I’m well acquainted with the Hudson. I grew up in New York City and spent many hours playing in parks along its shores, walking along Riverside Drive in Manhattan and across the George Washington Bridge to the New Jersey side. These days I live in the southern Adirondacks in a tiny town at the confluence of the Hudson and the Sacandaga Rivers. Over the years I saw the river on the verge of death from pollution, then brought back to life by the Clearwater and other river clean-up projects. And two years ago I witnessed its rage when storms and Hurricane Irene whipped it into a frenzy near my upstate home.
The river, however, is a wonderful body of water that flows 315 miles from a tiny lake near Mt. Marcy in the north to the Narrows at the opening of the Atlantic Ocean in the south. But it does have moods. They’re powerful and I respect them. The Hudson is a living entity that can deliver grief or calm with equal bearing.
I spent a bit of time walking along the Piermont Pier on Wednesday morning. The day was sunny. Gentle winds blew across the river but the river was quiet. I watched the ducks, gulls and other birds at the water’s edge. I took a few photos then sat at the end of the pier and let the tranquility of the day and the gentle temper of the river fill me with serenity.
Below:
The Tappan Zee Bridge connects Piermont in Rockland County with Tarrytown in Westchester County
Photos courtesy of Joann Pensabene and Jim Pensabene
This blog site’s design was not redesigned by design this week. It’s the result of an anomalous day that started with the question:
What do you do when you’re hunkered down during a snowstorm that could prevent you from leaving your warm, cozy house for a couple of days?
Well, of course, you tune into your local area news and to the Weather Channel for information. You listen to reports of NEMO’s trek toward New York City and Boston. You shake your head, stare out your window at the three inches already on the ground. Snow has been falling for six hours and it’s predicted to continue through noon tomorrow. You check your food, water, and emergency supplies. You’re prepared. You breathe a sigh.
Of course, you’re hundreds of miles from the areas where the blizzard is bearing down. Another sigh. You won’t get the brunt of the storm. You watch TV for a bit. You read. You work on the exercises from the blogging course you’re enrolled in. You’re restless so you clean your already clean house. You talk to Tessa who seems quite happy to go romping in the white stuff. She’s a six year-old, black lab who loves to problem-solve. You watch her from the window. She digs her nose into different places in the yard as she searches for familiar scents. She stays out longer than you’d prefer. You worry about dropping temps and her ability to find her way home. But there’s no sense in worrying. She always gets home. She knows the woods around the house better than you do. You smile when she comes in and you dry her off with a light towel so she doesn’t shake the wetness all over the place. That would only mean more cleaning which you don’t want to do any more. Actually, you didn’t want to do it in the first place. You aim was to keep busy. You wonder if you should watch a movie. You look through your Netflix queue, peruse your dvds. But you can’t decide what to watch and you scratch that idea.
You live in the mountains at the southern end of the North Country in New York. The storm has teased you all day. You’ve been through such storms many times. You know they can make you stir-crazy. You’ve already reached the high point of cabin fever over the past couple of months. And, by the way, this hasn’t been too harsh a winter. Two days ago the sun was shining, temps were above zero and, and you went shopping for a few hours. What a beautiful day that was. Today, however, you make a vigorous effort to keep as physically active and as intellectually agile as you can. It’s good for your creativity not to mention your mental health.
You play.
You go into your blog site editor and set your one and only blog post into as many free themes as you can. You experiment with styles, colors, images, widgets, applications, whatever you can manipulate. You combine every variable you have access to and you review the permutations that result. You focus on what ifs rather than accepting what is and you eventually hit upon an eye-catching outcome. You like it. You believe it suits your personality. At least for now. So you activate it. You write a post to celebrate. And to honor your deadline.
It’s after 7:30 p.m. Still snowing. What do you do now?
Chocolate chip cookies and a cup of ginger tea.
Change happens. Sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, always filled with unique challenges and outcomes. Nothing remains static and change, often compelling, can be enhanced by the circumstances in which it occurs.
A few years ago I gave myself kudos for a life well-lived and for achieving a positive self image as I edged closer to entering a new era of personhood. Comfortable as I was with myself, however, the approaching of my 60 year mark felt overwhelming. I wanted to acclimate with a quiet birthday and agreed to a small dinner at a quiet restaurant with a few close family members. My husband and daughter had another plan. And I experienced its jolt when they pushed me into a room filled with people yelling, “Surprise,” in front of a banner that screamed, “Happy 60th Birthday.”
After the emotional shockwave settled, my attention turned to the layout of photos set around the room. There I was, my life in stills, all baby-faced smiles, scowls, and stances. Memories flowed as I shared the stories behind those snapshots. Suddenly those life transitions frozen across decades awakened and I became animated, excited about sharing myself and my birthday with these people who loved and supported me through many passing phases and solid commitments. My uneasiness about elderhood disappeared. I felt encouraged, energetic, and hopeful. A new door opened and I was eager to explore what lay ahead. So over the threshold I stepped.
[This is my first post. I started this blog with only one objective—to blog once a week. I have no specific theme to advance at present. This project represents yet another change in my life, another area to explore. What do you think about change? Let me know. Leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.]
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