august morning in the city


traffic lights are flashing
above the dark streets -
gold. gold.
red. red.
a man drives by
thinking man thoughts.
a single summer cloud
is drifting -
dark gray against
the pale before dawn.
the cafe lights are dim -
there will be no coffee
for another hour.
a chain clinks
against the metal flagpole.
i sit in my car,
windows open,
playing solitaire.

Wash and save the glass jar next time you run out of mayonnaise. Next hot summer day, put a couple of scoops of your favorite ice cream in the jar - add some milk. Tighten the lid on the jar and shake vigorously until the ice cream has mixed and foamed with the milk. (They call this treat 'shake' for a reason.) Pull a couple of chilled glasses from the freezer, pour the mixture into the glasses and share.

You can add mashed fruit, or a spoonful of powdered malt to the ingredients to vary the equation. Life is good.

the mouse and the money

Once upon a time, a mouse named Hal was heading home through the little woods in the back of a neighborhood. He clambered over leaves and the roots of trees, and he stopped to eat a tiny wild strawberry nestled in the varied grasses. He foraged on and thought he should have found another berry, or maybe an acorn, to carry home to share, but there were none. But, lo and behold, he saw something new and unusual ahead on his little trail. It was smooth and flat and cornered and had a pungent, unfamiliar scent. The markings were in greens and beiges and a few colorful lines and curleques. One pattern was repeated on some of the corners. It looked like this : 1000. He tugged the leaf-like rectangle toward home.

Maybe this was money. He had heard of money but none of his friends had ever seen any that they knew of. Still, the wife - Opal - she would know what to do with it. He dragged it further and it flapped a little in the breeze and it got caught on thorns and under vines, but he set it free and got it to the opening of their nest.

Fortunately, it was soft enough that its shape bent and folded as he tugged it down the tunnel into the living room they had carved out beneath the root of an elm. Opal's shiny dark eyes lit up when she saw what he had brought in. She walked all over it, then walked under it. Would it attach to the ceiling? Was it good underfoot like a rug? She didn't know.

Hal walked away to get something to eat. He looked up from the wild onion root he was nibbling on, and stopped in alarm. Wait! But Opal already had the bill half chewed up into tiny strands and flakes and curls of fiber.

She lined the cubbyhole in the back with the debris, packing it snug here and there. She curled up, and, after all that work, took a nap atop the new bedding. Hal tentatively put his paws onto the stuff. It was good insulation for their cubbyhole. Warm and soft - not bad. He crawled in and fell asleep, too, curled up next to Opal.

the summer table

pleasant peaceful days
flow quietly in the past -
unfiled unflagged memories
the details blurred and distant
but i can make my own little flags,
and remember the calls of the chickadees
to mark what's gone by -
the blue glass pitcher
is filled with cool water
from the limestone aquifer
the voices of kids
echo from the front patio
a pair of does
amble through the backyard
a half-grown fawn
peeks into the living room window
the black and white cat
stares right back
it's growing darker
we clear the summer table
Venus glows in the dusk
of the western sky

There's an episode of the television program 'Northern Exposure' (1990s) where Maggie O'Connell, the prop-plane pilot, meets a man out in the Alaskan forest who is fishing in a wild creek. He stands poised and motionless. In a blink, he captures a fish from the sparkling water - perhaps salmon? - with his bare hands. Astonished, Maggie approaches him and the two of them talk, and he shows her the cave where he lives. She comes searching for him at a later time, and cannot find him. But there is a great bear at the creek, poised and motionless, among the rocks at the creek's edge. A sudden movement - he catches a fish. He glances at Maggie and she - and the viewer - become aware that the man is the bear, that this is his true self.

I heard a man's voice yesterday. He spoke Hamlet's line to Ophelia, 'Get thee to a nunnery!' I thought that was amusing, and, having no other plans for the late afternoon, I thought - where are there nunneries around here? (meaning Austin, Texas, and surrounding area.)

Four different Catholic churches came to mind - but as far as I know, none are associated with convents. I am familiar with some convents, but they are in Houston and south central Louisiana. (And there may be one east of here that raises miniature horses?)

Then - ding! - of course! Two enthusiastic nuns founded and ran a very small school in our neighborhood in northeast Hays County in the 1980s and 90s, kindergarten through third grade. (This was good - as close as I could get to the concept of nunnery on such short notice.) Our sons went there. The school closed around 2001, after the sisters retired. 

I know they no longer live there, and the school is boarded up by a different owner. But I'd just completed knitting a scarf, so I took it and the one I finished a day or two earlier as offerings of appreciation even though the nuns are not there.

No one was on the property when I drove up. I walked around the old parking lot and driveway where we once dropped off and picked up our kids, and where festivals were held. It was very hot and very dry and peacefully overgrown. Though the place looks woefully abandoned, decorated with this and that debris, it somehow still rings with the voices of children and teachers who grew gardens, and brought their sandwiches and carrots and cookies to school and went to Mass and stuck paper signs with Spanish vocabulary words on everything that stood still, and colored and wrote poems and played basketball and learned about distant countries, multiplication tables, and famous writers and composers. Still, there is a big contrast between the tidy little school when it was active and its state of deterioration today.

I hung the scarves on the broken railing of the covered walkway with a note - 'Dominican Academy lives on in the students who learned here.'

Somehow, I know the good sisters got the message.

to water a tree

It doesn't take much to water a tree. A bucket can work, or a hose. Any time of day or night - the tree won't complain. If you have a hose, you can spray the tree up and down and all around its branches and trunk. Trees like that. You can bring it water until you are tired, or happy, or both. The tree will be happy too.