The empty husk of paper wasp echoes in my head … paper wasps' nest on the apex of the gable roof of the house. Wasps beating at the windows. Wasp in the bedroom … chase it out, kill it, capture it, take it outside, let it go.
Black quartz rock, each little facet reflects a different sheen of sun.
A very thin cloud turns the sun into a gauzy brilliant rose and … where is my passion? I have too many.
The love of nature and places that wells up, that pours clear lucid water into deep wells that sustains me in life.
The passion for wronged children that causes me to pay attention to a crying child when a parent is seemingly not paying attention. And yet, I have experienced being the keeper of the crying child, and I know that it is not necessarily poor parenting.
The passion about environmental degradation — the eruption of anger when a fresh event happens that raises consciousness of corporate and government uncaringness.
The passion about the World Trade Organization and its wrenching of the lives of poor people around the world into tracks that fit corporate greed.
Then, there's the drama of freezing water in cascades down a ledge into a pool. Its crystalline beauty. Why are crystals beautiful? What is it about the light reflecting, refracting, pouring through?
And the sound of water, throaty trebles and basses, simple sweetness of life going through the molecules, one by one, of the touch of eternal as long as there is twice as much hydrogen as oxygen to combine. It seems miraculous that such a wonder as water can be made from three molecules of gases.
And the wonder of that water is that it can wear holes in solid matter.
In rocks, that it can change form and freeze in cracks and become sledgehammers.
That it can change form and float in the air, diaphanous, rising in the warming sun on a frosty morning.
As fog that rolls in on "little cat feet" (thank you, Carl Sandburg)
covering landforms, creating a new landscape of unknowns.
That it changes form to feed us,
to become part of our cells,
to nourish the mitochondria that feed us, that shape us, that work us,
that it changes form to wisp away unobserved,
to be taken up into the heavens,
to be coalesced, dispersed, tossed about, frozen, melted,
to succumb to gravity,
to drop downward to land, to splatter – splatter on the flat lake,
to drift diaphanous hanging veils above hot land,
to plink on a leaf, to spread over that leaf,
to slip into its pores,
to be drunk up the stem of the leaf, through the petiole, up the twig, up the branch,
or perhaps not — to just stay "leaf."
To become a drop of sap…
The smell of boiling sap — that sugar-encrusted scent
evoked every time I spend a drop of maple syrup on my tongue.
The smell of boiling sap, the foaming impurities skimmed off
(as we skim off and discard the impurities of our lives)
letting the clear golden bubbles of rich syrup foam more impurities until it is the gloss of dark gold.
Nothing escaped the golden sheen
as the fire roared in the arch
that held the red hot coals of quick-burning timber,
the likes of which were quickly and efficiently fed every ten minutes or so.
Not for this arch the long-burning log,
not until it was time to close the damper down and let the syrup settle for the night,
and the sap stopped running in from the holding tank,
holding gallons — buckets and buckets of sap that we carried from tree to gathering tank endless times.
The tractor chugging through the snow,
sometimes deep, sometimes mixed with mud,
until the days were too warm and sap soured and buds filled and song sparrows sang
and the boiling done,
the buckets scrubbed and set to dry on the wood stove so that they wouldn't rust between seasons,
and the taps washed and dried,
and the evaporator pans scrubbed clean of stuck-on foam and sugar particles
and turned upside down on top of the now-dead arch to wait for the next year —
the next wash of time that comes every year, whether it's a good sugarin' year or a poor sugarin' year.
Life is rich with the taste and the smell of a drop of maple syrup on the tongue.