tracks today–nothing very interesting:
*my boots–I have a pair of boots which are one half size too large so that I can wear extra socks. This is good as it is two degrees.
*Darby’s pawprints–he has large paws. I think I would be able to pick them out from others–their print is like a hand in paint on white paper to me.
* snowshoes leading farther down the trail–I don’t have snowshoes myself but I should get some. My father had a pair made of cat gut. He would go out on the frozen lake at night and walk across it to visit our friends. It would be cold but clear. He must have seen so many stars.
* deer hooves–these we see all the time anyway. It would be nice to see moose tracks but I think they are gone somewhere else until spring.
* mice-they are everywhere, including my basement.
Have been reading and enjoying The Missouri Review‘s latest edition called “Experiment.” There is much to fascinate between these pages, to be sure, not the least of which is the interview with Frederick Barthelme in which he says (in response to what what kind of fiction he is drawn to):
More than ever, when most of the published writing is so drab and pretentious, just give me a voice on the page–a voice with authority and sure-footedness that takes me where it wants to go, as long as where it wants to go is not someplace I saw on TV last week.
There are also three early stories by William Gaddis. I have only read the first (“Jake’s Dog”) of these so far and while I found the beginning quite interesting–the middle and the end fell a little flat for me. Still, one cannot help but enjoy a brilliant mind at work.
Finally, I was moved by Tara Cottrell’s “Epiphora”–a haunting, humorous and tragic tale of a young woman who, after losing the love of her life in a car crash, must make something of her new life and disfigured face (epiphora refers to the condition she has since the accident which makes her tear duct leak). Instead of moving forward, she regresses by stealing the next door neighbor’s monkey and making of him a duplicate of her lost love–but not in the form of Romantic love–rather as he might have been as a baby or a monkey.
After her neighbor confronts her, she gives the monkey to the zoo. Later she learns that he is not fitting in and is living in a sort of exile–much like she is. Her neighbor confronts her a second time and smashes her car and then fights her–injuring her in a way similar to a car accident. It is here she decides that the only way to move forward is to steal the monkey back from the zoo.
“Epiphora” is one Hell of a good story. Relying on flashback and the ramblings of an unreliable narrator, we are left with a broken-hearted tale we completely believe and for which we fall. Mostly because the narrator is so broken, so damaged and so sympathetic. We want her to succeed, but we don’t know what we want her to succeed at. She is the one who has survived and with that survival comes all of the guilt and shame of not having died. Ultimately, saving the monkey is the only thing she can do. Her future is not clear–nor should it be.
wow: canyonland, by joseph young
Allen made perfect choices in getting me Alice Munro’s Runaway and Mammal Tracks & Sign: A Guide to North American Species (this is meant to supplement the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Mammals I already own). I can’t wait to dig into the Munro but have already examined the Tracks & Signs books closely (and we were able to identify some scat we saw on a walk on Christmas day–coyote scat with rabbit hair in it.)
The wonderful (or gross, if you are not me and fascinated by tracking animals) thing about the Tracks & Sign book is that it has full color photos as opposed to just descriptions/illustrations. I am able to SEE in full color page upon page of full-color scat. The only downfall is that the book is too heavy to actually carry on a hike (well, I could but I would end up regretting it taking up space in my pack). So I will either have to commit the information to memory or bring samples home with me.
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=read08-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0811726266&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lc1=0000ff&bg1=ffffff&bc1=<1=_blank&f=ifrhttp://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=read08-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=140004281X&fc1=000000&lc1=0000ff&bc1=<1=_blank&IS2=1&bg1=ffffff&f=ifr
On the bare trees now are chickadees and blue jays. Fat gray squirrels forage alone, the foxes having eaten their fill.
The oaks have dropped their leaves, slippery on the ground. One leaf, held up for inspection, was massive, as big as a person’s head–an intimidating leaf from a tree much smaller than the robust pines bordering the property. The pine needles were dainty, filigreed, fragrant. They dusted the drive and laced the yard in orange.
Hoarfrost on the pachysandra, turns to broken, rusted leaves. Long, dark nights, snow piling down. Time to close doors and live secretly, as the Hmong, hiding in banana huts, waiting for liberation or death.
a photo of the moon from last week.
This is my favorite present. It’s called “Clueless Cow.” 
by Myfanwy Collins
I think of the woods and of losing you there and of the dark path that leads down to the cottage where I was walking when a half-dozen gray and silver wolves surrounded me. Some showed their white teeth in a snarl or a smile and others just stared. I was full of fear, fearful; there was nowhere for me to go.
When the dark trees cover the lawn with their velvet light and the shadows slither across the grass but high above them one can still see the blue sky and the sun shining somewhere-that is when it is time to go out into the woods and look for the path that leads to the lake; the lake that you live on; the lake that will drown you if you let it.
Do not let it drown you.
Follow, follow, follow and breathe and do not let the wolves get you and do not let the lake drown you. Just follow and follow and it will lead you.
It will lead you to where we are bom anew and we go to our new lives, where forgetting and remembering become the same thing.
We are not so much born as we are remembered.
Let’s go back to the woods. Let us go to the woods and build a garden with a rock wall. I will find the rocks and haul them to you in a wheelbarrow and you can place them one by one in a puzzle that forms a wall. Let us.
Let’s make each day a prayer that only we understand. Let us make each day a prayer. The ground there is dark, sodden with life remembering and forgetting. Life coming back again. It will never become that tar pit and it will never become that piece of coal. It will not petrify.
In truth, we don’t know how long we have and we can’t know how long we can know.
And I say this to you in my voice. This is my own voice and this is what I say to you. Let us make each day a prayer.
We will learn new words and give them meaning. We will teach each other to sing. I will show you my palm and you will kiss it.
This is the prayer today.
Let us go back to the woods
Where the path leads to the cottage
And the wolves surround us licking and sniffing
And the lake, which may drown us
Let us go there and build a wall of stone
Which I will haul for you
And we will teach each other to sing
My palm, kiss it
And we will learn new words and give them new meaning
Let us make each day a prayer
Let us
Between me, you
and the rest of the world
The mourning dove reminds me that it is not just day it is morning. The mockingbird coming home to her nest reminds me that it is time to pray.
Each day will be a new prayer with new words. You can bring them yourself or you can use the old ones. It doesn’t matter to me.
I will build the wall if you can’t fit the pieces together. I will build it from my memory of how it should be. I will forget and then I will remember again.
A rusty tree and wreath. A wraith. A life behind a fence is hidden to me. The ground molts and moulds. Sheds its winter skin and blinks at me. It is time.
Let us pray.
Here is your wall and your woods. Here is your fence and your shadow. Here are your wolves and your lake and your drowning (do not drown, you). Here is your forgetting and remembering and your remembering and forgetting.
If you will stay and not follow me there, I will show it all to you.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
by Dylan Thomas
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
Wikipedia is one of my favorite tools on the internet. No, I don’t take the information there as utter fact–no more than I would any one encyclopedia or source, but I do use it, find it helpful and informative.
With that said, I was interested in the technologyreview.com interview with Wikipedia’s cocreator (he left Wikipedia in 2002), Larry Sanger in which he discusses, among others things, one of the problems which happens with such a massive collaborative endeavor as Wikipedia:
there’s a second complaint against Wikipedia that bothers Sanger more deeply—the fractiousness among Wikipedians themselves. Sanger says participants often become embroiled in “revert wars” in which overprotective authors undo the changes others try to make to their articles. He says he’s afraid that this kind of behavior drives away academics and other experts whose contributions would otherwise raise Wikipedia’s quality.
Indeed, the interview suggests that a “revert war” was one of the reasons Sanger left Wikipedia. But what it all boils down to is not so much about knowledge, rather human nature:
To build a public encyclopedia, you don’t need faith in the possibility of knowledge, he says. “What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work together.”
(found the link to the interview on: slashdot)
myfanwy collins 