in mid-July, the summer-resident barn swallows who had successfully raised and launched four fledglings by June 23rd, 2025, attempted to raise a second brood;
while i am not absolutely sure if it was the same set of parents or another in the barn swallow community that utilized the nest — as there is a collective of more than a dozen swallows that visits and assists in feeding sometimes too — it is most likely they are the same parent pair;
this is the second summer the barn swallows have nested here in my barn — using last year’s well-constructed nest which they attached to one of the joists like a balcony cantilevered on a Chicago highrise;
i began leaving the overhead barn door open when i first noticed them circling and investigating the barn a few years back; and i was thrilled last year when they began construction of their nest — they were so very welcomed and wanted here — i now know to leave the barn door raised from mid May through July to give them access.
One experience of living rurally — without any obstructions of buildings or infrastructure — and with a full southern exposure out my front door, generous windows and an unencumbered view of all four cardinal directions — it’s like i am in the center of a beautiful compass at all times — is, that i have been able to observe and better understand the obliquity of the ecliptic:
marking the farthest northeastern point of the Sun’s eager rise and the farthest northwestern point of the Sun’s leisurely set at the Summer solstice with my own eyes — the Sun making a deep, high horseshoe arc on those long Summer days,
and to watch the Sun’s progression/regression daily,
and, to witness how at the Winter solstice, the Sun just sleeps in, lazily rising in southeastern Sky, just barely making an appearance for us in the northern latitudes — offering us the shallowest, little arc of light before quickly bedding down again in the southwestern Sky;
Darkness is so precious in the Summer and the light is so precious in the Winter. The darkness is so gloriously abundant in the Winter and the light is so gloriously a abundant in Summer;
i am so grateful and privileged to have experienced this solar panorama and time lapse in real life for eight years now, after living many decades in a major North American city — Chicago, without it;
and,
below is my favorite ever foto to share on the Solstice: Attila Kálmán faithfully and wondrously captured the obliquity of the ecliptic — his camera tracking the Sun’s path from a point on the Northern Hemisphere of Earth from Summer to Winter Solstice in 2012.
and a few of my own favorite Summer Solstice experiences:
the golden salmon sky beckons
before the orange orb emerges and the blue arrives
i call you to the glass doors for the eastern view
but you move with an intentional, sabotaging slowness,
without the respect, the urgency
that ephemeral light and beauty require of us
that’s just one difference between me and you,
i am keeping watch, i stay ready for some thing holy,
and you, you clock-watch for the mundane:
for the mail, for dr. phil, a rush only to ever get “it” all over with — the chore, the trip, the holiday, the ceremony, the meal, the dishes, even the damn dessert and bedtime prayer /
nothing ever truly experienced — or savored by you
save for your anger, your resentment,
and that ever-lasting gobstopper of hate, that you nurse in your cheek, its bitterness, sourness, leaching down into,
embalming, your still-living heart
how did i be-come me with you as a mother?
Continue reading “unalike”a sweet spot, a warm, quiet evening,
of a too-soft winter here,
on & of the good Earth,
that tempts the comfortable one
to flirt with forgetting
the hard totality
of this hot and cold, man-made,
loud and brutal World.
i am waiting for the bough to break — or, to be severed by proxy at my behest.
earlier this week on my daily walk-about, i noticed that a primary limb, the major artery, on a nearly 80’ tall and likely nearing 100 years-old, elm tree on the land i occupy, had cleaved and that the fracture was migrating down into the trunk — and dangerously so.
i don’t know the cause: if it was the abrupt shift in temperature to freezing here in southwest Michigan — or, if the tree was stressed from a standing-water-wet spring followed by a very dry summer, or if “it” is simply at the end of their life — all the elms here had unusually held onto an abundance of their prolific leaves until the fourth week of November.
no matter.
the matters:
the massive limb of the elm stretches high and precariously over the old barn, and depending on the wind direction, there’s a chance if it falls, it could clip the back of my house or take the whole tree down with it.
i await the tree surgery & removal crew. i am at their and the northerly and westerly gusts’ mercy.
in the meantime, i have also been wrestling with the possible choice of whether to have the crew amputate just the cleaved limbs — if the tree is in fact salvageable — or, to remove the entire tree at once instead of forestalling the inevitable.
Continue reading “waiting for the bough to break”
imagining cocoons of
luna moths
in every furled and fallen
leaf
i use all my breaths
to counter the Wind
who wants to roar them, all,
away
after weeks of near-drought, there came a life-bringing rainstorm,
and so Neith from her realms, overnight, joined in world-building, world-weaving with her Earthly kin
laying gossamer highway across the tree canopy, the meadow and the garden — an autumnal garland, glistening in the september morning light, heralding equinox
when the Sun reaches the precise height
above horizon,
then arrive the tawny-bodied apple pickers and gleaners/
stilts for legs,
i count twenty limbs in tree camouflage/
bypassing the bushel and the sack
the bounty of fruit down into their bellies //
ears like SETI,
searching for sounds of hoof-less life — canine or primate in the universe
and also, for movement of my unseen, yet intense presence —my breath and pulse slowed, just above, just beyond them —
but i am not in a tree stand/ i brandish no shotgun, no ray gun ///
how rare, these ones are among us,
— among we Earthlings :
silent, gentle and elegant ///
they linger in the morning gold as it stretches West to the lake and evaporates too quick into its blues/
i linger in the dark cool of the open bedroom window, facing North
my senses also honed — and sated//
on this eve of August’s ides,
autumn has not trespassed on the summer,
but was intentionally summoned ///
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 