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Whoa, December

Rae Spencer4 Comments

December 1

Whoa, December, wait one minute
I’ve hardly roused from my feasted slumber
When you start to number my days

Set clocks and worry flocks of shoppers
Lost in evergreen lots and sticker-shock
Tick tock, sweet silver bells ring the hour

As if to hurry my step into line
My dour minuet with Father Time
Stumbling on to the end

The bitter end of another year
Another calendar page, scrawled
With duty and a glitter of waste

With things I never desired
The blouse gift-receipt, creased
In haste and taped over the size

I couldn’t accept; a final refrain
After the glaze is scraped
From cold and golden morns

And oh, December, please wait
For the lights to change, for fire
To blaze through our litter of wrappings

Pause tonight among muttering beasts
In their scatter of straw, their dusty ease
From lust’s numb ache, from labor’s strain

Rest among these flight-tired geese
Mid-route, heads tucked under folded
Wings, murmuring psalms to themselves

Ready for Winter

Rae Spencer2 Comments

Robins pipe a shrill warning whenever I enter the yard, freezing rabbits and squirrels and warblers mid-meal.

Rabbit Nov 27

Their tense silence intensifies the pear tree’s rattle, the dry wind-notes that flash red and gold in chilly sunshine.

Leaves Nov 30

Perhaps an early snow will muffle it all, an icy blanket for the long dark hours ahead…

December

One Year Later

Rae Spencer8 Comments

A week after Mother’s accident, I met Vanna. I had seen glimpses of her before, darting through doorways or disappearing under a bed, but I had never really met her. She was a fearful, shy cat who rarely ventured into the open, even around Mother.

When Vanna finally allowed me to pet her, I discovered that her hair was dry and loose, falling out in handfuls. She had not been taking care of herself, and her matted fur felt like a physical manifestation of my own distress.

For the first time in days, I knew exactly what to do. Here was something that I could actually fix. I found Mother’s cat brush and went to work, laughing at Vanna’s ecstatic response to my grooming efforts. She purred and drooled, rolled and kneaded the air. And I fell head over heels in love. Three months later, when I announced that I would be taking Vanna home with me when I returned to Virginia, no one objected.

The drive was too long to cover in a single day, so we stopped at the Holiday Inn Express in Emporia. Mother would have laughed herself to tears over the thought of Vanna sleeping on a hotel bed.

Now it’s been a full year since our long drive together. Vanna has settled in and taken over the house. Her two housemates are too lazy to protest as she claims the warmest pools of sunshine and the softest pillows. They move aside as she bolts past them in the hall, as she chases her favorite toys or races to get there first, wherever she is going. They are patient, gentle cats, amiably dodging her jealous swipes and ignoring her touchy temper.

Some of their ease is rubbing off on her, and she is learning to share food bowls and favorite perches. Best of all, she rarely hides anymore. I seldom find her in a closet or under a bed. Instead, she sleeps in front of the windows and sprawls across the beds.

Every so often, usually after a poor night’s sleep, I catch myself indulging in a moment of grief as I watch Vanna. She is Mother’s cat, not mine. Or at least, she should be Mother’s cat. What if Mother had survived her injuries? Would she have consented so readily to my taking her neediest cat?

Such moments are lessening in frequency and intensity. I’m learning to file these questions in the unanswerable category, alongside a litany of other questions that start with “why?” and “what if?” I may as well ask why is there sunshine. Or why are there cats to enjoy the sunshine…

The Ginger Lilies (arachnophobia alert!)

Rae Spencer2 Comments

I don’t remember when the ginger lilies arrived. Years and years ago, long enough that I can’t remember what the yard looked like without them.

We started with eighteen bulbs, which I naively planted in pots because I didn’t know what a ginger lily was. I only knew that Mother had fallen in love with a vase of cut blooms given to her by a friend. She said the flowers smelled like warm cookies and looked a little like large, exotic orchids.

Mother’s friend gave us a box of beautiful pink-tinged bulbs, which I divided into three pots. Then I waited for spring to deliver a crop of cookie-scented flowers.

Instead of flowers, I got something that resembled corn. Each lovely bulb produced a green spike that quickly shot up into a leaf-wrapped stalk, taller and taller as summer wore on. In May they were knee high. In June they reached my hip. By August, they were head high with stalks as thick as chair legs. I had to brace their pots against the fence and support their weight with stakes.

Finally, September brought flowers, which were every bit as fragrant as promised. Less than half of the plants were able to bloom, constricted as they were in the pots, but it was enough to make me a life-long fan.

In November, my husband and I broke the pots with a hammer, because the bulbs had grown so tightly packed that we couldn’t get them out any other way. We cleared three beds in the yard, divided the tangled bulbs, and covered them with deep layers of mulch. After an anxious winter, we raked away the mulch and found dozens of spikes sprouting in all three beds. And so began years of delight…

Frost in the Forecast

Rae Spencer4 Comments

For me, winter starts when I cut the ginger lilies.

So today, even though it was warm enough to open the windows, winter arrived in the yard. Our forecast calls for temperatures near freezing Saturday night, and I didn’t want to risk losing any of the bulbs to frost.

As I worked my way through the tangle of stalks, I recovered three chimes that had broken off of a wind chime and two birdhouses that had fallen during one of the recent storms. Somehow, repairing the wind chime made me feel a little less guilty about the lingering scent of unfinished blooms.

The cats followed my progress, moving from window to window as I moved from bed to bed.

(Please excuse Vanna’s sour expression. She was trying to ignore the fact that there is room for two cats on that perch. Fortunately, a flock of robins arrived shortly after this picture was taken, providing a distraction from the uncomfortable standoff.)

The robins were soon joined by several warblers and a pair of hungry squirrels.

Today’s strangest sighting was this very disheveled red admiral butterfly. It seemed to be heading south, perhaps following the opposite path of spring’s massive red admiral migration.

Wherever it was going, I hope it gets there safely. And I hope it was able to pause, for a moment, and enjoy tonight’s beautiful sunset.