change – In the Woods

within the grip of winter

Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The gray perished landscape is shorn of color. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are wakening up. Colors are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bud opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of color emerges.
~ John O’Donohue
(To Bless the Space Between Us)

Groundhog Day was one of our favorite holidays. We had a tradition of taking our groundhog stuffy outside to see (or to not see) his shadow. We named him Basil (Wasyl) after my grandfather, who was born in Ukraine on February 2, 1882. By 2014 Basil had a companion, who was at first named Basil, Jr. At some point Tim, with his endless sense of humor, started calling the little one Oregano, and it stuck.

I cannot bear to continue this tradition without my beloved. So I decided to dig up some of the pictures I took of it over the years, in memory of Tim. I am definitely within the grip of winter, the one outside and a winter of grief. I still can’t imagine how a future without him will ever feel like spring.

Tim, Oregano & Basil bird-watching together (2025, Bolin Forest)
this turned out to be our last Groundhog Day together

definite shadows (2024, North Carolina Botanical Garden)

Tim waiting for the parade to begin with Basil & Oregano
(2023, Essex Ed Groundhog Day Parade)

fun in the snow (2022, Haley Farm State Park)

2.2.14 ~ Essex, Connecticut — Tim waiting with the Basils
(2014, Essex Ed Groundhog Day Parade)

Basil, Oregano and I will stay inside and light a candle this year.

to live with loss

The reality is you will grieve forever. You will not “get over” the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.
~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross & David Kessler
(On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss)

I have found these words to be true. It’s thirty-four years now since my mother died and I have healed and have learned how to live with that never-ending feeling of painful loss. After my father died twelve years ago, grief was much more familiar to me and I more quickly got used to feeling like an orphan. But now, to be a widow.

I miss my husband so much. How is this much pain even possible? The loss feels like it’s cutting even deeper than the loss of my parents because I intimately shared my life with this man for more than fifty years. My days are full of memory flashes, as if my brain wants to watch the video of our whole life together in bits and pieces. (I think in pictures.) So I pause whatever I am doing, recall the scene, cry a little, talk to him a little, and then try to remember what I was doing and carry on.

Sunday evening I took another very long two-hour walk with my friends. It was cold and the atmosphere felt like it was going to snow. It was magical. (It did snow the next day in some places nearby, but not at my place.) Very healing and I am so grateful for their love and support. We were still out there when the sun set. A good memory.

to drift into a brown study

On Saturday my son-in-law came to my rescue and figured out how to get pictures from my camera onto my laptop, and then patiently taught me how to do it myself. My daughter spent most of her weekend organizing and updating my important papers, accounts and digital information, for which I am grateful because I am so brain-numb and overwhelmed these days.

On Sunday my friends came over for another long walk and this time I brought my camera along. Naturally I forgot to bring an extra battery but I did get a few pictures before the battery in the camera ran out. It’s a start. I’ll get the hang of things again eventually.

The change of the landscape’s prevailing tint from green to brown is not a cheerful one. Look wheresoever one may, he is pretty sure, in November, to drift into a brown study, and this is seldom exhilarating.
~ Charles Conrad Abbott
(Days Out of Doors)

I never noticed before this old abandoned car a little way off the trail. (above) It’s been completely filled with rocks. We wondered how long it’s been there.

beech leaves turning from green to yellow to brown

Also on Saturday my granddaughter and I took a walk and she found three broken-off beech twigs with yellow leaves intact. She brought them home and put them in a vase for me.

passing summer

Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life. There is a time of sprouting, a time of growth, and a time of harvest, and all are part of the greater whole. There comes the time now to savor the harvest, to pause and know another year not yet brought to full finality.
~ Hal Borland
(Sundial of the Seasons)

each day a little shorter

There comes a warning like a spy
A shorter breath of Day
A stealing that is not a stealth
And Summers are away —
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1560)

8.29.25 ~ Battle Branch Trail
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

We tried out this trail on another lovely, low humidity day. We wound up getting lost and reluctantly decided to cut through somebody’s yard to get back to a road. Summer is fading away, as it always does, each day a minute or two shorter than the last. Emily’s poem has an added layer of meaning for me, now, as I take note of Tim’s breaths becoming shorter, too.

a fledgling cardinal

It’s been so sweet listening to our cardinals sing this summer, and now they have some youngsters exploring the world around them.

This one seemed particularly interested in our birdbath so I was able to get some fuzzy pictures through the sliding glass doors. He kept picking up and putting down catkins, splinters, and twigs, as if he was learning what might or might not be edible. He never did go into the water, though.

So, art thou feathered, art thou flown,
Thou naked thing? — and canst alone
Upon the unsolid summer air
Sustain thyself, and prosper there?
Shall no more with anxious note
Advise thee through the happy day,
Thrusting the worm into thy throat,
Bearing thine excrement away?
Alas, I think I see thee yet,
Perched on the windy parapet,
Defer thy flight a moment still
To clean thy wing with careful bill.
And thou are feathered, thou art flown;
And hast a project of thine own.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
(The Fledgling)

bluebird photo shoot

A bluebird finally sat still long enough on our deck railing for me to get some pictures through the sliding glass doors! He seemed to be waiting for a pair of goldfinches to finish splashing around in the birdbath.

As my chronic illness is making it harder to plan long walks and spend much time away from my home, the way we spend our days is changing. Most of my walks are now taken on a new treadmill, so I don’t have to worry about the weather or ticks or the location of the nearest restroom. I’ve fallen in love with tai chi and have also started resistance training to strengthen my bones. Tim gets plenty of exercise at cardiac rehab three mornings a week.

None of those activities make for good photo opportunities, though! We still try to visit the botanical garden once a week, as it has bathrooms for me and benches for Tim. But since we have so many birds right outside our windows we have started trying to make our garden even more inviting for them. We now have a birdbath and a suet feeder and a cylinder feeder, all of which are visited often.

We even hung up a little birdhouse. And much to our delight we have both seen a chickadee flying into it, on two separate occasions, but have yet to witness anyone coming out of it, even though we wait patiently.

a goldfinch and a male flower from the sweetgum tree

I so wished I could attend one of the Hands Off! protests on April 5th! I was there with everyone in spirit, but my illness prevented me from being there in person. It was very encouraging to see from news reports and social media posts that a sizable (5.2 million protestors) resistance to tyranny exists and my hope is that we will find a way to prevail.

Freeze warning this morning. I brought my new potted geranium inside.

on certain mornings

3.11.25 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden

Tuesday’s visit to the botanical garden was bright and sunny, and we enjoyed seeing the gentle, even light of the approaching equinox illuminating grasses, spring ephemerals, and shrub buds and blooms. Every year before spring arrives there are controlled burns in some of the piedmont and coastal plain gardens, and we happened to catch sight of one that day. We even spotted a squirrel along a path, so busy eating a bundle of plant stocks and leaves that he didn’t notice how close we were to him.

I can scroll and worry indoors, or I can step outside and remember how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me and includes me, too. The spring ephemerals have only the smallest window for blooming, and so they bloom when the sunlight reaches them. Once the forest becomes enveloped in green and the sunlight closes off again, they will wait for the light to come back.
~ Margaret Renkl
(The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year)

By Chivalries as tiny,
A Blossom, or a Book,
The seeds of smiles are planted —
Which blossom in the dark.
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #37)

The native wildflowers and grasses in these gardens beds evolved with periodic wildfires, which keep trees and shrubs from growing in and return nutrients to the soil. In a few weeks, new growth will be emerging from the ashes.
~ North Carolina Botanical Garden
(Facebook, March 10, 2025)

a yearly controlled burn in the Coastal Plain Habitat

So many simple ‘chivalries’ exist and noticing even a few of them can bring us great pleasure and help us to ‘remember how it feels to be a part of something larger.’

soon, when winter yields to spring

“When Icicles Hang by the Wall,
& Dick the Shepherd Blows His Nail”
by Edward Robert Hughes

Soon shall the winter’s foil be here;
Soon shall these icy ligatures unbind and melt — A little while,
And air, soil, wave, suffused shall be in softness, bloom and growth — a thousand forms shall rise
From these dead clods and chills as from low burial graves.
Thine eyes, ears — all thy best attributes — all that takes cognizance of natural beauty,
Shall wake and fill.
Thou shalt perceive the simple shows, the delicate miracles of earth,
Dandelions, clover, the emerald grass, the early scents and flowers,
The arbutus under foot, the willow’s yellow-green, the blossoming plum and cherry;
With these the robin, lark and thrush, singing their songs — the flitting bluebird;
For such the scenes the annual play brings on.
~ Walt Whitman
(Sands at Seventy)