ramblings

[a dozen dark photos from the past week — thank goodness the clouds finally moved on]

It was terribly dark and stormy for a few days. I love weather, but too many dark days in a row and it begins to feel like someone has reached out and pulled black curtains over the windows of my heart. This morning, Idaho is bright and cold, twinkling and wild, rising up in humps of stone — the mountains are elk molars! Precious, wild, earthen ivories. It is, indeed, a very good day to be Idahoan.

We are hosting a stragglers American Thanksgiving feast later this week — which is just a silly way to inform you that we are hosting Thanksgiving for all our friends. I refer to anyone who doesn’t travel for the holiday a straggler.

Get along little dogies!

We also have family coming to town for Thanksgiving which is a big deal for us. Any time any of our family members take the time and energy to visit us here in Idaho it means the world to us. I’ve been readying the spare room for them, and by spare room I mean the Airstream. I hope they bring their warmest pajamas!

Last year, we cooked a huge elk roast for the table, with all the Thanksgiving trimmings. This year, we are dreaming of and working on gathering enough game to roast one dozen wild shot pheasant for dinner. We have even been experimenting with a few recipes. Boy howdy. Have you ever eaten a whole roasted wild pheasant? Two nights ago we smothered a whole pheasant with honey and herbs, dutifully basted it to smithereens while roasting it and the meat was beautiful, golden brown on the outside, and tender and moist on the inside. It was amazing. It was delicious. I’ll let you know how our feasting plans proceed. Hopefully I’ll have an incredible photograph of a dozen roasted pheasants with their darling little drumsticks raised in wild defiance by the time Thanksgiving arrives! I bought a gorgeous turkey, just in case Rob and I can’t harvest enough pheasant for the table by Wednesday…I suppose that makes me faithless…or perhaps wise beyond my years! But oh, I love and believe in a wild harvested Thanksgiving!

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Besides being wonderfully run off my feet with too many irons in the fire, these past two weeks, I have been suffering this feeling of being splayed out on a large map of the world, reaching and straining to touch all the places my most loved ones live, and failing to physically touch any of them at all. Everyone and everything seems so far away at times. Robert and I have always lived where we want to live and we have always felt free to chase our dreams, no matter where they might take us. But the flip side of all that freedom is the fact that we miss our far away people, our various tribes, our families — we miss them all, all the time. I tend to get especially lonesome and melancholy for my people this time of year, but I also realize how thankful I am for the incredible batch of friends we have here in town — friends who are like family to us. That’s the truth of the matter.

How about you? Are you where your people are? Are you also splayed out on a map, trying to reach out and connect with all the ones who are far away and loved?

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Boy howdy. Didn’t November fly? The months have wings. If time flies, I’m a small rider on the back of a bird; it carries me forward and I hold on with fists full of feathers, my eyes are teary with wind, the seconds are measured in wing beats.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2013/11/23/7182/

This is a wind that teases tresses into bird nests and whittles bones. The trees are sailing! The sky is a billowing high sea. All the tumbleweed has rolled into Wyoming.

After I took this little walk last night, I realized I still had much daylight to spend (for the days are growing noticeably long now) so I took the pointers running with me, up the mountain. I felt the first terrible gust of wind when I rambled around a steep corner on the edge of a draw. It hit me square on and I felt glued in place. Tater was up the side hill from me, searching for Hungarian partridge, as his instincts insist. I tried to call him in to me, but the wind repelled my voice and swept my words down the mountain. I opened my mouth to shout again and my hair blew in and caught on my teeth. Once more, I called, and most miraculously, Tater heard. To me he came, we flew down the mountain and into the quiet cleft beneath the mountain where we make our home. Robert was waiting for us. He had prepared dinner and we ate it by candle light in the Airstream. We were safe from the tornado outside, as we nibbled at our pizza and talked endlessly about our summer plans. The dogs and cat were curled in sleepy doughnuts on the Airstream floor and above us I could hear the Austrian pine snapping and bending in the hands of the wind. By the time our little dinner date was over and we had demobilized our feast, the gusts of wind had turned steady and the world felt as though it was staunchly braced and deep-root-sinking.

We lay in bed, awake for hours, listening to the house groan. I wondered about the birds and where they were resting in this raw squall. I imagined the deer bedded down on the side hills, whispering and huffing in the sagebrush. We rose in the wee hours to secure a portion of aluminum sheet that came loose from the Airstream refurbishing pile by the studio building. What a mighty rumpus was that. All night long, I barely slept, I was set on edge by wind. When I did sleep, I tried to shatter my teeth and this morning my jaw hurts. I find myself wondering, are we all so affected by our immediate environments? Today, the wind continues its screaming, the trees are moving like blades of wheat on the great plains, I feel dishevelled and gritty. I think I’m probably just silly and sensitive but I can’t shake the feeling that my soul is pressed just as hard by this wind as the land is. I step outside and I squint through my hair as it wraps across my face. Gestures seem just as lost as words in the tumult of the gale, so I cast them off like messages in glass bottles on the currents of the sea and wonder if anyone will ever find them, out there, in the great wide and unconquerable space of the glorious West.

It is only February, but I feel March is already here and has entered like a lion. I think I should batten down the hatches, gird my loins…but on the other hand, I like the adventure of letting the wind take me where it will. I’m Canadian, but sometimes I’m so ridiculously French about things. This is laissez-faire at it’s finest!

This wind. This spring weather has me wholly distracted and each time I sit down to write, some unforeseen duty draws me up and out and I sprint around like a scoundrel while running my errands and I fight with and against myself to make time for creative work. Life feels fast. Is it just this time of year? Are you moving through your days like a freight train too? I feel windswept and pared down to the basic functionalities of life. I can only think to myself, every day, thank goodness for the expanding daylight hours, I am able to squeeze more out of every day that passes and this seems to help displace the overwhelmed state of being that threatens me to my very marrow, at times! Some other portion of myself says, “Oh! Let it be! Let it be.” And so, sometimes, I do.

This all sounds so melodramatic. It’s this wind. It’s made me inwardly stormy.

At any rate, it’s Wednesday now! Half the week has already dissolved! I would lament this but I know time treats everyone the same. I hope you are all well. I hope it’s windy where you are. Braid your hair, put on a light pair of gloves, go out into the day and let it take you where it will.

A Wind To Whittle Your Bones