It's raining hard this morning, a dreary, slanty, sideways rain, falling from a slate sky. How many more days until the forsythia lightens up the landscape with that first bit of yellow?

I thought of a morning last fall when I passed a woman planting row after row of bulbs in a New York City park. She smiled when I stopped to look. Daffodils, she said.

It turns out she was part a project that started just after 9/11 when the city yearned for color. A parks volunteer and a parks commissioner thought why not choose flowers as a way to lift people up, to remember and to look forward? A Dutch bulb supplier wanted to help and sent bulbs.

Soon the city had a bulb brigade, thousands of volunteers who, over the years, have spent a bit of their fall planting bulbs in public spaces and parks all over New York City, everywhere.

On this rainy, lonely day,  it's nice to think that hundreds of thousands of bulbs are nestled under the ground, waiting for just the right moment to cheer us.
                                                      ~     ~     ~

http://www.ny4p.org/daffodil-project

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/daffodils/

I like wondering where the next bend in the road or the long stretch of tracks

might take me. 

One sky, so very many moods. I can't stop looking.

The Empty Page

We spent Sunday afternoon considering the audacity and beauty of the empty page,
the way it dares you to consider all the possibilities that live 
in that white space, 
and the vision,  the decided determination it takes to fill it,
with a story, a song, a poem or drawings that eventually become 
an animated short film. 

We went to see the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts yesterday. It’s become a bit of a tradition. In the week or so before the Academy Awards, we try to see a collection of one of the short film categories, live action, documentary or animation. We end up having more of a stake in that one award than we do in all the major categories, rooting on a film that lasts perhaps 17 or maybe 11 minutes. 

This year two were tiny and slight but fun, “Fresh Guacamole,” and “Maggie Simpson in 'The Longest Daycare' " and three were tiny and anything but slight:  “Paperman,” the sweet story of guy meets girl, loses girl and finds her again with the help of his ingenuity, a couple hundred paper airplanes and one with a mind of its own; “Adam and Dog,” a visually stunning film about dog who discovers man (Adam) and is loyal to him, even after the man’s loyalty wanes and finally returns. And, “Head Over Heels,” the story of a husband and wife who have grown so far apart, he lives on the floor and she on the ceiling, and what it takes to get us back to the people we love and the people we were. 

This year, William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, who directed last year’s Oscar winning animated short film, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” narrated the collection of short films and told the story of their own journey to make their film. Joyce spoke about how they began with an idea and one empty page and another and another, all waiting to be filled and so they started drawing.  Life tossed everything their way over the course of 10 years, gave them every reason to give up, but they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. 

They told every artist wrestling with the blank page to do only one thing:
Fill it. 

                      ~ ~


 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/head-over-heels-oscars-animated-short-film-419900

http://smashinginterviews.com/interviews/authors/william-joyce-interview-peering-inside-the-mind-of-rise-of-the-guardians-producer-and-book-series-author

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkJPMsWw6Z8

Who will win best supporting actor?

Best live action short film?

Morning Song

They hide in the thicket of barren branches of the forsythia bushes that fringe the yard. Starlings, I think, or our morning birds because their song begins just after the first light.

Most often they fly off at the very sound of a footstep. If I am utterly quiet, I can step near enough to see six or seven or sometimes 11 or 12 of them in the very middle of the bushes, resting on a branch, then flitting off to another, but always chirping, singing, even on the frostiest of mornings,
such a welcome sound.

Enduring

I like it best when trees aren't tattooed,
when they're left to their own devices, to do all
they already have to do, lend a home for a nest, a branch 
for a bird hankering to sing a tune or two, provide shade for us 
on a hot summer day. But I paused by these initials anyway.

I had just heard a story on the radio about two people who 
assumed they would be single for the rest of their lives, until they 
fell in with the same group of friends who met on Wednesday 
evenings after work. She started to ride with him to concerts 
and games and there, when they were least expecting it, was love.

She said that of all that had happened in her life, he was the biggest 
blessing. Now she is ill and they face a test. She wants to keep
living life so she can keep living life with him.
He says he will help her live it. Their story was with me as I stood
by the tree and thought about love:
the magic, the everyday, the enduring way of it.  

http://www.wbur.org/npr/171994440/a-husband-and-wife-blessed-late-in-life

                                                       Whose move?

Cupid, a Valentine's Day symbol for sure, but I'm more enamored of
the guy in the jeans who can still make jokes as we shovel 38 inches of
snow together and as the roof of the front porch falls down a bit. We are not so
elegant perhaps as the pair in this sculpture, but lasting as the stone its
carved from. Chuckling, continuing a conversation that started more than 30 years ago.

Waking on this sunny morning, I know what a lucky, good thing that is.

Snow Mountain

There it was, a mountain of snow and two ways to look at it,
with a kind of weary glance, a testament to
all that shoveling and streets still snow-mucked and
tricky to navigate

or it was magnificent hill to be climbed and conquered,
the perfect sliding spot for a round plastic sled,
a tall snowy pile of adventure, plain and simple.

All around yesterday, in the morning and again in the evening,
the streets rang out with laughter and shouting.
Kids outside making elaborate tunnels and forts,
digging, stomping and, later, splashing in the deep
puddles left by melting snow.

A small dog, not quite five pounds, burrowed into deep
footprints, took a ride down a tiny hill on the back of a
sled and cavorted in and out of the drifts.

Two decidedly different ways of looking at that
same very tall tower of snow. And yesterday,
as is often the case, the kids
and the little dog knew best.

                   ~          ~          ~
It reminded me of  a couple of poems I've enjoyed trying to
puzzle out, each speaking to the idea of perspective:
Wallace Stevens'  "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"  
and "The Snowman." 

Having lived and worked in Connecticut, Stevens likely had
his share of snow to both shovel out and marvel over.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15746

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-snowman.html

 Where to?

You had me at
“I took my love and I took it down”
and the first image of the little colt and the guy training him.

How is it that a 30-second Super Bowl commercial had a few
million of us tearing up last night? It was just a young guy and a
horse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2prAccclXs

We all knew, even before the first clop-clop of the hooves,
that the horse who had moved onto the big time, would have to turn around
and see the guy who had trained him and loved him since his first steps.
Yet there we were sad for that split second (Had the horse forgotten him?)
and relieved and happy when the horse started running toward him.  

Sure, they’re selling us a beer or a search engine, a taco or a car,
but the good ones sell us
us
and the very things that matter  most.

Maybe it’s captured best here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk

(AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

I am trying to imagine the thought bubble over this rather resigned looking Punxsutawney Phil  yesterday during the annual Groundhog Day hoopla in Pennsylvania:
`Really?'

I have to hand it to America for our high wacky quotient, that 20,000 people would swing over to this corner of the globe to see if Phil sees his shadow or not. It seems that there are now competing groundhogs, a fella named Staten Island Chuck from New York and then General Beauregard Lee from Atlanta. But folks still seem to put their stock in Phil.

I read with interest that not only does he amble out of his den and either see or not see his shadow, he also "consults" with the president of the Inner Circle, a group of folks who "don top hats and tuxedos for the ceremony." There's a conversation I'd like to overhear.

It appears we are in for a treat. Phil didn't see his shadow; I'm not certain what other pearls he shared with the Inner Circle president but headlines read that spring is on its way.

Actually I kind of like our penchant for making a to-do, a zany little stir where there might otherwise be just the second day of February.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/02/groundhog-day-2013_n_2605213.html