Always a Beacon

Morning bench

In Charge

   The swan drank from large puddles and patroled the parking lot,

not so keen on us,

the interlopers.

Could it be?

A small, happy sign of spring!

Flying

Little Fish

Central Park Snowgal

Snowmen and snowgals dotted Central Park today. This one a tribute to the Games in Sochi. The snow artists used leaves and sticks and chestnuts to give each one distinct look.

Just behind her, little ones took to the hill on plastic snowboards and sleds, intrepid, ruddy faced and content.

Icing

Traveling Together

Small treasures

Happy

Happy, it's a toe-tapping, smile-inducing, can't-possibly-be-down-once-it's-on kind of tune and I can't stop playing it. The video? Even better.

I remembered reading a story in The New York Times about how Pharrell Williams, the hit maker, producer and singer, was struggling to make a light-hearted but pivotal song for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack. According to the story, he wrote and rejected nine songs and felt "backed in a corner" until he finally wrote a song he said captured what 'happy' felt like.

Then he and his team created two videos, a four-minute version and "24 Hours of Happy," with celebrities and regular folk dancing through the streets of Los Angeles and in a bowling alley, a rooftop, in a church, and a high school hallway in real time over a whole day. Old, young, balletic, goofy, they let the song just carry them, along sidewalks and side streets, making me wish this was the way the whole world moved on, say, a Thursday in February.

Williams dances all over the video, in his charming Canadian Mounty-like hat, and he sings, "Clap along if you feel that
happiness is the truth."

With this song playing, it is.

http://youtu.be/y6Sxv-sUYtM

(www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/arts/music/round-the-clock-giddiness-in-a-24-hour-music-vid)

A Kind of Poetry on Ice

Even after all these years and so many Winter Olympic Games, I am still astounded by the hurtling down mountains over moguls, the zipping down face first at 75 miles an hour in the skeleton and how, in the pairs skating, Maxim Trankov could toss Tatiana Volosozhar out into the air and she could spin and spin and spin and land perfectly on that thin blade - on ice - at once gracefully and strong, and they could finish a program together that seemed to me a kind of synchronized poetry on ice.

But it's what came next that will linger. As soon as they finished the long program, he slid across the ice on his knees, pumped his fists in the air, and she stood there as the crowd roared and began to cry. He skated over to her and took her face in his hands. They had left all of themselves there on that ice.

How lucky to be invited into such a moment, when the pressure they'd felt as the favorites faded and this palpable, exuberant joy took its place. That they won gold was almost secondary.

It crystallized those times, epic or small, when we put all of what we have, all of ourselves, into something and what we wish for and work toward actually happens.

The moment had that much heft
and that much beauty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/sports/olympics/russian-pair-wins-gold-restores-tradition.html

From The New York Times

Singing

In John Muir's Travels in Alaska, he wrote about how he ventured out one very cold night to camp on a small mountain, to discover whether he could hear the trees singing. He stayed there all night, in the very bitter cold, and later wrote that the trees' "songs never cease."

I thought about those lines walking among the trees at Kent Falls. I didn't hear singing but I noticed how these two seemed almost like good friends, laughing together over a familiar story.

It made me think of something else Muir said. "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."

Waiting' on Spring

Pop

The popcorn is popping.
Such a happy sound, those
kernels popping and and pinging
against the metal cover of
the friendly old pot,
retired from all tasks,
save for this one.

Sunday Mornings at the Cafe

The Cafe Atlantique: It's that home-away-from-home kind of place, good tea, and salads and a local baker who drops off her tasty from-scratch creations. On Sundays, a jazz and pop duo stop in for a couple of hours to play and, this morning, a little girl danced, unfettered and free, and then, from another table, a little boy got up to twirl, his small stuffed puppy in one hand.

Today, on this anniversary weekend of the Beatles bursting into America's homes on The Ed Sullivan Show, they're playing lots of Fab Four. At the tables nearby, two friends lean in and catch up, a family crowds around a small table, talking and laughing, a man reads his Times, and a line forms for cappuccinos and chai teas.

The cold outside the window seems far off and the little ones keep dancing.

Local Charmer

A Hopeful Sign

It was just a little homemade sandcastle, surrounded by a dry moat, a few shells for decoration, a stick as sentry or flag at its center and a bright red shovel left behind. 

But it was a promising sign on the first weekend in February; the snow and ice had mostly melted and, for a couple hours anyway, the beach became a playground again. 

On the walk home I heard someone say, "Snow tomorrow, three to four inches."