nine windows

Nine windows on two sides looking out at the trees

Beyond the deck with the bird feeders and sundial

Watching the season change the colors and textures

Green goes to yellow, orange, brown and soon bare gray.

I am alone in this house listening to the quiet

Watching the spruce by the deck fluttering with birds.

This morning the furnace circulates hot water sounds

Sprinkled in with cold drizzling drips of November rain.

It is just as quiet here at night when you are reading

The nine windows gone black in the darkness outside

Though the neighbor behind has a driveway spotlight

That outlines the big oak tree in our bedroom windows.

This is the quiet we wished for, the quiet that lets me hear

Grandfather tick tock towards his chimes on the quarter hour,

Lets me contemplate my thoughts without interruption.

The quiet stillness in this house is a sanctuary for me.

There is a meditation in music that I enjoy as well.

I put on sweet solo piano tunes that float along

Touch my heart with memories of loved ones

And thoughts of future times together.

celery farm foliage

album

automobility

If you live downtown in a congested city center

Where mass transit is nearby and frequent

And parking is a problem and expensive

It’s easier to give up your car.

It means you have to limit your shopping

To what you can carry in your arms or cart.

It means most likely doing your laundry

In the building basement or a laundromat.

The youth make these choices for their reasons

To be able to mix and meet and hang out at night.

The affluent don’t give up anything, enjoying

The urban context that lets them display their wealth.

For the rest of us living anywhere else

A car is a necessity and a pleasure to have

To go wherever you want whenever you want

Something everyone in the world would like.

And for all of us who participate in the global economy

Trucks and planes and boats move the goods we buy

Made in smokestack factories or grown on industrial farms

Depending on megawatts of electric power generation.

You could say I am addicted to this way of life.

I do not deny global warming but I do not change, either.

Like all the problems that were passed onto my generation

Now I repeat what was done before me.

I have a cabin in the mountains that is off the grid

Burning wood as long as trees remain

With solar panels for electricity and batteries for storage

Built in factories and shipped long distances.

The cook stove uses bottled propane tanks.

I burn a tank of gasoline driving there and back.

It’s a lovely refuge sitting next to a small waterfall

But no way is it not part of climate change.

I put a metal roof on it that will last longer than I will live

But it sits on a foundation beam on the ground

That will not last so long.  I do not know how to fix it

And I do nothing, leaving it for my successors to solve.

local fall foliage

album