:: mlle. h. bean ::

:: Wednesday, May 7 :: stargazing

The last few days, as the weather is warming up, I've been able to comfortably stay out on the back deck to watch the sun set. It started out on Sunday as a way for me to calm down after we returned from a trip to Mabou, and I was overtired and having trouble concentrating. So I took our "summer/guest mattress" out onto the deck at the back of the house, along with a blanket, since it was 7 pm and the air had a chill to it, and lay down, watching the clouds move slowly overhead, and breathing in and out from my belly. It was peaceful and stilling, to listen to the peepers making big sound in the wetlands, and to watch the bats swooping in the dusky sky.

It's since become a habit, and last night, along with the requisite mattress and blanket, I took out a newspaper clipping from Saturday's Chronicle Herald. It's the monthly astronomy column, called "Starstruck", written by John McPhee, whose author photo makes him look geeky, but in a friendly, rumpled way, which happens to be the way he writes: intelligent but also down-to-earth (no pun intended). The monthly column includes a chart of the night sky for Nova Scotia for that particular month, showing the constellations to be seen, as well as the prominent planets or stars. I'm not an astronomy expert — at least, not yet — but I'm interested in it. What started me going was getting the Farmer's Almanac this past January, and keeping it in the bathroom. I mean, you need something to read when you're on the loo! It might as well be something educational about the natural world. So I've learned about sun and moon set and rise times, and eclipses, and what's happening in the night sky month by month, as I'm, ahem, doing my business.

Mind you, when I go out to actually look at the stars, I can't really figure out which constellation is which, except for Ursa Major (the Big Dipper) and Polaris, the North Star, which I've always known. I thought I had found Bootes, using the Chronicle Herald chart, which I thought was a hilarious name for a constellation. But now I'm not so sure — the stars that I thought made up Bootes (snicker) look like they could be something else entirely. I'm thinking I need to get myself a stargazing-for-beginners book from the library. Luckily, library books are free, and I'm thinking stargazing books will be plentiful in the library system. And also luckily for me, I already have access to what most urban astronomers would love to have: an un-light-polluted sky. That's one of the major bonuses of living 8 kilometres from the nearest village, and 40 km from the nearest big town: bucketfuls of stars overhead.

So I was lying on the mattress last night, the blanket bundled around me to prevent chills and mosquito bites, and I was waiting for the crescent moon, only 1.6 days old, to appear in the West, along with Mercury, "the charbroiled planet", as the Almanac calls it. The moon appeared, fragile and silver as a fingernail clipping, but Mercury had yet to make an appearance. I was breathing in and out from the belly, and watching the clouds move overhead, as they moved from West to East. And I was thinking how activities like this, activities like fishing or stargazing or gardening, activities where the rhythms of the natural world dictate the actions of the human world, are so good for the soul. They slow us down, simply because the rhythms of the natural world are slower than the sped-up, artificial deadlines we humans give ourselves. And this is a good thing to do — we need slowing down.

And then Mercury appeared, tinier than I thought it would be, but still sparkling below the moon. And the peepers made their big sounds in the wetlands, and the bats swooped in the dusky night.

Labels: Cape Breton, stargazing, stress

Leah said at 11:05 AM
...

Today, April 22, is both the internationally-recognized Earth Day and my birthday! I'm 24 today, and I wanted to celebrate by sharing a few pictures that are mutually enjoyed by me and the earth, if we can anthropomorphize this little blue planet, and for this little example, I think we can.

Because what does the earth (and life on it) more good than bees? Yes, the picture above and the one below both feature a honeybee collecting pollen from a just-opened patch of crocuses.


If you zoom in you can even see the pollen on her hind legs! How cool is that ... These bees live in a hive that is on our property, and which is "kept" (in the sense that he is a beekeeper) by a local man. The bees come around our garden and the local fields and collect pollen, and then they go back to their hive and make honey and honeycomb with it. Later, in the fall, the beekeeper extracts the honey, and gives us some, so we end up eating some of the honey these bees made, which perhaps came from this very crocus!

Since that beekeeper is more of a hobbyist, most of the honey we eat comes from a Sydney beekeeper, and we buy it by the bucket. The cake I made for my birthday, which is an apple-walnut cake, calls for 3/4 of a cup of honey, and it came from fields in Coxheath, and if you go way back, it came from the millions of collections of pollen from bees just like this one.

And both me and Mama Nature think that's pretty damn cool. Happy Birthday to me! Happy Earth Day to the rest of you!

Leah said at 5:05 PM
...

It's tempting to start this post with another one of my photographs, and this is certainly not a complete abstention today, merely a pause. It's especially tempting because of all the nice spring weather we've been having, and how I've got a few shots already of little yellowy-green shoots coming up out of the ground, but I think I'll save that perhaps for an Earth Day/birthday post. (Yes, my birthday, April 22, is the same as Earth Day. That dang Mother Earth is always upstaging me!)

It feels like winter was plodding on and on, refusing to disappear, and that somewhere in February or March we all sort of accepted that it was going to last forever, and then suddenly — we're in April, and the snow is melting! What?!? I'm not exaggerating this feeling; everyone I've talked to about this agrees, and while that "everyone" is, in reality, my mother, her boyfriend, and a few neighbours and friends, we all have the same feeling that a yoke we'd grown to accept was suddenly and swiftly slipped from our shoulders. There's an actual missing of winter, or if not that, then at least disbelief and shock. But it's true — the sun is shining longer and longer each day, the air is warm enough to sit outside in the morning for breakfast, and the birds! The birds are chirping up a bloody storm! It's so enlivening to hear all the "doodeledeedee! doodeledeedee!" variations as I eat my morning porridge.

Not to mention the fact that the snow is rapidly retreating back into the woods. There is actually lawn to see, and the garden beds are coming out from under the cold, slushy blanket they were under all winter.

Good ol' spring: a both literal and metaphorical return to the light, a re-generation. I couldn't be more grateful.

Do you eat porridge in the morning? Are you happy it's spring? Leave a comment to answer either of these pressing questions.

Oh and, there's still some salad talk going on, so scroll down to read the previous post.

Labels: Cape Breton, spring, time passing

Leah said at 5:23 PM
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I welcome, enjoy and delight in your comments but I reserve the right to edit or delete comments I find offensive.