Spring

Early spring in Montreal.

It looks a little bit like Antarctica:

Except for all the plants.  Frozen under, sprouting through crusts of ice and squelching in the mud: so many plants.  So much chlorophyll, waiting for the sunshine.

Some of the animals are already into it before the snow thaws.

Others, like this raccoon, seem to need a little moment to gather themselves.  He was standing three feet off the cross-country ski path, blinking blandly and looking like he might need a cup of coffee.

No coffee necessary for the waxwing; he's already dressed for the party.

Ditto the great blue heron, the redwing blackbird and the pileated woodpecker… all spotted within Montreal city limits.  

I think I'm going to like life in Quebec.  The people, like those year-round resident birds and early returning migrants, don't seem to stand on ceremony when it comes to celebrating the season.  The first day the thermometer crept up past freezing, our unknown neighbor, red-nosed and mittened in the still-brisk air smiled at us broadly on the street and proclaimed, "Le printempts est ici!"  Or anyway, that's what I think he said… I've got a long way to go on my French.

After securing ourselves an apartment in our new city, Tyler and I spent several weeks in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine, watching spring unfold further.  It started with the skunk cabbage, and quickly proliferated from there… oh, the plants!  The plants of spring!  How can anyone bear so much green and yellow and color?  Suffer brightly with me:

We watched the forest blossom, blueberry barrens buzzing with bees, the tiger swallowtail butterflies clinging to the northern bush honeysuckle.  The columbine, the fringed polygala and the lady slipper peeking from between the umbrellas of the wild sarsaparilla.  We ate several rounds of fiddleheads, powering up with forest nutrients, and then cracked the guidebooks, trying to learn about everything around us.  One month ago I could name only a dozen wildflowers, but in the weeks since, I have listed 50 or so from around the midcoast region of Maine.  The names of trees are coming more slowly, perhaps because I have to look up and away from the wildflowers to study them closer.  The birds are all hidden in the foliage, and we took to lying on the dock and staring back up at the canopy, waiting for warblers to hop briefly between perches.  A glimpse of bright yellow almost always meant a Yellow Warbler, but closer looks occasionally reveal Pine Warblers or Goldfinches.  In lieu of definitive glimpses, we began to get better at identifying bird calls.  The most ethereal bird call in the entire forest is the Hermit Thrush.  For weeks, they haunted our hikes, sounding like magic flutes beckoning us deeper into the forest.  Then, Julia and Schuyler came to visit, and Julia, who is normally busy cramming her brain with the finer points of grammatical structure in ancient languages, confidently identified the Hermit Thrush as the only bird she knew by song.  The Ovenbird, the Eastern Wood Peewee… we know a few now.

And in between studying bird calls, botany and French, we went swimming.  

I Went to the Great Northwest and This is What I Saw

First impressions of my new country: everything in the Canadian Rockies is bigger and craggier than anything south of the border.  Everyone is so dang friendly.  The air smells clean and I like it.  We spent several nights in a lodge in Yoho National Park.  Half these photos were taken around Emerald Lake, and the other half at Lake Louise.  Sometimes the smaller trees have curly tops.  Sometimes you are driving along, and suddenly you see a tree that looks like it has a gigantic marshmallow on top, but it turns out to be a hunk of snow.  Watch out for chutes and avalanches!  We saw so many pretty winter birds: a Three-Toed Woodpecker, some Nutcrackers, and our old friends the Snow Buntings.  AND.  We finally heard the American Dipper sing his most sweet and amazing song!!  Is there anything like rounding a corner and finding a tiny, rotund bird with his feet planted in a freezing cold stream, singing away with all the joy in the world?  It is entirely different from swinging your headlights into a parking lot at night and spotting a herd of lady elk hunkered in the snow drifts, which is instead a scene of awesome quietude.  I am happy to accept either experience in the course of a day, thank you world.

We have journeyed, slowly, up the coast from San Diego to Vancouver and then east to Montreal.  Several years ago, I drove the opposite direction from Vermont to St. Louis and then eventually Portland, OR.  I thought I knew what to expect, but somehow I was still startled seeing the topography in reverse.  And mentally, there is a really curious thing I am finding about seeing what is here in Canada, instead of the Unites States… its like I never really imagined Canada to be anything but a hat of land sitting on top of the country I grew up in.  But Canada!  Gee whiz.  I had no idea, not one single clue.  And I have been here before… it just feels totally different now that I can stop anywhere I want and just live there if I like it.  Some farm town in Saskatchewan.  Some forest in Manitoba where the Great Grey Owls hang out.  Some French paper mill town in Northern Ontario.  Wherever!  

We're stopped here in Montreal for the time being.  We'll get ourselves signed up for some free French classes and see how that goes.

Look who else we saw:

Also, this is a rabbit print in the snow:

2014: The year that on top of everything else, I quit biting my nails.

We have taken exactly eight photos since we arrived back in the US, and they all look like this:

Tyler's mother has decorated their house in Rancho Bernardo to be a calm, peaceful, clean space: white, white, little black, more white.  Her kitties match the house perfectly.  These three brothers are new to Tyler and I; they were kittens while we were wintering in Svalbard.  We have been here since Thanksgiving, and have spent the holidays in the traditional American style: turkey, shopping, Christmas trees, wrapping paper, way too many sweets, football and commercials.  There have been a lot more palm trees around me than in any other December of my life, but we did take a trip to the mountains last weekend for a tiny dose of snow.  Snow!  Last May, I wasn't sure if I would ever miss it; I was so sick of shivering and runny noses and wet socks.  The fact that it is December 31 and I am now 31 brings me to consider the year.  It has been, frankly, huge.  Here, look at this:

Northern lights and the moon.

My 30th-birthday gibassier, or how I spent December 25, 2013.

Snow and ice over the river in Oslo.

Southern Oman.

Mosque, Sharjah

Barentsburg: "Welcome to Russia," popped up on Dagmar's phone when we sat down for our lunch break.

Svalbard daytime.

Danish fields.

German fields.

Seychellois hibiscus.

Tropical sunset and windswept hair.

Rome, overcome with clouds and tourists.

Texture from the door of La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona.

Tiles at Parque Guëll.

Wild irises in los Pirineos.

Wild thistles in los Pirineos.

Dahlias in Gabe's parents' garden where I house-sat for all of August.
PS: I am the world's best house-sitter, hire me to come watch your house in your exotic and interesting neighborhood.

Oh that Oregon coast...

Waterbugs at the Cute Patrol Camping Trip.

The Alhambra, Granada, Spain.

Neighborhood gatos, Granada, Spain.

Silver chicken from the crazy procession we saw in Granada for the lady of a million sorrows or something like that.

Lisboa!

Oh, crumbling, lovely old Lisbon...

Weird old Spanish mountain town with the dogs that fought in the street.

Pigeon at the Alhambra.

Chefchaouen blue.

Morroccan Bee.

Sunset over Meknes.

A million storks over Meknes.

Ait Benhaddou.

Morroccan coastline north of Sidi Ifni.

This is not a muppet, this is a bald ibis, in nature.

See? This is where he lives, with all his friends, along the edge of the old Paris-Dakhar Rally Road.

The harbor at Essaouira.

Brighton beach stones.

The bright boardwalk at Brighton.

Sunny old England.

Is it any wonder that my heart hurts a little trying to assimilate all the wonderful things that have happened to me this year?  I'm really not sure what to say about it.  Where to begin, first of all, but also: seriously, what happened?  There is probably something inherently unhealthful about marathon travel.  If I look back at my notes from the final quarter of the year, they are full of references to my tattered flag of stamina.  Tyler and I got sick in Spain in September, from a mistake involving water from a fountain that was not potable.  Two weeks!  It was awful.  I have lost things-- many things, including some valuable things on the edge of the Sahara, but none more valuable than my patience, which is still a bit thin from so many hours trying to yoga-zen my way through airport lines and city streets and nights asleep on lumpy or hard or cold or damp beds.  I have had knots in my neck for going on six months.  Is it possible they are permanent?  Should I go see a chiropractor?

But here is the thing about it: I have been "home" for, what, 6 weeks?  It seems almost impossible, but I am pretty sure that the slight flutter of anxiety I feel upon waking is basically itchy feet.  It was so fun to go to the mountains last weekend!  To sleep in a new place, wake up to a morning that looked new, watch for birds I had never seen before, leave behind the list of things I "had to do" and focus on being somewhere for a while-- days at a time, only needing to be somewhere and live it.

If you think I am anything but grateful for the year this world has granted me, you're crazy.  I am so gol-dang lucky, it just isn't funny.

So what to hope for in 2015, and what to resolve to?  "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting," wrote Robert Frost in The Figure A Poem Makes.  Sometimes I feel like I stepped up onto a big piece of ice, and now I just want to be able to ride it along on its own melting for as long as it will sustain me.  Hoping there's another ice flow to hop to when this one becomes more puddle than piece. I think this is also what surfers do when they are riding the swell.  As long as I can keep renewing my patience and energy, then I can hope to hang on.

Last year, by the way, I resolved to quit biting my nails, and totally kept my resolution, so here's to that!