Misty Morning

We were out early this morning for our Spring Lake walk. The sun was struggling out at our house a few hundred feet up the hill from Spring Lake which is tucked in between three dams with the hills on the other side. In other words...it is a bit of a soup bowl of mist which takes awhile to clear. We were well bundled up as the temperature hadn't topped 40F (about 4.5 Celsius). More rain is forecast to begin later tonight and continue through Saturday. It's an early beginning to the rainy season but we are certainly not complaining...The land is desperate for it.

The rest of my morning was spent at the Dermatologist's office...or getting there. The socially distanced chairs in the waiting room were all taken and I was given a buzzer and told to wait in my car until they buzzed me. There was a time when the 45 minute wait in the car would have undone me, but clearly they were busy and short staffed, they had accommodated me by giving me an earlier appointment the the 4pm one I had originally, and I would probably have been sitting somewhere catching up on Blipfoto comments anyway. The sun came out and was shining through the window, warming me nicely.

I'll say one thing for the doctor...once she gets started she is very fast. She removed squamous cell carcinoma #1, put in some stitches and I was on my way home in half an hour. Back in two weeks for #2. I got some beans and a very old frozen ham hock cooking before the anesthetic wore off. There's not much else in the house but one thing Covid times have taught me is how to use everything. 

I'm inspired in that respect by a book called Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She is an indigenous woman (Potawatomi from the Great Lakes region of North America), a botanist and a poet, and bridges two worlds beautifully with her wisdom about our connection with the earth and with each other. Reading the chapter on learning to make baskets from ash trees, I was struck by these words:

Responsibility to the tree makes everyone pause before beginning. Sometimes I have that same sense when I face a blank sheet of paper. For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me. And now (making a basket) there's another layer of responsibility, writing on a thin sheet of tree and hoping the words are worth it.


I'm reading the book on my Kindle, but this is one of those books that is so wise and beautiful that I want to own a 'real' copy of it.