extravigant minutiae

My ability to get out and about with the camera has been interrupted lately - the digital is my husband's and it's his passion, so it stays with him most of the time. Plus, I'm not all that comfortable with all the settings. I want my old Nikon FM and the ability to go in the darkroom and make my own prints, red light darkness and the tangy smell of chemicals, the swish of the developer in the stainless steel can, the burble of fix as the prints are flipped, bare-fingered.

But then they'd have to be scanned and all that. So.

For today I'm the camera.

Some recent snapshots via my own eyes:

On Sunday my daughter rode in her first big horse show. First time out jumping, period. The stadium course was the most complex one she's ever done - ten solid jumps laden with flowers, no straight lines, complicated pattern, maximum height and width for her class. She was visibly nervous, face tight and lips set, but when I asked if she wanted to ride it, she said YES. Adamantly. Her pony was flustered by the applause after each round, shying sideways, prancing, and by the time they entered the arena, he was a bit wound up. She got off course midway and at the next jump he refused, quite suddenly, and she fell. Big covered arena, surrounded by riders and trainers and family members and spectators and a judge... a course she was suddenly in the midst of and confused by. A pony who clearly wanted to be Done With This. She stood up, got her pony's reins, brushed herself off, and remounted. Tried again. Two more times he refused, but she stayed on, circled him around, and the fourth time he jumped it perfectly. Her tenacity was astounding. This snapshot files with one I remember from her second year: our family in the mountains, hiking to Linville Falls. The two year old who absolutely refused to be carried, but hiked the whole way there and back on her two little feet. People stopped and commented on her tough persistence.

Yesterday: a neighbor's horses got loose while she was at work. They came straight to our fence line, seeking the company of other horses. Keil Bay alerted us with his deafening hyena squeal. I envisioned a horse fight in our own herd, but he was squealing at the neighboring herd on the other side of our fence. Suddenly they spooked and ran back toward their property. The snapshot - four bay horses of varying sizes, cantering free, such an odd sight but beautiful. The wildness of horses is hidden with our domesticity, but there it was, flowing manes, tails, no fences.

Today: white sky, the bare black branches of trees in silhouette. Wind rushing, cold air. A glimpse of winter, nearly colorless but for the evergreens, which keep us hopeful.

simple pleasures

Today we got hay from our favorite local hay grower. He has the most beautiful, organic orchard grass hay around, and has been very generous in loaning his farm truck when our minivan died and we lost our hay transport vehicle.

Now we can get a good-sized load in the horse trailer, and when my husband pulled up with the hay around noon, I ran out, as I always do, to watch the bales being stacked in our hay room.

I do not know why this gives me so much pleasure.

I suppose it comes from all the years of wanting horses at home and finally having them. The hay is the full cupboard, akin to the full house feeling of standing in the barn aisle at feeding time while four heads wait patiently over stall doors.

And then Keil Bay knees his stall door with one huge bang. Reverie has its limits.

Next to getting hay, I love when the shavings guy dumps our huge load. It lies beneath the blue tarp like a huge cat sleeping, or a small whale waiting. The cats, Osage, Dickens, and Keats, careen down the sides and eventually end up on top, like Sphinxes.

Putting clean shavings in means forking them into the wheelbarrow multiple times and emptying, one load after the other, into the stalls. My favorite part is to spread the shavings, bank them against the stall walls, smooth them out, feel the springy, fragrant pine beneath my feet. The equivalent of making a bed up with crisp clean sheets. The thought of rest to come.

When we moved here to our farm, a full year ago, I imagined my pleasure in these simple things would pale with the repetition.

It hasn't.

hit by a Cosmic Ray

Today I was writing an email when my laptop suddenly made a high-pitched squeak and went deadly black. I sat for a moment, terrified, then closed the laptop and waited for the little light to blink, letting me know it was still alive.

Nothing. I opened the laptop back up and hit the power button. It made the usual sound, but the screen remained black for what seemed like too long a time - so I grabbed the phone and dialed my personal computer tech support guy. He told me to restart the computer. :)

By that time the screen was on again and things seemed normal. Until a little window popped up saying that my computer's clock was set for some date in 2001 and I needed to do something manually.

Personal tech support guy talked me through it. It had already reset itself to "Apple Time" by that point anyway. Files opened. I had lost the email. I thought I had lost Firefox. Tech support talked me through re-finding it.

I asked what it meant, that the computer had done this.

"Was there a power flutter?"

"No."

"Nothing happened with the electricity?"

"No."

"Must have been a Cosmic Ray."

I thought at first he was teasing me. Then I thought maybe it was some new Eckhart Tolle thing. Tech support guy googled something and read it out loud to me. Something about a, yes, Cosmic Ray, knocking out computers, something called soft errors.

By this time, I was completely charmed by the idea that I Had Been Hit By A Cosmic Ray.

:0

I'm convinced it forebodes amazing, fabulous things.

:)

Sorry, I was unable to obtain a photograph of this amazing experience.

vultures

I've been trying to get the three ravens in a photo to no avail, and didn't have the camera with me the morning I saw the stand of vultures, probably twenty-five or so, in a roadside field.

But my husband came home tonight with a gift - this lovely photo of three vultures, a nice compromise, particularly in silhouette.

Thank you, Matthew.

the ballerinas

For the past few months the house has been occupied with spiders I've named the ballerinas because of their exquisite delicate legs and violin-shaped bodies. The ballerinas create nearly invisible webs and thus seem suspended in mid-air, gracefully spinning, sometimes doing what seems like dance across the span of threads, occasionally seeming to cartwheel as they stay out of the path of my movement.

One was beneath the windowsill by my garret chair. In the evenings when I write she would spin to keep me company. Her spinning is what brought me out of a stuck place in the summer.

Another one lived by the window over the kitchen sink. She would visit as I washed dishes, quickly disappearing if I splashed too much water.

Last week I discovered one in the huge seashell that sits on my bathtub ledge, the perfect place for a spider who needs easy access to private spaces.

This one lives above the roses hanging above the laundry room sink. Although she sometimes comes down to the sink itself, today she was encouraged to come low enough for the photo.

The ballerinas seem to be dying out this time of year, although I'm noticing lots of very tiny ones, nearly impossible to see in their fine, transparent youth.

Other than Charlotte, these are the first spiders I have become attached to - they seem to add something to the spirit of creativity, artists in residence.