Anticipate Joy, A Christmas Hope Deferred

the thing with feathers

anticipate joy
though it may nest seeds of pain;
cancelled christmas trip

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I often feel ungrown, childlike in more ways than I care to admit. One of the foremost perhaps is in still feeling acute disappointment at having an anticipated joy taken away. My kind eldest brother, who knows me very well, called today to say that a trip to Texas planned for this Christmas would not be wise given the current storms of Covid swirling around the country. It was a call that I perhaps knew was coming and contained wisdom in it that I fully accept. And yet, and yet—with so many others in this horrid year, I know—it always takes a little while for the adult me to calm the child me.

And so, to process my feelings, I said a prayer, brewed some Tazo Joy tea (which my dear sister-in-law in Texas always makes sure…

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Autumn, Elegy

From a sister blog.

the thing with feathers

Several days this week have had a coolish tinge and my thoughts turned briefly to Autumn. Such August foreshadowings have happened to me several times before, with each experience producing a deep pang of anticipatory joy. It was not so this week. Instead, dread.

The title of this piece could well have replaced its comma with an equals sign, autumn=elegy. Or perhaps one might imagine these two words appearing in the same thesaurus entry along with others: wistfulness, lament, convergence, recessional, farewell. Autumn is all those things—a fullness, a fruition, a condensation of the promise of Spring, the fecundity of Summer. Is it any wonder that it is the season for the making of jams.

And, yet, under and around this elegiac, backward gaze there also exists a forward facing foreboding, a miasma of dread for the coming winter, as the daylight dims ever earlier and the cold winds…

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Of Mountains and Mangoes and a Great Lady – Veda Samuel

A post about a dear aunt from Pakistan. From a sister blog.

the thing with feathers

Veda Shakuntala Das was the eldest of the five children of the Reverend and Mrs. P. I. Das of Sialkot, Pakistan. And being a “Das” was a fact that she would proudly own till her dying day; indeed pride of bearing that name may just be somewhat of a besetting sin of some us Dases. Under her married name, she was Veda Samuel, the very respected English teacher at the Lahore Convent of Jesus and Mary School and the wife of kind and gentle Uncle Samuel. She was mother of Ansel and Emile Unjom, our elder cousins who we so looked up to and who would show us the sites of the great metropolis of Lahore. And she was “Phupo” Veda to my brothers and me.

I think that you can learn at least a little about what a people hold dear by the degree of linguistic specificity that they…

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Thoughts Upon Frying Cod

From a sister blog.

the thing with feathers

Two of us in my current shared household of four men are inveterate salmon eaters—great fans of Aldi’s economical wild caught salmon with the skin on, which we bake or fry in large batches for the week. It is a great grace that the others in our home who are not partakers do not complain. Salmon frying indoors is legitimately a cause for disharmony. Did I mention we leave the skin on, creating what one of the said gracious roommates just noted “leaves residuals for days.” Well, they don’t complain much!

And so it was somewhat of a change-up today when I set into my cast iron frying pan thick fillets of firm-fleshed, skinless cod, procured from Aldi’s somewhat more sophisticated step-sibling Trader Joe’s (it’s a complicated story). Today I kept things simple and added butter and oregano, salt and pepper. I even left off the lemon which…

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The Corona Yard at Night – Queens – New York City

Bric-a-Brac, the Show – Opening Reception – August 11th, 3-6pm – La Mancha Coffeehouse – St. Louis, Missouri

Bric-a-Brac, the Show-Opening Reception, August 11th, 3-6pm La Mancha Coffeehouse

This show is already up, but I am hoping that you can make it to this opening reception at La Mancha. Feel free to drop in anytime during this 3 hour period. You may choose to buy a meal or snacks or a drink from La Mancha (which would be a lovely idea) or just hang out and look at the photos and talk to friends.

The Firefly Hunters – An Image from a Failed Shoot – Forest Park, St. Louis

This evening I went out seeking a prairie/wetland area in Forest Park where a friend told me there were many fireflies. True to his word, the area was teeming with their twinkling, many of them appearing to be in sync. I tried to take some long exposures, but even with my 6D the noise in the images in near darkness was simply too much to produce many usable images. I am going to have to work on my technique.

I waited for some bicycles with lights to pass but did not manage to get a great shot. Then I saw the lights of a group that had lit jars, presumably to store caught fireflies. I pointed my camera at them and hoped for the best. The image is noisy, but after some working over, it shows the group as they waited for a while before heading down the path. It has a painting-like look that I rather like. You may wish to view the image in a new tab/window to see a larger version.

Contingent – A Reflection on the Spring Flood of 2017

From another blog…

the thing with feathers

Feature image is of the Old Playground Pavilion in Tower Grove Park, St. Louis

I sit to write this brief reflection as I work a shift for a colleague trapped on high ground somewhere South of St. Louis, the water of a swollen Meramec River keeping her at home. Another friend upstream posts pictures of the water that has trapped her family near where the same river passes just southwest of the city. I, myself, though largely dry, save for a trickle in my basement, stare at MoDOTs highway closure map, zooming down on red and yellow lines slashing the lower half of the state that block my easiest routes to a weekend retreat, placing my trip in jeopardy.

Contingent: “dependent on or conditioned by something else”

It is not a feeling that we like to have–being reminded that we are not the free-agents that we think ourselves to…

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Chesed Shel Emeth – The Jewish Cemetery Desecration – Reflection and Haiku

A piece from another blog to which I contribute.

the thing with feathers

Image by Jim Salter, Associated Press.
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Today I drove through University City as I have done many times over the past thirteen years. Today the St. Louis area turned again to the sense of Spring that had come too early and which was interrupted by a week of cold, which left all the magnolia blossoms dead, their normally bright blooms appearing in ambushes of joy throughout the city now like brown dirges, their depressing refrain repeated every few blocks.

It has not been the first time that I have passed the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery since it was desecrated on a weekend last February, but in today’s ordinary, good Spring sunlight, the act became more horridly real to me, perhaps just because of the ordinariness of the day.

This was the cemetery that was next to the Missouri Council of the Blind thrift store which I visited so…

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Rainy Day Magnolias – Tower Grove Park – St. Louis, Missouri