“I heard a Crow elder say… ‘You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough — even white people — the spirits will begin to speak to them.  It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land.  The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.'”

Gary Snyder, “The Practice of the Wild”

It is strange to think that the house we live in has stood for more than 200 years.  When it was first built, this area was farmland, and Route 9 was a dirt carriage track to Boston (the “Old Post Road”).  The beech tree that I so admire in a neighbor’s backyard may have been here even longer.  What is 20 years in comparison?  (And, actually, 2012 only makes 19).

Still, nearly two decades is long-ish in the arc of a human life, and very long in my particular life when moves were very frequent as a child.

The warmth of spring was unsettling (again) today.  What is the mass-pleasure about ‘nice’ weather, anyway?  I sometimes get the feeling that no one would care if climate change utterly destroyed life as we know it, as long as we didn’t have to wear mittens!

So, I was up.  I thought it was K’s restless legs that had me downstairs at 1:00, 2:00 a.m., but maybe it was one of the ‘old powers’ — drawing me to the window, and finally, outside, to capture this shot of the full moon just minutes before the sky clouded over fully and rain began to spatter.