January 15, 2025

ASC back last night. My voice was gone half way through. Sat beside a new guy named C, slim, elegant, British/Italian, teaching history remotely at DePauw. He lives in Marshall, but his house stood above the water. We lamented together the fall of UNCA, but then it was revealed that A is his aunt, and that his house stands on their mountain beside hers. I refrained from observing that his aunt is the person who started my university irreversibly on its decline. Small world.

Sweetboi came back, and took his tribute yesterday. Maybe he doesn’t migrate at all, but makes his rounds among his benefactors. 

Occurred to me last night that I didn’t say goodbye to either of my parents. That must mean something even now. 

Wolf Moon

 

January 14, 2025

Recalling how snow-cover renders the mysterious night garden fully visible, so you can see and identify anything that moves. The Wolf Moon of the last three nights made the illumination almost painful. The snow also reveals the tracks of a man (I suppose) who wandered down my drive at some lonely hour of the night. You hoped for dog tracks beside him, but there was not even that.

Thunderbird

 

January 12, 2025

Lovely snow cover significantly eroded by the end of the day.

Finished The Joiner.

Listening to videos of the Los Angeles fires. Catastrophic. Every now and then a house or two stands untouched in the midst of ruin. 10,000 buildings consumed. Some suggest the fires were deliberately lit. It began Tuesday; today is Sunday. It is my understanding that it hasn’t ended yet. I don’t like the idea of being helpless, utterly without a useful suggestion to make, a remedy to offer. One man wept bitterly for the dogs he’d left in his house. One woman screamed from her car, “I have to find my father!” It was foolish to keep watching after I began to sob. 

Our hurricane and California’s fire bring something into cruel focus. Our emergency services are not up to the task, nor are they intended to be. Biltmore Village stands empty and dark. Roads into the mountains will never be rebuilt. FEMA stops paying hotel bills for people who have nowhere else to go. Firefighters and linesmen, etc, are not part of this issue: they worked until they fell in their boots, and no one can level criticism at them, heroes all. Nor can the victims be blamed: we dragged people out of the water, cooked meals, opened our homes; Californians stand on burning roofs trying to save the houses of their neighbors. The people behind the desks are a different story. They scrimp in the name of economy, but that economy serves mostly to get money into the pockets of the rich. Let’s see how little can be enough, until we’re exposed by the next disaster. It will be worse with the incoming administration, which says outright that its purpose is to get money into the pockets of the rich. The American government does not exist to enable or defend the welfare of its people. It is a miraculously well concealed plutocracy, and somehow the masses buy into it. I wish I could fly over LA like a thunderbird, shedding rain from my winds. 

 January 10, 2025

Our much-heralded winter storm was a fizzle– maybe an inch on the ground, melting as it gathers. The brunt seems to have passed to the south, enabling news reels of students at Clemson gamboling in the snow. The sound on my study window now is much like rain. Disastrous fires continue in Los Angeles. One commentator said an area the size of San Francisco is charred. An aspect their fire has that our hurricane did not is the celebrity apocalypse. Anthony Hopkins’ home went up in flames but did not float down the French Broad. 

Sweetboi is gone. He’s like a grown son who comes back on holidays, has a few square meals, and then is off on his adventures. 

One neighnorhood lady walks her bulldog on my side of the street instead of on the sidewalk. I thought this curious, until, watching today, I saw her let her dog shit on my lawn, where it wouldn’t show and she wouldn’t have to clean it up. Mystery explained. 

Fire

 January 9, 2025

Los Angeles is aflame. It’s the next big national disaster after ours. All in all, I’d prefer wind and water to fire, so my heart goes out to them. Videos from Malibu and Pacific Palisades are horrifying. 

Trying to reconcile my apparently insatiable appetite for feral hog hunting videos with my belief in the sanctity of all sentient life. 

Discovered that I have a seat warmer in my Toyota. The little blessings. . . .

 January 8, 2025

A bluebird perched on Sweetboi’s branch. Which pleased the branch more? The branch reorganizes, re-projects itself according to who’s perched upon it. 

Rose yesterday and wrote in the dark before morning. Morning was a long time coming, but when it came, the east went purple-gray. 

Bluebirds and robins still thronging. I don’t know exactly what to do for them. Maybe I already did it by not raking the leaves. 

Resolved to visit M in Mission Hospital. It has been thirty years since I was there, and I'd forgotten how dauntingly enormous the place is. I parked at the exact farthest corner from the place I was meant to be, so I wandered through the mass of it. Reminded me of the several times I worked in hospitals. M was having a procedure and not in his room. I waited for an hour, but he didn’t come back, so I went on my way. He is so sick the presence of a visitor might not have been a pleasure anyway. Security is tighter at the hospital than I remember, or would have imagined. One is photographed, IDed, watched suspiciously in the corridors. That did allow me to ask directions quickly on those several occasions where I found myself lost. The view from the hospital windows is spectacular, frosty blue mountains rolling into the distance. 

Epiphany

 January 6, 2025

Epiphany. Almost incredibly inclement outside, with high winds from the north and swirling veils of grainy snow. The ground and low air skitter with robins. I’m glad I don’t rake my leaves, for they’re scratching around under them trying to find sustenance. They gather on my east porch, a little out of the full brunt of the wind. Little birds, sparrows and wrens and my handsome towhees, shelter in the tangle of raspberry stalks I leave outside the bedroom window, where I can see them from my bed. The wind and the trees and the birds all move in various directions, making the earth turbulent to behold. 

I’ve been keeping this journal for 56 years. 

Looking up JG’s house, I strayed onto mine, discovering a bounty of former owners, and that my roof was new in 2005. All the photos online are from before I moved in, but as the place was when I first saw it. Certain listings cite my father’s care facility in Alpharetta and my former PO box downtown as former residences. 

Wind howling like Coleridge’s poem, and like Yeats’.