What a beautiful spring-y day! Ran with Scott to the falls in the early afternoon. He talked about the bolt he had to replace on his guitar neck which isn’t a bolt but a bone — a synthetic bone, in his case. He needs to sand it down and he’s planning to use sandpaper that’s been in his clarinet case since college — about 30 years! I pointed out the pile of branches on the side of the trail and mentioned how I’d seen the workers pull up in the parking lot as I ran by a few days ago. I figured they were planning to trees; I was right.
The falls were falling fast and hard over the limestone and under the one ice column remaining. There were lots of people at the park, admiring them. A few bikers, but mostly walkers. A school bus, but no sign of the kids. Was there a field trip, or a bus driver taking a break?
I noticed angular shadows everywhere — small branches, a street lamp, fence slats. Soft shadows too: us.
Only a few random clumps of snow on parts of the grass that rarely get sun.
time
Many different thoughts about time this morning: metronomes (see entries from 10 june 2024 and 29 august 2024); erosion needing time and pressure; stuck in a moment unable to get out vs. suspended in time and not wanting to leave; Mary Ruefle’s pause, Emily Dickinson’s hesitation, JJJJJerome Ellis’ Stutter; a time slip, a shift; Mary Oliver’s ordinary and eternal time.
While reading a book, I encountered this purple description:
The light in the sky was fading, the clouds now purple and dark, the meadows and the surrounding wood losing their color, fading into grainy variations of gray.
Kind Worth Killing/ Peter Swanson
(fading twice?) I thought: purple represents the space between light and dark, between the last bit of color and gray, between not seeing well and not seeing at all (with my central vision), after the crumbling of cone cells and before the total collapse (the last cell gone). This is my purple hour. I want to use that in a poem playing with my literal and figurative meanings of purple.
The biggest snowfall of the season. Of course it happened on the day that FWA and his college friends were taking the train to Chicago. Last year, when FWA and RJP were flying to Chicago: a big snow storm all day.
The snow is the worst kind for shoveling — heavy, wet, deep. It will probably melt by the end of the week.
The view from my desk: a man walking his dog in the street wearing snowshoes — the man, not the dog! Will I get to see any skiers too? I hope so.
Today is my mom’s birthday. She would have been 83. She’s been dead for 15.5 years. Last night at community band rehearsal I laughed at something my friend Amanda said — I can’t remember what. And my laugh was my mother’s, at least it sounded like it to me. Sometimes I hear her in my laugh, and sometimes one of my older sisters. I can’t describe the laugh — it’s been too long since I heard it — but I felt it and her last night. That’s how my memories of her work now; they are faint and fleeting and difficult to put into words.
The president’s address to congress was last night. Neither of us talked about it until it was over, but then Scott and I admitted to each other that we had been a little worried he might do something extreme, like declaring the dissolving of congress or pronouncing himself king for life. Thankfully, no. What a world.
circumambulation
In the fall of 2023, when I first started thinking about Gary Snyder and circumambulation, I printed out the Mt. Tamalpais poem, along with a related one my Forrest Gander, and put them under the glass on my desk. They have been there, beneath my fingers, ever since. Today, I reread them and was inspired. I’m thinking about creating another National Park-like unigrid pamphlet for the Franklin-Ford loop. Like the Mt. Tamalpais poem, it would have particular spots on the loop (the poem has 10) where you stop and chant. In the poem, you chant Buddhist prayers, but in my pamphlet, I’m tentatively thinking you will chant some of my favorite poetry lines — or lines I write (inspired by JJJJJerome Ellis and their prayers to their Stutter in Aster of Ceremonies). My lines would be about my blind spot.
I’m also thinking about creating somatic rituals related to these spaces — I’m using CA Conrad as inspiration for them. Yesterday I requested their book, Ecodeviance: (soma) tics for the future wilderness from my local library.
In the introduction to Ecodeviance, also posted here, Conrad describes how their (soma) tics are designed to fight the factory approach to writing poetry they had been using by creating rituals “where being anything but present was next to impossible.” For Conrad, these rituals create an
“extreme present” where the many facets of what is around me wherever I am can come together through a sharper lens.
While Conrad identifies the factory model as the source of their key problem of not being aware of place in the present, the model that I’m trying to fight in my writing/creating is the academic one, which shares some similarities with the factory.
Am I brave enough to try any of Conrad’s rituals? For one of them, they fully immersed themselves in the color red for the day —
When I say fully immerse myself in the colors I mean ONLY eating foods of the color of the day, as well as wearing something or keeping something of that color on or around me at all times.
The red experiment is part of a 7 poem sequence, (soma) tic MIDGE. For more on it, see: You write what you eat. This essay describes the poems and has links to audio recordings of Conrad reading them. Very cool.
In their introduction, Conrad describes purple in this way:
Purple being the natural transformative pivotal color which is born only when the starting color red (fire) and the last color blue (water) bleed together.
Hooray for being outside and on the walking trail! Hooray for not much wind! Hooray for running up the Franklin hill! My back was a little tight, but not too bad. My legs felt fine.
The river was open; the only ice was on the edges. The sky was a mix of clouds and bright sun. Before the run I heard some geese — did I hear any during? I don’t think so. Also heard before the run: some kids having fun inside a house — laughing and yelling through the closed windows.
At some point, I had an idea for my monthly challenge: the run as ceremony. Inspired by Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies, I want to return to Gary Snyder, Mount Tamalpais, and circumambulation. What sort of ceremonies can I make out of my run that brings together my blind spot and the gorge?
10 Things
bright pink graffiti on a foot of the 1-94 bridge
the top of one section of the wooden fence on the edge above Longfellow Flats is missing
the chain across the old stone steps has been removed
the path was almost completely clear — the only bit of snow I recall seeing was under the lake street bridge: a low and narrow ridge — just remembered one other bit of snow: just past the franklin bridge
a full-length mirror left by the trashcan
disembodied voices — coming from inside houses, below in the gorge, far behind me on the trail
sh sh sh — my feet striking the grit on the asphalt
my shadow briefly appeared – not sharp but soft, faint
at least 2 trios of runners, some pairs, several runners on their own
my friend, the limestone slabs propped up and looking like a person sitting against the underside of Franklin, is still there. I’d like to name them and add them to my list of regulars: Lenny the limestone?
lower back pain
My lower back has been sore lately. Sore enough that I took 5 days off of running. Not sure why I’ve waiting this long, but i decided today to look up lower back stretches for runners. I found this video and its 4 helpful stretches — the video claims to have 5 stretches, but they are only 4. I wonder what the missing one was?
The stretches: pretzel, thread the needle, plank to lunge, hip sweep
I’ll see how it feels in a few hours, but right now, having just stretched, it feels good!
a purple spill from march 1
I wrote this yesterday, but didn’t have a chance to post it.
It’s March and the purple hour is over, but in true purple fashion, the color can’t be contained to one month. Always it oversteps its boundaries. Reading the poem of the day, “Fog” by Emma Lazarus, purple appeared:
Swift, snowy-breasted sandbirds twittering glance Through crystal air. On the horizon’s marge, Like a huge purple wraith, The dusky fog retreats.
wraith
1 a: the exact likeness of a living person seen usually just before death as an apparition
f you see your own double, you’re in trouble, at least if you believe old superstitions. The belief that a ghostly twin’s appearance portends death is one common to many cultures. In German folklore, such an apparition is called a Doppelgänger (literally, “double goer”); in Scottish lore, they are wraiths. The exact origin of the word wraith is misty, however, and etymologists can only trace it back to the early 16th century—in particular to a 1513 translation of Virgil’sAeneid by Gavin Douglas (the Scotsman used wraith to name apparitions of both the dead and the living). In current English, wraith has taken on additional, less spooky, meanings; it now often suggests a shadowy—but not necessarily scary—lack of substance.
Wraith — I like that word and what it conjures. And to make it purple? Good job, Emma! I’m not sure about the middle section where she imagines the “orient town,” but I like “Fog,” especially this:
for on the rim of the globed world I seem to stand and stare at nothingness. But songs of unseen birds And tranquil roll of waves
Bring sweet assurance of continuous life Beyond this silvery cloud. Fantastic dreams, Of tissue subtler still Than the wreathed fog, arise,
And cheat my brain with airy vanishings And mystic glories of the world beyond.
Returning to the purple — I like how she imagines the lifting fog as purple. Back in November of 2022 (how has it been that long?!) when I studied gray, I devoted a day to fog and mist: 23 nov 2022. Last month, purple — especially lavender and lilac or eggplant and dark purple — replaced gray. Where I used to see gray everywhere, now I see purple, or imagine purple.
Sitting at my desk in the front room before heading out for a walk, I could hear the wind howling. I wrote in my Plague Notebook, Vol. 24, the wind purpled the sky. Later, walking with Scott and Delia, feeling and hearing and seeing the wind, I said it again and explained it to Scott: the blustery wind, like someone mad and full of bluster, their face turning purple with outrage. I had been planning to try running outside today, but after being pushed around by the wind, I decided I’d prefer to be in the basement.
My favorite things about the wind: the way it swirled the leaves on the sidewalk; turning the corner and feeling the wind on my back, seeing the leaves flying ahead of me.
bike: 30 minutes run: 1.5 miles basement
Watched part of S2: episode 1 of Sprint on Netflix while I biked. I’m so glad I put on the audio descriptions! I could never read the big block text they used for identifying people and locations. It’s pretty good, even though they’re using a worn storyline: rival sprinters, one is flashy and talks a lot, the other is quiet and avoids the spotlight.
Listened to a running podcast for the first 10 minutes, then an energy playlist for the rest. I didn’t want to do much in case my back or hips flared up. They both seem fine — not completely pain free, but not painful either. It felt good to get my heart rate up for the first time since Saturday.
Writing this part of the entry at 11:45 am, it’s even windier with 47 mph gusts! Very glad I didn’t go outside to run!
the purple hour
The final purple hour. I’ve enjoyed devoting time to this color. Today’s goal: to write some lines inspired by my exploration.*
rituals/ceremonies for each of my main colors? see CA Conrad on red
2 shadows, cast on the closed curtain, light source: a neighbor’s security light shadow 1 = a thick smear of bird poop on the glass turned into a small form on the curtain shadow 2 = the thin branches of the serviceberry bush, shimmering in the wind, thin shadows vibrate on the curtain
The wild/ing in this girl is purple, I think, A deep and dark purple.
Machetazo!, Bony Ramírez & Blonde Dreams, Alison Saar
you can take the girl out of the wilderness you can strand her bewilder her for a time you can even hang her upside down in your rickety attempt to shake loose the source of her power but you won’t ever disentangle the wilding from her the force of a thousand suns unfurling and hurling her toward the ground you won’t be able to erase the traces of salt lacing her ravenous dreams oh you can try unwebbing her feet but the lizard in her will keep sunning itself as the day is long and at nightfall will crawl up your walls lurking at the corners of your vision goading you on while she thwarts your every endeavor abandoning her tail anything required of her to keep eluding your capture
*Here’s a first draft of something about purple:
Purple Things
a wind-stirred sky / the space between your eye and the object you’re looking at / agitation / the light from a full moon filtered through the blinds / the square shadow it casts on the carpet / deep inside the beat a thought a dream / darkened doorways / a bruise / mold / mist / a sunset after a volcano / a fashion craze / a widow’s shroud / fibs / a house, settling / the beginning / the end / interiors / oxygen-starved extremities / ornamental grass / asters / tantrums / restlessness / the buzz beneath / impending thunderstorms / ink / iodine / inheritance: a mother’s jacket, a daughter’s despair / fake fruit flavor / static / the only color I see when I wake up in the middle of the night
One more day to rest my back. It only feels a little sore, so I think it’s okay, but I’m trying to be cautious. This is the longest break (5 days) I’ve taken in a year? I’m not sure. Another morning walk with Scott and Delia. Sunny and spring-like. All the snow has melted, almost all of the puddles have evaporated.
Picked up a new pair of Brooks’ Ghosts in the early afternoon. I’ll save them for after late April/early May, once sloppy season is done . Black with white and gray. On my walk I wore my bright yellow Saucony’s — the ones that hurt my feet last year. I’m going to give them another chance. Maybe they’ll work this time?! Forgive me, future Sara.
the purple hour
No purple hour last night. I slept straight through, only waking up briefly at 5:30 when Delia jumped on the bed. This sleeping straight through only happens a couple times a month.
In non-purple hour purple thoughts, yesterday afternoon I finished listening to/reading along with JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremonies. So good! The connection to purple is: purple asters, a big chunk of the book is printed in purple ink, I envision the Stutter/pause as purple. Here are some passages I want to remember:
Dr. Bejoian, a speech therapist I worked with from 2012-2013, taught me a technique called soft contact. “If you’re struggling to say a word that starts with p, b, or m, try starting the word as softly as possible.,” she said. Sometimes this made the syllable hard to hear. “Pause” could sound like “awes”; “brain” like “rain”; “master” like “Aster.” I want to follow this softness offered by the Stutter. Thank you, Dr. Bejoian.
For most of my life, my relationship to my stutter was rooted in shame, anger, and despair. I responded to these emotions by trying, and failing, to master my stutter through various means: undergoing hypnosis; making a fist while I stuttered, opening the first to release the work; talking in singsong; expanding my diaphragm while speaking; saying my name is “John”(my middle name) or “Shawn.” Failure has led me to a grove of unknowing. If I can’t master the Stutter, what can I do? What might it mean to try to Aster my stutter?
Aster of Ceremonies (123) / JJJJJerome Ellis
Follow the softness. I love this idea and generosity (to Self and Stutter) it offers. My vision gives softness too, not in sound, but in image. Things that are never in sharp focus are never harsh or exact, but fuzzy and gentle.
Teach me to Aster You. Teach me to treat You as an Elder that has so much to teach me. I will surrender and attend to Your ensemble of blossoms. Your Dandelion Clock* will be my timekeeper. I will seek not to overcome You but to come with You; not to pray to be rid of You, but to pray for your continued presence in my life. To stay with the mystery You steward.
What might it mean to Aster You? To pray that You Aster me? Instead of “I speak with a stutter,” what if I “advertised” to someone by saying: “I speak with an Aster. My speech is home to a hundred blooms. These silences you may hear hold more than I could ever know. Thank you for your patience as I pause to admire their beauty.”
Aster of Ceremonies (124) / JJJJJerome Ellis
I was incredibly lucky to find, a few years into my diagnosis, Georgina Kleege’s book, Sight Unseen. Her generous approach to her own central vision loss — including not understanding it to be a death sentence and giving attention to how her seeing works and to challenging assumptions about the infallibility of vision — helped me to be curious about how seeing works and to develop my own relationship with both being without seeing and seeing in new ways. Even as I struggle with not being able to see that well, I also welcome the new knowledge my strange seeing/ not-seeing is giving me. I imagine Ellis’s “astering the Stutter” to share some similarities.
Ellis connects their Stutter to the Aster and to the many plants (he names them Elders) that their ancestors relied on. They feel a strong connection to these Elders. Such a powerful idea to bring all of this things — ancestors, plants, a glottal Stutter — together. Wow! Inspired by this approach, I’m thinking about how I experience my central vision loss in relation/beside the gorge and the eroding rocks and relentless, remembering river. What ceremonies could I create to honor the different layers of rock? The seeps and springs and floodplains? How does the wearing away of stone, the persistence of water, and my eroding cone cells open a door to a new space in which to dwell to explore to learn from? ooo — I like this idea. I want to give a little more time to thinking through how Ellis makes their connections, and how I can make mine.
pm: 45 minutes cooper school / 7 oaks / edmund 51 degrees
More sun and birds and warm air. Lots of people and dogs also walking, runners too. A woman running in bright pink shorts. A woodpecker softly knocking, or knocking loudly but at a distance. A biker whizzing by then turning into an alley in front of us. A man coughing thickly. We talked about our kids and their futures, a possible spring break trip, Scott’s plug-in, the Brooks Ghost 16s I’m thinking of buying with our REI refund.
My back is feeling better, but is still sore. I probably won’t run again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll bike on the bike stand?
excerpts from Indigo Insomnia/ Monica Ong
Indigo insomnia is the great waking, this birthing of the world anew. From the indigo, an even deeper blue, is it said.
We talk so much of light, please let me speak on behalf of the good dark. Let us talk more of how dark the beginning of a day is.
. . .The mouth holds many things except the language of the new, still forming between the lungs. The spoken vow we breathe, but don’t yet know how to defend.
. . .Wondering if your voice is in the wrong chord, the wrong song, the wrong language, or just a painting of the ocean, its roar muted by a gilded gaze that see but doesn’t listen.
Indigo insomnia is diving into the deepest waters of memory to uncover the bodies hidden by our bad inheritance.
Thinking about traumas we inherit, despite others’ best intentions. I was pregnant with RJP when I learned my mom was dying. What impact did my overwhelming grief have on RJP and her mental health?
—
Reading about indigo in On Color, here’s something I’d like to remember about the difference between dyes and pigments:
Technically, a dye is a coloring agent that bonds with the molecules of the material to be colored. Pigments are also coloring agents, but they differ from dyes in that they don’t bond with the material; they are small particles of color held in some suspension, forming a film that attaches itself to the surface of the substance to be colored. Pigments, one might say, are applied to materials; dyes are absorbed by them.
On Color / David Kastan
Another important thing to remember:
. . . the slaves who worked on the indigo plantations in the Americas really were dying. A soldier who had served under George Washington in the Revolution afterward wrote about the “effects of the indigo upon the lungs of laborers, that they never live over seven years.”
Nonetheless, the worldwide desire for the remarkable blue dye allowed indigo plantations to thrive anywhere the conditions of climate and soil permitted indigo-bearing plants to grow. In the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies the plantations of the New World satisfied most of the world’s desire for natural indigo.
Sun and no wind and barely any snow + chirping birds + barely iced puddles + mud and grit = the feeling of spring. I’m excited for warmer weather, although I’m also disappointed we didn’t get more snow. I suppose we still have March and April for that.
Walked with Scott and Delia. Scott and I talked a little about the U.S. and politics and how getting outside makes it a little (just enough) easier to endure all of this terribleness.
10 Things
a black standard poodle stopped in the road, its human patiently waiting for it to move
boulevards that are more mud than grass
a thin, almost invisible sheen of ice on the shaded side of the sidewalk
noticed for the first time, even though we’ve walked past them dozens of times: a kid’s footprints embedded in a stretch of old sidewalk
chirp chirp
the warm sun on my face
near the end of the block: someone repairing or adding to a front porch
heading south: a cool breeze
blue sky
the alley: mud, grit, puddles, ice
70 minutes to the library and back 45 degrees afternoon
Another chance to be outside! A wonderful afternoon for a walk. Sun, no wind, clear paths. Books to pick up at the library: Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color and Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Noticed a dark bluish purple fence that clashed with a dark blue house and a house painted plum.
the purple hour
I did wake up a few times last night, but I didn’t take any notes about it. This morning, I’m finishing the violet chapter in On Color.
What color are the haystacks really? What color is the cathedral at Rouen? Monet’s answer is that the haystacks and cathedral are the color (or colors) they seem to be at the moment of looking (147).
“ocular realism” = a commitment to the illusionistic rendering, not of the world, but of visual experience (147).
1:30 pm / neighborhood walk
As I walked to the library and then back from it, I tried to think about violet and purple and images the evoke my feelings of restlessness and uncertainty and not-quite-formed. A hummingbird, mid-air — moving too fast to see the motion, or a spinning top, constantly whirring but looking solid and still. Carbonated water, something fizzy and bubbling — small little bouncing balls or shimmering bubbles. An insistent, soft whisper. Soft, unstable.
25 minutes with Delia to the Winchell Trail 53! degrees
No running today; I’m being careful with my sore/stiff lower back. Thought I’d be taking a longer walk in the warm weather with Delia, but I made the bad decision to go to the Winchell Trail. Even though I tried to be very careful on the thawing hill, I slipped and SPLAT! fell flat on my butt into gooey mud. The butt of my jeans, the back of my coat, and my hands were caked in mud. I’m lucky I didn’t hurt myself. Whew! The worst part of it was the 10 minute walk of shame through the neighborhood back to my house with my muddy butt.
the purple hour
3 am / bedroom
A quick look at my iPad. When I turned it off and put it down, an afterimage: a bright rectangle, then all darkness. It took more than a minute for the lavender light to return. As I waited, I recited “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.” The light gray blanket on the couch glowed a pale violet which I mistook for a square of light until I touched it and felt the blanket. If dark cast on the light is a shadow, what is the word for light cast on the dark?
Reminded of a poem I gathered and its description of light cast on the dark:
Good-Night/ Seamus Heaney
A latch lifting, an edged den of light Opens across the yard. Out of the low door They stoop in the honeyed corridor, Then walk straight through the wall of the dark.
A puddle, cobble-stones, jambs and doorstep Are set steady in a block of brightness. Till she strides in again beyond her shadows And cancels everything behind her.
Now I’m thinking of ED’s a long, long yellow on the lawn The light in my bedroom had a pale and cold ghostly glow, not a warm one — no color.
a pool of light? a stream of light? what are some other words to describe light in a dark room?
4:34 pm / front room
violet — On Color/David Scott Kastan
Yesterday, reading an essay about periwinkle, I discovered On Color by David Scott Kastan. My local library doesn’t have it, but RJP’s college does. Hooray! I was able to download the entire book! Currently I’m reading the chapter on violet. Here are a few passages I’d like to remember:
An exasperated French novelist, Joris- Karl Huysmans, complained that “earth, sky, water, flesh” were inevitably now the color of “lilacs and eggplants” (141).
Lilacs and eggplants. That’s what light and dark look like to me in the bedroom in the middle of the night. That also seems like a great name for a poem.
Landscape became the characteristic genre of the impressionists, but their interest was not, as with earlier landscape painters, in recreating the particularities of its geological, agricultural, or architectural features. They wanted, it was said, to recreate the immediate visual impression of that landscape, produced by the light in the very instant before the brain fully organized the scene (144-145).
Can my brain every fully organize the scene? Sometimes it/I get stuck and a landscape doesn’t make sense.
It isn’t that they painted objects as we see them. They painted the luminous air and light that exists in between the eye and those objects (145).
I’m fascinated by this in-between space and all that happens in it. Here I’m thinking about Alice Oswald and her invoking of Dante and the spiriti visivi — light as insects traveling to object to collect the color like pollen and then deliver them to us.
I’m roughly halfway done with the chapter, but I’ll stop here for now.
back pain
Looking up lower back pain I’m happy to report that it’s most likely only a weak core/overuse issue. Time to do some “gentle moving” — walking, stretching — for a few days. I’m cool with that. This article recommends dead bugs, planks, side planks, glute bridges, and child poses. Also: a heating pad.
1.5 miles neighborhood, with Delia-the-dog 38 degrees
Ahh! Sun, above freezing, no wind! Birds! Melting snow! The promise of spring! I’m taking a break from running today because I’ve run 5 days in a row and my lower back is tight and slightly sore. Also, I wanted to make sure that Delia got a proper walk today. It’s difficult to balance walking her and running. And, when it was so cold last week, she didn’t want to go out that often.
Lots of walkers and dogs out on the sidewalks. Overheard: 2 women walking in the street — one to the other, isn’t that cute! aww . . . poor thing. Poor thing? Were they talking about Delia in her cute orange letterman’s sweater? If so, why did they say, poor thing? Did I miss something when I put her harness on?
10 Things
blue, cloudless sky, only a few birds and branches in it
drip drip drip — one gutter
gussssshhhhhh — another gutter
a steady stream of cars on the river road
a steady stream of runners on the trail
one runner in shorts, their bare white legs glowing in the sun
soft snow on the grassy boulevard, no sharp snaps from my striking feet as we walked, avoiding the voices and a clanging collar behind us on the sidewalk
the faint knocking of a woodpecker
a view of the river through the bare trees from above on edmund: all white, looking less like water and more like field
that sun! stopping to let Delia sniff, feeling the warmth on my face — flashes of memory from other warm winter days
the purple hour
2:30 am / bedroom
light coming in through the ineffective blinds, casting purple — lavender carpet and walls, indigo couch and closet interior
8:45 am / dining room
Trying to determine which tint of purple the carpet was, I encountered periwinkle.
Periwinkle is a color. . .
A subset of violet, which is a subset of purple, periwinkle denotes a precise shade that appears somewhat brighter than lavender, bluer than lilac, clearer than mauve, and dimmer than amethyst. But it’s hard to say with precision, because the purples are strange ones, polarizing, and violets are even more so. Few hues are more beguiling and more reviled than this grouping, the last stop on the rainbow and the tacked-on v at the end of that schoolchild’s mnemonic, Roy G. Biv. According to the scholar David Scott Kastan, shades of violet exist within their own special category. Violet is, like glaucous, a color-word that denotes a certain quality of light. “Violet seems to differ from purple in whatever language—not so much as a different shade of color than as something more luminous: perhaps a purple lit from within,” Kastan writes in On Color, his 2018 book on the subject. “Violet is the shimmering, fugitive color of the sky at sunset, purple the assertive substantial color of imperial robes.”
But lately, I’ve found myself waiting for the sun to go down, timing my walks so that I can be outside then, when the bats begin to swoop around the oaks and the mosquitoes hum around my face. It’s not the golden hour (which occurs about an hour before the sun touches the horizon), it’s the periwinkle window. It lasts only a few minutes in the summertime; dusk descends fast in the north. But for fifteen minutes, the sky is painted with various shades of violet, indigo, and mauve. At dawn and dusk, my tiny little dead-end road becomes another place, quieter than during the daylight hours, but visually much louder.
The species is commonly grown as a groundcover in temperate gardens for its evergreen foliage, spring and summer flowers, ease of culture, and dense habit that smothers most weeds. It was once commonly planted in cemeteries in parts of the Southern U.S. and naturalized periwinkle may indicate the presence of graves whose other markers have disappeared.
Everyday, in every room a shawl tossed untidily upon a chair or bed Created no illusion of lived-in-ness. But the periwinkles do, in beds That flatten and are starred blue-violet, a retiring flower loved, It would seem, of the dead, so often found where they congregate. A Quote from Aeschylus: I forget. All, all is forgotten gradually and One wonders if these ideas that seem handed down are truly what they were? An idea may mutate like a plant, and what was once held basic truth Become an idle thought. like, “Shall we plant some periwinkles there By that bush? They’re so to be depended on.”
…a snail/whelk
Littorina littorea is known as the Common Periwinkle. It is native to Europe from the White Sea, Russia to Gibraltar. It has been introduced to the West and East coasts of North America and the Mediterranean. Some introduced occurrences have failed to establish sustained populations, but others have persisted, especially on the East Coast from Newfoundland to Virginia. This snail is characteristic of intertidal rocky shores, wharves, and pilings, but also occurs in mudflats and marsh habitats. It is a common food item in Europe, but is rarely eaten in North America. It is highly abundant in parts of its introduced range and has had impacts on food webs, through competition with native species and increased grazing which reduces seaweed abundance. It is also host to a variety of parasite species.
Feels like spring today! Birds! Warm sun! Melting and dripping snow! It is supposed to warm up all next week. The path wasn’t that crowded, which is surprising because it’s so nice and it’s Saturday. I don’t remember much from my run, other than wondering if my back was hurting (occasionally, a little) or if I should stop to tie my shoelace (I did). Can I remember 10 things?
10 Things
3 or 4 fat bikes on the dirt rail that is on the other side of the river road and runs alongside Minnehaha Academy, lower campus and Becketwood
a biker and a bike stopped at the bench across from Folwell
the rounded shadow of the light part of a lamp post
a thick layer of snow on the walking path between folwell and 42nd
three runners ahead of me evenly spaced across the whole path
my dark shadow ahead of me as I ran north
the clanging of an unseen dog collar
a walker talking loudly on her phone as she walked, her voice echoing through the neighborhood and then above the oak savanna
a runner in a bright blue jacket turning onto the trail from 42nd
the river, all white, all covered in snow
I listened to voices as I ran south, the mood: energy playlist on the way back north.
The poem of the day on Poetry Foundation is First Fig. Figs can be many different colors but are often associated with purple. Since I’ve posted this well-known poem about a candle burning at both ends before, I decided to find out if Millay had written any other fig poems.
SAFE upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
First Fig and Second Fig are from Millay’s 1922 collection, A Few Figs from Thistles. Is her use of figs and thistles a reference to Matthew in the Bible?
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
Matthew 7:16-20 King James Version (KJV)
Speaking of thistles, my mom often had globe thistles in her garden. After she died, I recall wanting to grow them in her memory, but I can’t remember why. Is it because butterflies like their round purple flowers, or because I do?