Monday, January 28, 2013

January's Wolf Moon


Our recent full moon of January 26th is called a "Wolf Moon" in the legacy of northern and eastern tribes of the Algonquin and Iroquois nations. In cold mid-winter snows, wolves roam the landscape in search of food.
No wolves are seen around here but the moon still rises bright, clear, and crisp over buildings put up to house the waves of immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: these are the buildings we refer to as tenements.

Jamaican-born poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay (1889 - 1948), was inspired by the sight of moonlight over the tenements.


"Upon the clothes behind the tenements,
That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines,
Linking each flat,but to each indifferent,
Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines."

A Song of the Moon
Claude McKay


The use of the clothes drier and concerns for tenant safety have brought the sight of laundry lines to an end in most big cities; but the moon still shines upon the tenements and, in places far away, families of wolves are searching for sustenance.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Looking forward

The winter holiday celebrations are fading quickly. The green presence and the fragrance of our homes' Christmas trees are about to become a thing of the past. It's the start of a new year - 2013 - and we begin to look forward to spring's verdant growth and renewal.
Even if you have only a window box, it's a great joy to spend time on a cold and gray day browsing through garden seed and plant catalogues. The photographs and illustrations are splendid and bring on dreams of warmer, sunnier times, hands digging into earth, and bountiful harvests of flowers, fruit, and vegetables.
American essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner wrote seriously and sometimes humorously about gardening.

"To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race..."

"The thing generally raised on city land is taxes."

Charles Dudley Warner, American author, 1829-1900
My Summer in a Garden [1870]