Here in the United States, we are doing a lot of marching these days.
I participated in a sister march for the Women’s March on Washington on January 21st. These marches took place throughout the United States and around the world, even Antarctica! We had about 3,000 participants in Binghamton, although we had expected only a few hundred.
There have since been other major marches, including one for indigenous rights.
April will see two major marches on Washington with satellite marches elsewhere, one for Science on April 22, which is Earth Day, and a Climate March on April 29. I wish I could be in Washington for both of those, but will probably have to settle for a local combined march.
The marches themselves are energizing, but the larger point is that people use them as educational tools to raise awareness of important issues and then continue their advocacy through follow-up actions. That has been an encouraging thing that we are seeing in the US this year, that so many people are getting involved in civic life at a new level, so…
B’s dad, who was a very long-tenured elementary school principal in western Massachusetts, used to do an announcement every March 17th about what an important day it was because, in 1776, the British were forced to leave Boston, which had been under siege since the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19th, 1775 (which is commemorated as Patriots’ Day). In the days of dot-matrix printers, he even had little greeting cards printed for Evacuation Day, which, of course, involved a Minuteman and cannon.
He used to use Evacuation Day as an excuse occasion to gift his wife with flowers.
After he passed away in 2005, B and I took up the tradition of giving Evacuation Day flowers to Grandma, first having them delivered from their favorite local florist, and then choosing and delivering them ourselves after she moved here from Vermont.
Last year, daughter T, who was home on spring break from grad school, and I chose a planter instead of cut flowers. Grandma loved them and put them in the center of her dining room table, as she usually did.
We didn’t know that Grandma would succumb to a heart attack less than a week later.
We kept the planter there for a remembrance and a splash of color as we did the necessary work to clear out her cottage. Then, we brought the planter to our home.
Over the summer, T, who had just finished her MPS in conservation biology of plants, took over plant care and broke the planter into separate pots, as it was becoming too crowded. The African violet stayed in the original green basket.
When she left in late January for her Missouri job-on-the-prairie, the plants were looking healthy and a few weeks ago, the African violet started to bloom.
So, this week it has many blossoms to remind us of the happy occasion of delivering flowers to Grandma for the family tradition of Evacuation Day.
Oh, and lest I forget, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, too!
House with snow banks at about 5 PMI am really worried about the snow sliding off the garage roof and blocking the overhead door…At 5 PM, I measured 27 inches (2/3 meter) of snow in the front yard.
The snow is supposed to continue until at least midnight and the wind has started to pick up. I am about to go out for shoveling session seven. We are all hoping that we don’t get heavy winds. Big snowstorm is preferable to blizzard.
Today, here in the Binghamton (NY) area, we are experiencing a nor’easter, which is a storm that comes up the Atlantic coast and whose rotation results in winds from the northeast. This is the strongest we have had in many years, perhaps because it was strengthened by a second low pressure system coming from the west.
The tricky thing about forecasting nor’easters is that the exact track of the storm makes a huge difference in the snowfall amount. The prediction had been that we were going to get one to three inches starting about midnight, with an additional eight to ten during the day.
I set my alarm to get up in the pre-dawn darkness – insert grumbling about Daylight Saving Time here – to shovel the driveway to get to an morning appointment. I looked out the front door to find not one to three inches, but a foot (about a third of a meter) already on the ground with heavy snow continuing, sometimes at a rate of two to three inches an hour.
Our house mid-morning
Apparently, the storm had tracked further west than anticipated – and then stalled. Fortunately, the cold from the day before was holding, though, so while we are getting A LOT of snow, it is light and fluffy, not the heavy, wet snow that mixes with sleet and freezing rain and causes power outages.
Still, it is daunting to shovel so much of it…
I worked for an hour and didn’t even have one lane of the driveway clear when I cam in to rest.
The appointment with E’s obstetrician’s office was cancelled because the office was closed, along with just about everything else in the county. The governor instituted a travel ban and is calling out the National Guard to help in the storm cleanup. We may get as much as thirty inches of snow , which I can believe, given that we have almost two feet on the ground as I write this in mid-afternoon.
(Just in case you had forgotten about E’s pregnancy – I had forgotten myself that I had written about it – you can read some of the backstory here.)
I’ve spent the day alternating shoveling time with rest and recovery time. I am very grateful that, during shoveling round four, our next-door neighbors came to help with their snowblower. Ordinarily, B uses our big Ariens snowblower that my dad gave us when he no longer needed it to clear snow for us and the neighbors, but B is away on business, the Ariens is currently in need of repair, and I am not strong enough to use it. They were able to clear the second pass of snowplow pile blocking the end of the driveway and make an initial path to the front stairs and mailbox, although there isn’t going to be any mail delivery today. Sometimes, the “neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night” bit doesn’t hold.
I need to get out there for round six now. I am trying to keep the driveway and path clear enough that we could get out in case of emergency. It is getting harder because the snow banks are getting higher than my head, so it is hard to throw the snow over them. I have left myself a little extra space for the driveway, in case of bank mini-avalanche, but I am dreading when the snow slides off the metal garage roof and lands in a giant pile in the driveway. Maybe it will wait until tomorrow, or Thursday, or even better, Friday, when B will return home.
I am not a fan of Daylight Saving Time, which started today in most of the United States.
It is not an accurate name. The amount of daylight is determined by astronomy, not by clocks. Naming the time of sunrise and sunset differently does not change the time between those two events.
What most annoys me, though, is waking up in the dark again. I had just gotten to the point where I was waking up to the light of dawn, which I find more energizing, and now I am instantly back into mid-winter waking-to-darkness.
This is not helped by the fact that we are having a cold snap and may soon have the most snow we have had in weeks, depending on the track of a developing nor’easter.
I know that many people will argue that having it be light longer in the evening makes up for the dark mornings, but we had already been able to eat dinner in natural light, although I admit that we tend to eat dinner on the early side.
By June, it won’t be fully dark until after 9 PM, which makes our usual 10 PM bedtime feel like we are children, being put to bed as soon as evening falls.
Daylight Saving Time, especially the current US implementation, also causes issues with long-distance communications. E’s daily call time with her employer in Hawai’i will shift. B’s daily 6 AM conference call with colleagues in India (thankfully) stays at 6 AM for him, but his India team has to change the time at which they call. Because the US extended the dates of DST, for the next three weeks, US time will be out of sync with many of the countries that observe DST using the original dates.
It would be so much simpler if we just dropped the whole concept and left our clocks alone.
Daylight doesn’t care, but I do.
How do you feel about Daylight Saving Time? Is it observed where you are?
This post is going to be very short, because I just spent a bunch of time writing a post about the Sappho’s Circle poetry reading last night.
I guess the other thing I should mention is that I had to adjust the mike last night because I am so short…
*****
This short and sweet post was written in response to Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week, which was “short.” Join us! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2017/03/10/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-mar-1117/
Last night, Sappho’s Circle, a women’s poetry workshop convened by Heather Dorn, hosted a poetry reading at the Bundy Museum. The Bundy is our home and we decided to do the reading during Women’s History Month, as part of their current emphasis on women’s issues, particularly suffrage.
We chose to each read a poem from a woman poet whom we admire, followed by a poem or two of our own. I chose to read “The Bleeding-heart” by Mary Oliver. I admire her talent for melding nature imagery with insights into the human condition. I paired it with my poem “Discovery” which is thematically related – by springtime, by heirloom flowers, and by family connections.
After Sappho’s Circle members had read, we opened the floor. We were thrilled to have several poets share work with us. I was especially happy that three of the Grapevine Group, formerly the Bunn Hill Poets, read. There is significant overlap between Grapevine, which meets a couple of times a month to workshop our poems, and Sappho’s Circle, so it was nice to have support from our poet-friends and give them an opportunity to join in the fun.
And it was tremendously fun!
And the poems were amazing! Several of the participants are great performers and I admired their skill in engaging us with their movement, pacing, pitch, and tone. Many of the poets also used the opportunity to present some of their edgier work, using language that I, small-town-New-England bred, good-little-Catholic-girl, would never be able to pull off.
I am honored to have been a part of the reading. I can barely believe that I get to be among so many helpful, talented poets on a regular basis. I am especially indebted to Heather, who, when she was assistant director of the Binghamton Poetry Project, connected me to what is now the Grapevine critique group, and who started Sappho’s Circle to foster women poets who want to publish their work.
