early november miscellany

On this, the first day of the return to standard time, the sunrise was beautiful and early, and the skies stayed blue for a couple of hours. Then, the clouds moved in; we began our slow return to gray, and some snow flurries sneaked in. In fact, the weather forecast calls for a dusting of snow overnight.

While making one of my many morning observations of the pond, albeit from the back door in the kitchen inside our warm house, I spotted a Great Blue heron sliding along the edge of our shore, its feathers almost exactly the same shade of gray as the sky, its legs almost completely covered by the cold leaf-covered water. The heron was in the perfect spot for me to take its picture, and I had my camera at the ready, but it had already spotted my slow, careful movements, and I knew that if I opened the door, it would fly away, like it always does. I chose to watch it instead, though it took at least five minutes for the heron to get back to the task at hand instead of watching me.

Nothing stalks prey quite like a Great Blue heron. In retrospect, when I wrote about the crows stalking around a couple of posts ago, that was wrong. They weren’t really creeping up on anything; they were doing something comical, like a bunch of stuffed marionettes being marched around from above. The Great Blue, however, with its graceful long neck, odd way of lifting its legs one by one out of the water, and leading with its spear-sharp beak, definitely stalks. I watched it come out of the water, having caught nothing, and start to wander in the woods, until I lost sight of it, its body blending in with the bark of the trees, perfectly camouflaged.

I received an unexpected compliment this past week which made me very happy. Dave Bonta, over at Via Negativa, included The Pine Meadow Pond Journal in his “Smorgasblog” sidebar. Dave is a talented poet and writer, and I’m frequently moved by his work. He has also been writing lately about the fall. Two of my favorites are his poem, “October dusk,” for its evocative, gorgeous imagery, and his recent post, “The shining season,” for its beautiful photography and accompanying text which allow the reader to tag along with Dave on a recent hike through his part of the world. Please spend some time exploring Via Negativa and Dave’s other blogs; you won’t be disappointed.

The Pine Meadow Pond Journal was also recently accepted into The Nature Blog Network, which is a community of nature blog writers, as well as a “portal through which readers and publishers alike can locate the very best nature blogs on the net.” There are some seriously topnotch science and nature blogs out there, in a wide variety of specific subject areas, and you can find many of them by clicking on The Nature Blog Network’s badge over there in the sidebar to the right, just below the tag cloud.

Speaking of badges, are you wondering what that one at the top is all about? NaNoWriMo What-Mo? If you’re not familiar with it, that silly tongue twister is the acronym for National Novel Writing Month which occurs every year during the month of November. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days. Yes, that’s a lot of words in a month. And lots and lots of people – more than 200,000 – from all over the world sign up to do it. This year, I’ve signed up to do it, too.

Have I suddenly turned wannabe novel writer? No, I have no desire, now or ever, to write a novel. I like my real life characters – geese, turtles, coyotes, hawks – much better than any characters I could dream up. The good people at The Office of Letters and Light (could there be a more perfect name?), the organization behind NaNoWriMo, is very egalitarian. They welcome all comers. It doesn’t matter if you don’t write novels. In that case, you can be a NaNo Rebel. And I very much like being a rebel.

So why am I doing it? Several of my blogosphere writing friends are doing it this year, so that was part of the draw. But I’m really doing it for the writing. It’s for the discipline and the practice. It’s hard, and it’s risky. As author Gina Frangello writes in her essay at The Nervous Breakdown, “Everything that matters burns. I believe that. On the page and in life.” I’m working on a few burning things of my own: my migraine memoir, some longer stuff about the pond, and a difficult piece about the death of my dog three years ago.

Some of it may become blog posts, but maybe not. Some of it is looking as if it wants to join together and not be separate anymore. The number in the badge is my current word count for the month. I’m not terribly concerned about getting to 50,000 words. If I do, great. But, as I said, this is about the writing. Butt in chair, hands on keyboard, every day, writing like a woman possessed, or, should I say, writing like a writer.

Tagged as: autumn, friends, Great Blue, heron, NaNoWriMo, photography, poetry, snow, stalking, time change, Via Negativa, writing