Blog-azic

Emerald Outback, searching for Backbone Trail. Found the serene ridge top, the houses on spacious yards (of this mountain beech and grass), and Oz Forest Run. Muddy, wet feet, magic mountain top. The color green in dappled light. Every puddle is an exploration. In the afternoon we drove down the mountain to Banner Elk to Tate-Evans Park. We walked the green way upstream, following Shawneehaw Creek. We picked a few black raspberries for Adella, who thought they were too tart at first, but after she realized that she could pick them herself, she couldn’t get enough. We coaxed her away from the canes with the promise of river play in the cold, clear, swift water. In the evening, after Adella was asleep, I went out in the porch and looked at the moon through binoculars. Susan joined me and we watched a movie on the porch. 

Sassafras Trail. Paved easy road. Down into the hollow. Expanses of club moss. The laurel hollows. Tulip poplars. Another family with a whining child, who silenced as we past and started again when we got further. Coaxing Adella for more steps. Buckeye Recreation Center. A wonder of a play ground, but closed. Adella tried to go under the caution tape around it. Instead, we went down, down a rocky, laurel ravine to a loudly rushing mountain stream. The trail followed along side the stream until it passed over via a bridge at a waterfall. On the other side, Adella splashed in the feeder streams and seep water. Settling on an offer. Pizza (hidden from Adella) and movie.

Overlook Trail, a climb at elevation with child in arms. Dense forest over boulder bones. The dirt, where present, dark and spongy. Lake Coffey to Lower Pond Creek Trail. Hiking up to the same park from the morn. Around the lake and over boardwalks. The beeches looked strange, kind of gnarled. I came to know that they were the garden variety beech, but that a disease was wiping them out. It explained the dead, and felled beech at our cabin that so interested Adella, and the dying beech still upright beside it.

 A tiny sliver of moon hangs in the west. As it slips down, it rings round. This is the phase I love best. After the photographer came for staging photos, and I could finally let my breath out, I closed my office door and laid on the floor, unable to concentrate on work, and I listened to my thoughts running over each other. I tried to calm my mind and clear my head, but I was too tired. It’s taken days to recover a sense of peace, and it’s even some low stress state and not true calm. But such is my life now. We went due East, turned off of I-40, and headed to the hill country. When we stopped in Boone for groceries, Susan took the family to a small garden behind the store, and I met them there. It was cool, and lush, and is probably the closest I’ve come to the Ohio clime. In fact, I later found that both Beech Mountain and the Lake Erie Basin have the same climate type (called the humid continental climate). We twisted up from Banner Elk to Beech Mountain, and found our cabin cl...

 Adella had a clear moment of growth today. I found her and Mom in the bedroom playing on the floor, and I sat down and started to chat with Susan. While talking, Adella crawled on Mom's leg and bit her! Mom exclaimed. I signed "it hurts" and pointed to the spot where Adella bit. She stared blankly at us for a few seconds. Then her lower lip waxed, protruded, and trembled. Tears welled in her eyes. Mom picked her up and held her close and in a few moments, she was laughing again. Today she saw first, that she can hurt people, and second that Mom and Dad expected something of her that she didn't attain. 

 For weeks, we had a dry spell with relatively cool weather and sun and wind. I spent a whole week watering grass seed twice a day. Then, on a dime, the weather turned and we had buckets of rain. The ground is now soggy, and the air is very humid. We caught New Hope Creek at the end of the dry and after the deluge.  After a few weeks exploring the Little Creek Waterfoul Impoundment, we started hiking Duke Forest. That first day, we parked on the roadside behind a long line of cars and hiked in. A large timeline sign reviewed the history of the land: clearcut, managed forest, selected cuts. We went down to the river, cautiously stepping off the trail to avoid our fellow hikers. It was a short loop and then back up a different hollow, baby now switched from Susan to me. The next time, we went across from a Durham park to a lush green bottomland forest, with giant sycamores (a treat in this area) and equally impressive tulip polars and a shurb layer of spice bush and pawpaw and j...

This year is our five year wedding anniversary. I want to check-in with the wedding party and musicians to see how they are. The desire has been rolling in me for a while. It's affecting my dreams, now.  I've been dreaming of people I know, err knew. People I've left behind, unfortunately. People with whom I should reconnect. First, it was Dianne, a violin player I gigged with. I was traveling far away in the dream, and somehow I met her. We may have played a little music. Then, it was Rob, an NC friend who is now in SF, CA. I dreamt my family visted his family in SF. His house was my old co-op though. He and I snuck off, smoked a joint, and he took me for a drive. His car (in fact lots of cars could) drive on water, right over the Bay.

 Adella past the one year mark. To celebrate, we threw her a birthday party. Grandma and Grandpa Lyons were in town. Other friends included: Liz and Eric, Ben and family, Hafed and family, Eric & Alice (and Caroline), Kory and Evan. I cooked a couple chickens and baked a pan of cabbage slaw. I also disgorged our last bottles of champagne before the party. Susan made a no-sugar smash cake for Adella (oats and bananas), and we also bought a half sheet cake from Harris Teeter for everyone else to enjoy. I tried to be a good host, and I did manage to greet all the guests as they arrived, but after that I lost focus on guest and did what I really enjoy: following Adella around. After some time, we got things together enough to sing to Adella. I cut giant pieces of cake for the kiddos while Adella delicately ate her smash cake. Grandma enjoyed the smash cake, too. Then, I played piano and sang tunes while Eric plunked along on banjo. Susan read a story for the group. 

2020 nuff said.

An earth tone drive through Ohio rain. Direction: southeast, into old hills. I thought about the Native Plant Rescue as we sped through the Nelsonville bypass. I peered into high oak hollows. In each or some of those crinkles of earth is maidenhair fern and other plant treasures, things that evoke mystery and speak of age. The maidenhair. It evokes another memory. I remember an old visit to Cantwell Cliffs: the maidenhair in the valley, scrambling over timber and ferns, revelations of a lost sister, really getting to know someone, barbecue for dinner.  We were bound for - I think I am bound to - Athens, sleeping in the wide, alluvial plain of the Hocking, and bustling up above that fertile ground on brick paved, pock marked streets. Up the hills it creeps. Children in rotting houses slummed out over the hills that are close enough to the past that they still remember woods. I am one of those children. This time, I come with my own child. Earlier in the trip, safe an...

I went out back behind work yesterday (building 11), into an area where the scrub woods, pines and young hardwoods, are bisected to open a wide shady space. The space has been un-neatly filled with various plant debris (clippings, dirt, defuncted annuals), probably by Cisco facilities. You can walk over the mounds of detritus to Lake Betz (the northern side). I walked there sloping from pine to grass to soggy ground, cattail muck, recurred bramble thorn, a trampled deer path. I stopped short when a noticed a patch of grey under a beech tree. I went down - yoga squat - close to mud, close to grass sweeps where something goes in and out of the lake, brown water but settled and clear, trying not to disturb the solemnity. After a few minutes, I bowed and humbly picked my way back through the brier as the heron watched. That little natural jaunt sort-of changed me in a way that slowly washed off as I waded through the next day. We left North Carolina on I-77 north, and I felt like I sa...

Winnipeg was unlike I’d ever seen. Maybe because of repeated visits (this my fourth), maybe because of nostalgia, I found myself seeing more in this trip. So many murals, patient trees, people bundled for the weather (which was mild). I walked one evening to a Safeway grocery (against advice from a customer-colleague) in an aging neighborhood. I distinctly felt like a foreigner, like the cashier and I were speaking different languages, like I felt in Mexico City. Most nights, I ate a quiet, deliberate dinner at Stella’s at Plug In, a hip restaurant near my hotel, while reading a thick biography of Dr. King, musing about duality - not good and bad necessarily, but inner and outer selves, being great and being average, being remembered and being forgotten. The last night, I lay in bed feeling anxious and defeated, having been reminded by a conversation with my trainee that I gave up on the hardest (networking) test I’ve ever taken. Then today I thought, “I’ve found my limit, and...

I’m bound for Winnipeg, the fourth and maybe last time to support a long project I’ve been assigned. It’s a dirty and cold city full of elms, tall with up stretched arms and down turned finger (spooky looking at night). These past months have past by very peacefully, and I haven’t had the strong urge to blog through it. Though I would like to save some memories before the end of the year. I spent the morning with Adella. We laid on the futon in her room for a while, looking at the oak trees out the window, talking about the bells, laughing at Benji, wiping up drool. I’m sure there will be a time when such unabashed affection will only be a memory. Susan let me alone with her the other night, and I handled all the night wakings. Certainly a tiring event, but also it feels good to be so needed by her. Susan’s folks were visiting last week. It did feel good to have them, and I think it’s very good for Adella. We need to get back to Ohio. Maybe Cincinnati. Yesterday, w...

Susan wanted a walk, so we drove down a big hill to the bottom land of Woodcroft and walked back on the Third Fork Creek Trail. While we were still on the Woodcroft Trail, I noticed the mature oaks and beech trees lining the road. It made me think that this was a rich forest before it was developed. Perhaps there are small pockets remaining where it is still wondrous (though, it has been called one of Durham's dirties waterways ). Some early morning, while Susan and Adella are still sleeping - or perhaps they'll come along - at about 6 am, when the unrisen sun starts to grey the horizon sky, and as the birds are joyfully singing about lush spring, I’ll come here with Benji and sneak about, sweating under a heavy wool shirt (to keep away the mosquitoes), looking for adventure. As it stands, we had a small adventure yesterday on the trail. There were massive ants swarming the parking lot we used. We grabbed Adella and Benji and set off. We decided to walk without a wrap, and...

It could have been a week cooped up inside, a lack of sleep, new parenthood, etc., but Bolin Forest has never looked so full of wonder, so mysterious, so lush, and has never felt so familiar. The clear cut is just as chilling and stark as ever, but we spotted a barred owl on its edge. In fact, we walked in such a deep silence. It felt restorative and refreshing, like the cold, sparkling creek. In a clearing under the deep beech shade we stopped. Sun rays struck downward and dust caught in micro currents reflected the light. A pair of titmice made soft and curious contact calls between tree branches, not unlike the ornate sweep of the cardinal’s song. Afterwards, we went to Weaver, which is remaking itself new, and talked honestly with one another and tried to make ourselves new, too.

Mystic mountain sailing through time. Hillsborough is a fog creeping up your feet. Mountain laurel testifies in your quarry pulpit: “Stone feels harder in brutal sun.” Sourwood choir sings the refrain: “Thin detritus feels drier in humid air.” The woods were somewhat moist. I mean, Occoneechee Mountain is always dry, but in mid spring, it felt not so parched. The southern heat is only beginning. Jessica and I ran along the loop trail with Benji along side off lease, over tumbling ground, rock strewn. Over and back making small talk. Down by the Eno, in the northern shadow of Occoneeche, we got to the meat of the matter: grown up things, middle age things. It’s the summer of our lives, and, say, is it getting hot in here? I know she wanted to stay longer and explore more. Admittedly, so did I, but I was thinking of getting back for story time.

We left in high pollen, kicking up clouds of yellow dust in our wake. When we reached Virginia, the trees were still leafing, but once we climbed the Shenandoahs, the trees were winters’ brown. In West Virginia, they became tart, yellow green again. Athens was a bit of a whirlwind. Susan stayed at the BnB while I went to pickup takeout Casa. The city was jumping, but then it was an exceptionally warm spring Thursday - the weekends begin for many students on Thursday as often a class will not meet on Friday. I drove down Mill Street and the shirtless college boys didn’t stop their game of catch football as I passed. They simply chucked the ball over my car. When I finally returned to the house, our old friends and their kids were there. The house was a jumble with a baby crying, children running, and adults shuffling behind. For the kids, I bought a simple bag of Nilla Wafers with “artificially flavored” boldly advertised on the package. It wasn’t until dark settled when the hous...

We all woke up slowly today, stretching, yawning in a lost blanket, white sheet Highway. While Susan nursed, I picked up a book of Norse mythology and read aloud the story of Ragnarok, sad but hopeful and new, bittersweet like a good cry. The story drew a bold line between the past (the old stories of the gods) and the future (the end with fire and ice). In the are between the two (the present), lives we, human kind. Later, as Adella had her biweekly cranial massage, I drifted off in a daydream thinking about my own mythology: my twenties. Being adventurous parents, we drove Morgan Street downtown instead of going right home, then, north on Person, past the iconic Krispy Kreme to the Yellow Dog Bread Company. We ordered coffees and a loaf of sourdough bread, but mostly sat in the car while the sky let down it’s rain and Susan let down her milk. Nursing, I think, is like a running gag taken too far. The key to comedy, and all life really, is repetition. Being now hungry and a...

I bent down on my hands and knees, put my nose to the stump, and took the last thing the tree could give me: the scent of live, fresh wood, it’s dying breath. Part of me wondered at the morbidity of the scene , the chainsaw carnage, the massacre of a mature forest community. "Here I am romping in sap blood and drinking the smell of rotting flesh," I said. All the same, I had to understand the extent of the damage. Years ago, I walked into this same stony woods alone. I was young, yearning for forest solitude, wanting to explore my new home. By a vernal stream in a little fold of the land, I harvest yellow poplar bark and made a basket. A wild hare hopped along the stream. The moon was up early, waxing gibbous, chasing the Sun, which lay on the western horizon. The sky was a perfect Carolina Blue dome, unbroken by clouds. Benji and I drifted our separate ways in the cut. Soft mud swallowed my boots. Dusk descended as I regressed. The world was shadow. I found my ...

A maple moon rose low in the east. Its watery light filtered through sleeping trees, diluting the cool, humid dark. The night tasted sweet in my mind, but it was also bitter. A familiar taste, sure. I chase the bitter sweet because it’s where I feel most alive. But now, there was a presence in the space I never knew before. I walked these dark paths fifteen and more years ago, longing to fade away into my private vision of nature. Now, I could remember the longing, but it was old. I was outside it looking in. A new perspective. Is this the wisdom of age? Susan and I were walking the college green, past Cutler Hall on the north side. I gestured to the thin redwood, bearing a new gash. The spreading maple was gone, with a young black gum in its place. A trio of sycamores arched over head, spread out long glowing arms, and made a cathedral. The kind, old Norway spruce still watched Scrips Amphitheater. I wanted to stop and converse with all of them, but we walked on, sipping a decaf ...