Let's
2025 calendar; Then, Now and When?
September 21, 2024. Today is Summer. Tomorrow comes Fall.
I leave home with two pears and return with apples from seven trees and scarlet runner beans. This is my form of a growth economy, where excess is shared and made into dinner and a pie.
The salmon leap and flail in the sky and splash back into the cooling water. Empassioned attempts to go further faster, but then they just swim to the end of it all: Olympia, where there is a small dam that will be removed before too many summers go by, then to Deschutes Falls where they are scooped up and their creamy milt and round shiny orange eggs are stirred in a bucket to make more fish for not next summer but the next. And here is the Fisherman in thick wool hat standing in the water in this gray morning. He casts and casts and casts and casts. He was here when the sun set lighting the sky orange and blue. Did his hope keep him in the water all night? The hope of summer seems that endless. But it is over. Tonight. Live it up. Share some fruit. Roll around in the orange bright light.
When? Tomorrow.
The light already is at a sharper angle. Each day there is a layer of wool added, each time for another hour. Wool socks for the morning and back on again in the evening. A thin sweater hidden under layers so as not to alarm those still parading about the town with ease in shorts. I eat breakfast with squirrels. They nibble the seeds of vine maples while I eat chanterelles found in black woods. One squirrel runs up a tree, up a hundred feet with a mouthful of leaves, shoves it in a hole, and just as quick races down. Another mouth of leaves is brought up before I can take a sip of tea. I am slow this morning. The sky is gray. There is work to do. I sip some more and read Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack post. She reveals the patterns of politics, the then, and now, and when of human governance. I take it all in. I gather the fruit, the apples and pears to sweeten the days ahead. All the work for the future is done in the Fall.
When? Now.
My 2025 calendar is now available.
Please order it here or from your local bookstore (they can order it wholesale at Buyolympia.com).
This is my 27th calendar! That’s a lot of scampering up tall trees and stashing leaves. The stack of all the years of calendars is about eight inches tall. Twenty seven years in eight inches, a geological strata of not very long, yet it is expansive. Whole lives! People ending and beginning. Trees planted and getting taller, bearing fruit and seeds and shade. Thank you for growing with me. Let’s see what happens in 2025!
Let’s.
Let’s emit together.
Let’s reveal time
and light this orbit.
Let’s fulfill what may be.
Turn into an island
and dissolve until the equinox.
Let’s.
Let’s gather with the rain
and brighten dark days.
Let’s.
Yesterday photo by Carson Ellis who writes Slowpoke on Substack. Her new book One Week in January is a reminder of distant days that we still want but we have been told the quickest way to spawn is the best. Return to the slow swim. There’s time. Days. Weeks. Months. Seasons. Years. Lives.