A Deep River Year
January 29, 2014
The past few weeks have been a harsh January cold spell, but the days are getting a bit longer and the seed catalogs have been enticing me with their usual bounty of optimism.   Someone once said that January is the best month for beans, because it’s the time we dream of next year’s garden.  And we imagine that garden in the pictures of the catalogs, free of sweat and bugs and dry spells that will inevitably discourage us come July.   I love to look at the front section of all those catalogs, which are full of the best new varieties of vegetables and flowers for the coming year.   This year’s crop of offerings includes such wonders as a heart-shaped, rose-colored tomato; a golden snow pea;  and a cute little climbing cucumber.   How can I resist ordering a new pink rose called “Jump for Joy” that smells like apples?

And now my seed orders have begun to arrive.  Of course, it’s still too early for me to sow them.   Sometime late next month I will begin to plant, starting my seeds in small boxes of potting soil which I will gently water, wrap in plastic, and place on top of the furnace until they germinate.   Then the flats will go under lights on a table in the basement, and passers-by peeking in the cellar windows will wonder what it is that’s growing tall and green down there. 

But, for now, I shake the packets and look at the pictures in the catalogs and dream of the heady scent of great purple lilacs and the taste of the first peas snapped from the vines in the sweet days when apple blossoms fly and the earth smells rich and wet and good.   And I remember that all of the best things in our lives start as seeds waiting to sprout and grow.   Sometimes they don’t seem to amount to much--our little loves, our little efforts to be good and true and honorable.    But it’s a good thing to hold on to them anyway, especially in January.

Seeds

In my hands
I hold hope.
In these bitter days
The wind laughs,
Stings, until eyes water,
And fingers, numb,
Reach for an envelope
Bearing promise.
Here are Matt’s Wild Cherry Tomatoes,
Orange Sun Peppers,
And Carnival Hollyhocks.
And someday, soon,
I will spill dirt into trays,
And sprinkle these seeds
Into the fertile darkness
And watch for green.
It is enough, now, to wait,
To dream of purple and red
Where all is white, barren,
To know that every good thing—
Courage, wonder, glory, love, —
Has its January
Where there are only seeds
In our trembling hands.

--Timothy Haut, Jan. 29, 2014

A Deep River Year
January 22, 2014

It snowed again last night, and this morning required boots and gloves and shovels.    And, of course, time to go outside and make it passable for us who must get back into the world again.   Inside the warm house, afterwards, there was waiting for me hot coffee and a crossword puzzle, and Ming, one of our two Siamese cats.       He loves to jump up onto the table, square in the middle of the open newspaper, and rub against me until I offer a luxurious massage of his ears and belly.  

Ming is the darker of the two cats we rescued from an animal shelter several years ago.    We went there with the idea of possibly adopting one Siamese cat, but the shelter supervisor confessed that there were actually two of them that had come in together.   “It would be a shame to split them up,” he added, “though of course you could just take the one if you want.”   Of course, we came home with two.   Sushi, the more timid of the two, hid out around the house for over a year, coming out only at night to eat.   I thought for a while she had slipped out the back door when it had been left ajar.    Ming has always been more social, and he always seeks out my attention when I am trying to do something else.

Yet these cats bring a certain Zen-like presence into the home.   Often I find them sharing a sunspot on the living room floor, or curled up together on the warm cable TV box, or purring in stereo as they languorously lay braided together on top of the radiator while the snow flies outside.    I have heard it said that cats are mysterious and spiritual creatures who may, from time to time, leave their bodies via astral projection while they seem to be sleeping.   I think it’s more likely that they just know how to be content in the present moment.   No worries, no plans, no fears.   Just this moment to be warm.

The Zen of Cats

They seek some warm place,
Perhaps just a small halo of sun
To be their simple solace.
Entwined, they are one,
Comforted by each other’s
Familiar deep-throated rumble.
They are centered, serene, 
Content to be creatures
Who have found their place,
Even as the world goes off to work,
Or worries itself to wakefulness,
Or scours the pestilent streets
For food and kindness,
Or waits for love to warm it through.
This is what I wish
Sometimes:
To stretch out, silent enough
To hear my own heart,
To be warm inside for a while,
And, like a cat,
To just be.

--Timothy Haut, January 22, 2014

A Deep River Year
January 15, 2014

This week we have enjoyed a January thaw here in Connecticut.  The snow is almost gone, except on the edges of streets and parking lots where it had been plowed into piles not too long ago.  There has been a softness in the air, and we have been able to walk outside just a little slower now that the bitter arctic cold has left us for a while.   The old New England farmers never relaxed on a nice day, of course.    They learned to expect that storm and troubles were always just around the corner, and that it was a good idea to prepare yourself for them.

But I am not an old Yankee farmer.  I will take these days with gratitude, even though I know that there is a lot more of winter yet to come.   So I wander through my back yard, and up into the woods, where the bare bones of the landscape show themselves most clearly in winter.  And walking back toward the house I notice that the melting snow has revealed again all the tasks which were unfinished last fall.    The yard is covered with wet, matted leaves that I never got around to raking up.    The garden is a mess of skeletal flower and vegetable stalks.   Over in one corner a covey of plastic pink flamingos lean against the face, and the pole of prayer flags that wave brightly in the wind on a spring day has drooped into the mud.  A gazing ball over by the barn is off its perch, nestled in the stubble underneath the lilacs.

And up by the terrace, where the yard backs up to the woods, are two metal chairs that threaten to be obscured by overgrown forsythia.    Nobody has sat in them, probably for years.    They are rusty and need paint, but they sit there, together, like an old married couple looking out over the debris and remnants of their lives.    From this vantage point, I look down a gentle hill toward the house and garden, and beyond the fence and across the street to the white Congregational Church.   I can remember, from here, my now grown-up children playing wiffle ball and hide-and-seek, and I can see other faces, some long gone, looking at the world from this very place.    I can see myself here, too, all of those years--a life passing in this same metal chair.    And I wonder, too, who will sit in the empty chairs of my life in whatever years remain.

The Empty Chairs

The chairs are empty
out there near the edge of the woods,
under the bare trees
which give no shade
from winter's spare and fractious light.
I should have dragged them away,
warehoused them for a season
in the dusty barn loft
or in a basement corner
where they would sit in the dark
waiting for the grass to green again.
But I like them there, among the wet leaves,
rusted and empty.
Ghosts of the past sit there,
and I wait, and wonder,
about who may yet come
into this yard, this life,
to fill these empty spaces.
It is not a good place to sit, now,
even in this January thaw
which has exposed the unkempt garden,
the broken remnants of marigolds
and sunflower heads, hanging limply,
colorless as the cold earth.
Once my father sat here, though,
looking out at the climbing peas
and beyond, to the roses,
as a white cloud bloomed overhead
in the bluest sky.

--Timothy Haut, January 15, 2014

A Deep River Year
January 8, 2014

Yesterday was almost as cold as it gets here in Connecticut in the winter.   The Great Plains have been assailed by the same "polar vortex,"  which makes it dangerous just to be alive and outdoors at the same time.    I think about the wild creatures  seeking  some shelter from the wind,  perhaps finding some little warmth in each other to help them survive.    We do not belong in such weather.     We hide in our little homes, relying on the hum of furnaces and the sagging wires that carry electric current from pole to pole through the brutal arctic cold.  We forget how close we are to perishing.

I remember the winter of my senior year at a college in Minnesota, which was perched on a hilltop where the wind raged in below zero temperatures.     My old red Ford sedan spent these winter nights in a flat, exposed parking lot.   For many nights in that most bitterly cold January term I would set my alarm and get up at 2 or 3 in the morning and drive around that quiet little town just so that I could keep that car from freezing over altogether.    Eventually I got the bright idea of disconnecting the battery and bringing it into the dormitory where it spent the night under my bed.   That nice warm battery would be all set to turn over that frozen motor in the morning.

But the true measure of cold, for me, was when, as a boy, I would be outside, playing in the snow until there was no feeling left in my mittened hands.   I would head inside, toss my mittens on the radiator, and run hot water over my hands.    I could barely stand it.    Those cold fingers would ache as the warmth worked its way down toward the bone, then sting as the blood would begin to circulate again.   The windows would be rattling, etched with frost, but my hands around a cup of hot chocolate made the world all right.  This is winter's gift, that we sometimes have the power to make the world habitable for each other in the most intolerable of times.

Cold

This cold
rules over a world
not fit for us.
It bites deep, stings,
hurries us to a place of shelter.
Overhead the trees cry out,
great limbs creaking in the night,
keeping the squirrels awake,
curled up in their open holes
and dreaming of spring.
All are strangers here,
in this alien world
stripped to the bone.
A kind of hunger rises in us,
a longing for another season
that feels more like home.
But here, in this winter exile,
we know the truth:
that we must make our own shelter
to rest, to endure, to grow.
Sometimes it is enough
to warm each others'  hands,
to pull the blankets round,
and then to wait
for something inside us
to burn again.

--Timothy Haut, January 8, 2014

The Kings' Gift

They did not feel like kings
as they neared the end
of their strange journey.
The old roads had not been kind,
and they carried their weariness
along with the little treasures
they planned to offer
to the One
who was to be born
under a portentous star.
Perhaps they slept fretfully
that last night
before they finally found him.
They could not have known
how their world was about to change,
that every sacrifice they had made
to come to this place was nothing
compared to a sacrifice
that was yet to come.
But they got up in the morning
and went on,
a sign to us who must continue
our own dark journeys
into an unseen morning.
He is there,
waiting for us
in some new day.

--Timothy Haut, January, 2014

A Deep River Year
January 1, 2014

 Today is a new year. For us, the passage of time is momentous. We face this passage with some bravery, because it makes us remember that our stock of these things is running low. None of us gets too many years to spend. So we plow into 2014 with a certain intention to make things better while we have a chance. We vow to lose weight or exercise more. We intend to be more tolerant of the foolishness and flaws of others, and if we are wise, we hope to be more forgiving to ourselves.

 Years ago Phyllis and I planned a wonderful New Year's Eve. It was a major turning of the calendar, the edge of a century beginning with the number 20. Some looked at the coming of year "Y2K" as ominous. Prophets of doom said that computers would fail all over the world. One man warned me that our church should be stockpiling food, water, guns and money to prepare for the catastrophe that was sure to come (it was in the Bible, you know). Phyllis and I had other plans. We put on our fanciest clothes--a gown and a tuxedo--and headed off to an elegant party, in spite of the fact that we were both suffering from a terrible case of the flu. We could hardly stand up as we sipped champagne, and finally we excused ourselves from dinner well before 10 p.m. and made our way home. We fell into bed, turned on the TV, watched reruns of the fireworks over the Eiffel Tower, and fell asleep. We didn't make it to midnight in Connecticut, but we woke up the next day and the world was still here.

So today we begin the great wheel of the year again. The world is still here. I am too, for the time being. I celebrate that I am not alone. And I have faith that is good to begin again.

Sparrows' New Year

 The sparrows huddle in the forsythia
 this cold, cold morning,
 a choir waiting for the altos to show up,
 and with no particular song in mind.
 I would teach them
 a chorus of Auld Lang Syne,
 remind them of a day, once,
 when the world was young,
 and love was sweet.
 I would teach them, too,
 to make some plans, to dream
 of some better idea than this,
 perhaps a sparrow heaven.
 But for them, this day is young,
 and love is as sweet
 as a winter sun on feathers
 and a morning full of seeds.
 Like today, for them
 every day is a beginning,
 a new year,
 a good place to hold on,
 where they can move closer together
 when the night comes.

 --Timothy Haut, January 1, 2014