Did you mean “enduring hours”?

Susan Tiholiz
214-478-7395 (cell)


> On Jan 15, 2021, at 11:38 AM, Ted Levin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> 7:19 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday), 27 degrees, wind SSE
> 1 mph. Sky: Clear with a peach wash. October fog, November temperature,
> late March feel. Permanent Streams: overnight dusting speckles ice. In the
> flat woods, where water, in a level run, delivers freight to the marsh,
> layered and growing ice-shelves extend from the shore, squeezing ephemeral
> canyons . . . tighter and tighter. Wetlands: beige reeds residue in a bowl
> of chowder-thick fog. Extends mid-way up evergreens along the western
> shoreline. Crown of pines and hemlocks poke through a band of mist that
> hovers like ringside cigarette smoke above Mohammad Ali and Zora Foley
> prize-fight, circa 1967. Frost on sausage-shaped alder catkins. Tiny
> crystals. Pond: feeder stream opened a bit, otherwise a duplicate of
> yesterday and the day before . . . and the day before. Deer artist
> elsewhere, old tracks hardly suggest deer.
> 
> Today, no robins. Yesterday, they visited roadside bittersweet. Vines lace
> pines together; freeze-dried berries kept robins alive—flecks of red litter
> the snow.
> 
> 
> Overnight influx of red-breasted nuthatches and chickadees—headed either
> north or south—a riotous outpouring of *toots* and *dees*. One nuthatch
> wanders down a pine, blood rushing to its head. Pokes and pecks at scaly
> bark. Eats something too small for me to recognize. Others forage in tufts
> of lichen, clusters of pine needles, cages of suet.
> 
> Sunshine brightens and then devours fog. Jays argue. Crows scream. I stand
> in the front yard, sun on my face, dogs by my side, humming a tune from the
> nineteen-sixties. With the ringing of the Post Mills churchbells, colonial
> sound floats over Robinson Hill. Makes me recall the wildest, the most
> primordial sound of my childhood. Jews didn't ring bells; they blew the
> ram's horns, like a Viking's call to arms or an Arowak addressing dawn on a
> conch shell. The sound of the shofar made my spine tingle, the reward
> for enduring fours in synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Winter
> sunshine and churchbells, instigator of tender thoughts, and familiar
> birdsong.