Beech and willow and mistletoe

Today I climbed at least a 136-year-old beech tree, lifted my face into the sun beneath birches and oaks and ash trees, scaled a small rock face, and was fearlessly hunted by a ginger tabby kitten not yet two months old that answered to its name. We were starved for trees and autumn; nineweaving and I spent the afternoon at the Arboretum. I had not been there since I was ten or twelve. I used to climb on the cork tree, collect tadpoles from the ponds to watch them metamorphose, over weeks in the flat-sided fishbowl that no longer held Siamese fighting fish, into tiny dark frogs that we returned to the Arlington Res (no doubt perturbing the local ecology), stoop under the weeping screen of beech leaves to read the initials of lovers I would never meet. I added no graffiti of my own this afternoon, but I had my hands on cold bark and the ruined harvest smell of old leaves whenever I breathed and the sky was that pure dark blue that hurts against yellow leaves and the ghost-flaking spray of birch branches, a sugar maple turned more luminous fire-colors than pumpkins or candy corn. I have two shallow scrapes down the inside of my left forearm, where the beech accepted its sacrifice. There is lichen on my coat. Greer took hundreds of pictures, to which I will link tomorrow. Everywhere we looked were berries, roots, tangling vines, sunlit sweeps of meadow; shelves of mushrooms on a sawed-off stump, a hayfield hillside with crabapples. Except when climbing, I was bitterly cold, carrying my scarf in my pocket and wearing what Greer calls my strangler's gloves; I heard at least five languages I recognized. It was very much what I needed. The kind of day designed for the word invigorating; it puts its own life inside you. I can hold on to that exhilaration against a lot of dark.

I did not watch more than two innings of the latest playoff, but Eric has presented me with the first installment of my birthday gift, which is his compilation of the essential early Pere Ubu; I love them. Right now their music reminds me most of Mission of Burma in their noise and layering and neck-snapping tonal shifts, Pylon in their dismembered dada approach to songwriting—Pere Ubu of course predating both bands, I'm hearing genetics in anachron. I suppose it's no more backward than watching The Muppet Show before I knew its guests (especially Peter Sellers) from a dent in the ground. Or reading Patricia McKillip and Lloyd Alexander before Tolkien. The point is that the original is still going to stick in my head.

And I slept, if only five or six hours. Nonetheless, the wind through the screen smells chill and turning, a fetch of snowmelt; I have a day out of mythscape and strange music to close my eyes on. This is happiness.