Monthly Archives: January 2026

Tracks

This was no fox.

The other day, we noticed a coyote limping down the meadow. We hear them now and then, at night, but we seldom see them; and this one was out at noontime. A bit unusual. I felt concerned about it as it moved off into the undergrowth at the field’s edge.

Out of curiosity, I guess, the next day I traced its tracks from the treeline between our property and the next one, down through our meadow, into the woods beyond our lot. Mind you, I am not an animal tracker. Furthermore, our snow is absolutely criss-crossed by tracks: deer, rabbits, humans, birds, squirrels, cats, and the occasional owl-hit. It took a little looking to determine which tracks had been left by the coyote, but I had seen it taking the deer path through the dead weeds, so I started there. It wasn’t really too difficult to determine, despite paw prints from all those other critters. The prints resemble dogs’ tracks; and there aren’t spots, like those you see with a fox, where the animal suddenly prinks, leaps, or lunges its nose and forepaws into the snow while chasing field voles. Also? The prints were too big to be a red fox.

An aside–I recently read Catherine Raven’s memoir-ish book Fox and I, which I liked very much and from which I learned a more than a few fox-related pieces of information. And some descriptions of winter in Montana, which is too much winter for me, especially after this latest snowfall in Pennsylvania. But anyway—

The average cat weighs 10-12 pounds, the average red fox 30-ish pounds, and eastern coyotes in our region can be 45-55 pounds. This one was, I think, a male because it left quite heavy tracks, though possibly it was putting more weight on three legs because the front right paw was injured badly enough it never set that paw down. I recall once when our family dog got caught in a neighbor’s “soft-paw” fox trap. As soon as I got her loose, she ran for the house, and I noticed her prints in the snow–three heavy prints and a lighter one since she was favoring one foot. This coyote wasn’t using its leg at all. In a few places I could see a swash on the snow surface where the snow was deep enough that the coyote’s foot had skimmed it. The circuit led into the woods and I pressed no further.

That’s about the extent of my animal-tracking knowledge. It was, however, an interesting departure from my usual winter walk, and a nice day for walking. Everyone else in the county was out buying gasoline and groceries because a big storm was in the forecast for the weekend. Which did arrive (the storm, I mean. Well, also the weekend.).

I’ve been working on new poem drafts lately, after weeks of barely any new writing, focusing on revision instead. What do you bet that coyote, or its tracks, or at very least, the snow, will show up in at least one new draft?

~

FYI: Here’s another set of tracks commonly seen at my house in winter:

Tracks of a John Deere Model M (c. 1947)

Shirt knowledge

I have been missing my dad, so today I put on his old cotton knit sweater, the one that’s developing holes in the weave, the one I kept because his scent lingered in its fibers. It’s been over five years since his death and, alas, that familiar scent has finally vanished from the sweater. Though I like to think that it has been absorbed into the other items in my closet, maybe the hoodie my daughter knitted, maybe the flannel pjs, maybe the four old pairs of jeans I wear continually or the one full-length gown I’ve seldom donned but have kept for reasons not entirely rational. I’m hoping my dad has somehow permeated my closet, the things I wear next to my skin, my life.

And I came across this poem recently in Gary Whited’s Having Listened. Indeed, it resonates in the way a poem can, a sort of slanted parallel of feeling, affinity, relationship. I love the idea of “shirt knowledge,” the thought that inanimate objects might “know” in ways humans cannot perceive. Those last lines: “how to be private and patient,/how to be unbuttoned,/how to carry the scent of what has worn me,/and to know myself by the wrinkles” seem accurate to my current state. Comfortable, comforting.

Like an old shirt. Like a good poem. Like a memory of my dad.

~

My Blue Shirt

hangs in the closet
of this small room, collar open,
sleeves empty, tail wrinkled.
Nothing fills the shirt but air
and my faint scent. It waits,
all seven buttons undone,
button holes slack,
the soft fabric with its square white pattern,
all of it waiting for a body.
It would take any body, though it knows,
in its shirt way of knowing, only mine
has my shape in its wrinkles,
my bend in the elbows.
Outside this room birds hunt for food,
young leaves drink in morning sunlight,
people pass on their way to breakfast.
Yet here, in this closet,
the blue shirt needs nothing,
expects nothing, knows only its shirt knowledge,
that I am now learning—how to be private and patient,
how to be unbuttoned,
how to carry the scent of what has worn me,
and to know myself by the wrinkles.

by Gary Whited
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91973/my-blue-shirt

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

Unsettling

We got some rain on Saturday, which we’ve needed, and dismal cold rainy January days are perfect for settling down with a book. I’m reading The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture (1977) by poet, writer, farmer, educator, activist Wendell Berry, still working at 91–his book Sabbath Poems was published in 2024. I’m much more familiar with Berry’s poetry than his prose, though he’s written at least half a dozen novels and many books of nonfiction. This text, I’ve since learned, is one of his more famous–it’s been revised and re-issued six times. The copy I got from the library is the original version and features cover blurbs by Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Stewart Brand, among others; Publishers Weekly summed up the book as “a cool, reasoned, lucid and at times poetic explanation of what agribusiness and the mechanization of farming are doing to the American fabric.”

Which is a fairly good one-sentence précis, though Berry’s wording often strikes me as more passionate than “cool,” and agribusiness is only one aspect of his critique. I was in high school in the 1970s, and at the time it seemed average Americans were beginning to recognize that pollution and overpopulation could be problematic, that maybe we needed to eat more natural and wholesome foods, and that establishing an Earth Day might help people turn focus toward the planet. Simultaneously, we had Earl Butz as Agriculture Secretary, a man who ended many New Deal programs to help “small” farmers and who encouraged large (eventually, corporate) farms. Butz appears several times in this book, and no wonder; he and Berry debated the topic in public and in print, and their thinking was almost diametrically opposed concerning the philosophy behind agriculture. Berry’s book is a social and philosophical argument that is only somewhat dated and really quite prescient, though he might come off as mildly curmudgeonly to today’s readers. Or maybe not so prescient. He was simply paying attention.

The sections of the book that most resonate with me are those in which he writes of nurturing and relationships, and points out that good relationships involve responsible actions and collaborative, mutual care whether they are marital, family, or social relationships or relationships with the soil, the flora and fauna, the whole planet. He predicts a future in which people live in their houses and not with the land, or even within their communities, and where wilderness is “conserved” so that it can be exploited for entertainment and scenic views. People in the US, he says, don’t feel responsible for the land on which they live; they don’t understand its cycles, its weather patterns, its waterways; their property is merely property–a commodity for convenience and investment. I’d say that future is already upon us.

Thus, Berry has made me think more deeply about my relationship with “my” property. If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you may notice how often I consider weather, dirt, local animals, insects (especially invasive or non-native ones), plants, tree diseases, water–I’m no farmer, but I am a gardener and do feed myself at least partly from my own backyard. I take almost daily walks around the perimeter of our 6+ acres, poking around in the hedgerows, scanning the sky, looking down at walnuts and animal scat, watching for new buds or coloring leaves or bird nests or wildflowers. I worry over droughts and hailstorms and flooding. Climate change concerns me in very local and specific ways, not just in general.

One could say I’m at least trying to nurture the earth. I’ve made many mistakes along the way and done some damage that I’m learning how to rectify; I have also realized that I have to accept some changes, such as incursions by invasive species, because they are beyond my control. Through the almost 30 years we’ve lived on this land, I’ve tried to understand it better. After all, we built a house on it. The soil was hard-packed, acidic, overused from previous decades of corn-growing, full of stones, sumac, and asiatic rose bushes, a fallow field that hadn’t been planted or farmed in decades but didn’t necessarily need me to tend it. It wasn’t my family’s land, and I didn’t intend to end my days here; however, I figured if I was going to live on this spot, I had better do whatever tending and nurturing it might require.

Which is about the best I can do as far as a relationship with the land in which I dwell, and about the best any of us can do in any long-term relationship: try to understand it, get acquainted, do some research, make plenty of observations (maybe take notes), and nurture what seems to need special attention and care. The land has given me much more than I’ve ever given it. It’s offered shelter, beauty, an education, food, the companionship of animal life, cricket sounds, tree frog songs, firefly lights on long summer nights, open spaces for my children to play in, owl calls and fox kenning, the grace of leaping whitetails, dead-fall wood we can burn in winter, forest-bathing, hammock-swaying, inspiration for writing. The wonderful porch here, where I often sit to write in my journal, opens a view to the meadow out back. So many poems started on that porch, with that view…

That’s how the earth nurtures me. May I be somehow worthy of it.

photo by David Sloan 2020

Small, refreshing

Another day. One that the calendar claims occurs in 2026, although at times I disregard the calendar–another human-made thing, and I find so many human-made things destructive and frustrating. It’s not as though a “new” year puts away what has happened the previous 365 days the way I can put away the holiday decor. Which I haven’t actually done as yet. Anyway, we’re still in the first week of January, and Twelfth Night has barely arrived, so if I do want to acknowledge the calendar I can excuse my lack of clearing-away. But I can’t clear away the losses of the past year, and I don’t want to. I want to remember my friends for as long as I can.

It’s true that wintry walks offer quiet splendor (sometimes) and a chance to reflect, but mostly winter affords the chance to stay inside, curled up with a book or browsing through garden catalogs. Theoretically, it’s a good time to revise and submit my work; often, however, I don’t get to that process because winter is also a low-energy time for me. I powered through a fibromyalgia flare two days after New Year’s Eve because loved ones were visiting, but there’s a bit of fallout as a result–worth it, though; and I’m chuffed about taking poetry workshops later in the month. Meanwhile, reading books! I got a Samuel Hazo collection from my local library, I’m reading Wendell Berry and Richard McCann, and Ada Limón’s You Are Here is on my to-read pile. I’ve also felt inspired by the start-of-a-new-year blog posts Dave Bonta has curated on his Poetry Blog Digest. Many writers and books there I want to check out, and many writers and poets feeling some of the same things I’ve been feeling about the past year and what to make of the years ahead.

So to recharge, as it were, I’ll do small, refreshing things this January: take photos, doodle with watercolors, read books, tromp about in boots, meet pals for morning coffee, draft poems, play with images, as per Johan Huizinga–“To call poetry, as Paul Valery has done, a playing with words and language is no metaphor: it is the precise and literal truth…What poetic language does with images is to play with them.”