The things of the earth are changing again in the north. Marigolds rim our houses like the rings of Saturn. Old apples fill every corner and mushroom-eaten pocket of our yards. The yellow jackets work around them as they shrink further, down to the core. As the days of the season peel themselves off, we too eat this fruit in silence. The Finnish poet Eeva Kilpi said, “Autumn knows: the shrikes are leaving, the butterflies linger, scent of thistles fills the air, sweetness runs wild…”

Over a period of about thirty years or more I have followed a variety of musical paths as a singer, starting with American folk, stopping at jazz, hopping the world music train, and engaging in my own songwriting. For almost thirty of those years I have been compelled to pick up and play the kantele. I have performed and given kantele workshops in old tin sheds, Temperance halls, cow fields, old school houses, churches, libraries, museums, log palaces, and American and Canadian Universities. Why do it?

I was reading the New York Times one day. It led me to an interview with the writer Meghan O’Rourke who had written a book that deals with the death of her mother. The article was about grief, how we stumble through loss and what we carry away from the subtraction. It made me think about how I remember my own mother. How even though she died 12 years ago in many ways the grief of that loss has not disappeared. And as it is for many people, the loss has transformed and lessened, but is always a subtle shadow. And maybe because we were close and shared many ways of looking at the world, she is always with me, not a haunting, but a presence.

April snow has swallowed up my yard once again. It waits for wind sheer and boot prints of the mailman. It is as white as an unwritten page. Many invectives could follow here, but I’ll attempt to refrain.

In the spring I make an attempt at a nature diary. It is often all scribbles and bits, dribs and drabs of observation and more often a great deal of long odes and field hollers of desire. This is that time of year when I feel like Blanche DuBois, standing on the fire escape waiting for Stanley to go ahead and rip his t-shirt.

On the 45th parallel where I have lived my entire life, I find I am still not a winter person. But while SADS sits down in my living room like an unwelcome nine-hundred pound elephant, there is a large part of me that sighs gratefully for the wave of darkness and quiet that kaamos brings. For many people this is the season of skiing, skating, snow boarding, hockey, winter camping, hunting, snowmobiling, and yes, carving holes in lake ice and jumping in– and it all seems so healthy and invigorating as I ponder it from a distance while I sit with a pile of afghans, drinking a cup of Mexican hot chocolate. That is their winter season. For me, winter is museum season.

In 1980, a few days after Thanksgiving, I stood in a line at a table in a Greenwich Village club to see if a singer would autograph my napkin. It was an incredibly long wait. Many people were wanting to talk to her, share their accolades. As I finally got closer, a family of fans right in front of me seemed to want to ask the singer endless questions. They kept chatting at length about things that fans often do, snippets of their lives, their favorite songs. I was the last in line and I eventually lost my nerve. I knew she had another set and needed to begin soon. I decided to return to my seat. As I started walking I heard someone say, “Hey baby, come here!”

When we lose someone in the music community it is a clarion call to acknowledge, celebrate, mourn, honor and hone in on all those memories of how that person entered our lives and why it mattered. Music is such a visceral thing, as a writer I shy away from writing about it at all because it is so ephemeral. It is the art form that is all about the ears and the body below the ears. Sure we can watch it, but it is how it makes us feel, how we feel the beat and how we really hear that Albéniz tango, that drummer from Ghana, that liquid Miles riff, that poem sung by the Fado singer, that long instrumental Wilco break or the unequaled guitar picking of Doc Watson.

Two Poems by Diane Jarvi, published at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology.

For me birds are symbols of how to cheat gravity and ride with angels. They are symbols of our simplest desires to be giddy and find love, to possess power, but also symbols of adaptability, delicacy and rebirth. In life and in death, these two birds showed me just that.