Category Archives: Haibun

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Nesting Magpies

The nest has lain dormant all winter. It is small, seeming a perfect cone with pointed side down, nestled within the crotch of three large branches of a naked tree, around twenty feet above the pavement.

Swedish 'skata'-magpieIt is early April and the nest’s builders, a pair of magpies, have returned. They are refurbishing it after the long winter’s assaults upon it. The temperatures are still mostly below freezing, but the birds are not deterred from their resolute occupation.

Their tree and others like it were planted a few decades ago by the builders of this neighborhood of well maintained apartments. The trees and buildings surround the Minneberg bus station, the gathering point for travel to and from nearby Stockholm City and beyond. This morning’s early travelers are the workday commuters. I am on my way to exercise at a club.

The bus will arrive in five minutes. I am captivated by the furious activity of the skata. They dash between the nest and nearby trees where they collect twigs and branches which suit their plan. Branches, some twice as long as the bird, are inspected, poked and prodded until one is selected and taken from the tree, snapped neatly by a twist of the head.

It is difficult to navigate, with a long branch in her beak, from the middle of a tree into the space between the trees and thence to the center of the nesting tree. One was forced by interfering branches to drop hers to the ground. Since she had so carefully chosen it, I thought she might retrieve it from the ground. She doesn’t, and I speculate on the reasons why Nature may have dictated that she shouldn’t.

Sometimes both birds are in the nest, each with branches they have captured, interweaving them collaboratively with those already laid in.

The bus arrives and I reluctantly enter it, regretting that I can’t interrupt my routine to continue watching the construction project.

It seems nature’s plan
that I should travel away
from the nesting birds

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Lost key, found key: a haibun

Seven o’clock on a winter’s Sunday morning. It’s laundry time in the washroom of our apartment building.

Today we have an oversize load of chair coverings which requires the additional use of the large washer and dryer in the apartment building some tens of meters away.

It has been snowing for the past week with temperatures under freezing. The maintenance workers have cleared the paths and laid down gravel to reduce the chance of our slipping. The cleared snow is piled high beside the paths.

Overnight, it has been raining with the temperature above freezing. The paths are slick with water and ice and the gravel is sinking below the surface. It’s a slippery walk from our building to the next one.

I don some outer clothes over my house clothes to carry the big blue IKEA bag over the slippery path to the next building. I didn’t have my full night’s sleep and am not feeling tip-top, as Eva likes to say.

There is one key to access the building next door and another for the wash room. Each key is on a ring with other things. It’s awkward to use the two key rings while holding the bulky bag, but I get through the two doors and do what has to done to start the washing process. Then I leave for home.

When at the front door of our apartment building I can’t find the ring that has the electronic key to open the main door. The key works for the main doors of either building. I check my pockets several times in disbelief, until I believe.

I sluggishly retrace my steps, searching the path and the snow banks to either side, with no success. Thinking I may have dropped the key ring in the wash, I decide to wait to search further. It takes some window rattling and door pounding to get Eva’s attention to let me in. It’s lucky our apartment is at the same level and next to the building’s main door, otherwise I would have been trapped outside until Eva might notice I was overdue. I wasn’t fully dressed for the temperature.

After an hour, I use a duplicate key to open the front door of the other building to transfer the washed chair covers to the dryers, but I find no key ring. Disappointed, I return home.

Eva and I discuss the possibilities, both reasonable and unreasonable. She traces all the steps I have already taken, to no avail. We finally give our selves over the kindness of a stranger—that is, an unknown neighbor—to find and return the key ring to the maintenance office where someone can trace us via the key’s ID  number.

We go about performing other Sunday duties, including a trip to the grocery store, a short subway ride away.

Meanwhile, it continues to rain and the snow banks continue to recede. On our return from the grocery store, Eva decides to look once again around the entrance of the other building while I, still depressed by my misadventure and visions of impending senility, leave her to this short departure from our regular path, and carry the groceries home.

Several minutes later, Eva arrives, her spirits high and with happy voice tells me she found the key ring. It was just to the side of the other building’s entrance where the melting snow uncovered it. We laugh and hug each other like children.

After a short while, Eva says she is glad I lost the key ring, otherwise we would not have had such a happy moment.

the snows of winter
now melt away to reveal
forgotten treasures

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Empty Time

Here we are in Gällivare, awaiting the train from Narvik, Norway, just over the northwestern corner of Sweden. We need to get from Gällivare to Luleå by train, thence to Piteå by bus where we will stay at a traveler’s hostel for the night so we can, on Sunday, visit Eva’s son Max, a junior physician, who has a summer job in this remote lumber and paper mill town on Sweden’s northeast coast.

The sign showing scheduled departure and arrival times for trains through Gällivare tells us the 3:26 PM train is delayed because of problems on “the Norwegian side,” thus allowing us Swedes to absolve the railroad people on the Sweden side.

The pleasantly clear female voice from the overhead speakers informs us that we cannot reasonably expect the 3:26 P.M. train until arton, null, null, or 18.00 (6:00 PM).

I have finished reading the two books I brought for the overnight train trip from Stockholm to Saltoluokta Mountain Station where we stayed five days. Gällivare is the point of transition between train and bus, both ways.

I now have nothing to read except Swedish newspapers, but I am illiterate in Svenska. Eva has her daily Sudoku number puzzle, but this exercise in mental torture is not for me.

I have already taken a 20-minute walk around town and passed by almost all the stores and boutiques.

I have watched the others waiting inside and outside the station’s waiting room. I feel I have known them for a lifetime.

The waiting room is hot and muggy. It smells of stale humans and their detritus. The temporarily stranded passengers are moving, sitting, aimlessly moving again, dull-looking specks in slow Brownian motion.Despite the pesky mosquitoes I sit outside the train station, sheltered from the scattered rain showers by the overhanging roof. The sun on its shallowly slanting path glares at me through pauses in the gray and white clouds on the vast horizon. We are well above the Arctic Circle here.

The nearby low hills covering one-third of the view to my left are plain and uninteresting. The shifting mountains of cumulus clouds above the remainder of the horizon are too distant to dwell upon. They are there for the occasional glance when I need to rest my eyes from this writing.

I move to the unsheltered side of the station to avoid the relentless sun and sit on a damp bench facing the “Grand Hotel Lapland,” an unremarkable edifice of four stories. The area outside this part of the train station serves as a bus terminal for connections to northern regions.

Eva comes to me from the waiting room and tells me the train has been delayed yet another hour. We notice a bus leaving the area showing the  legend “Luleå-Kiruna.” We check the posted bus schedules outside the train station only to learn this was the last bus to Luleå today. We, and the others, had not thought to check the bus schedules as alternatives to the late train. The train company is silent on such matter

So we wait until at least 6:53 PM for the 3:28 PM train. It is now 4:53 PM, providing two hours, at least, to do… what?

I remain in writing mode, waiting for the next random impulse to translate itself through my fingers and this pen.

perhaps I will find
while waiting hours for the train
my buddha nature