Hummingbirds typically reappear in these parts around the end of April. Often on April 28th. Which is not to say that you can set your calendar by them, but close.
This year, feeders have been in place for more than a week, installed during one of the hot days in this on-again, off-again spring. But I’ve yet to see one of the early arrivals, the so-called scouts, male birds who fly into an area a week or two before the females to search for food.
I look at the feeders, notice that one has lower levels of nectar than the other. Maybe I’ve missed a few birds, but I doubt it. Just to be sure, though, I’m writing this post from the deck.
What is it about a vista that appeals to us? The balance of color and texture, of breadth and height? Is it familiarity? A place that reminds us of a yard or a hillside we knew long ago?
I was thinking about this while on a walk yesterday. I took that route because of a specific vista that I knew I’d see from it. But more than halfway through my stroll, I realize I’d missed it. The view I was remembering was from a winter vantage point.
I love the green profusion we have now. It’s most welcome, especially when it’s hot outside. But with it comes a narrowing of vision, a lack of perspective. The new growth cocoons us, keeps us from harsher realities. And that’s fine with me. I’ll accept that trade.
I’m a morning person, so what I’m about to say should be taken with a grain of salt. When I woke up today, all I felt was gratitude. This is not my usual pattern. Typically, my gratitude is mixed with a goodly amount of anxiety: What needs doing? Who needs help? Where should I begin? I let to-dos dominate my earliest waking hours.
I have fantasies of rising mindfully, moving from bed to yoga mat, stretching and saluting the sun. From there to longhand writing, no keyboard. Posting can wait, emailing, too.
This is not what usually happens, of course. And it’s not what happened today, either. But what did happen was a wash of gratitude, an awareness of time passing, but also of my presence in it.
This didn’t last long. The checklist raised its hand, demanded attention. But for those first blissful moments, I was aware only that I had awoken to a new day. And that was all that mattered.
The Revolutionary War lasted over eight years, and it seems to be taking me almost as long to read Rick Atkinson’s magisterial trilogy about the war.
I somehow finished the first part, The British Are Coming, in the three weeks my library allotted me. I’m not faring as well with the second installment, The Fate of the Day. This is in no way a criticism of the book, only a comment on the time I’ve had to read it.
As it stands now, I’m less than halfway through the 880-page tome — and I have a decision to make. Either I will fold gracefully and wait another few months to see how things go with the ragged Continental Army. (Spoiler alert: I hear they make out well in the end.) Or else … I skim.
Skimming: the secret weapon of avid readers everywhere. I skimmed a bit to finish The British are Coming. But given that book three won’t be out for another year or two, I’ll probably save that secret weapon for my next go-around.
I can rest easy knowing that the Battle of Monmouth is over, the Continental Army has begun to come into its own, and General Lee has been court-martialed. With these facts under my belt, I can surrender the book to the next reader.
(Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth by Emanuel Leutze, courtesy Wikipedia)
The day before Earth Day 2026, I wandered along Reston trails, no particular destination in mind. I turned left where I usually turn right and right where I usually turned left.
A chilly morning had blossomed into a spectacular spring afternoon. Recent rain filled the creeks, sent water tumbling over rocks, gurgling and singing. I stopped at a bridge and took in the scene, inhaled deeply. I have my problems with the suburbs, but I could have landed in worse.
How prescient are these paths and the woods that surround them, how lucky we are to have them, portals to the sublime.
So on this day devoted to nature and preserving the bounty of the planet, I salute my place, my tiny dot in the universe. May it thrive for many millennia.
I write this post from the room that was once for dining, then for playing, and finally, given over to a much-loved doggie. It’s a room now dominated by two bookshelves and a large aviary bird cage. In the cage are two petite parakeets. (Are there any other kind of parakeets?)
They chirp merrily as morning sun floods the room with light. It is a pleasant way to begin the day and is why I once tried calling this the morning room. But that was too highfalutin a term and did not stick.
I observe the budgies. They are flitting from perch to perch, nibbling on a collard leaf, bobbing and feinting. Cleo has Hoffman coming and going. He dances to her tune. She’s the older woman, and he struggles to win her affection.
He warbles and chirps and cocks his head as if to ask, what do you think of that? Most of the time she can’t be bothered, but she provides just enough encouragement to keep him going.
Which is all to our benefit. He fills the house with song.
(A photo of Bart, one of Hoffman’s predecessors, similarly colored, though suffering from a rash at the time.)
When it rained in Bruce Springsteen’s hometown of Freehold, New Jersey, the place smelled of coffee grounds from the Nescafe factory. In his memoir Born to Run, Springsteen says that he didn’t enjoy the taste of coffee but he did like the small.
“It’s comforting,” he wrote. “It unites the town in a common sensory experience.” To Springsteen the smell of coffee meant that there was “a place here—you can hear it, smell it—where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures…”
In Lexington, Kentucky, it was the scent of burnt peanuts wafting from the Jiff factory or the tang of drying tobacco leaves from the auction houses on Angliana Avenue.
I never smoked but I loved that autumn bouquet. And now, if I happen to catch a whiff of tobacco, it takes me back to the land of my youth, when the local television news would carry the fast-paced patois of tobacco auctioneers and downtown Lexington smelled like a cigar bar.
Burley tobacco was a livelihood, an industry, and later a pariah and an embarrassment. But for me, it was always the aroma of home.
(Circa 1930s tobacco warehouse photo courtesy Lafayette Studios, Lexington, via the Explore UK photo archives.)
In my neighborhood, we have squirrels, chipmunks, fox and deer. We have owls and hawks, too. But rabbits have always been scarce. I imagine that the fox, owls and hawks have something to do with that.
Yesterday, while ambling the Lake Anne trail, I spied this bunny, which hopped right in front of me and posed (froze in fear) in hopes I didn’t see her. I had time to snap this shot before the critter reversed course and vanished into the underbrush. Was she off to feed her young? Was her zigzag path an attempt to throw me off the scent?
I just read about cottontail nests, which are hidden in plain sight, in tall grasses or piles of leaves. I wonder how close I was to this bunny’s nest.
When I was 9 or 10, my father disturbed a rabbit nest when he was mowing. Thinking the mother had abandoned it (which she most likely had not) we took two babies inside to care for them.
I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I fed the wee creatures with an eye dropper, cuddled and nurtured them. One of them escaped from its box, leading us on a merry chase throughout the house, jumping out from under the skirt of an arm chair and scaring my mother half to death.
It was an adventure that became part of family lore. And thanks to the bunny that hopped in front of me yesterday, it was top of mind again.
Speaking of warmth without shade, I just finished reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which explains that we are living through an “extinction event” caused not by an asteroid or volcanic eruption but by homo sapiens. Consider these facts Kolbert presents:
“Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff.”
Most of all, Kolbert writes, citing Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen, who named this era “Anthropocene” to indicate that it is shaped by humans, we have changed the composition of the atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has increased by 40 percent in the last 200 years.
All of these changes are happening faster than our world can adapt to them. So, despite the noble efforts we’ve taken to save individual species or to rid our forests of knotweed or other invasive plants, the fact is that the world we’ve created is changing the planet on which we live. Here’s Kolbert again:
“When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda. To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity, though, of course, modernity is its fullest expression. Indeed, this capacity is probably indistinguishable from the qualities that made us human to begin with: our restlessness, our creativity, our ability to cooperate to solve problems and complete complicated tasks. As soon as humans started using signs and symbols to represent the natural world, they pushed beyond the limits of that world.”
The Sixth Extinction was published in 2015. The situation has only become more dire since then.
This morning I was walking by 7:15, but yesterday I left in the noon hour. It was warm, on its way to the upper 80s, and I searched for shade. Unfortunately, shade is nascent at this point in the spring.
Leaves are emerging, but tree cover is thin, no match for the sultry summery weather we’re having now.
It dawned on me as I strolled that there’s a reason we don’t usually have 90+-degree weather in April. The trees aren’t ready for it, and people aren’t, either.
Warmth without shade is a perversion of the natural order. But it’s what we have now.
(The Bow Bridge in Central Park, seen through bare branches. We’re further along than NYC, of course.)
