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Category: nature

Bird Bath

Bird Bath

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It doesn’t take long for nature to make its presence felt. Even a 10-minute escape from the office, enough time for a walk around the building, finds sun and breeze and sparrows splashing in a fountain.

These little guys look for handouts from lunching office workers. They roost in the hedges that line the street. They are urban birds, tough critters who’ve learned to fend for themselves.

Maybe these birds had the same idea I did — to escape their daily routine for a few minutes; to take a break from pecking for food, preening their feathers and building their nests  (though I doubt they’re doing that this time of year).

I like that they took one thing (a public fountain) and made it their own. I hope their hearts, like mine, were gladdened to be awake and alive at that moment in time.

May Day?

May Day?

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Here we are at May Day — sodden, squishy, water-logged. The petals of our dogwood, our Kwanzan cherries, scattered and beaten to the ground. Our airy forget-me-nots hardly the azure clouds they were three days ago. The azaleas hesitant, unwilling to bloom.

After this winter, I’d hoped for a knock-’em-dead spring. Something to warm and delight us. But nature doesn’t operate like that, I tell myself. Rain pelts and puddles — or fails to fall at all. Winds  funnel and destroy. Sometimes, snow even falls in spring.

The balance we seek, the recompense, is not in the natural world. If it is to be, we must supply it.

Waist-High Weeds

Waist-High Weeds

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I found my neighbor, Teresa, weeding in the woods. “It’s Japanese stiltgrass,” she said, “and the only way to get rid of it is to pull it up.”

Tell me about it. I’ve been pulling it up all summer, but have never felt sufficiently ahead in my own yard to take on the common land.

But Teresa has. And does. She and her husband, David, often take a bag along on their walks to pick up trash in the neighborhood.

I do not bag and neither do I weed. Instead, I ponder the stiltgrass as I walk, notice the height of it, waist-high in spots, think about this wild vegetation taking over the woods, the fields, the yards.

It’s a green wave, a green sea, rolling ever forward. We can try to stem its tide, but we are powerless in its wake.

The Volunteer

The Volunteer

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I didn’t plant this flower, didn’t even notice it until last week. A volunteer, I suppose, a morning glory that decided to glorify us on its own, not sought out, not planted (its seed nicked and soaked as the instructions on the morning glory seed packet suggest).

Instead, it grew from escaped seeds, from flowers settled two, three summers ago, blown to the other side of the deck stairs, cosseted by leaf mold and azalea shade. Its green tendrils twined around the evergreen branches, spiraling up and around, through sunlight and darkness. Invisible for one season at least, maybe two.

And now, finally, it finds itself here, at the rag-tag end of summer, glinting in the sunlight of an August morning.

The volunteer proves that nature has its own designs and humans are often not a part of them. Beauty, however, often is.

Goals and Deadlines

Goals and Deadlines

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On this national deadline day, a few thoughts on reaching goals. How what keeps us going is setting new ones, and what happens when we don’t know what the next new one should be.

The natural world may be of some help here. It’s all about growth and change: bud to flower, flower to leaf. Waves rolling in; waves rolling out. The steady rhythm of the tides.

But all of this within seasonal cycles.

Nature doesn’t mind repeating itself. But it does so with endless variation.

Outdoor Performance

Outdoor Performance

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A summer evening at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. Spreading a blanket on the lawn, sharing wine and conversation as the sun slants through the trees. Birds in the rafters, fireflies  in the air.

For all good suburbanites the experience begins with the drive there, and this one was better than average. Crowell, Brown’s Mill, Beulah — back roads that made me feel like I was out in the country, which Wolf Trap once was.

Outdoor performance has a character of its own, the crowds diffused by the presence of grass and trees and the high steady murmur of the wind. At a certain point in the experience you almost forget what you’re there for. But then the curtain rises, the lights come up, and the performance begins. It’s then that you remember you’re there for the dance, the music, the play. (Last night it was Ballet Hispanico, a beautiful and improbable blend of ballet, modern and Latin dance.)  It’s then that the illusion and the reality merge.

Photo: Wolf Trap

Haying Time in Franklin Farm

Haying Time in Franklin Farm

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On Friday’s walk I spied two monster tractors motoring back and forth across what remained of a meadow quadrant, cutting down everything within reach. It was a brisk, efficient business, abolishing in minutes what it took months to build: the waving golden rod, the spindly stalks of Queen Anne’s lace, the nettles, the Virginia creeper and the chicory.

It is haying time in Franklin Farm, which means not the cutting, drying and bundling of grass to nourish animals through the lean months, but rather a tidying up of the suburban landscape. Franklin Farm is a subdivision, after all, and this is not the mowing of a lawn but of the common land, a place set aside for recreation and beauty, a tip of the hat to the dairy farm that was here before, and as such, a place I like to walk because (despite the paved paths and center-hall colonials), it has some sense of the genuine about it.

I’m almost afraid to walk past the meadow today. Will the entire swath of grass-carpeted land have fallen to the blade? If it has, we will all be the poorer for it. We will miss the beauties of first frost on tangled briars, a seasonal transformation made possible only by negligence, by leaving alone the delightful chaos of nature.

A Duet

A Duet

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I was carrying bags of give-away clothes to the end of the driveway, tip-toeing across the ice, when I heard a sound scarce around here lately, the faint “who-who” of a great horned owl. Moments later I heard another, similar call. This one was slightly lower in pitch and seemed to come from farther away.

I stopped what I was doing and listened to the duet. One owl was raspy, staccato, insistent; the other smooth, tawny, intricate. It was dawn and the sky was pink. I was enthralled with the wild sounds, felt my day grow larger and more filled with possibility because of them.

And though I would later read up on these owls and learn that they are some of the only creatures that eat skunks, that they prey on ospreys and falcons and are not only not endangered, but endanger others — this doesn’t change the way I felt hearing the owls’ song. It was if the houses and cars and driveways fell away. What was left was the world of wild things.

Small Pond

Small Pond

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I jog past the cattail pond on West Ox, a containment pond, I suppose. But filled with cattails and buzzing with insects it becomes much more. It makes me think: There are as many hidden glades and sunny meadows in our neighborhood as one needs to inspire creative thought, to parse an identity. In other words: There are revelations that come to me along the path, and if I’m listening, they will find me. The natural world, even one as cramped and pruned as ours, holds wisdom.