summer morning in the cemetery

At twenty after eight the sun is already strong. Walking up the gravel path, eighteen twenty through eighteen eighty-nine, eighteen seventy-three through nineteen oh-one, the shadows are still long enough and forgiving. Junipers stand straight, whose roots do not up-end the stones. The light old flat ones are cool, the new dark shiny ones are already taking on the day’s heat. Summer comes, too, to the cemetery.

     (Q: Can I forgive these narrow thoughts?

            A: Does the world forgive the sunset?)

The crow scolds. I want to be him, inky feathers folded, head cocked, at home on a tombstone. Here in the heat autumn auditions, at once I see the corner oak turning copper, the maples scarlet and blowing. Without invitation snow settles and the sun arcs low. Something in me stays, with the crow, while the seasons swiftly ebb. Thank goodness for the prism, the sight that sees two sides. Small things fall away.  And we are (gladly) left like living stones.

the fifth season

The sounds this time of year sure are funny. It’s no wonder traditional Chinese medicine, with similar seasonal cycling, calls late summer the fifth season, when growth comes to a plateau, fruit sets, and all is still for just a bit. The outward, upward yang meets inward, reflective yin who will bring rest and let us fallow, and for a bit they overlap. What an auditory overlap!

The raucous celebration of summer visitors has mostly disappeared – the warblers are all gone, though I still see flycatchers and swallows. The cedar waxwings are flocking, now – along with the turkeys – and their unmistakable high-pitched ‘tseee’ is greatly amplified. They’ll be descending on anything with fruit (they are entirely fruititarians) pretty soon, leaving a laden honeysuckle bare.

It’s the mornings that are most different, with no more robins querying at dawn. The general uproar has quieted and old friends, here all along, have come back to the fore. Most notably the jays and the crows, who seem to have the reigns again. It’s a funny thing, a jay scolding over a slow and lazy ka-tee-did. A chickadee calling, not singing, while picking ripe tomatoes. And yesterday of all things I heard my personal bell of winter, the nuthatch’s puttering ‘yank!’ All while watering beds still full of flowering Echinacea, black-eyed susan, and daisy. The cardinals sing all summer, but now they have no competition in the thrushes and wrens for virtuoso status.

I think it’s just me – my ears are ready to hear the full-time residents again. I’ve luxuriated in the fancy and exotic and now I’m happy for jays and crows – the trees will take the lead in sensation, now.  A hillside of golden aspen and firey sugar maple – what punctuates that better than a jay? A thrush would be audacious, a gilded lily.

Before that happens, though, we have a plateau – we can watch the squash plump up and relax, a bit. Feel the last push of growth and sniff the oncoming chill, but slowly. Revel in the overlap, the fifth season. 

we need rain

We need rain. There have been a couple of passing showers, enough to soften the cracking grass a bit and to plump the leaves just slightly, but not nearly enough to satisfy or invigorate. The neighbor’s flowering dogwood has all but folded in on itself, pointed leaves with deep parallel veins now rolled together like little papery cones, all silver underside. The lilac that bakes in full sun beside the raspberries is limp and rattling – its velvet triangle leaves have little protection, with no thick cuticle like the oaks. The jewelweed, some of which already have their mottled orange flowers that look like gnome caps, is tired and far from its vigorous, succulent self. Our corn, too, is stunted – two feet tall and already tassled out. The peppers seem to hold up alright, and the maples.

But there are those hearty ones too who are showing their stress. Roadside sumac, their peaked fruit still ripening, are starting to burn scarlet, and an oak sapling in our yard has ruddy tips. What is a showy and blazing and beautiful decline in September and October seems like an SOS now (we see neon everywhere, now, but it seems to me without chemicals sumac and sunset must be the brightest colors anywhere). But interesting, to me, is how this early, spotted shift allows me to try on the next season. A month ago it would have seemed unthinkable, exhausting even, to think about lush green maples wearing their crimsons and golds. But now I’ve progressed enough, perhaps, to settle into it – to see scarlet and let my mind wander to spice, to squash, to crunching leaves. I stoke my figurative beard and think, ‘yes, interesting.’

It is at these times of dry weather especially that I think about the underneath of trees. That they have a mirror image, or nearly, anchoring them in their vast swaying greatness. I wonder where the water table is, and whose toes are still wet, whose roots have enough energy to reach a bit further, whose roots hairs are clinging by toes to their roots, reaching and sipping. It is the old ones, usually, who reach the greatest depths. The ones with great height have big ropey taproots, and I wonder what it must be like for ones whole enormous, old body to live in such extremes. Imagine, your hands one hundred feet in the sky, parallel to hawks, fingers catching hot sun, great stormy wind. And your toes in topsoil, mineral soil, and down down to cold bedrock, sweet pure groundwater. All manner of creatures burrowing, laying, digging, digesting, transforming. When I sip cold water it starts at my tongue and cools my chest; the enormous elm would feel just the opposite.

It reassures me, the big old ones who’ve tapped so firmly in the ground beneath them. I root for the saplings, too, though they will have to earn their stripes. At least when they are stressed, and thirsty, and tired, their blushing is brilliant and beautiful. But we do need rain.

siren thrushes

All things that grow are, this time of year, sending their energy upwards, outwards – to grow, to fruit, to leaf, to disperse… This includes myself, and I find the majority of my time is spent in simple absorption and observation, rather than reflection and synthesis. That, and my there is so much to do! The tomato plants are in, albeit a few days before the ordained date of May twenty-first, the official ‘post-frost’ day in New England. Today we sow kale and more lettuce, along with peas, as the first crop has been thoroughly nibbled. Needless to say, we also have to build a fence.

But I still have the early mornings, and they are for birds. This morning, specifically, was for thrushes. They are the sirens of the woods, and I have been drawn in to no avail countless times. They dwell in the woods, and are for the most part dull and rusty colored, and as such evade viewing nine times out of ten. Ten out of ten for me – I’ve never seen a hermit thrush, a wood thrush, or even a veery. They might be like an avian Echo, for all I know, made up entirely of haunting, ethereal sound. Their voices are so extraordinary they don’t need anything else of note – one might think with voices as enchanting they’d have to be dressed to the nines, with foot-long plumes and scarlet eggs or some such thing. But that would be altogether too much. Leave the colors to the warbler who sounds like a squeaky wheel.

Sometimes you’ll hear the thrushes without having to venture off your path – wood thrushes can be heard along roadsides, and I’ve heard veeries in more open wet places. Apparently hermit thrushes will come to trails in the woods, but I’ve never seen one there. You can hear them a long ways off, but I’ve found I have to get deeper into the woods to be really surrounded by their song.

This morning I was the luckiest I’ve been listening to thrushes. I sat on an old stump in a typical New England forest, beeches wrapped around old barbed wire, clearings here and there from logged white pines, low blueberries growing up in the openings… One can’t just go searching for the thrushes – they’re sirens, recall. You don’t need to strap yourself to a mast, or stump, but you do have to sit, and simply let them sing. As I settled down the thrushes started up, first the veery to my left, all fluted waterfall. The two words you’ll hear in any description of thrush song are ‘flute-like’ and ‘ethereal.’ Both are true, but they’re a bit vague. The veery is four downward spiraling trills, the first two starting higher than the last two. All thrushes sound like wind chimes, multi-toned and metallic, but the veery adds a lovely courseness, and almost an urgency. Imagine those carved wood frog instruments – when you rake their back it sounds like a frog’s trill. Add that to a wind chime, and you’ve got the veery.

Then I heard the wood thrush, or three, coming from a bit deeper in the woods. They sound like a wind chime giggling, though I’m told you can listen for the definitive ‘ee-o-lay!” pattern within their rather tripping call. Finally came the hermit thrush, the first I’ve heard this year. I’m surprised – I thought I’d have to go a bit farther north to hear her in the summer (they winter in the Carolinas). I’m thrilled, too, because their call is undoubtedly my favorite. How do you possibly describe it? It might as well be the eternal voice of the Woods herself. It is not urgent, or hurried, or really even playful. It is better described as plaintive, though melancholy is more apt.  A long introductory note, the flute, and then trace the chimes with your hand, but slowly. Mournful? Not quite, it’s not the loon or the mourning dove. It’s more restful than that, and it doesn’t ask a question. It is expressive, not seeking. And the magic therein is that when you really, really listen to a hermit thrush’s song, she has induced that very spirit in you.

It’s hard to hold on to that expressive stillness, with peas to be planted and errands to be run. But the thrushes will hold it for us, and we can return to the woods again another morning.

who speaks for spring?

“Spring is like a perhaps hand,” says e. e. cummings, whose poem of that title goes on to evoke an ethereal jack frost-of-the-spring, lightly and kindly undoing his work. A blush of rose here, a quiet hand quickening the willows to bright gold. The ‘veil of green,’ as my father put it, which appears when buds swell. This image is often used—the maiden of spring – as opposed to the bold, brazen, boisterous matron of summer and harvest. The one with wild hair and twinkling eyes, who produces tomatoes and pumpkins and corn and honey – all things outlandishly fertile. She is delicate spring, come of age and fruitful. Round and rowdy and overflowing.

Maybe it’s because I haven’t felt the abundance of summer in almost a full solar orbit – the feeling that every inch of space is not only alive but brimming – but it seems to me spring is as bright and daring and messy as anything else this year. Snowdrops appeared full and hearty, thrown suddenly amidst dead leaves and hummus. The grass has greened, unabashedly, overnight. There are grackles, blackbirds – the icterids are home. Daffodils don’t coyly lift their heads, blushing with attention, either. They do what they look like they should – they trumpet. The whole world is blaring, just like the crepuscular robins. But that’s for the next entry. Let us say for today that robins (some individuals of which do, in fact, overwinter, changing their diet from worms to berries) are cheerful, evocative, social, and extremely demanding of your attention come dusk. And soon, come four o’clock in the morning.

All this blaring and wild waving of blossoms and beaks makes me doubt the ‘maiden’ idea. It all seems twinklingly sneaky to me, but kind. Maybe spring is a coyote, but she’s wiser than that. The archetypal hag? Clarisa Pinkola Estes is an anthropologist and storyteller, who has championed the wise old woman. She lives in muck and dirt, the edge where things die, only to be transformed. A conjurer of bones, a seamstress of flesh.

There’s a touch of all forms in spring – that is the magic of the ‘edge’ of a season, where you can see all things in one. But when I see the alien purple tentacles of skunk cabbage reach out of the ooze, see the snowdrops bust out of leaves and mud – I hear bright laughter, and something that resembles a happy cackle.