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.

remembering summers

Two years ago yellow warblers built a nest in the roses outside of the ranger cabin at North Hero State Park in Lake Champlain. Two years ago we were a nest, the five of us, woven and resting and thriving. The scene I wrote down two years ago could be titled ‘nighttime in a cabin,’ or ‘Living in Community,’ but also ‘blow up your TV.’ There is magic in a summer night, the only sounds breathing, turning pages, crickets outside and a moth against a screen.

The haunting cry of calling loons,

A cabin in the woods.

Pages turn in yellow light,

Stillness here imbued.

Friends with eyes held fast in books

Have bodies calmly cast

In different patterns, folded deep,

A presence formed in past.

Nighttime beckons, darkness calls,

As words bind friends in pulsing thrall.

or

Their bodies are shadows,

The lines and patterned limbs

Cast by thrall and rapture.

Substance lying in stories, bodies

are echoes, afterthoughts,

They are

Formed inside pages.

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.

on robins

 The mere sight of an American robin isn’t the first sign of spring, although the Audubon here in Massachusetts gets calls all winter reporting errant and harbinger robins. Many individuals do over-winter, changing to a diet of berries instead of worms and moving deeper into the forest. But all the particulars change in the spring, and they become my backdrop – something so simple and clear and honest it’s always already happening before I realize it. I have moved into spring, already, and I stop in my tracks and realize the evening robins have brought me there.

Their plumage changes in the spring, like many birds. But it’s a bit subtler than the noticeable brightening and blackening of the goldfinch: the bill brightens to sunflower yellow and the red breast gets deeper and ruddier. They get a bit of flash, especially when combined with the two outer white patches visible on their tails as they streak away from lawns with their woodpecker-esque trumpeting. They wear white-ringed monocles, and their dapper gray backs and long thrush tails make them appear as though they’ve put on their morning suits, all three pieces with a cheeky red vest.

We see them now on lawns, pulling worms from wet earth. They seem to me always clumsily avoiding some kind of amusing mishap, because yes, they hop like most birds, but they also kind of run. They actually scamper about. I haven’t been able to find much research or basic information on songbirds who seem to run around, but it seems to me it makes sense for a larger songbird who spends a good deal of time on the ground. Hopping takes a heck of a lot more energy than speed-walking. Try it.

So T. migratorius is a sight for the eyes, but more profoundly he is a wake-up call for our inner ears. Their song is a somewhat clumsy, liquid four-part question, to me. You’ll see it written as ‘cheerio, cheerily, cheerio, cheerily.’ It is most definitely thrush – there is a depth and clarity to it, though nothing like its cousins the hermit or veery. It’s not long and impressive, like the operatic song sparrow, or multi-toned like the boreal thrushes. It’s not absolutely unmistakable like, say, the towhee (‘drink your tea!’), as the gray catbird can sound like a robin, perhaps after a bit of champagne. But nobody sings you into twilight like the robin. They are quintessentially crepuscular, singing loudest before dawn and after dusk. They’ll sing when almost all the light is gone from the sky, and it’s the cheeriest sound I know. It’s the activity gentle but bright enough to offer allowance that our own can stop. Someone has taken the reigns for the day, and off we can drift. 

Their evening song is taps, for me, but not the sort that brings tears. It’s the taps we sang at camp – “day is done, gone the sun…” Reverence with the corners of one’s lips turned up, no great heartbreak, just rest. And a bit of a chuckle, because they are pretty silly.

while i was away

from 3.10

Stones and beeswax on a quite pretty table, all the hurts and haunts pressing. But there are plum blossoms blooming on my windowsill, and they, even, were pruned. They were cut off because they were not the Best For the Tree, and here they are blooming in a small blue cup with a little water. And the cup is broken, too, it’s an accidental vase. It still has its white patches without glaze where the handle fell off, but I just turned it around.

They bloomed while I was away. I left them greening and stretching, and I looked at them every day. I leaned over all my books and made sure they were not thirsty. It was even hard to see, because their little cup is blue, and you know so is water. But then I went away, and when I did not look at them they opened. So when I came back it was just a little thing, it was all theirs. It didn’t take my proud look for every each petal to be a miracle of spring.

But I rescued you, didn’t I? I picked you up and chose you so especially based on the size of your cup and the size of my windowsill and your perfect asymmetry I thought was most reverent but Not Too Proper. I quickly with sneaking smile copied nature, I brought awe inside and articulated it, didn’t I?

I wonder if I will notice each one wilting.

leaving the webs

There are webs in most of the corners of our house. Some are simply lines that span the edges of the window, rainbow threads I only notice at certain times on sunny days. Others are bigger and well developed – those have become fixtures, as much as the pictures we’ve hung on purpose. My favorite looks like a kite, above the kitchen sink. It’s fastened on three sides, its complexity concentrated about the middle, and so takes on the appearance of a box kite, all filigree continually airborne. Some of these webs are active, some probably aren’t – I rarely see their makers, except scuttling around the floor here and there.

I realize at some point I’ll need to wipe the slate clean – things could get rather Great Expectations-y. But I love them, and I love sharing the space with spiders. It seems a worthy compromise, for all the good work they do. And, luckily for me and thanks to my mother, spiders have ceased to be a source of fear or surprise (most of the time). Instead they’ve taken on traditionally mythic proportions. Like Charlotte, spiders are wise weavers, creators; they are storytellers. A web is a trap, surely, for prey as well as all flights of the imagination. A number of American Indian myths have Spider weaving the first alphabet, giving humans the written language.

I lived for a while in Seattle with a fairly large spider in the corner of my bathroom. She was an excellent exercise in patience and understanding, because she was BIG: probably three inches in diameter, including big ol’ legs. I love spiders, but they will make you draw your breath. Every morning I had to confront my initial reaction and take the time to see her. Then to thank her. I finally let her out, as I don’t think there was much of an insect food supply among the tile. Doors long shut in one’s brain can be opened, I’ve found, by letting something scary be. By dwelling along side it.

Besides the individual inspiration the spiders bring, I like the fact that insects find reason to take up residence. The health of an ecosystem can often be measured by the presence of predators, as such it’s an excellent sign that we’re due to get our mountain lions back in twenty or thirty years (in the words of famed tracker Susan Morse, “don’t build, and they will come”). I don’t (or do I?) necessarily want catamounts lurking behind the sofa, but I am glad we’ve got some complexity in the house. Clean is good, sterile is terrible. If we go to the trouble of tossing out all the detritus, literal and metaphorical, nothing grows. I’m reassured that we’ve got teensy bacteria and particles to feed the ones who feed the ones who feed the spiders. Then we’re living, and cycling, and changing.

There’s great precedent and expectation to strive for perfect cleanliness in the places we dwell – our psychological space included. But health is balance, not an inert extreme. Things that die take a while to break down and re-filter, and they’ve got to linger a bit amongst the living. That’s when the spiders will set up shop, and weave the most wonderful webs.

Change is a tonic

The few times I have gone away from New England I have always ended up feeling parched and stagnant. We grow according to our topography, I think, and often underestimate its effects. This is not to say that we cannot adapt, and that certain landscapes cannot offer us an expected release, reprieve, or connection. My friend Erin grew up on a pear farm in California, and found the sage scrub-steppe of Colorado disconcerting at first, and then extraordinarily liberating. She then felt like she needed to take deeper breaths when she transplanted herself to the dense vegetation of western Washington state.

The grandeur of the Pacific Northwest was what I couldn’t take. The overwhelming lushness. Maybe that means I’ve taken the puritan aversion to self-indulgence too far, but there it is. Everything is bigger, taller, wider, rougher – more extreme. Take Acer macrophylum, the maple out there. ‘Macrophylum’ means “large leaf,” and they are, actually, bigger than your face. The trees themselves are often two hundred feet tall, all a-covered with draping moss. Western hemlocks tower over our eastern ones, and the shrub vegetation of the forest floor is dense and can grow to eight or more feet. Much of it is green all winter, and when you rise up over any old hill there’s the jagged, fourteen-thousand-plus foot peak of Rainier. There’s only so much gasping one can do.

It may seem odd that one could feel something like ‘parched’ in a region as notoriously wet and verdant as the Northwest. What I craved was the quick and magnificent turning and cycling of New England. The distinct and dramatic nature of our four (or more) seasons has become a circadian rhythm for me, and as years tick by I notice and begin to understand my own periods of dormancy and fruition. Change, these cycles of death and birth and death, a thousand times a day, are the stuff of life. I have finally recognized the great myth of the upward, linear climb, finally reaching an inert and stable plateau for the great illusion it is. It’s more a messy sine wave, I suppose. What I fear is not failure but stagnation (well, I’m sure I feel failure a bit, still).

All landscapes change, of course. The desert for some is as inspiring and evocative as any other place, and the Pacific Northwest squirms and roots and fruits and changes, too. But I’ve set my clock by New England, and the springing robins at dawn open something, always, in my chest. I’ve adhered my own weather to our own barometer, and now I need thunderstorms. And the sound of sap thumping the bottom of the bucket, the great humidity of summer, fireflies, a ponderous winter. I need rock walls to train my eyes through a naked deciduous forest, to see what’s bare and stark in myself. And then a floor of warmed pine needles to bring a languid rapture.