"One More Lap Around"

If you live in Ohio, I don't have to tell you how beautiful it has been these past few days. This morning was no exception, though it was a little cooler--and more seasonable to be honest. Before we leave tomorrow on our trip, I took one more walk around the loop: through the orchard to the back pasture and up through the woods trail that spills you back out at the cabin.

The ground was spongy soft with moss that is thriving on the dew and warming temperatures. The understory of the woods sparkled with the leftovers of an early morning rain shower. The sun was noticeably warm on my backside. LeRoy ran ahead of me through the grass and leaves, scampering around like the puppy he is apparently channeling.

"Just one more lap around!" That was what I used to say to my dad when I was about seven years old on one of our family vacations at Lake Dunmore in Vermont. Dad would let me steer the little outboard motor on our rented rowboat around and around the inlet in front of our cabin. Thanks for that, Dad.

I could take "one more lap around" my loop a million times and never tire of it.

Lilac in bud, check.

Naturalized daffs coming up, check.

Misty, lacy, dew-dropped woods, check.

Fairy orbs in place, double check.

And look at this fabulous nest from last year. Heather of the Hills, if you're reading, do you know what made it?

And what does it use to glue it over the suspending branch like this? Amazing!

Well--there you go, until March 31 or so. Have a GREAT spring equinox tomorrow everyone! It's here!

So Much More is Going on Than Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...

I have wanted an Ecological Calendar ever since I found out about it several years ago. I finally purchased one (it was only $14.99 for heaven's sake) and it arrived last week. If you've never seen it before, I urge you to click on the link and take a look. It is "the first" calendar to display the year in four astronomical seasons. It is a calendar from the Earth's perspective, if you will. Along with listing the traditional Gregorian days and dates, it offers up a poetic contemplation/celebration of natural phenomena in three-month increments. As I return to it over the days and weeks, I learn new things about my world and I am moved to meditate on the Earth. What's she doing now?

The website offers a peek at the Winter panel which begins on December 21 with the Winter Solstice. All of the months have names that suggest their mood: January, February, and March are called Celeste, Sleet, and Bluster respectively. The days, too, have names in addition to Monday, Tuesday, etc. Today, February 11, is called Mountain Quail. I'm not exactly sure why, unless it is simply to bring my attention to the fact that Mountain Quail exist in my hemisphere. They've come up with 365 names, one for each day, which after all is only a small sampling of the diversity of living things and phenomena that exist on our planet.

Today doesn't feel like winter--it is 63 degrees! It feels like a raw spring day out there. It feels like Bluster. I know that it is only a tease, though, and I'm keeping my enthusiasm in check lest I come into despair when it snows next. The ground is squishy with water. The water sits on top of the saturated earth in shiny puddles. This afternoon, I put on my brand new LL Bean boots, the ones I broke down and spent the money on after the rubber toe on my cheaper duck boots split like a rotten melon, and took a walk through those puddles and all the mud slicks that are waiting for grass seed. I wanted to photograph the spoils of the winter storm we had two weeks ago.

A big maple tree near the edge of the woods split in two and fell--this way and that:

It is sad to see a tree that size succumb to the elements, especially since our woods doesn't have that many big trees in it. I am not sure about the age of our woods. I want to say that it has been growing for forty years, but that is a guess, or a number remembered from a casual conversation with the previous owners.

One of the things that concerns me about some of the maple trees in our woods is that their trunks look like this:

Like they are soaking wet, but it isn't raining. In the summer, they look drier, as if they were charred in a fire. I assumed it was fungal, but a search on the Web suggests that it might be a "bacterial wetwood infection." Sounds dire, and it is. There is no cure for it.

Well, at least the tree will help keep us warm next winter. John (with help from Jack--get ready Jack!) will cut it up for firewood. The pieces that are too large or too small will rot back into the ground, with help from gorgeous decomposers like these already at work:

And those leftovers will nourish the saplings nearby.

I am at my best, I feel, when one thing is changing into another. And so, I am happy now, as Sleet turns to Bluster, as the moon begins to wane after a spectacular fullness, as the ground swells with moisture, as fallen trees lie in wait. Time is circular after all. Round and round we go.

Conflicted

LeRoy ate a mouse this morning. A whole mouse. I was happy he caught it (in the mudroom) because I don't want mice in the house if we can help it, but also horrified at the spectacle and the suffering.

About three weeks ago, I started putting LeRoy into the mudroom at night. Well, to be truthful, I put him in there several times throughout the day. He is full of kitten-powered energy and Clare and I get tired of him. He rarely sits still, hardly ever naps, and mostly prowls around looking for trouble. He jumps Clare and attempts to eat her head. Clare yowls and screams and hisses and then the two of them gallop across the floors and crash into all the stuff that is still laying around. If he isn't pestering Clare he is pawing at my necklaces that hang artfully from the old planter, or he is up on the bathroom sink looking for something to bat around--maybe a bottle of medicine that he can knock under the dresser. You get the idea.

For the past two days when I opened the mudroom door to get more wood for the fire, instead of finding him asleep in his pile of old sweaters on top of the potting bench I've found him crouching by an old box that sits in the corner. Uh oh. Mouse alert.

This morning when I opened the door he was playing with a terrorized and injured mouse. He seemed tentative about biting down hard on the moving mouse, but of course he wasn't letting it go, either. I thought I would take the poor thing outside and let it die quietly behind the woodpile--they say freezing to death is not a bad way to go. When I went to pick it up, however, LeRoy was having none of it. It was his mouse. He became resolute and took a good hold of it with his mouth. I opened the door to the outside and he took it out there.

It was a clear, cold morning with a good covering of snow on the ground. The cold air and the expanse of Outside seemed to trigger a more serious response from LeRoy toward his prey. He trotted off with the mouse and I let him. Of course he didn't go far--he took it around to the side porch onto the scrap of rug in front of the glass doors. And there he proceeded to eat that mouse. I watched for a brief moment, just to be sure that it was really happening, and then I turned away. Jeez, all this before coffee.

Next time I looked there was no mouse. And no blood. Nothing. Except a cute little kitten begging to come inside.

You know how you feel when you watch Nature on PBS and the hawk or the fox hasn't eaten in a week and really needs to catch something, so you root for it while it chases the bunny, but when it catches the bunny you feel terrible about the suffering that ensues? But the predator finally got a meal so you are happy...but the bunny had baby bunnies so you are sad...
Finally you end up sighing with the realization that life is hard here. Existence is a rough game. No getting around it.

LeRoy wasn't starving, but he did what predators do. I guess I was glad that he actually ate the mouse instead of killing it and letting it go to "waste." I don't mind that he keeps the mouse population down, but this spring I hope I don't find bird remains. Someone asked me once if we were going to put up bird feeders near the house. I said No. No we are not. Binoculars work just fine, thank you.

Foto Friday

Time for some visual.

The moody skies...

The dying grasses...

The comical cats...

And the big oak tree, hanging on to its bronze leaves at the top of my favorite curve of land...

all seem to conspire for my delight.

Happy Friday!

Okay, just one more

I found not one, but two saddleback caterpillars (Acharia stimulea) munching happily on a dogwood sapling underneath the pear tree the other day. Is it not the most crazy looking caterpillar you've ever seen?

Back in the '80s, I would have so wanted a pair of earrings in their likeness.

They turn into this moth, which I've never seen. Notice the weird little circle on the body of the moth. I wonder if it is left over from the "saddle" on the back of the 'pillar?

I felt a small triumph at spotting these guys. I felt primed to see them because I've been flipping through all the glossy pictures in my identification book, going, "Ooh, ahh," and "I'd like to see that one in real life!" The saddleback was one of the latter. I was fiddling with the hose out by the new trees one evening and happened to glance over and spot them. It was an example, I feel, of that maxim by Louis Pasteur: "In the field of observation, chance favors a prepared mind."

So, I am prepared to spot caterpillars. Woo hoo!

Another Moth Moment, brought to you by a local sponsor

I was so happy to have my caterpillar identification book on hand when I found this creature struggling along in the mud down by the new house the other day:

I was able to identify it as this moth that we found several weeks ago:

It is a Pandorus Sphinx moth (Eumorpha pandorus). My book says that the caterpillar (about 3.5 inches long!) is "frequently encountered while it is wandering in search of a pupaton site." It also says that grape is a common host plant for it, so I left it by the grapevine in front of the cabin in the hopes that it would find that a suitable site for its metamorphosis.

Pretty cool, huh?

Into the Woods

Deep summer and the forest is dark and dense. It covers the hillside to the east of the cabin and rolls along southward till it meets another line of woods that heads west. In winter, you can see the top line of the hills and all the ground below. In summer you see only the trunks of the nearest trees and behind them, a curtain of deep, dark, mysterious hush. In summer, it is the forest of fairy tales, the archetypal forest that characters must enter for one reason or another. All sorts of magical things happen under the cloak of the aestival forest.

I’m sitting in it as I write this. In this chair: John is working from home and the infernal “conference calls on speaker phones” have begun (in quotes because I think it could be the name of a band—an awful punk band who plays dissonant, screeching chords over screaming vocals:) I moved to the bench under the apple trees with my trusty laptop, but the boys are playing the radio and making a racket at the new house. So, I escaped to the woods. It is another world, right next to the one I was just in a second ago.

The threshold to our woods has been celebrated with one of John’s arbors. As well it should be, because there is a distinct difference in tone as you cross over from open meadow or lawn to woods. Immediately there is a shift in perception. Some liminal awareness in the brain is roused. The meadows are all noise and light and color and movement that hold pockets of silence here and there. The woods are the opposite. They are quiet and dark, mostly green and brown, with small darts of movement and shivers of sound that startle and catch the eye. In the meadows I am looking at everything. In the woods, everything is looking at me. We’ve got a lot of multiflora rose in our woods. And bittersweet vine and grapevine and Virginia creeper and another type of vine whose name I do not know. All of that is unfortunate, but not unusual for this part of the country. The old growth forest is long gone (except for the logs of our cabin!) and those nasty invasives have taken hold. We make the best of the bittersweet and grapevine, though. John makes his wonderful furniture and I cut swaths of the red berries haloed with orange petals from the bittersweet in fall. And I have to admit that the shapes of random grapevine make me want to craft on the spot.
People are talking about summer winding down and I begrudgingly admit that it is. The warm weather will stay around for awhile, I know, but the days are getting shorter. You can sense the plants beginning to draw back into themselves. The beauty we have to look forward to, though, is the glory of fall. The woods will change moods along with its clothes. I’ve seen it before, but this year, I’ll be here for all the subtleties and I’m excited about that. Another simple pleasure (that is somehow complex) of living here year-round. I’ll report back on the changes.

Strange Changes

We don’t have a TV here in the country. Our old set is at the apartment in Columbus and it still works for channels 4, 6 and 10, but it is a dinosaur in the land of electronics and I’m not going to move it here. I think we will get a new TV when the new house is ready, but I’m not sure of that. I don’t want to miss anything because I’m watching TV.

I don’t want to miss the deer that come to the orchard in the morning mist.
I don’t want to miss the milk snake crossing the driveway.

I don’t want to miss the colors of the sunset reflecting on the clouds across the meadow.
I don’t want to miss seeing the crazy collection of moths dressed in their Erte cloaks resting against the back of the new house.

My life here is definitely different. My habits are different. When I go to the apartment in the city, the TV sits on a table in the smallish living room and I automatically desire to turn it on. Like an alcoholic seeing a bottle of gin, I guess. I want to zone out, numb over, forget. Out here, since I don’t have a TV, I end up sitting quietly on the porch, looking at the meadow and noticing the thoughts flickering across my mind and the general feeling in my heart and my body. It amazes me how much time I have spent avoiding this kind of introspection. Even though I crave it, if given the opportunity to avoid it, I will—through a variety of means that the city offers in truckloads: shopping, eating, drinking, watching TV, working out. None of those things is bad in and of itself, but I have used them all to avoid quietly sitting.

One of the reasons I wanted to move to the country was to cultivate this art of quietly sitting, and it is one of the things that is changing me the most. When John is in town at the office and I’m here all alone, the quietude really spreads its fingers wide. A deep well appears and so far, I’ve just peeked over the edge at the dark waters below. It is both restful and energizing in a way that I don’t have much experience feeling. And because of that lack of experience, it can be a little scary. It is intriguing enough, though, to keep me tuning in.

Before anyone gets too aggravated with my rhapsody, I want you to know that I understand what a bit of grace it is to be able to do this. I don’t have kids to haul around and cook for, and no full-time job sapping my last bit of creative energy. And for that I am grateful to the marrow (the job part especially--I love my kids :) I just wanted you to know that I’m not wasting my dose of grace on TV. Maybe when winter comes and the dark settles early and the new season of House begins, I will change my tune. For now, I’m allowing the exterior change in my life to affect the interior, too. And I am here to report that the process is surprising and amazing. I have the feeling that it would take me as far as I wanted to go. That somehow, it wants me. It wants all of us and is waiting patiently for us to pay attention so that it can reveal wonder after wonder.

I Need Monet

The cat has acquired a new habit since moving here. When I open the door to let her out, she swivels her head back and forth, from side to side several times, continuously as she steps slowly, carefully across the threshold and out the door.

I know how she feels. There is so much to look at. When I walk in the meadows, which are glorious right now, I do the same thing. My pace slows, sometimes to a standstill, while my eyes try to take in everything, every detail, every nuance in the landscape—the long views, the macro views, this leaf, that flower, this grass, that tree in the distance.

It is a matter of texture: there are thousands of them in every square foot—hairy thistles, smooth grass blades, fuzzy seed heads.
It is a matter of shape: circular discs of clover leaves, candelabras of ironweed blossoms, fountain sprays of goldenrod getting ready to burst into full feather dusters.
It is a matter of color: purple coneflowers dying back to brown, green apples with the first blush of red forming in the trees, bright yellow surprise of Jerusalem artichoke waving on stems as high as the ironweed, all against a background of chlorophyll in every shade imaginable.
It is a matter of pattern: how many thousand—five, ten?—round heads of Queen Anne’s lace bobbing in the breeze on a plane just above the tallest grasses.

I can’t see it all! My eyes are like hungry puppies that can’t gobble their food fast enough. I could look and look and look all day. If I had my books with me, I’d rustle up a quote from E.O. Wilson’s, Biophilia, about how we humans evolved in the midst of all this creative variety and artistic juxtaposition that exists in nature, and therefore in us. No wonder our brains are so complex. And no wonder that we need nature in such a fundamental way, that it inspires us still.

Or, forget E.O. Wilson, and think of Captain Kirk visiting that planet that was so like Earth. After all those barren outposts with rocky terrain and red skies, they came upon a planet soft with vegetation and ringing with birdsong. The crew went native and was in danger of forgetting the Enterprise altogether, of chucking interstellar travels in exchange for fresh air and moist dirt. Even Spock’s half human side was awakened by the lush forests, warm sunshine, and cool streams. It was home at the deepest cellular level. (Of course a pretty lady was involved, from whom Kirk had to pry himself away to save the Enterprise, but that’s another piece of nature I’m not talking about right now.)

Before we moved here, I wondered what it would be like to be able to watch the meadows unfold all year long. I wondered what I was missing when we couldn’t make it out here for weeks at a time. I guess this post makes it clear that I have not been disappointed. The only thing missing is my painting skills. About every ten feet, while taking my walks, I stop, hold my hands up to make a frame and say, “Now that would make a beautiful painting.”

I feel that one of the raisons d’etre for humans is to notice and sing the praises of this most remarkable planet. I almost feel an obligation to learn to paint for that very reason. Because photographs can’t capture the subtleties, I should move to paints. If only my grandmother were here. She’d set up an easel and get busy. For now, I'll have to be satisfied with my Fuji Finepix camera and mere words.

Inner Children will be Children

I woke up the other morning to caterpillar acrobatics and bluebird feeding lessons. Groggy with sleep, I muddled through making the morning coffee then took my mug onto the porch to finish waking up. The sleep began to leave my eyes with every sip of espresso, like the mists that rise gently from the valleys in the meadow and waft away with the sun’s heat.

What in the world is that? There were one, two, three comma shapes hanging in mid-air in the front yard. Are those caterpillars? I picked up the binoculars and looked. Sure enough, they were the fuzzy white caterpillars I often see scooting along the porch furniture. They were hanging from threads of their own making, like spider webbing, from the walnut tree. Were they climbing up or lowering themselves down? In the twenty or so minutes I watched them, I couldn’t tell. I got off the porch and walked over to where they were gliding in the breeze. From what I could see, they were working hard at climbing back up the thread. I watched a caterpillar shed its skin for the final time once, before turning into a chrysalis, and I can tell you that it looks like hard work. This was no different. Little guy was doing ab-crunches over and over again like some version of Pilates torture, and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Tired just watching, I went back to my soft chair on the porch and sat down. Now my eye caught sight of two more caterpillars swaying in the breeze a little more to the right. Five caterpillars in all, moving up and down their invisible threads in an early morning dance. The wrens were chattering and bringing insects to their babies, and didn’t seem at all interested in the bait hanging from the tree where they nest. It was a peaceful, routine morning with the added fascination of a caterpillar trapeze act.

And then the squad arrived. Three bluebirds, two juveniles with a parent, flew up and landed, one at a time, on the branch of the walnut tree with a view of the caterpillars. I heard them as they landed, flump, flump, flump. Uh oh. This was looking like a Marty Stouffer moment in the making. And I hadn’t even finished my first cup of coffee. Two of the bluebirds swooped from the branch. I turned my head part way, squinted my eyes—I didn’t want to look, but wanted to see what would happen—and Hey! The bluebirds flew right past the caterpillars towards the front porch and hovered about a foot above the ground. They wanted some insects that were in the grass there, but Clarabelle the cat was sitting two feet away on the front step watching the whole thing with me. The birds flew back up to the tree branch, made a few more passes at the grass until Clare got up and left, unnerved by the spectacle.

Soon there was another parent and another juvenile bluebird and all five of them hunted for food in the front yard. I watched them through the binoculars and marveled at how big the babies were. Their brown speckled breasts were giving way to pretty blue wing feathers. They were doing a good job of hunting. No more sitting squat on a branch and shaking their feathers till mom and dad brought them a snack. These guys were showing their stuff.

With the threat of imminent carnage past, I began to think about the caterpillars again. What kind of butterfly would they turn into? Could I find out what their rappelling act was all about? Why didn’t the birds eat them? Were they poisonous? Questions that would make an inquiry-based classroom teacher get all tingly with excitement. Like a good student, I decided to catch one and raise it. I’d see for myself what kind of butterfly (or moth) it would transform into.

I searched through the kitchen and decided that the Red Vines container would make a good caterpillar home. It was clear plastic and large enough to let a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis. I had to throw away the remaining licorice (sorry, Dad) and throw the lid out. I cut some window screen off a roll in John’s workshop and attached it with a rubber band around the top of the container. Assuming that their host plant is walnut, I snapped a branch off the tree and put it in there. We’ll see what happens next.

Now, I know that there are people who could tell me right now what kind of caterpillar this is. And what their dangling act is all about, and why the birds weren’t eating it. But, I want to find out for myself, preferably through observation. When I was a kid, I used to rearrange my bedroom on a regular basis. Sometimes, I would set it up so that I could be a scientist. I devoted space on the dresser for lab experiments and put a clipboard and paper on my desk for note taking. I loved the sense of order and purpose it gave to my life. Of course the “experiments” I concocted—potions made with the toiletries on hand in the bathroom along with food coloring—would get moldy within a week. I was not, nor have I ever been, a scientist. But I still have a love of what science finds out about the world and a great admiration, I suppose, for the patience it takes to get an answer. I think I can be patient enough to observe this caterpillar for a week or more and fulfill my urge to perform citizen science.

Or maybe the attraction of this latest experiment is simply that I get to be a kid again. Living here with the meadows and woods right out my front door lets me be childlike, exploring the nooks and crannies of the world, dragging home caterpillars and egg sacks and interesting rocks, setting them on the front porch for further investigation. It is exciting to play like this again. The world seems to hold endless miracles and fascination and every day is yet another chance to discover something cool or gross or beautiful or mysterious. Who knows what will present itself tomorrow morning while the coffee pot gurgles to life and I bring my forty-something body with the nine year old inside out onto the porch?