House of Mercy

A man walks by your bench along the Capitol Crescent Trail in Bethesda, Maryland, population 61,000, seven miles from Washington, D.C.  You can’t tell if he has a limp or a swagger.  He clutches a tissue in his right hand like a small storm he is trying to contain.  A woman in a long purple scarf descends the wooden steps to the path from her back yard; every other article of clothing she wears is white: shirt, skirt, socks, shoes—each one jaundiced by its neighbor, like a Great Pyrenees suddenly golden against winter’s first snow.  On your right, where the trail edges a parking garage, locust trees live up to their Latin name—Robinia Pseudoacacia—or “False Acacias.”  They grow tall and branchless in the shade, their spreading canopies of compound leaves not appearing until twenty or thirty feet, looking savannah-like, as if they have been browsed by giraffes.  Everything here seems a little “off,” including you:  a much younger man on a bicycle says “hi” and slows down until you look up and he sees you are not as pretty as he hoped, your long hair having masked a rather mannish nose.  You are embarrassed for him.  He continues on.

            “Alisa! Alisa!”

            “I can go higher!”

            The sounds of a daycare playground several hundred yards back ring in your memory.  You passed it—a wood-chipped square strewn with heavy-duty plastic outdoor play-sets from Wal-Mart or Kmart—on your way in.  There is little dialogue here. Most people are involved in conversations with entities not present:  chatting on cell phones, listening to iPods.  A mother walks silently next to the flesh that came out of her—her teenage son—a body now inconceivably separate, and taller, as if it were trying to outdo its creator.  Dense mats of Japanese honeysuckle drape the trail-edge in odd shapes, like layers of nacre, concealing what’s beneath: decaying logs, a single rock, some native shrub.

            By now you have a single mosquito bite on the back of each hand, your sacrifice for being here:  your blood—your own cells—in the body of the female mosquito, low on the food chain again.  A girl whose red hair clashes with her yellow-green neon tank top jogs by.  Across her upper arm you see a single band-aid, as if she has recently received a vaccine.  Another biker whizzes past, his light blinking brightly and rapidly enough to cause a seizure.  You look away, down at your hands.  Earlier in the day you had a hangnail.  It is so easy to cut yourself with a knife  (you think about a morning last week, when the blade went right through the bagel you were slicing in half and into your palm) but difficult to bite through your own skin.  So you just kept pulling it back with your teeth—the hang-nail—farther and father, until it broke off on its own and the dermis showed beneath.  It is what you would like to do to this land:  peel back its layers until it reveals what’s essential.  But suddenly mosquito bites populate your hands—the knuckles, the heel.  You must cast yourself out of this place, this sweet-smelling, too-wet urban woods, which you have borrowed temporarily, away for the weekend.  As you leave you pass an eight-and-a-half by eleven inch paper sign that someone has printed and affixed to a wooden privacy fence:  BEWARE, it says.  But rain has smudged the large capital letters so they conceal anything more specific that might have been written beneath.  

Drought

I haven't heard you much this year.  Your post-rain summer evening call, always so other-wordly, like a sound effect from a 1960's era Sci-Fi television series, has been silenced by drought.  Instead you've appeared to me twice, taken shape in some unlikely place like an apparition, as if frogs had souls and yours was restless.

The first time, I opened the newspaper box from the back and there you sat like a stone, gray skin granular and crystalline, waiting for news of rain.

Last night, I filled the watering can and emptied it on the petunia, its pink, bugle-shaped blooms spreading from the pot en masse, like a phonograph's horn, emitting nothing, but trying to swallow the whole sun.  I returned to the spigot to fill it again, to water the marigolds and the fern, and when the water hit the bottom of the can you appeared at the top, from the inside.  You had survived the recent flood, a torrent of water that didn't kill you but must have made you think twice about nature's intentions, wavering as she does between neglect and passion.  I picked you up and you leapt onto my shirt, revealing splashes of bright yellow behind the knees on your outstretched legs.  You were no longer a specter, the extra-terrestrial voice of Earth's humid, mid-summer nights.  You were real.  Eastern Gray Treefrog.  Your toepads clung to my shirt and you climbed right up to my sternum, settling in.  I could feel the weight of you there, though ridiculously light, like the weight of a human infant.

Betsy and the Bluebird

Two fledglings landed on my window screen one day--probably English house sparrows from the yearly nest that materializes in the attic.  Like two snowballs thrown against the glass they suddenly appeared, though fortunately for them the storm windows are out so they did not go splat and fall to the ground like the indigo bunting my husband found this spring outside our living room.  He scooped it up with a garden trowel and sat it on the windowsill next to the back entrance of our house so we could enjoy its iridescent blue feathers for a while.  They shone brightly against the silver and black of the small shovel.  Then one day the bunting simply caved in, as if its entire body--bones included--had given one last exhale--one long breath in the shape of itself.  

But these two landed safely like heavy moths against the screen, tail feathers splayed.  I turned my head from the computer and I could see it in their faces:  here were two adolescents realizing their power.  Flight.  Something wasn't quite right yet, they were thinking--I could tell.  Their feet, when they landed, should be less vertical somehow.  They were a little flustered, a little uncertain.  But with a few more tries they would realize their power.

Not so one of the bluebirds out back.  

Author David Gessner offers this advice to nature writers:  when you are describing that beautiful meadow, for every glistening lily there should be one can of Alpo dogfood.  In other words:  don't ignore the trash.  Adhere to this equation and you will avoid over-romanticizing nature.  So I warn you:  what follows here is all puppy chow. 

Later that day, while I was weeding the garden, my dog, Betsy, came over to the strawberry patch and started to pick strawberries with her mouth.  She left the patch after each one, flung it into the air and then proceeded to roll on it wherever it fell on the lawn.  After weeding, I went to lay with her for a moment in the grass and it had worked--a sweet strawberry perfume wafted up from her sticky neck.  She has done this before with pine branches sawed off by twig girdler and twig pruner beetles.  The pine scent, also sticky but longer-lasting, is a cleaner, more masculine cologne.  But usually she rolls in rotting carcasses or scat.  (Just this morning on our walk past the remains of a small raccoon she has dutifully ignored for a few weeks--now it is just fur and bone, mixed, today, with a little rain--she suddenly swept her neck downward in a break-dance like move to attempt a dousing; luckily I had her on the leash and was able to yank her away in the middle of the act).

But back to the bluebird.  On a more recent weeding expedition I saw Betsy over by the bluebird house, tail wagging, amidst the kind of group screeching birds sometimes emit that is easy not to notice, though if you attune to it, it will alert you to a snake, a hawk, a cat. As I strode across the yard I saw her preparing to perform her signature move:  that familiar neck roll.  There was a tiny bluebird on the ground by her nose, its eyes closed, nothing on its human-colored skin but a few tiny shards of barely-barbed feather-quills on each wing.  I gave her the signal to stay, and she did.  I picked up the bluebird and stuffed it as gently as I could through the hole in the box, back into what appeared to be a very full nest.  Then I called Betsy away.

Over the course of the next few days, I would peek into the nest and whistle softly at the babies to see how they were faring, Betsy always at my side.  She would sniff around the grass below, rather ridiculously, I thought.  What were the odds a baby would fall from this same nest again?  Then she would sit, intently focused and impossibly still, the way a dog will when it believes food is coming, and look up at me.  My husband, on his way from the barn to the house, would remark that Betsy looked like a student beside me at the bluebird box, intent on understanding something.

You can see where this is going, so I'll just tell you:  a few days later the same scene replayed itself.  I was weeding. Betsy disappeared, then reappeared at the bluebird box with a wagging tail.  By the time I arrived at her side she already had the little guy in her mouth.  You could see the top of his head protruding from one side of her muzzle and his feet from the other.  She pranced through the yard refusing to put him down for me or my husband, who tried to pry open her jaws, though surely the little bird's body was already as deflated as that indigo bunting's had become on our windowsill months ago. When I brought out half a leftover hamburger to coax Betsy to drop him--though I don't know what I would have done if she had--my plan backfired:  she bent to take the hamburger from the sidewalk without relinquishing her catch and they both went down, bird and burger--in one swallow.

I won't moralize about the misguided, unequal value my husband and I place on a cow vs. a bluebird, about how this incident only underscores that humans don't view the food we buy for ourselves at the store as ever having been alive.  And I won't try to appease my unjustified sadness at the bluebird's death by imagining how its warm cells turned into the warm cells of a border collie in a matter of seconds, how that bluebird--like those house sparrow fledglings--has in fact mastered its power, flying around my yard on four legs, hopping over soybean plants in pursuit of deer and coyotes, larger prey than it ever could have imagined.  I will only say this:  we were disgusted with Betsy for a few hours, my husband and I, but then we suddenly loved her again like our own child.  We should be more like her.  We are fickle, but Betsy--Betsy and the bluebird are of one mind.

Two-Acre Summer

I circumvent my favorite weeds while mowing--one lone mullein along the back border that will rise to four feet before the summer is over; a patch of orange hawkweed by the fire pit; two or three of the giant version of Solomon's seal that arc out from beneath a heavily-lichened oak behind the barn.  Now, I have time for such close observation of the lawn.  The wild chamomile which began to announce my daily arrival home from work in early June through its crushed pineapple scent brushes my tires with new height when my car doesn't move for several days.  You see, school is out for summer.

I inspect the scat in the crook of a silver maple that has split into three broad trunks at breast height, full of seeds and the golden forewings of coleoptera--which, hardened to act as sheaths for the beetle's more membranous hind-wings, are indigestible.  I knock on the bluebird house as if to request entry but really to urge the mother out, who has sprung nearly into my mouth when I have opened the box without warning before.  I check for the rapid breathing of the gray babies.  I wonder if they will fledge or if, like some years, they will die and mold in the nest, perhaps poisoned from insects soaked in Round-up, which the farmer rains down on the fields surrounding my small plot of land.

There is a small part of me that wonders whether I should be away on some adventure, taking advantage of my sudden and prolonged freedom.  Have I traded rows of desks only for the invisible rows on my lawn, which I ride up and down with my loud mower, and the short rows in my garden, along which I crawl on all fours, pulling up plants I might, elsewhere, covet?  Maybe, one day, I will go. 

But this year I think I might take a safari in the lilac.  I say it this way to make it sound like the Sahara or the Amazon or the Orient, for to me it is territory just as uncharted.  All day long I watch the hummingbirds fly back and forth from the lilac to the feeder I have hung by the window and the plants I have hung on the porch.  So I will pull a simple chair into the bush (which is half the size of a garage) and sit and stare, until I lay eyes on that walnut-sized hummingbird nest made of plant down and spider webs that I know--I just know--must be there.

Feeding the Birds

"The hummingbird talked to me today," my husband jokes.

"What did he say?" I ask, intrigued. 

"He said, 'Mexico was great!'"

Each year we wait for the migrants to return. My mother emails from Maryland to tell me when her hummingbirds arrive: "A day later than last year!" She says, proud she had the feeder out and ready for them. 

The birds fill my yard with such outlandish color (the center-of-the-sun-orange of the oriole, the gun-wound-red of the grosbeak, the raspberry head of the house finch) and such song (if there ever was anything upon which to base faith in a supreme being, for me it would be the simple fact that birds sing), but often I forget the most astonishing thing: it is not "the orioles" that return each spring, but this oriole, this singular one, who could have a name if I'd give him one, who comes to my 2 and 1/2 acres each year after his 1,000 mile migration. I wonder what my house looks like from above, at the end of his long journey, a night-time of straight flying: the same as it looks to me when I drive over that last incline of road after visiting my family on the coast? "Well, the house is still standing," I say to my husband each time, and he nods. We unlock the doors and resume our life. 

I wonder what this oriole's winter life is like--if some family in Mexico halves oranges and spoons grape jelly into a shallow dish and sets them out for him as I do, and which place he considers his real home.

I wonder if to him I am recognizable--the one who takes down the sweetness for a few moments every other day, then brings it out again, calling, "Food for orioles!" to the inhabitants of the yard--or whether I am just "homo sapiens," some other species, a blur whose actions he may appreciate in some basic way but not need, not love.

Desire

I've traded my desire.

I used to crave the tannin-red or mud-brown water of a creek, and a flat rock where I could lay in the sun with a book. I first remember discovering this rejuvenating combination of sun, stone, water, and words about fifteen years ago in a gorge of hemlocks I had trekked to along Maryland's Gunpowder River. Certainly I had united with those first three elements--sun, stone, and water--many times before but on this day I had in my hand a heavy tome: three novels by Thomas Hardy bound as one, and I was deep into Tess of the D'urbervilles. I selected a giant cube of a rock, one of many that made the water there run deep and narrow. The rock was a perfect mattress and pillow, a reservoir of heat; my raised and open book, a parasol. I listened to the water and read as Tess took all of life's hardest blows: poverty, rape, death, lost love. I laughed when Tess and Angel, escaping town after Tess commits murder, happened upon Stone Henge: it just seemed so contrived. But there I lay on my own stone monument. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't taken up in her downward spiral, like the branches disappearing in the whirlpool below me. I would be lying if I said I wasn't shouting yes! and no! to her at all those points when life seemed to offer choices. Perhaps she couldn't hear me, I thought, over the sound of the water.

But now I crave a small, still pool and the bridge above it, a tiny kettle lake that wasn't filled for the first six years I hiked this segment of Wisconsin's Ice Age Trail but now is, thanks to a cyclically rising water table. The pool is just down from the parking area--a square of mown grass in a hayfield--but I hike to it from the other end of the trail so it feels like I'm three miles in. I lay on my stomach on the warm boards, which heat more quickly than stone but cool more quickly too. My chin on my hands, my elbows and hair dangle over the bridge's edge. I stare into the algae green water, at water boatman and whirligigs and all the mosquito larvae that will make this pastime unbearable in a month except on extremely windy days, when the metamorphosed adults will not be able to alight on me. Last week, as I stared, what looked like a large and purple beetle unwound itself from a mass of algae and underwater grasses, but it was actually a salamander's head; he came to the surface, took a breath, then took cover again, repeating this process every ten minutes. I read here too, but mostly nonfiction now: memoir after memoir after memoir, each life told in retrospect, so there is nothing to say in this silent place, no advice to give, though like the hooves of the deer that leave their deep prints all along the shore, I am totally absorbed.

So it's sun and wood and water and words now, and it's just as good.

Tease

A red-winged blackbird teeters on one of last season's cattails in a drainage ditch along the road. A "v" of geese flies overhead. In the distance, a sandhill crane calls. Two robins land on the matted, wet grass. Sap buckets sprout from the maple tree. These are all clichés, I know, but I let myself fall hard anyway. I make big plans for a hike--same trail, same distance, but something is different.

I wear an old pair of boots. The evening before--even though the temperature was below 32 degrees--when I set out with my dog for the hill behind the house, we soon found the cornfield was no longer frozen. The mud took us in: me to the ankle and my dog to the belly. My boots are still drying in the foyer.

Today in the woods it is warmer, but the trail, which I've packed hard with walking all winter, is like a bobsled track. It's a single line of ice topped with a thin coat of water through the otherwise snow-less forest, the width of a man and as long as a man can care to travel. I am forced to walk not on the trail, but beside it. As if to spite me, it warns, "Don't rush things." This happens every year. The last ribbon of winter rests just where I want to put my feet.

And that is March. Like a fickle lover, it pulls you in one moment and the next it keeps you at bay. You can be sunk in it, mud like batter for some kind of recipe and you a key ingredient. Or you can be forced to inch along the periphery, dangerously close to where you want to be.

Porcupine

The wind has been making strange sounds today, squeaking at the windows like rags full of windex, speaking like unexpected visitors on the porch whose slamming car doors I didn’t hear. It blew snow across the road like smoke from a witch’s brew spilling over the edges of a pot, heavier than air. On our walk, it blew my dog’s fur into pinwheels.

It’s dark now, and I can’t stop thinking about the porcupine my dog has run into twice this winter in the hedge between two fields. The first day, she had a face full of quills by the time I reached her. Covered with tiny barbs, the quills expand from the heat of whatever they stick into and are difficult to remove. You’re supposed to twist them a little. I didn’t know this. They didn’t seem to bother my dog, who continued—to my friend’s chagrin—to bark at the porcupine until I got her on the leash. We took her home and my husband held her muzzle closed while I pulled the quills out of her nose, her gums, her chin.

The second day we encountered the little porcupine, the smallest one I have seen, he appeared in a tuft of long grass the same winter-black and tan as his cowlick of quills. He didn’t seem particularly bothered by my dog’s relentless barking. He blatantly refused to escape up a tree. He sat on my boot while I tried to keep the dog away and looked up at me, miniscule eyes in a tiny face on a body unsizeable because of the raised quills. I pulled the dog away and we watched him waddle north, until he determined we were headed that way also and turned in the other direction.

The wind is still blowing, rattling the storm windows like small claps of thunder all around the house. My dog is on the couch curled into the smallest circle one can imagine, all four feet concealed somehow beneath her. I’m sitting under an afghan, my hood up. And somewhere in the windbreak between our field and the neighbor’s is the little porcupine we sometimes see.