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.

Last Hike Before Gun Deer Season

The coy deer, like a misplaced lawn ornament, stands on the trail at the top of a hill, its neck bent to graze on clover that doesn’t exist because I have obliterated anything green by walking this path every weekend. Directly above the deer, in a stand so empty for most of the year I have hardly noticed it, waits a man in camouflage, his neck-warmer covering his mouth like a thief’s. His big black bow looms out before him like some sort of insect antennae. I am startled to have come across another human being in these woods. For some reason—because I don’t want to ruin his hunt or because he looks so official—I don’t say anything, just salute. Then with a whistle, I urge on my confused dog.

In a mile, I spot a doe at the tree-line. Either the dog does not catch her scent or she’s still puzzling over the last deer, which didn’t give chase when she sniffed its knee. This deer turns, her neck bent like a swan’s, and watches us saunter by. A half mile more and we both hear something in the corn, a pounding of hooves on the packed mud. A buck runs out perpendicular to the rows, crosses the trail in front of us and heads for an adjacent field. The dog follows, yelping like a coyote, and is gone for a while. In another quarter mile I see four does. Then six turkeys. An owl. At the end of the trail I turn to begin the walk back. The coy deer hasn’t moved; neither has the hunter.

“See anything?” I ask, the one phrase I know to say to these strange men I encounter during certain seasons in the forest. He lowers the neck warmer. He is much younger than I thought.

“Not really,” he confides.

I tell him about the buck.

“Was it a big one?” He asks.

I want to say yes, but I don’t know the right lingo, can’t zero in on points or estimate pounds.

“I couldn’t really tell,” I say. He nods. I like him much better after we talk.

It is getting dark when I near the trailhead. But light from the open road allows me to notice one last thing: something on the forest floor that doesn’t seem to belong, something I must have stepped right over when I began my walk. Deciduous, like the leaves I find them in, antler sheds--white and rodent-gnawed—reveal themselves to me every other year or so, a little late-winter gift. But this is far too early to be a shed.

When I pick the antler up, I find it’s missing the cauliflower-like burr at the end, the part that disjoins from the pedicel on the deer’s head when the antler is naturally dropped. Instead, this antler is fractured. The inside glistens like quartz, smoky in one part, rose in another. I fantasize that these colors are from blood vessels that recently fed the growing bone. It’s tough to believe this solid thing grew, that less than a year ago it didn’t exist. I try to imagine the rut that broke it off: a smart, firm hit. I exhale, and a few short, bristled hairs on the antler’s surface embark into the air and disappear—like the deer from the hunter for the next ten days, and the hunter from the woods for the rest of the year.

Spotted

I zoomed above him, my wheels from his perspective like two dark galaxies spiraling by. I could see, through my windshield and then my rearview mirror, how he moved like a hieroglyph, like a drawing in a child's flipbook, this dark thing crossing the road. His body turned first one way and then the other, feet either forward or back, never in between, limbs all at right angles. I turned the car around and parked on the opposite side.

I recognized him instantly--the chunky, grooved middle, bulbous eyes, a dark slate color that to me has always looked purple: a Spotted Salamander. He lacked the two rows of large yellow spots down his back, a sign that he was new to the world--the waterless world that is--a metamorph less than seven days out of his pond, migrating to some mammal burrow in the forest where he would spend the next two years, coming out only nocturnally to feed on invertebrates in the soil. I felt lucky for this encounter.

He may never be "spotted" again, living a solitary life until one April night when the temperature remains above sixty-five in spite of a persistent rain. The warmth and moisture will draw him out of hiding, and there in the air a scent will guide him--a scent like mother's milk, the smell of her neck where you and I hid, as infants, our faces from strangers and then fell asleep. For him the smell will likely be of the algae that his mother passed into the jelly sacs of his egg, which bloomed in his own cells and has there remained, a plant living inside of an animal. It will be the smell of the first water, which, lungless, he moved through his gills and his skin to breathe. It will be the smell of the pond where I sit waiting for his once-a-year appearance. He will follow himself to himself.