Tricked

My husband and I like leaves.  When we lived in forests, we dipped them in paint and pressed them on our skin, then lay in piles of them, trying to be them.  Now, we add them to the yard.  We plant raspberries, an apple tree, a cherry tree, currants.  We tend a crowded garden, guiding long arms of pumpkin plants out onto the lawn.  His father brings up clippings from corkscrew willows, black-eyed Susans, a yellow lady’s slipper.  They drive to the woods and come back with two maples and a cherry that look like tall but emaciated children, plant them far apart, each supported by two square wooden stakes wider than their trunks, twine looped around their middles, torn squares of t-shirt slid in between to prevent the twine from cutting into them.  My father-in-law gives us a spent moonflower pod, a branch of rose-of- Sharon that we thrust into soil in a pot, hoping it will take root.  In two short rows, we plant eight spruces picked up for free on Arbor Day.  We mow around common mullein whenever it appears, let its low fountain of furry leaves flourish, then wait a year for its towering five-foot stalks of yellow flowers to spike up ridiculously from the lawn.  Watching for growth, I notice that even the evergreens in the front lose their leaves en masse in two year cycles, then sprout new needles from small brown, grape-like clusters of soft tissue.

            Some things thrive.  Even through drought, the spruces reach half-Christmas-tree height in six years.  The apple we watch carefully, dreaming of pie, and when we notice one year a clump of leaves gone missing and then clouds of tent caterpillar nests in the crook of almost every branch, we pull the caterpillars off with our hands one-by-one—easy to find along the wispy web trails they leave on the branches—and smash them beneath our feet. 

Sometimes we are neglectful caretakers. Occasionally chance steps in to reverse our errors.  The leaves of the transplanted maples and cherry wilt and brown, making the trees no longer look even like emaciated children, but like sticks poked into the ground.  We stop watering them, wondering if we should.  And then it rains, a long pour that lightens but continues over night, and the next day on the way to the garden I see new leaves, the greenest green, growing from twig-ends on two of the trees.  In our bedroom, the rose-of-Sharon sits dormant for months then suddenly does the same thing. 

And then there are the moonflower seeds.  My husband carefully shakes them from the flower pod onto a plate and lets them dry on a bookshelf.  Then he plants them in two rather regal, blue flower pots and puts them outside. Sprouts shoot up.  We water them religiously, courted by the thought of broad white blooms opening at night, dying before morning. They grow, but the leaves seem odd, glossy and bright rather than the grey-green we remember from his parents' house, linear rather than broad, each marked with a dark thumbprint at its center.  We water them anyway, certain they are moonflower.  We avoid the internet. When my husband finally does look up moonflower he says he can’t make out the leaves in the pictures.  The plants prosper and spill over the edges of the pots.  Then, one day in the garden, I realize I am pulling up the same plant we are nurturing in those containers on the patio—lady’s thumb, an invasive weed.  I tell my husband.  I walk to the front of the house and look down at them, the racemes of miniscule pink flowers among the sprawling green so stately in the dark potting soil encircled by the shiny blue pot-rim.  In on the joke, I decide I’ll continue to water them, these stand-ins, these goblin children.  I’ll give them one good season.

Home

          The dog army-crawled under the bed, elbows and knees thunking the old oak floor as if to drown out the oncoming thunder we hadn't anticipated yet.   The boxspring, a squat roof, held her safely down in the lift-off of air as a low pressure system rolled in.  Her nose filled with ozone, sky somewhere already on fire.  Often she stays there for hours, licking clean the static from her fur, coming out when the weather has cleared, trauma forgotten, as if the universe has done her no wrong.

            But this one passed quick, before the sun had set, so I leaned from my chair to look out the window and there it was, eight years coming.  I’d seen it once before, here on fields so fantasy-green with young corn they look photo-shopped.  One end came from a hump in the ridge the glacier made, the other fell on someone’s summer home, so clear I thought the people inside, if they were there, would be all blue and red and yellow.  The rest of it arced up over the road, spanning three crop fields like some kind of extravagant irrigator that shows itself only after the watering’s done.  I stood in the road and because nobody else came out I claimed it as mine, the whole scene:  sun shooting straight across the yard, wide-set drops of rain still falling, and the entire crazy arch.  This was no half-rainbow, filling a gap between tree-covered mountains, which, on other days, I might have longed for to break up the sameness of this smoothed-over place.  This was something else, full-blown, which only this level land seemed built to hold.

Irruption

Last week, a large flock of white birds alit across the road from my house, each bird like a single feather, circling slowly down on a coil of unseen currents in the air.  A small temporary lake of snowmelt in the empty cornfield was their resting place.  Once they were all down, to an undiscerning eye they simply looked like stubborn patches of snow in last year’s furrows.  Their thick bodies and long necks were impossibly white against the dark soil. They were tundra swans, migrating, to my delight, from my old stomping grounds:  the marshes of the Mid-Atlantic. Each spring, 70,000 of these swans travel 2,000 miles to their breeding grounds in the tundra of Canada and Alaska. They stop just twice on their route, always in the same places: once in eastern Pennsylvania, and once in the Great Lakes.  If you live in Wisconsin, every year you can count on tundra swans to signal spring, and then, on their return route, to bring winter back again. 

            

But last week we were thrown off course--not by the ice and snow and below-average temperatures--but because my husband turned to look at the bird feeders that hang from our porch and saw what looked like parakeets:  four finch-sized birds, two of them with orange rumps and breasts and caps, the other two olive-green, all with dark wings.  One hung upside down and stuck its pink tongue out.

Photographs revealed the birds’ curious bills, which overlapped at the tip.  They were not parakeets but Red Crossbills, a non-migratory bird that breeds in the coniferous forests of very far northern Wisconsin and Canada.   Although they are a fairly common bird, Red Crossbills are not a local resident.  They were with us only for a morning, busily eating sunflower seeds beneath our large, old white pines, which I imagine must have looked to them from above, in the farm fields of central Wisconsin, a little bit like home.

What we had witnessed was likely part of an irruption—that’s irruption with an ‘i” not an “e”:  a dramatic, irregular migration of large numbers of birds to areas where they are not typically found.  Irruptions occur due to poor food sources.  In my Audubon guide, a map shows that Red Crossbills can irrupt across almost the entire eastern half of the United States.

I had not heard this word before, and I like it very much:  the idea that animals can irrupt, can break or burst in, enter forcibly or suddenly, as if they had something important to tell, doing what they want despite our human notion of balance and regularity.   I will watch for irruptions now, for unplanned things, as closely as I watch for each season’s parade of long-time friends.

Naked

“The first thing I did was take off my pants.  Naturally.”  So said Edward Abbey, when one summer he  reached a deserted mining camp five miles below the Native American village of Havasu, on a branch of the Grand Canyon, where he lived alone for thirty-five days.  My husband and friends hate this line, because I say it all the time.  “I just want to move to the desert and take off my pants,” I joke, whenever I get exasperated with life, my career, my own drama.

           

Today I am leaving the desert, and I want to say goodbye, so I get out of bed an hour before sunrise.  My traveling companions sleep tight—they will be off to greater travels in a few months.  My husband says, “It’s so early . . . ” when I rouse him, then rolls over.          

           

I walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood, past squat, earth-colored ranch homes, at a time of day that would be mostly unfamiliar to me anywhere.  It makes me feel slightly uncomfortable.  A coyote wails, loudly and rooster-like, more deranged than usual.  I’d like to see him in the distance, over the low desert plants, but I imagine him close:  waiting at the trailhead, daring me to cross into his territory.  Every dog in the neighborhood responds, more odd-sounding than the coyote—their wild canine barking muffled by stucco walls.

           

At the trailhead, I press my nose to the map, attempting to review, in the light of the just-two-days-ago-full moon, the trail I hiked once already yesterday.  I can’t see it, which, combined with the coyote and the general strangeness of the place and time of day, makes me a little afraid.  I hesitate.

           

But we need a little fear in our lives, I think, and anyway, soon enough, the world will be almost too beautiful to bear:  my husband will appear, stirred by the coyote’s wail and enough concern for his wife to follow me on this humble pre-dawn hike; and then the sun, sending its unfathomable but undeniable warmth across 93 million miles; and then, one-by-one, six hot-air balloons.

           

“They look a bit like some kind of alien spacecraft,” my husband says, turning from our perch atop Sugarloaf Hill, sunblind, to view the balloons hovering high above the sleeping tourist town.  And there it comes again:  the naked mind rotating between so many things—night and day, fear and beauty.