July 10: Remnants of the Past

One of the reasons why I was hurrying down Old County Road this afternoon was to get to Port Clyde to catch a boat. The other reason was because I was passing the Rockland landfill, a strikingly odiferous zone. That strange stretch of road also features several creepy limestone quarries filled with opaque dark water (that more than one car has ended up in), a few houses whose residents hopefully have no sense of smell, some ATV trail crossings, and all that's left of what must once have been several farmhouses: well-spaced clumps of lilac bushes, honeysuckles, purple phlox, and big patches of day lilies that once graced some long-gone dooryards. One patch of lilies so abounded with big orange blooms that if it hadn't been for the smell, I might have even paused to take a photo.

Near the smelly dump,
explosion of day lilies.
This was once a farm.

Measuring the Miles

As I continue to recover from an injury, when I run these days I need all the motivation I can get. Often it's my iPod shuffle, which drowns out the sound of my labored breathing and shuffling steps and impels me forward with peppy beats. (Favorite running tunes at the moment: Kanye West's "Stronger" and Delerium's "Silence" featuring Sarah MacLachlan.)

But some days I want to be distracted by bird song. In the spring, this is my chance to see what's back singing in the neighborhood. This time of year, it's to see what's still singing. By keeping track of the birds I see or hear during my run, my mind is (mostly) distracted from the toll exacted by the physical activity. To really help myself focus outward, I try to see how many total species I can tally in a run, which requires listening with care. It sometimes even determines which of my usual loops I will take. One loop almost always nets a house wren. The other usually guarantees a vulture or two.

When I get home, I figure out the average number of bird species per mile. Since my distance doesn't vary a whole lot, this can be a decent measure of bird activity. My high count for a run of three miles was 24 species, yielding an average of eight birds per mile.

This morning I was ready to run right after the rain stopped, ideal conditions: the air felt fresh and clear, birds livened up as the sun burned off lingering clouds, and as I began to overheat, trees refreshed me with sprays of loosened rain. I heard mostly the usual neighborhood species: titmouse, blue jay, goldfinch, red-eyed vireo, cardinal, yellowthroat, catbird. A highlight was an unexpected black-throated blue warbler singing in the woods near my office. It was a good run.

I measure my pace:
three-mile run, 24 birds--
good to go slowly.

July 8: Blue Jay Feather

Wandering through my back yard this afternoon, I came upon a blue jay feather in the grass, bright blue with black barring, a pretty thing. A family of blue jays lives nearby--I often see one perched on a particular branch over the back yard, and even more often, hear them. To find one of their feathers, so neat and intact, seems like a gift. Perhaps it was given in exchange for the ripe cherry tomatoes I've been lining up for the jays on a stump under their favorite tree.

The blue of a blue jay's feather is not a result of pigment, as with many colored feathers. Rather, it's caused by the way light refracts through the barbs of the feather. If you flip over a jay feather or hold it up to the light, it looks dark grey. So the blue, which so defines this brash, beautiful bird, is in a sense a mirage.

Blue sky, blue feather--
a gift given or molted?
Flight path souvenir.

July 7: Patch of Sun

I love this hot summer weather, luxuriate in the heat of sunlight on my bare arms, want to roll around like a cat in that patch of sun on my office floor. A set of windows faces west in my office, so the light streams in these afternoons. Heliotrope and purple and yellow vetch blossoms fill the horizon above the sills. Other than boughs waving in a light breeze, the only thing moving out there on this steamy afternoon are goldfinches visiting my feeder, chattering in the distance. A female goldfinch just paused here, her gold breast glowing, the color of sunlight--which of course has no color, but I imagine sunlight made visible to be just that color. She carries with her a patch of sun. She embodies this summer heat.

I watch a goldfinch
from this sultry patch of sun,
both of us glowing.

July 6: Strawberries

We get many of our summer vegetables from a local farmer, and for a little extra, we can go out to the farm and pick our own strawberries. The bleak, rainy weather of late spring and early summer delayed the berries a few weeks, but now these ripe red jewels are shining from beneath healthy leaves. I picked three quarts today to eat fresh, eating a few as I moved down the rows. The sun beat down, and surrounding the gardens, thick grass waved in fields amid vetch, day lilies, and black-eyed susans. A phoebe watched from the wire fence. Does anything taste more like summer than a sun-warmed, perfectly ripe strawberry?

I like to accessorize to coordinate with my fruit

Here's tonight's dessert:

mouthful of a summer's day--

fruit, garden, fields, sun.

July 5: Red-eyed Vireo

As summer progresses and we finally feel the heat here in Maine, we hear less birdsong. Most birds have nested and even fledged young by now, so there's no biological reason to sing unless you're trying for another nest: no need to advertise for a mate, no territory to defend. While a few birds still join in the dawn chorus or add their voices to the robin's evensong, it's generally a lot quieter out there than a month ago. Except for one bird, which seems to sing non-stop all day and all summer long: the red-eyed vireo.

Red-eyed vireo photographed by my friend Brian Willson

I can hear him now out back. He sounds like this. To me, he sounds like the long, lazy days of summer.

One day in May 1952 Louise de Kiriline Lawrence decided to follow one red-eyed vireo for a whole day. The bird sang for a total of ten out of almost 14 hours. And she counted--he sang 22,197 songs! (This is recounted in Donald Kroodsma's The Singing Life of Birds if you're interested in reading more.)

While the songs can get a bit repetitive by day's end, there's something truly lovely about the tone and cadence of the vireo's singing. A red-eyed vireo song is robin-like, a rapid series of chirrups. He sounds like he's asking a question and then answering it, over and over, a slightly different question each time: "Where are you? Here I am. Who are you? A vireo." He's got a lot to say. Kroodsma thinks that the males will sing as long as there are females out there willing to mate (vireos may have multiple broods in a season). So if the vireos are any measure, the trees in our neighborhood are quite the summer pick-up joint.

Lucky for our ears,
vireo's incessant song
is also pretty.

July 4: Read, White, and Blue

I had thought that today's holiday was going to be bleak and rainy, so I'm delighted to be writing this from a lawn chair in my sunny back yard as heavy mist and clouds rapidly shift eastward over the mountain.

Now I can spend at least the morning (before the predicted afternoon thunderstorm rolls in) hanging out in this very chair reading a book, one of my favorite summer activities. As I sit here now, the river rushes behind me, the sound of wind in the trees. The local cardinal just paused at the feeder. The neighbor's cat is sprawled next to my chair, visiting. And I'm surrounded by a family of titmice, one adult whistling, a flock of young wheezing in the lower branches all around. From the cacophony, they had a very successful nest. Other birds make their presence known: blue jay, goldfinch, robin, song sparrow, catbird, crow, yellowthroat down on the riverbank. 

Last night's rain shines on the glossy leaves of the rhododendron. A lawnmower drones in the distance. The sky brightens even more. I've got a big mug of green tea at hand and a new mystery book ready on my iPad (Steve Hamilton, Misery Bay). And a day ahead of me of complete freedom to do whatever I most enjoy.

To quote a found poem, the words of which were written by a young boy in 1939 and which I've heard Pete Seeger sing: "He will just do nothing at all. He will just sit there in the noonday sun."

Day off: a good book, 

blue sky, birdsong in the trees.

I don't need fireworks. 

July 3: Nesting Dreams

In order to once more reimpose some discipline on my creative life (which, ironically, seems to make me more productive), I'm going to revive my poetry blog and try to keep it up if not daily than as close to daily as I can make it. The result each day may not be a haiku, but it will be something as close to poetry as I can get it. Feedback of any kind, please, will also help make it feel worthwhile--to know someone other than my mother is reading this. (That doesn't mean you can't provide feedback, Mom!)

****

I woke in the dim pre-dawn and couldn't fall back asleep, so I lay still and listened to the ethereal song of a distant robin harmonizing with the river rushing outside the open bedroom window. When I fell back asleep, I had a strange series of dreams, in the first of which I woke up, went out into the kitchen, and noticed all this stuff piled up by the back door--someone was trying to rob us. Before I could get upset, though, I realized that some of the furniture there was not at all familiar so I must be dreaming. Then I fell "back" asleep. Still in the dream, I woke again and told my husband all about this weird dream I'd just had. And fell "back" asleep again. And woke again to another scenario--I don't even recall what--that I realized was too surreal to be true. Finally I woke up for real.

Dreaming within dreams is not an uncommon experience for me. "Do I wake or sleep?" asked Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale. Maybe the robin's song inspired this most recent sequence. I'm reminded of the ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi who famously woke from a dream about being a butterfly questioning whether he was a man who'd dreamt he was a butterfly or was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

Robin's dreamlike song
lulls me to sleep. Or was I
already dreaming?

April 22: Black to White

A pair of crows flapped above my car as I was driving yesterday, the sunlight shining on their wings turning their black feathers to white. The apparent transformation, brought about by reflection rather than absorption, transfixed my thoughts.

Black reflecting back--
lifted wing of flying crow
made white by sunlight.

April 6: Spring Cleaning

Our Christmas tree is lying on the ground amid a heap of dead leaves, waiting for me to dismantle it with a hacksaw. Behind it, the spring-swollen river rushes past. It would be so easy to give the old tree a nudge into the swirling, cleansing currents, let drift away out of sight around the bend...

I'm tempted to push
the brittle old Christmas tree
into the river.

April 4: Surprises

This rather dreary afternoon the precipitation has shifted from rain to snow to rain to snow again. As I work at my desk, I periodically check to see what it's doing now. In the time it took me to type those two sentences, what were distinct snowflakes have dissolved into a near-invisible drizzle. I never know what I'm going to see each time I look up.

Earlier, a small bit of motion caught my eye--the first phoebe of spring perched on a branch in the back yard, wagging its tail. A few minutes later, more motion. Although I was alone in the house, I exclaimed, "Whoa!" out loud and ran for the camera... as a flock of six or seven turkeys strutted through the yard. A big hen stopped not ten feet from the window, and I swear she looked right at me, unperturbed, brazen.

Later, as I was heading out to my car, I did another double-take. There, in a barely exposed portion of my flower bed, a small cluster of snowdrops blooms, beautiful little white flowers glowing in the mud. Where did they come from? We've lived here six years and I've never seen them before. I never planted them. What a gift!

Stopped me in my tracks:
snowdrops risen from cold mud
as wet snow still falls.