A Gesture

On my way out of the house to the car yesterday, in the front yard I saw a strange sight: a squirrel was carrying something odd in its mouth, something enormous. The squirrel was startled to see me, appeared to panic, dropped what it had been carrying, and took off into the neighbors' yard. When I went over to investigate the dropped thing, I realized it was a very tiny baby squirrel. I also realized that I have never in my life actually seen a baby squirrel. An hour later, when I returned from my errands, the baby was still underneath the shrubs, and Mama was nowhere to be seen. Baby was lying very still, flat to the ground, in what seemed an effort not to be noticed. There are a lot of outdoor cats here, and I was certain that would be the fate of this animal if we didn't do something. So we found a big, empty box and put it on top of the planter by the shrubs, off the ground. Our hope was that the squirrel would seek shelter in the box on its own while awaiting its mother's return. And it did. And while we figured it was probably so young that it wasn't yet weaned, we left out a bowl of water at the edge of the box.

All day, that little squirrel sat in the box and chirped periodically, calling to its mother. After a few hours of this, I began to wonder if it had been truly abandoned (hard to know for sure, because I know deer leave very young ones alone for whole days at a time as well, so that the babies often just *seem* to have been orphaned). But since I couldn't just stand by and watch it die, and as young as it was, that's where things would be heading, I Googled all over, trying to find some sort of wildlife rescue in this area to help out. The closest I could find was in Roanoke, about 40 miles away. But they didn't laugh their heads off at a person calling for them to rescue something as common as a squirrel; their intern, who lives in Radford, said she would drive down after work, pick it up, and drive it back up to the rescue.

By evening, when we checked, Baby was gone. I have to believe that the mother did eventually come back for her baby.

Twitterings

For the second year that we've been in this house, a pair of European starlings has set up house in the crevice alongside the chimney (this house is full of crevices, hence our Neverending Battle of the Bugs). One of my most vivid memories of the first days with newborn V. exactly a year ago, was the seemingly incessant sound - right next to my head while lying in bed - of many newborn baby birds CHEEPING! for food. At the time, I remember considering the parallels between helpless chicks and the brand-new one I had of my own, how utterly, singularly focused they were on the same exact thing: sustenance. Funny, and sad, how much less dependent my little chick is now, a year later. Her whole world is so much larger now. I used to be the center of it, and now I am simply a (still huge) part of it.

This year, all I can think about is How. Very. Loud. those little creatures are. And how they seem insatiable. And how I wish the nesting birds were something much more interesting and less nuisanc-y than starlings. Like bluebirds.

A Cleansing of Heavenly Trees

Sometime before 8 am a few mornings ago, a large truck arrived in front of our house, a group of strange men piled out with chainsaws in tow, and began chopping down a sizeable portion of trees on the side of our house and yard. Who commissioned these men? Certainly not the owner of our rental house - he was too cheap to even agree to put window coverings in this place. We concluded that it must be the neighbors, and that these trees which seem in "our" yard must actually be part of theirs. We still are puzzling over why, if someone were to go to such trouble, they would only remove some of them, and not all, why they'd merely cut a five-foot swath between the tallest trees and the fenceline. At the end of the day, the landscape was significantly changed.

Usually I would be sad at such a violating gesture, but not this time. The removed trees are all "tree of Heaven," ailanthus altissima, a highly-invasive species native to China and Taiwan. They are the foundation of what is literally a non-native ecosystem in our yard. I once spent two days in Schenley Park in Pittsburgh with no other goal than to remove ailanthus seedlings, fought with them in my own yard there, and I know firsthand what a pervasive, stubborn, impossible species it is. I know too that because those men left behind remnants - the stumps - by the end of the summer, it's likely that much of that work will have been pointless. It can, and will, come back with a vengeance. That's what it does. Always.

Just more evidence that things out of place are usually out of place for good reason.

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers

I've talked here about my "bird issues," how despite my being an animal person wholeheartedly, I've never really liked birds, except for the big, impressive birds of prey ('charismatic megafauna' anyone?). There's just something twitchy, unpredictable, and more than a bit creepy about them to me. All of them - in a sweeping generalization kind of way. And really, since I've mostly lived in fairly urban areas, I've been too busy paying attention to other animals where I can find them to notice something that's always seemed insignificant to me as birds have. And then I came here to Appalachia, where birds are the most abundant wildlife that I encounter regularly. They are everywhere, always. And it turns out that the three-year old really digs birds.

So, last fall, we went and bought a bird feeder for the front yard - which has now multiplied into three in the front yard and two in the backyard. And I dusted off that Audubon Guide to North American Birds - Eastern Region that's been sitting largely unused on my nature writing bookshelf for years, sat down at the front window, and I have forced myself to start paying attention. And this act has surprised me, in ways I couldn't have imagined. Such a diversity of birds. Such an unexpected thrill when I see a new one and *need* to figure out what it is ("I saw an eastern bluebird in the park today!"). Such fun to pore through the book with that three-year old, identifying what we look at together. Such sadness for four long days after a Terrible Squirrel Incident when the front feeders had been emptied and few birds came to visit.

I will likely never be a bird person, not even when The Toddler tells me she would like a *pet* bird. But I am learning to appreciate them, for the first time. And I guess it isn't only the big ones that can mean something to me.

Apologia

It seems I have terrifically underestimated the time - and energy - demands of full-time parenting & part-time teaching. I've spent almost the last two months compiling the beginnings of nature blog entries & sticking them into a Word file, which is now many, many pages long. Will those fragments ever become manifest? I certainly hope so. I keep up with the reading, but not the words, not the thoughtful part of things. I have a tiny moment to breathe, and I hope to catch up with responding to all those Words Not My Own this week. But as for the currency of this blog, I can safely say that I definitely do not get a *passing* grade for my own assignment!

Landscape & Intimacy

I’m now comfortable in the darkness of the sequoia forest as if it were my own skin. When insomnia awakened me at night as a child, I would feel my way deliberately down the hallway and across the furniture, without turning on the lights, remembering instead the placement of each obstacle in my path. Mastering the darkness was exciting, the way it tested and forced me to be brave. The darkness taught me to see with my senses, not simply through my eyes. It is the same way now with the forest.

Tonight I decide to hike to Sunset Rock to sit beneath the stars for what may be the last time here. My headlamp is forgotten in my cabin but I don't care. The slivered moon remains hidden behind the sheer granite faces and heavy forest canopy. I drive my car to the chained service road near Round Meadow. On the other side of the road the path is wide, the direction it takes overly familiar from my years of use. I walk straight until the soft ground turns hard, then right when the forest thins out. From memory my feet follow each twist and bend along the trail at the edge of an old pine forest. Twigs and fallen branches snap under my hiking boots as I walk slowly.

I do this more to savor the act of walking than to feel my way in the darkness. Nighthiking becomes an instinctive act. I move forward. Eyes open, then closed. My heart beats loudly, rhythmically, but the sound doesn’t frighten me. Still unable to discern tangible and familiar shapes, but it hardly matters. This is a darkness to which human eyes cannot adjust. Like swimming in a blueblack ocean under a moonless sky.

There is always the possibility of falling, stumbling over a large rock underfoot. I trust. With each movement, each step, my feet will meet solid earth. I walk without hesitation. With the same sort of ignorant faith that once made me believe a former lover, when he had lied to me many times before. The air overflows tonight with the the musty forest scent of loam and wet, decaying leaves.

The trail isn’t long and when my boots scrape the huge granite boulders, I know to stop. In a clearing now, out of the darkness, my eyes focus on the outline of the valley below. The moon has risen slightly and the rocks reflect the pale light, illuminated white and shiny. We came here once my first season, to see fireworks on the Fourth of July. How could I have known that the towns would look so small, pinpricks of light in the distance, or known that the ledge where we watched was much higher than the tiny, far away explosions? I remember disappointment, because there was no sound, no loud booms or firecrackers, only the midsummer sounds of crickets and owls.

I’ve spent so much time here. We came to these rocks to drink wine and tell ghost stories, to watch sunsets, and to sunbathe in the late summer before the weather turned cold. If I could put all the time together in a straight and continuous line, Sequoia is the one place I’ve lived the longest since I was a child. This forest is my home.

Lying against the rocks, the granite is cold and rough on my back. I look up at the sky and try to find the few constellations I know. Aries, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the Pleiades. Since I was a small child I’ve searched in every clear nighttime sky for those same constellations. Always comforted by knowing they are there, fixed and constant.

At this high elevation the stars seem close enough to touch if I reach out my hand, the Milky Way a curling ribbon of smoke that weaves in between and around the stars. The planet Jupiter looks like a single star, not much brighter than the others. And in the place where I know a lacework nebula exists, I see nothing.

I am feeling very small, humbled by the vastness of such a sky. I’ll need to make a decision soon about where to go this time when I leave. I have clarity enough to know that I’ve learned what I needed to from this forest, have learned many of its secrets. Feeling very small, but not scared of this open expanse of life. The shadows and tall trees will outlive me.

Needfulness

Between the Cold. That. Wouldn't. Leave, the upcoming family visit/birthday party planning, and teaching, I'm finding this weekly blog business to be more challenging than I imagined. I had somehow envisioned my being able to keep right up, and the practice would feel as good for my soul as the spring that's is lurking just under the surface. I've composed many entries in my head, but haven't found even a minute to manifest the words. Funny how things don't quite turn out as we'd hoped. And now that I have a moment - a stolen, brief moment - I'm not even going to write one of the entries that has been circling without landing in my mind.

I just had a phone call from the doctor's office, with news about all the bloodwork that it seems every physician insists upon doing at the first meeting with a new patient. Nevermind my insistence that my cholesterol is below average, or that despite 20+ years of vegetarianism I've only ever suffered pregnancy-induced anemia (vindicated again this time!). The nurse rattled off everything I already knew, but then she said something stunning and wholly unexpected: I am, apparently, extremely Vitamin D deficient - something I've never even really heard of in an adult. How I got this way is perplexing, since even in winter I do not sequester myself in the house, run several days a week outdoors and take the wee ones to park usually every weekend. How I fix being this way - and I will have to fix it, as the consequences aren't so appealing - is pretty straightforward: intensive supplements with retesting in a few months, and a directive to get outside more.

Now I find myself considering the metaphorical implications of this diagnosis. I've always known that I am happiest and feel most thoroughly alive, something I commented on in Kristin's recent post, A Cold, S(easonally) A(ffected) D(isordered) Place, when it is sunny and warm outside. My Self was most centered when I lived in Tucson, with its two seasons of Warm & Hot. People always tell me that I'd miss proper seasons, if I decided to settle in a place like that. And I tell them I most certainly would not. It's interesting to me now that my lifelong, intuitive desire for a place marked by endless summer has not been just an emotional one. More than just desire, it is also a real, physical need. My body craves the light for physiological sustenance just as much as my soul craves it for balance and inner happiness. And it's no longer a want, but a genuine need (a difference I wish I could make the three-year old realize...). It's a large realization, this. That my body simply cannot live without the light. Well, it can. But it shouldn't. And so oddly comforting, somehow. A justification - as if I ever needed one - for being out in the world as often as possible.