Just Beyond my Porch

I sit on my front porch and look out at the laurel tree that is just poking a branch out into the picture; you should see the huge rest of it, and the ornamental cherry trees. There are three of them and they look like whirls of pink cotton candy when they're in their full spring bloom. And their scent!! Their scent is like what you'd imagine honesty would smell like, that sweet, that clean. I love to walk into the shade of these trees not for the coolness but for the closeness I feel to them there.

The Sky in My Backyard.

To think we are together in this world with things such as clouds, with things such as sky; sky above and below us and on either side of us. Amazing.

Visions

I opened my front door early this morning to put my cats out and watched and listened to the starlings as they started their day by leaving my hedge. They left in swarms, I suppose the ones closest to the top of the hedge might have flown first. I felt as though I were peering into their bedrooms, watching them get dressed for the day. There is more than a hundred of them that have taken to sleeping in the hedge lately. I don't know how long they will do this. At dusk I walked up the driveway to the mailbox. I didn't realize they were just settling in and I frightened them and the ones that were settling in darted out and flew back up to the telphone lines, or whatever those lines are that are strung up on telephone poles. (I'm almost sure they're not telephone poles. Ah, they'll be electrical lines, utility lines).

I felt bad that I'd frightened them off so when I left the mailbox I walked back across the road and walked down our other driveway. I stopped halfway and when I stood just in the right spot I could see through the branches of the laurel tree (not to be mixed up with the laurel hedge) and I could see them returning and disappearing into the hedge.

They in such numbers and the sounds of so many wings against so many leaves have the cats frightened and I think, good for them, good for those birds. And I think how in numbers even little birds can make big sounds and create a force that scares cats.

So, I think further and think about the speech that Bono made tonight at the NAACP awards. He said we can be the generation that ends poverty. He spoke from the deepest place of his heart and it makes me wonder what I am doing to help. Thousands of children dying everyday in Africa from starvation and even more from malaria; "a bite," he said, "from a mosquito". Oh, the greed and meaness that have let this happen is terrible to think about. How could this be happening. If we held one of those dying children in our arms we wouldn't; we couldn't, not do anything.
It makes the things that I worry about sometime petty and meaningless. Bono grew up in war torn Ireland and he heard the words of Martin Luther King and he was moved by them and has never forgotten them. Bono was created from the ashes of bombs you could say; he rose up to stand up against all the meaningless preventable deaths. He's a hero. And he's one man and look at what he has done.

He's collecting more people to stand up with him and he's being like the starlings...making all this noise with wings and he's scaring the fat mean cats away and he won't back away. There's not a lot of things that I can say I know for sure but I can say this about him, he'll never back away.

This is the day I saw the starlings get up and go to bed and heard Bono speak words with wings!

Morning and Evening.

Moon Shadows

It was midnight when we came home and I wandered out to the edge of the field with my moon shadow. There was no breeze and the scent of cow pies (yes, scent i.e perfume). The night often holds scents that can't be discerned in day. Though of course, we've all (if we're lucky) have smelled cow pies in daylight. Perhaps it is on still nights. It's possible I'm imagining it but it feels like just beyond my ken I sense the ending of winter and the dawning of spring.
I saw today that little tuffs of grass are growing beneath the american elm. It's leafy branches spread out so far and cut off sunlight during the summer months so no grass grows. Or is it that I haven't paid enough attention and perhaps it was my not raking the leaves up sooner that killed what little grass was there. I was thinking of sprinkling some grass seeds and watching.

I put the cats on the front porch and the opening of the screen door caused the starling that roost in the hedge at night to rustle in the leaves sending me the sound of wind passing by. I like imagining the birds tucked cozily away in amongst the laurel leaves and so closebye. How many are there? Twenty-thirty? Fifty? More?

The river was low today. With the muddy bank of Fisher Island showing itself off more than it usually does this time of the year. I was thinking how so often the river puts me in context; I am one of those beings that lives along the river; I both observe the river and in a way feel I am observed by it. Whatever the mystery of that is I love it and don't need to understand it.

This afternoon I opened the window beside the dining table so I could hear the red-winged blackbirds sing as I construsted a wall hanging from the branches and mosses that came from the tree they were singing in. So now I've brought the american elm into my house; it's branches spread across my deck and partially veil the view of the fields. This tree is nearly a hundred years old. It is good company.

Tide at Slack

It's almost noon and the tide is at slack, which means the river is not moving; the tide is not pushing the river up nor pulling it down toward the coast. The trees on Fisher Island are mirrored in the river and a seal moments ago, glissening a wet gray, lifted it's head and then with back arching slipped into that invisible opening and disappeared. That is how it seems. I watched to see it come up but from my window I did not see it resurface. A seal can hold it's breath for, I think anyway, near twenty minutes.

The large shards of tree trunks and stolen up roots of cottonwood, alder, sometimes fir and pine, have been piling up against our dock. But today the earlier tide action and the low river level have taken the ocean-going timber back up river; withdrawn it like a breath to exhale it again and send it back downriver to lay perhaps against the dock, bringing together all their pieces to make one whole gathering of ones.

It is in silence where the important things can be heard. So I believe. Perhaps silence is like a light in which it is by contrast that we can see; hear. I've always believed it is the silence between the notes that makes the music.

Tide at slack like this gives me room for these kinds of thoughts because it's as though a breath is being held. You know like we do when we're listening intently to hear something barely audiable---it's like that. Like the river at this time is suspending time as it is suspending the gulls and the drift wood; not so much as holding it in place but more like just letting it be in the place that it is in with no tugging this way or that.

I imagine that before life as we know it stirred on this planet this silence must have filled every cell of everything alive and perhaps from that silence life found room to grow.

I love these thoughts that emerge on mornings like this.

Field of Geese

Canadian Geese made the field theirs this morning and it was a delight to see them eating and napping and strolling through the grass. Just think of walking on your plate of food. I mean the freedom of it; nothing between you and what goes in your mouth and well, I suppose what comes out too.
The geese are a wonder to watch as they take off and land; changing from flight to feet; from air to ground. I have a feeling they are aware of their ability of flight; that they don't take it for granted. I have stood so close beneath them as they have flown over, with their wings curved for landing (I call it having their landing grear down); hearing their voices coming from their throats; their necks outstretched, their eyes focused ahead.

This morning's sun shinned on their white breasts. I've never noticed how white their breasts were before. Not long ago snow filled the field and they flew overhead. I wondered then where they were going to land for food. They were flying low.

Then there were the hunting a few weekends back. They dressed up in all their finery, being sneaky, waiting in hiding with the plastic toys out in the field! Dean and I were walking in our field and they were further down in the our neighbors field. Two geese fly over us and we called ot them to keep flying high. We watched as they headed to where the hunters were and then...we watched as the geese made a splendid quick left turn sending them over to Fisher Island and out of range of the hunters. I like to think we played a part in their decision.

The starlings are sleeping in the hedge tonight as they have been for a while now. I hear their wings fluttering against the waxy laurel leaves. It's nice knowing they are there; trusting the hedge that we planted to give them an abode for the night.