Emerald Green

I don't mean to freak you out, but I have a dead hummingbird lying on my nature table. I found it on the pavement outside of Talbot's two weeks ago, where I had gone to buy a new pair of black pants. My old pair, which could go anywhere from work to the opera, had died. I don't know about you, but I really need a good pair of black pants.

Karen, the best saleswoman on the planet, was there because I was praying the whole time I was walking up there that she would be. She's even tinier than I am, knows the merchandise in and out, and has the gift of knowing exactly what I, not a good shopper, should buy. I explained my predicament. She walked several paces to a rack of trousers, plucked off a trim pair-- exactly my size-- and swung them in my direction. "This is it," she said. "You can wear them anywhere, throw them in the machine and they're ready to go. Perfect every time."

Leaving the store triumphant, I noticed a speck of emerald green on the expansive esplanade in front. Emerald is an unusual color, so I was curious and approached the speck. A dead hummingbird, of all things, in the middle of the sea of pavement! My immediate thought was to fish a tissue out of my purse, scoop him up and gently deposit him under a bush. But-- how often do you get to see a hummingbird? If you see them, as soon as you see them, they are gone, out of there, faster than the blink of an eye...

So at first, I stared. At his plumage, shimmering emerald. At his long, needle-thin beak. At the tiny ruff of feathers around his neck-- a circlet for a prince. (I'm guessing this bird was male because male birds seem to get all the gorgeous colors.) How did he come to be in this sea of pavement?

I walked home holding him in the tissue, and soon, when I can bear to let him go, he'll be buried amidst the ferns of my garden, ashes to ashes, green to green, another bit of stardust in this shimmering web of life.

Filled with Life

You have to take pictures because they fill you with life.

Henri Cartier-Bresson


This one's for Trudy :)

The ineffable fragrance of you

I trod across the hillside
rounded the corner
and was stunned
by the ineffable fragrance
of you.
Suddenly I became all
about finding you,
buried in woodland thicket,
the cause of this glorious infusion,
this piercing, classic, delicious
only-in-springtime aroma.
And there you were, modest
in size and appearance, but
Empress of the lands around
you, and I your slave.


May 28, 2009

The delicious, common, road-side honeysuckle

The Ones I Can't Live Without: Favorite Nature Books

If all else failed, these are the books I would want in hand, these invitations to explore and savor nature.

Louise J. Halle, Spring in Washington (NY, Atheneum, 1947)-- chief among them. Halle was a young State Department employee in 1945, when he slipped out daily before sunrise, swooping through city, riverside and marsh on his bicycle, observing with relish the progress of spring along the Potomac. An especially keen birder, his writing is fine and nimble, from the scientific to the philosophic and lyrical, with a dash of humor. Such a pleasure! What I perhaps most admire is the quiet independence of his preoccupation, his solitary choice to spend each dawn in the natural world.

To snatch the passing moment and exaine it for signs of eternity is the noblest of occupations.

Edwin Way Teale, A Walk Through the Year (NY, Dodd, Mead & Co, 2978). In the winter of 1998 - 1999, I was bedridden for 2 ½ months (sounds rather Victorian) and survived thanks to my family, meditation, and this book. For 18 years, I had been a landscape designer, and enjoyed daily contact with the out-of-doors. This book was like water to the parched-- a daily sojourn through the seasons, with Teale recording daily observations of natural life on his Connecticut farm.

From his entry for May 9:

Out in the meadow I look up High above me two red-shouldered hawks spin in an updraft. Just as I get my glasses focused on one of the soaring birds, it sweeps back its wings, tilts steeply downward, and like an arrowhead, streaks in a long plunge toward the earth. I follow it down and down. I see it near the ground, open its wings, check its descent and begin climbing upward again. A hawk sporting in the air of spring.

Get's me every time.

Marie Winn, Red-Tails in Love (NY, Pantheon Books, 1998). Switching back from countryside to town--Marie Winn, nature columnist for the Wall Street Journal, tells a tale of love and high drama along with the inside scoop on the Central Park world of New York naturalists, the Regulars, as they are called. Delightful!

And lastly, favorite field guides, trusty companions:

Roger Tory Peterson, Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Birds (I'm sure there are more up-to-date editions than mine). My mother recorded every bird she ever saw in her copy, and I consult this more than any other single volume in my library. Though I still haven't figured out which kind of hawk used to soar by my office window last spring...

National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies. Irresistible. The chocolate-brown butterfly with blue spots I saw on Huntington Street on March 6 was, I learned, a Diana.

A Golden Guide to Insects. "Full-color," the cover helpfully states, "Easy-to-use". No truer words were ever written. See bug, can find. And, after all, there are more of them than there are of us, so it's kind of nice to know their names.


Happy trails!

Earth Day: A Hymn of Thanks

These are our local woods.

Just a 15-minute drive from home,
we can be on our favorite woodland path,
immersed in a symphony of green,
light pouring down through the treetops.

Nothing feels more peaceful.

Nothing connects us more to the earth.

Back at the trail head


Thank you, Mother Earth!

Happy Earth Day!

With Thanks to William O. Douglas

Sau and I took a walk on the Canal near Old Angler’s Inn on Saturday, where the tree branches are still bare and the only true sign of spring was the number of us homo sapiens out digging the sunshine.

‘The Canal’ I’m referring to is the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal on the north bank of the Potomac River, which begins in Rock Creek Park, Georgetown in Washington, DC and ends 184.5 miles later in Cumberland, Maryland. Built in the early to mid-19th century, it was used to transport goods on barges pulled along by mules on the bordering towpath and guided through a series of locks that closed and raised the water level 75 times to bring the barges up to grade. Ingenious!

It nearly vanished, between the many floods that have washed over it and the plans to convert it to a parkway-- but was saved in 1954 by the conservationist Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and eventually became a National Historic Park.


Douglas believed in the concept of legal standing for nature. He talks about ships having legal stature in maritime law, and says,

“.... So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes - fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it."

From the landmark environmental law case, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972)

Don’t worry! I looked up ‘water ouzels’ already, and found out that this is another name for the American Dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) reported on the website Yosemite Explorer to be John Muir’s favorite bird. There is a charming description of the bird’s unusual behavior—apparently it dives straight into rushing water hunting insects—and includes videos and still photos if you are eager to see: http://yosemiteexplorer.com/photos/v/birds/american-dipper/

Sau and I walked on the Canal towpath for hours, laughing and discussing our dreams, as only dear sister-friends can. We saw a blue heron flying, striking with its unusually wide wing span and long, skinny legs trailing out behind.

Sublime day!