Downed peonies

Yesterday’s welcome,

heavy Memorial Day rain

knocked the peonies down,

pink and white petals

strewn on the grass

for their own funeral.

But next spring

the peonies will come full circle

for another brief turn

in the May sun.

This year, while we

admired them

in their time,

they gave us not

a moment’s thought.

And soon it will be June.

Peony petals at my funeral

might be fine,

but I’ll look for a few

more bright blooms,

please.

The grass whithers,

the flower fades,

and the rain knocked

the heavy peonies

down.

Living Light Bubbles

At low water there is a pool just downstream from the North Unit of the Bowersock Hydroelectric Plant. A slight current seeps through the plant. Limestones on the levee, the blue sky, the weedy bank – all reflect on the near stillness.

But at the edge of the sand and gravel spit where I sometimes stand, my soles squishing at the level of the river water, the slight current rises up from the pool and rushes around the shallow point.

The sunlight, lowering its intensity for the winter, refracts off ripples too slight to be seen at the water’s surface and trails of fringed light bubbles appear a few inches below, slipping and slithering along the bottom.

The water, even the Kaw water, is so clear at this depth as to be invisible. And the bubbles of light appear to magically form out of nothing, living for the length of a single pace, were I willing to step in and get the tops of my shoes wet and perhaps annihilate their world. They quickly slide, one or two at a time, quickly after each other, a nano-something above the muddy sand, bending for the rust-colored mossy stones in their path. They shimmer for an instant, then are caught briefly in a net of shining crossing lines, flickering like flames under the water, before everything disappears into the murky depths on the other side.

As the sun was setting, I imagined that only I had survived to tell you of this non-carbon based life form of light bubbles about to go extinct in the night.

Perhaps they will return against improbable odds. Perhaps it will rain and their entire universe will be changed. They were something to behold for the moments they passed through my awareness.

And then I turned and walked away.

***

I went back to that very spot a month or so later. It was windier for one thing.

I saw no light bubbles. But as I crouched in the loose, water-logged gravel on that point,

a brown-feathered duck swam soundlessly into my vision. He was scarcely farther away from me than I am tall. There was some white on his head with brown irregular spots. His bill was pink.

He turned in the water and opened his bill as if to speak, and then he paddled away.

There is little more to be made of what I saw that afternoon, other than to say that I was there for a few moments.

And grateful.

***

I went to that spot yet again. I saw a few small colonies of light bubbles that afternoon. I walked along the shore and came upon a younger couple standing in the sand. Her cap was nearly the color of the duck’s bill and I stopped to mention that if they were in no hurry they might wander back up to the point and look for the light bubbles.

I later saw them standing down there, well below where I then sat on a bench on the levee, my jacket off in the low January sun. I saw the woman point with an extended arm toward the water at their feet.

I opened my mouth as if to speak, and then I turned my head and looked out across the river.

***

An eagle flew nearly over their heads and mine at about same the time the younger couple were looking downward, watching their step, as they climbed up to the levee from the sandbar.

In a few minutes, they approached, the woman had her brown hair tucked under the faded baseball cap about the color of the bill of a brown-feathered duck that had swam toward me at the very same place where only these few moments ago these very same two people had recently been standing on the river shore, this woman herself pointing toward the very spot.

We talked for several minutes – of the river and other things. I saw no reason to mention the eagle.

To me it’s not the coincidences that are amazing, but that I am here to see any of it at all.

If we don’t mess everything up, another eagle will be flying here on another day - and maybe then, these two will be here to see it.

***

I haven’t meant to tell you everything. If you have questions, ask the duck. I think he knows more than he lets on.

But I have seen those living light bubbles. One place you might see them is a point just below Bowersock North. If you don’t find them, well, don’t fret. Not everything is as obvious as a new pickup truck commercial.

***

I saw the woman in the cap with the pink bill walking with her fiancée, a few weeks back. We acknowledged each other but we didn’t speak. For me, the sighting was a welcome as an eagle flying over my head.

Enjoy life where you are. Light bubbles require more time and attention. Sometimes astonishment will just fly right over your head if you’re looking with your eyes open.

- for Charity and Tim

Two doves, now four

A pair of mourning doves made a nest in the planter box on the front porch. I saw an egg in a rare moment when one of the doves wasn’t sitting on the nest.

Then, one day, we saw two chicks half the size of the parents who were switching off taking care of them.

Then, the rapidly growing birds were perched down below on the porch swing. And then they were gone.

My wife and I never had children of our own, but the dove nest now seems very empty outside our window and I catch myself looking out for those young doves. I startled one out of the spring growth on the side of our house. The young dove flew up to the maple tree. I was glad for that.

For so long those parents had just sat there, occasionally fluffing their feathers against the cold. What patience! And then in about a month of my time, they had come and gone. Two more doves in the world and some stray grasses and twigs to sweep off the porch.

One neighbor girl is in Colorado, the other in Oregon. Successfully fledged. They flew through last Christmas with their parents. It was good to see them on our front porch again.

Click on photos to enlarge them.

Toad World

Life goes on around us whether we notice it or not.

And if I say that some very, very long time after the very first beginning I built my little garden pond, should I imagine that the toads that live there now think about me?

In early April I heard the first one trill his mating song. Then a few days ago, the sun bright and warming my back, I watched a large toad, Bufo americanus, sitting on a rock at the water’s edge. He expanded his vocal sac like a brownish grape and called out a long high trill. Then, a smaller toad swam up and climbed out on the rocks. The larger toad scuttled behind the smaller one and they bumped up the rocks until they were hidden in the yarrow. Some time later they partly emerged from the yarrow fronds, looking back out over the pond, still joined together, male and female, after their kind, only now I saw the smaller one on top of the larger.

Last spring, I saw two toads sitting out on the stones one evening, inflating their throats and trilling their call. You could hear them – going at it – well into the night, even with the windows of the house shut. And then one day in the early summer - in perhaps every cubic inch of my roughly 10,000 cubic inch pond - there was one tiny dark tadpole wriggling or resting in nearly every cubic inch of water. When I first spied them in the late afternoon sun, it looked more like a million.

So were the Adam and Eve of their species formed out of the dirt around the pond? Or did they hop all the way over from Mary’s Lake? More likely, some toad eggs attached onto the legs of a bird where toads were already established and then were washed into the world I had created. But what about clear back at the very beginning, before even that first single-celled organism - how? and what of all that followed? and why? My mind nearly boggles at what I can see in my own little pond with my own eyes when I open them. There’s hardly a word for my astonishment at life going all the way back to the very beginning of creation.

I assume that considerably less goes on in a toad’s mind than in my own. Questions of beginnings, what it all means and such – that’s more of a homo sapiens thing. But I’m also not so far from the toad world when you think about it.

Food and shelter. Singing and mating. Sitting in the sun, looking out over the water.

And a few days after the mating I witnessed, I spotted a strand of toad eggs in the pond. Most of last year’s tadpoles apparently didn’t make it, but I expect to see another generation making a go of it soon.

Creatures we all are. Making the most of a life we can’t possibly fully understand.


Postscript: This morning I saw black cumin seed-sized tadpoles along the egg strands. One wiggled it's tail, probably not at me.

A little springtime tune

I heard a whistle in the distance, high and piercing.

I was ensconced on a bench, as not very many people say.

The pitch was a little shrill and constant – but slightly irregular.

I was comfortable in the shade with a healthy breeze rustling my papers.

The sound of the whistle was getting closer – or were there two?

The noise of cars behind me I recognized – a certain incessance.

And then a mother walked into view from up the sidewalk –

trailing two little girls piping off my port bow.

Their light dresses caught the springtime breeze

and their pink lips were clearly not tired of their little game.

And then the older girl stepped right in front of me where I sat

and held up a shaped piece of hard, pink sugar on a stick.

‘It’s a candy whistle,’ she nearly giggled the words.

And then she and her little sister ambled on,

whistling a one-note tune on down Massachusetts street.

I smiled a little smile at the thought of getting one for myself,

but I’d likely be taken for a public nuisance.

And a little white cotton dress surely wouldn’t do anything for my image.

Maybe I’ll just hum a little under my breath.

I’ll be harmonizing and no one else will know.

But I might just buy a candy whistle for a little girl I know;

I’m sure her parents will not thank me.

But what do I care?

It’s spring.