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.

Test, one, two

I have paused to sit on a rocky bank along the Kaw.

Wind-driven waves gurgle below my extended legs.

My shoes took on some sticky mud to get here.

The west wind carries the car sounds from the bridge.

White noise.

An almost steady droning, occasionally unmuffled, distant.

The swallow-tailed birds repeat their high calls as they fly in front of me.

Killdeer is the name I know, but maybe these are terns.

A gust of wind is caught in the curls of my ear.

A sound check –

a blowing into the microphone to see if it is live.

More of those killdeers, I’ll call them,

they flitter and call.

I can’t make out what they are trying to say.

But in my world, this is what passes for quiet:

A distant drone,

a gurgle,

a bird call, now and then.

And the wind blowing across my ears.

Fire

This is a story that has no discernible beginning. But it begins in fire.

My mind is amazing and unique, in a similar way that David’s dog, Milo, has an amazing and unique mind. And so, all of these minds have become ordinary and entirely common. Peculiar. The improbability that I exist springs to mind and I might dismiss it, but for the recollections.

It should not surprise you that the universe - call it reality, if you wish - enters into my mind, and then in the night, thoughts flame into existence as did the flickers of flames that sprang to life in a field near Pomona Lake where moments before there had been nothing but dry grass. Over and over I saw it happen that day in front of my unbelieving eyes, the head of a shovel, black against a blacker black, snuffing out flames the color, nearly, of the very sun. And then, at some measurable distance across a space of sere grasses and beginning green, another flame, ex nihilo.

Now, of course, I have a modern mind and I do not mean that there exist spirits in fire. Physics should be sufficient. So I must, perhaps, be something of a fool to even speak of these things in this way.

But this is what I know. In the day just past, I, and two friends, mounted a red chariot pulled by many strong horses and we drove to a place as mundane and unique on the face of the earth as you might imagine. We then futzed with other machines, with tools and water tanks, and after our preparations, we ramped screaming mechanical beasts over dry fields. Tom fired pile after pile of cut and dried honey locust wood with a roaring propane torch.

And following that, each one in its own blaze, a fire as ordinary and unique as all the rest burned fierce and hot - orange, growing, tinged with black smoke, swirling, roaring, reaching high into a perfect blue sky like an animal, a spirit, a tongue, licking at an inverted bowl a color so blue it was nearly blinding.

My senses, my very mind, took all this in, hour after hour. My gloved hands on the handle of my shovel, scraping earth and fire, the wind, a variable breeze, blowing across my ears on occasion like a sound check - but only when I noticed. My mind was alive. My body moved, repeating motions.

And then at the end of the day, we sat on a tailgate. I drank ice water. David dug at the earth to retrieve the bulbs of an early wild lily with the blade of his shovel that had recently seen fire.

And a few questions that have been asked as long as there have been human minds were asked and insufficiently answered.

We drove home. The sun, a glowing red ball of flame, settled on the horizon to our left as we sped along the highway. And then the earth tilted and day became night.

And so it is my experience that somehow some of these questions will fire up in the dry grass of my mind in the darkness. The answers elude me, but somehow, my mind senses that something means something.

Do I use words like a shovel, beating, cutting at the thoughts that spring to life, not with only a mind but some spirit of its own? These are the blunt and occasionally effective tools that I have at hand.

Billions of years ago there was fire. I believe that. And in the possible distant future, I assume there will be ice.

But yesterday was a day I walked in a breathing world, filling my mind with recollections.

And now, what appeared to be irrevocably in the past, fires again.

Perhaps I make too much of this. We burned brush. Tom and David and I ate and drank. Milo collected cockleburs. We humans talked. We had looked into fire.

Some mystery burns.

What creatures are these?

As I was walking across the bridge,

a great blue heron flew over ahead of me,

coming in for a landing.

Wings outstretched, neck crook’d, he glided over.

Then as he cleared the bridge,

that heron began to rapidly slip vertical lift.

He dropped a foot or more for every foot

he flew forward

for a hundred feet at least.

Within seconds the heron descended smoothly

from a height well above my head

to the surface of a shallow pool of water

well beneath my feet.

And then the heron stepped down

as lightly, nearly, as a feather,

and silently folded his wings against his body.

It all appeared as effortless as –

as me putting one foot in front of the other

as I walked across that bridge.

Now his species has been learning to fly

for millions of years.

And mine has been learning to appreciate

beauty and grace for millions as well.

But to actually do

the things we have evolved the capacity to do

within time and space

is something else entirely.

I walked on down the levee

and as I returned

the heron stood still where he had landed.

Surely he had already forgotten all about his masterful descent,

as he had in his flight matched without conscious thought

every feather and muscle

to the laws of gravity and aerodynamics –

that is, he flew with the elegance of

a great blue heron.

I will likely have forgotten it as well

in not too long,

but I managed to see this one heron

in a long line of herons

and for a moment

my wonder exceeded my reason.

As I headed home,

my mind flew over ahead of me

as I recrossed that bridge,

walking one foot in front of the other.

Rain on whose parade

We could talk about this or that,

or we could talk about the weather.

It seems to me not so inconsequential,

rather, the question is who the weather is consequential for.

If your nose is on the inside of the glass,

frozen numbers on the outside are merely talking points.

A dusting of snow or a foot changes the chance of a school closing,

the likelihood of sleds on nearby hills.

And will there be cold drizzle on your parade?

This year I jumped ahead of tradition and planted a few potatoes

on an 80 degree day two days ahead of St. Patrick’s Day.

This year lettuce and spinach seeds had to wait for late winter snows to clear.

With the weather more unpredictable,

gardening starts to feel like more gambling.

Today’s the parade.

The streets are packed with young and old

bundled up against the north wind.

I had to admire the young women

perched prettily upon the back seats of convertibles.

And I smiled at the startled look that crossed one smiling face

as her driver revved the engine and released the clutch

too quickly.

The big blue beer truck crept passed too slowly

and the big boys and girls club bus,

packed to the windows with noisy, waving kids,

could have driven more slowly for me.

And the girl scouts walking in their sashes,

looking for people they might know

on either side of the street.

And there was candy, too.

It began to sprinkle as I walked down the sidewalk

against the flow of the parade.

The bow of the S.S. Minnow was crashed on a desert isle

riding the back of a flatbed truck.

Multiple copies of Gilligan in red shirt and floppy white sailor’s hat

danced to amplified music.

Another flatbed carried musicians from the Americana Music Academy.

At the corners of a tarp, human tent poles tried to protect the instruments.

I heard fiddle music but couldn’t see a fiddler as they all crowded together.

A few blocks from my warm and dry house,

I came upon the end of the parade

still waiting to begin.

Have I mentioned anything of more consequence than the weather?

It depends on who you ask.