FIELD NOTES: Speaking of backyard murder-mysteries...

June 23, 2008

...I buried my third squirrel this morning after nearly running over the corpse with the lawn mower. The neighbors must wonder what I keep yelping about because I just can’t help reacting loudly when discovering some sort of crime or violation. Not two weeks ago, I saw something white in the lengthening backyard grass. I wondered what it was; maybe a bag blown into our yard? Upon inspection, my son and daughter inside the house heard my yelping: AAAKH! Oh oh oh oh oh! AAAKH! The white was the underside of a squirrel belly-up on the lawn. My eyes trailed up the ancient oak trees where a labyrinth of dead and dying branches exists and I thought perhaps, like the first squirrel I think I wrote about some time ago, he had fallen from the weak canopy. So today, shovel in hand again, I went to dig a hole at the back of the lawn where brush and leaves are left to mulch naturally and discovered the grave of squirrel number two had been breached. Ah, the animal world, driven by a combination of self-preservation, compulsion, survival and instinct rather than morals. And yet, not always so very different from our own as my active mind raises its inner eyebrow…did these squirrels fall…or were they pushed??

FIELD NOTES: It's a great position to lie in because...

from a hammock you get a new perspective on your own backyard. There is intrigue, detail, small stuff that is important (to the small) and even the murder-mystery. There is a particular cat – a white one with a black fur cape thrown over his head and back - that frequents my yard, stalking my beloved birds but earning redemption by rounding up the rodents. I think it his cache that I have uncovered under the shed. An old picnic table I use as an outdoor potting bench sits atop a set of wooden pallets where I store odd containers along with seasonal bags of soil and peat. A loose board and the hole underneath bequeathed a lip-curling collection of bones, furry pieces of tails and a shriveled up bird carcass. I know there is an underground system of tunnels from sometimes having the lawn sink beneath my feet and I have seen Mr. Blackcape watching the entrances and exits. I’m lying crosswise in the hammock and spy two pointy ears periscope up, then quickly down, behind the wood pile. I imitate a friendly purr to draw Mr. Blackcape out. Maybe we could be friends? But he interprets my overture as artificial and reacts in either mistrust or condescension. I accept his rejection as a condition of nature and like a lion in the wilderness, we will live parallel lives, respecting an invisible, silent boundary and considering each other’s actions with a pinch of suspicion. I have to do something about not getting enough hammock time.

FIELD NOTES: Just a week ago, I wrote about planting a 'memorial garden'...

June 1, 2008

...and it is in more ways than one, not just as my Memorial Day ritual, but as a memory of many things - of earth, of my maternal grandmother and even of me. I have a habit of gardening in flip-flops. I do end up destroying them which is why I sigh to myself when I’ve forgotten to slip out of my good flip-flops and into the two dollar ones from the drug store. I don’t do it on purpose, I run out just to do water maintenance and, before I know it, I’m pulling a weed which turns into a hundred weeds. My nails fill with dirt and dinner is delayed, but no matter, it’s summer and dinner can be eaten at eight without much consequence. And that is the memorial to my grandmother who, in the days before jellies and crocs, fashioned her own backyard footwear out of flip-flop bottoms and ruffled elastic lace from the five and dime store because she did NOT like a thong between her toes. She trimmed her toenails with a pocket knife that fascinated and startled me at the same time and her size six shoes were just right for little girls to play dress-up with. I remember her feet brown with soil from walking around her make-shift gardens – the sunny strip behind the garage where green beans crawled and horseradish, rhubard and sour grass for schav (Polish sorrel soup) squatted wherever they could and at the end of the hedgerow atop the steep bank were tomato plants or little cukes in old metal tubs. By memory or design, I pretty much grow the same stuff. And my feet sink into the soft fertile earth, my toenails fill up with garden dirt and I swing my feet, one at a time, into the bathroom sink to scrub them. It would be easier to wear sneakers or garden boots, but it wouldn’t feel nearly as good, it wouldn’t have that glorious connection to ancestors, to earth…to me. It happens to be my fiftieth birthday…and it feels good.

FIELD NOTES: There is never enough of what we love best...

Memorial Day, May 26, 2008

...early morning is too brief in my case. Especially at this time of year when cardinals (and company) wake me and sunrise is just the right temperature for those of us who have perpetually cold hands and feet. I don’t celebrate Memorial Day the way I used to or, by some standards, the way I should. I sleep a little later and am not fond of public gatherings in New Milford that invariably require a plan of travel, where to park and how to jockey for a seat from which you can actually see something. Our town harbors the delusion that it is still small, but an event here is more like the privilege of saying you were at a ball game or concert in person and yet coming away having seen and heard less than if you had watched it on TV. When my children were little and we lived on Main Street in Terryville across from the town green, they played with their toys in the living room until we could hear the marching band up the street. Then we’d grab some chairs and go out on the front lawn with our elderly landlady. My late uncle, one of a dwindling group of World War II vets, would march by practically within touching distance, wink at us and we’d wave back. The parade was just long enough for the attention spans of my children and to get the point across, then we’d usually have a picnic at my parents’ house at the other end of Main Street. Saying that, I just now realize that it is possible to live inside a Norman Rockwell painting! As a school child, Memorial Day in my hometown of Terryville was a key event. All of us scouts lined up with our troops at the grocery store parking lot in the north end of town. It was a big deal who would be asked to carry the flags for each troop and who would get to read the poem Flander’s Field when parade participants and spectators stood in respect around the war memorial on the town green. Back then, the parade took a much longer route around town (several miles that were unkind to the 1960’s penny-loafers we all wore with our Brownie skirts and white ankle socks) and after the reading of the poem, the older scouts would continue on to the cemetery to hear Taps. If you made it through all that and still had your uniform on, you could go down to the Eagle’s hall where they handed out free vanilla Skippy cups with wooden spoons. Today, I will observe Memorial Day perhaps not so reverently as I have in the past, but in the closest way I know right now at this place in my life. I will plant a garden. I will regenerate, protect and perpetuate. I will try to be a soldier for our earth. I will try to be a good one.

FIELD NOTES: My dearest Harrybrooke, there must have been a battle;

March, 2008

...just as good and evil are found inherent in us, it is found in nature as well. I was astonished to see how many branches (not just kindling, but limbs of size) were so widely strewn. It was your Gettysburg, a family fighting itself, the force of nature wielding itself against the beauty of nature. I can imagine the booming rite of Stravinsky, the art of war and so many unknown battles. You will repair and reinvent yourself and I might see your progress week by week, season by season, if I care to pay attention. As I stepped around your lost members, the day’s brief sun was chased away by outbursts of wind and tossed pillows of gray. But the little rivulet was trickling and its sound, even more than the proverbial first sighting of a robin, signaled to me the persistence of spring.

FIELD NOTES: There are stars on the water...

Wednesday (after school), March 26, 2008

...flashes as bright as mirrors on the afternoon river, perhaps the original impetus for the belief in fairies… like Tinkerbell on the Disney wristwatch I am wearing; I experience after-images for some time as I blink my eyes and continue walking. I try to count their points – are there five… or six…or eight? But they move too quickly and if I standstill, they disappear; they are only visible with the movement of my body. Most days the water’s reflection is all-of-a-piece - a length of moving moiré – but today each reflection is individual and singular in appearance. Are these the wishes released from comets…or snowflakes in the afterlife? Is it silly…or naive…or hopeful…to put aside simple science or complexities of faith…and believe…(no, delight) in the magical? The same wind that ripples the river pushes me up the rise in the road like an over-eager classmate behind me in line. An ordinary day becomes extraordinary, when I am not just pretending to re-live childhood enchantment, when my mouth makes up a soundtrack of peepers and gurgling water and an awakening nest of frogs to use the next day with my little students, when I forget the need for explanation, when it all comes naturally upon me in a flash. It feels peaceful to be so awed in middle-age and yet a burden because there are those who may not appreciate that I see stars on the water after school….that I am so easily amused...that I can pose the question: is Earth the heaven of stars and snowflakes?