Sunday, June 28, 2009

Spring












Poem on a Theme of Snow

From heaven fall icy petals;
In the sky not a spot of blue remains …
The sun rises over the mountain peak.
The chill pierces my bones.
Silence prevails.

Muso Soseki (1275-1351)


Though this is a poem of winter, for this spring it rings true. It makes me think of the white, almost grey cherry blossoms of Tokyo’s parks. They too fell from the trees as soft icy petals and covered the ground like drifting snow.

It seems obscene to think in these terms after the past winter. After all, I am enjoying my newly remodeled backroom, looking out at flowers and green grass, and when I walk the twenty or so feet to the garage I am enveloped by the smell of the lilacs that have grown through our trellis from the next-door neighbor’s yard.

Just yesterday as a cold north wind blew, we spent the gray afternoon looking through the garden diary that my wife Charlotte kept for many years after we bought the bungalow. The first few years were bleak. Our cars were parked on a slab and our backyard is open to the alley. There is grass but no other plants. And our neighbor’s yards are devoid of any landscaping.

Now some fifteen years later, two twenty-foot pine trees keep watch over dozens of perennials, annuals and vegetables planted in laboriously enriched soil. The community of birds that now makes our yard their home is the reward for the tedium of work.

Every year the environment matures and changes as do the number and types of birds. Adding a finch feeder brought common house sparrows, red-headed sparrows, slate-colored juncos and the adorable common goldfinches whose plumage changes from a drab green in the winter to a bright yellow in the spring. As a hedgerow has grown along the fence between our northern neighbor—who after raising four children finally has the time to landscape her yard—house wrens appeared as if by immaculate conception.

They announced themselves one morning several years ago with a loud cry that could not be ignored, especially considering they start singing prior to sunrise. It drove me to my bedraggled copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds. He describes their song as, “A stuttering, gurgling song, rising in musical burst, then falling at the end.” To that I say, amen.

The honeysuckle brings the occasional ruby-throated hummingbird. These are birds on a mission. They are not lingerers like the mourning doves who spend hours under the bird feeder searching for scraps left by the finches, or like the robins who crisscross from one yard to the next, back and forth all day pulling worms from their subterranean lair.

Hummingbirds have a buzz saw quality to them with manic wings that mimic the sound of the heavy jets that perpetually pass overhead on their way to O’Hare’s runway 27L. Their syringe-like beaks disappear into the orange flowers and sap up the nectar within.

They only hover for a few moments and then, engaging their warp drive disappear. Fussy eaters, they do not investigate all the flowers as the myriads of bees do. Maybe it is my presence that drives them away, but it is hard not to want to get close to them.

The birds put up with us. When we finally stop working and get a chance to sit, if we are too close to the feeder, we find out soon enough. The goldfinches enforce the unseen boundary. To put it bluntly, they are nags. Their usually pleasant song becomes guttural and dissonant until we reluctantly get ourselves up and relocate a few feet farther from their coveted thistle seeds.

It would be nice to think we are masters of our environment. We did build it, but this would be fooling ourselves. From the squirrels that are compelled to take one bite out of every ripe tomato and deposit it on our doorstep; to the skunks that waif through at night silently leaving their scent; to the raccoon that made its home in our attic insulation, it goes on.

We have had large hawks hunting woodcock; a baby robin abandoned in our large, now deceased, climbing rose; possums depositing their young; and raccoons expertly tearing the grass up as they search for grubs.

We have a constant battle to discourage dandelions, violets, creeping Charlie and crab grass. We are only beginning to appreciate my mother’s deft hand in keeping the grass and the garden weed free. In this she took after her father. He too was a master gardener. I am afraid I will never live up to the likes of them.

It is now the end of the third cold and rainy weekend of this spring. I am trying to remain positive, even as I sit in my wool vest with the furnace cycling hot water up from the basement to the radiators. I reassure myself it is past the frost date and the icy petals are only a literary illusion, but knowing that my chilled bones are real enough.