A few nights ago, twilight brought a moment of crystalline clarity. The yard turned a warm, monochrome blue. Today, an odd midday fog washed everything blue again, but it was a cheerless, grainy blue. Dandelions folded, tree limbs drooped, and the only creatures that stirred were a pair of restless seagulls over a nearby pond. Both scenes reflected my mood, eerily accurate manifestations of changing emotional weather. How’s the weather, where you are?
Today is too warm for March. And too humid. It feels like June. The sky is low and gray. The yard’s air is clotted, a claustrophobic weight that has me hiding in my office, where a tower of neglected paperwork teeters on the brink of deadlines.
To lighten the mood, I took a brief stroll through the butterfly archives. This was my first “successful” butterfly photo, taken in July of 2010.
Yesterday afternoon, an Unidentified Dreadful Object appeared in the yard.
The Object landed in a major squirrel cache, amid a trove of buried tidbits. This squirrel made a wary approach, but quickly lost courage.
From the fence’s safe vantage, the squirrel eyed the Object for a while. After a few nervous changes of direction, over the fence and back again, anxiety defeated hunger.
Once the squirrel was gone, the Object was easy to subdue and remove.
A sidewalk runs along our fence, and litter tends to accumulate in the wax myrtle border. Every so often, something finds a break in the wax myrtles and lands in the yard. As a kid, I did my share of littering, so I pick up what lands in my yard with a weird sense of satisfaction. An atonement, of sorts, as if each current act of responsibility erases a previous moment of carelessness.
I’m stunned by the number of bees in our yard. Bees of every shape and size, sampling every flower. The pear tree is the main attraction, but only because it is the most flamboyant, positively exploding with blooms. The bees are not so pear-dazzled that they ignore the dandelions and irises, nor any of the other flowers that vie for their attention.
It’s definitely that time of year. Today’s walk in the park was all birds and bees. (Mostly birds, and most of the birds were osprey.)
Rae Spencer 