nature

Before I Knew

Rae Spencer3 Comments

Before I Knew

Before I knew pleasures
Should be guilty
I climbed trees

Forfeiting homework and chores
In search of the beginning
Of wind
In those days shadows danced
Proved the sun moved around the Earth
(Did Ptolemy climb trees?)

Before I knew history
Was more ancient than myself
I hunted arrowheads

Scouring new plowed furrows
I exhumed fallen masterpieces
Of war
In those days summer ruled
Proved we would live forever
(Was Einstein once a child?)

Before I knew memory
Shaped the future
I dreamed easily

Dozing among the branches
Bare feet thickly shod
With dirt
In those days apples beckoned
Proved the universe was infinite
(Did Newton also dream?)

Published in The Powhatan Review, Vol. V, Number 1, Summer 2005

Landscapes

Rae Spencer9 Comments

I once believed that I was not suited for any landscape outside of Tennessee. I was a green and rust girl, addicted to leaf-litter and streams, katydids and quail. How could I learn to love anything other than what I had known?

When I moved to eastern Virginia, I found everything too vast. Too much sky, too much ocean, too much horizon. The sand, pine straw, and salt marshes shifted unpredictably underfoot. There were no katydids. If there were quail, I couldn’t hear them for the gulls.

Virginia was blue and beige, flat and salty. It felt barren, a virtual moonscape compared to the ridges and hills of “home”. And I felt jaggedly out of place, a coarse river-stone rolled loose by some sudden flood and washed all the way down to the sea.

Fourteen years later, the coast has grown on me, and in me. I’m still a girl of green and rust, but no longer frightened by sky. The sand has polished me a bit. I’ve discovered that a little salt in the water does not equal poison. Best of all, there are green places here, too, where I can feel at home.

Through a Lens

Rae Spencer2 Comments

My camera reveals a small, shy, distant world that I cannot enter on my own. The zoom and macro functions transform me into Alice, and I crawl eagerly through the tiny lens, emerging in a land of wonder.

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Squirrel in the Bird Feeder

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I photographed this little visitor in the first week of February last year. A full year has passed since then, a remarkable sequence of months that have been some of the most productive of my life, and the saddest. I suppose the same might be said of any twelve month span, as I tend to measure time by milestones of success and loss. But what if there is another way? What if I should learn to measure time as the distance between meals, as the difference between hunger and a handful of seed?

Birds

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I do not consider myself a true birdwatcher, as I seldom venture outdoors with the express purpose of finding birds. I’m more of an opportunistic birdwatcher, always happy when my path leads to a bird, but equally happy to run across a snail or squirrel or vine in bloom.

After acquiring a camera capable of photographing birds (and squirrels and snails and vines in bloom), I quickly accumulated an awkward catch-all folder of “Unknown Bird” photos. This method of cataloguing my photos soon proved impossible to manage. Now, with the help of field guides and online resources, the Unknown Birds folder has dwindled to a minor subset of my bird files.

I’m grateful for the urge to name what I photograph, because I’ve learned about Pied-billed Grebes and Yellow-rumped Warblers, Pine Warblers and Northern Flickers. And I want to keep learning, which perhaps makes me a birdwatcher after all.

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