My video skills suffer from lack of discipline. My hands are shaky, I tend to forget my tripod, and I forget to turn on the image stabilization feature. I’m too eager with the zoom, always wanting to get “closer”. The resulting clips feature subjects that drift and leap out of frame. The quality of these two videos is best described as amateur, with hints of motion-sickness.
Like everything else, I’m working on it…
Every year, I mean to do better. And every year, I fail. In keeping with tradition, I have waited until the last possible moment to start organizing the taxes.
Next year, I’ll do better…
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.
There’s so much going on that it’s hard to know where to look. If I focus my camera on the vultures wheeling overhead, I miss the carpenter bees zooming underfoot. There are crane flies mating and irises blooming and new visitations of wonder in every corner of the yard.
(First, I apologize for the green fence. I blame the weather.)
Second, there’s a rabbit in the rose bed. It’s been there most of the morning, and I have no idea why. It isn’t grazing, just sitting in the rain as if waiting for something.
Third, there’s a squirrel on the fence above the rabbit. A full-alert squirrel, complete with full-alert scolds, waving its tail in agitation.
Fourth, there are yellow-rumped warblers. Flitting and chirping in nearby branches, the warblers add credibility to the squirrel’s alarm. (Because birds are more credible than squirrels…)
But there’s nothing to explain the rabbit’s vigil, or the squirrel and warbler alarm. It’s just a scene, a few moments cut from the yard’s mysterious context.
I feel like a child, plaintive in my need to know. I ask, again and again, “Why?” And the yard, like a distracted mother, answers with silence.
Rae Spencer 