Where does the time go?

Where does this thing/concept/whatever we call time go?  Thinking this evening,"gee, I haven't updated the blog in a while," I realize it's been over five weeks--weeks of meetings and conferences and drafting work-related documents and grading papers and wondering "will I live long enough to retire?"  (Consensus: maybe.)

It's been a strange fall--early frost, followed by warm weather, followed by rain and mold and a series of days that can't seem to make up their mind what the season actually is. I need, however, to report on a glorious weekend afternoon, though I cannot now remember exactly which weekend it was.  At any rate, the temperature was in the sixties, the sun was shining, and the unraked leaves were crunching underfoot in a most satisfactory way. (And I do remember the day--it was just last Saturday but seems longer ago than that.) The sugar maples had dumped a significant portion of their load on the Adirondack chairs in the back yard, necessitating uncovering the chairs in order to have a place to sit.

Basking in the warmth, too contented to grade the stack of research papers I'd taken outside with me, I started examining leaves, mostly dry by the second week of November.  Visible on a good many of them were tiny dots, quite likely insect eggs.  Biologist Doug Tallmadge of the University of Delaware, author of Bringing Nature Home (one of my favorite non-literary tomes), has noted that our native maples host something like 265 species of lepidoptera.  Those leaves blowing around our back yards are actually the nurseries for next year's butterflies.

Sounds like a good reason to let sleeping leaves (and potential butterflies) lie. 

Fall Fling

Wordsworth at 28 (when he seems to have felt very old, having no idea that he would live to be 80) pulled himself out of an emotional crisis with the thought that "nature never did betray the heart that loved her."  Considering some of the things that nature does (fading sight and hearing, the inconvenient effects of gravity, among others), it's hard not to find friend William a tad naive (as he noted a few years later when his favorite brother drowned in a storm).  But today was a day of unexpected grace and beauty.

Given the dryness of most of the summer, I've not been expecting much in the way of fall color.  (And yes, in our part of the world, we have recently had so many rainy days that some some of us were starting to forget what sun looks like, but rain the first week of October doesn't make up for months of drought.) Some of the trees in our neighborhood have been turning plain old brown, skipping everything that usually separates green leaves from brown ones. After driving across Ohio this morning, I am pleased to report that many of the states' trees are managing to put on their usual autumn show.

It started with a little yellow along I-77, then some red--sumac, maybe?  Skirting the edge of Amish country on Route 250, my hopes began to rise as a dogwood or two displayed their usual glorious burgundy.  By the time I was headed west on US 30, fall was in full fling.  The skies opened out as I left the hill country, pure blue, and there were the trees--maples, sassafrass, and something in clear, singing yellow.  (I don't identify leaves well at 65 miles an hour.)  Few things are more beautiful than a blue sky reflected in the clear blue of a farm pond, but one of them is the doubled sight of sugar maples strutting their stuff in this, their show-off season.  Perhaps this is the kind of sight that led Wordsworth to describe his "cheerful faith, that all that we behold is full of blessings."

Yes, indeed.

A long journey

I have to confess that fall always makes me a little sad, even though I love the crisp air and the satisfying crunch of walking through fallen leaves.  So much is ending, and at this stage of my life, there seem to be more endings than beginnings.  Over the last few weeks, news of deaths and advancing illness have made this fall, still in its beginning phase, seem even more intense than usual.

My usual habit of turning to the outside world for solace has brought yet more meditation on endings.  This was a good year for butterflies, but the brevity of their lives has contributed to my autumn melancholy.  They add so much beauty to the world, but few of them live more than a few weeks.

One exception is the year's last generation of monarchs, which fly south to Mexico to overwinter, then start north in February or March, lay their eggs in the southern U.S., and die, leaving that next generation to complete the migration to our West Virginia hills and fields.  Knowing that the caterpillars busily defoliating our backyard milkweeds a few weeks ago were the last generation of 2010 led me to commemorate them.

The defoliated plant that led to the discovery

of the VERY hungry caterpillar

 caught in the act of chewing.

Waiting...

The last generation, who got to fly away.

An urban haven

Today my other half and I discovered a truly amazing place in the center of Toledo--Wildwood Preserve Metropark.  This 500+-acre estate includes woods, meadows, part of the Ottawa River, remnant tallgrass prairie, a formal garden designed by Ellen Shipman, and the 32,000-square-foot house of a 20th-century spark plug magnate. While the noise of busy Central Avenue was generally audible as at least a background hum, and while the park was well-used--on this Labor Day weekend, the parking lots were nearly full, dozens of dogs were being walked, and picnics were happening at just about every table--sometimes it was possible to forget, at least momentarily, that we were in a city of more than 300,000 people. Here is a picture that gives some idea of how tall some of the grasses were.  This clump of big bluestem is much taller than my 5'6".

This monarch butterfly was totally oblivious to our presence, as was the Ottawa River in the following shot.

The Toledo Metropark system has impressed me in the short time I've been even vaguely familiar with it. This Rust Belt city seems to have made a concerted effort to make green space available to all its residents; five large parks are accessible by city bus, and many of the paths are wheelchair-accessible. At Wildwood, the water fountains include ground-level fountains for the dogs that people bring with them. While it is unlikely that much of any of the parks is pristine wilderness, I was heartened by the variety of plant and animal species we noticed in just a few hours at a time far from prime for wildlife-watching. It seems that vibrant urban life can coexist with a fair amount of wild nature.

In case this post seems too sweetness-and-light, let me report that there was a literal snake in the garden. We saw this juvenile beauty pursuing a toad just below an elegant iron gazebo in the formal garden. The toad escaped.

Transitions

I woke this morning to heavy mist, the kind that seems to signal some kind of change in the weather.  In this case, the two days of reasonably cool days and cooler nights that we've had are supposedly giving way to several more days of heat. (I guess the warm upper air that let the fog form is going to descend on us--oh joy.)  Fog, besides demonstrating atmospheric transition, has always seemed mysterious to me; as a girl, I loved walking, and even driving, in swirling mist.

This morning's fog seems an appropriate marker of the state of my life, since this has been a summer of transitions.  The shift in certain people's health statuses has caused different caregiving responsibilities, with additional and different check-ins.  We may have inherited a cat whose human can no longer care for her, bringing our total to five, way over the "one cat per human" guideline followed for most of my adult life.  (Anyone out there want a declawed, one-eyed, geriatric calico cat who wants to be an only feline?) There is the obvious transition of adjusting to life in a new place with what should have been a new garden, though the deer and the poor soil have left some of our plants in a pitiful state.  Here's hoping that the decrease in level in the compost bin signals that compost is in fact happening.

The major transition has been my husband's finding of the job he's always wanted, in a city five hours away.  Two committed adults with computers and cell phones can of course maintain contact under such conditions, but this was not a change we had planned for. Helping him get settled, I have found much to like about the new location, not least the abundant city green space, great birding, and mass transit, and his new dean has noted that there are likely to be positions in my field next year. This possibility seems worth exploring. The future right now is as misty and mysterious as the back yard.

Extravagance

Today I want to praise extravagance. Since the go-go years on Wall Street that brought about our current economic woes, and since more of us have become aware of our ecological footprints, extravagance has gotten a bad name, but there are multiple extravagances, and it is some of those that I wish to praise, in no particular order.


• This morning, the deep green of the dogwood leaves was broken by the arrival of a male cardinal, extravagantly red, noisy, and exuberantly checking out the state of the dogwood berries, or whatever else in the tree might have been edible. Other birds manage to attract mates without being quite so eye-catching (and as Julie Zickefoose has noted, being eye-catching is often dangerous for cardinals), but such colorful perfection was this morning’s blessing.

• Berries themselves. The next time someone complains about the seeds of blackberries, raspberries, or strawberries, remind them that the fruits we and the birds crave are really seed dispersal mechanisms. Those luscious berries lure us in so that seeds can be spread more widely than the parent plants can spread them, and aren’t we lucky that the universe opted for this extravagant method of plant reproduction?

• Seeds in general. Those of us who aren’t faithful deadheaders of spent blossoms find that birds help themselves to our coneflowers and coreopsis, and in the process, scatter seed and make new plants. If we don’t immediately sweep up all the purchased seed spilled under our birdfeeders, we are rewarded by free sunflowers and millet. Let’s hear it for the extravagant generosity of free plants.

• The extravagant laziness of house cats. Is there anything more totally relaxed than a fat middle-aged cat sacked out on the sofa? (Or more generally graceful than cats, anyway?)

• The energy and generosity of certain young humans. This afternoon, I was privileged to attend a benefit for a cancer patient, organized by her young adult children and their friends. They had acquired donations of goods and services ranging from massages to meals to football weekends, and people who knew the woman in question packed the town hall and opened their hearts and their wallets. Love is always a good kind of extravagance.

Taking nothing for granted

Having planned to do a lot of writing this summer, I find that life (along with my general lack of organization) got in the way, as it tends to do. But I’m in good company: Eric T. Freyfogle, editor of The New Agrarianism, a collection of essays I’m currently enjoying, notes that “agrarians have typically been happier to live their lives than to write about them” (xviii). And while I’m hesitant to describe myself as agrarian, having been contentedly ensconced in one town or another for the last thirty-five years, the low-key pleasures of a localized and semi-outdoorsy life have become increasingly important as I move toward old age.


This has been an unexpectedly rough summer, emotionally. An old friend, a highly competent Renaissance man active in educational, environmental, and artistic circles, is fading away from Alzheimer’s; a longtime acquaintance, a woman about my age, is experiencing serious unspecified neurological problems; a troubled relative in her early fifties, after decades of erratic behavior, has recently been diagnosed with a progressive neurological disease, always fatal and always hideous. Part of my next few years will involve helping this individual die as peacefully as possible. My own good luck—being reasonably healthy, gainfully employed, and happily enmeshed in a web of relationships—seems more and more a kind of amazing grace.  All I can do in response, it seems, is to pay attention as much as possible.

In our immediate corner of the world, this has been a good week: the yard drainage project has been completed, creating not one but three new planting beds in the process (though the heat and dry weather have not yet revealed whether or not the basement will remain dry). Friends and acquaintances have offered plants to fill in some of the new spaces, so a friendship garden is being created. (Not that there aren’t already plants with stories in the existing beds—these daylilies                            

were acquired by my Bulgarian friend Milena in 2007, from a nursery owner who gave her far larger clumps than those offered to other purchasers that day. We suspect an infatuation with her accent.)

Other joys of the week include these:

•  Meals in which nearly all the food was locally raised.  Sitting down to a meal in which the chicken, the potatoes, the green beans, the tomatoes, the blueberries, and the wheat for the cookies all originated within a twenty-minute drive of our dining room is a reminder of what a rich area the Mid-Ohio Valley truly is.  Now if only chocolate, coffee, and grapes for Chardonnay could be grown somewhere nearby, I could truly be a locavore. . .

• The serendipitous combination of rose "Lady Elsie May" blooming with a nameless bicolor daylily that has accompanied me to three houses 

• •Sightings of two of the Black Squirrels of North Parkersburg

•  Chipmunks becoming regular visitors to our feeders, and (drum roll, please)

• •The return of the goldfinches!  The ratibida, sunflowers, and silphium are blooming just in time.