Category Archives: Small truths

Birds, In the neighborhood, Small truths

Hope, in feathers

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There’s a kind of rightness and predictability in bird behavior that is almost comforting to me.

Knowing to expect that every last hooded merganser will take flight to the farthest edges of the pond when I raise my lens confirms to me that I know one aspect of this species pretty well.

Waiting for the local pair of osprey to begin setting up housekeeping in mid-March or the woodcock to twitter and spiral through an early spring dusk or merlins to streak low through the dunes in late afternoon looking for a meal to keep them through a night’s chill… all enhance my awareness of life’s insistent rhythms and set a pace for my own schedule in harmony with a larger, more universal system.

There’s also the realization that birds have important lessons to teach us; about being careful and its necessity for survival (hoodies are overly careful, I think) and about beauty and stirring the imagination (think of a flock of terns dropping from the sky into the summer blue bay or a scarlet tanager suspended in an oak) and also, they teach us about hope.

I found that hope looking me squarely in the eye a few weeks ago. Along an often-walked path through the local woods, I looked up a tree trunk one afternoon to find it looking back at me, in that magical way that owls have of appearing out of nothing. I’d stopped looking for screech owls along that path a couple years ago when their nesting box was vandalized, but this one had found a little hole in a nearby maple with which to frame his unblinking face. I think we both were somewhat shocked to be seeing one another, his face full of concentration at not being seen and mine one of pleasant surprise at learning that sometimes good birds are closer than we think.

What good birds have you found lately and what did they offer you?

😉

Remembering, Small truths, Snapshots

Preening

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Sometimes it feels as if the entire space he carved out in the world has simply closed over.

A coworker the other day noticed the faraway look in my eyes and asked what I was thinking about. “I’m trying to find something in my mind,” I told her. I have this penchant for losing track of stuff and then becoming obsessed with finding whatever it is. Often this necessitates tearing the house or my desk apart.

A couple weeks ago the search was for a handwritten note from my dad; one he’d written years ago to accompany the return of some money I’d loaned him. It wasn’t some thank-you note, mind you, but instead a sort of brief family history. The theme of that history was money, specifically loaned money, and detailed my father’s firmly held belief that what goes around, in terms of generosity, comes around.

Anyway… the details of the note and our family’s financial history are probably too personal to share here, but suffice it to say that I really wanted to find that note and feel the connection to my dad that it represents. I don’t have much else tangible to remember him with. When I first came across the note a couple years ago, I’d probably put it aside for safekeeping and now it’s lost forever.

😉

The other day at work I somehow started thinking about the small gold cross my dad gave me as a little girl. I’d worn it exclusively for years, on a necklace that had been my mom’s. I have even fewer tangible thngs to remember her with, save that necklace and a pair of earrings and her wedding band. I’d been obsessively hunting for that necklace and cross the last couple days and wasn’t able to put my hands on it. I found every other piece of jewerly I own, mind you, but not that simple cross my dad had given me so many years ago.

This put me in a bit of a funk, you know? Granted, my foul mood wasn’t only about that, but oftentimes some seemingly inconsequential thing is the trigger for major crankiness.

The people closest to me must be used to this part of me by now, the part that hangs the *do not disturb* sign on the door and disappears from them without any warning. Those with more open hearts don’t often understand the need of some to draw inward, in self-preservation, when life gets to be too much.

I’ve learned how to take my space when it presses in too closely, even when I can’t physically wander away. Plenty of people don’t understand that about me, don’t understand the secret hiding places I can curl myself into, that you can’t win anything by force with me, that there is no prying me out of my muteness.

I recognize it straight-away when I meet with this trait in others. Often it’s a child, but there’s plenty of people who’ve grown to adulthood processing the world in the same instinctual way I do, people who live everything from a place very deep inside. We recognize each other, somehow, and meet somewhere in the open between backing off and standing by. That’s a sweet spot, I think. A place of acceptance. A place where the things we hold onto and the lengths we hold on is understood and trusted.

(Oh and I finally found my necklace. All is right with the world again.)

😉

Small truths

To answer your question

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“You know how it feels,
wanting to walk into
the rain and disappear–
wanting to feel your life
brighten and grow weightless
as a leaf in the fall.
And sometimes, for a moment,
you feel it beginning–the sense
of escape sharp as a knife-blade
hangs over the dark field
of your body, and your soul
waits just under the skin
to leap away over the water.
But the blade,
at the last minute, hesitates
and does not fall,
and the body does not open,
and you are what you are–
trapped, heavy and visible
under the rain, only your vision
delicate as old leaves skimming
over the mounds of the seasons,
the limits of everything,
the few shaped bones of time.”

Mary Oliver, At Blackwater Pond

I know I’ve made you all wonder what the question was, but that doesn’t matter, really. This poem is what came to mind and is what distracted me from my own fumbling train of thought and clumsy words. Funny how poems or music so often do that for me; describe in carefully crafted images what my heart knows is true but can’t easily put to pen.

Seasons, Small truths

All that glitters

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It must be some sort of record that there’s a tree in my house before December. It’s only half-decorated, but I’m hoping early for some of the magic of the lights and baubles to improve what is lately a hard time of year for me.

At some point, the holidays became less about magic and hope and celebration and more about rushing around and obligations and ridiculous expectations. I feel terribly selfish for it, but I almost want to just skip the whole production.

Scandalous, I know.

The DH has had his radio tuned to the *24 hour-round-the-clock-make-you-insane-all-Christmas-music-all-the-time* radio station for two weeks now. I’ve growled at him often enough that he just quietly changes it to something less offensive in my presence. He reminded me the other day that we practically wore out a tape of favorite Christmas music on our honeymoon. Our Christmastime wedding, all hollyberries and seasonal cheer, guarantees that I should forever have the Christmas spirit, right?

Right?

I’m less confused by my change of heart than he, but can’t easily explain the tarnish that’s come over the season. There’s a lot less innocent belief, less love for the ritual, less hope for the power of one day on the calendar to make things what we wish them to be.

What’s left feels false. And forced. And not at all golden.

This horribly depressing post brought to you courtesy of days of rain and gray gloom. Rather than the twinkly lights of a Xmas tree… I think I may need a raging bonfire to improve my mood… or a short vacation to the tropics.

😉

Small truths

This sand and what crumbles

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Castles made of sand fall into the sea, eventually.

Or at least that’s what we’re made to think.

I’m not buying it though.

I imagine the best is yet to come.

I expect impossible things.

I know that I don’t know and that I’m not alone in that.

I anticipate answers from surprising places.

I believe trust is the face of courage.

I dare to love myself first.

I choose risk and its joys and unexpected pain.

I accept dreams as a guide to what’s possible.

I remember everything that my heart already knows.

What about you?

😉

Small truths, Snapshots, Travels with the flock, Wanderings

Letting go

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Mother, I’m letting go.
It’s what you did a year ago
Now I know how, I swear
Walking so long in the dark, I arrived
To this now.
I don’t have to tell you
The forces that were my life,
You know.

You who could describe the moon
With so much care
And spoke everything – but not of your fear of dying
You knew why flowers grew on grass
To say, “I’m born”
Or that they might spring from crevices of rock to dance with the wind.
Sometimes your words split darkness the way you crack open a rock
Nothing diminished or unseen.
Like the time we described the good and happy life of a friend
And you said, “I know, I know, but he’s a hurt person.”
He’ll never know how you saw into him.
What Thoreau said he longed to do, you did –
Speak “first thoughts,”
While ours lay like cocoons spread in confusion

You never said the reasons for failure – why we get lost
Only that we are, and whether your thoughts spilled like butterflies into air
Or cut like an axe
You never lost the knowledge of center
That the failure to love ourselves deeply enough
Is more or less fatal

Well, the eventual is now
And I am broken like the moon,
Driftwood in the sea of my own drowning

Let me feel the attention you gave
To this world.
(Were you afraid of dying in case what came afterwards took less?)
With the same care you gave all along.
Safe with yourself.
I’m turning now to that shore.

–Constance Greenleaf

Bits of this were bouncing around in my head as I watched this scene, but it took a happy accident yesterday for me to come across the complete poem. It feels presumptuous to think I know anything of what was going through Lynne’s mind that day on the anniversary of her mom’s passing, but I liked the spirit of this poem, anyway, and was very touched by Lynne’s trust in sharing some of her grief with us.

Hugs to you, Lynne.

Small truths, Travels with the flock, Wanderings

Hints that your friends might be just a little nerdy

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So we were on a non-birdy bird walk, led by my friends Scott and Linda from SHBO, at the Beanery in Cape May. The Beanery can be a very fun place for birds, but it was really quiet in the rain and wind that day.

Good friends or good naturalists can find plenty of ways to amuse themselves when the birding is slow. Mostly we made bad jokes and acted obnoxiously. We had plenty of opportunities to embarrass ourselves this way over the course of the weekend.

Every so often there’d be a new plant we could dork out about, like these sweet gum balls that Lynne wanted to try planting at home in Minnesota or the wild persimmon fruit that I got them to taste just by promising them it wasn’t poisonous.

😉

I don’t guess many non-birders dance this way when spotting a Black Vulture for the first time. A little nerdy? Yes. Fun? Absolutely.

Other than Jay’s prodding it with his foot, this is not a typical scene when normal people spot a black rate snake along the trail, is it?

😉

Nerdy.

A very pretty snake, btw, though it was a tad nervous with all our cameras pointed its way.

At some point we’d given up on seeing any birds and wandered away from the rest of the group, content to find our own fun elsewhere. Who needs birds when you’ve got friends that are just as nerdy as you are, anyway?

Note: Susan, Lynne, Jay from birdJam and Delia will not take offense at my calling them nerdy. We’re cut from the same cloth, I think. That’s why I like them so well.

Remembering, Small truths

That magical muck

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The mudflats of the tidal marshes of Sandy Hook Bay or any of the brackish creeks closer to home exhale a sharp, salty smell at low tide. Some might call it rank or putrid, but to me it smells like home. I know very well the wealth of fidgety creatures that lay exposed at low tide in that slick, smelly mud.

Very few of us have the good fortune to live as adults in the same places we knew so intimately as children. Set me in some other landscape, one of rolling hills or towering evergreen woodlands, and I can imagine myself reeling and disoriented, wondering from which direction the scent of salt water will come.

The landscape of one’s childhood is all magic and heart. For me, that magic is more about the smell of seaweed than of hay. It comes from knowing where the masses of swallows will gather in late summer or when to find scoters and scaup playing at the edge of the sea or which stand of beach plum produces every year regardless of the vagaries of weather.

This deep intimacy with a place is learned slowly; little bits of wisdom accumulated by observing the rhythms of days and years until one’s fluent with the language of a place. Anywhere else I’d miss the clamor of laughing gulls and the fall bloom of the groundsel tree, the hiss of wind across the dunes and the greening of the cordgrass in late spring. I’d miss the presence of the sea and the smell of that magical muck as the tide shrinks.

What intimate details do you recall from the landscape you grew up in? Things that only a child could know… maybe it’s the sweet scent of honeysuckle, the glow of tamaracks in fall, a pale moon in the desert, or the taste of windfall apples… tell me what you remember and long for.

😉

Birds, Small truths, Wanderings

Just ducky

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I’ll let you all in on a little secret, so long as you promise not to take too great an advantage from it:

Ducks are the way to my heart.

Stand with me beside the bay on a freezing winter day, face streaked with tears from the biting wind, ducks bobbing in the distance and you’ll have found a friend for life.

If it’s June and there are no ducks to be had in NJ, find an excuse to be in ND and coast with me along deserted roads, bordered by great puddles filled with all manner of breeding ducks and I’ll think you the best birding-buddy a person could find.

And if it’s late September, when only the earliest of Northern Pintails can be found on some secret shallow marsh, go with me to the decoy show and let me anticipate the arrival of my most favorite class of birds.

Humor me as I agonize over which decoy I’ll bring home.

Try not to be too impatient with me as my questions elicit yet another story about how an ex-insurance broker came to carve shorebirds and paint lighthouses in his retirement. Or how another came to copy the great carvers who made their living from decoys in the days of market-gunning.

Don’t be embarrassed when I (too loudly) compare the antique animal traps at the taxidermist’s “display” to barbarian torture devices. Be proud, in fact, that I don’t back down from his smart-ass response to overhearing my comment.

This is a decoy and gunning show, remember.

And I’m a duck-watching, tree-hugging, dirt-loving fool.

For all that pains me about it, there is almost nothing that I don’t love about the heritage this show represents. Historically an impoverished area of the state, the baymen who made their living there did so in cycles, commercial fishermen in season and boat builders or electricians or decoy carvers in winter. Cranberry and blueberry harvesters or chicken farmers on the side.

Collectible decoys are an artifact of tools that have outlived their usefulness. The draw for me is the workmanship; the finest of floating sculpture that was designed to be tossed in salt water and into the line of fire. Gone, mostly, are the days when decoys were used to lure ducks and shorebirds to the hunter’s gun and then on to restaurants or the millinery trade.

The 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act put an end to the commercial hunting of wild birds and so we’re left with a piece of history. A piece of that heritage remains in the decoy, more sophisticated now than the early carvings meant just to evoke the likeness of a bird and thereby bring the real thing into the sights of a hunter’s gun.

Of course it’s those primitive-style decoys that I prefer. I think it must be partly because they remind me of the way I experience ducks as a birder; old style decoys are all about field marks: cheek patches and tail shape and bill color. There’s no time to see the fine-feather detail on the flanks of a Bufflehead as they bob like little rubber ducks in the frozen bay, anyway. Too much detail distracts my eye, makes me keenly aware that what I’m seeing is, after all, a decoy.

The Ocean County Decoy and Gunning Show continues tomorrow in Tuckerton.

Remembering, Small truths, Whatever

Legacies

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I can not:
sew
cook
decorate
match shoes to bag
make small talk
say goodbye
show interest
at baby showers

I can not stop:
looking back
pushing away
keeping secrets
being late
trying too hard
pretending
it doesn’t matter

I can:
laugh in spite of myself
(most often at myself)
wonder
be honest
be happy
be vulnerable
see love and loss
without fear

– – – – – – – – – – –

There are days when I feel like I’m writing the same blog post, over and over, but with different words. And I wonder if you all notice?

😉

(Blogging as free therapy)

There’s some tangential relationship here to this post, I think.

What has me thinking about my mom tonight, some thirty years later, I’m not sure. Probably it has to do with this lady I work with; there’s something about her and the way she carries herself in the hallway at the office. There’s times when I catch sight of her; really, it’s the sound of her shoes that reminds me of my mother – something inexplicable and familiar.

Weird.