Whenever its regal mother appears, the crows and the mockingbirds are the ones taking wing. It calls out, forlorn, as the mockingbirds and crows harass it endlessly, diving into the hemlock again and again, until the baby hawk lifts clumsily into the sky to circle a bit before settling in the tree again. The gaping nestlings lifted their heads in concert when I opened the box to check on them.Ī new-fledged red-tail hawk has taken shelter in my neighbor’s hemlock tree.
But the bluebird eggs survived both the wren with egg-murder on his mind and this year’s stifling heat. These parents are young, and experience matters when there’s a territorial house wren darting through the brush piles. These are not the same birds who nested there earlier this summer, and I worried when I saw a new pair moving in. Last week, four tiny bald bluebirds hatched in the nest box I had set out for them. Watching from a distance, it looks as though the flowers have lifted into flight. All day long, goldfinches pick seeds from the black-eyed Susans, flitting from blossom to blossom, yellow on yellow, gold on gold. The Joe Pye weed is in full, glorious bloom bumblebees embrace it with the urgency of love. Most of the perennials in the butterfly garden have faded now, but the passionflower vines are bearing green fruit, and I have not given up hope that the gulf fritillary butterflies will be arriving any day to lay their eggs on their leaves. Bats wheel in the darkening sky above the roosting box we installed in our prettiest sugar maple tree. Katydids sing in the trees at night and crickets sing in the grass.
SPEND THE REST OF MY DAYS HERE PATCH
The heat may be monstrous, the air may be filled with smoke from distant wildfires and suburban Americans may be drenching their yards with poison, but in this wildlife-friendly little patch of Nashville, nature carries on in its lovely, halting way. Life is not at all a long process, and it would be wrong to spend my remaining days in ceaseless grief. I give all the money I can spare to nonprofits fighting for the earth on a far larger scale.īut I also remind myself sternly to attend to what is not dying, to focus as much on the exquisite beauties of this earth as on its staggering losses. I vote for environmentally aware political candidates. I do what I can to lower my carbon footprint, to encourage biodiversity in my small yard. And these days a person sitting on his porch in Kentucky can smell the smoke from wildfires in Oregon. This isn’t the lovely kind of summer that has us lingering on the porch and watching the lightning bugs, if only because insects are among the most deeply imperiled lives in the Anthropocene. Human behavior has plunged the earth into an everlasting summer. There’s a difference between weather and climate, of course, but increasingly the connection between them - and between them and us - becomes clearer. In one important sense, summer has gone nowhere: During a single week at the end of July, the National Weather Service issued five heat advisories for Nashville, with heat indexes over 100 degrees in this fertile place traditionally known as the Garden of Tennessee. We wonder: What has become of the languorous summer we longed for back in the sadness of winter? Where did the endless, grass-fragrant days go? The children trudge back to school under a blistering sun. The dog days of August crisp the spring-green underbrush to crackling tinder. How brief is the season of “splendor in the grass,” as the poet William Wordsworth put it, and surely summer is the time that brings such lessons closest to home. Life is a single wink from a single lightning bug. Life is the glint of light on rushing water, a flash of lightning.
Now my father is gone, and my mother too, and I know that life is not at all a long process. “There’s still time.”īut that was long ago, when I was still young enough to believe those words of comfort. “Life’s a long process,” I would say, echoing my father’s reassurances. Sometimes I remember how I tried to comfort my children when they encountered a setback or were disappointed that a dream they were nurturing had not yet come true.
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