For the first time in seven years the Prunus americana (wild plum) along the driveway to the wand shop has fruit. Like the red-black berries of the chokecherry on the north slope, overlooking the ravine, the plum seemed to hang on its branches all through our dry August.
Il pleut. Il pleuvait. Il a plu. Il pleuvra.
A neighbor has just sent the moisture report for the hill, and I’m tempted to see this, too, in Préverted terms. It was raining. It rained, certainly. It was hailing. We put the petunias in a trash bag. With a twist tie, we closed the bag. We put the trash bag in the trash. Without looking at the window box. Without looking at the hanging basket, where the geranium hung like the empty sleeve of a Civil War veteran.
Scarecrow
The sun is up, low over my shoulder, just east-northeast. My shadow leaps out along the wet grass, over the lip of the rise and across the deer trail down into the ravine. And when you can see your shadow on June the 18th, long and twisted among the scrub, it means twelve more years of ecosystem collapse.
Colorado Blue Spruce
A local news station has a recurring segment they run called “The Most Colorado Thing I Saw Today.” Viewers send in photos, or one of the reporters comes across something quaint or quirky. You know the sort of thing. Cowboys skiing at Steamboat. Ranchers riding their horses through Walmart. Folks fly-fishing a flooded cul-de-sac in …
The Very, Very Few Birds of Winter
This time of year I sometimes feel like a castaway walking to the edge of the surf and looking long and hard at the horizon. Inside the house here, plants that can’t overwinter outside are struggling: some of the Calendula succumbed to aphids; the rosemary dried — it likes neither electric heat nor wet feet, …
Daylight, skunk
I recently wrote a poem called “Skunk, Twilight”, which I include below. It sometimes happens, despite every good intention to walk during the week, that the time gets away, and especially in these short winter days, the sun is down before you know it. We have barely nine and a half hours between sunrise and …
A dairy road walk
The movie Gone with the Wind has an intermission. It’s almost inconceivable nowadays that a movie released by a major studio would need an intermission. While they’ve ebbed and flowed a little, most films clock in at between an hour forty minutes and two hours. Alfred Hitchcock said the length of a movie should be …
Hitting the window
In January of 2013 three conservation biologists, all with a professional interest in migratory birds, published a study in Nature Communications (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380) titled “The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States”. It was picked up and widely reported in the mainstream media. What got everyone’s attention was the claim that cats …
Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay
Cold. A little snow. The cottontail is out between flurries, nibbling on the pale grass. She looks up when I turn the car down the drive, with an expression that can only be described as woeful. Someone on Facebook, of course, will be summiting a mountain; a friend will post a picture with people you …
Untranslatable
The Irish word tenalach, we’re told in breathless Internet posts, is untranslatable in English. Which means, of course, that there is a translation but it’s long and flowery — the verbal equivalent of a scented candle — and in this particular case, the following: “Tenalach: A relationship one has with the land, air, and water; …
