Spring Find

Sally found it. She was raking last year’s leaves and needles from under one of the big pines between the cottage and the garage, and saw a gray and furry-looking blob. At first she thought it might be scat. But there was just the one small lump, and on closer inspection she saw it was threaded with tiny bones. Mouse bones. It was an owl pellet.

Owls, I’ve read, eat their prey whole. Their systems can harvest nutrients from most parts of the animals they eat, and what they can’t use they regurgitate in a pellet like the one Sally found: fur and bones. It was quite dry, and pretty clean, although the bottom of it had once been sticky – there were a few pine needles plastered to it. She put the pellet on the old aluminum table that sits out in the yard so I could study it, too. I took a picture. It was between two and three inches long, and looked a bit like a miniature clump of knitting, stuck through with tiny needles.

Soon after, our neighbor from down the road came by, walking his dog, while we were raking around the mailbox. “Want to see our owl pellet?” Sally asked him. Like us, he loves the outdoors and is interested in the natural world. He said yes, and came down the drive with us and into the yard to see.

“Where’d you find it?” he asked, looking it over, and Sally pointed a couple of feet away. I couldn’t read the expression on his face, as he followed her gesture, and then looked up and around the yard. To the north, my sister’s property is as of yet undeveloped, and while I can see my next-door neighbor’s house to the south, my wetland lot, with the spring creek that is right now merrily burbling its way out into the Bay, lies between. A lot of people on this road have just one lot, sandwiched between two houses. I wondered if he was thinking owls must like the privacy of our yard. Or was he looking behind Sally at the homemade fence my dad put up next to the garage, to keep the deer out the year he had a garden? It’s falling down. I haven’t decided what to do with it; or with our ancient, rusty wheelbarrow, which is propped up against it. I’m thinking I may make the barrow into a planter…

I mentioned that I remember my dad once found a tree where an owl was roosting, just off the trail across the road from our driveway. “I don’t know where it is, now,” I said. “There were lots of bones and pellets underneath it.” My voice rasped some, as I said it. Our neighbor’s face looked a little sad, and I thought maybe he was seeing for a moment what it was like here, forty years ago or more, how much I remember, and how sometimes change is a mournful thing.

Then he told us about a screech owl he heard one night. It was putting up a terrible racket, he told us; he said he was out in his pajamas in the middle of the night, trying to see what it was. “It sounded like a kid being killed!” he said, and laughed. I nodded in agreement. I’ve heard that sound, too. The summer I was nineteen, I was alone at the cottage but for the family dogs. They wanted out in the middle of the night, and as I stood at the back door peering into the pitch blackness and waiting for them to come back, I heard an ear-splitting scream. It truly sounded like someone being killed, except somehow more supernatural. (I guess because it wasn’t human.) I didn’t know what it was. I had to ask my dad about it, later. Without hesitation he said, “Screech owl.”

Our neighbor and his dog moved on to finish their walk, and we put the owl pellet in the garage. Like so much we used to bring in from the outdoors, not just stones and shells, but snakeskins, bird bones, the empty paper wasp nest my dad hung in a corner of the ceiling – we’ll keep it. It’s a sign that the wild is still here, around us. It’s a hopeful thing.

 

 

A Thousand Words

It was cold, colder than even old Hans – the oldest person in the village – could remember. Pieter said it was so cold that the wings of the birds froze and they fell from the air like stones, but we knew it wasn’t true. We saw their black shapes flapping across the dull sky, and standing like iron statues in the bare branches of the trees.

That story was just Pieter trying to explain coming back empty-handed. Anna and I saw him return, with the other hunters, walking stiff-legged in the deep snow. The dogs followed behind, tails down, too cold to nip at each other, even the biggest of them loping along as if exhausted. The hunters hadn’t much to show. Only one of them had a long, skinny fox slung over his shoulder – just one, not much for the stewpot. The animals were all hiding somewhere, trying to keep warm. “Porridge for supper tonight,” I said, as we stood looking out the window.

“I wish we could have turkey,” Anna said, standing on the bench so she could see out, her small hands balled in fists, resting on her apron.

Her disappointment pained me. I eyed the huddled magpies perched in the ice-rimed trees along the lane. Not enough flesh there to tease an arrow.

As cold as it was, the hunters didn’t linger together, didn’t pull out pipes and light them while deciding whether to go home, or into Veykert’s tap room. They dispersed, and Pieter came in with a great bustle, stomping his feet at the door before sitting down to pull off his shoes.

“Are you cold Pieter?” Anna asked. She didn’t say anything to him about wanting a turkey dinner. For a small child Anna is perceptive. An old soul, Mama says.

“Just my fingers and my nose,” Pieter said, and touched an icy finger to Anna’s neck so that she shrieked and laughed. “It’s so cold out the foxes are hiding,” he told us, and then the tall tale about the birds falling, frozen, from the sky.

While Pieter was gone we had swept the floor with clean sand and scrubbed the table and the cooking pots. We had no work left to do, so Anna and I returned to the window while Pieter sat on a stool in front of the fire, smoking his pipe. Out in front of the tap room, the Veykerts were building a fire to singe the hair off the last of their pigs. Would that we had a pig to roast!

Down in the valley we saw a woman cross the snowy white of the bridge, carrying a bundle of wood on her back – an anonymous woman, dressed like anyone in our village, a white apron, and headcloth; the edge of a dark skirt above dark stockings. Not until she was halfway up the hill did we recognize her. “It’s Mama!” Anna called out, and jumped down. A few minutes later our mother came through the door.

“The mill wheel’s frozen,” she announced. I wondered what old Hans would say about that. I helped her unsling the bundle of branches from her back – none any thicker than my arm. “Not a stick to waste,” she said, as she tossed a piece on the dwindling fire. Pieter had jumped up too, when she came in. “How was the hunt Pieter?” she asked. He just shook his head. She put out a hand, rubbed his arm. After a moment she said, “Well, spring’s not so far off now,” and turned to us to see about the porridge.

Later that evening – we were in bed early and under a pile of quilts, to save the firewood – Mama told us that while gathering wood she’d watched some boys playing at stones on the river. I could imagine the whisper of the big stones as they slid over the ice, bound for the target. On a warmer day we might have gone down ourselves, to watch, or to skate around the pool at the river’s bend. Anna cannot skate yet, but sometimes Pieter puts her on the lid of Mama’s largest basket and tows her behind him. Pieter is a good skater, as was our father. I am not – a sad affliction, for a young person in our village, but there it is.

When Mama was done talking, I thought Pieter might tell us something about the hunt. I waited, but he was quiet. Probably because he didn’t bring back anything for us to eat, I thought, and I felt bad for him, so disappointed in himself. Still, I envied him.

I imagined trudging through the dark, quiet closeness of the woods, where the foxes make their lairs, safe from the biting wind. Then coming out from the trees, and the sudden white of the wide, frozen fields spread before me, bright even beneath the hushed, grey-green sky, about to drop its burden of snow. I pictured the village sprinkled along the valley, the edges of the thatched roofs peeking out from under a frosting of white, everything so tiny from a distance: a cart like a toy moving slowly along the road, the game players Mama had been watching just specks moving on the glass of the frozen river.

I imagined standing in the sharp cold, the air frosty in my throat, when a big shaggy hound bounded up to lean against me. Waiting for me to show him where we would go next. I imagined all the world spread out before me under a blanket of white; and a thin wisp of smoke, coming up from the village, reaching my nose and reminding me I would be going home, in a while.

I envied him.

Pieter Brueghel, Hunters in the Snow

Out in the Country

Seeking the writers’ conference, I get off the freeway and drive past a couple of barns and some silos, then turn towards the city. Everything starts looking suburban, and thus familiar: a high school, the bleachers for the playing field peeking out from behind the building; a church, and then another, both of them red brick and modern-looking; then strip malls, facing each other across a busy intersection; and finally, a swarm of houses covering the landscape. This is when I decide I must be going in the wrong direction, and head back the way I came, through all of it in reverse: bungalows, strip malls, churches and the school. Then the road crosses the highway that dropped me here, and suddenly the landscape opens up, wide fields edged by woods, roads set at right angles and drawn in straight lines that head off into a seemingly infinite distance. I’m in farm country. I feel awash in light, even under the leaden April sky.

The community college, when I find it, sits in the middle of this vastness like the Emerald City rising from the hills of Oz: new, sparkling with glass, surrounded by fresh parking lot. It’s nothing like the old farmhouse I pass near the entrance, seething with meticulously painted gingerbread, repurposed as an insurance agency or law firm’s office. A historical monument, is how it impresses me as I make the turn off what must be a county road. The colors it’s been painted are so vivid (mustard and maroon, I think) that I’m spellbound, as I drive past and up the long, curving drive into the campus.

Inside the college is almost self-contained, or it would be if the cafeteria were open. Today is Saturday, and it’s closed. So I venture out again for fast-food lunch. I’ve been advised I have to head back towards the city to find a restaurant. I glance in the other direction, looking for traffic before I turn, and see a road empty of cars, bordered by a seemingly endless succession of fields.

When I come out of the burger joint it’s snowing, but nothing is sticking. That’s how it’s been this April – cold, and everything slow to green. As I drive back to campus, the fields on either side are dull stubble, the branches of the trees in the distance bare and stark against the gray sky. Yet it’s anything but depressing. I don’t know why I find this landscape so reassuring, why it seems to help me breathe. I wonder if my ancestors felt this way, as they cut down the forest and rolled back the wilderness, setting their cows and horses to graze. I’ve never lived out here, never spent much time on a farm – but perhaps it’s in my blood, somehow; something passed down to me from my grandparents, and great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents…

When my sister and I were small, our grandmother would tell us stories about her childhood, growing up on a farm. “I want to live on a farm!,” we’d chorus – mostly because we pictured being around the animals. Grandma would respond that we didn’t want to live on a farm, we’d have to work too hard. She was born in 1897. I’m sure she saw us as city kids who hadn’t a clue, growing up in the ‘burbs in the 1960s. She was right.

I still don’t have a clue, what it’s like to live on a farm. But I’d like to drive into farm country more often. True spring is right around the corner, and I’m wondering where I could sit for an hour or so, in the open, looking at the green, listening to the larks and sparrows calling across the fields, away from the roar of constant traffic.

There’s always the community college parking lot.

 

Arrival

I’ve been working on editing and collecting some of my writing about the cottage. Here’s a bit from May two years ago.

We arrived at the cottage yesterday, our first trip this year.  After we took the shutters down, we had a winter’s worth of dust and spiderwebs to clean up, and we found that mice had once again made their winter encampments in the furniture. This time they claimed some dresser drawers, and one of the sofa beds – which I’ve decided is going to the junkyard, despite its classic early 60s lines.

Today we’re working out in the “yard.”  I call it that, but it bears no resemblance to a suburban yard.  There’s no grass, except for a few tall tufts of wild stuff that sprout around the tree trunks and in the packed dirt of the driveway.  Just like my dad used to do, I take a scythe to the wild grass – and think of him as I’m swinging it back and forth, how he used to joke about “mowing the lawn.”

Right now the sandy, moss-grown ground is covered in drifts of pine needles and oak and maple leaves, exposed when the snow melted. I start raking behind the cottage, and find that the bottom layer of old leaves is dark and shiny, glistening with moisture and full of earthworms – lots of them.  Smallish night crawlers, they stretch out like thin rubber bands as they move away from me, avoiding the tines of my rake.  As I pull away the leaf mold beside the well pit, I make another discovery: the glossy brown shells of eight or ten acorns, each split by a greenish-white root winding its way into the soil like a gleaming, determined tooth.  My rake sweeps a few away, but the rest remain – at least for now – taking hold in the damp sand.  An infant oak grove, just beyond the bedroom window.

╬╬╬

Later we sit on the beach, relaxing and hoping to warm ourselves in the sun.  The wind out of the north is driving a low fog before it, so rapidly that we can see wisps flying by.  As we watch, it keeps covering and uncovering the island like a magician performing sleight of hand: now you see it, now you don’t.  Occasionally a puff of fog is thick enough to throw a shadow, but mostly it’s thin as gauze drawn over a pale white sun. The surface of the Bay glitters, dimly; and we can feel a little of the sun’s warmth getting through.

We sit and watch for a long time. Slowly, the north wind herds the wisps and patches south; slowly, the bottom of the Bay fills with fog like milk collecting in a bowl.

Ten Sure Signs of Spring (Despite the Cold and Snow)

1. After slipping and sliding on the ice-covered trail in the shadow at the bottom of the hill, I sit on a sun-drenched bench at the top – and find a new dandelion leaf, no longer than my thumbnail, growing in the still-brown grass.

2. A few days ago, the near-40 temps turned the snow-packed trails to slush – and down near the river, a mosquito flew in my ear.

3. There are robins everywhere: in the crabapple tree outside the window, on the lawn, and all over the golf course.

4. The sun is getting stronger – insistent, hard to ignore; I feel it calling to me through the windows: wake up!

5. Pairs of mallard ducks, floating in the still water of the river’s oxbow.

6. Patches of real blue sky – not the faint, robin’s egg color you see in a Currier and Ives winter scene, peeking around the massive banks of clouds – but true blue; and floating in it, the first fluffy white clouds.

7. A heron flying high over the treetops, its long legs dangling beneath it.

8. Mud.

9. Last week we walked past a vernal pool on a sunny afternoon and Sally thought she heard a frog.

10. Did I mention the sun? So strong that on my walks I stop in my tracks and let it soak into my back, then turn and closing my eyes, tilt my face up to receive it… Soon I’ll be putting on lotion and wearing sunglasses to block its rays – but for now, bring it on, the first kiss of the waxing sun.

Snowshoe Meditation

The day was ending. Making our way back, we followed the trail along a crease that led down and between the hills. The sinking sun grazed the hilltop on our left and shone between the tree trunks, throwing bars of gold on the snowy slope opposite. My snowshoes landed softly in a true sea of white: during a snow squall earlier, I could smell the Lake – Michigan – just a few miles away.

The sun’s rays shot over our heads, and up against the hillside we walked in deepening blue shadow. I could feel the temperature dropping already, in late afternoon. We were not so far from where our car waited – a half-mile, maybe – but still it was sobering how fast, how cold the night came on. Deer tracks crossed the path – something we’d seen a lot this day. Peering into their prints, I could see that their slender legs sank like poles into the powder; and yet the deer seemed to have galloped effortlessly across our trail and up and down the ridges, leaving behind a picture of grace and power.

We’d just been talking about survival – how it could have been tricky getting back, as darkness fell, if the snowfall had continued and filled our tracks. I was thinking of what it would be like to be a creature of the forest; and also about my dad, who loved the woods and has passed on now.

And then a thought opened, full-bloom, in my head: it’s not so bad, death.

It was present with me, the knowledge that this is where the wild beings of the forest die; on the wooded slopes, drifted in white, the papery leaves of birches still clinging to branches and shaken into sound like a shaman’s rattle by the passing breeze. Here where the light was both fading and becoming more dramatic: blue shadows and golden patches shaped by the spaces between trees.

It’s the norm, in our culture, to view death as painful and fearful. Most often I’ve approached it that way, fearing the pain in separation from loved ones, fearing physical pain – wondering what the rabbit must feel, when the coyote’s jaws close around its throat. Suddenly I had a different understanding. Death not as something bad; just as something that is. Part of the landscape – as was I, in that moment.

Walking downhill in snowshoes while the cold sharpened, the shadows lengthened and the sunset shot golden arrows over the hill.

Stranger in the Snow

I love this time of day: the sunset glowing pink on the snow, light lingering in the sky while the backs of the condos across the courtyard are falling into shadow.

Yesterday comes back to me, when we walked in the overcast in the falling snow. “Look,” Sally said on the bridge, “paw prints all alone, without a person’s.” I looked down and saw them – small but spaced apart, suggesting a loping kind of gait, keeping to the edge of the bridge. They were so fresh they had not yet begun to fill up with snow.

We followed them, down off the span over the river, along the trail and then, into the field. It was harder to see the tracks there, broken and lost in tufts of grass, but we managed; saw where you investigated a jumble of dead wood, followed your meandering path this way and that. We tracked you through a grove of bushes and Sally, watching in the distance, called out “Look!” I lifted my head and saw a hunched, dark shape, moving fast among the bare trees at the bottom of the hill. “It looks almost like a cat,” Sally said. But we knew you were not a cat – even from a distance, we could see you were larger, heavier than a cat.

You disappeared from sight. Sally started to turn away, wanting to leave you be; but I argued for another glimpse. We pushed forward, crossing the field, and rejoined your prints where they circled a big hollow tree. Had you gone up inside? There was such a muddle of prints, it was hard to say. Maybe you did, we thought; or maybe you vanished into a burrow waiting for you on the hillside.

We went back to our planned route: up the hill and onto the mountain bike path, looping and twining its way along the wooded hillside. A squirrel jabbered at us from high in a tree; I spotted five deer moving in the field below and pointed to them as they raced out of sight. Later it was Sally’s turn to point out a herd of deer that faded silently into the brown and gray of winter thicket.

Along the river a small bird flew out from under the dry grass on the bank, then sailed right back in, disappearing. Ice had formed on downed logs; it spiraled out from the trunks of trees and made chutes in all the spills and falls. The river chuckled through, unconcerned, flowing under the ice where it spread in sheets and hurrying out the other side. Around the bend where the river widens and picks up speed, I could see chunks of slush racing toward us, and where a willow trailed its fingers in the water they were coated in white, bobbing in heavy suits of ice. I thought of the sugar crystals we grew on strings hanging in syrup, in elementary school. We stopped for a moment and looked down; at our feet, the water was roiling and thickening like some kind of ice soup. We could hear it slipping along the white-edged banks, whispering and shushing as it went.

The world was mysterious: the snow slowly coming to earth; the gray, muted light; the rushing water whispering with ice; the deer that kept their distance and seeing us, slipped silently into the trees. But nothing was as mysterious as you, stranger, who walked just before us across the steel and timber bridge and trotted, steps ahead, into the yellow straw of the winter field; disappearing when we spooked you, leaving only small footprints filling with snow.