Thank you, Emily Dickinson. Even though that poem is not my favorite of yours (I like the shocking ones like, "Because I would not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me––"). But still, these are the words that come to me over coffee as I sit watching the birds at the feeder. Who doesn't like a bird-feeder? (Answer: don't even tell me. Killjoys.) There's a nice variety swooping in the first week of April: nuthatches and chickadees, house finches and gold finches, cedar waxwings and juncos. (My sister intones "There's a rumble in the junco!") Plus flickers and downy woodpeckers, robins and pigeons, red-winged blackbirds, a single determined crow goose-stepping at the perimeter. The birds are at war, I think, despite how they sound chipper and some poets might suggest they embody hope. They are always skirmishing over seed at the feeder. Or chasing off potential suitors. Or courting like overcharged sixth-graders. It's a little like watching the television news. Only a little less bloodless and a lot less duplicitous.
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Though I have blogged about it before, I can't get enough of the critter cam photos of the Would-Be Farm. We set up a couple of these stout little digital cameras and get a peep at what's happening. When we leave the Farm, they keep working –– unless the batteries freeze solid, or beavers move the trees on which they are mounted, or some reprobate half-inches them. I wonder if there's a humorous technical term for when a user fails to correctly set the time and date on a digital device? Like, say, "Lazy"? Yeah, but...anyHOW, disregard the dates, times, temps that appear at the bottom of the following captured images: To celebrate both the turn of the season and my own return to full ambulatory powers –– she walks![Let us pause for a moment while the saga of the putrid toe remains untold.] Phew. Even when a thing is remarkably astonishing and revolting, it does not always need to be told in full. Now, back to the celebration... A beautiful day at the start of the new year, my husband and I taking a walk before breakfast in the park that recently opened its gates. It's not a "park" park, but a buffer zone for wildlife, separating coastal mangrove wetlands from the recently sprouted Homes from the $200's. There's a signboard, dirt parking, and a sandy path in the watery space between the Homes's PVC privacy fence and the big wide open. When it's warm, the mosquitoes and gnats will pretty nearly carry a human away. Even when it's cool, bugs lurk in the lee. A cool and breezy day, like this celebratory first hike of 2016, is ideal. Among the birds we spot right away are white pelicans all goofy and lovely, plus egrets, wood-storks, white ibis, a grumpy blue heron, a Cooper's hawk, a tough-looking shrike, an osprey, and more. Like this bald eagle, which was scrunched down in the nest, just at the end of my telephoto's range And though there's a long list of wild Florida wildlife we didn't see, we did find evidence of what happens in these parts while we aren't looking. After about three-quarters of a mile, the path ends and we are both ready for breakfast, so we retrace out steps, the rich, muddy-smelling air buffeting us as we go. And the silly white pelicans –– so skittish they must have been mistaken for ducks by some hunter in 2015 –– spook again and flap noisily past. *That quote would continue something like "...a miniature sled and eight tiny reindeer," as I am not quite over the hump of Christmas. And it's not an exact quote, but my inner pedant will have her way from time to time. When I was a kid, my mom used to play the "Songbirds of America," a vinyl record she borrowed from the library, over and over at top volume. The memory is vivid: from, I suppose, the year before kindergarten, when the other kids -– the pack of cousins and friends who spent their days under Mumsie's supervision –– were away at school. Mumsie was a housewife then, an unapologetic homemaker. She ironed the laundry after taking it in from the line. She waxed the wood floors and prepared hot dinners every night. On some weekday mornings, she met with other housewives for coffeecake. But she also made a study of wild birds. She went to the occasional meeting of the Audubon society. She carried a fresh paperback Roger Tory Petersen field guide everywhere she went. I wonder about these two impulses, the domestic and the outdoorsy. She'd crank up the hifi and put "Songbirds of America" on repeat while pottering around the house. To this day, I half expect the sweet "chu-tweedle-ee" or what-have-you of wild birdsong to be followed by an authoritative male voice announcing, "The territorial call of the common Wood Thrush." Echoing birdsong is part of how a person learns the birds. I break into "chick-a-dee-dee-dee!" more often than is strictly necessary, but I'm lazy. I return to high-tech assistants like the Cornell Ornithology lab website frequently to help me make an identification. Although she wasn't really impressed by them, Mumsie approved of these innovations: smart phone apps, websites. I think she understood that –– for all the interactive bells and whistles –– all of it is just a short step away from listening to a record. Stories are pigeons. Flapping up out of nowhere, gobbling up scraps and crumbs, cooing frantically. And way way too often, they wing their way back home from thousands of miles away. You send them off, and curr-hee, currr-hee! they reappear on your doorstep, fluffing their feathers and glaring at you with a ruby-red eye.
So when a story that's been sent out into the world actually does land someplace else –– published! –– it's a happy day. My "At My Back I Always Here" appears in the Fiction section of Stone Coast Review Literary Journal, Issue #3, which came out yesterday. <Insert sound of stadium cheering because, after all, fiction.> After closing shop last fall at the Would-Be Farm, we set up a game camera, pointed it at the fire pit at Base Camp, and then betook ourselves South. The game camera is a little modern marvel: a stout camouflaged plastic box, with motion-detection and infrared flash and a metric butt-load of memory. How much is a metric butt-load? Over 13,000 images. Here are a few highlights: Rather than relieving my curiosity about what comes and goes outside the door, these photos only make me want to set up more game cameras, maybe build an observation blind, possibly get night-vision glasses, and keep my dang eyes open!
What makes something humorous? As to be expected, a whole field of scientific inquiry (called "gelotology," not to be confused with gelato-ology) has devoted itself to the subject. Oh, to be on those PhD boards... The Cliff-notes version of what makes funny funny suggests something like this: humor arises from transgression and surprise. We have expectations of what's normal, so humor involves challenging or overturning those expectations in a way that is mildly alarming and/or absurd. A duck is not supposed to walk into a bar, in the normal course of affairs. The duck's smart-alecky comment is usually something of a surprise or something patently absurd. <insert sound of canned laugh-track> Radiolab, the fantastic radio show, also looks at gelotology in this episode. National Poetry Month -- it's doesn't have to be serious, people. The Florida State Fair takes place in February –– a fact that continues to surprise me, despite knowing full well what the weather is going to be like in August. Heading to the Fairgrounds, I find I have just enough intestinal fortitude to share a single deep-fried delight (A plain but weighty elephant ear this year. 2014 was the year of the maple-bacon funnel cake), but a perhaps endless appetite for the livestock aisles. There was a bit of drama among the fowl. Imagine the scene at home for this guy: Story #1
Setting: A modest living space, well-lit but with very sparse furnishings. Our hero enters in a state of greater-than-usual dishevelment and begins in a rush: "I'm ADOPTED?! Mother, how could you let me go to the Fair, knowing what would happen? You know what? I'm GLAD to be going to the slaughterhouse. You ruined my life!" Story #2 The scene is a long dining table. The murmur of voices diminishes, and from the head of the table, a deep male voice rings out: "So, it appears that Junior here is NOT a Cochin? Marge, is there something you want to tell us?" Story #3 And in the hot-headed world of the Telenovela: " 'Cochin' mi culo! Más como cochina!" This parent osprey and his/her brood of two are keeping watch over the northern side of the house these days. When not eating fish, the three line up and watch us earth-bound creatures as we move around in the sand. Getting a bead on us in their sharp eyesight, they all three perform a sassy head-slide, as if saying, "Oh no you dint-ent!" They make a LOT of noise: they are the avian version of SNL's Loud family. (An obscure sketch that was too annoying to continue...) Fun facts.
The scientific name is Pandion haliaetus, after Athenian king Pandion whose daughters were turned into birds after an unfortunate domestic-violence-rape-and-cannibalism incident. After that bit of flair, it's a bit of a let-down to find out that "haliaetus" means "eagle." The osprey is supposedly also known as a fish-eagle. Not that I have ever heard them called so. The osprey (along with most of our North American birds of prey) nearly died out in the 1960's and 1970's, as the pesticide DDT in the food chain led to fatally thin eggshells. It's been a pleasure to watch the numbers bounce back. 22 ospreys on the the light fixtures on the 3-mile-long Howard Frankland Bridge the other day. Thank you Rachel Carson and Silent Spring! I imagined that it would be easy to list a dozen things a day that make me happy. Two dozen. More –– I recognize that I live a cheerful and lucky life. But as it turns out, it's often the same things each day. Here are a few:
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