Category Archives: nature

You who have stood at the bedposts.

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We have a new baby in my parish, over whom we are rejoicing, though we haven’t met him yet; he has a few weeks to go before being brought to church on the traditional 40th day after birth. It’s a good time to post this poem that I only recently discovered. 

Every baby coming into the world is a unique event, and my own feelings about births I’ve been present for have also been various. The group of people who have been appointed, as it were, to participate, each in her own way, bring all their personalities and prayers, and God is always present. 

I’m sure that many of my readers also retain impressions and images from standing by the bedposts (or lying in the bed), during or just after childbirth. None of the photos I might put here (the one above is from the internet) are much good by comparison with the golden moments that remain our personal possessions, even if with time they lose their crispness in the mind.

“Nothing else was ever so important.”

BEING BORN IS IMPORTANT

Being born is important.
You who have stood at the bedposts
and seen a mother on her high harvest day,
the day of the most golden of harvest moons for her.

You who have seen the new wet child
dried behind the ears,
swaddled in soft fresh garments,
pursing its lips and sending a groping mouth
toward the nipples where white milk is ready —

You who have seen this love’s payday
of wild toil and sweet agonizing —

You know being born is important.
You know nothing else was ever so important to you.
You understand the payday of love is so old,
So involved, so traced with circles of the moon,
So cunning with the secrets of the salts of the blood —
It must be older than the moon, older than salt.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Here’s a little something about Carl Sandburg’s own children.

The next day was honeybee day.

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The day after Groundhog Day, or Candlemas, etc., my walk took me past a long hedge of rosemary in bloom, where hundreds of honeybees were already getting ready for next year’s Candlemas. There were both the golden orange striped and the browner kind. I had a lot of fun taking their pictures and sorting them. Most of the shots had to be tossed, quite a few because I had completely failed to include a bee in the frame.

I don’t know much about bees, but it seemed crazy that so many of them were around to notice the rosemary; our nights are still frosty. Do the people with the rosemary hedge also keep bees… handy? But many blocks away, on my own street, was a single such bush and bees were buzzing on its flowers, too. Now, as I write, it occurs to me that I saw bees on rosemary two years ago, possibly as early as January, in a nearby town.

When I got home I went straight into the back yard to see what’s going on with my own rosemary. It is barely starting to bloom, and there was not a bee to be seen. But across the garden, the cyclamen are coming up!

What the birds do in January.

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This afternoon I stood on a bridge overlooking the creek, and watched a Black Phoebe for about ten minutes. He would briefly perch on a branch near the surface of the water, and then fly up, do a quick whirl of an aerial pirouette, and come down on the same or a nearby twig. Over and over again… he must have been catching insects.

It took me a while to be sure that he was a phoebe. I had only seen those birds in my garden one other winter, some years ago. I tried taking pictures but that didn’t work out too well, as you can see.

Just down the path from the bridge, about half of the town’s wild turkey flock were grazing — eight of them to be exact. I took their picture, too, but they kept their heads down in the grass, and I really only got this presentable shot.

The birds that gave me a rush recently were bluebirds. Three of them were checking out my birdhouse several days in a row. First there was a pair: they flew back and forth  from the trees to what was designed to be a Bluebird House, but which chickadees have used most often; they sat on top briefly, they flew back to the tree. The girl went in the house, then the boy. Then a second boy showed up! He also went in the house to look. I can see they have some decisions to make, about their relationships and about where the family will start out. They all three sat on the fence for a bit, but it didn’t seem long enough to have the necessary conversations.

Our Western Bluebird, from the Internet

I hope the girl makes her choices before the chickadees show up to take a tour of my lodgings, and most of all I hope she decides on my place, and that it’s not too late. Though, come to think of it, the other time bluebirds hatched in there it was midsummer. Anyway, I’d love to see something like this again:

The daphne by my front door has been blooming like crazy this year; twice as big and flowery as last year, which means a double dose of its heady scent every time I come and go.

Tomorrow is the last day of January I will be doing that, but February is a good daphne month, too. It was in February many years ago now that my neighbor brought me daphne blooms at the birth of my dear Pippin. Who would have guessed that her bouquet back then would make me remember her so often, this far away in time, as I do nearly every day… The sweetness of the memory and the scent of the flowers by my door get mixed up together, and make winter delicious.

Communing in the gardens.

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Scaly Rustgills under my fig tree.

Late this morning the sun came out again, and shined on all the droplets of dew and fog. I had a date to keep in town, but I noticed through the window that the fountain was dripping instead of flowing, so I went out to put the hose in there for a few minutes. Of course I saw many glowing leaves and caught the scent of decay. How can decomposition smell so fresh, and how does the earth’s breathing wake up my whole body?

Lavender under a net.

I took a few pictures and then I was happy to be on my way, on to the community garden to meet my friend Bella where we have been together a few times before.  Strolling through other people’s gardens is thoroughly relaxing and nourishing; lots of interest and no responsibility. A garden comprised of dozens of gardens, each with its special personality, is even better.

Often we get to take home some treats, for immediate food or for seeds. Bella found ears of corn lying in the path, and she showed me where a few beans hung from a trellis, the seeds somehow still dry and clean inside the mildewed pods. How could I not bring a few home to try? The way those beans offered themselves suggested a small planting, which is not intimidating. And they are intriguing Mystery Beans to me as yet; does anyone here know what kind they are? Such a dreamy-creamy color…  (below).

After my first big greenhouse planting project last winter, and the way so many of my starts did not take off, or for various reasons never bore fruit in my own garden, I am ready this spring to try just a few things, a few seeds…. a more minimalist garden.

What if my pumpkins had been successful, and I’d ended up with half a dozen of those gorgeous French cucurbits such as I roasted yesterday? They would have been too heavy for me to lug around the neighborhood as gifts.

I picked a bagful of meaty, rainwashed collard leaves from Bella’s plot, and the sweetest parsley ever from the free-for-all borders. The calendulas I gave my friend last spring are still blooming there under the collard canopy, and looking wintery — the sun may be bright on days like today, but its rays are sharply slanted, and every image is darkened by shadows.

Another plot owner was there with his teenage daughter, whose name I didn’t learn, but I will call her Maria. They gave me cilantro from their bed, a generous bunch of it, which I’m sure was the most fragrant I’ve ever got a whiff of, just picked after being hydrated for weeks. Maria came to talk to me while I was bent over the parsley, and we chatted about cooking. She filled me in on the hearty ham-and-eggs meal she had helped to make for breakfast this Saturday morning, and agreed that cooking for only oneself the way I do would be difficult.

Her father José talked about how his children don’t like to come to the garden with him. Maria explained, “We never want to bother getting out of bed and going outside unless something is happening that day, if we are going somewhere or people are coming over….” She smiled when I said, “Oh, but things are happening here: the plants are busy growing!”

Today, of course, was unlike any other, and I felt the restfulness of January, and cautioned how it would not even be a good idea to pull weeds when the soil was so wet. Maria and her father seemed quite contented. She may have had the same unconscious rejuvenating response in her body and psyche that Bella and I were having, being in the open air surrounded by trees and grass, fava bean plants and every kind of brassica exhaling oxygen. And Maria did get to be with people.

After our new friends left, Bella and I wandered up and down the rows, admiring every leftover bit of life, such as two tiny bright red peppers clinging to dead stick stems. We examined a banana tree that appeared to have been stricken by frost, but we hoped not killed. And we sat at a picnic table listening to the tinkle of the wind chimes, as hummingbirds swooped back and forth over our heads. It was a simple gift of a day.