Gone to seed

Wednesday is my catch-up day. I don’t teach on campus on Wednesdays, so I can sleep in and take a long, leisurely dog-walk before getting started with grading, online teaching, and other teaching tasks. Wednesday is when I run errands, do laundry, and catch up with housework. My Wednesdays always feature a full to-do list, “catching up” being a never-ending task. But because I don’t typically have to be anywhere at any particular time on Wednesdays, I can take my time chipping away at my midweek to-dos. Wednesdays are always busy, but they are busy in a relaxing way.

Now that November is over and I’m no longer committed to posting every day, I feel like my blog-mind has started to go to seed. This morning when I walked Reggie on the rail-trail where we often walk on Wednesdays, I couldn’t help taking lots of pictures of plants that have gone to seed, their tidy blooms replaced by fuzzy fluff, wizened fruit, or scraggly bracts. Last week or the week before, I would have stockpiled these Wednesday pictures to use throughout the week, but this morning I wasn’t pushing to feed the blog. Instead, I let Reggie off his leash, and we each walked at our own pace, stopping to sniff or photograph whatever caught our fancy. Instead of clinging to the blooms of seasons past, we allowed things to ripen into untidy seediness.

I think my fondness for flowers that have gone to seed is related to my fondness for weeds. Gone-to-seed flowers, like weeds, are scraggly, scrappy, and untidy. Gone-to-seed flowers, like weeds, have no place in a proper garden, as respectable gardeners diligently deadhead those blossoms that are past their prime. It should come as no surprise that for all my fondness for wildflowers and weeds, I’m no gardener, content to let my landlord keep my yard from falling into unbridled fecundity. If it were up to me, plants as well as dogs would be free to run off-leash, enjoying the leisure of commitment-free days to flower, fade, and fruit in their own time, not mine.

 

Fair and fowl

It’s become something of a holiday tradition for J and me to take a long walk on Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year, we decided to leave the dogs at home and take a stroll to Newton Cemetery, where we’ve walked in the past.

J and I like to walk at Newton Cemetery for the same reason I like to walk at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Newton Cemetery is basically a pretty park where people happen to be buried. Because of the graves, the atmosphere at Newton Cemetery is quiet and tranquil: you can walk the roads without worrying that cars, joggers, or cyclists will run you down, and you can take your time looking at monuments without feeling like you’re hogging the view of other browsers, as I sometimes feel at museums. In a good garden cemetery, all the lanes are the slow lane, so you can enjoy a leisurely stroll admiring the landscape, remarking on the architecture, and paying your respects to strangers. Since Newton Cemetery is a gentle walk from J’s house, going for a cemetery-stroll feels like one way of meeting the neighbors, even if those “neighbors” no longer happen to be alive.

Walking in a cemetery also serves as an excellent reminder of how grateful you are simply to be alive. When J first suggested that we go to Newton Cemetery for our Thanksgiving walk, I quipped, “Ah, so we can spend Thanksgiving afternoon being thankful we’re not dead?” J immediately responded, “Yes, and that’s true everyday.” Ah, yes: a point well taken. Every time we’ve walked at Newton Cemetery, J and I have happened upon some particular marker that stops us cold, whether that’s been a tombstone with my name on it, the grave of a local victim of 9-11, or an entire field of war dead. This trip to the cemetery, we spent a lot of time looking at markers of the recently deceased, many of which had been decorated for the season by grieving family members. There’s nothing like a tombstone bearing a autumnal bouquet from a grieving widow (complete with a greeting card, “To my husband on his birthday”) or a yet-unveiled stone for a stillborn infant (freshly adorned with toys and with the carved inscription “Step softly, our dream lies buried here”) to make you realize how lucky you are.

And then there are the waterfowl. Like most garden cemeteries, Newton Cemetery has several ponds that add a quiet, contemplative tone to the landscape, and like most cemetery ponds, the ones at Newton Cemetery are popular with ducks and geese. During a cemetery stroll last spring, J and I chatted with one widow whose decision where to bury her husband was decided in part by the ducks and geese of Newton Cemetery. Over the years, whenever she’d visit her husband’s grave, she explained, she and her children would bring stale bread to feed the waterfowl, making an otherwise sad visit a bit more happy. “My children love it here,” she explained, gesturing toward her now-teenaged kids. “One of my sons said the other day that this cemetery isn’t a dead place, because there’s always something new to see here.”

Always something new to see, indeed. Just when I’d thought that the waterfowl of Newton Cemetery was limited to the usual mallards and Canada geese, on Thursday we spotted a half-dozen hooded mergansers who carefully kept an entire pond between themselves and our impertinent camera lenses. Apparently even a cemetery doesn’t always provide the privacy that wild ducks crave, at least when the local paparazzi are taking a stroll.

Click here for a photo-set of the various waterfowl we saw on our Thanksgiving Day stroll at Newton Cemetery. Enjoy!

 

Dreaming of birds

It’s probably not surprising that, as a birder, I occasionally dream about birds. Almost always, the birds I see in my dreams are unidentifiable. Instead of dreaming I saw actual tanagers, buntings, or grosbeaks, I often dream of seeing some weird creature I’ve never seen in books: the kind of creature you’d say you’d never dreamed of.

In these dreams, I’m always without a field guide, so I spend most of the dream staring at the unusual bird and reciting its field marks to myself, forcing myself to remember a combination of colors that seems so striking, you’d think it would be easy to identify later. In nearly all instances, though, I wake up without remembering exactly what I saw. Was it an orange bird with green wings and a purple head? Or was it a purple bird with green wing-bars and an orange rump? Whether or not I actually remember any of the details, though, the simple fact remains: the birds of my dreams don’t exist. Even if I could remember their field marks, I’ll never find them in any field guide because they represent an idea that doesn’t exist outside of dreams.

One night last week, I dreamed I saw an unbelievably bright, lemon-colored bird, the size and stockiness of a large sparrow. It literally glowed in the tree it was in, its plumage similar in color to the reflective, Day-Glo vests that runners wear after dark to avoid getting hit by cars. More incredible, though, was the texture of its individual feathers, which were curly, giving the bird the nubbled appearance of a close-cropped poodle or short-tufted Berber rug. In my dream, the astonishing nature of this bird’s plumage reminded me of the overlapping, crowded and curled petals of dry hydrangea flowers, leading me to repeat to myself over and over, astonished, this most remarkable of field marks: “It looks like a yellow hydrangea-head! It looks like a yellow hydrangea-head!” And then I woke up.

 

Of frost and pheasants

It’s brilliant and bright outside: the kind of chilly day that deceives you with light. Why haven’t we learned over all these years that the brightest days are often the coldest, as if the light refracted through the remnants of a hard frost is even brighter than light unadorned?

Reggie and I saw a hen pheasant this morning: she was hunkered in the leaves next to a fence skirting one of the factories along the railtrail, and I was stopped taking a photograph while Reggie was sniffing dead leaves. Had the hen not moved, I’d have never seen her, as she was exactly the color of dry leaves. Had we both–Reggie and I–not stopped, I’m guessing this bird would have let us pass, not stirring the slightest to betray her presence. But with both a snooping person and nosy dog in close proximity, the hen first walked and then flew away, wanting to have nothing to do with our impertinence.

I don’t think I’d ever seen a female pheasant at close range and indeed didn’t recognize it at first, initially thinking we’d stumbled upon a female grouse. But the bird’s pointed tail and stiff, skittering flight were both indicative of pheasant rather than grouse, as was the fact that she flew to a nearby field rather than a neighboring row of trees. But my first startled impression belonged to no particular species: just the sound of leaves rustling, then the startled realization that one particular patch of dry-leaf color was vaguely bird-shaped and moving. In the split second before my mind could apply the category “pheasant” or “grouse” to that moving, bird-shaped patch of dry-leaf color, the only thought I could formulate was “some sort of brown, gallinaceous bird.”

Had I been a Stone Age hunter with a slingshot, that would have been enough for me to toss off a shot or two, as brown gallinaceous birds are tasty, regardless of whether you tag them “pheasant” or “grouse.” Instead, I raised my camera, had the presence of mind to switch the setting from “macro” to “auto,” then snapped several shots in the general direction I knew the bird to be, not being able to see foot nor feather of her on my camera view-screen.

Some of our best shots, I’ve learned, are blind ones, taken with an air of “what the hell?” J recently mentioned he’d like to try his hand at bird photography, and I’ve been slow to stick my birder’s foot in that open door. I think J would enjoying birding, as I do, and I think it would be something fun for us to do together…but I also know how difficult it is to watch birds with nothing but bare eyes and binoculars. Knowing how elusive birds can be, and knowing how challenging it can be spot them in any light much less the prime conditions needed for photography, I can’t imagine how difficult it would be go birding with a camera. As much as I like birding and photography as their own separate pursuits, I’ve always been too lazy to try to combine them.

For this reason, whenever J expresses his budding interest in bird photography, I find myself thinking, “Oh, you have no idea what you’re getting into!” But then again, most of us don’t know what we’re getting into on any given day, and we don’t let that stop us. Without having much of a clue but with an air of “what the hell,” we simply point our cameras, aim our slingshots, or stick our feet in doors, trying to have the presence of mind to switch our settings before taking a blind shot.

Click here if you want to play “spot the pheasant,” or here if you want to see a cropped version of the same photo. Enjoy!

 

An apple a day

It’s a question I’ve pondered previously. In a season when summer abundance is cast off and lies in heaping piles underfoot, shouldn’t we feel bad to see such fecundity go to waste?

Not far from the Keene State College dining commons, there is an apple tree that is currently boasting a bumper crop of fruit. Bushels of apples cluster on limbs high overhead, and buckets of apples cover the ground and sidewalks underneath the tree: some entire, and others crushed. Although I’ve occasionally seen students eating apples while they walk on campus, more commonly they are eating ice cream, chatting on cell phones, or listening to omnipresent iPods. With a dining commons that offers an alluring array of comfort food, the most popular Apples on campus seem to be the laptop kind, not the proverbial Forbidden Fruit.

With so few students eating apples these days–and with a dining commons nearby where students can choose fruit that hasn’t been lying underfoot, crushed or entire–you might worry that this year’s bumper crop of local apples is going to waste, rotting on or under their tree. But as I’ve long suspected, nothing in nature ever goes to waste, there being some campus denizens who don’t have meal plans and thus find their food apart from the dining commons: Keene State’s friendly (and furry) clean-up crew.

 

Nosy neighbors

I wonder which of us is the nosier neighbor: Reggie, who insists on sniffing every last one of our neighbors’ leaves, or I, who snap incessant pictures of same?

 

Autumn 2009

Every year, I worry that I’ll miss the so-called “peak” fall foliage season. If you travel to (or even within) New England to leaf-peep in the autumn, you presumably don’t want to waste your time looking at anything but the best colors, so there are handy maps to help you determine which places offer the best leaf-peeping bang for your travel buck.

If you live and don’t travel much within New England, you don’t chart your leaf-peeping by maps. Instead, you see whatever you stumble upon, particularly if October is your busy season and you don’t have time to drive to picturesque spots offering the best autumnal money-shots. Last year I struggled to find a handful of appropriate images for the Photo Friday theme “Autumn,” and this year, I find myself facing the same sort of insecurity. Given the challenge of picking one picture that says “Autumn,” how can any one image live up to the hype?

If you think that fall foliage has a “peak,” then you have a problem. What if you stumble upon, breathless, a particularly lovely autumnal scene, only to learn later that this vision of loveliness was merely mediocre? As soon as you think “peak,” you introduce the possibility of disappointment, for anything less than the height of perfection is second-best. Wouldn’t it be better to hold off in your peeping until you were quite sure autumn herself was peaking? And yet by waiting, wouldn’t you run the risk of missing that precise moment of visual perfection you were holding out for?

I say to hell with peak foliage: I for one don’t have the time to wait around for it. While others are planning their fall-foliage tours against maps and weather forecasts, every day I just walk the dog. The pictures illustrating today’s post come from a dozen photos I snapped on Wednesday morning’s dog-walk; if you don’t like these, I have others. On any given day, the sights we see might be below average, prime, or merely mediocre, but they are, after all, all we’ve got. Whether or not this moment, this picture, this red-flaming leaf is Peak or not isn’t my matter to decide. Instead of waiting for the One Perfect Moment that captures Autumn 2009 in quintessential perfection, I’ll continue taking and sharing whatever images I can gather.

This is my contribution for today’s Photo Friday theme, Autumn 2009.

 

Memento

This morning, among fallen horse-chestnut leaves, I found one perfect buckeye which I picked up and polished in my palm: a souvenir of the season.

It’s mild and partly cloudy today after yesterday’s unremitting gloom and last night’s rain: a perfect Saturday. It’s Columbus Day weekend, so half of Massachusetts will be driving up to New Hampshire to look at the leaves of others while half of New Hampshire drives up to Maine. As for J and I, we’ll stay close to home this weekend, realizing our own backyard is just as lovely as anyone else’s.

This morning I saw a single red maple leaf snagged in spider-silk, wildly dancing in a breeze that showered down its gold and crimson fellows. It was almost eerie to see one single maple leaf caught in suspension, as it autumn itself were held in abeyance.

Time stops for no one, and changing leaves and ripening berries are a vivid reminder of that simple fact. These days of gold and crimson are the ones we New Englanders live for, cherish, and hold in memory: bright days savored against bleak times. These are the days that get us through the cold, monochromatic days of December and January, when color is a distant memory.

This isn’t something a leaf-peeping tourist can appreciate, for the true beauty of a New England autumn doesn’t fully ripen until mid-winter, when both the leaves and their peepers are gone. In the dark days of mid-winter, only hope and the memory of bright gold and crimson breezes remain, curled like cotyledons in their seeds. The memory of these bright and brilliant days is what we New Englanders tuck inside our souls like folded snapshot, a cherished memento to cheer us when the nights are long and cold.

 

Fruitful

This morning I took a handful of pictures of the gathered acorns along a Newton curb and storm sewer: a river of acorns that has puddled from an ongoing torrent from overhead branches. This year’s bumper crop of New England acorns has been reported in the news and on the blogs, and it’s a phenomenon I’ve already Twittered twice. Whenever I drive into J’s driveway, I hear the snap-crackle-popping of crushed acorns under my tires, and whenever I walk Reggie around the block, we watch our step, careful not to roll and stumble over marble-like nuts underfoot.

This year’s over-abundance of acorns has everyone talking. The neighborhood mail carrier Reggie I see pushing her mail cart from door to door most mornings remarked about them today, predicting a bad winter given the number of nuts underfoot. I don’t know if trees “know” what the meteorological future holds, but their insentient guesses are probably as good as anyone’s.

I do know we had an abnormally rainy June here in New England, and I don’t know what sort of effect that has on the life cycle of oak trees. An abundance of autumnal acorns, in other words, might say more about this past summer’s weather than it does about the coming winter. Still, whatever the winter has in store, the squirrels and chipmunks will be well-fed, at least if their autumn hoarding has keep up with a healthy supply of rodent-food.

It’s also the season for the prickled seeds known as beggar’s ticks, which I can’t pull off quickly enough to keep Reggie seed-free. No sooner than I detach one clinging cluster of flat, microscopically hooked seeds than I find another and another…and by the time I’ve de-seeded the dog from one walk, it’s time to take another. There seems to be no end in the supply of beggar’s ticks, with each year offering another bumper crop. Whereas an over-abundance of acorns gets swept by autumn rains and homeowners’ garden hoses toward gutters and storm sewers, beggar’s ticks arrive inside suburban houses, smuggled in the nestling warmth of dog and cat fur.

It’s a lush and fruitful world out there, even as Nature is closing up shop for the season. Trees are tucking the last of their summer sugars into roots and fruits, and squirrels and dogs alike are helping to disperse plant seeds, wittingly or not. Fall is, after all, a time to cast off leaves and fruit in mind-boggling abundance–nature’s dumping time, the season when cast-offs get carried and squirreled away, stored against the coming season of want.

Click here for this morning’s handful of acorn images. Enjoy!

 

Drawn from nature

Last Thursday afternoon, I took my first-year writing students outside to draw in their nature journals. It was sunny and mild, and I gave them a choice of two tasks: either draw clouds or draw the lilac tree that sprawls in front of Parker Hall. It’s an exercise in seeing as much as drawing: once you stop and look, what do you see? I think looking is addictive, or at least I hope it is. What I want instill in my students, if they get anything from this class, is an inquisitive spirit that looks, notices, and wonders.

This cultivated habit of noticing is a theme running through this entire course, “Thinking & Writing: The Art of Natural History.” It’s what Robert Sullivan does in his rat alley, it’s what both Henry David Thoreau and Clare Walker Leslie do in their journals, and it’s what I urge my students to do in their semester-long projects. Pick a topic that truly interests you and spend a semester investigating it from every conceivable angle. Really look at it, deeply and and repeatedly, noticing its nuance and details over time. Read about your topic, think about your topic, and talk to others about your topic: get to know it first-hand and up-close, in a way none of the rest of us do. Become our resident expert in the minute details of your topic and its intersection with your life.

It’s a foreign concept to many of my students, this invitation to explore their own life deeply. When my students learn the first day of class they they have a 15- to 20-page paper to write, they immediately think of distant, well-publicized topics that they reason will will be easy to research because so much has already been said about them. Surely for a long research project, they think, they should pick a big and grandiose topic: serial killers or the death penalty or Global Warming with a capital G and W. These are Big Topics, ones that garner attention, headlines, and entire shelves in bookstores and libraries: the Brad and Angelina of research topics. With so much attention being paid to these types of topics, my students think, writing a long research paper will be easy, like a big scavenger hunt: just go out, find the “facts,” and bring them back.

My students don’t yet know–they don’t yet believe me, really, when I say it–that this is not the kind of research topic I’m looking for. I hesitate, in fact, to call this project a “research paper,” because that mere term causes my students to click into a familiar mode of producing out of sheer habit Whatever Worked In High School.

The long project is an exercise in investigating a topic close to home, like the rats that ran down an alley in Robert Sullivan’s own city. It needn’t be spectacular; in fact, the best topics are usually the most obscure ones, the ones that Only This Student deeply loves and is genuinely interested in. In asking my students to be intellectually curious, I’m actually asking them to take a deep and genuine interest in their own lives. I’m asking them to show up on a partly cloudy day in the shade of a sprawling tree and capture what they see.

Once again, I’m asking my first-year writing students to keep weekly nature journals as described in Clare Walker Leslie’s Keeping a Nature Journal: an assignment designed to complement the kind of observation and intellectual inquiry their semester-long writing project demands.

The three journal entries illustrating today’s post come from my own nature journal: three separate entries from three separate Septembers. You can read more about the philosophy behind my “Art of Natural History” class–and you can see another September nature journal entry–in this post from 2006. Enjoy!