Late February

The sun rises a little higher in the sky every day. With no foliage to shield its glare, it exposes the worst of winter’s detritus: the glint of a beer can on the side of the road, a sudden spread of mold along the base of the porch. If you look carefully, though, you’ll notice a reddening in the underbrush and the witch hazel’s first gaudy yellow tassels fluttering in the breeze. And yesterday afternoon a platoon of robins commandeered the flattened wildflower field, moving in formation as they picked their way through the soggy stubble. Thaw and freeze; freeze and thaw. There’s been no thick blanket of white this year. Instead, the remnants of our last storm have been scattered like used rags across the tired lawn for weeks now. The image of melting snow as laundry is one that the Pulitzer Prize-winning midwestern poet Ted Kooser employs below with his usual home-spun charm.

Late February

by Ted Kooser

The first warm day,
and by mid-afternoon
the snow is no more
than a washing
strewn over the yards,
the bedding rolled in knots
and leaking water,
the white shirts lying
under the evergreens.
Through the heaviest drifts
rise autumn’s fallen
bicycles, small carnivals
of paint and chrome,
the Octopus
and Tilt-A-Whirl
beginning to turn
in the sun. Now children,
stiffened by winter
and dressed, somehow,
like old men, mutter
and bend to the work
of building dams.
But such a spring is brief;
by five o’clock
the chill of sundown,
darkness, the blue TVs
flashing like storms
in the picture windows,
the yards gone gray,
the wet dogs barking
at nothing. Far off
across the cornfields
staked for streets and sewers,
the body of a farmer
missing since fall
will show up
in his garden tomorrow,
as unexpected
as a tulip.

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Snowy night

Barred owl. *Photo: Anders Gyllenhaal

If I happen to be outside at the end of the day — usually when dusk is beginning to fall — I’ll often hear the gentle, haunting cry of a barred owl: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? It’s unlike any other bird song I know, close to human-sounding in tone and cadence. But also intimate and somehow loving, like a mother calling her children in for dinner.

Nearly thirty years ago, the night we first moved into our house, something swept across the road in front of us just as we were pulling into the driveway.  It was hardly more than a shadow, flying low, its wings outstretched: a barred owl. It almost seemed to be welcoming us to our new home. Over the decades, there’s always been a barred owl or two around the place. It’s the perfect habitat for them, facing the wooded rise of Harvey Mountain and the rapid babble of Baldwin Brook. They hunt on our land, then sail across the road to perch in the hollows of trees or the repurposed nests of squirrels and hawks. They tend not to migrate, or even travel very far.  Cornell Lab reports that “of 158 birds that were banded and then found later, none had moved farther than 6 miles away.”

It’s comforting to think of us living side by side all these years. I don’t often see them; they blend so beautifully into the landscape. But their songs at twilight let me know they’re still there.

Snowy Night

by Mary Oliver

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which,
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn’t tell
which one it was –
the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air –
it was that distant. But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

*For more on barred owls, including a gallery of stunning photos like the one above, go to: https://flyinglessons.us/2020/04/23/quarantined-with-an-owl-nextdoor-but-will-we-ever-find-him/
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Rain, year’s end

Except for a light dusting at the beginning of the month, it’s been a snowless December in the Berkshires.  Though hardly a dry one. The unusually inclement year is doubling down as it nears its end with rain forecast almost every day this week. The fields are water-logged. The road is mud. Our seasonal creek is overflowing its banks.  The ground has yet to freeze for more than a day or two at a time. Morning mists linger well into the afternoon.

Winter will surely arrive at some point.  But the demarcation lines between Continue reading

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In plain sight

All summer long a pair of blue jays flitted around one of our espaliered pear trees, hopping from the barn gutter to the ground to the top limb of the tree where they’d disappear into its leafy shadows. Despite all the feints and evasive maneuvers, it was clear that the jays were nesting. But it wasn’t until the last of the leaves had fallen a few weeks ago that I discovered where. Packed into the spikey circle of twigs at the tree’s crown, woven with moss and straw and pine needles, was a miracle of avian engineering that had blended perfectly into its surroundings.

The fall reveals so many things that had been hidden in plain sight by summer’s canopies of green: the cresting wave of Continue reading

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Haunted house

The back of the house as seen from the kitchen garden

Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay from 1925 until her death in 1950, is just over the hill from us in the Berkshires. A decade or so ago, after an extensive fundraising and restoration effort by the Millay Society, the house and grounds were opened to the public for tours, but financial setbacks forced the place to close again in 2018. We paid a visit recently during one of the rare occasions when the Continue reading

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A pilgrimage

We drove up to Provincetown on a recent trip to the Cape. The place was still in a summer mood with traffic bumper to bumper on Commercial Street in the East End and tourists lining up for ice cream on MacMillan Pier. But I was there in search of something that couldn’t be discovered in any of the bustling antique shops and art galleries, something I’d been longing to find for many years.

Continue reading

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Queen Anne’s Lace

Ranks of Queen Anne’s Lace have taken over the wildflower field this year — tall, pale, and lithe as ballerinas. This August’s endless rains have brought them to their knees time after time, but by morning they’ve sprung up again — seemingly taller and stronger than ever. Despite the royal title, Queen Anne’s Lace has quite humble origins: it’s actually wild carrot and considered to be edible in its first year of life. Like many wildflowers, it possesses a litany of uses. The Romans ate it as a vegetable and the American Colonists boiled the taproots to make wine. Its sugar content is second only to that of the beet among root vegetables, and it’s been employed as a sweetener in various cultures around the world. Continue reading

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One perfect rose

Growing roses in the Berkshires is a thorny proposition at best. The season is too short. The winters too long. The weather unpredictable throughout the year. This summer, June was one endless dry spell while most of July seemed to have passed under a severe thunderstorm warning.  But even when conditions are at their best, the rewards tend to be fleeting. There’s usually about a two- week window between the moment the first blossoms unfurl to the morning when the advance guard of Japanese Beetles land like an invading army (or air force) on the roses’ delicate blooms. Continue reading

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Strawberries

I wish I could say that I grew these.  They look delicious, don’t they?  So sweet and juicy. The ones I did grow were coming along quite nicely, tiny white and yellow flowers abloom, bees bobbing among the bounty. The berries themselves — tight little balls of pale beige — began to form. Heads down, shyly, half-hidden under their blossom caps.  Then they started to flush — just the lightest tint of pink.  But the next day when I checked on them, they were gone. Disappeared. The whole berry patch dismantled. I know that I’ve only myself to blame. I should have been more careful. I’d noticed the chipmunks, scampering along the top of the split rail fence, casing the joint. And I could see that they were pilfering the odd berry or two as the fruit started to ripen. But I never imagined they’d be able to cart the whole crop away overnight. Continue reading

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When Lilacs Last …

Lilacs are flowering everywhere in the Berkshires now — in front yards, along the roadside, in a fallow field where a house once stood. Though seemingly delicate and fragile, lilacs are quite hardy and can live well into their seventh decade. Every spring, their blossoms fill the air with a potent fragrance that’s infused with longing — the mixture of “memory and desire” T. S. Eliot wrote about in the Wasteland. What is it about the sense of smell — the strongest of the human senses — that can transport us so quickly into the past?  Lilac was the signature Continue reading

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A Wing and a Prayer

Barred owl

The phoebes are busy setting up housekeeping under our eaves.  All day long they swoop and whistle to each other — phoebe, phoebe — and pick through the dead grass to line their nests. They’re usually the first of the migratory birds to return to their breeding grounds, harbingers that another spring has arrived, that nature’s ancient rhythms are quickening again.  It’s a moment to cherish. Especially now that we know birds across the globe are vanishing from our skies in staggering numbers. Continue reading

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Wild thing

Forestwander.com

Early one recent morning, I looked out the kitchen window and saw an enormous cat sitting in the breezeway between our house and garage. Its back was towards me, but I could tell that it was watching the bird feeders, no doubt sizing up the breakfast menu.  It must have sensed me there, because it suddenly swiveled its head and stared straight at me with yellow eyes. I felt that I was gazing directly into the wild.  I was five feet away from a bobcat.
A second later, it slipped away around the side of the garage but not before I noticed that it had a bobbed tail and little black tufts on the tips Continue reading

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Month of despair

It seemed for a time, for most of January actually, that winter had passed us by. We racked up weeks of mild weather when the occasional rain segued into snow which melted politely away by morning. The daffodils started to push up.  The witch hazel shimmied with its gaudy gold and crimson tassels. Surely spring was right around the corner?  It was our year of magically thinking that we’d dodged the cold dark bullet that is February. Then the wind kicked in. The temperatures plummeted.  The muddy road froze solid with ruts as deep and hard as luge tracks. The rain turned to sleet. We woke up yesterday morning to a world made of glass: every tree and shrub and left-out Continue reading

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Snowfall in the Afternoon

I love the way snow transforms the world around us in mysterious and beautiful ways. How the mountains disappear into the sky and the fields swell with drifts.  How the limbs of the spruces become draped with ermine and the last of the oak leaves — high up in the crown, gloved in white — clap wildly in the wind.  Snow lends itself to imagery — from Emily Dickinson’s “leaden sieves” and “alabaster wool” to Robert Frost’s extended metaphor of suicidal thoughts in “Stopping by Woods”—with, no doubt, thousands of other examples in between.  One of my favorites comes at the end of this poem by Robert Bly who died in Continue reading

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