Poetry Friday: Something There Is That Loves A Fence

Poetry never seems to really leave me alone, not that I am asking it to...but I don't exactly beg it to stay either. I haven't written a Poetry Friday post for some time and yet when I planned today that I would join in again and post something up I had about four or five ideas for poems come zinging into my consciousness. I would never self-identify as a poet but I do love a good poem and I seem to have a lot of poems rattling around in me trying to get out.

Poetry Friday is being hosted today by Poetry For Children and I am thrilled to join in again! Check out the other contributions. Happy Summer!

Today I am sharing a poem about our California backyard. This is our first yard with a genuine privacy fence and I have to say that I love it, the privacy and the peeking over and through it to talk to the neighbors. Its amazing how much I think of Frost's poem and chuckle.

Privacy Fence
I walk the high board fence between our yards
Escorting the black hose the length of the flower bed
Hissing fallen petals, shed leaves and dust ahead of us.
Your glory vine is pushing fingers through the planks,
Spying at my boys as they lounge in the hammock
My leadwort is getting positively coquettish,
Throwing its sky blue tresses clear over the wall.
In your direction.
Neither of us mind.
You peek at me through the slits in the boards grinning
Passing bags of Cambodian shrimp chips over to us
Or dropping candy bars to my jazzed 6 year old
I bow and wave and wish you a good day
Sometimes sending over a bouquet of mint
Or a few choice stems of rose blossom
And over us, your banana cluster ripens benevolently
While my passiflora vine tenderly creeps up
Into the arms of your apple tree.

End Of Summer Notes

We are going tubing down a river tomorrow morning and I should be in bed by now so that I will be awake bright and early to make everyone omelettes before we leave. (Boys who go places with no food are not boys you want to go places with.) Instead of sleeping, I am up folding laundry, contemplating the moving away of one more friend, obsessing about my homeschool plans and trying to decide how to wedge in one teeny stay in a rustic cabin in the mountains before the holidays. So many things going on and suddenly it feels like everything is speeding right up.

I told Ru and Nib that they could both sign up for fall baseball since we skipped out on the regular spring season. Argh! I am such a lazy mama....I don't wanna do it! I have the hardest time convincing myself to be ambitious enough to arrange friend play times and classes or activities of any kind. Nib has incessantly nagged me all summer long to take him fishing and I only managed to do something about it once when we were in Michigan sleeping 20 feet from my in-laws private dock. Better a little than nothing at all. Ha. But, seriously....I think I need to just take myself to a local bait shop or a pier and let some old men school me on how to catch the local fish and how in the world to fix up the fishing rods I have but have not in proper order. I am considering one of those cushy trout ponds for a personal boost as a beginning.

In all seriousness, I do want to have and to show ambition. I am not interested in avoiding all work and having my kids end up resentfully annoyed at their own inability to participate in anything because I dragged my feet for all eternity. I am however, loath to sign up for baseball. I love watching how they learn from coaches and build friendships on the team but I truly hate rushing off to practices and having our whole life filled with practice and games.

 So far, I have still not received a note about Little League starting up for fall season.....so who can say. We must not butcher our chickens before they're hatched.

I have been harvesting the little volunteer Sungolds in our garden for the past couple of weeks. I was a little nervous to see what would appear when they began fruiting since I know Sungold is a modern hybrid and not very inclined to end up true to kind. I have been very surprised by satisfied by how very like its parent this tomato has appeared. I have the same juicy, sweet/tart little golden marble fruits and have been merrily filling a folded over pouch in my shirt with them pretty much anytime I find myself lingering in the yard. I have also been picking arugula, some tender second and third flush broccoli and our first very late crop of peas. The peas never seem to make it inside to the house, the kids like them too much. I'm all for healthy snacking however, so there's not much fuss to make over the issue.

The boys and I are working more on nature journalling and have been pulling out our paints to sketch things up a little from time to time. I am still trying to use our journals for a chance to record and research new species to us since moving Out West. Speaking of new species to us...we recently revisited the trees I noticed this spring when they were blooming. I thought they were maybe apricots or peaches but this time of year I could clearly see that they are almond trees. So amazing to discover that there are so many exotic nut trees scattered around. I sometimes feel like I know a lot about plants and animals and that outdoors and that I can feel confident in my knowledge. And then I think about things and realize that I am still humblingly unknowing in many ways and make absurd sounding rooky guesses. I only just realized this spring that the leaves of apricot trees look nothing like peach tree leaves and that I had been walking right past them all my life and not noticing. And then, there's the almonds-look-nothing-like-other-nuts-they-look-like-peaches foul up that I made in trying to learn what was along the highways. I can't believe how much there still is to notice and know and understand....even about the common things. One new fun tool I have been playing with as I learn is the app iNaturalist. Its actually kind of amazing. You take a picture, it notes your location via gps and then identifies your find. Super empowering. The boys love it. We end up running around at parks snapping pictures of things I would normally just shrug at.

Summer isn't quite over yet, even though school is starting next week so I am looking forward to a few more beach days, a little blackberry picking, a pie or two, a rodeo and a music festival. Autumn will come in its time but I'm not quite ready. 

Woodpeckers From My Life List

Today, on the playground I was distracted from a truly delightful mommy conversation by the lisping call of an acorn woodpecker! Right there in the middle of a suburban play area, across from the plastic twisty slide...there was a colony of acorn woodpeckers, Melanerpes formicivorus!!!  I took a minute away from my totally normal friends who are not magnetically drawn to woodpeckers and got to see them working away at peppering their telephone pole cum larder with holes, each one a storage hole for a meticulously shelled acorn meat. Totally exciting! I had wanted to see these guys ever since reading about them as a little girl. Most woodpeckers are pretty solitary, feeding from suet at windows around other individuals but mostly operating solo unless its mating season. This woodpecker builds a larder of acorns together with other frien


ds, male and female and shares nesting and incubating duties with other couples....its like a commune woodpecker! So California! I love it.

 When I was maybe 10 or so my sisters and I found an old woodpecker nest by mistake. We were knocking over deadwood in the area of the woods where we liked to play and we snapped open a deceased maple tree about six inches in diameter and there, in the snapped open trunk with a carved open cavity with the old nest, a shockingly minimal pile of woodshavings leftover from the excavation in the bottom. We were pretty fascinated by it and I remember feeling so lucky to find such a hidden thing. Google "downy woodpecker nest" and see how many people are getting glimpses inside of one. Its a pretty rare pleasure.

Anyhow, this was a whole new woodpecker that I had never seen before....we have no woodpeckers here in our yard at Orange Blossom Cottage, just jays, towhees, mockingbirds, crows and lot of assertive little hummingbirds. I miss them. They are a fixture of northern feeders and were an iconic part of my childhood bird watching. I used to leaf through field guides and make mental lists of birds and flowers that I wanted to see someday that seemed exotic and faraway...things that had range maps that were nowhere near Michigan. And there I was, a responsible 36 year old mother, transfixed by the sight of a one of those birds on my  imaginary lists, while suburban mothers around me offered their children goldfish crackers and placidly reapplied sunscreen. Its truly fantastic how life doesn't always wait for a "natural moment" to hand you a wonderful pleasure. I had to take a minute to swallow down my mania before I was ready to go back and join the group again. Some of the best victories have to stay private because only truly odd people can sometimes understand our own little fixations.

We spent a long time more lingering there while the kids shrieked and ran through the splash pad and we moms had many enlightening, comforting and hilarious conversations, someone got stung by a yellow jacket and we pack and unpacked our lunches over and over as kids ran in and out of our circle taking and returning bits of food and stray flip flops. I love a good playground lingering anyhow, especially if its with ladies that fill my cup and make me smile but my favorite kind of open ended recharge session plus a childhood bucket list item....that's a secret victory if ever I heard of one! And its only Monday, folks!

Persimmon Secrets

This is a persimmon blossom.

I never saw one before, because I never had a persimmon tree. We have two trees in our backyard here at Orange Blossom Cottage which were loaded with fruit this past fall. We had so much fun eating them all autumn, its amazing to see this delicious, unknown to me fruit in all of its stages.

I love that the blossom only has four petals, that its got thick, stiff, waxy petals that are gently tinted orange like a hint of the fruit that will come next. I also love that the flower is displayed in that great platter of a green sepals. Its like a giant medieval ruff around the blossom! So small and secret, tucked under the much larger and more prominent glossy leaves....but there it is, the beginnings of our fall harvest and a new experience for me, all in one tiny, thumbnail sized bit of wonder.

Poetry Friday: Secret Apple Code

Happy Poetry Friday to you all! Its late at night and the house is quiet....I have had a dreamy day out with some of the best company and have wakened my mind up in a redwood forest. Its a good night for a poem and even though this one came dragged out of me in a tangled fashion, I hope it will be worth sharing with others. I liked listening to my brain stumble through the meanings and the unsnarling of the steps of the story. 

I forget how much writing poetry can feel just like meditation, like painting and like yoga when I sink in properly. Its best done in a dark house after everyone has gone to sleep, I think. You can finally get into the thick and flowing weight of the process if you have no voices left, no other presence and no one but you, even your physical self snoozing in the computer chair really while your brain and your soul work macrame with ideas and thoughts and personal truth. This is why I mean to read poetry and mean to write it. 

This week, a poem about the story of this beautiful little apple and how it came to be mine and how in the world despite its stunning beauty, I managed to have it disappoint me. 

An Apple Lesson

I wanted it to be most sweet, a tangy, juicy pleasure

Instead it punched me bitterly, a plug of sour, drying feathers. 

It was the largest on the tree, its skin all pinkly blushing

The freckles on its spherical cheek all winking at me flushly.

The children playing squirrel games had buried all the others 

A row of mole-hills neatly made, with marble apples under.

I noticed all their digging work, each stick that marked a pile. 

I heard the secret offerings arranged for deer in sylvan style. 

The meaning of each twig and heap, the messages spelled out

When every plan had been described, oblations all laid out

I told them if I was a doe, I'd be most grateful to them each

And have a secret thrill to find their message and the treats. 

Attention is a cheerful gift, a momentary pleasure

A child who is listened to grows dignified and tender

Because I entered in their world, my fingers in the dirt

My head inclined and face awake, my spirit in the work

They paused and then behind a back emerged this largest pome

The rusted ruby biggest fruit, unburied and alone

They gave it to me as a gift, a gesture peer to peer.

Their largest apple never laid in sacred mounds for deer.

I thanked the little architects who'd shared their schemes with me

And made a circuit through the park, a gleeful apple posessee

I cupped it in my hand and tossed and felt its weighty cool

With glittering eyes I breathed and rubbed it to a ruddy yule. 

The tartan flannel of my shirt my regal buffing cloth

My lucky apple, sparking bright, held vampishly aloft. 

Alas, this prize of children and my adultish greedy yen 

Had a jolting oral skirmish when I bit into the skin.

Not every beauty that we find is there to be consumed. 

Some gifts are handheld sermons made of eloquent festoons. 

Our Poetry Friday roundup being hosted this week by The Miss Rhumphius Effect. Please join in or read along any week that the urge strikes you, this friendly group of poets and poetry lovers has no limits or rules about participation and has been so welcoming to me. Please come along if you like!

What Do You Call An Egg With No Shell?

Check out this egg that one of my hens laid.

Pretty, right?

Pretty weird!!!!

Its an egg with no shell....just the thin, skin-like membrane that normally lines the inside of the shell. Reading a list of reasons why this could occur isn't particularly enlightening (stress, low calcium, too much salt, immaturity, old age). I am going to bet on stress as the most likely cause. Its hard for me to tell which hen laid this because the shell color is my normal way to tell any given hen's eggs from another but I'd venture to guess Pearl is our most stressed hen after her recent recovery and I'm in the process of putting together a whole new coop with lots more space in the house and the yard because I think all the girls are a little too short on room and that could be stressing any one of them.

Nature is strange and sometimes beyond believing. Time to fire up my drill and get that coop together lest our eggs keep arriving in little skin sacks!

Hummingbird Messages

How strong is the magnetic power of the mind? Strong enough to bring a hummingbird nest to me in the wild?

Research continues to show us that our thoughts are more predictive and prophetic and full of power than the skeptical, modern scientific mind might be willing to believe. (Hello, placebo effect!) I have had a few kind of unexplainable experiences in my life, one of which is kind of "willing" certain things into my life. I'm a praying kind of chick but I can't honestly say that I specifically prayed for these things, just thought fondly and hopefully, maybe even confidently about find them and then they showed up. Its always things. I am thinking of a certain food or movie and then someone else brings it over or suggests it (this happens with A and I fairly frequently which we joke is our private ESP), I am hoping for a particular kind of dishware or a specific item of clothing and lo and behold they show up in my local Goodwill, and then recently....a hummingbird nest came my way. I made a New Year's Resolution to find a hummingbird nest in the wild. I know that sounds kind of loony but as I mentioned, I've had enough of these experiences to feel like its possible and so I just stepped out and wrote it down.

There are the boys and Aunt Sheila right before we walked down the trail and saw the nest.

Then this spring, during a miniature hike at one of our local parks with my Aunt Sheila, we stopped under a scraggly wild apple tree for a minute to admire a woodland pond and I just saw a hummingbird dart above my head and when I looked up, there was the nest, right over me with the mother, snugged down inside it.

There it is! See it?

How about now? Astounding, right?

Life is amazing. Like I said, I have had this kind of thing happen to me before but it isn't daily and its so powerful and special feeling when it happens that I still feel really astonished and elated when it happens. I want to tell everyone and shout, "You won't believe what happened to me!!!" from my sunroom roof.

Just like my previous, mysterious visitation with woodcocks, I'm enough of a mystic to go hunting for meaning in these kinds of experiences. I believe God speaks, I believe lessons are everywhere, I believe that all of nature is the realm of the Spirit and I believe that paying attention matters.

Hummingbird color plate from Ernst Haeckel's ''Kunstformen der Natur'' (1899) via Wikipedia

Hummingbirds beat the symbol for infinity into the air around themselves over and over, "forever" is their lift. I love that idea. May the idea of forever lift me. They are able to pause, midair even in the midst of flight at tremendous speeds, which is a wonderful vision of presence and attention. They built their tiny little nest out of lichen scales and line the inside with spider's silk, which is both incredibly strong and also very flexible and basically means that they create an expandable, elastic home that grows to allow their babies more space as they mature. So fabulous, yes? I aspire. (That gives me shivers, y'all!) May I mama like a hummingbird, in this and every home. They also are connected intimately with flowers and cannot survive without them. I've always been a flower lover and have let my Master Gardener training go but its a good reminder that I belong outside, that I need blooms and buds and petals in my world and that I should keep gardening in my tray of possible pursuits when I pick my career options in my next life stage. They are also amazingly resilient in hard times. Like many birds they have astounding caloric needs and require a very hefty food source. If food is scarce or at night when it gets cold they have to ability to willfully put themselves into a meditative state with drastically slowed heart rate and breathing and they will even appear dead in their survivalist stupor. When conditions are right they will "resurrect" and go about their business. Wonderful, no?

I waited until the mama had finished raising her young ones and abandoned the tiny little nursery and then the boys and I went back to collect it. Its sitting on my window sill now. So wonderful to have these messages sent our way....watch your world, friends, the truth is out there!  

Jellyfish on the Ceiling

Jellyfish hanging from my ceiling has never been a big dream of mine....

Until now.

The boys and I went to the local aquarium and they were in the process of hanging dozens of gigantic white vellum jellyfish from the roof. They were stunning! Isn't it amazing to see something enlarged and made into a decorative paper form and suddenly see it as an object of art. This is why I love biology, I love noticing the intricate details and rippling patterns the shuddering beauty of it all! This kind of thing is all around us....life is beautiful art. I bet the parts of a cell or different varieties of lichen would be just as beautiful in hanging paper decorations....its just hard to see the beauty of the world sometimes until you turn it into a hanging sculpture that flutters gently in the air over your head.

Girly Frog, Changes Clothes

 

Did you know frogs shed their skin????

Totally blown away by that, just a little fruit of my naptime research on Science Tuesday. The boys and I went out for a little hike this morning and found this beautiful she-frog. She's a "green frog" which is a real name, not just the obvious descriptor for her coloring. We found out she was a girl when we got home and did some digging. Girl green-frogs have a pale creamy belly (you can just see the edges of hers peeking out below her jaw), boys have a yellow throat. Lady green frogs also have an ear (that circle behind her eye) that is the same size as their eyes. Boy froggies have whopper ears. I wonder if they can hear better than the females. 

But yes...the skin. Frogs can breathe through their skin and drink through their skin and that's why they are slimey to the touch. They secrete a mucus to keep their delicate hides all perfectly in tune. If they can't drink or breathe because the works get clogged they'd be in major trouble...so they change outfits a lot...keeping their skin in perfect condition. When the old skin needs replacing they wiggle out of it (like a snake) and pull it over their heads with their front feet and then......

.....they eat it. 

Surreal, right? Nature. Its a trip.

Frogs In The Sunroom

It was a good day full of sunshine and warmth and scratching things off my list that I have been meaning to do for years. Like catching wild frog eggs with my sons!


Frogs are hard to see...harder if you are between 2 and 7 and prone to wiggles. BUT...I persevered with my stillness coaching and we saw frogs. Several of them, mostly males of different colors, brown and green with touches of gold and black trim and one that was a dark russet orange. I also saw one female, pregnant with a big poofy clutch of eggs. She dived before the boys could follow my pointing finger.



I thought we were out if luck looking for eggs though. None. Not one cluster. And then I started seeing them, tucked almost into the leaves, visible when your head was tilted just so, sunlight hitting to surface of the vernal pond in a certain way. Like a cluster of black pearls just below the surface.



The boys were curious and amazed and each had to feel them and ask 40 questions because 20 is for slackers. We put one cluster off glistening eggs into a plastic Superman bowl and filled a juice bottle with extra pond water for later and took them home.



And now there are teeny, little frog babies growing in a fishbowl in my sunroom! :) Happy Thursday to me!

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Winter Minutia

There is something very crisp and healing about a winter hike. Even here, in the land of very little snowfall the winter woods feel cleaner and peaceful. All the inhabitants of stream and leaf are sleeping deeply or gone away all together and everything from bud to burl is snugly folded for the resting season.

The palette is a simple: khaki, bone and taupe, so that every little snip of color shows up like a blinking sign in the even landscape. Its good to be outdoors and to feel pure solace, no chance of meeting other hikers on the trail, and hear only the hoot of your own voice or the echo of a raven's call in the distance.

Its time for little things to have a small moment to shine: the dark maroon purple of a wineberry leaf, the chartreuse carpet of moss under rusty oak leaves, the glint of mica in a trailside boulder. There were no bird's nests this hike but I always like to look for them once the leaves are down and all the occupants have flown off to other habitats.

 Away from highways and crowds and busy activities you can finally hear the drip of water off the spruce tips and the scuffle of a squirrel over the next rise and the rattle of the dead beech leaves in the wind. Small beauties, little things...but good to remember. All these small things are there, under the momentous importance of our busy lives if only we will take the time to bend down and see them.