Growing Trees

A windless day, rare for our hill, and warm enough for a t-shirt. Most of the snow has transmogriphied into wet leaves, mud and sticks.

To be honest, I miss the snow’s whitewash of the work the yard will need. A false spring or a hint of it? I’ve seen the weather forecast for the week so my brain knows the answer my heart and skin refuse to believe.

My wife, Patty, got me a bird feeder so I can see some of the birds I hear. It’s been up for days and I’ve only seen one little bird on it. I looked it up and the bird is a chickadee, a black-capped chickadee to be precise. They live here throughout the winter. I read that they prefer caterpillars to seed, but in winter there isn’t much of a caterpillar buffet.

I was cheap and filled the feeder with old seed. Who knew seed could get old? Patty, for one. She had an idea that the package was somewhere around ten years old. I kept staring at the feeder expecting flocks of colorful, singing birds to arrive and then to sit on my shoulders and at my feet like a statue of Saint Francis. As days passed and the flocks didn’t materialize I figured they just couldn’t find it in the cold and snow and begin to feel sad for the plight of these birds, cold and starving with salvation so close. I had become Charlie Brown’s friend, Linus Van Pelt, vainly waiting for the Great Pumpkin. To her credit, Patty didn’t make fun of me. She merely suggested that new seed would attract birds. I’ll be buying fresh seed for him and his friends and cousins. Maybe I’ll get some bird pictures for next time. Unless, of course, I am blanketed with grateful avians.

For the past few years, I’ve been watching a miniature evergreen forest spring up alongside my driveway. The big trees have made babies. It has been


fun watching them grow. I should transplant them but I have had little success with planting things and fear killing them. Enough things have grown here and left already. The boys, Mark and Scott, were two when we moved here. Livy was born here much like this little one that appeared when the

snow melted. I haven’t killed any of my kids. I made mistakes. They never mention them, but I know. Would these little trees be as resilient?

Patty is much better than me at growing things. It isn’t just nurturing. She pays attention to details I don’t know exist. To see her fawn over a tomato plant and know its needs is as remarkable to me as her getting off the phone with one of the children and saying, “There is something wrong. I can tell.” She’s correct much more than she isn’t. So one day soon I’ll ask her what to do with the little trees. She’ll know how much root ball to dig, if they need shade or sun and how much space they need to thrive. I’ll ask her right after I put new seeds in the bird feeder.

Night

I’ve written about the wind, the cold, how the wind makes it cold, snow in various stages of causing me work or misery and I’ll stop listing before this becomes a rant. Sure it’s windier, snowier and usually colder up here on our hilltop in the country but there is pretty cool stuff here that nobody ever sees in the city.

            Tonight is near perfect. There is no wind or clouds. No mosquitos buzzing threats of West Nile and attracting bats that swirl around me like day-trippers at an Atlantic City buffet. The bright moon casts crisp shadows around me and illuminates just far enough into the woods that I’m sure I see things moving in the trees with every creek and groan of snow burdened limbs.

            I look up into what seems to be forever in the stars. I know without a telescope it’s just two million years of light to the galaxy Andromeda. She is the farthest thing I can see. I share the view with my kin from back then. Our bodies have changed, the earth has changed. The sky is very much the same.

There are colors, faint barely discernable tints to some stars. I can identify a few constellations. The dippers, both big and little, Orion. Sometimes the Pleiades are out here, but not yet tonight. I never saw all seven in the city, but here in the this nearly lightless neighborhood I can. I wonder if there are is someone looking back at me from across distance and time and wondering, too. Did my ancient kin take notice of these lights?

            As I look up I can hear snow landing on my nylon jacket and wish I’d worn a quieter one and that I still had the pick up truck. I’d lie in the back at night and watch winter’s meteor showers, the Leonids, Geminids and Quarantids through fog of my breath and cigarette smoke.  I’d lie there until the cold took more of my thought than the flying light would.

            Some kind of owl calls softly and another answers. It’s a cooing hoo, hoo. I ‘ve always called them hoot owls, but I’ve been told a hoot owl screeches and a screech owl hoots. It hoo hoos again and waits for an answer. I don’t know what to tell it and then from another direction comes a faint reply. The first owl ‘s hooing moves closer to that of the second as they call back and forth. After a few minutes it stops and I’m left in silence broken only by the sound of my boots and the snow and my pen on paper.

Today, I’ve come back outside after Auggie’s bedtime walk. Fresh snow and a bright moon begged me to come out and look at my shadow. It points sort of north. I could have brought out my phone or ipad  and used the app that tells me directions and names the things in the sky, but I don’t want to learn anything or be sure tonight.  I just want to look, listen and wonder. 

Salt, Ice and the Sea

The ice crusted snow is an eggshell over the yard. It will crack and robins will appear. Puffed up robins growing fat from feeding on worms that grew fat feeding on grass clippings and shredded leaves of my last few mowings.  Some growing fat from the eggs that grow inside them. For now, I release rock salt crystals one at a time. I want to see if one will slide all the way to the woods.

Nose close to the driveway, I sniff around looking like my German Pinscher, Auggie tracking moles. I try to determine if the briny water I’ve made from ice and rock salt smells like the beach. I’ve always had a nose for the beach. It can tell if I’m moving closer or away miles from the shore. The water heals me It always has. Cuts, acne, depression all fade when soaked in the breaking waves. I like to imagine I was a sea creature in another life. I’ve never been much of a swimmer so I wasn’t a fish. Maybe a bird. The delicate dance and piping of the plover or the clumsy waddle and piggish grunt of a pelican? Most would say my temperament points at crab. I wouldn’t mind crab. Shore crabs are quick, industrious and even when in large groups go about their business alone.  I can see myself as a fiddler crab menacing anything that comes my way with a claw bigger than my body.

Rock salt is tenacious and finds small dimples or bumps to slow it down. It dies in a tiny ocean it makes from itself and the ice. So I slide pinecones, which go nowhere. I guess their not quite cylindrical shape is to prevent them from rolling too far. I know a pumpkin works and car keys have gotten pretty far in the past. The keys were not on purpose and were very difficult to fetch off of an inch of slippery ice that I had to traverse. Going down and stopping was rough. Coming back up was nearly impossible. Hats off to Tenzing Norgay and Edmond Hillary. Getting up this little hill almost did me in let alone climbing Everest.

            Once the ice was just a little higher than the bottom of the storm door leading to this flat part of the driveway where our cars, snow shovels and salt were. I had to go out the front door and slide down the hill on my butt towards our cars. Hatchet in hand, I looked like a Viking berserker raiding England. I slid into the cars feet first and used the hatchet to free the back door.

The briny water doesn’t bear the scent of the sea. I mix in some mushy leaf bits since I haven’t any sargasso or sea grass and jump in the puddle. Maybe the grinding of the salt into plant and the spread of droplets in the air will bring the ocean here to Beech Road.  That is the ultimate irony of all this. The name of my street is a homophone of the place I love to be. It’s not four hundred miles. It’s just one letter.

Toes in the Snow

No coat or hat today. The west wind is blowing sunshine this afternoon. It’s not overwhelming the other sounds. I hear airplanes rumble, the hum of the furnace exhaust. The rapid-fire drops streaming in the downspout. Melting snow on the ground has a sound. Snap, crackle, pop like Rice Crispies.

My father didn’t witness snow until he was nineteen and the Italian army sent him north to Bologna. He told me how miserable the cold was and how in Ceccano, his hometown, it hadn’t snowed in a hundred years. His grandfather told him about it once before the war when there was time for story telling.

A woodpecker pounds for a few seconds. I guess he found nothing and went away. A bird tweets, a hawk shrieks, guns fire sporadically at the sportsman’s club. I can’t see any of it. My eyes are open but none of the makers are in sight. I hear crows call and respond from my left and right.

I scraped away snow with my bare foot to feel if the grass was like it was in Italy and just hiding from the cold. I visited the farm where my mother was from and had run carefully barefoot in the grassy vineyards. The seven cows my uncle kept pastured there left cow pies which when uncooked are unpleasant between the toes.

My mother accepted the horrific snows of Endicott, New York like she accepted everything else. We moved there from Rome a month before my first birthday. Six months later a twenty three year old woman who had never owned a coat went to the market for my milk wrapped in a blanket. She didn’t tell me this. She wouldn’t complain. I heard it from an aunt on my father’s side who cursed her kin and shamed them into helping us.

My foot feels less cold than I thought it would I’ve felt worse at the beach. Maybe it is expectation at work or the fact the snow is only a little colder than the air touching it. I’m making a snowball to 

compare the sensitivity of the two extremities. My hand feels ready to fall off after a few seconds holding a snowball. Can Mr. Science or Bill Nye tell me why? Don’t suggest Dr. Oz. He is more make believe than the humbug wizard in the movie.

I met Ethiopian students at Pitt. I complained about the weather in pre-class conversation. They laughed and told me about running out in the first snow they saw to touch it, how it felt like white fire when they held it too long, how quickly the newness wore off and how they bought coats, sweaters and scarves to keep the cold away.

The airplane sounds are nearly constant. Some times of year the flight paths shift and it seems every jet in the east is flying over my house. In the pre-dawn morning I can see lights from a dozen planes in the ten minutes I’m out with my dog. After the sun comes up the contrails look like pick up stix in the sky.

I was going to wait to see if my shadow would reach the woods, but it’s gotten cloudy and my wet foot is feeling chilled.