Some days start off with a profound but temporary sadness for the life I’ve chosen.
This sadness hits especially on Mondays, when I let the cats out for their morning jaunt around the Homestead and my husband leaves for work. He’s switched into business attire after a weekend in ripped Carhartt’s doing garden clean-up. Up and down the street, car doors slam and engines rev as neighbors back out of their driveways and head off to other places. This is the time of day when I can hear the highway hum and vibrate like a wire in the distance. Highway 82 is ushering untold masses away from their homes and off to offices and shops and businesses to be productive and social and earn paychecks. I used to be one of those masses. At this time of year, I’d leave for work before the sun touched the mountains across from my house and return after the skies had darkened again.
Nowadays, I stand outside in the backyard dressed in my puffy and hat, holding a steaming cup of coffee. I listen to that hum, and the quiet in the garden seems amplified. Perhaps the world has left me behind. It’s easy to let doubt creep in when you try something new. Sometimes I have to shake my head and actively remind myself that I chose to opt out of that vibrating hum.
Then a funny thing tends to happen. My attention shifts and the sound of vehicles slowly recedes, giving way to the chirps of little songbirds. They’re flitting around in the ash tree now, hopping from branch to branch, sometimes dangling upside down, and I have no idea what they’re doing. They appear to be watching me just as curiously as I’m watching them, and they land on a nearby branch to size me up before flitting away again. In the first morning light, the air is thick with woolly aphids, these floating and ponderous tiny puffballs of blue. I cringe and hope the birds are eating some.
Then the sun pokes over the distant mountain, and two crows fly overhead. One has what looks like a chicken bone in its mouth, and they’re squawking at one another and performing arial acrobatics in defense of that bone. They swoop and soar between the houses, around their perch across the street, and then one flies back alone over my yard, victorious for the moment.
I hear the geese approach long before I see them. They’re still circling the valley floor in their cock-eyed Vs. It’s hard to believe their young have yet to master the formations required to migrate. They’ve been practicing since July. But there they go overhead, and one straggler calls out from far off to the left as if to say, no this way! Come this way, which they do.
In the yard of the neighbor caddy-corner to mine, the squirrels stir from their high arboreal homes and begin making their way to the ground. I have no idea where they live up there and can’t wait for all the leaves to drop so I can bring out my binoculars and search for a nest or tree cavity. In the front yard of my neighbor to the right, a nest, either squirrel or crow, has already revealed itself. I’m agog that squirrels make these kinds of homes and that a bundle of woven leaves can keep the squirrels warm enough through the coldest winter months.
Then the first little Hey Squirrel arrives on the shed. I’ve scattered some seeds for the birds up there and am surprised that the squirrel prefers sunflower seeds to the nutrient-rich walnut in the shell. At last, this little one grabs the nut, adjusts it several times in its mouth, and runs off. I try to track where the Hey Squirrel goes. The neighborhood is a network of squirrel highways, from the fences separating yards to the phone lines up overhead. The little one carries this nut, larger than its head, up to the phone lines via the neighbor’s crab apple tree. I follow its motion through the bob and sway of branches. It crosses high above the next-door neighbor’s yard then hangs a sharp right and slips down into an apple tree and out of sight. Anyway, I’m distracted by the second little one who shows up and mirrors the action of its brother. For better or worse, I feed the squirrels a little. We are down to a nut or two daily and a squirrel or two from a summer heyday of wildlife chaos that was, frankly, overwhelming. I sometimes wonder where they all went but am glad most chose to move on.
Once the squirrels are gone, I take a tour around my vegetable gardens. Most are now covered in sheeting or put to bed with a thick layer of mulch. When the air warms, the bees still stop by to seek the flowers underneath the blankets, and so I peel open the plastic each morning. Underneath it, tomatoes, carrots, peppers, a squash plant or two, and other produce are valiantly refusing to give in to the increasingly cold weather.
Beside the beds, a pinecone has fallen into the grass, and I toss it into the growing pile underneath the huge blue spruce trees that are destroying my lawn in their drought-stricken search for water. My hope is that the stockpile of pinecones will serve as a midden of sorts, a secret stash for the squirrels to discover when the season gets dark and cold. They’ve found no apples this season to store in the rafters of my shed.
And suddenly I realize my sadness is gone. The noise on both the road and in my head has faded. My “cooler talk” is now with squirrels and chickadees and crows, and my work is simply to be a part of this world, this garden, this Forty-One Acres and all the wild and wonder within it and then to share out my stories and observations with others. Perhaps they, too, will slow down and begin to notice this natural world around us and maybe there’s meaning (and a paycheck) in such work.
Earlier this season, over the course of a few days, I unintentionally talked about the crows with three different neighbors. I mentioned that crows may have the intelligence of a five-year-old child and described the way we talk back and forth to each other nearly every day. Each neighbor peered up into the trees, cocked their heads, and said some variation of huh, I didn’t know that. I just thought of them as birds.
A subscriber sent me a fabulous video of a young bald eagle being heckled by magpies, noting she wouldn’t have been looking up if it hadn’t been for my latest dispatch on bird migration. Then last week a friend sent a photo of a squirrel sitting outside her window staring at her for the duration of a conference call. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them get this close to the house,” she said.
Perhaps it’s the first time she noticed. The wild, I’ve learned, is all around us, even in our suburban back yards if we choose, and they are watching us and judging what we do. They know your yard as well as they know mine — what do they find there?
In mine, the hummingbirds flutter over my cats’ heads and cast an accusing look my way that seems to imply, are you insane? Put these beasts indoors. The squirrels tease the cats. My gardens hum louder than the highway at rush hour during the height of summer. They host a mind-boggling diversity of pollinators and insects that lure in yet more creatures like snakes (of which my husband is not fond). The song birds, the crows, the squirrels, the robins are all curious about what I’m up to. There’s even a local raccoon with whom I had a fractious relationship when I owned chickens but who now comes safely to drink from the squirrels’ water (less attractively he likes to poop on the shed). This summer that enormous raccoon took shelter in the shed when it was injured. It gave me the most soulfully sad look before curling up to rest on a cardboard box. I let it be and simply watched from a distance, just like I did the wounded rabbit and the sick robin. The crows even have a call for me. And when the cats are outside? They have a call for that, too. And so perhaps I’m not really alone here in my Forty-One Acres after all. Perhaps my purpose is stepping into this natural world and getting to know it better.
Eventually I usher the cats indoors and settle in my office for an online photography class. I’m boning up on my skills wherever I can: linocuts and prints, watercolor, acrylic and photography classes. All of it benefits the young mail club I’ve started, and part of my work now involves being a learner again.
In the middle of class, a squirrel comes to sit in the peach tree outside my window. He stares in at me and the cats, twitching his tail to catch my attention. How strange that he knows exactly where I am in this house. More than once if they’ve seen me leave the office, the squirrels will make their way back around the entire perimeter of the yard to wait for me on the shed where we generally meet up.
I open the window and say, “Hey Squirrel,” but I can’t leave my desk, and he soon loses interest and climbs back up into the soaring blue spruce. As soon as the class ends, I’m back outside again and find him perched over the garden in the neighbor’s Russian Olive, the invasive tree that fed all the surrounding wildlife and migrating birds when native food sources failed this year. I leave him an almond on a fence post, but he moves on to another neighbor’s yard via the phone lines. Someone will be back for it.
And now hours later, I sit at my desk writing this, wondering if this makes me sound like a person who has become unhinged and disconnected from my own species. If it’s somewhat true, I’m okay with that.
The window is still open for both the cats and me, and the skies are overcast with the expectation of rain. My tolerance for being indoors has diminished since last spring. I want to be out there in it, whatever the weather, if only to observe how the rain comes in or that a chicory flower has magically withstood the frost and now stands fully open and waiting for the last of the season’s bees. Later, perhaps, I’ll take a walk down into the Forty Acre Wood to stretch my legs and see what’s happening there.
The shadows of chickadees pass by my window as they land in the bed below to scratch for seeds and whatever else it is that chickadees search for. My cats perk up to watch. A squirrel is protesting something in the distance, and now here come the magpies with their grating, chalky, conversational voices. They’ve returned to the Homestead after a long time away, and I wonder what they’re up to.
I think I’ll go and say hello. That’s my job now.
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