6:03 a.m. (sunrise eight minutes later than last Monday, August 16). 66 degrees, wind SSW 3 mph, humid. Sky: low, textured ceiling, an unspackled crack or two, otherwise thick, gray, overly ambitious. Somber woodland, the darkest green. Hurricane Henri veered away from Vermont, reducing the hope of a wind waif: a sooty tern; a bridal tern; a tropicbird, scissor-tailed and elegant as a snowflake.
Crickets murmur, the undercurrent of dawn, September's preamble. I feel the seasonal tilt of Earth—the gray dampness, the jolly voice of the goldfinch . . . per-chick-o-ree, per-chick-o-ree. Yellow specks below concrete clouds, commuting in every direction. White-breasted nuthatches. Catbirds. House wrens. A single cardinal whistle faltering. A single, throat-clearing raven, guttural as Yiddish.
Friday, staining the slats of the deck railing in advance of the storm, I paused, looked up, and glimpsed an adult bald eagle high overhead en route north beyond the delta of the White River, sunlight flashing off its head and tail, anointing the afternoon. A momentary sacrament . . . just enough to keep me staining for a couple more hours.
As much as I love to travel to remote corners of the continent, if I have to be stuck at home (again) as I was for more than a year, I'll sharpen my senses on my new homeground, be thankful for the occasion eagle, the companionable chickadee, the lemon-colored finch. And I'll tune my strings to the lullaby of the seasons.
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A lifelong naturalist and Yankee fan, Ted Levin follows a trail blazed by John Burroughs and John Muir, neither of who paid baseball much attention. His work has appeared in Audubon, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph, among many other publications. His nonfiction works include Backtracking: The Way of Naturalist, Blood Brook: A Naturalist’s Home Ground, and Liquid Land: A Journey Through the Florida Everglades, which won the Burroughs Medal in 2004, the highest literary honor awarded to an American nature writer. E. O. Wilson called America’s Snake, Ted’s most recent book, beautifully written [demonstrating] just how good nature literature can be. He divides his time between the deck and the road.
Homeboy at Home Adjusting
Ahh - I see how it is as you adjust and acclimate not-so-far removed from where you were and with the same observational powers of a hawk or eagle - similar latitude and the same tropical storm which spared us across the river here in NH. I was listening to the near silence about a week ago at 7 am, maybe a goldfinch, chickadee and a phoebe. I thought of the now missing warbler songs of May, the woodthrush and veery songs still present in early July and I nearly wept at how quickly we're closing on Labor Day weekend. Each of the 52 weeks is a season. I won't miss humidity and mosquitos in January - but I already miss the morning chorus.
The Delta variant is hurting my heart, as if affects more children. For 31 years, I felt the call of school opening--and now I can't even imagine what teachers and students are facing. I find myself so angry with those who refuse to be vaccinated--so I turn to these words for solace:
"To divert the beam of your attention to nature, to take in the staggering scale of spacetime under the starlit sky or the miniature cosmos of aliveness on the scale of moss or the blooming of a single potted flower, is to step beyond the smallness of your own experience, beyond its all-consuming sorrows and its all-important fixations, and into a calibrated perspective that arrives like a colossal exhale from the lung of life." ~Maria Popova~
https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/09/18/i-go-down-to-the-shore-mary-oliver/