6:28 a.m. 46 degrees, wind SSE 4 mph, a Hoagy Carmichael and Ray Charles breeze . . . Georgia on My Mind. Sky: a rebellion of blue and gray, bruised but gorgeous, spitting rain. Half-an-hour later, the cloud ceiling shreds and opens in the west, long frayed fingers, wispy and curled, celestial bangs dangling through an open pale-purple rinse. Permanent streams: status quo flow minus snow (and ice). Wetlands: subdued light on the marsh; reeds motionless under gray-blue, opening by the moment. Pond: five hooded mergansers, three females and two first-year males, no longer confined by ice. Two of the ducks, wings aloft, rush across the surface. Airborne, they circle the pond twice and then pitch into the marsh; my two German shepherds and three remaining mergansers stare with bemused resignation at a world in flux. No sign of the mink, the otter, the snapping turtle, painted turtles, frogs, tadpoles, or blithely water-skating insects. Looks like November. Feels like May.
Pileated laughs at a private joke then passes through the open canopy, red crest swept back, a pterodactyl of bird, rising and sinking in joyous undulations, completely oblivious to absentee ballots. Three chickadees hang upside down from the ends of hemlock twigs, prying tiny seeds out of tiny cones . . . their specialized legs muscles, which permit dangling inversion, would impress Walter Payton or Bo Jackson. Maybe even Jim Brown.
In the neighborhood of acrobatic chickadees, a chorus of nuthatches, redder than white, blue jays, crows, and a trio of red squirrels chattering in the pines. One squirrel launches from maple to pine at a forty-five-degree angle, four limbs extended . . . similar to the nascent glide that an ancestral flying squirrel took more than thirty million years ago.
Chickadees, busily exercising their leg muscles, ignore the squirrel . . . a strategy we should use for political polls, which are as obsolete as bellbottoms.
Appalled at the huge waste of money and time spent on politics, I turn to one of my mentors, Walt Whitman, who wrote:
This is what you should do:
Love the earth and sun and animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people...
reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
dismiss what insults your very soul,
and your flesh shall become a great poem.
~ Walt Whitman ~
(Excerpt from Preface to 1855 edition, Leaves of Grass)