All Creatures Great and Small

August 21, 2010

The hummingbirds are back in town, using up the last of their vacation days before losing them to a new fiscal year. Why they choose to spend those precious days in Lincoln is a puzzle to me, although I’m grateful for the company. Just the other evening, a ruby-throated passerby stopped in our backyard just long enough to pummel the Canna lily that abuts our patio furniture. I was mighty grateful to have my butt in that furniture during its brief visit.

This is the time of year that I am reminded of old words, like “bounty” and “harvest.” Words that once conjured up kindergarten images of a two-dimensional horn-o-plenty stuffed full of gourds and apples now fill my head with live things--buzzing cicadas, put-up-your-dukes praying mantises and lightning-fast hummingbirds, things whose fleeting decadence both delights and exhausts me.

This overstimulated environment is no place in which to read today’s headlines. How, pray tell, am I supposed to find the room to take in the news about Russia’s endangered seed bank, home to 1,000 kinds of strawberries, for St. Petersburg’s sake? It simply stymies the mind to try to ponder how each of these berries stands apart from its cousins. Those who tend these fields say that 90 percent of the plants there can be found nowhere else in the world. And to learn that the thing that is threatening this natural savings-and-loan is a real-estate venture. . . frankly, such news does not shine a warm light on our kind.

I felt like a manic-depressive Paul Harvey this morning, licking my index finger in a desperate search for something more hopeful on page two or page three or perhaps on page four. Alas, that proved fruitless, ironically, as I read that there is now evidence the moon is shrinking.

Tossing aside the morning news, I replaced it with something glossier and more upbeat—the latest issue of my newly-crowned favorite, “The Smithsonian” magazine—where I still found no solace. Instead, I was haunted by the flat, black-and-white images of a foundling ivory-billed woodpecker sitting atop a man’s hat. The photos were from 1937, the last time anyone had irrefutable proof that these magnificent birds were still around. Proof, in this case, came in the form of a nestling whose clumsy, spectacular frame graced this man’s upper torso for five or ten miraculous minutes, deep in a no-longer-there Tennessee virgin forest.

I cannot imagine such grace.

And yet, maybe I can. Maybe I need to do nothing more than wander the meandering garden in my own backyard, where goldfinches now alight on pooped-out purple coneflowers, prying loose their mid-morning snacks. Maybe I just need to run my hands across the four kinds of tomatoes now growing in our garden, each with a different, pulpy fingerprint, one more tart than the others. Maybe I just need to give myself over to the decadence and overgrowth of my own small world, and let myself be amazed by it all, ignoring the siren songs of the newsprint that is trapped inside my house.