Butterfly Winter

The day after most of our brief snow accumulation bled away in warm temperatures and misty rain that followed quickly after the snow, I walked in the marsh along Quincy’s shoreline which I visit repeatedly during the year. The path was squishy, with some patches lasting longer here mainly because a few of us have compacted the snow by our footsteps, so it melts slower. Otherwise, another mostly sunny, mild January day. Actually, more factually, this was an unusually warm day even for this turncoat January, and the temp would rise to about 60. It felt that warm in the marsh.
Then I saw the butterfly. It was black-winged – a Morning Cloak? Or maybe a day-flying moth. But though I cannot identify species I have observed butterflies quite a bit in recent years, they visit our garden, and I know, we all know, how butterflies move. This moved like a butterfly. I don’t know suspect it’s going to be happy with its surroundings long-term, but it flew across the trail in front of me and disappeared among the trees.
Maybe it was the recently melted snow, but the world had a fresh and shiny finish to it. The sea looked blue and creamy, as if someone had poured milk into it. The sky was a darker blue, and with so much light sent skyward off the leftover fast-melting snow it seemed deeper than winter skies usually are. The clear blue above showed autumn dense against the bare limbs of the taller trees.
Besides the butterfly, the day warmed up some other creatures. I saw birds, chickadees among them, working among the thickets, and stopped dead when my ears distinguished the characteristic woody pat-pat of the woodpecker. I could see nothing at first, but kept looking steadily at a close at hand bare-limbed tree. Finally, the woodpecker rounded a branch and leapt into focus. It was tapping not far above me, not apparently aware of me. Slowly, silently, I unzip the camera case. The thing is half out when the bird takes off. Not hearing me, in no particular alarm. It was just time to move on.
A red-headed woodpecker, I decide, with the skeletal spine-and-ribs white marking down his dark-colored back.
On my way out, almost back on the main path, I flush a rabbit out of a thorny patch of thicket, where I had no idea he was hiding just a yard or two from my path. I would not have noticed him. But he skitters away, his puffy white tail blazing his whereabouts. He shoots through the weeds and onto the main path, and is gone by the time I get there.
The marsh has attracted one more visitor this winter, a posse of Canada geese, grazing in the yellow marsh grass across the marsh in the direction of the school, the only large birds I see this day. But they see me come round a bend in the trail and stop and stare. I am far away, to far for photography, but perhaps at a shooter’s distance. Do they worry about intentions? Or do they stare at me simply because I’ve stopped to gaze at them.

Winter? That was fast

We had winter a week ago. A soft, steady, rather modest snowfall fell on a Saturday and kept up all day, leaving us about four or five inches at the end. It was a very well-behaved meteorological event, arriving on a day when it wouldn’t foul up a commute and lacking the gusty winds that make for drifts. Still, the local plow crews hit the roads early and often, as if to make up for a snowless winter in one day. We made a snowday of it as well, not moving the car from the driveway or going outside except to shovel, pretending we were snowed in.
Two days later the snow was gone. So much for winter.
A warm winter is good for keeping down the fuel costs and for anybody suffering from substandard (or no) housing. But, as we say around here, “It tain’t natural.”
In many respects, the absence of a proper winter with its deep freezes and substantial snow packs may not in fact be good for nature and, need we be reminded?, we are all natural beings. The absence of a snow pack may result in water shortages in areas that rely on it to make the rivers and streams run hard in the spring and fill reservoirs, underground streams, and aquifers.
And where is the water that ordinarily gets tied up in snow accumulations in latitudes such as ours? Remember the recent record snow accumulations in locations such as New York City and Washington, D.C.? Is that water – that weather – going somewhere else this year? Our daughter reports a rainy winter in Beirut, but winters typically are rainy there, characterized by fierce downpours. What’s different this year is no sunny days between the rainy ones. So where did Lebanon’s sun go?
Other obvious concerns. Winter kills pests – insects, microbes, germs, diseases. Our ecology needs the deep, killing frosts to reduce the numbers of those tough, otherwise invulnerable creatures that make it hard on us in summers. Will a warm winter and early spring mean the mosquitoes get a head start this year? What about all those flu germs we ordinarily put out of mind until the next “winter flu” season. Will we start having warm weather flu seasons?
We have a common “black spot” disease in our roses. I don’t know if it’s properly a fungus, or a mite, or a mildew, or any of those other distressing names I read about in gardening books (and remain mostly ignorant of), or some combination of all. But I have to think winter cold sets it back each year, enough to gives us that annual booster wave of June blooms. I’d hate be fighting it with organic sprays and shamanistic charms any earlier than I have to as it is by mid-summer.
Every gardener has a plant disease story, and none of us really want to hear them.
So let’s get on to a happier subject – spring. But even here I am worried. Spring winds up its impact from the hard-rock resistance of winter. It builds on contrast. It moves insides us because of what has come before.
I want to know when winter is over so I can celebrate, and exult, and go quietly mad over spring. But how can winter be over if it never really happened?

Hawk-eyed

The first time we saw it, it loomed on a solitary tree pretending to be a fat squirrel’s nest exposed by winter’s bareness. Anne pointed out my mistake. The hawk was alone, red-tipped at the end of its tale feathers, no other living creatures in view except for us. He must have seen us, but he didn’t seem to care as I expostulated over forgetting the camera and then the two of us helplessly fiddled with Anne’s phone trying to discover the magic of the cell-phone photo function. People hold up their boxy little phones and just push-button away, I think. Happens all the time. They must be accomplishing something.
The hawk ignores us, certain he’s in no danger from this comical pair. Anne finds the camera icon, so we snap away, mostly by accident while looking helplessly at one another. Since we can’t find a zoom, the results are not promising: little spot of something against a bare tree and open sky. We move closer still. The hawk finally gets sick of us and flies, majestically, across the marsh to find a tree on the other side.
The second time I see it I am by myself. Human being-wise, I mean, because I am alerted to the presence of something by the agitated squawking of some 40 to 50 starlings occupying the same bare tree as some huge ball of gray, contoured fluff that individual members of black bird flock, undoubtedly the antsy young males, keep flying up to in order to peck at it.
Oh. Huge hawk.
Must be 50 to 100 times larger by volume than his persecutors, but he can’t be bothered to respond to any of these feeble aggressions. The combined squawking of these pygmies of the sky is loud and sustained. Little birds keep flying up to the big one, making a quick dive, and flying away. What a shot. I take my camera out of my “man bag” and hit the power button. Nothing.
I remember.
The battery is resting quietly in a comfy charger plugged into the kitchen wall socket just over my plate of toast crumbs. I am tempted to rush home and get it. But there is work to do and, of course, tomorrow is another day. I walk directly underneath the branch of the tree on which the huge red-tailed hawk takes his afternoon break, unruffled by the displeasure of the locals. He pays me no more mind than he does the starlings.
The following day, empowered camera in my bag, Saul (home for a visit) beside me, I traipse around the marsh without running into mobs of starlings or any sign of a hawk. On the back stretch we come around a curve in the trail and there he is. I take out the camera, get off a few long-range shots. We decide to keep walking, see how close he’ll let us get. We stop, close enough I think, and I take a few more. Later, I discover that even with benefit of the zoom, a large bird has been rendered very small. It’s the world that’s big.
Closer, still. The hawk spooks and I snap a few in-flight shots. Probably the best of this group.
The fourth (so far last) encounter comes some days later. I do have the camera, but it’s cold and I see no signs of anything moving in the marsh – no ducks, gulls, nothing, as I round the same bend in the trail where we discovered the big bird the last time. Then, astonishingly, from the same area – not one, but two hawks shoot out from among the branches before I can even properly see them. The larger one flies straight to a tall pine. A smaller one, deciding on the wing to follow, arrives a few seconds later and, so it appears to me, takes something from him and then flies back in my direction and disappears in the trees. The first hawk, the big one, then flies across the long end of the marsh past me (click, click), eventually crossing its width to hide somewhere in a further tree-line. I keep walking, wondering where I will find the smaller one.
When I do, she is mostly hidden behind layers of branches, I have no clear shot, but she flushes immediately and takes off the in the direction of the pine tree where she’d last seen her mate. That’s when I get the best shot.
Later, Anne managing to blow it up for me on the computer, it’s clear that something is hanging from the bird’s landing gear that does not belong to the bird. Do they fly with such long claws (legs?) hanging free below? Not reasonable. No, that can’t be bird we’re seeing hanging down. She must be holding, carrying, something. We blow it up some more.
My god, that looks like rabbit legs to me.
With this new perspective the encounter feels something like stumbling onto a crime scene and finding the evidence in the photo. Or simply interrupting dinner. Sorry, guys.

Winter Comes to Quincy

I step outside today, it’s late morning, the sun is shining brightly, and my breath immediately forms a steamy veil that covers my face. It’s shockingly cold. Impossibly cold. Not really, of course, since it’s December and the thermometer reads a seasonable 28 degrees. But it feels like another world to me, after a month of forties and occasional fifties.
But it’s not only me. The leaves of the rhododendron bush lose their greeny soul to a deep, sub-freezing night and droop. Warmer temperatures will bring them back; colder nights will cause them to pull all the moisture in their cells inward to try to preserve it from freezing.
Cold nights mean big days at the bird feeder too. After putting the feeder away for the summer we’re back to buying bird feed again, black-shelled sunflower seeds, which so far have drawn a busy tribe of little brown sparrows. One of them has a patch of red on the back of his head, but he flocks with the others. A couple of tufted titmouse too today, gray and crested and swooping in to take their chances with the others. Underneath, the squirrels are busy and multiple.
To combat squirrels climbing up the feeder this year, we’ve come up with a mixture of oil and hot pepper which we brush on to the metal baffle and the curve of the pole right above it. Some squirrels fly – no other word for it – right over the baffle, brace their back feet on the pole, lean over to the feeding ring and suck the seed out of the feeding tube. Their oversized presence on the feeding ring scares away the birds, leaving us with the prospect of watching fat squirrels feed instead of happy, chirpy birds. So far an application of cayenne, chili pepper and sunflower oil seems to chase them away for a couple of weeks before wearing off.
So the winter routine begins.
But if the nights aren’t achingly cold and the wind’s not searing my lungs, I like to walk in them. Here’s a poem about early winter nights.


Winter Transit

Anybody know where this world is going?
On a chilly, brilliant winter night,
Chinese spices smarten up the air
The city bus hums nostalgically into my sight
Ten, twelve faces frozen in the light,
The very same ones every night
A rumble from behind, a second sighting
– a two-bus astronomical transit! –
Passing like ships in the night
Catty-corner, a calligraphed tree imprints its shadow
On the speechless pavement, while from on high
Jupiter’s celestial eye casts an unwavering gaze
On the first night of the first month of winter…
Only one hundred more such tales to follow
Everything changes the same

An Old American Elm Tree Awaits Execution

They live among fools.
The tree grew not far from our house, but a ways back from the main road. It had long grown on a considerable estate, shading a mansion which was taken down before we moved to town in preparation for a college expansion that was never built.
Recently the city bought the land where the tree still grows, shading the earth, cleansing the air, moderating the temperature, absorbing heat through the pulp of its tons of tree-matter. The city also bought a few other neighboring properties and knocked down an empty parochial school that stood on one of them, in preparation for building a needed new middle school. They city, or somebody working for the city, decided the job would be easier if they cut down the century-plus old tree American Elm Tree growing there in defiance of the Dutch elm disease plague that had taken almost all of its cohorts.
And so they said, the city’s spokesmen did, that the tree was dying and would have to be cut down. The tree does not appear to be dying, but perhaps a fool would not know what a healthy tree looks like. It grows a canopy of green leaves in the summer; it sheds them in the fall. In winter it holds its many limbs against the sky, one of nature’s more enduring candelabras of life.
But the city’s spokesmen aren’t really looking at a tree. They are saying what they have been told to say.
Then comes the cover-up. Who determined that the tree is dying and needs to be removed? It’s an obvious question. The answer comes that an arborist hired by someone working for the city said the tree has heart-rot and fungus and is dying.
The next question is also obvious. Who is the arborist? Can we see the report? The spokesmen don’t know. They say they will produce the report.
They produce a document written yesterday or the day before by someone who is not an arborist and does not evidence a professional knowledge of trees. The report does not say the tree is dying, but has some fungus, and is too close to the school and will probably be killed by the construction.
Obviously (again), this document is not the “report” on which a decision taken months ago could have been based. The likely inference is there never was a “report” by an arborist certified by the state of Massachusetts or any other one.
It’s just a story to fend off complaints. Sorry, couldn’t help it, had to cut down the tree. It’s diseased, you know, dying.
It’s a red herring.
The real reason? They want to cut down the tree, which plans show is located is the intended parking lot because it will be in the way when the builders start bringing in their machines. They don’t want to work around it. The real problem is the city doesn’t really have enough land to build this school.
This explanation sounds a little crass. It sounds better to say, too bad about the tree. We’d like to save it, but it’s sick. In fact it’s dying. Nothing can be done. It might fall down on the school. We have report, from an arborist (who? Wait a minnit, I must have the name here somewhere), which says so.
Here’s a poem called “Trees,” by Joyce Kilmer, who died in action during World War I:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

It’s one of the best-loved poems of the American people.
Stylistically, this is greeting card verse. If you analyze its workings, simple da-dum rhythm, end rhymes, breath of vocabulary, it’s nursery rhyme simple. But every red-blooded American has liked this poem since its publication 100 years ago, particularly if they don’t like poetry in general (which was almost every red-blooded American for the last 100 years hasn’t).
Why do we all like it? Because it’s so obviously true. Because it speaks to something deep in us.
But not only are poems made by fools like me, so are political calculations, city hall press releases, building plans, and even needed schools.
For well over a hundred years, perhaps a hundred and fifty, the American Elm on Hancock Street has lived among fools, whom it tries to protect from the excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases our fossil-fuel driven society has put into the atmosphere. We overheat the atmosphere. The tree takes CO2 out of the air, which cools it, and releases oxygen, which we breathe. Its roots absorb runoff. It’s shade lowers the temperature. Its beauty raises spirits and, by the way, property values.
Now it is condemned to die among fools who fail to recognize its value.

Indoor Fun

Now that’s December and I don’t have much to do in the garden any more, indoor activities assume greater deal of importance. For instance, one activity I’ve grown particularly fond of is asking myself why am I sitting at my desk so often staring absently at a screen.
Do I think my computer screen is a garden? Do I think it will start “blooming” if I look at it long enough?
Windows, I mean real ones, not the virtual/digital/computer meaning of “windows,” a term that encompasses the ever-increasing universe of “pictures” or “pages” or “screens” (or, redundantly, “windows”) which do in fact, in some sense, “bloom” on your computer once you start playing with it and saying “Yes! Yes! Yes!” (click, click, click) to the options, opportunities and offers afforded to you by the determinedly (even ruthlessly) indoor world of the internet….
So, no, that’s not what I mean by windows…. Windows, the real ones, become increasingly important the more time we spend indoors.
But don’t you, btw, love the digital, virtual vocabulary that has grown in our Age of the Screen? “Virtual” (along with “windows”) may be the best and most searching of these new usages. We can now have virtual lives. Virtual used to mean “sort of the real thing” or “close to the real thing” or “you really can’t tell the difference, can you?” That’s what we mean when we say something is “virtually the same,” isn’t it? But when we take a “virtual tour” of some place where we’re thinking of staying, for example, is it really anything like the same?
I suspect many people in our increasingly indoor lives have already figured out how to ‘grow’ a virtual ‘garden’ on a screen – a notion that’s just occurred to me. I’m about to say how pictures are great, I take them all the time, but a picture of a garden, or a plant, is not virtually the real thing… (but I think I’ll stop right there).
As for the real garden, it’s a very quiet place these days; and too cold for someone of my delicate sensibilities to spend much time in these days. When it comes to cold, I wish I were made of sterner stuff. Instead…
Windows, as I started to say, those actual glass portals on the world beyond, have assumed a centrality to my days that goes beyond their many valuable uses such as letting in the light, and the solar heat (especially now). They also have the practical use of allowing me to spy on our neighborhood. I can put this more positively by saying “check up on” or “keep tabs on” the neighborhood, with the implication that somebody might some day need our help. But mostly we’re looking for stimulus, sensory information. I may not want to go out there right now, as I would have up to a month ago, but I sure as heck want to see those birds outside our kitchen window competing like mad for a peck at the bird feeder. (The squirrels? Not so much.)
Even when there’s “nothing going on” to our fight-or-flight programmed, motion-detection senses, the greater world outside our window companions us. The sun shines, and we miss it if it doesn’t. The wind chimes sing through the seasons – until the gusts of winter storms make us bring them indoors. The rain threatens; or lets up. The traffic bounces over the “sink hole” in front of the house caused by the last repaving.
And for the last three weeks or, one of our national energy monopolies has cooperated by staging a long-running performance of “Let’s dig up the streets and plant new gas lines!”… a traditional neighborhood favorite any time of year.
It’s a garden of machines.
So now when I step outdoors to take in the sunset, every December day’s greatest show, I can get a photo of “Twilight over the backhoe.” Or the dump truck. Or the dirt pile with funny orange cones. Or the little tent with the plastic roof cleverly erected to permit digging tie-ins on a rainy day.
Yes, the world beyond my window is virtually a garden of enchantments. It’s just not the same.

The Pocketbook Caper

Dumpster diving was nothing. Last night’s adventure begins with a cancelled meeting. Last minute cancellation, no notification, only a sign posted on a board once we get inside the church building.
We walked back to Park Street station through the Gardens and the Common, sharing an umbrella as a light drizzle grew stronger, then tapered off. We waited in Park Street, took the Red Line home to Quincy, stepped off the train at our station, and Anne announced she was no longer in possession of her pocketbook. We scream at the conductor; the train pulls away.
Downstairs, the station minder made some calls, and then we made some calls, but no one reported finding the pocketbook on the train. Around 10 p.m. Anne gets the idea to call her cell phone number. And a few minutes later we get a call.
“Did you just call this number?” a voice asks. “We’ve got your phone.”
Overjoyed! What a relief! How can we get it back?
But, overhearing the call, I get a funny feeling. The guy on the phone doesn’t identify himself, doesn’t say he’s calling from the MBTA, gives only a first name when asked for his name, and can’t come up with a street address for his building.
He says we can come get the pocketbook.
“Ask him for the street address!” I coach from the sidelines, hopping up and down on one foot in agitation. “How are we going to check it out?”
“Kenmore Square,” Anne says into the phone, repeating some information. “Beacon Street.” She hangs up.
“Please tell me you got a street address?”
“I got an intersection.”
She tells me some street names. An intersection, if it’s a major one, can have maybe 12 or 13 addresses, buildings, businesses, whatnot, on its various corner points, I point out. This one is major, Beacon and Chestnut Hill Avenue. We find it on a map. It’s a long way from Kenmore Square.
Nevertheless we get on the road; drive the expressway, take Storrow Drive to Kenmore Square, turn onto Beacon Street. It’s late enough by now so the streets have little traffic. We fly through the lights, drive through the darkness. It’s still a long way.
I’d been imagining out destination would be some busy T office in busy Kenmore Square. I’ll wait in the car and we’ll be out of there in minute and speeding cheerily back home. Now I think, “You’re not going in there alone.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I told him my husband is coming with me.”
Great, we’re safe now. “Did you tell him your husband is packing?”
More dark streets. I begin to have second thoughts about the whole expedition. What I’m thinking is…
So this guy, let’s call him first-name “Pete,” calls up and says he has her phone – which he easily could have acquired in any number of ways – and he doesn’t say he works for the MBTA until Anne explicitly asks him, and when she asks his name give his only first name, and when she asks him his office’s address can only give an intersection, and when she asks him what the building looks like says it’s “a station.” And who also says we can come pick up her pocketbook any time all night…
So while I’m driving down Beacon beyond Coolidge Corner, beyond Harvard Street, beyond any place in Brookline or Brighton where I’ve ever been, the headline I’m seeing in my mind is “Two White Middle-Class Idiots Murdered in Pocketbook Scam.”
I have half a mind to turn the car around.
When we finally get to this promised intersection, driving along the streetcar tracks, Green Line cars scattered everywhere as if suddenly abandoned by drivers who felt a pressing need to do something else, stores and buildings and businesses (as predicted) all over the place, cars parked everywhere with nobody in them and nobody on the sidewalk because it’s late, and no MBTA station anywhere, no T signs on any of the buildings, I ask, politely, “So where the hell is it?”
“I’ll call him,” she says.
I nose the car around a few parking areas; no place to park, and back out onto the avenue, ready to turn around.
A few attempts at dialing. What if somebody else answers the phone?
Then “Phil” is on the phone. Anne says we’re at the intersection; where’s the office?
The light turns, I take the green arrow, drive across the tracks right in front of a Green Line streetcar with nobody in it, and pull over to the side of the road.
“He says it’s near the Dunkin Donuts.”
Oh sure. Likely story. Is there any intersection in Greater Boston that doesn’t have a Dunkin Donuts? I peer out the windshield and say, “We’re at the Dunkin Donuts.”
There’s a narrow lane behind the store. “Is it down the alley?”
Phone: What?
“At the back of the Dunkin Donuts.”
Phone: Where are you?
Anne: “We’re at the Dunkin Donuts.”
Phone says something.
Anne to me: “He says there’s a road just past the parking lot.”
I pull the car around to the other side of the store. We see a parking lot. We see another narrow road just beyond it. Apparently “Phil” has never been to the back end of the Dunkin Donuts. He really needs to get out more.
This narrow road has streetcar tracks implanted down the middle. More cars, and a few streetcars, are parked every which way. A few feet down the road we spy a small, nondescript building with a glass door and a light on inside and an incomprehensible poster in the window, and no sign suggesting the place has anything to do with the T.
“Oh, here it is,” she says. “You can just stay here, I’ll be right out.”
“You don’t want me to go with you?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll just be a second.”
I stay in the car. I watch her enter through the glass door, disappear from sight, and return half a minute later with the pocketbook.
So no scam. “Phil,” she reports, is just as vague as he sounds. The business of his office is inexplicable. Somebody turned in the pocketbook somewhere on the T system and it ended up here. Phil never goes anywhere beyond Dunkin Donuts.
Pocketbook in hand, everything turning out all right in the end, we head light-heartedly home and run smack into a hellacious traffic jam on the expressway.
I think I may be owed something.