BEING SEEDS

Last night after a cold but sunny day of casual work in the garden and firewood (chainsawed a big stash of cherry from the landscaper below) I was beginning to think we’d had our last frost and Spring is here, when I looked out the big front window before heading to bed last night and there was already a big white BAM! on the deck, and snow was falling heavily in fat flakes.

So Spring is NOT here yet, nyah, nyah, said each flake, my potseeded lettuces getting more anxious by the day, like the beginning bergamot, dill, thyme and Italian parsley, all bent in green eagerness from their little pots toward the window each morning to sense what they can about the weather and the temperature out there, is it time yet, is it time? Are we there yet? sussing out the day length and all that other stuff plants know so much about, wind strength, moon phase too probably, angle of sun etc., all that natural computing going on in their stolid green beings. And we think we have the brains.

So this morning down at the ice-covered train station, my thoughts wisping Springy things around in the background there, I gazed at the beauty of the sugarcake mountains powdered with white against the big blue morning sky, when up at the edge of my uplooking eye I saw something moving and looked further upward -- there, coursing along in the high blue were two broad wedges of geese heading north-- in silence, from down where I was, though way up there the air was likely filled with excited chatter at the big goings on.

I stood and watched them go for as long as I could see them, each wedge being 70-100 geese; the sight filled me with the feeling I've been waiting for, the rush I get each year when the unspoken promise is kept once more as nature declares the arrival of Spring, and it came to me what seeds we humans are.

COMING RAIN

The cloud cover was densing yesterday as evening neared, whole slabs of sky moving up slowly and warmly from the south, bearing the hard Spring rains of the next few days of rainy season.

Ahead of time got all the new firewood covered up and the basil sprouts too, shielded from the hammer of torrential rain that debasiled me a few years ago when I was more ignorant than I am now. The straightneck and crookneck squash plants from US seeds are now big enough to do fine under the skybattering. To my surprise, they're feeling right at home, though the scallop squash is a bit cautious.

The US yellow wax beans, though (can't find those seeds here, same for the squashes above), are reticent - most of them anyway - even though they don't have visa problems. They're wary about sprouting, even the few who tentatively poke up, but the ones that do get used to it. Plus I replant, and word gets around, so maybe. The US green beans, on the other hand, recognize the place, to a bean. "Hey, this is Japan, isn't it! I'm from the States! They have soil rain and sun here too! Cool!" (Sprouts talk like teens, as you know.)

The wild ducks are looking forward to the rains though, a duck couple is just now flying down from upmountain paddies, practically holding hands, wings whistling in the dusky silence that is deepest just before the big downpour. They swooped downward over the Lake then climbed and sped south, as together as ever, into the coming rain.

THE BIRDS

There are a lot of interesting birds around here. I don't mean interesting species, but interesting birds. Individuals. Real characters. Some of them are complete mysteries. When you live where this great a variety of birds actually do their thing, you get to see that they have character, for example the manic warbler, and the crazy bird I’ve never spotted that shouts "What the hell?" over and over at every Spring sunrise, then there's Dr. Crow of course, couldn't go without mentioning mister dark wisdom himself, much referenced in these ethereal pages-- or the hawks, the swallows, the pheasant in lust or the ducks in love--

For recent example - this afternoon in fact - there's a certain bird, the screaming blur that hangs around here and is highly secretive about his true identity (I suspect it may be a brown-eared bulbul, but I've never spotted him in well-lit stillness), he blends in so well with the gray lower branches of the cedars where he mainly seems to hang out cloaked in the darkling invisibility he prefers, all in perfect keeping with his gothic mood, because although he's very territorial, he's also extremely paranoid at all times of year (which for a bird is really extreme), so whenever I go outside in this leafless time and that bird is within 50 yards of the house he spots my sinister movement and screams "Look out everybirdy! The monster just came out of that unnatural structure there and it's coming for us, it's moving this way with giant claws, it has two legs but no feathers! Fly for your lives! FLYY! FLYYYY! FLYYYYY!" And he keeps that racket up until everybirdy within 100 yards has flown to safety in fear of their lives, he himself taking off at the last minute, still screaming for all he's worth, leaving behind only a dancing branch just before I can grab him with my long giant claws and devour him whole. Interesting bird. Don't really know him; just a gray blur streaking off screaming into the dusk of the trees.

Then there are the frantic tiny feeders who come by once or twice a year in large numbers and scour every inch of every tree for insects and whatever they can find in the way of avian fast food. Some weeks ago Echo put up a pretty realistic sort of 3D sticker butterfly high up on the big glass doors by the weeping cherry for when the grandgirls came over the holidays, and when a few days ago those birds arrived to scour the tree, every five minutes during bird-party time one of them would spot the delectable butterfly hovering right there midair in delicious stillness (talk about out-of-season but who cares, it's like caviar in NYC) and dive for it before any other bird could get it, hit the glass BONG!, flutter stunned to the deck below and stand there wobbly for a few minutes looking up, trying to figure out the meaning of glass and what the hell was that butterfly, then it would fly back to the tree and give another of its fellows a crack at the inviting delicacy.

This went on for a goodly time (Bong! Bong!) until a couple dozen birds had gone for the big bright snack and hit the deck, by which time I suspect some of them were sitting there in the cherry tree chuckling to each other, chirping "Psst: There goes Harry: Look: He spotted the 'butterfly.' Go for it, Harry, Grab that baby! Go get it, Harry, it's all yours! HA HA HAA!"

There's also the thrush that collided once with our big kitchen windowpane, and no thrush ever since has done so.

Like I said, when you get to be really neighbors with them, not watchers or hunters or simply-passing-byers and whatnot, bird personalities can be pretty surprising, anthropomorphically speaking. No doubt just as surprising as I am to them, aviomorphically speaking.

METAPHOR

This morning while gazing at the Lake in that wondrous and silent glaze that spring dawns afford, my eyes followed a pair of ducks that flew together in a wing-to-wing dance just skimming the water surface all across the long horizon, out of the dark through the borderless blues and reds and violets and golds that were slowly braiding the rainbow of morning from the rising sun out across the dancing water, until the pair became one with the blinding light... I have never beheld a more beautiful metaphor for love.