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Spotted: my first black squirrel in Chicago! Seen them in Detroit and Toronto before, but this little peekaboo is unique among the tawny grey fauna here at home. |
How about you? Are the squirrels where you live grey, black, red, or perhaps a distinguished and scholarly white? Tell us all!
Last night, I found a brown creeper on the sidewalk. Stranded on its back, barely moving twig-lean legs, eyes huge and flat black. I lifted it up and brought it home, waiting for the treatment center to open. Dark and quiet place, but this morning the creeper hadn’t made it. I’m still seeing its frail feet twitch, feeling the little shudders run through it, thinking it would live, be strong.
So our butterfly is the mascot for this morning, when I need something hopeful, lovely, easy, something less melancholy than a bird I couldn’t save.
Fall is here and birds are passing through. On Saturday errands took me downtown. I didn’t want to find birds, didn’t want to see them broken on the ground. But it’s that time. Time for this little thrush to fly the last time, to fall, to close its eyes and tousle its feathers softly on the way down. Like sleeping.
Curling toes, weightless bones beneath speckles, soft as anything. Like sleeping.
Tyrannosaurus rex returns to reclaim its prehistoric domain, spreading terror throughout Chicago. And I, for one, welcome our new reptilian overlords!
(Q. “Return”, “reclaim”… would T. rex actually have roamed over Chicago back in its late Cretaceous heyday?
A. So far, the fossil record suggests its North American distribution ended well to the west, in today’s Rocky Mountain states.)
(Q. So this is an advance? Territorial aggression? Manifest destiny, but in reverse, and for giant lizards?
A. Yes.)
Starring in this scene is a beautiful flower with a less-than-luscious name, the scabious. Yes, bad as that: it is related to “scabies”; and even though it commemorates the flower’s power to cure, much nicer not to be reminded of that most unpleasant situation. Apparently it also goes by “pincushion flower”, for the sloping dome at its center. And one cultivar, Scabiosa atropurpurea, is the hauntingly folkloric “mourning bride.”
Whatever we call them, the moths don’t mind. Scabiosa is rich in nectar, and you’ll seldom see one without a butterfly or moth nearby.
The other star here is northern sea oats, Chasmanthium latifolium. On the end of long lamppost stems, it shows lovely flat little heads, pleated like origami packets tight around the seeds inside. Powerful seeds held there: like its sibling grasses it is firmly territorial, and spreads its seeds with lebensraum abandon.
My camera is dead. I wasn’t prepared for how lost I’d feel.
I have a healthy immunity against wanting things. Seeing something beautiful rarely makes me yearn to own it. But these last few weeks without my camera, I’ve realized an insatiable greed I do have. A beautiful moment brings a lust to capture it. All around me the city is simmering with rich life, bright life, and I’m split between a nerve-deep happiness to be part of it, and a hot nervy frustration at not being able to grasp it.
It feels like failure. Isn’t the point, the simple lesson of nature to appreciate the moment? To glory in it wholly, to feel it more precious because it will spin out of focus so fast? I don’t these days. I covet, I grab at it, I resent each moment that passes. Because it passes.
I’m moving apartments soon, which I never like to do. I get tripped up in loss, among all the threads that tied me to a place. Today I couldn’t tell you about the freezing winters here, when the heat flies out the rotten window-frames. I couldn’t tell you about the ants that angle in through every crack of the walls on bright days. I only know that my balcony has been home to lush life in the summers. Right now. Tomatoes are swelling their skins. Peppers reach down from stems, stretching back to their soil. Why leave this? Each soft-skinned herb catches the wind with a hundred wings: basil like tidy oval songbird wings, cilantro like ragged tiny moth wings, shiso like paired wings for angels. Why go?
I feel loss, and no control. And I think that’s why I need to grab each moment that I can. Capture, catalog. And why letting them go feels so wrenching.
It’s a cold summer this year. Though it’s disappointing for picnics and games, I think it’s making the city’s other life even more rich and complicated. Caterpillars, birds huddled close together, strange clouds overhead. A riot of seasons. This year pigeons have taken to my balcony. Three of them come home each night around eight, and nestle down to sleep. More arrive for breakfast each morning, bringing news. Yesterday eight of them, today six. How will I remember this? Which days were six, and which were eight, or more?
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This is curly dock, but you’ve seen it before. It’s among the most common weeds we know. Sidewalks, roadsides, vacant fields. You may not know that it’s related to sorrel, the culinary green, whose flush of oxalic acid gives its leaves that tangy lemon savor. I didn’t know. |
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I also didn’t know sometimes it looks like this. Like a fairy-tale plant. A candy-castle spire, a unicorn’s horn, a perfect curling cyclone with valentine hearts in its eye. It’s so enchanting, and it’s really real, and it’s rather a pest and a nuisance, until you see. |
