Sketches of a Life in April
Apr. 29th, 2009 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
summer_jackelThis month's!
The whole world felt alive that night. Elsewhere, in places cold has a longer presence and a differing character, spring is very new yet, but in this coastal forest, things are in full, temperate eruption. The wood sorrel is everywhere stretching with new growth and bright flowers while already the mosses are drying, the fronds of shade and moisture-loving ferns are toughening to a darker, less tender green.
Between the equinoxes on the summer side, night is more inviting; sufficient light lingers that I can walk an hour or so past sundown, and the air is warmer. Birds remain active at dusk, and I see a woodpecker flash his handsome white bars, hear his call warble sharply through the evening air.
There are salamanders. Never many, but there is enough moisture still in the ground that I find several in motion as we cross paths in the forest. This one is a Giant Pacific, a juvenile no longer than my ring finger. As adults, they might be longer than my hand.
I pick him up gently, admiring the tenderness of his textured skin, a dark orange-brown dorsally but splendidly vivid orange underneath. The little creature does not protest or struggle, but holds my fingertip with tiny clawless hands as minuscule, perfect and utterly harmless as an infant’s tiny fist.
The little soft throat pulses quickly with his breathing. I replace him carefully in the leaf litter, watch him resume his journey, and wish health and longevity to this tiny, innocent life.
Returning in the half-light of dusk, I hear an owl’s call, low and rich, muted in the branches. I walked into that night of aging spring, and found it delicious and full of wonders, so welcoming and alive.
***
The noise of these trains, in this city. They comfort me, the frequent whir of the commuter line, now and again punctuated by the longer moaning whistle of the freighters. The human mind tends to make connections, and so I think when I hear them of a small dwelling where once, for a little while, I found a measure of peace and safety in this unlovely, overcrowded place. Their predictable din, not loud enough to really irritate but impossible to ignore, also recalls me of certain later occasional mornings waking beside a woman I more than fancied---springtime, you know; I think we must all have our favorite memories of it.
April in the city, and there are associations, so: roused well before sunrise by a train I was no longer used to, moved by her extraordinary presence and the frightening power and complexity of my own reaction. Listening to her soft breathing and the unending succession of trains, thinking of all those lives and plans and destinations and motion while here I lay, utterly still, wanting absolutely nothing more in this moment of complete peace. How good it felt to love that much and to be that vulnerable, even knowing full well how badly and inevitably I was about to get hurt by it.
Years before, when I lived near trains and only dreamed of resting in her arms, I would walk for miles beside the tracks, escaping a city that I despised as best I could. Amongst the sharp rocks and graffiti scrawls and errant garbage I found enough beauty to sustain; the gray, hard weeds forever fighting asphalt, the sleekness of a brown rat in motion and the plump importance of pigeons, species we ought to love since we have made a world for them.
If I was lucky, but often enough that I learned to recognize at least two individual birds, the red-tailed hawks. Perched high on poles or moving down with a strike of breathtaking grace all the more perfect and regal for their homely surroundings, they were there. Given enough hunting and empty space, even here, glossy and powerful and magnificent, proof that a fierce wild thing might still thrive. Moments of joy in the barrenness, flashes of hope amid all the pain; a bright wing, the early sunlight gilding my lady’s hair and skin. These things help one live, remember why, sometimes.
The oak trees have offered tender new leaves up twice since then, the rains come and gone. The memory of joy, it seems, lasts longer than at least most of the sorrow. So I hear the trains in April, and think of love, hope and tenacity, and I am grateful for them.
***
Today, banana slugs are apparently on the move. I often see them, but this morning I lifted three from the road as I walked to the trail and another one on the way back. In the woods I lost count, but my total was over half a dozen and I wasn’t even actively looking for them.
I think they’re cute. Yes, I know I’m weird. But I love their detailed little faces, the delicate eyestalks, the way their breathing orifice opens and closes, the pretty stripes on the side of a long, flexible foot. I know some of them personally, the ones who come to my yard: the fellow who has one large spot in the middle of its mantle, the clear yellow one with no spots at all, the baby with markings very similar to the first. They are like friends, and it is pleasant to see them. Good neighbors. We share a habitat.
Why are they all out in force? A book on the subject states that they breed at all times of year, but I wonder if they might seek one another more frequently in spring. I have never witnessed their long, slow, violent courtship, though it is among those things, like gametophytic ferns, liverworts and predator sightings that make me extremely happy and for which I maintain a sort of unconscious, constant search.
Perhaps it is just that they know the rainy season is ending, that slugs’ winter is nigh, that the long dry season will soon force them to seek dens, curl tightly and conserve moisture. They must understand this, in their intuitive invertebrate way, though a slug’s knowledge and experience has be so very different from our own. Still, in my own way, I think I can relate.
It would be a mistake to ignore their experience, no matter how much simpler than our own it has to be. To be alive, to live in the midst of a moment that is ending, but to love it nonetheless. To be in that place of perfect joy that is the utter lack of desire for anything but the experience: I’ve only known it a handful of times. Perhaps a banana slug dwells there.
The whole world felt alive that night. Elsewhere, in places cold has a longer presence and a differing character, spring is very new yet, but in this coastal forest, things are in full, temperate eruption. The wood sorrel is everywhere stretching with new growth and bright flowers while already the mosses are drying, the fronds of shade and moisture-loving ferns are toughening to a darker, less tender green.
Between the equinoxes on the summer side, night is more inviting; sufficient light lingers that I can walk an hour or so past sundown, and the air is warmer. Birds remain active at dusk, and I see a woodpecker flash his handsome white bars, hear his call warble sharply through the evening air.
There are salamanders. Never many, but there is enough moisture still in the ground that I find several in motion as we cross paths in the forest. This one is a Giant Pacific, a juvenile no longer than my ring finger. As adults, they might be longer than my hand.
I pick him up gently, admiring the tenderness of his textured skin, a dark orange-brown dorsally but splendidly vivid orange underneath. The little creature does not protest or struggle, but holds my fingertip with tiny clawless hands as minuscule, perfect and utterly harmless as an infant’s tiny fist.
The little soft throat pulses quickly with his breathing. I replace him carefully in the leaf litter, watch him resume his journey, and wish health and longevity to this tiny, innocent life.
Returning in the half-light of dusk, I hear an owl’s call, low and rich, muted in the branches. I walked into that night of aging spring, and found it delicious and full of wonders, so welcoming and alive.
***
The noise of these trains, in this city. They comfort me, the frequent whir of the commuter line, now and again punctuated by the longer moaning whistle of the freighters. The human mind tends to make connections, and so I think when I hear them of a small dwelling where once, for a little while, I found a measure of peace and safety in this unlovely, overcrowded place. Their predictable din, not loud enough to really irritate but impossible to ignore, also recalls me of certain later occasional mornings waking beside a woman I more than fancied---springtime, you know; I think we must all have our favorite memories of it.
April in the city, and there are associations, so: roused well before sunrise by a train I was no longer used to, moved by her extraordinary presence and the frightening power and complexity of my own reaction. Listening to her soft breathing and the unending succession of trains, thinking of all those lives and plans and destinations and motion while here I lay, utterly still, wanting absolutely nothing more in this moment of complete peace. How good it felt to love that much and to be that vulnerable, even knowing full well how badly and inevitably I was about to get hurt by it.
Years before, when I lived near trains and only dreamed of resting in her arms, I would walk for miles beside the tracks, escaping a city that I despised as best I could. Amongst the sharp rocks and graffiti scrawls and errant garbage I found enough beauty to sustain; the gray, hard weeds forever fighting asphalt, the sleekness of a brown rat in motion and the plump importance of pigeons, species we ought to love since we have made a world for them.
If I was lucky, but often enough that I learned to recognize at least two individual birds, the red-tailed hawks. Perched high on poles or moving down with a strike of breathtaking grace all the more perfect and regal for their homely surroundings, they were there. Given enough hunting and empty space, even here, glossy and powerful and magnificent, proof that a fierce wild thing might still thrive. Moments of joy in the barrenness, flashes of hope amid all the pain; a bright wing, the early sunlight gilding my lady’s hair and skin. These things help one live, remember why, sometimes.
The oak trees have offered tender new leaves up twice since then, the rains come and gone. The memory of joy, it seems, lasts longer than at least most of the sorrow. So I hear the trains in April, and think of love, hope and tenacity, and I am grateful for them.
***
Today, banana slugs are apparently on the move. I often see them, but this morning I lifted three from the road as I walked to the trail and another one on the way back. In the woods I lost count, but my total was over half a dozen and I wasn’t even actively looking for them.
I think they’re cute. Yes, I know I’m weird. But I love their detailed little faces, the delicate eyestalks, the way their breathing orifice opens and closes, the pretty stripes on the side of a long, flexible foot. I know some of them personally, the ones who come to my yard: the fellow who has one large spot in the middle of its mantle, the clear yellow one with no spots at all, the baby with markings very similar to the first. They are like friends, and it is pleasant to see them. Good neighbors. We share a habitat.
Why are they all out in force? A book on the subject states that they breed at all times of year, but I wonder if they might seek one another more frequently in spring. I have never witnessed their long, slow, violent courtship, though it is among those things, like gametophytic ferns, liverworts and predator sightings that make me extremely happy and for which I maintain a sort of unconscious, constant search.
Perhaps it is just that they know the rainy season is ending, that slugs’ winter is nigh, that the long dry season will soon force them to seek dens, curl tightly and conserve moisture. They must understand this, in their intuitive invertebrate way, though a slug’s knowledge and experience has be so very different from our own. Still, in my own way, I think I can relate.
It would be a mistake to ignore their experience, no matter how much simpler than our own it has to be. To be alive, to live in the midst of a moment that is ending, but to love it nonetheless. To be in that place of perfect joy that is the utter lack of desire for anything but the experience: I’ve only known it a handful of times. Perhaps a banana slug dwells there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-30 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-30 09:09 pm (UTC)I'll see if I can't dig up a pic of the _huge_ one we found while doing work under my house several months ago. It was gorgeous. And also, huge. It didn't fit in my hand all the way, certainly not if you include the tail. And they are, as I mentioned, entirely harmless.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-30 09:13 pm (UTC)