american gold finches and hawks

While writing I have been visited. After my father died last August and briefly took on the form of a hummingbird in my mind, I have the uncanny though pathetic fallacy that birds are telling me something. I'm trying hard now, nearly a year later, to see it as a lovely coincidence that amazingly beautiful birds visit me while I'm writing. It makes sense that while I write about plants and birds, and I'm sitting still, I would see something through the window in front of my desk. Today I saw what I think is an american gold finch, the first I have ever seen of whatever it is-- truly bright gold with a touch of black on its wings. Its color set against the green pounced at me like a parrot or a tropical fish reminding me that I am still a tourist having moved between micro-climates in the Bay Area in my ten years here. The question is really who is visiting whom?

My son and husband are in Reno visiting his family, who are struggling with our brother-in-law's newly diagnosed leukemia. I'm home struggling with my newly diagnosed pregnancy. Just talking to Doug on the phone he told me about the hawks living in his mother's backyard. We were up there last weekend and our son Jackson checked out the hawks and immediately gave a pretty good impression of their calls. We thought it was maybe just wishful thinking, but now we know Jacks has that hawk call down. Just now I heard him make the call while talking to Doug. Those hawks are not just "visiting;" Jacks' in direct dialogue with them. The hawks usurped a squirrel's nest high in a tree and seemed to have formed a ring of nests around the house. Last week the hawks were very much with us while we gardened with our three year old nephew, whose parents are both at the hospital full time right now. We planted a giant 100 pound pumpkin, contest-size, to be ready in time for Halloween. Who knows what this summer and fall will be like for our nephew; hopefully, nature will be benevolent. The hawks with their awesome feeding patterns are pretty brutal but magnificent also.

It's wrong to say we are visited by the natural world. Yes, tiny ants, famous in Berkeley, form giant Macy parades in our house whenever a grain of rice is left on the floor. We've decided to coexist with several spiders, about one per room. There's been a lot said already about the forces of life and death mirrored in the plant, insect and animal world. We humans like to separate ourselves from the others and use them as metaphors, and maybe that is why we are stunned, like a bound Gulliver, when we are felled by a disease or morning sickness or worse, death. I know my father found solace in only a few things while fighting prostate cancer: his tomato plants, his family, the hummingbirds at his feeder, New England coastal storms and the sounds of waves. A poem I wrote for his memorial service called "How to prepare for a storm," concluded with the directive: "let yourself belong again." It's ironic how language and thought make us feel apart, yet how language also brings us back.

Flau-wa and "pests"

My 14 month-old son says maybe five comprehensible words, but my favorite is flau-wa. Most of his new words ( ball, mama, dada) start as just a play on sounds or an onomatopoeia, then they have amazing specificity (amazing for a mom!) as he points directly at the named thing. In the third stage he generalizes and goes-to-town, and suddenly the moon is a ball and a circle is a ball, and balls are literally everwhere. Flau-wa has hit the third stage and now seems to name not just all the flowers in our garden and neighborhood, but all things plant-like at eye-level. Working with a baby in a garden (even a small 500sq foot one) , letting him dig, teaching him what is edible and what is not, or how not to torture a snail, is an extremely relaxing activity. We notice bees, hummingbirds, robins, finches, and sparrows, which plants they frequent and which days of the year they seem preoccupied with our garden and when they have moved on. The sparrows, which played and hung out in packs of 40 or 50 on the telephone wires, diving and performing aero-acrobatics between our small trees, have moved on. The robins seem bigger and the lesser gold finches dropped in for a week or so in early April. I always notice their entrance on the scene because of their calls. I suppose I should teach Jackson how to collect and throw out all our snails or learn to enjoy escargot, but I haven't the heart for it yet. We could get a duck to eat them (and wouldn't he love that!).

What I couldn't know empirically is that their presence means the environment is reasonably unpolluted (says Pam Peirce in "Golden Gate Gardening", an awesome resource book for our area) and that the mockingbirds and robins control pests. The robins eat wireworms (their big 1/2 inch leathery, pale yellow larvae found in the soil around our plants look like something unearthed from Pan's Labyrinth), cutworms and caterpillars and the mockingbirds eat beetles, grasshoppers and other insects. Ironically, among the reasons why we have so many birds in the first place is because there are insects. I do my best to keep my pesticide-happy husband from using toxins. Tiny ants thrive as do probably a whole host of other pests. We were fortunate to inherit a garden intended for local fauna. We have what is officially called "attractant flowers" which are "especially valuable in late winter and early spring when little is blooming" (GG Gardening, p. 131). We have Mexican Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) bushes, drought-resistant, beautiful hummingbird lovers with small throated red and pink lips for flowers. Apparently, this sage's leaves can be used to make tea or to flavor fruit dishes. The flowers can decorate a salad or dessert. We also have two Japanese Plum trees (Nubiana's, I think) that are famous in the neighborhood. The white-crowned sparrows feast on new buds in February and local human families, with a similar seasonal knowledge, stop by around in June to eat plums. One such neighbor asked me if he could bring his daughter to show her the fruit he ate when he was as kid growing up around here.

The middle school where I teach does not have a garden except for the ruins of a long neglected garden beside the front door. It has a black top, which is an effective space for basketball, handball and gossip's required space for clique dispersal. We have no curriculum around food though I am developing a project about waste for whole school in June. Perhaps because we don't own the property or that as a community we have been chronically ambivalent about the pittance of a play yard, this area of school life is sorely lacking. Compare it to Martin Luther King School's Edible Garden a few miles away that is now world famous thanks to Alice Waters and Prince Charles and Camilla's visit, and we clearly lack vision in that area of middle school life. Even though all we have to offer the birds is uneaten lunch, huge seagulls and crows guard the blacktops like savvy bullies.

("speechless sorrowing of Nature")
(you will get lost you will be left)
bending over looking for the trinket lost
(most quiet heaven)
-- "Middle Distance," from Swarm by Jorie Graham