FROM MY WINDOW OVERLOOKING THE BACKYARD

 

Don’t know whether a bird in hand is worth two in the bird bath or not, but we don’t have any problems with our stone bath in the backyard inviting in even one feathered friend because it’s always empty — on purpose. I mean, most Louisiana bird baths should be re-composed as planters, backyard decor, or something other than hold a place where immodest birds flock to bathe naked daily. In reality, if water is left in these stone bowls, they draw in Louisiana mosquitoes the size of horseflies, and mosquitoes draw in rats and snakes. Right?

Half the time, the bowl of our bird bath in the New Iberia back yard lies upended on the ground, but a hurricane isn’t the cause of its upending. Judging from the population of raccoons, an armadillo, marauding dogs and cats around us, I think that the bath is a target for some animal game called “tip the tub.” Most of the time, the bowl lies on the ground looking as if it’s anticipating becoming a planter we should fill with vegetation that will survive backyard shade.

Our smaller bird bath in the yard at Sewanee, Tennessee, isn’t often visited unless it’s filled with purified water, and I think the birds have taken on some of the “entitled” aspects of the clergy/scholars who live in that rarefied Sewanee atmosphere. They turn up their beaks at ordinary rainwater. Most of the time, in both locales, New Iberia and Sewanee, we don’t fill the bowls of the baths because squirrels come calling if they see the water. We’ve caught Squirrel Nutkin swishing his tail in the Sewanee bath several times — and we won’t comment on pesky squirrels that inhabit both Louisiana and Tennessee yards... but I’ve been known to threaten to order a b-b rifle similar to the one I gave my brother Harold on his 7th birthday and …

Well, hummingbirds don’t drink water, and I’m partial to that species of bird life, so I’m thinking of planting coral bells, columbine, or coreopsis in the upturned mouth of the empty bird bath at planting time. The red blooms will look great against the background of the new cedar fence at which the hounds next door bark despite the wall’s impassive, uninviting stance.

 

Photograph by Victoria Sullivan

 

 

“THE LEAVES OF LIFE KEEP FALLING ONE BY ONE…”*

Wet patio, swept clean

The day after Christmas I go outdoors at 7:30 to sweep up wet leaves on the patio. I’m sweeping with an old broom, which should symbolize something, but, for me, the age of this bundle of straw only indicates a certain reluctance on my part to spend money on a new outdoor broom, even if the New Year is approaching. My oldest daughter Stephanie says I have obsessive-compulsive disorder because I go out every morning and make sure the patio is cleared of leaves that have fallen from an overarching oak during the previous day and night.

Stephanie doesn’t understand that sweeping is a cleansing exercise designed to clear my mind and heart of anxieties, concerns, fears – all that past and anticipated trash that we humans carry around every day or dream about in the night. Since Louisiana has a good track record for creating conditions that birth wet leaves, I’m passing on to readers the suggestion that sweeping wet leaves is a more effective exercise than sweeping dry leaves and requires a stronger, swooping sweep to get rid of past or anticipated problems.

Squirrels watch me from the safety of a high branch and sometimes pelt me with acorns, which is their attempt at creating problems to replace the ones I’ve swept away, and I shake the broom at them or whack the trunk of the oak so that they scurry across the yard and into the coulee. Since I’m of the age and disposition not to care what the neighbors think about an old woman in her pajamas shaking a broom at squirrels, I carry on until I have a tall pile of wet debris that gives me pleasure to lay at the feet of the oak. This morning I disturbed a frog taking a puddle bath near the edge of the patio, and he leapt away indignant that I’d think he should be sent to join those leaves of negative thought. You can tell from the photo of the oak and leaves on the ground how many worries I carried around in my head and heart last year.

Last year, I published several books of poetry, one of which included a poem about the art of sweeping. In A Lonely Grandmother, I wrote about dust that is stirred up, but I think the poem is appropriate for this blog, even if the subject is about soggy debris that is swept away:

“The Art of Sweeping:”

There was something about the comfort

of provincial stillness I felt

while sweeping Grandmother’s front gallery,

but I was nine, a quiescent stage

behavioral scientists say,

the calm of the known settling

into the slow hours of summer,

a sawmill up the street

humming a monotonous aria.

It was before the many steps ahead

and the arrival of by-and-by.

When I went outdoors to do the task,

bright as a morning butterfly

sweeping away the grains of dust

beneath the scaling swing

and from around the overflowing fern,

I learned a way I would remember

to rid the remains of future suffering,

the broom moving across

a splintered floor,

each whisk clouding the humid air,

and under the yellow needles –

the quiet of old dust.

Happy Sweeping, Happy New Year!

*A line from The Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám. The complete quatrain: “Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,/Whether the cup with sweet or bitter run,/The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,/The leaves of life keep falling one by one.”

FALLING LEAVES

I know it’s Fall on The Mountain at Sewanee when I sit on the front porch and hear acorns popping on the roof. Their noise breaks through a dense silence peculiar to cooler days, and I think that if the squirrels took better aim, I’d have a few knots on my head because they throw the gnawed shells from the rooftop, then scurry back into the oaks, turning their backsides and swishing their tails at me.

On cool Fall days, birdsong almost disappears, the hum of insects dies down, and I hear only the squawk of crows piercing the silence. However, some sound carries farther in the still air, and the cries of children playing in the distance reach me, a poignant noise that rises, then dies away, as if they’re at recess and then it’s over and they’re back at their desks. Yellow and brown leaves, like old memories, rustle and fall in the yard, and my thoughts turn away from the world, moving inward as the season begins. Fall time is remembering time…

Every Fall when I hear the sound of children breaking through the stillness on The Mountain, I think of my firstborn, Stephanie, going off to school for the first time. When she was six, back in the 60’s, school commenced in September instead of early August as it does now, and we had a faux Fall on the day I walked her to the small school a few blocks from our home in New Iberia, Louisiana. She was frightened… and I was anxious. I don’t know whose heart raced the fastest, but when she and her best friend, Johnna Kay, a neighbor’s daughter, entered the first grade classroom at the same moment, both girls looked at each other and burst into tears.

“You have to let them go,” Johnna Kay’s mother said, clutching my arm.

I gave Stephanie a wan smile. “I’ll meet you outside at 3,” I told my sad-faced child.” More tears, and the teacher signaled for us to leave our sobbing children to the mercies of the public school system.

It was a cool day, and after lunch I sat on the patio for awhile, listening to the children’s cries in the distance. The shrill voices sounded like separation anxiety to me, and I began writing a poem: “I delight in my child/who presses the small leaf of me/into the branch of her larger perceptions; /I delight in my child/when my false possessions possess/all but one capricious movement/tipping in barefoot daring/through the splinter of my ways./This one with the burnt corn hair,/the first robin song of each morning,/making calculated pecks at my cheek,/urging me to reduce this world/to a tiny merry go round for her hands,/whines the carefully taught noise of my name/in impish assumption of reckoning./I delight in my child/as she presses the small leaf of me/into the branch of her larger trust/and I crackle with the dry anxiety/of mother love.”

At 2, I went indoors to shut out the sound of the children’s voices and called my spouse. “We must buy Stephanie a bicycle,” I said in my no-opposition-allowed voice. “Today. Right now. Before school lets out.”

“What? It isn’t even time for her birthday, and Christmas is almost four months away. I’m at work, you know,” he said.

“I don’t care if a new well is about to blow,” I said. He was a reservoir engineer with a major oil company and had an office job, so the allusion to bringing in a well at a field site was an exaggeration reflecting my agitated state. “She needs something to make her feel better. I left her crying at school. I’ll get a taxi and go after the bike alone if you won’t leave work.” I hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, he arrived and we drove to LaBauve’s Bicycle Shop a few blocks from our neighborhood. Another fifteen minutes passed before we loaded an aqua-colored bicycle with a luggage carrier, a basket and bell on its handlebars, and rolled it into the garage, closing the doors against the curious eyes of the neighbor across the street.

At 3 sharp, I met Stephanie and Johnna Kay in front of the school, and Stephanie ran into my arms. “Do I have to go back?” she asked. “I already know how to color in the lines, can say by heart poems from A Child’s Garden of Verse, and all they do at recess is jump rope and sing something called “Pizza Pizza Polly-ola.”

“Yes,” I said. “You have to go back. You should know a little more than how to color within the lines and how to say nursery rhymes, and every girl should learn how to jump rope. But…” I stopped and smiled at her. “We have a surprise for you.”

She looked at me sullenly and followed me home, dragging her new green backpack on the pavement. I felt anxious, wondering if a bicycle would make up for the hours we’d spend away from each other, but not once had I felt foolish about the impulsive purchase or regretted that I was giving her Christmas in September. When I pulled up the garage door to reveal the surprise, Stephanie’s smile told me that I’d made a good choice – the bicycle was going to ease the pangs of separation.

“Oh!” she said. “I’m glad I went to school.”

The tone of Stephanie’s first week at school got lighter and lighter, and I learned not to sit on the patio where I could hear the children’s voices. Stephanie’s resistance to school lessened, and her adaptation amazed me. However, I knew that she kept the vision of that bicycle in her mind until the bell for school to let out rang and she could race home to ride her bike. That year, we learned to endure the pain of severing the long cord that had held us in a pre-school bond, and I attribute our maturation to an aqua-colored bicycle bought on impulse.

Now, on Fall days when cool weather approaches, and I hear the clear voices of children in the distance, I can’t help wondering if there are first graders among the voices who feel as much separation anxiety as I did on Stephanie’s first day at school. I hope not.