Author Archives: Ann E. Michael

Goals, sort of

http://www.wmo.int/gfcs/idmp

Our regional drought continues. I sometimes entertain the idea that the universe is telling me I might as well consider moving to the Southwest–where my children now reside–since the Mid-Atlantic area currently has less rainfall, higher temperatures, and lower humidity than where they are. Granted, this is likely to be a temporary situation; but for the present, I get the chance to walk on crunchy grass and hard soil daily and see how I like it. And to see blue skies for days on end, and see how I like that. What next?

Speculating on “what next” comes rather naturally to me, a reflective sort of human being; but making goals and ambitions toward accomplishment–not so much. Lately, though, the years-ahead thinking has been moved the forefront of my thoughts. It’s all those dang Medicare and Social Security and AARP mailings, in part, and my peers and I heading into the so-called retirement years. Inescapable: the conversations crop up around the dinner party table, while having coffee with a pal, or on a phone call with siblings. People keep asking me what my new goals are. I suppose, having reached the age Social Security (used to) kick in, I was expected to come up with new goals? Must have missed that memo.

Goal: the word is of uncertain origin, says Etymology Online, but appears in the 14th c “with an apparent sense of ‘boundary, limit.’ Perhaps from Old English *gal ‘obstacle, barrier,’ a word implied by gælan ‘to hinder’ and also found in compounds (singal, widgal). That would make it a variant or figurative use of Middle English gale ‘a way, course’…” And there’s the further meaning of a stake that signals the end point of a game. Interesting that goal can be an obstacle, a limitation, an end-point, or a pathway.

If I think of it as a pathway, the question is, what do I want to do? After many years as an educator…do I throw all that experience away and take up something else? My guess is that I’ll find myself imparting information of some kind, one way or another, regardless of employment status. So no major change of course, just a change of scenery, situation, or audience. After all, I will still be writing.

Or are we talking aspirations? What is it I would like to plan for…self care? travel? conferences and retreats? Time to do–what, exactly, and with whom? Here there are perhaps barriers and limitations: can we ever stop worrying about how much will it cost and how much time it will take to achieve the specified goals? And obstacles–you cannot plan for them. Maybe I go blind or get cancer or get hit by a bus. Maybe the apocalypse occurs in my lifetime. That would certainly be the stake that signifies “game over!”

Then again, what if my plans are to get into the woods more, sit under trees more, take more walks, read more books, tend to plants and animals, hang out with my beloveds, write poems? Those things, I want to do in future. But it isn’t as though I am not already doing them now.

Photo by Michael Heinrich on Pexels.com

Novels & words

When I was about seven years old, I discovered books offered me a way to immerse myself in adventure and temporarily escape life’s discomforts. Novels, and later, poetry, were the genres I turned to most often. Though I also liked history, science, biographies, and art, there was something about a piece of sustained fiction that enthralled me so deeply I could easily ignore anything around me: the television, my siblings’ bickering, the vacuum cleaner, my parents’ calling me to dinner. In later years, immersed in a book, I risked going late to class or missing my stop on the F train. The only area of my life where I understand what is meant by hyperfocus has been reading.

Then I had children, which changed everything. I remained an inveterate reader, but I found it far easier to get through non-fiction, poetry, essay or short story collections, and literary memoirs than to devote myself to novels. It was simply too easy to get lost in a book of fiction, to wrap myself in those worlds to the detriment of my own. Too easy to become irresponsible to life’s requirements, which were suddenly so many and so urgent. If my situation had been different–let’s say, commuting by train for half an hour or more daily–I might have continued reading a hundred or more novels a year. But I was home in the rur-burbs with two young kids, and I could read only in short spurts throughout the day. Granted, I read a lot of books to my son and daughter, some of which were new to me and most of which were fictional…but a bit below my grade level.

Those children are in their 30s now, but I became so accustomed to the non-fiction genre that only recently have I begun to turn back to my first love, the novel. Granted, I did my reading-all-of-Dickens stint during covid, and I never completely abandoned reading novels; but I got out of the habit. Because my workplace office is now in the library, however, I have been picking up the occasional, usually contemporary, novel that appears on the library’s New Acquisitions display. This is where I found R.F. Kuang’s book Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution. Imagine an alternative Dickensian-era Britain, with the underlying power struggles between education and political power as per Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and the almost-believable otherworldliness (and creative footnotes) of Susanna Clarke’s fiction…with the late-adolescent outsiders who bond over knowledge that cements the Harry Potter books…and add some genuinely academic background on linguistics and etymology.

That’s about as close as I can describe Babel by means of other books, but what I really enjoyed about the novel is the way it got me thinking about how dismayingly interconnected education and scholarly pursuits are with power structures such as governments, politics, wealth, and colonialism. Kuang deftly shows her readers how the focus on knowledge that her characters love and possess talent for inevitably leads to a narrowness in their perspectives that differs almost dangerously from an uneducated ignorance. They are good young people, but they operate as elites in a fundamentally callous system. The system either corrupts or smothers. The “fun” part of her world construct is that power operates on the use of words: on languages and their etymologies, which are magical enhancements.

But of course, power does hinge on the use of words, doesn’t it?

The question this poses in my mind has something to do with poetry, with the writing of it, the speaking of it, its use of words that are not magic but can carry with them a power to evoke that seems pretty magical at times. Reading this novel was not only entertaining (sad, thrilling, surprising)–it got me, after I’d completed hyperfocusing, to reflect on ideas that twine with the roots of poetry. To me, that’s the best takeaway from any reading experience.

Humble pie

I have always understood gardening as a practice that keeps a person humble. Wise gardeners are not control freaks, as Nature has its own inconsistent methods to which climate change has added further randomness and unpredictability. The latest in my region is a winter/spring period of “abnormally dry” weather–not quite the same as a drought. In an area that averages about 46″ of rain annually (71″ in the amazingly wet year 2011), we’re now about 2″ below normal for the month and 10″ below normal for the past 12 months, even though we had a month’s worth of rain during three days in April. On May 2, a local news source reported:

…during a wet well draw down, workers at Lehigh County Authority’s wastewater treatment plant fished something unusual out of the water.
A baby American alligator was found embedded in a clump of material screened out before entering the plant along the Lehigh River…“This alligator was embedded with only its tail sticking out [of] a boulder of …horrible grease and motor oil and diapers and fat,” said Barbara Miller,
who was involved in the rescue.

Stephanie Sigafoos, WLVR

Poor alligator! [No, alligators are NOT native to Pennsylvania!] Meanwhile, this May I have been watering my vegetable garden and some of my perennials for days on end; we’ve had no appreciable rain since the first of May, and there’s no rain forecast for another week or more. It’s tough when there’s no rain during the time we sow seeds. Seeds need moisture to germinate. Climate weirding, as my friend Bill calls it, takes its toll randomly. For example, my daughter in New Mexico is experiencing a wetter-than-usual springtime in the desert that is not a direct result of the snow pack in the Rockies and Sierras. It’s just…rainy.

What all of this amounts to is that no matter how long you’ve been gardening or how much education you have acquired about gardening in your region, you’re going to be surprised sometimes. Like, maybe every year. Or many times in a year. So one also acquires a bit of humility. This year, my tomato seedlings, started from seed as I do every year, haven’t thrived (why? dunno) though I am attempting to keep them alive in the garden. And the spinach has been inconsistent, though it was fabulous the past three years: Viroflay, same seed, same supplier.

But then there is this iris, which needed no assistance from the gardener to achieve peak beauty in spite of weird weather. I didn’t even water this bed.

Random beauty.

Reading friends’ books

One thing about being a writer is that, after awhile, you meet other writers one way or another: sometimes through social media, Zoom events, or in person at book signings and readings; sometimes through conferences, workshops, or various educational programs; sometimes by finding local writers groups or getting an introduction to someone through a friend. When you meet writers, you get the additional privilege of reading their work. It so happens that lately, many of my writerly friends and colleagues have published books, and I’ve been busy reading them!

First, I want to mention that whenever possible, readers should purchase literary volumes from the writers themselves or from their publishers, or–if it’s an option in your region–from an independent bookseller. I do resort to ABE and Thrift and Amazon when a book has gone out of print or when the publisher prints through Amazon, but I want to remind people that the other sources will support the writers themselves or the independent small bookshops and publishers who launch these books into the world.

Now that my virtuous aside has been accomplished, here are a few of the books-by-friends-&-colleagues I’ve been consuming lately–not all of them newly-published (it takes me awhile to get around to the reading).

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The near-abstract imagery and the concrete place-names and lyricism in Heather H. Thomas’ 2018 Vortex Street appealed to me on several levels, from the scientific (a repeating pattern of swirling vortices, see “fluid dynamics”) to the particular: my husband grew up in Reading, PA, where some of these poems are suspended in recollection. I’ve also loved reading Grant Clauser’s latest, the 2021 Codhill prize-winner Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven, a collection of poems that strikes me as both deeply beautiful and tenderly sad. Poet Lynn Levin has published a terrific book of short stories, House Parties, that remind me of the wry sense of humor and wide-ranging knowledge her poems have while proving she’s also a deft hand at plot and character. Maureen Dunphy’s memoir Divining, A Memoir in Trees, brought to mind parallels with Lesley Wheeler’s memoir in poems, Poetry’s Possible Worlds. In both books, the authors have chosen a locus [an American tree, a contemporary poem] and used the exploration of that “trigger” to draw out something personal. What better way to connect with readers than through something we love and value? Which brings me to a shout-out to Jane Satterfield, whose poetry collection The Badass Brontës isn’t in this photo because I’ve already lent it to someone who’s a Brontë fan.

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In addition to the above books, I am eagerly awaiting new works from a host of other poet-friends: chapbooks by Beejay Grob (forthcoming from Moonstone Publishing) and Lisa DeVuono, poetry collections from Jerry Wemple, Jeanine Hall Gailey, and others that slip my mind at the moment. My only regret is that I have all this reading to do just as gardening season gets really underway!

Generosity

It is a well-documented fact that writers can be dismissive, hypercritical, and downright insulting when it comes to the work of their peers and predecessors. Juvenal, Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Sayers and her nemesis Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Parker, John Logan…the list is long and spans centuries. Some of the critiques are valid, in their way; many are wickedly funny, which doesn’t remedy the unkindness of the barbs. Most writers who have been writing and presenting or publishing their work for awhile will have encountered some less-than-generous “feedback” from other writers. Given human nature, such responses are probably inevitable.

In the mediated circle of the voluntary critique group such as may be found among MFA programs or community writers’ groups, the group or mentor often establishes protocols for sharing work–methods of responding to creative efforts that avoid too-harsh criticism, ad hominem attacks, or dismissive/discouraging comments. Once your writing is out in the world in whatever public form (print, slam performance, live reading, video, online, etc), however, the best advice is sometimes “don’t read the comments.”

Many agendas may drive the urge to bash particular writers or their works, among these envy, attention, pride, status, self-preservation, righteous indignation, or a sense that one needs to scramble to make space for oneself in an already small environment (“the literary world”). Even, dare I say, ignorance. I could speculate on reasons for unkindness until the proverbial cows come dawdling home, but I suppose it can be attributed to a kind of social Darwinism. People can be mean-spirited when threatened. Though exactly how the writing of poetry poses a threat to other poets remains a mystery to me.

Maybe I am a Pollyanna (entirely possible), but although I can recall some incidents and critiques that have stung me, there have been far more instances of generosity from fellow writers. While contemplating writing this post I sat back and decided to count how many fellow writers have extended courtesy, respect, useful advice, helpful criticism, networking and publication leads, encouragement, and the sense that I’ve “been seen”–acknowledgment as a writer–and I found the list was long. I considered listing names, but there are so many…and I was afraid I’d inadvertently overlook someone. I consider this an excellent “problem” to have.

Granted, some stings have been…memorable. However, I’ve been writing and publishing poetry and related prose since the early 1980s, so there have been many years during which I’ve had the joy of connecting with other writers in generous ways. Writing is both a large community and a small one, depending upon where I am in my own life: local at times, semi-isolated other times, and then–thanks to social media platforms, with which I have love/hate relationships–national and international!

As I get ready to pull back a bit from my work in the realm of higher education, I hope that the lessons I have learned about being generous to my students, gently encouraging while pointing out areas to keep working on, will stay with me. My feeling about poetry is that there’s certainly room for more of it in a world which can be harsh, and that acknowledging other humans’ urge to express their awe, fear, grief, passion, love, anger, and perspective won’t actually harm many of us.

Thus, to all of the fellow writers and artists living and dead who have been generous to me: Bounteous gratitude. I’ll keep trying to pay it forward.

Artistry, art

Wednesday evening I participated in a lovely (if under-attended) event at a local listening room, Godfrey Daniels Coffeehouse. The venue’s been in existence nearly half a century and hosts many a folk, blues, and folk-rock band/singer-songwriter, as well as the occasional puppet show, jam, open mike, children’s event, and poetry reading. Quite a storied place. Dave Fry, one of the co-founders, offers a monthly “Dave’s Night Out” during which he invites songsters, singers, lyricists, musicians, and poets to take the small stage and present their work as well as discuss their working process–with Dave himself and with the audience. It’s a wonderful opportunity to exchange creative and artistic ideas in public. The poets were me, Danielle Notaro, and Cleveland Wall. Dave’s take on the evening is here.

On the way home, my beloved and I had a discussion about artistry and “being an artist.” As he is from an artisan/craftsman background, he does not think of himself as an artist. The term seems a bit “elevated” to him. And while he is a creative problem solver–crucial to being an artist–I see why he does not consider himself an artist.

Some of that thinking is simply semantic, however, a perception based on someone else’s definition of an artist. Beloved asked me, “Do dancers or musicians consider themselves artists? Do you consider yourself an artist?” Good question, and the answer’s probably individual (i.e., it depends).

I mean–do I consider myself a poet? A writer? Let alone an artist. I immediately thought of a Substack post by my friend, journalist (journalists are writers!) Peter Moore, in which he publishes an excerpt from his post-college diary. Brave man.

“On the ferry from France to Folkestone I floated on a rising tide of words words words: “I must enter into the intense feeling I had while riding the Tube this morning,” I wrote, “that I honestly feel like a writer, that it was just a matter of time and effort before I am recognized as one. I hope and trust that this is prophetic.”

https://petermoore.substack.com/p/r2e-excerpt-46-the-rising-tide-of

Yeah, I remember feeling those particular 22-year-old feels and the questioning that accompanies them. I am certain that similar enquiries appear in my old journals, though I may have been more cynical and less trusting than Peter was. He closes this post by saying: “Meanwhile, all those blank pages were screaming at me. Fill them with what, aside from intense living?

“Pretensions to artistry!”

~

Which is not to say that poets and writers and dancers and songwriters are not artists. It’s just that some of these folks think of themselves as artists, and others think of themselves as artisans, or craftspeople, or creative innovators, or…name it what you will. Poetry is a form of creative expression, and if you (dear reader) categorize that as art, then it is. If my poet colleagues think of themselves as artists, I respect that and will not argue. Perspectives, right? Not the same as pretensions, although I will admit that in my opinion, there are some people who write poems, and other things, a bit pretentiously. I have been guilty of the same, especially when I was young and getting the practice underway. Pretentiousness may even be a kind of motivation. We learn humility as we practice our missteps.

Contemporary Western society casts a great deal of gravitas and status on the word “artist.” So to answer my spouse, I replied that well…I do consider myself a writer and a poet, but I seldom think of myself as an artist. However, if you think poets are artists, I am an artist. Because I do indeed think of myself as a poet. I cannot get away from that urgent need to observe, imagine, interpret, restate, turn into metaphor, reflect, create into form, and otherwise do the making (Poiesis) of word play.

Information from poems

I tried to attend a poetry event on Saturday afternoon, but the weather was against me.

The rain came accompanied by lightning strikes, high winds, falling branches, flash-flooded roads, sleet, and a little hail, all in the space of two and a half hours. I left home only to turn around after three miles. The highway was blocked with traffic piled up due to various “storm-related events” (said the weather sites). Actually, I was grateful for the storm, since our region has been unusually dry and even warm for April–my trees, shrubs, meadow, and perennials needed rain. And upon my return, I got back to reading books of poetry. This past week these included collections by Marilyn Chin, Elizabeth Metzger, Grant Clauser, Jennifer Franklin, and Natalie Diaz. Some wonderful work there.

Through these books of poems, I also gleaned lots of interesting information. That’s something many people who claim not to like poetry don’t understand: you can learn about so many things through poetry! Poems contain fascinating facts, intriguing perspectives, tons of social and cultural observations, vocabulary and terms I would not have known about otherwise…poems have been the impetus for me to learn more about astronomy, theology, historical events and people, the geography and topography of the earth and its oceans, the life cycles of insects and plants, how metal shops operate, how to catch fish or tie a fly, what it is like to “live with a disability,” how the process of dying has differed from era to era and place to place, what it is like to reside in a war zone, the traditions of people whose backgrounds differ from my own, and other so-called “non-fictional” information.

Facts, in other words. Poems may inhere in the emotional or intellectual realm in many ways, but they also can–and often do–inform. They contain facts as well as multitudes. If people did not get so hung up on trying to decode a secret meaning behind everything they encounter that appears to be a poem, they might be surprised at how much they could learn from such (usually) brief texts. Yes, it might help to look up a word or a reference or two. That can get a reader started on a whole trail of interesting and valuable knowledge, widening the worldview, changing the perspective.

It may even lead a person to recognize that facts can change depending on point of view. Contemporary science acknowledges this, but most human beings haven’t accepted it yet. Anyway, this points to one reason poetry has often been considered unconventional, subversive, even dangerous or radical: Poems can challenge the status quo of what is accepted, received, unquestioned in society’s knowledge base. Terrifying the authorities by means of information.

Go for it. Read a book of poems.

~

Coming up in May, I’ll be featured once again at GoggleWorks in Reading PA, 6 pm on May 4th…it has been awhile since I was there (2012), and I look forward to it!

Pastoral call

When my father put on his collar and his well-shined shoes but it wasn’t a Sunday, we knew he had meetings to attend or visits to parishioners to make and that sometimes, on coming home, he might seem quiet, which was unusual and meant he was turning things over in his mind. I try imagining him as he must have been then, younger than my son is now, counseling people through their griefs and doubts, encouraging the ill, attempting to comfort, confronting so much inequity and pain. What did he know?

Trouble came. His father died young. My little sister was stricken with pneumonia, gasping, feverish, hospitalized. My pregnant mother in such pain she could not climb the stairs to tuck us in at night. And so, with no one near to take me for the day, I was his visitation sidekick, dressed as though for church, carrying paper and pencil and a book I couldn’t yet read. People welcomed us into their homes in formal rooms sun never seemed to reach, seated us on sofas with doilies on the armrests or crocheted throws along the backs, or sometimes in carved wooden armchairs with lion-paw feet. There were often candies in a glass dish on a side table. The women gave my dad coffee and sometimes I got a glass of milk. Once, I had tea in a translucent cup decorated with pastel-colored flowers, and I took two sugar cubes and stirred carefully so as not to spill or make any noise.

Sometimes the parishioner offered me the run of a playroom or nursery–those children now grown, maybe as old as my father–and I rummaged through the old toys and imagined my own stories. It was important to make as little sound as possible, to be a presence invisible to grownups while my father took someone’s hands in his, prayed beside them, or listened to quiet sobbing. Indirectly, I was learning that adults cry, too, and that they were not always invincible, or even in charge.

It seemed a privilege to be with him being with people when they most needed something, Maybe not something he could give or grant them, true. He started to realize that very early in his ministry.

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In early childhood, once I abandoned the idea of growing up to be a princess, I liked the idea of being an artist or a scientist when I got to be an adult. That hasn’t quite worked out the way I guess I expected, but my ambitions (if that’s what they were) indicate that I had begun the lifelong process of wanting to understand–well, everything, almost! I found the following passage in Rebecca Elson’s book A Responsibility to Awe, and I feel as she does, though in her case she’s talking about observing and studying the Large Magellanic Cloud and its star structures:

There are times when the enterprise seems mechanical, when the constraint to pursue the truth seems to suffocate the imagination, and the mysteries of the Universe seem irrelevant to the lives we humans lead down here. But on the whole, understanding the Universe seems a fundamental step in understanding our origins, and in establishing a perspective with respect to space and time that I find comforting.

Rebecca Elson, “From Stones to Stars”

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It took my father quite some time to find a perspective on life, faith, and human behavior that comforted him. I do not possess the same perspective, but I believe he would be okay with that.

Astronomy

As a freshman in college, seeking to expand my limited science knowledge, I enrolled in a Physical Astronomy course, an introductory seminar class that taught students how physicists study the cosmos. At any rate, it introduced us to how that was done in the early 1970s. Thanks to computer tech and so many rapid changes in the field (we were using slide rules!!), the discipline has changed in some respects. I was terrible at the math, never having gotten beyond Algebra II in high school, but I had a terrific professor and loved the material. As may be obvious to readers of this blog, the cosmos and all that is in it provides me with endless opportunities for learning, speculation, and reflection.

Rebecca Elson, whose book A Responsibility to Awe I just finished reading, keenly reminds me of how fascinating the study of the universe can be and how little we know of it. Each decade the science and the theories take immense leaps in measurement and exploration, and each leap reveals how many more questions we have yet to ask, let alone answer. Not just inquiries into the galaxies, but also biological and ecological worlds to explore: salmon, eels, oceans, mountains, our own histories and our own mortality. Elson’s area of study centered on galaxy formation–the chemical evolution of stars, and globular clusters. But she started out collecting rocks with her geologist father who was doing fieldwork in Canada, then studied biology. It wasn’t easy to be a young woman studying the sciences in the 1970s, and she felt she was drifting a bit; writing, however, she felt more sure of. In the essay that ends this collection, she states that the atmosphere at Princeton during her post-doctoral study was “a stronghold not just of men, but of theoreticians” who looked down on work which involved “mere” observation, which is what she had painstakingly been doing in her research in Australia and Cambridge. At Princeton, though, she met a group of poets who encouraged her work and who made her stay at the university more comfortable. Good observation skills make a terrific foundation for poets.

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If the ocean is like the universe
Then waves are stars.

If space is like the ocean
Then matter is the waves
Dictating the rise and fall
of floating things...
  --from "Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe"

She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma when she was 29, died ten years later, and this book is the only example I’ve been able to find of her poetry. But it is revelatory what Elson does with simple language and deep, theoretical concepts as metaphor, topic, or theme. Some of the poems are so brief, yet I find myself thinking about them again and again. Like good haiku, they are not aphoristic–but they linger. Her sense of awe is palpable in these poems; I think that’s what I like most about her poetry.

Evolution

We are survivors of immeasurable events,
Flung upon some reach of land,
Small, wet miracles without instructions,
Only the imperative of change.

~
Salmon Running

Who isn't driven
Up the estuaries
Of another's flesh,
Up rivers of blood,
To spawn close to the heart?

~

A poem titled “OncoMouse, Kitchen Mouse” thanks the laboratory mice whose lives led to the cancer treatments that, for a time, prolonged her life; “Antidotes to Fear of Death” finds her eating the stars, or stirring herself into a young universe. While one late poem is bleak (“There is no poetry to cancer/To the body betraying itself”), another–the last entry in her notebook–observes the flourishing of spring. Much to learn here. Enough admiration that I wish, selfishly, she’d had more time on earth so I could enjoy more of her poems.

~

Fledgling Stars in Stellar Nursery by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

Morning birds

Every year, late March, starting at dawn, the cardinal thumps against our basement window, reminding me of a bored bear I saw long ago in a too-small cage–that repetitious sway and stomp–poor thing. But the bird’s unfettered and the window’s behind a large bush, a spindle tree we planted too close to the house–what’s driving that bird? Territoriality? We think perhaps it sees its reflection, so we’ve tried bird scare tape, opening the window, curtaining. Some years there are nests in that bush, but it’s never been cardinals nesting there. Thunk! Thunk!

My son used to stay up playing League of Legends until 3 am in that room, only to be awakened at 5:45 with irritating regularity by “Morning Bird.” He has left the nest, but the bird or its genetically programmed-to-thunk offspring returns annually. So it must be Spring.

Finally we got some good rain, about 3″, but the feeder stream behind our property lies pretty low and swampy after a mostly snowless winter and a dry autumn. Times have been when that stream flowed four feet deeper, rushing to meet Saucon Creek and head to the Lehigh River basin. I walked there this morning looking for frog eggs and salamanders, found two of the latter in a vernal pool where the skunk cabbage drills up from the swamp. Skunk cabbage doesn’t have much of a reputation for beauty but looks lovely with the sun behind its unfurling leaves.

I’m not a birder and can only identify about 25 birds by sight, fewer by sound. I noted mourning doves, mockingbirds and turkey buzzards, robins and redwings as I headed toward the creek. I have loaded Cornell’s “Merlin” bird app on my phone, though, and spent some quiet time sitting back on my heels in the sunshine while recording birdsong. The field sparrows weren’t in the field as yet, but other sparrows were calling: white-throated, song, and house sparrows (the house sparrows love to hide in the thick English ivy bush near the back of our house). Cardinals, of course, house finches, American crow, bluejay, red-bellied woodpecker, hairy woodpecker, tufted titmouse. Deeper in the woods, the white-breasted nuthatch got noisy, and an Eastern phoebe scolded me quite insistently from a beech tree. I was scouting around the largest beeches to see if I could find any dry beechdrop stems, but likely these trees aren’t quite old enough for beechdrops. I was happy to find some partridge-berry leaves, though; ten days ago, when my husband mowed the meadow, he saw a bobwhite–and left some cover standing for it.

I heard the Carolina wren as “Merlin” identified it, and was interested to note the bird app also recorded the presence of black-capped chickadee, bluebird, and Eastern towhee. It’s a bit early for towhees, but I’ve seen them here in past years, usually in April. And just before this recent rainstorm, I spied a killdeer in the meadow. I feel like an amateur naturalist! Anyway, forsythia are blooming. Even if we get more cold spells, I call Spring as having sprung.

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By 10 am I was assessing the vegetable patch, where I moved a couple of perennial herbs and tore out as much shotweed as I could find. Some winter weeds can stay in the soil for later season removal, but shotweed flowers early, bolts fast, and sends out thousands of seeds so effectively that winter weeding is essential. I can’t keep it out of my lawn, but I can keep it under control in the garden. Redwings, robins, and woodpeckers kept up their calling while I worked. Good to get sun on my hair and dirt under my nails–feels like the first real spring day.