birds – In the Woods

whenever we’re not looking

5.11.26 ~ Race Point Beach, Provincetown, Massachusetts
photo by Jon

In May I took a whirlwind trip to Cape Cod and Connecticut to scatter and bury Tim’s ashes. Five intense days of sharing memories and enjoying the family and friends and activities that Tim used to love. It’s taking me a while to recover but I’ve decided to share a few pictures here to help me remember.

On May 11th, 27 of us headed out to Race Point Beach in Provincetown where I scattered some of Tim’s ashes on the beach where he spent many of the happiest days of his life. Tim’s brother Dan shared stories of their childhood adventures in P’town. And many in the gathering took turns spontaneously sharing their favorite memories. Moments after I scattered Tim’s ashes, we heard the particular call of a laughing gull flying overhead, gently reminding me of Tim’s wonderful sense of humor.

While we were there we took advantage of the opportunity, with all of Tim’s remaining brothers gathered, Dan, Matt, Jed, and Josh, to scatter some of their father’s ashes. Erik had died back in 2008 and also had close ties to Provincetown. And Tim’s cousin Allegra scattered some of her mother’s ashes there on the sand, too. Her mother was Tim’s beloved Aunt Delorma, who died in January, only three months after him.

We all have such happy memories of vacationing at the family home in Provincetown. The current owner of 180 Bradford St. was very gracious to allow us to leave two memorial blown glass hearts in the garden. Allegra sculpted them, with some of their ashes inside, the red one is Tim’s.

The next day, Fran, Allegra and I had an amazing family history adventure, locating 72B Commercial St., where Tim and Dan’s 2nd-great-grandparents, Elijah & Zipporah Rodgers had lived. When Tim and Dan were kids they were taken to the house and met the widow of his great-granduncle, Capt. Neadom Oscar Rodgers (1876-1953), Aunt Lil, and Neadom’s son Oscar. (Oscar was Aunt Lil’s stepson.) Allegra was also taken there, as a very small child, on a separate occasion. Tim showed me the place on our honeymoon but my memory of its location got very fuzzy.

As we were checking it out a man came down the grass-covered lane it was located on and, after explaining who I was, I asked him a few questions. One thing led to another and the next thing we knew we were sitting in the dining room of an elderly neighbor who has lived there his whole life and remembered Aunt Lil Rodgers and playing in the lane. Aunt Lil died in 1979. The information we got from him led me to find more information about the house and its occupants online.

That afternoon I took a walk on Beech Forest Trail with my sons and nieces and nephew and some of their spouses. (No one in my generation was up for the hike!) I told them the story of Tim & me taking this walk on our honeymoon, and how we took it again after getting our first digital camera in 2009. The picture of the squirrel on the sidebar of this blog came from that walk, and was my first taste of enjoying nature photography. Sadly, this time, I, and some of the others, came back with a tick.

I’m thinking the universe may be trying to tell me that fewer nature walks and more genealogy research will be my new direction in life…

At the end of this mile-long loop walk my sons discovered a poem by one of my favorite poets under glass on the top of a picnic table. They brought me back to see it and it seemed like a beautiful reflection of my mood about the changes in focus I’m going through in my life.

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now – whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade – surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.
~ Mary Oliver
(Can You Imagine?)

…to be continued

that veery’s song

“Veery. Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary. Lenox, Massachusetts”
by Paul Danese

Ah, Henry, I’ll wager that you, scribbling notes in your cabin by the pond, never worried about the difficulty scientists might have reading your atrocious handwriting some 150 years later. How could you have known they’d unearth those notebooks, use your records of 1850’s bloom time to compare with ours today? To sound the alarm about Walden warming? But were you alive today and ambling about your pond, I’d wager you’d notice what’s already a little off: blueberries and trillium in flower and maples aleaf more than two weeks early. You’d know that means earlier caterpillars, which means decreased food for the birds who can’t resynch their calendars and migrate north while food is still being served, which means, among other things, that veery’s song you loved to listen to (vee-ur, veer) might grow increasingly rare.
~ Barbara Hurd
(Listening to the Savage: River Notes & Half-Heard Melodies)

Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hillsides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the whip-poor-will, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood pewee, the chewink, and other birds.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(Walden)

freedom within

“Portrait of a Little Girl” by Jahn Ekenæs

They shut me up in Prose —
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet —
Because they liked me “still” —

Still! Could themself have peeped —
And seen my Brain — go round —
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason — in the Pound —

Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Look down opon Captivity —
And laugh — No more have I —

~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #445)

what bird did you see

My dear sister-in-law, Fran, and I attended a Dar Williams concert on Tuesday, February 10, at the A. J. Fletcher Opera Theater, in Raleigh, with Seth Glier opening. We had such a great time listening to her wonderful story-telling melodies. The little anecdotes she shared between songs were very amusing and heartwarming.

The words to one tune in particular, from her new Hummingbird Highway album, resonated with me deeply, especially at this time in my life:

In the parking lot the dark becomes two panes of light
There’s a charcoal slash of ocean and a smoky plank of sky
Now they’re changing colors
Laurel green with alabaster,
Agate blue with snowy aster.
And as the blues are brightening and the cars are coming in,
You see a seagull weave a path upon the wind,
Like a thread that can begin and then begin
While the world just goes about its day
As the ground beneath you falls away
In this time when there’s no time, there is no place to be,
What bird did you see?

You think a goldfinch is enchanting and you know you told her,
Now a goldfinch lands above you like it’s on your shoulder,
Yesterday you saw a red-tailed hawk
Around a corner proud and still
Out of place, a sentinel.
And at the window when sparrows flew away,
A single cardinal seemed to know he had to stay,
He had to be the bright vermillion in the gray,
While the world just goes about its day
As the ground beneath you falls away
In the presence of this absence, was there one bright flash, a simple song, a revery
What bird did you see?

And You will feel the summer sun and autumn rays,
You will return to busy friends and busy days but now,
In this time between the here and the hereafter there’s a feather at your door,
Love will find its way,
In the very life you have today,
You’ll go back to what you understand,
Maybe unbelieve
But tell me now, what bird did you see?
It’s okay to know it’s me.

~ Dar Williams
♫ (What Bird Did You See) ♫

sore must be the storm

The Homestead
image credit: Emily Dickinson Museum

On April 9, the Emily Dickinson Museum received notice that a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, had been terminated the preceding day. In 2023, the Museum was awarded a grant of $117,000 by IMLS to digitize records related to its newly catalogued collection and to locate related information in other repositories with Dickinson family materials. The notice states, “IMLS has determined that your grant is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program.”
Our work to amplify Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice – by opening her family homes to visitors, by interpretive and educational use of her family’s material legacy, by holding up her enduring poetry – continues with support from the Museum’s friends and our unending gratitude.
~ The Emily Dickinson Museum
(Facebook, April 16, 2025)

I was sad, but not surprised, to read this Facebook post from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. We visited this wonderful place many years ago, probably a few years before I started writing this blog, but never got around to visiting again. My memories of that day are a bit fuzzy now, but I was in awe of seeing her little desk in her bedroom in the Homestead, and could feel her presence, sitting there, looking out her window, and writing her poems. The docent told us she loved to bake and would often lower a basket of goodies down outside her window to delight the neighborhood children. The tour also took us along a path to see her brother’s house next door, The Evergreens. There Tim got so distracted examining the unusual hinges and latches on the doors that he was scolded by a docent for lagging behind the group. The museum has been working hard since we were there to keep restoring the houses to look even more like how it was when Emily lived there with her family. Wishing them the best as they continue with help from their many friends!

And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm —
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #314)

in the slanting light

10.18.24 ~ Pritchard Park
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

There’s hardly a spot of color on the hardwood trees in our yard, but the light is glorious, as it always is in October, and the signs of fall are unmistakable. ….. Always, when nature works as nature must, there are joys for every grief, a recompense for every sorrow. ….. Night falls earlier with each passing day now, but the recompense of shorter days is the glorious light of October. I wish you could see what happens to the magnificent colors of berry and bird and flower in the slanting light of October.
~ Margaret Renkl
(The New York Times, October 14, 2024, “Growing Darkness, October Light: A Backyard Census”)

These pictures were taken on Friday morning, the day we stood in line at the Chapel Hill Public Library to vote. Afterwards we took a walk on the trails in the woods surrounding the library. North Carolina has early voting, something new to us. Before we left Connecticut we had voted in favor of bringing early voting to our old state. I wonder if it passed. Our habit was to get up early on election day and get to the polling place before it opened. We were always near first in line.

Something new for the citizens of NC is having to show a photo ID when they check in to vote. We always had to do that back in CT. It’s so interesting getting to know the different ways the governments of different states run things, something I never thought about before, having lived in only one state my whole life.

As I stood in line I reflected on how encouraging it was to learn that our 39th President, Jimmy Carter, made the effort to vote while in hospice care at the age of 100. He was the first president I ever voted for. My thoughts also returned to the sacrifice so many of our ancestors made for us in the Revolutionary War, so that we could have the right to vote today. As the granddaughter of Ukrainian immigrants on one side and the descendant of several Mayflower passengers on the other, my complex place in American history has always fascinated me. While appreciating the myriads of reasons Europeans have crossed the Atlantic over the centuries to make better lives for themselves here, I also feel deep regret for the harm they have caused to the original people who lived, and still live here.

When we moved down here I started looking for southern nature writers who might help me get acquainted with my new environment. I’ve become a big fan of Margaret Renkl, who lives in Tennessee at the same southern latitude as we do. Her lyrical writings resonate with the seasonal observations I’m experiencing here. I’ve read three of her books, checked out from the same beautiful library where we voted, and enjoy her occasional editorials in the New York Times.

I tried to capture some of the slanting light of October to match Renkl’s words. This is our second autumn down south and the way it is unfolding feels much more familiar now, it’s starting to feel more like home.

sculpure at Chapel Hill Public Library parking lot

that sweet monotony

“A Childhood Idyll” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, -if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass; the same hips and haws on the autumn’s hedgerows; the same redbreasts that we used to call “God’s birds,” because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?
~ George Eliot
(The Mill on the Floss)

It’s been five years since I last shared a William-Adolphe Bouguereau painting, which surprised me because I used to post them fairly often. His pictures of children are so sweet and this one seemed to go along very well with George Eliot’s words.

I spent my childhood experiencing that sweet monotony, endless days playing in the oh-so-familiar woods surrounding the house my parents built. I can still close my eyes and picture the snow-covered hemlocks, the magical swamp and vernal pools, the baby garter snakes sunning themselves on my father’s stone walls in summer, the gray shed, the lovely chestnut tree, and the tiny bluets blooming behind the hens-and-chicks in my mother’s rock garden. My own childhood idyll.

a true autumn day

“Autumn Morning at Eragny” by Camille Pissarro

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
~ George Eliot
(Letter to Maria Lewis, October 1, 1841)

~ autumn equinox ~
(2:49 am eastern time zone)

birds and sleigh bells

You wouldn’t think it was spring, Austin, if you were at home this morning, for we had a great snowstorm yesterday, and things are all white this morning. It sounds funny enough to hear birds singing and sleigh-bells at a time. But it won’t last long, so you needn’t think ’twill be winter at the time when you come home.
~ Emily Dickinson
(Letter to William Austin Dickinson, March 24, 1852)

Springtime snowstorms were not uncommon in southern New England a hundred seventy-one years ago. They happened often enough when I was a child, sixty odd years ago. I prepared this post several years ago, hoping that we might get one again and I could use Emily’s words to go along with the weather. But it was not to be and since this is my last spring in New England I decided to post it now, in fond memory of times gone by.