Week 6Summer Week 6
Now is the night one blue dew.
—James Agee, “Knoxville: Summer, 1915”
The world swells with fecundity, thick days and thicker nights pooling with song: cicada and tree frog and cricket and a thousand others I can’t name. In the corners of our windows, spiders profit in the damp.
The fierce hummingbirds, who come to my feeders only every now and then in early summer, are back in earnest by late July, waging battles among the zinnias and the coneflowers and the bee balm to protect this territory. All day long, the bumblebees sink into blossoms, an embrace that looks so much like ecstasy it sometimes feels indecent to watch.
My favorite summer song is the cry of fledglings hollering for help from tree branches and the thickest shrubs, and sometimes in plain view from a fence post or a mailbox. They seem to be wholly unaware of the dangers they might be attracting. When he was little, I told my middle son that a mockingbird fledgling was calling to its mama, “Feed me! Feed me!”
“To a cat I fink it sounds like ‘Eat me! Eat me!’ ” he said.
I love to hear the young jays screaming for a meal, as demanding as human teenagers perfectly capable of making their own sandwiches but hoping a sandwich will miraculously appear even so. “Is there anything in this house to eat?” my sons would ask, standing in front of a well-stocked refrigerator. If I pointed out all the options, they would clarify: “Is there anything in this house to eat that’s already cooked?”
I laugh at the ungainly young crows, not yet so sleek as their parents, bumbling along on the ground, croaking like frogs and stumbling like drunks. I once saw a fledgling crow flip upside down while trying to balance on a power line. It dangled there for a moment, perhaps considering a poor flyer’s limited options: let go and hit the ground, or flap and hang on, hoping to right itself. This youngster chose the former but lifted off again immediately after its graceless landing. Feathers can apparently do more than lift a bird into the air. They can also break its fall.
In July, there’s hardly a reason to feed the birds in this yard that is well stocked with bugs and seeds, but I sometimes feed them even so, just to see them up close, their colors as bright as any summer flower. The red wasps, too, have babies to feed and help themselves when I set out mealworms for the bluebirds. I used to shoo them away—bluebirds respect the dagger of a red wasp as much as I do and won’t come near any feeder a wasp has claimed—but I don’t do that anymore. The world is fertile. In this yard, for now, there’s enough to go around.