Week 11Summer Week 11
Like them, I have sought to comfort and / so be comforted.
—Vievee Francis, “Like Jesus to the Crows”
September, and the hardwood trees are still bright green. Temperatures remain in the nineties, feeling nothing like fall, but the chipmunks have already lost their minds. If I spill the birdseed, it’s no time before they are up the spindles and onto the deck, stuffing their cheeks to the point of comedy and then rushing back to their burrows under the house, stocking up for winter.
Chipmunks are not cooperative creatures. Except during mating season, or to bark out warnings of a predator on the prowl, they forsake the companionship of their own kind. Their unconnected tunnels spread like arteries beneath the crawl space of our house, but I rarely see them in summer. Now, with autumn coming on, they are scooping up seeds like warm-blooded Roombas, ignoring one another, maneuvering under my chair and between my feet as if I weren’t there.
The chipmunks are not alone in preparing for a changing season. Hot as it still is, the winter-flocking birds—starlings and robins and blue jays and crows—are already beginning to gather again. All summer they kept to their individual tasks, building their nests and tending their young, but their fledglings are more or less self-sufficient now. After months of near silence in the shady woods, the crows are back to talking among themselves.
The last of the milky magnolia petals are going brown, and the bees are working the remaining pollen with all the focus of a lonely soul at a dive bar’s last call. A few lightning bugs still wink beneath the trees at dusk, but the cicadas that have been singing in the branches all summer are beginning to weaken and lose their grip. I once saw a cardinal, her head nearly bald from her August molt, snatch a fallen cicada from the grass and carry it across three yards before disappearing with it behind a neighbor’s house. I could hear the cicada crying out as it was borne away.
The fall before we married, Haywood and I went camping outside Berea, a college town in the Appalachians of central Kentucky. Poking around the town’s art galleries, we found a potter who adorned the edges of her hand-thrown dishes with subtle reminders of the earth from which the clay had come—a four-petaled flower, a stalk of grass gone to seed. We fell in love with it. My mother had been after us to choose a tableware pattern for our still-nonexistent wedding registry, but these dishes were so much nicer than anything in a department store. Each plate, each bowl and mug was clearly part of a set and at the same time utterly unique. Irreplaceable. The potter agreed to take orders from our friends and family members, keeping track of who ordered what, and some months later our beautiful wedding dishes arrived.
When our first child was performing the usual gravitational studies of toddlerhood, tossing everything off the table, we learned the hard way that our irreplaceable plates needed to be put away till our son—and, later, his brothers—was old enough not to destroy them. It wasn’t until our youngest sons were packing to move that I suddenly remembered our wedding dishes, still in the attic decades after we hauled them up there. We gave our sons the ordinary white plates they had grown up with and installed our wedding dishes in the kitchen cupboard. We eat on those plates every night now. Sometimes, in the quiet house, we remark on their loveliness and remember to each other how they came to be ours. We have not yet learned how to cook for only two.
Abundance is the story of approaching autumn, in our lives and in our yard. The southern arrowwood bushes are adorned with bright blue berries, and the branches of the sugar maples are thick with seeds. From a distance it looks as though the trees have turned brown long before it is time for them to go golden. Every limb, every twig is dense with seeds, a load so heavy that the lower branches are nearly brushing the ground. It’s a mast year for maples, and I wonder if they somehow know how many other nearby trees have been felled this year and so are bearing seeds enough for them, too.
The drooping petals of the coneflowers are dry and brittle now, and the goldfinches are tearing apart the seed crowns, picking each seed from its spiky carapace. This is a garden for pollinators, so when I remember to, I deadhead the flowers to force the plants to keep producing blooms instead of seeds. I never deadhead the coneflowers, though, for there are few things more beautiful than the sight of a goldfinch still wearing his summer finery and riding a coneflower tossing in the autumn wind.
A new slant of light signals the changing season even in this humid heat. The ruby-throated hummingbirds know it and are bulking up for their long flight, guarding every nectar source before they go. The dominant bird, a young male, takes up his patrol from the pokeweed branches, where he has a clear view of the large pollinator patch in the front yard and the smaller patch next to the driveway. In this way he can swoop upon any encroachers and chase them entirely out of the yard.
Up at the cabin, where there are more hummingbirds and also more branches to perch on, the birds engage in a ceaseless aerial war that rises high into the trees, a chittering swirl observable from any window in the place. Soon they will all make their way south to their wintering grounds in Central America. Some will go by land. Others will fly directly across the Gulf of Mexico. In the meantime, they fight for dominance over the feeders. Adding more feeders does nothing to resolve their disputes. There is plenty of food to go around, plenty of insects and plenty of seeds, but wild creatures have no interest in sharing.
For us, too, change is almost always a source of dislocation, but if nature teaches us anything, it’s that nothing prevents the passage of time, the turning of the seasons. It might be a long time coming, as Sam Cooke so gorgeously sang, but a change is gonna come. I take his words as a pledge.