Segues

or Joinery

Crocus chrysantha 'Cream Beauty'

Friends of mine who are woodworkers get a little tender about joinery—tender as in touchy, but also softhearted.  They will stew and fret (and quite possibly even curse) over a mortise and tenon that doesn't nest together just right.  If you don't notice their rabbets and dadoes they will be wounded to the core.  And their rough, scarred hands will touch a well-made dovetail as if it were a newborn baby.  End joints are well enough in their way, but to someone who loves wood for its own sake, they are poor substitutes for craftsmanship.  They lack the strength and grace of interlocking connections.

It's funny that we use the word dovetail for both joinery and transitions.  In joinery a dovetail brings two pieces of wood together firmly and permanently.  Separate things become one unit.  But a dovetail can also be fluid and ephemeral, the clean segue from one set of sounds or ideas or ways of doing things to the new ones that replace them.

When I worked in radio many years ago I loved the quest for the perfect segue, the transition that would make the pairing of two songs seem almost inevitable.  Words didn't do it.  The ideas they represent are too abstract to make strong links in a sonic art.  The bridge needs to be musical:  a shared timbre, a melodic riff, a rhythmic impulse that resonates between the old song and the new.  Important as it is, the segue only lasts for a few seconds before disappearing into the flow of the music, speeding on its way through time.

I've been thinking about dovetails and transitions lately.  I finished cleaning out the central bed, paring back the blue grama grass just as the crocuses came into their own.

Last year I wondered whether flowers that bloom halfway between the solstice and the equinox are really spring flowers or winter ones—whether they're signs of change on the horizon or just lovers of the cold, plain and simple.  This year I'm seeing the crocuses more as the transition between winter and spring, a bridge that spans them both.  Their timbre resonates with the straws and browns of last year's grasses and leaves, as well as with the warmth of a strengthening sun.  They are as china-thin as a brittle winter wind or a delicate dawn sky in spring.  Clean and spare, they fill the bare, spare places in the garden after the cutting back; clean and spare, they radiate freshness like the clean, fresh growth coming in.  Winter fades out; spring fades in, with the crocuses making a graceful dovetail between them.

I also find myself thinking about joinery, though, and the way things become inextricably bound together.  The sandhill cranes that winter along the Rio Grande are migrating, you see.  They arrive in October, their calls echoing against the garden walls, when the fall-blooming crocuses open.  When the spring crocuses bloom in February I know I will again hear a throaty purr above the garden and look up to see families and clans and nations of silvery, long-winged birds circling, wheeling, riding the thermals higher and higher, until with one mind they turn irrevocably to the north.  And then they're gone.  I miss them when they go.  So when the crocuses open, I feel a small pang of sorrow on the cranes' behalf, because crocuses and cranes—they just go together.

You'd think the link between them would be one of simple association—simultaneous impressions butting up against each other like an end joint, not something to get all tender about.  To my mind, though, the connection is stronger than that, more graceful, more finely crafted.  Those migrating birds and rooted bulbs share features that interlock them together, no matter how intangibly:  the way wings and petals both catch fire in the sun, turning translucent, iridescent; the way they cup themselves around the air.  The way their fragility is deceptive:  despite delicate bones and wings like china-thin petals the cranes will journey thousands of miles in the shadow of winter; the crocuses can endure biting winds and snow and still bloom at the next touch of sun.  They are not like the tulips, holding out for a little more warmth, or the hummingbirds, waiting for nectar to flow.  They respond to the changing season, the quickened pulse of the earth, the intensifying, vibrant message of the sun, with urgency—immediacy.  For them the time to move is now.  And the time is brief.  We will enjoy them for just a few short days before they're gone.

Before they disappear into the flow of a new season, speeding on its way through time.

Of Crocuses and Cranes

or A Pang at Parting

They're leaving.  Last weekend as I sat on the patio the sandhill cranes were circling overhead, riding the thermals to gain altitude, one small flock after another joining the rising spiral in a sky streaked high with cirrus clouds.  All the while they were calling out, but their normal creaky purr sounded remote, as detached as an echo, as if their thoughts were already elsewhere.  Abruptly, the haphazard circles broke apart and stretched into the trailing limbs of a V.  The cranes locked on to magnetic North, and in a few minutes they were gone.  A little later a new flock appeared, circling, calling, distant, the hive mind already focused on summer nesting grounds.

The cranes are heading north a little early this year, I think.  I often hear them around the third week of February, but just a few, the early scouts rather than the main troops.  This wasn't the vanguard, though.  It was the full migration, a morning's worth of cranes, and not the only one.  They're leaving.  Last week I heard them go overhead by the hundreds; yesterday I heard a few flocks go by; today a few birds.  By now they may all be gone.

A mess of sandhill cranes, in the circling and mixing phase, February 2012, from my garden.  Not an inspired photo, I'm afraid, though if you're interested in sandhill cranes it might be worth clicking through to see the birds full screen.

Their departure is one of the few pangs of winter's passing for me.  I almost always take a trip down to the cranes' winter quarters at Bosque del Apache or thereabouts over Presidents' Day weekend to bid them farewell.  This year I wasn't able to manage it.  Instead I kept vigil from the patio, with crocuses for company.  It seemed fitting:  the fall-blooming crocuses had joined me in welcoming the cranes last November; how right, then, that the spring bloomers should be present to see them off again.

Funny.  In the last post I talked about crocuses nestling among the pebbles in the garden's settled beds.  The central bed, though, is still in the throes of re-planting and is largely empty and unmulched.  A small patch of crocuses there has come into bloom in the open space under a young Agastache rupestris—and it is actually blooming as a patch.*  With these flowers, blossoming on bare earth, I'm not so much aware of happy nestling and groundedness as of the way they reach skyward, stretching with all their might toward the sun.

It's as if they, too, want to travel with the cranes, as if roots and gravity are impediments, as if wanderlust burns hot inside them, and they ache with the desire to fly, to be away, to look over the garden walls to the next hill, and the one after, and the one after that, with the horizon always one siren song beyond.  It's as if they feel the pang of being left behind, the walls closing in behind them.

Bernardo Wildlife Area, NM, February 2011

The way that I do, too.
________________________

* If you want to join me in jumping up and down for joy, I won't stop you.

When you're tired of my exploring different ways of looking at a crocus, please do say so.  I don't have to reach thirteen (and won't, I promise).  In the meantime, don't miss Jean of Jean's Garden's post on different ways of viewing forsythia.  It's fascinating and delightful both, and strikes home for anyone who's ever experienced a dull, gray winter.  (Most likely, that would be you.)

Other not-to-be-missed participants are b-a-g at Experiments with Plants and HolleyGarden at Roses and Other Gardening Joys.

Watering Holes

or Birds of a Feather

When you turn on to New Mexico highway 247 in the little town of Corona, this is the sign that greets you:

U.S. Highway 285, 48 miles away.  The next event on this road isn't a town.  It's an intersection, and the next intersection—the very next time you see a cross-road—is 48 miles away.  (Bonus:  you can't get lost on NM 247.)  Not even a little county road meets you until then, nothing but the posts and crossbeams marking the dirt road entrance to a ranch here and there.  You might meet another vehicle somewhere along the road.  Then again, you might not.  You'll see small herds of black Angus lying in the blue grama grass and cholla or congregating around a stock tank; you'll probably come across some pronghorn antelope grazing.  Crows, hawks, yesterday even a badger (a badger!); toward evening maybe some mule deer.  But people?  Likely not.

The scenic route between Albuquerque and Dexter, in the southeastern corner of the state, zigzags along various roads through some 200 miles of low mountains, high plateaus, and scrub desert.  It reminds you what a large, empty place New Mexico is:  2 million people in an area larger than Poland—and half of them live in Albuquerque.  In the ranching areas heading south, there's a lot of open rangeland, and not much else.  When you do come to a town, the parking lot at the local watering hole is usually full.  Folks drive for miles to meet in company over a green chile cheeseburger and a drink, to enjoy being social animals for a while.

My sister and brother-in-law's house is a watering hole in its own way.  Their home near Dexter is the kind of place where strays drift in with the tumbleweeds and needlegrass:  cats, dogs, skunks, waifs in general, and the occasional sister looking for a Thanksgiving dinner.  You can be assured of a good meal and good company (human, feline, and canine), and hey—if you ever need de-worming, well, they probably have something for that, too.  A holiday done right is also an oasis of sorts, a pause in your journey through the year, a chance to flock together with others of your kind and be refreshed.

I've been thinking about watering holes because of the more-or-less traditional, day-after-Thanksgiving excursion that my sister, my nephew, and I made to Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge along the Pecos River east of Roswell.  Like the Rio Grande's Bosque del Apache, the wetlands there are the winter home to snow geese and sandhill cranes—possibly record numbers of them this year, as the continuing drought in Texas sends waterbirds elsewhere.  During the day they go off to feast in cornfields, but when the sun begins to set they return to the shallow waters that keep them safe from night-time predators.  Only once have I seen a sandhill crane alone, and it was standing sentry (or had maybe been put in time-out).  They are highly social creatures, impressive in numbers and in their apparent singleness of thought and purpose.

When I returned home from the holiday and went out to the garden, I startled a trio of goldfinches, which had been perched forlornly on the empty birdbath making little "tsk"ing sounds.  They don't ever bathe in the birdbath, but they do drink from it; I'm not sure what other water sources they have in the neighborhood.  Cleaned and refilled, the birdbath now welcomes them to congregate on the rim of its garden-variety wetland once more. 

And here I am, playing on the World Wide Web, that watering hole extraordinaire, where we flock together to meet in company and enjoy being social animals (of a kind) for a while.

If nothing else, driving through the desert does fixate you on water...

Late Arrivals

or The Last Hurrah

When the hummingbirds leave around the first of October, the party goes kind of flat.  Your favorite guests have gone—not that you don't care for the others, too, of course.  But the goldfinches, housefinches, sparrows, and mourning doves are the mixed nuts of the party, while the hummingbirds are the champagne.  You can count on them to add zest and a touch of magic to anything they do.  And with their explosive tempers, you never know when sparks will fly, or when a high-speed chase will ensue.  You wouldn't enjoy the party nearly as much without the other birds, but when the hummingbirds leave, they take a lot of the fizz with them.

When the sandhill cranes return near the end of the month, then, they are doubly welcome.  You hear their creaky purr sounding long before you see them, and when you first catch sight of them gliding down the Rio Grande valley,  the sun glinting off their silvery, upturned wings against an azure sky... Oh, they do know how to make an entrance.  Late arrivals though they are, they breathe new, dramatic life back into the party.  They bring a new character to it, too, a touch of elegance and dignity.

The cranes arrive about when the first of the fall-blooming crocuses opens.  In the garden, 'Wild Thing' autumn sage (Salvia greggii) may still be partying hard—if anything, blooming even more raucously than usual—but everything else is getting sleepy and quiet.  The agastache is winding down, the gaura looking tired, the West Texas grass sage ready to call it a day.  When the crocuses suddenly appear from nowhere, you welcome them with delight.  They bring a bright presence with them as they sound the last hurrah of the growing season.

Over by the patio, 'Wild Thing' is getting to the "wearing a lampshade and dancing on the table" stage—although really, it arrived in that condition and has kept up the rumpus ever since.  When the crocuses call you away from the action, inviting you over to their corner for some intense conversation, you're happy to go.  You appreciate 'Wild Thing,' you really do.  Its high-spirited loudness gives it a special place in your heart.  It's been blooming enthusiastically since April and is just as ready to spread a good time around now.  It will even still be cheerful tomorrow morning, with no (apparent) regrets. 

The crocuses, though—they'll be gone before you know it.  (Actually, last year one crocus or another bloomed through to December.  But each particular crocus is only around for a short while.)  For all their glowing color, they are fragile, ephemeral.  They remind you to make the most of every shining moment, and to enjoy their company while you can.

But don't get despondent about the passing of autumn or the fleeting nature of time or anything.


'Wild Thing' will still be partying hard tomorrow.

Taking Flight

or Against the Sun

Perhaps it's because I'm usually there on winter afternoons when the sun is low enough to catch in feathery seed heads and dried grass stems, or perhaps it's because those afternoons glow for weeks in my memory, but I always think of days in the bosque—the wooded area along the Rio Grande—as backlit days, seen against a scrim of radiant light.

I had heard some sandhill cranes fly over the garden on Saturday, headed due north, so high that they could barely be seen—so high that they weren't just moving from one cornfield to the next but had to be set for the long haul.  They were probably just the vanguard of the migration to come, but in the next few weeks the cranes will be taking flight in earnest.  I will miss their creaky purr once they go—they are among my favorites.  So, wanting to see them once more before they leave, I took advantage of the three-day weekend to spend an afternoon at the Bernardo Unit of the Ladd S. Gordon Waterfowl Complex about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. 

The cranes were there in the thousands.  The thousands.  I cannot get over the sheer numbers of them.  With my car parked on a dirt road between wetlands on one hand and a cornfield on the other, I sat on the hood for over an hour and—I can't even say "watched" them.  I experienced them flying past from pond to field.  A grouping of a dozen, then another, a few odd strays, another dozen, perhaps a hundred birds a minute.  A brief pause, enough for a handful of breaths.  Then another series of small groups, another hundred birds.  A pause.  Another group, stream after stream after stream.

And all the while that purr is filling the air, first on one side, then another, from one V higher up, another farther out—and then suddenly a group flies past in silence, so that you can hear the air whistling through their wings, beating with each downstroke.  Their shadows play along the ground, while light shimmers off their wingtips against the sun; the red spot gleams on their foreheads.

A little later, from a bird blind overlooking the wetlands:  the cranes can't see me and are no longer veering to one side or flying high in wariness.  I am surrounded by rushing wings and that primal, throaty call.  The thrill of wildness runs through me—heart leaping, I find myself wanting to shout, "Yes!  Yes!  Wait for me, I'm coming!"

(Fortunately, they are just going to the next corn field, and I can follow in my car.)

Later still, between wetlands and cornfield once again, I am waiting for sunset—a sunset free of telephone wires and rooftops and antenna towers.  Shortly before the sun skims the horizon, the curfew sounds from every voice at once, not only from the cranes but also from ducks and geese and songbirds and crows, a free-for-all of a warning bell.  The fields take flight as bird after bird returns to the water side of the road to roost, their silhouettes dark, almost shapeless against the lowering sun.

At one moment, overhead I can see all their different models of flight at once:  the frantic wingbeats of ducks, the air singing shrilly around them; the Canada geese flapping just as frantically, but on a larger scale; the steady thrum of the cranes, their wingtips turned gracefully upward even as they struggle for more height; a flock of blackbirds rising and falling in clouds, like the day's ashes blown on the wind; and above them all, a lone hawk circling, its wings from the distance looking perfectly still.

In a haze of gold, backlit by the sun, the cranes are returning home.

The Thrill of the Chase

or The Leaves Are Always Yellower on the Other Side of the Bosque

Yesterday I found myself singing Steel Rails, one of my favorite Alison Krauss songs:  "Steel rails, chasin' sunshine 'round the bend, winding through the trees like a ribbon in the wind."  I love that image of chasing sunshine—the gleam of sunlight on the railroad tracks always just ahead of you, the endless promise of brightness just ahead.  Yesterday was a sunshine-chasing kind of day.  The weather was so gorgeously warm and fine and the cottonwoods so deeply golden, that a certain itchy-footedness set in.  I ended up heading down to Bosque del Apache, a nature preserve about 85 miles south of Albuquerque, following the ribbon of cottonwoods along the Rio Grande all the way down I-25.

When I've been to the preserve before, it's been in the dead of winter, usually on a vacation day in the middle of the week, and the place has been quiet and empty.  On a beautiful Saturday shortly after the arrival of the sandhill cranes, snow geese, and other migrating birds, it was busy with life of all sorts:  serious birdwatchers, including a pair with binoculars bigger than their sunhats; serious photographers with tripods and lens hoods, including one whose setup was practically bigger than his car (and who probably found me, with my little point-and-shoot, equally entertaining); serious bicyclists bravely eating road dust and looking happy about it; not-so-serious families entranced by shimmering dragonflies; totally unserious teen-agers riding in the back of a pickup truck; serious joggers looking uncomfortably warm but virtuous.  Ostensibly, they were all there for a particular purpose, but at heart I suspect that, like me, they were really out there chasing sunshine.  (The joggers may even have caught up to it.)

Chasing sunshine:  tracking down the perfect day that's just beyond the next hill, the perfect photograph with exactly the right light, the ideal turn of phrase that's on the tip of your tongue, the cottonwood tree that's so golden it takes your breath away, the ducks (there is no elegant word for a duck) that might, perhaps, just on the offchance, for a few seconds, have their heads out of water.

Of course, the whole process can also be pretty pointless—an exercise in dream-chasing when reality is perfectly satisfactory.  As one of our "sorbet-colored sunsets" (as a local writer likes to call them) poured through the driver's side window on the way home, I found myself wondering what I had accomplished, other than to tire myself out when I could have enjoyed totally adequate—nay, the exact same—sunshine in Albuquerque, where we also have a plentiful supply of cottonwoods and as many duck bottoms to look at as anyone really needs, with a lot less dust.



I guess sometimes you just want the thrill of the chase.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

or The Stories We Tell Our Children

A friend of mine has a precocious son who, at the age of two, would declaim random facts that he had learned from books.  He would earnestly tug your hand until he had your attention, raise solemn brown eyes to yours, and then soulfully inform you that, "An octagon has eight sides."  Or that "Water boils at 100°C."  Or "Geese migrate south every winter."  He was so wonderfully pleased that the world was full of things to know, that one could know them, and then there you were.  Fortunately, he lives in Vermont, so his bubble about some of those facts won't be burst for a long time to come.

Since the sandhill cranes have begun coming home, I've been thinking about the extent to which most of the stories we tell about the natural world in this behemoth of a country really only apply to relatively small portions of it.  If we were asked, say, whether Canada geese migrate south every winter, we would nod enthusiastically in agreement—even if they don't do that where we live.

Colorado, for example, is hardly the tropics, yet as harsh as its winters can be, most of its Canada geese do not migrate south.  They don't go anywhere at all.  Ever.  They just move from one park or lake or cornfield to another and honk for chortles in passing.  Many was the time as a young child that I would point to a V of geese in November (or December, or January) and exclaim, "Look!  They're flying south for the winter!"  And one long-suffering parent or another would say, "Actually, that's northwest," or "Nope, due east."  I learned a great many directions from Canada geese (and my parents), but south was never among them.

The snow geese, on the other hand, do migrate south, and the bosques sparkle with them at this time of year.  That is to say, this is the south to which the snow geese migrate.  Migration doesn't always mean away.  In fact, in most of the country, autumn is not the tidy season of departures summed up in "Geese migrate south every winter."  Some do, some don't; some stay, some leave, some arrive—but that's hardly the stuff that word-and-picture books suitable for precocious two-year-olds (which are most likely published in the northeast, where geese migrate south every winter) are made of.

Or take the boiling point of water.  I vividly remember a high school chemistry experiment that began with the directions, "Bring water to 100°C."  We lit our bunsen burners and started the water to heating and waited and waited and waited for it to get to 100°, while our teacher prowled around in his lab coat making knowing wisecracks every time one of our beakers would get to 95° and then...stop.  We never could get it any hotter, and meanwhile the water was boiling away to nothing (while we enjoyed a pleasant facial steam in the process).

Well, as we learned, water boils at 100°C only at sea level.  The boiling point drops by about one degree for every thousand foot gain in elevation, and in Denver, the Mile High City, the boiling point of water is 95°.  Our textbooks didn't mention that little fact; our teacher just let us know that the facts it did mention didn't apply to us, and on we went. 

Unless you live in the relatively small area of the country where received wisdom actually works, you quickly learn that most of the wisdom doesn't apply to you—but that doesn't mean you don't receive it.  You recite "April showers bring May flowers" every spring, even though the rainy season isn't until August; you associate snow with snowballs and snowmen, even though the snow in your area is generally too dry and powdery to pack; you firmly believe that Platonic ideal geese fly south every winter, even though "your" geese stick around all year.  All these little ways of describing the world—you accept them as true, perhaps even as the standard, while you also learn that they have nothing to do with, you know, reality.  In the back of your mind you just add the footnotes and the fine print that says "except..."

An octagon, on the other hand, really does have eight sides.*

__________________

* Except in alternate dimensions and universes, where normal rules of the space-time continuum do not apply.

In Which We Are Excited By Birds

or A First Time for Everything

Oh, what a confusing subtitle:  we haven't even gone anywhere yet, and already we are off track.  To clarify, this is not the first time I have been excited by the sight of birds, even though I am not a bird-watcher.  I may not spend my days standing in dense woods looking with binoculars up into the tops of thickly foliaged trees for a tiny brown speck of avian life with a distinctive eye-ring, but if birds conveniently come and present themselves, I am happy to admire them.  Every year at about this time, some of my favorite birds pass by, and the first sighting of the season is always cause for celebration.  Actually, it's not the sight that's so moving at all.  It's the sound—but we're getting ahead of ourselves again.

I've been thinking about the difference between "autumn" and "fall" for no better reason than that...well, frankly, for no particular reason at all.  When writing I usually prefer "autumn"—I like its look on the printed page, its sound, and the fact that it isn't focused as wholeheartedly on leaves as "fall" is; besides which the bonus little "n" at the end is just so charming.  Perhaps because the preferred word here in the US has changed over the years from autumn to fall, autumn always seems to suggest the antique to me in ways that resonate fittingly with the year's aging.  On the other hand, I love that "fall" is really a verb.  Fall and spring are such active seasons, when we move rapidly from growth to sleep or back again to growth; it's only right that they should both be represented by verbs.  Summer, on the other hand, may look like an active season, but it's not a season of change in the same way.  It is a season of surface activity that window dresses only one primary event:  the growing season.  And winter—the other noun season—is of course a time of lying fallow and of rest.

For some reason I've been especially aware this year of the little events of fall.  (Maybe that's a useful distinction between a verb and a noun season:  the difference between activity and events.  Summer has lots of activity but very few events; fall has less activity but events a-plenty.)  I've been aware of all of the lasts, certainly:  the last hummingbird, the last basil harvest, the last use of the swamp cooler, soon the last early morning coffee on the patio, and hopefully the last of those endless "waterbugs."  But more so all of the firsts:  the first wolf spider seeking shelter indoors, the first moment that it's cool enough to plant garlic, then flowering bulbs, the first golden cottonwood leaf, the first time I reach for a jacket, the first lighting of the furnace pilot, soon the first frost, then the first killing frost, possibly someday the first snow.  All of these mark the progress of the season until we find ourselves knee-deep in autumn.

But my very favorite first, the one I start anticipating from the moment the rabbit brush blooms, is the first time the sandhill cranes fly over.  Thousands upon thousands of them winter here in New Mexico, whether along the Pecos River at Bitter Lake Wildlife Refuge or on the Rio Grande, most notably at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge but even here in Albuquerque at the Rio Grande Nature Center and the Open Space Visitors Center (and anyplace they can find a cornfield in between).

Festivals—weekend-long, even week-long—mark their arrival.  We love our cranes.  (Correction:  those of us who are not farmers with cornfields love our cranes.)  Their call—a kind of creaky purr—is one of the most wonderful sounds I know of (if you choose to click the sandhill cranes link above, be sure to listen to the recording).  To hear it from dozens of throats at once and then look up and see these large, graceful, delicately-boned birds circling hundreds of feet overhead, glinting silver in the sunlight, riding the thermals to gain altitude, or flying in a slow-winging V (with none of the frantic flapping the geese engage in), is to become homesick for the power of flight.  When I hear them leaving in spring I am always smitten hard with wanderlust; hearing them arrive in fall, on the other hand, is a kind of homecoming.  It is lovely to live in a place where autumn signals not only the departure of life but also its arrival; I suspect, however, that the appeal of the cranes lies also in that homing signal, received just as the days are closing in and the temperatures are dropping and the neighbors light their first piñon fire of the season and we all want to be nestled someplace warm in any case.  At such a time, anything that radiates "homecoming" is bound to be welcomed with fervor.

I heard the first cranes last weekend.

Now it's really fall.