Dearness
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things, Gerard Manly Hopkins
This is my world.
I am standing in rain, something slightly more than a mist. Behind me, yellow petals fall from the astonishing blaze of forsythias. At long last we have come to the greening of the year. There are the tiniest, sour-green aspen leaves dancing over my roof, tender pleated beech leaves, red, mouse-ear oak leaves. Oh my.
The trees of my forest are haloed, as are the blooming willows in the water meadow below.
Every year, I watch for something different. This time, I am following the swelling maple leaves as I watch them unfurl from the tiniest carmine to tender, verdant handkerchief-sized ones, new every day. There are the pleated beech leaves developing on my only slender beech, but also furry, silver green aspen ones are springing up.
I could look and look all day and still not take it all in.
The strangeness surprises me.
Trout lily’s mottled leaves, Bloodroot’s giant umbelliferous leaves, which do not look as if they could possibly belong to their delicate milk-white blossoms.
The Dearness
Threading through all, caroling from the pinnacle of trees, is the newly returned, astonishingly orange oriole. And I am brought, as I always am, to the dearness of birds—I see no particular species which would impress you, but every bird here is precious to me—the woodpeckers: downies, hairies, red-bellieds and pileateds, the surprising white-crowned sparrow pair, surprising because I think of them as northern birds, but this year nesting near my home: Oh sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet…, the flickers, calling for rain, or so my father told me when I was walking with him on his trails through my childhood forest.
Specially, I think of the bird with the most magical song
One spring night, while we were still living at Foley Mountain, but transitioning to our new land at Singing Meadow, Barry and I slipped over there to see the full moon climb high above the hills. Standing hand in hand, we watched until the silver light broke above the sheltering hills so that we could follow the old cartway which winds through the valley.
At last, we headed back towards our car. While Barry went ahead to check something about where the footings would go, reluctant to leave, I lingered at the edge of the forest. And, for the first time here, I heard the hauntingly beautiful song of the secretive wood thrush. To my delight, the music came from the woods right behind the land where our house would be built. Barry joined me, and we stood, wordless. The moon, the thrush, the barely stirring new aspens over our heads. How could we be so lucky as to be going to live here?
**
It has been almost twenty years since we came to Singing Meadow, and every year so far a wood thrush has returned to our woods.
Do birds sing for joy at homecoming, I wonder?
Seriveceberry image: Alfred von Mirbach