November 15, 2009
Sunday

That time of year . . .
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
                  — William Shakespeare, 1564-1616
                       English poet and playwright

Our lawn service came on Friday to do the “fall cleanup.” They gathered up and piled at the curb the not inconsiderable amount of leaves that our deciduous trees have dropped. I got used to seeing the yellows and reds on the ground and the green grass now visible again on our front lawn looks odd.

We don’t have a lot of green grass at the back of the property. The trees there were leafy and mature when the house was built in 1976. They’ve now become such a canopy in the summer that grass won’t grow underneath. They do, however, drop a lot of branches, and the crew hauled them away as well. They also cut back the forsythia that has been in place as a screen along the back property line for fifteen or twenty years. It had gotten wild and been overtaken by weedy, choking vines that were causing it to have a very brief and not very showy bloom time.

It had to be done, but the resulting devastation made me gasp. And the removal of the screen exposed some of the very things a screen is supposed to conceal: the commercial-size Dumpster on the church property that adjoins ours, as well as the blue tarp they have thrown over some old building materials, and the unfinished storage shed at the far end of their land.

This morning as I sat with my Coffee & Contemplation (C&C) I saw a drama develop at the bluebird house that is just on the other side of the ramshackle structure that was once Lynn’s playhouse.

Back in February we saw a bluebird pair scouting our back yard, checking out a decorative but (we’ve discovered) not very useful bird house I bought from an artist in Vermont. Ron spent the whole time I was in Georgia researching how best to attract and keep bluebirds. He got the kind of house they like and hung it at the height the guidebooks recommend. He bought live mealworms (which we keep in the refrigerator, beside my Nissley Holiday White wine) and set them out according to a protocol that would train the bluebirds to feel comfortable coming up on our porch.

We had a wonderful season with the bluebirds. They produced three or four sets of hatchlings, and we think that there was another pair at work elsewhere in the neighborhood that came to our feeder. The males became quite accustomed to using the feeder that we can reach just by opening a window, although the females remained cautious. When I sat at the table I could sometimes see one out the corner of my eye, and I learned not to turn my head or make a move to get up until she had finished, so as not to frighten her away.

The bluebirds don’t occupy the nesting box we have set up for them unless they have an unfledged brood inside. With the end of the breeding season they stopped coming to the feeder for mealworms, preferring to live in the trees and forage from the abundance of the summer landscape, so we haven’t seen as much of them. Occasionally, however, a sparrow or a starling will investigate the nesting box, and the response of the bluebirds is swift and decisive. They come seemingly out of nowhere, attack the invading birds, and make it clear that they want the interlopers to not just move away from the box, but to leave the Zip code.

That’s what happened this morning. Not only were there two sparrows sniffing around the house, two blue jays, much too large for the opening, were also fluttering at the hole and peering in. Suddenly, at least two bluebird pairs appeared, raising a noise and attacking. And before long, two male cardinals arrived to help.

And that’s when I realized what had happened on Friday. The cardinals — two pairs at least — have lived in the forsythia hedge for years. They eat black sunflower seeds that we offer in a hanging feeder under a tree just out of the frame to the right in the picture above. They come just after dawn and just after dusk. In the spring their scarlet bodies dart out of the yellow flowers, and in the winter the flash of their ruby wings against snow-crested branches is beautiful to behold.

On Friday, we took away their habitat. Chances are the bluebirds were living in there as well.

In all likelihood, they will hang around. There are plenty of other places for them to live, including a continuation of the tangled hedge along our neighbor’s property to the left in the picture, and their food supply remains available. The forsythia will begin to grow back in the spring, and before long, things will be as they always were.

But it must have been a shock to them, for men to come with noisy machinery and whirring blades.

Some critics think that Shakespeare’s sonnet, which on the surface seems to be in the voice of someone nearing his own death, is actually a reference to the abandoned monasteries of 16th century England, closed by Henry VIII, their buildings destroyed or left to decay and their inhabitants displaced.

I have lived in this house for thirty-three years. From time to time I think about the possibility that I could change my life, move to a townhouse community where care of the property is not my concern, or maybe follow Lynn if she at some point chooses to establish a family in a more distant city. In my wildest dreams I up and move to Wyoming for two years to pursue an MFA in creative writing. I think about those things, and I look around this house where I have been so comfortable and so happy, which is furnished and decorated in a fashion that a friend once said “is so you,” and I think, not a chance.

I regret now that the forsythia disappeared so suddenly and so completely, even though it would have been impossible to communicate to my winged friends what was happening and to offer them transitional housing until their bare ruined choirs begin to regenerate. I’m moving into a season where I can expect some upheaval and disruption in my own life. I will look to the cardinals and the bluebirds, who appear to be accomodating this sudden change, for inspiration. 

The NaBlos of the Past:

2008: I did not post on this date in 2008.

2007: The Morning When I Must Start – It was raining this morning when Ron and I started for the airport. At five after six, it was also still night. Under sunny skies and normal traffic we are maybe twenty minutes from the airport. I figured on getting to the baggage check desk at 6:30 and through security by 6:45 and have plenty of time to enjoy a bagel and cream cheese and the latest issue of Newsweek (about the pivotal year 1968) before I boarded my 8:00 flight.

2006: I did not post on this date in 2006

 

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