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Precious Bugs

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It’s the time of year when spider webs waft through the air from impossible heights in the oddest of places and often capture falling leaves along the way. Of course there is a spider somewhere responsible for each of these, but what I see is a magic leaf, seeming to hang and dance but not fall, held in the air by an invisible tether. I saw two of these instances today, in very different places, so I took a picture of the second–a sourwood leaf suspended above our road. Because this September the webs I’ve run into have been few and far between. I had to remove a very scary spider from my room before I went to bed last night (not pictured). This one was of the wolf variety. Not a web-maker. More of a marauding hunter. It was tricky to get at it with the empty yogurt container (my bug removal device of choice) both because it was near the corner of the wall and because I had to move a floor lamp to reach him, which I did as carefully as I could, praying he wouldn’t move. Just a foot or so from him was a crevice he could easily hide in, between painted cinderblock wall and concrete floor (no baseboards in this room). And I had to crouch and reach without throwing a shadow across him. Slap of plastic onto wall then scrape of cardboard square sliding between plastic and wall, and he was with me traveling to a new home outside the front door. All of this happened swiftly (I’ve moved hundreds of spiders from inside my house to out over the decades I’ve lived here), but this year such encounters have been particularly focusing for me. I think it is because there are fewer of them. Insects, that is. I used to be afraid of insects. They seemed to be everywhere, and I knew nothing about them. Now, I’m seeking them out. I am thrilled to see them, mostly. Especially when they are outside, like the caterpillar pictured above, who looks like she’s wearing a fancy dress costume. Apparently she belongs to a group that has earned the title “dangerous saddleback caterpillars,” and will turn into what is unpoetically called a slug moth (about as handsome as the name implies). But I didn’t know that when I was inspired to photograph her in her… Continue reading

Doily Bowl Spiders in Spring

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Bowl and Doily Spider webs seem magical, spun during a warm night in early spring and visible at first light because the dew was heavy. On two days in a row, in two different places, I happened to time my walk perfectly: the moist air made the exquisite architectural enterprises shine as if powered by their own light. A delightful though precarious synchrony of physics and biology, this integration of light, water, spider spit, and twig. And poignant, since the fact that I could see the webs meant that they would likely fail in their intended purpose. Covered by water droplets, backlit by slanting-in sunshine, they were beautiful but useless. Maybe not useless. Perhaps, as the day warms, the strands will dry into invisibility, maybe even before the insects that the spiders want to catch warm up enough to fly. In my thirty years wandering their territory, I’ve never seen a Bowl and Doily Spider, probably because I only remember that they exist when their webs are impossible to miss, when both spider and prey are absent. I have yet to see a dry web with prey caught in it. I may know what they are called, but these spiders are a mystery to me. What does any human really know about the intentions or fates of these unseen multitudes? I only know that when I witness their artistry revealed by a trick of light and water, the vision always stirs mixed feelings in me. Joy from the heart-stopping beauty; awe at the spiders’ craft; empathy, even sadness, for what seems like fervent hopes dashed. Here is a poem I wrote in 2005 about the metaphors conjured by a field of glowing webs I walked through one January morning. At the time it seemed to me that the spiders had been duped by a weather pattern that might destroy not just the webs but the spiders. Bowl and Doily Spiders in January (2005) You labored all through the long, strangely warm January night to be finished before the morning mist-rising time, as if it were spring already. But snow ended this false start at sunrise. On my way to feed the goats, Tiny crystals hung in the centers of your webs: hundreds of glistening doily bowls suspended amidst dead grass blades and the damp stalks of last year’s wildflowers. It occurred to me that you might starve, your webs too… Continue reading

In Praise of February

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It’s about to start again—spring, I mean, in all its frantic frenzy. The birds have begun singing courting songs in the mornings despite the birdbath water being solid frozen. Daffodil buds may be shut tight, but their stems grew two inches earlier this week, when we had one of those weirdly warm nights in the midst of what has been a graciously, seasonally cold six weeks.  Before spring springs, I want to honor winter, praise the quiet glory of the winter woods, a time of shapely silhouettes, of shiny, silent stillness. What inspired me to write was the walk Scott and I took a week ago to the skunk cabbage realm, guessing that there might be blooms. They grow in an out-of-the-way bit of bottomland spreading out from a small stream that runs through a forest on a neighbor’s land. All the way there, the forest floor was a smooth orange-brown mottled mat of frozen leaves. It was unusually pressed down and uniform because of the extended snow cover in January, which had melted and refrozen several times before disappearing altogether a few days ago. It was a look we remembered from another decade, a more wintery look than we’ve witnessed in years. On our skunk cabbage walk, we enjoyed a beautifully open, mostly frozen February forest. Being a creature that listens to day length more than temperature, the cabbage plants had already pushed up their hooded-alien-head blooms in the thawed places of the bog. It was exciting to try and guess at where the ground was frozen enough to hold us as we wandered into the muck where the cabbage lives. We folded ourselves close to the ground to take photos (which, though we take them almost every year, are never nearly as interesting as the real thing). We headed home a different way and happened into a new patch of woods, for us. This is saying something, since we’ve been wandering these forested hills for thirty years. We knew the fields below and the ridge running parallel, but we’d never walked through those actual acres. The size and height of the trees enthralled us, and we noticed a broad diversity as we moved among them up and down the folded hills. There was a secret feeling to the place, no visible evidence of human disturbance. No mounds or trench scars from skidders, no stumps from previous logging. The… Continue reading

Grandmama Oak

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Good morning, Grandmama Oak! And what a lovely, misty, mild December morning it is. I wonder, did you feel those turkey toes scratching in the dirt before you felt my footsteps descending through the forest?  I spooked the gang as I opened the east pasture gate at the edge of the woods. A dozen or more of them scooted off, and several opened their wings and stepped into flight where the hill sloped steeply beneath them on your north side. They’ve landed again, and I hear them moving far below us, their footsteps percussive in the crackling, leafy duff. If it were raining, I’d say they sound like water falling from trees; if it were windy, they could be the music of still-hanging leaves rustling on twigs. I come here for the chance to be still. You are my mentor for that. I’m sure you are feeling this rare wet air moistening your dry limbs and seeping slowly into crevices against your trunk. It must be a welcome feeling in what has been a dry winter until now. From my bench-seated view, I can see four very long, quite dead limbs among your many live ones. Still attached to your trunk, they are thick as my torso, thicker than most tree trunks in the forest surrounding you. One of them, if standing straight up, would be as tall as my house. The dead ones are small in number compared to your live limbs. But you had no dead limbs when I first met you nearly thirty years ago. Sometimes when I’m with you, I try to imagine you in your earlier life, before me, way back when you were at the start of your “growing up” years. You sprouted two hundred years before I met you. And in my time here (as your dead limbs testify), you have crested over into the “growing down” part of your life, which could take two or three hundred more years. Since you are on our land, you’re safe from being cut down by a person, at least. For now. But other humans and less obvious foes may challenge you after I’m gone. I plead with the universe as I gaze at you: let Grandmama Oak have a full life, the rarest thing for any tree in the world today. This morning’s fog shrouds you. The misty air rolls through the world behind you… Continue reading

A Long, Long Fall

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“What color would you say they are?” my husband asked yesterday as we were sitting at the small table in our living room, eating lunch by the window. He was writing in the journal we keep about what’s happening outside. It was December 10th, and bright red, orange, and burgundy leaves from the Bradford Pear tree were scattered all over the yard, shining out against the muted browns of our other yard trees’ leaves, most of which were raked away two weeks ago. He was asking about the leaves still on the tree, though. The last to let go of her green, the pear tree shifts colors as she fades, her leaves taking on just about every autumn hue before her leaves finally drop and eventually fade. Her twigs only began to let go about ten days ago. At the moment when Scott asked that question, the sunlight backlit the smattering of leaves still left on her branches and made them glow. I told him neon-peach. The pear is my autumn clock. Winter is officially here when she’s finally bare. Or at least that’s how it has been since I first met her in 1992. This decorative pear was planted in the front yard by my husband‘s ex father-in-law a few years before this place became my home. The type is non-native and generally considered invasive. From where I stand in the yard today, I see the pear tree’s sapling children in several places, all still holding some peachy leaves. They look like harmless shrubs, but I know better. I won’t let them reach flowering age. Today is cloudy, so I’m chastising myself for not coming out yesterday in the sunshine to take photographs. As I move around taking photos with my phone, I hear the train–another sign I associate with winter coming. When the train crosses the James River, the water and cliffs south of the river make the sound echo so it sounds close once the leaves have dropped in the forests between here and there. This year, the time of colorful, falling leaves came late and lingered long, longer than I can remember for more than a decade. But memory is a tricky thing. What I do know, though, is that the white snow drop flowers bloomed in November, and they are still blooming. These early spring bulbs should bloom on the other side of Winter Solstice…. Continue reading

Ritual to Release the Year

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I remember last spring, not only did Covid rip the rug out from under humanity, but a record high number of friends were experiencing cruel twists of fate, from long-standing marriages unravelling, to cancer diagnoses, to the death of loved ones. At one point I sat down and made a list of all the upheaval and unwanted events that were transpiring simultaneously, thinking that doing so might by some magic send them away. I was wrong, of course, and left off the list-making long before it was complete. On December 23, before the cold snap pushed the temperatures below freezing for several nights in a row, I noticed that a coneflower in my south side garden had recently shot up new bloom stalks, a few of which were attempting to birth flowers, the petals not quite formed but promising, their orange-purple color still tucked in close to the center. Ah, I thought, yet another unwelcome, unprecedented anomaly for 2020. Here was a May-blooming plant trying to flower in late December, a “bad timing” event to add to all the others the year had brought already. Nonetheless, I was careful not to say anything morose in front of the flowers. They are only trying to respond to environmental cues, to information from a source that used to be reliable. It was a year of unprecedented loss for so many, even if (as I managed to do most of the time) one kept the dominant discourse on domestic politics and social unrest out of earshot. So here it is, the last evening of the calendar year 2020, as we measure time in the Western World, and I am using this post as my ritual release of this riotous, unrepeatable (I hope) year. Welcome, 2021. We’ve been waiting for you! Continue reading

Thank you, Dogwood

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I can’t decide whether it’s their polka-dotted chests, eager dark eyes, the mighty way they rip the berries off the twigs, or how fast they swallow that bright red sugar bomb that I like most. I’m a bird addict. Knowing they’re there by a sound or a glimpse or even a shaking branch brings instant joy. Right now I think it’s the sound that won’t let me go: the swift drumming wings of nearly-weightless bodies dodging their way through branches to alight then toss themselves into the air again. Such rapid, acrobatic flight! They are wild, crazy flyers, not afraid of me as spring birds are when I stand on the back porch so close to the dogwood trees. For these birds, our yard is a purposeful stop in a long journey with a tight schedule. I was lucky enough to get a close up view of several wood thrushes (polka dot chests, coppery backs, not pictured) because they were close to the kitchen window when I was making my tea this morning. From the back porch I’ve also seen a black and white warbler, a not-like-any-that-I-know woodpecker, and two kinds of mainly yellow birds, one of which I’m pretty sure was a female Scarlet tanager (see blurry picture above). But I’ve given up on the ID-ing. I’m just in awe of the Dogwood for having all those tantalizing berries. Oh, here are more birds —five, seven, more like twelve of them. It’s hard to count the shaking branch ends, the tufts of trembling leaves that hide their bodies as they come and go. I’ve tried to photograph, to video, but watching is what I end up doing, phone in pocket, binoculars hanging unused in my left hand. How can I do anything else? Dark is coming. Tomorrow morning the berries and the birds may be gone. Continue reading

Looking for Big Trees

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I knew I wasn’t going to save the lovely beings I was walking among, but I do think they made a big impression on the young photographer walking behind me and taking pictures (by young I mean at least ten years younger than me). She was not an experienced hiker, but very game (”I’m not used to walking where there’s no trail,” she said). She soon felt lucky, though, to be the one chosen for this photo shoot, which was only happening because one of the paper’s regular columnists had managed to convince the editor that big trees were worthy of a Sunday spread. Especially big trees that would soon be no more. That patch of forest had been marked for skidders and chainsaws, based on the USFS forest plan of 2014, still in force in 2020, which designates the Pedlar District for timber interests. Age class average for trees in this parcel, so they said, was 94 years, and 94 (though more than ten years older than me) isn’t old for a tree. I was thinking to myself how much has changed since 2014. The way the world is now, many people never see trees as old as these. Ever. But what the young person following me was learning first hand was that forests are so much more than trees. I was happy about that. The place had been left alone for more than her lifetime, I imagine, and it had begun to become itself. It had forest magic. When the next forest plan revision comes up, will there be a call for more old growth allotments in the Pedlar District or anywhere in the National Forest? These trees are almost there. Too bad they won’t be here when USFS plan revision time comes around. To tell the USFS what you think about how this forest should be managed, send comments to Nicholas.redifer@usda.gov. For a recent News&Advance article on the project see News&AdvancearticleSundayOct4 Continue reading