Here We Are

I am in the garden, it’s all garden, I am mowing, I am cutting the pasture high; I am outside, on the porches, on the patio, planting pots, shoveling away winter detritus on the patio; I am walking to the barn and walking back to the barn gardens, I am at the pond. I am walking in the middle of the road at night. Night vision. Burgundy Farm, Capon Bridge. The children were little. 

There was a small hastily-painted sign above a screen door at camp, pointing to a nest tucked away: “Carolina wren nesting, 🪹 don’t disturb her.” The sign didn’t have to say, so come in another way. 

Today I was sweeping off the front porch again. It’s a formal porch. No one ever comes to the front door. At Christmas we hang a large Maine wreath, with a spot on it, on the front door. Every spring, I hang baskets on the front porch. I move concrete urns with old ferns out there. It takes a beating from the elements, though it is a deep beautiful in the snow, which shapes itself into onto and around the porch and its Greek columns. But it is not an unoccupied or unused front porch, and we know the life out there. Fucking squirrels chew thru everything everywhere they can. I sweep up piles of insulation, hubs pounds away at the holes in the porch ceiling & calls in the posse when he can’t reach. The little bastards get in through the cornices as well. 

Each corner, on the outside columns’ pediments, contains a small built environment, nests. Every year they’re there. It’s quiet in the front; mommas are vigilant but not alarmed; soon the fledglings are fine. By the time I hang baskets all is sorted out. This season, though, the rain, incessant rain, constant, deluge, unrelenting, and wind, not thunderstorm wind, but derecho wind. The fucking weasels got the hens 6 weeks ago. 

I digress, but it’s all related. 

Yesterday when I went to sweep off the front porch, amid the squirrels’ rampage I’ve barely kept up with, I noticed a tiny feathery just gossamer ghostly creature, the nest blown down probably the night before when some fearsome straight line winds came upon us as once in awhile in terrible storm they will, and I think barely, barely hatched. I knelt a bit and whispered to it. It was a something, it had had a beating heart. 

Tonight. I swept. Wept. The wisp of the bird was bigger. My knees wanted to crumple. And as I propped my head against the hand clutching the broom, just aside atop my eye, a movement. Another wee speck of life. The smallest moving bird leg I’ve ever seen or will ever see again. A nanosecond of movement in a puff of lightest grey. What do I do? Grateful I was not vigorous in my sweeping. 

Would the Burgundy campers bury them? Would they cry for them? Oh life.