I’m channeling Chaucer in this suburban oasis–

Haven for road weary warriors

With chrome camels called

Hyundai and Prius and Lexus.

No one here seeks ”the holy blissful martyr”;

No swaying palms shade these travelers.

Reclaimed fast food venues suffice–

Remodeled and newly outfitted:

On one side overstuffed leather thrones,

High bar stools hug huge windows,

While within the Apple logo glows neon yellow

In the rush hour twilight.

All speak Starbuckese:

A grande or a venti,

the new Blonde Roast or an Espresso Macchiatto?

Mr. Blue Tooth cuddles his Wall Street Journal–

Could he be The Reeve?

Miss North Face student texts furiously–

A modern day Oxford Clerk?

Handyman wearing tattoos and a braided beard–

The ribald Miller?

Thin dowager approaching counter like a supplicant at the altar–

The Nun?

Soldier in camouflaged fatigues–

The Knight?

What tales they might tell of deals made, battles won, and hearts forsaken

Along their asphalt pilgrims’ paths?

And still the coffee beans grind and whirr….

Awaiting yet another influx of

The new moms, the Willy Lomans, the retirees–

All seeking refuge

and free WiFi

While Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” ring out

Along this Watchtower,

As in Chaucer’s Tabard Inn in Old Southwark–

Wayfarers seeking their own shrines…….

No paradox here, this December dawn–

At first glance, only browns–the dominant hue,

A closer focus reveals

Rich russets, magentas, and viridians–

Whorled patterns of tangled vines and arching berry canes.

Blond asparagus fronds curtsy low

To March’s dense harvest of heady, tender spears….

In the next row, hard neck garlic cloves

Nestle cozily within their deep, dark trenches.

Nearby, stalwart chard clumps wave

Their maroon-rippled leaves defiantly at Jack Frost

While the leek bed boldly beckons–

Sap green stalks standing tall like sentinels,

Full of promise for a savory pot of stew.

Enthroned amid the herb bed–the French sorrel–

Her lemon-scented leaves cascading

Fountain-like to the newly mulched soil.

And, the black-capped chickadee atop the split rail trills his daily aria

In tune with Nature’s resounding rhythms,

As the Winter Garden glows and glistens….

.

One of our four laying hens “went broody” this past May, and “broody” Jeannie has remained despite our repeated efforts to cure her of this annoying condition.  Broodiness can best be compared to a false pregnancy in humans or a bizarre state of utter bird-brained insanity somewhat akin to the “Henny Penny” syndrome.

Jeannie is so determined to hatch a brood of chicks that she sits in the nesting box constantly–all day long except for occasions when we deliberately pull her out  to eat, drink, poop, and forage.  And, even while she is out of this would be “maternity ward,”  she cannot refrain from performing her strange little dance in which she raises and lowers her head to the ground several times  prior to shaking all of her feathers out.   Then back into the hen house she races on her  pantaloon- shaped , t-rex legs at full tilt,  frantically flying up the green plastic staircase of her Eglu Cube coop, and onto the  hay-filled nesting box.  Clucking softly to herself,  she settles into her well worn spot festooned with black feathers from her belly which  she has plucked bald in hopes of offering proper incubation for her imaginary chicks to be.

Ironically, a broody hen stops laying her own eggs,  so we haven’t seen one of Jeannie’s beautiful powder blue eggs in months now; yet whenever one of her “sisters” lays her egg, Jeannie is ready to roost on it.  She lowers herself onto the egg with the utmost care, nudging it tenderly under her belly with her beak.  We have even observed her in the act of “stealing” an egg out from under one of her sister hens while the latter hen is happily roosting away–a brazen act which inevitably leads to pandemonium in the hen house.  Once ensconced on an egg,  Jeannie l patiently sits and sits and sits….Even when the eggs are gathered up from under her, she continues to sit on nothing until she is lifted  out of the box and set on the ground.

An Ameracauna breed, Jeannie’s glossy black feathers  shimmer with an irridescent evergreen hue.   Her face is framed by feathered muffs that are characteristic of her breed and accentuate the perpetually silly expression on her face.  Unfortunately, being the smallest of the flock,  she occupies the bottom rung of the pecking ladder,  enduring far too many harsh pecks from the other ladies in the hen yard.  Being a scrappy bird, however,  Jeannie  has learned whom to give a wide berth to while  scratching and pecking for tasty morsels in the yard.  And, her primary tormentor, Frances–a large barred Plymouth rock hen–makes it her life’s mission to keep itty biddy Jeannie in her proper place!

We have tried numerous approaches to curing Jeannie  of her broodiness but to no avail.  We placed her in a smaller coop away from her sisters hoping she would snap out of it by being thwarted in her efforts to gain access to the main nesting area.  She squawked and squawked indignantly, making such an ungodly din that we finally caved in, letting her have her way.

So, what can be learned from such a determined bird?  I like to think that each of God’s creatures can offer us humans a legitimate life lesson.  Perhaps Jeannie’s purpose is to remind us that we should be as focused on our lives’ true missions as she is with her hopeful vision of hatching her “eggs.”  We  have come really close to securing some fertilized eggs for her,  knowing what an attentive mother hen she would be.  Not willing to get emotionally involved with a new flock though, we will just let her be broody.  Surely, broodiness is its own reason for being. I wonder if Descartes would agree?

The white crane soars

High above the sea of death–

He weeps for Japan

 

The wave swallows all;

Its thirst is unquenchable–

Gone is the wee wren.

 

Tsunami roars in,

Sweeping away the green buds–

Japan’s spring sorrow.

 

The wave crashes down,

Fishermen cannot escape–

They die in their nets.

 

The ebb tide recedes,

With a village in its froth–

Only crabs remain.

 

Tsunami kills spring,

Hokasai knew its power–

The wave blots out green.

Since our daughter’s childhood days I have enjoyed taking her on seasonal walks at Green Spring Gardens.  She especially loved the delicate columbine flowers dancing whimsically in the early spring chill.  At the height of summer, she would delight in identifying the ripening harvest in the carefully tended vegetable garden and the dramatic splendor of the stately cannas standing like elegant sentinels along the pathways.

She learned to love gardens from those walks, and to our great delight years later, she planned our backyard vegetable garden.  During its first two years, the garden featured raised beds of vegetable plants–corn, bush beans, sweet peppers, hot peppers, squash, eggplant, okra, tomatoes, chard, and herbs of of every type.

Last year our daughter became engaged and began planning an early fall wedding. Her fiance and she decided to grow their own flowers for the reception, shunning the traditional, stiff floral displays for more natural, carefree arrangements.  On a warm June weekend, they purchased over fifty bags of good top soil, poked holes in their plastic bottoms, cut off the tops, and planted zinnia seeds of every size and color, then calendulas, straw flowers, marigolds, mini-sunflowers, and giant cosmos.

As the summer evolved, the flowers sprouted and grew into full fledged hearty plants lending breathtaking beauty to what had been strictly a utilitarian vegetable garden.  By late August the giant zinnias were chest high as were the cosmos and sunflowers.  The garden glowed with bright reds, purples, oranges, yellows, and pinks.

For years we would rarely see a single hummingbird in our back yard, but this summer we could not even count the numbers of magical hummers that feasted in our garden.  They would perch on tender stalks between feedings and often furiously chase each other away from their favorite blossom, much to our great amusement.

When it came time to make her table arrangements, we watched our daughter reverently enter the garden on her wedding day morning with clippers in hand seeking those special blossoms from the seeds her husband to be and she had planted just a few months before.  I reflected on the symbolism of their wedding vows resembling the seeds of their love which will surely grow and mature throughout the summers of their lives together.

The seeds of our daughter’s love for gardening began when she was just a little girl skipping along the paths at Green Spring Gardens shouting impatiently,

“Mom, come see these beautiful flowers.”

On any given late winter’s day, our backyard of one third acre of cleared land rimmed by forest provides a perfect stage for viewing many dramatic and ordinary interactions among our feathered neighbors.

During the early morning hours, the melodies of songbirds–chickadees, cardinals, wrens, and tufted titmice herald the morn, reminding us sleepyheads to greet the new day with good cheer.  They sing in unison from the crepe myrtles, from the wood line, from the blue spruce–even from the spreading yews where they often hide from the neighbors’ prowling felines.

By noon time, the morning birds seem to have surrendered to the sun’s warming rays for a well earned siesta.  In their place appear the stalwart robins roaming the yard, each a distinct pace away from his fellow robin in their constant quest for the most delicious worm.  By tea time, the only birds at the feeders are cooing doves, pecking at the seed hulls on the ground beneath the safflower seed feeder.  Not as quick as their fellow fowl, the doves are somewhat hampered in the face of danger by their not so quick reflexes and their chicken- like large feathery breasts.

This afternoon while sorting through the seed hulls for the choicest pieces, one of the doves failed to notice a threatening presence perched on a nearby pin oak limb–a young Cooper’s hawk hungry for a meal.  Suddenly, he descended like a meteor onto the back of the unwary dove who was mercifully stunned into submission.  The hawk then grabbed the dove by its talons and flew off into the woods, leaving behind its victim’s bewildered mate.

Instantaneously, a cacophony of angry squawks and caws reverberated throughout the backyard.  Our resident five hens–Annabel, Frances, Dorothy, Nan, and Jeannie-raised their horrified cluck-clucks  in protest, having observed this sneak attack from their safe haven of a caged coop less than twenty feet from the strike zone.  And, the resident fraternity of large black crows caw-cawed their outrage from tree to tree.

In mere seconds a gentle bird of peace was singled out, killed, and taken off to be eaten by a carnivorous member of its own species.  A few gray feathers strewn amid the seed hulls memorialize its existence.

And so, Nature plays her random hand in our back yard aviary….

My form transfigured:

Feet, befinned,

Eyes, begoggled,

I am a blue-footed human boobie

Waddling to my take off perch

Poised between terror and wonder….

Fins first, I plummet

Splashing into the crystalline deep

Its primal chill

Propels me upward like a fleshy cork

Bobbing at the surface seeking my leader.

“Over here!” he shouts.

With a frog kick and a snorkel breath

I jettison toward a coral centerpiece

Blossoming below me in alizarin splendor,

Festooned by violet undulating sea fans–

An underwater luxury condominium,

Where neon tetras dart their zigzag patterns

And cerulean parrot fish nibble greedily

At algae-encrusted coral fingers.

A shy nurse shark peers out

From within her coral cave;

A mottled puffer fish confronts me, eyeball to eyeball

As if to demand, “Your ticket please,”

And a squadron of sergeant majors files by,

Commanding a salute

To these delicate denizens of this fragile diorama.

All too soon I am once again finless and myopic;

All too soon I am rendered human

But forever transformed

By such ephemeral beauty off Grand Turk.

 

Ancient pilgrimage site–

Twenty dusty miles from  Interstate 550

South of once sacred Shiprock–

North of Gallup

Once settled by Anasazi men

Wearing corn husk sandals on calloused feet,

Skin burned copper red by the sun god.

Long ago they followed the Raven

Across the high desert plateau

Down into the sacred kivas of Pueblo Bonito

Where they told their secrets and stories

To generations yet unborn–

The cliff dwellers of Mesa Verde.

Towering sandstone ridges of crumbling rock

Encircle a ruined condo culture

Now lost to time :

Chaco, Chaco, Chaco–the canyon walls echo–

Another vortex of the earth

Like Stonehenge, like Delphi, like Sedona….

Why so desolate?

No corn, no rain, no reason

Except to believe in the realm of the Raven

Soaring triumphant evermore……

While brushing my teeth this morning, I heard unusually loud squawking resounding from our backyard chicken run .  Immediately recognizing the owner of this  voice as Frances, the stunning barred Plymouth Rock queen of our micro-flock, I quickly finished my toilette and hurried out to check on this annoyingly impatient bird.  She was, as I guessed, well into the throes of her daily egg deposit.  As to why her announcement of the impending egg’s arrival out clamored previous ones, I can only surmise that this time I happened to be paying attention.  Then again, perhaps there was something different about this particular egg.  So, I decided to take a good long look at it instead of mindlessly washing it, dating it, and stashing it in the egg carton as I typically do each day.

Frances’s eggs have outweighed and outsized her sisters’ since these three hens began laying regularly in February.  Her eggs are  two-toned beige in color with dark brown speckles sprinkled over their wider ends.  They are perfect oval spheres–ideal for still lifes in drawing or watercolor classes–veritable marvels of engineering, in fact.  And, when they are cracked prior to cooking, they often require two thwacks on the bowl as their shells are uncommonly strong and thick.

At first glance, I see nothing different about this particular egg to warrant the exuberant cacophony  I heard earlier.  The only difference being that this egg is festooned with bits of feathery fluff from Frances’s bountiful rump which gives it quite a comical appearance, especially when I place it in a rather silly  chicken- shaped glass egg cup,  into which it barely fits.

Of course now that I am fully engaged in this exercise of “seeing,” I’ve become acutely conscious of the most probable cause of Frances’ heraldry:  her body’s passing of  not just an object of perfectly proportioned visual beauty  but also its potential to nourish and produce new life given the proper conditions–truly a natural wonder, especially when the egg has just left her body, still wet and warm to the touch.  And, to think she performs this amazing act daily sans fanfare.

Pardon my having taken you for granted, dear hen.  Now on to my egg salad sandwich!

Dear Jane,

I hate to tell you this, dear lady, but your oeuvre has been tampered with while you’ve been moldering in your grave all these years.  Yes, it’s positively scandalous what our 21 st Century “mash up” writers have done to two of your best known works–Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.  You see, apparently most modern readers are incapable of reading your understated and elegant prose, but due to the fanfare your novels have enjoyed over the past fifteen years following their televised presentations on the BBC,  such folk believe that they should at least attempt to read them.  And so, enter  two enterprising young hack writers eager to ride the trendy wave of your popularity by fusing your carefully crafted plots and brilliantly drawn characters with modern readers’ obsessions with vampires and zombies.  Their names are Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Ben Winters, author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters–both of these travesties are New York Times bestsellers!

But wait, knowing how incredibly witty you actually were and how much you relished undermining established conventions, I just realized you might actually approve of this literary tampering?  In fact, at the Smithsonian sponsored panel discussion I attended last night with my daughter and neighbors–all huge fans of your actual novels, by the way–the topic of plagiarism arose.  These two male writers who were obviously quite impressed with themselves and their success on your “coattails” or more aptly “skirts,” defended their books as extensions of what has been in the “public domain” for nearly two centuries.  They believe they are bringing an entire generation of reluctant young readers back to the classics such as your masterpieces by adding gore, slime, and explicit sex.  At least 150+ people were in attendance at this event–each one a fan of yours who rereads your books faithfully.  No one seemed annoyed by the monsters now appearing in these versions of your works, and some noted that your novels actually featured human” monsters” such as Lady Catherine de Bergh.

So, I don’t believe you will be resting too easily under those marble slabs at Winchester Cathedral.  You’ll either feel compelled to come back zombie fashion to punish us for our literary transgressions or perhaps praise us for fanning the fires of your immortality.