Category Archives: Spring watch

Spring watch

at a ministers’ retreat, Wareham, Mass.

After the high winds died down midday, I went out for a walk in the woods around the retreat center. There were birds everywhere: after spending twenty four hours hunkered down in shelter from the gale, they were out busily feeding and defending their nesting territory. They were so busy that they paid little attention to me. I managed to get within eight feet of a Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher, a tiny little bird: it was carrying a feather in its bill, presumably to add to its nest. And then I rounded a bend in a trail, just as a Wood Thrush started singing in a tree nearly over my head: that ethereally beautiful call, those four liquid notes, so close: it provoked a deeply emotional response, a surge in my heart, a lift in my spirits, a feeling of sudden intense joy. It sang twice, and flew away, and the moment was over.

Pollen

This afternoon, when I walked out to my car, it was covered in pollen: spots of yellow about an eighth of an inch or less in diameter all over the burgundy paint of the car. It looked as though the tree under which it had been parked had dropped little pollen bombs all over it.

When Bill and I were setting up for tonight’s concert at the church, he heard me coughing. “New Bedford is number three in the state for high pollen count,” he said.

No wonder I felt slow and out-of-it all day. I’ve been breathing pollen soup, not air.

Spring watch

When I came down and looked at my car this morning, it was covered with a faint yellow haze of pollen.

The Herring Gulls that live on our rooftop are noisily amorous most of the day. I stuck my head up out of the skylight once and surprised them in the act. I was embarrassed, they were just pissed off.

One of the realities of living in a sea-side city is that when you walk down the streets on a damp spring day like today, every building seems to exude a faint moldy smell.

The sea ducks and loons have mostly headed north to breed. The seals have swum off to wherever it is that they breed. Now when I stand on the end of State Pier and look out, the surface of the harbor is empty, except for a few gulls.

I came around a corner and looked up at a tree covered in white blossoms. Right in the middle of the city, surrounded by drab stone buildings. It took my breath away.

Spring watch

Carol is friends with Eva, and Eva is a farmer who grows organic greens primarily for the restaurant trade. Carol and Eva have a deal: Carol goes now and then to pull weeds for Eva, for it is hard to find weeders, and in return Eva gives greens and other produce to Carol.

Today Carol went to Eva’s place and picked some greens in the green house: baby spinach, arugula, various kinds of lettuce, miner’s lettuce, and some other things that we couldn’t identify. These are the first locally-grown greens I’ve eaten all winter. The flavor was stunning.

All the “fresh” food they ship from California (or even farther away) is a couple of weeks old by the time it reaches the supermarket, and has lost most of its flavor and goodness. As for frozen and canned food, about all you can say is that it’s edible, and at this time of year it’s often better than the so-called “fresh” produce. And this is what we have to eat for most of the winter: it keeps you alive, but it doesn’t taste like much.

A month ago, I did manage to get some wintered-over parsnips which had been grown nearby, and they were very good indeed. But I had forgotten just how good fresh greens can be.

Spring watch

A poem by Frances Watkins Harper:

Dandelions.

Welcome children of the Spring,
   In your garbs of green and gold,
Lifting up your sun-crowned heads
   On the verdant plain and wold.

As a bright and joyous troop
   From the breast of earth ye came
Fair and lovely are your cheeks,
   With sun-kisses all aflame.

In the dusty streets and lanes,
   Where the lowly children play,
There as gentle friends ye smile,
   Making brighter life’s highway

Dewdrops and the morning sun,
   Weave your garments fair and bright,
And we welcome you to-day
   As the children of the light.

Children of the earth and sun.
   We are slow to understand
All the richness of the gifts
   Flowing from our Father’s hand.

Published in Poems by Frances Watkins Harper, 1895. Complete book at Project Gutenberg.

While searching for poetry by Unitarians and Universalists, I came across “Dandelions.” Even though Frances Harper uses late 19th C. American poetic conventions which may sound dated to our ears, her images and her thinking captured my attention. I liked the image of “Where the lowly children play/ There as gentle friends ye smile”; which is both profoundly egalitarian, while also in the context of the poem perhaps offering an exegesis of Mark 10.13-16 where Jesus befriends children.

And I particularly liked the image of humanity she offers in the fifth and sixth stanzas, when she calls us human beings “the children of the light. / Children of the earth and sun.” Those two lines alone make the poem for me.

This being the week when dandelions are beginning to appear widely in New Bedford, I thought I’d post the poem here as a sort of meditation on the season.

Spring watch

Standing on Pope’s Island this afternoon, I saw both a few last winter residents and one of the first summer residents. A pair of Buffleheads, perhaps the last of the ducks who wintered on the harbor, swam and dove in the water around the city marina, not far from the first of the recreational boats that appeared in the slips this week. Further out in the middle of the harbor, a Cormorant, one of the first summer residents to arrive in the harbor, flapped heavily and rose from the water where it had been holding its wings up to dry.

Late last week, the harbor was still full of wintering waterfowl. On Thursday, when the temperatures went up into the seventies, I walked over to the boat landing in Fairhaven. There I stood and counted more than thirty Brant, two dozen Buffleheads, and perhaps a dozen Red-Breasted Mergansers; and all the while, a Mockingbird sang lustily from a nearby tree. The waterfowl must have taken that warm day as a warning call for spring migration, because since then I haven’t seen more than a dozen waterfowl on any one day; and today I only saw those two Bufflehead.

Spring watch

Red buds on gray twigs —
maples come into bloom and
pollen fills the air.

Pollen fills the air,
it makes me stupid, I don’t
feel that cold north wind.

Feel that cold north wind!
Daylight is lengthening but
earth is not yet warm.

Earth is not yet warm
enough to turn green. But trees —
red buds on gray twigs.

Spring watch

At 6:30, I finally made the last phone call of the day and headed out for a walk. I figured I had half an hour before it got dark. I walked briskly, not paying too much attention to anything except walking.

Looking down from the pedestrian bridge over Route 18, the man running past the Wharfinger Building on Fisherman’s Wharf looked like John. He wasn’t wearing John’s usual bright yellow Cheerios hat, though, so it couldn’t be John. Only a handful of people run regularly down along the waterfront, and briefly I wondered if another runner had moved into our neighborhood.

As i walked down the spiral ramp that leads from the pedestrian bridge to the wharf, I met John running up. “John!” I said. “You’re not wearing your Cheerios hat!”

“I know,” he said. “I thought it was much warmer than it really is.”

Yesterday was warm and sunny, but today the clouds moved in and it got chilly. I was wearing my big winter coat; John was wearing a long-sleeved jersey and shorts. He looked cold. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s cold today.”

He didn’t linger, but headed on home.

Spring watch

It didn’t feel that cold when I went out to take a walk this evening, but the wind was chilly. It was a raw damp spring wind that reminds you that we could still get snow. I had had a busy day at work, with more than the usual ups and downs. It was six o’clock when I finally left the office. I was going to take just a short walk before making dinner. But I kept thinking about the work day, the thoughts tumbling all around inside me. Carol was going to be at a meeting this evening. Dinner could wait. I kept walking.

When I finally got home at 7:30, all those tumbling thoughts had come to rest. And I had walked hard enough and long enough and fast enough that it felt warm and almost springlike outside.