Little creatures crashing all around us. In the dry leaves from the oak trees they come on. My little castle walls made of porch screen and azaleas, pink and leopard-printed. Lizards was out today in the sun, a red-headed woodpecker, as we walked to Old Fort Bayou. A constant companion bee, buzzing between me and the trees. Two butterflies, two different kinds, flying and tussling, and i followed them with my mouth open in amazement, and they flew and fought then parted both to the sky. Such small and vulnerable and delicate creatures to get their height and their speed and they were gone.
Nature keeps astounding me. It really does. Small red seeds carrying life on, joyfully. We seen them turtles the other day, stacked, both seeking warmth and granting warmth in friendship.
The light of the setting sun too big and old to have me in mind, but it seemed like a lucky game to get to play. One moment a dark and overcast and gloomy wet woods, the next a fiery cast of sunset light glaring and glowing and changing how everything looks and - not even a minute passed, it was gone. Clouds unpredictable, untelling, before the next chance of sunset-luck. Small and camouflaged plants made very beautiful for a moment, if you can only imagine the fumbling human on the other side of the camera, only catching the last moment of the ghost.
It was that way for so much of the trail, all of it real familiar now, glowing then shaded and then again burning in beauty. Never knowing what the light and temperature and trail will bring, will show.
still holding all these animal homes. What creature digs a hole and digs out through on the other side? There is a toad home next to the doorstep. Crawfish homes going up all over. A spider above the door and the crepe myrtles, a spider at the back door. It caught a lightning bug late one night, the biggest i’d ever seen, it fought and i felt bad but didn’t want to change no late night alarms. The next morning it was still fighting, and i freed that little feller, deprived the spider of her prize.
The dramatic light of the day, as if it were all a theater. Making sure every tree is accounted for. Making sure you see all of the textures and time & aren’t getting caught up with fleeting flowers. Light that feeds every plant, knowing all it’s power and playing.
Every moment when it seems maybe spring has evened out and it would not ever get more beautiful or bursting, it does.
This was my first trip through the woods without Wilbur. He does this thing on the trail, where he stops, then catapults forward at top speed, and back and forth that way on the leash. Without him running and crashing and barking, the woods are very quiet. They were quiet before but now it is stop-and-stand quiet. Studying quiet. I am out catching squirrels by surprise now, and they sail through the underbrush, up to top-tree-safety.
Now it is steady enough silent to study every step, barefoot, heel-to-toe silent in the mud and sand and pine needles that been fell afore we arrived.
Small surprises still meet us here and there, when the woods have quit their sunset show. Spring ringing in, ringing in, ringing. Same as folks, not everything has the same advantage or disadvantage, the azaleas browning and speckling after their eager springing, as the next bloom makes its show. Each plant buds, the devil’s walking stick unfurling, ferns still wand-like and reptilian and rising, all the unknown plants gathering all of their might to be known again.
Flowers fall but the plant survives. The bees have come out in force, the lightning bugs are out and blinking, the bats making their appearance, i am here in the terror of the end. In January it was new, in February it was stalled and nervous, knowing - March was a non - month, it would always be from February on to April, on to the end, so there would be no come-down, no worrying about
how am i going to get along after all of this glory?