High Drama on the Pond

Wednesday evening only three Canada geese showed themselves – two large feeding geese and one, smaller, sentinel goose.  Thursday there were ten geese feeding at the base of the dam.  I thought it a gathering of the clan; Ox thought there were two families of geese.

The geese were milling around nibbling stuff in the grass.  Suddenly one of them, a small goose with something black dangling from its beak, curved its neck into a sigmoid, extended its neck with its head two inches from and parallel to the ground, and ran at a nearby goose. The attacked goose backed off with loud honks.  The small goose then ran after another goose, who also backed off with loud honks. The attack goose kept running at the other geese.  They all ran away in a cacophony of  honks.  Suddenly all but the attack goose and one other flew, with very loud, excited honks, forty feet up to the middle of the pond at the dam's top.

I often wish I understood goose sociology.  The anthropomorphist in me wanted the remaining goose to be  the chosen caretaker of the wild goose.  Once the others left, the two at the bottom of the dam quieted.  The geese in the pond continued honking, with diminishing excitement, for about five minutes.

Research on the net indicates that the goose was probably defending its nesting mate and eggs.   It seems the attack goose was the caretaker.  See  http://www.preservewildlife.com/geeseworld.htm

Life in the wild is full of mystery!

Learning to See

After a stressful day, Ox took me to Mint Springs Park late in the evening.  Most of the people had left the upper pond; some fishermen were on the lower pond.

We heard a bullfrog call several times.  I recognized, for the first time, though I had walked under it many times, that the leaning, distorted, blossoming tree was an apple tree.  We saw a silver flash and heard a flop – a fish?  As we walked around the pond the stresses of the day melted.  I felt very much one with the scene.

I think about all the people in my life who have taught me to see, hear, feel and treasure the things of the real world.

I particularly think of my friend Carolyn because of the spring green of the tiny hardwood leaves.  We were once walking down a sidewalk by a silver maple tree.  She stopped, bent her ample frame to pick up a small cluster of perfect maple leaves, held them to the light and just looked.  I had passed clusters of new maple leaves on the ground many times, but I don’t think I ever noticed them before then. The leaves were as beautiful as a newborn’s hands.

My father dragged his kids up into the mountains most weekends.  Sometimes, to keep us paying attention, he’d offer a quarter to the first child to see a deer, or a mammal.  When we tired, he’d give a gentle push.  We learned young that beauty was all around us. I learned to love landscape from my father.

Ox has walked me through city streets, up mountains, around ponds and lakes, and around neighborhoods.  He is almost always the first to see the movement of an animal.  He has taught me to think about how animals live and feel.  He always notices something I haven’t.  He taught me to love good music, too, not with an educated ear but with an attentive and grateful ear.

My daughters taught me to perceive as they observed the world around them with intention and absorption in the years they were growing up.

When we got all the way around the pond toward the sand, a pair of geese, startled to see us, took off toward the lower pond with loud honks.  We drove home.

The Editing Problem

I have recently written two six page memoirs of my elder brother and younger sister for their shared birthday.  I’m now writing a memoir of my elder sister of about the same length.  I forgive myself the errors of fact; memory is a selective thing.  I have physical reasons, too, for memory lapses.  I am not so sanguine about errors of form.  I never see what needs editing for days after writing it.  I don’t understand why distance in time is necessary to find stupid grammatical or even mechanical errors in writing.  I have a similar problem with painting.  I’ll paint a picture and not see the distortions in perspective, color, until the picture has been turned to the wall for some time.  Sometimes I don’t see distortions until years later.

Since some critical facility exists in my brain, why does it take it so long to show itself?  This has become a noticeable problem for me since I started this blog.  I’ll publish something and for days after have to edit some other annoying lapse.  The thing that pushes me to write must exist in a separate part of my brain from the critical part, but you’d think that they could work together.

A hypothesis about the editing problem is that I remember too well what I intended to write and just don’t see what’s in print.  When I paint with the canvas upside down I paint more accurately – I think that this is because I paint what I see rather than what I know.  I don’t think turning the computer upside down is going to help me edit prose.

I’ll tell you next week how many times I have edited this post.  Maybe you should wait till then to read it.

Note: 4/21  Edited 5 times on 4/16.

Return to Mint Springs

We went to Mint Springs just after the sun went down tonight.  The sky was leaden with grey lumpy clouds except to the west, where a large opening showed a pink thunderhead - lit by the sunken sun. A couple of red- winged blackbirds landed on cattail stumps calling harshly.  Two geese were feeding,  a third, smaller, bird was the sentinel.

The maples by the shelter, yesterday red and fluffy with maple flowers, are now green and soft with tiny maple leaves.  The green blush has gone a third of the way up the hills.  The trees on the top two-thirds are still brushy and gray. The light silhouettes the tree trunks and branches on the ridge top, defining the ground with a tree lace edge.

As we walked around the pond I missed the beavers that have lived in the pond over the years.  It was always at this time of evening we saw their wakes, long silver streaks across the pond.  They built lodges and raised their young.  Soon we’d see the pencil tips of chewed saplings - next year’s coppice.  Eventually hubris undid the beavers.  One year it was a large tree felled across the hidden inlet to the pond, another it was a huge willow limb chewed off near the path to the pond.  These great feats announced the beavers to the park authorities and the beavers were removed.  It always took a few years for a new set of beavers to discover the pond.  I think this time they may be gone for good.

Mint Springs Eternal

The heavy hand of man has tinkered again with Mint Springs Park.  The park service drained the upper pond so that the dock could be shored up and the bridge to the infants' beach could be rebuilt.  They replaced the playground equipment with other playground equipment.  They’re erecting a black chain-link fence around the swimming area (an aesthetic improvement over the old metal colored chain link fence).

While the pond was drained, we saw mysterious bivalves dotting the pond bottom.  We entertained ourselves with wild hypotheses about how salt water shells came to be in fresh water.  It turned out that the shells belonged to fresh water mussels.  When the pumping stopped a few large puddles remained at the pond’s bottom.  The water was gone from around the cattails.  The man running the pump assured us that the pond would refill by itself; there were no plans to pump water back in.  Ox and I worried about the health of the turtles, fish, and frogs.

The pond is almost entirely full now.  The weeping cherries are in flower today, the pear trees in the woods, and the plum trees at the park.  The weeping willows are sap green and the red of the maple flowers makes the maples fluffy.

As we walked around the pond, near the shelter we heard spring peepers over the murmurs of two families of geese.  We heard one green frog glunk and the hollow hammering  of a pileated woodpecker.  As we approached the dam, the geese took off for a quieter pond with muted squawks.  Down by the cattails the frogs were roiling the water in an noisy orgy – mating.  This annual ritual can last weeks.  It's loud and compelling while it goes on.  As long as the peepers are peeping they're mating.  I am comforted; the vigor of these amphibians speaks for a healthy pond.