Here We All Are

It is finally, fully green around the pond, where we live. The woods are hidden now by thick foliage. Even the ground is being erased by the ferns and other understory plants that seem to actively resist your intrusion as you step cautiously to retrieve the baseball you’ve been tossing with a child. You alone must retrieve it, of course. What sensible child will volunteer to step across the lawn’s boundary to search with its hand beneath an underworld of vegetation teeming with what slithers, inches, and crawls?

The woods are resurrected and alive. Until recently, I might have seen to the neighbor’s house or up the side of the hill. As of today, a curtain has been drawn, as across an exam room. The message is clear: wait outside, we’ll fetch you when the baby is born. Which is exactly what’s going on—new life arriving inside tunnels and nests and burrows, hidden and protected by the woods.

Most nights, the peepers drown out every noise. At other times, we listen for the sound of any rustle coming from beyond the reach of the porch lights. Nothing jump-starts the imagination quite like the sandpaper sound of trampled leaves, or the snap of a twig. In our open field, with a few fruit trees, we are treated occasionally to the sudden snort of a deer that comes close enough to be surprised by a whiff of us. Yellow eyes of raccoons, the fat shadow of a porcupine skirting the grass, the screech of owls, the heavier crunch and crash of whatever else is out there. For the next few months, we will be curious neighbors to the muffled sounds and brief glimpses we get of creatures darting in and out, busy under the tent.

For now, I don’t venture into the woods after dark, or paddle on the pond in a canoe. I know the beavers are working. I know the loons come out to rumble. I know the snakes are sneaking up on the frogs. The rest are coming down to the shore to congregate for a cool, evening drink, moose perhaps, bears, the coyotes, certainly. The animals that live in the woods, on or beside the pond, have mostly bequeathed the daylight hours to us to avoid unpleasant consequences. Past sundown, the shoe goes on the other foot. Everywhere, everyone is hungry. I am fair game at night. Rightly so.

No sense of personal space exists with the ticks, black flies, and mosquitoes—soon, also, the greenheads. It is eat or be eaten every moment. I massacre them. They swarm me, relying on their infinite numbers. They dive bomb the net over my head hoping to find a vulnerability, perhaps where it opens around my neck, always tempting. They slip through cracks around the window screen, hitch a ride on a pant leg, piggyback on the dog. We are not safe from their advances even in our bed.

It is June. Here we all are. If you live in town—any town—you may be noticing it is harder to find a parking space, or that someone is in your seat at the bar. At home, we are swerving to avoid hitting toads and garter snakes with the lawnmower, stepping quietly onto the porch to so the mallards don’t panic, frantically trying to keep weeds out of the gardens. Happily, among the latest arrivals to our little patch of woods are the dragonflies, which devour black flies. I am watching them right now, appearing like a line of motorcycles coming through town on a bright summer day.

Of course, we don’t get too many motorcycles out here. But we did have a bald eagle spend a few casual moments on a rock in our cove yesterday afternoon.