Phenology

No, not the stuff where you read bumps on people's heads, this is an actual science based on observation of the timing plants and animals display.  Like crocus coming up now, in spring, after snowdrops and squill.  Like robins returning.  Like asparagus in the supermarket because the growing season in Florida is producing crops.  I didn't realize there was a word for it, I found the link on the weekly email I receive from the Farmer's Almanac.  And really, no great shakes here, but I am taking pictures of flowers as they appear in succession, and hope to complete this minor project through the last vestiges of fall.

Most of them are cell phone pics, which works for me as the thing is handier to carry than the camera.  Unless I get myself to the swamp to formally photograph skunk cabbage, this is the way to go.  When I was a kid living out in Clarence, New York, I would bring my mother bouquets of anything I could find, including the dried heads of Queen Anne's Lace, teasels (ow!), or the remaining brown heads of purple aster.  She loved it all.  I remember looking for the first chickweed, the first dandelion, and a real coup in late spring of the first wild daisy.  Clover, buttercups, locoweed, evening primrose, and stuff I couldn't tell you the name of sprouted in her glass vases she would place on the kitchen table, or in the living room.  Maybe this is what I am trying to relive.

She taught me how to press flowers, and iron fall leaves between sheets of waxed paper; Mom knew what catnip was and where it grew, and could make a whistle from a blade of grass.  Old timey doings that I am sure she learned from her own mother, my Grandma Ida who came from German stock in Crawford County, Pennsylvania.  Close to dirt poor, my mother would rankle at the word "hillbilly" and often said that was not what I wanted to be.  But she loved the soil and planted flowers, roses, iris, peonies, and got my crabby father to help her haul rocks for a rock garden.  There was a bit of a vegetable garden, but not much as the raccoons and deer saw it as a walk-in buffet.  Not much else to do way out there, without a car.

A forest fire started by my idiot cousin wiped out acres of trees and low growth preferred by the families of pheasants and fox.  It jumped the crick, and I remember her and my Auntie Anne dressed in heavy jackets, their hair and faces wrapped in scarves, wearing gloves and boots in the heat and sparks for protection, they heaved my Uncle Bob's wooden trailer away from the grass fires headed towards the two houses.  It took  only a few weeks of rains to begin the sprouting of green again, years before the trees and brush came back.  I walked on the hot, bare, black ground still smoking the next day, and saw a line of bones that may have once been a tail.  Me, you know me, I grabbed a few and flew them up into the sky as crossbones on the Jolly Roger skull kite my father had bought me.  There was an investigation, with my cousin supposedly having to do some sort of community work along with the other two geniuses involved.  He's now an idiot pastor down South.  Yes, you are probable keerect.  Totally.

This is partially where the love of the seasons comes, with each player arriving onstage with fanfare and glad appreciation.  You know how it feels to pick that first tomato, or cuke, or tulip, or what most of us just did, see that first robin.  It's just wonderful.  Here is a link to the phenology website:  http://www.usanpn.org/.  So much to see, so much to celebrate.

What a day it was here, with sun and temperature.  I actually didn't get out beyond one trip to the car to dig out a box, but even so, the day was shining.  Min is here beside me again, Tulip is at my foot on her bed, Kai just traipsed by and is now washing her bib; Stevie is atop a china cabinet, and Snowbelle is on the bed.  The fish tank has been tended, and the clown loaches are noodling together under the driftwood.  They have a habit of floating sideways upsidedown on the bottom till you think you have to get the net, and then they zip away, pleased with the charade.

I hope this evening finds you safe and with most loose ends tied.  Take up old wood and leaves, rake them away and get the beds ready for the coming show.  Sleep well tonight, gathering, pondering, deciding, moving forward.  All of it is growth, slowed only by the darkened hours when the stars gyre in the welkin of heaven.  Sleep.