– ONE –
An hour ago as the day was leaning west, I was pulling east, bringing the laundry in ahead of the dew. It smelled of light and fresh air and flowers: I can’t wait to sleep on today’s mountain air made linen. Deciding I needed a little music, and finding no other singers around the house — a problem that needs work, yes — I took my guitar in hand, headed back out to the deck, tuned up, and settled into some familiar songs.
I’d finished one, and in the stillness that followed there was a loud humming of wild bees that wouldn’t let the song fade, as though they kept running those lower strings while they foraged in the blooming rhododendron. I took the capo up a few frets and was beginning another tune, when a louder hum whizzed just behind my head, and the ruby-throat of a hummingbird dove in, both audibly and physically, among the bees. Wonderful to watch his moth-beating wings, just a few feet away…
He wasn’t concerned with me, or if I may anthropomorphize, perhaps he enjoyed my music; in any case, he sipped in and out of the flowers as the bee drone did the same, as my attention did the same, and my next songs did the same.
– TWO –
You’d think I was invisible. I sat at the table, working on a new version of my friends’ Newburyport Yoga website, when I noticed motion out of the corner of my eye. I thought, “Ah, Shadow’s back around for his evening dish of cat food…”, but the black fur of him kept coming into the frame of the window, and coming in, and coming in, filling it quite a bit fuller than any cat in my back garden had business doing.
My response, of course: a cinematic double take. Then an involuntary expletive [one of the tamer ones: insert your favorite here] as the shape that should have been Shadow was instead, when it came into focus, the bumbling mass of a large black bear.
(!!)
Well, now I know who has been exploring my compost pile lately. I figured the digging was that of a rather ambitious raccoon… or something raccoon-sized… but couldn’t imagine who would be so interested in citrus rinds and banana peels and the odd peanut shell.
Well. Now we know, don’t we? And the goat fence that I was going to put around the pile to keep raccoon out clearly is not worth the effort, as my pet bear would in no way be deterred by a little wire.
“Spring Black Bear” by Hugues Deglaire @ DeviantArt.com
– EPILOGUE –
So here sit I, sniffing around for new digs like a hummingbird at a flower, or a bear at a banana peel, hoping to buy some land closer to friends and community… yet it’s growing more and more difficult to consider leaving this buzzing and bumbling natural world behind, only to have it held at arm’s reach and diminished by the noise and gridlock of a City.
Live and listen. The best choice always arrives… when it arrives.
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