I need a new journal. I write almost daily now, about the garden and the birds in the yard and how much regret I feel placing rat poison out there. “Use gloves when you place it,” said the man at the home improvement store. I assume his advice is meant to save my skin, but instead he tells me how skittish rats can be about taking bait. “If they smell human scent on it they won’t eat it.”
I place the green blocks around the perimeter of my garden from which my tomatoes keep disappearing in the night. Six blocks feels like a good albeit violent number. In the morning two blocks are gone. Over the next few days The Rat(s) takes only half a block here and there. More tomatoes are missing. I will continue this each night until it stops.
Something about the man at the store makes me trust him. He leans casually across a small tower of unpacked boxes jutting out into the aisle. Black garden hoses still coiled. He carries pet treats around in his pocket and tells me other customers’ rat stories. He is warm without the fakery of being paid for it, and I do not catch him looking me over despite that I’ve come to the store in a red sundress. I think this must be who he really is. I will never find out for sure.
As he instructs, I do not use my bare hands when setting out the poison. I put it down each night after sunset, then wake early to gather whatever is left back into its zip-sealed packaging. I do this so that the birds visiting my yard do not ingest it. In a way, the garden plants and the birds and other animals I bring into my life (by choice) are my children. I could never harm them.
I have just finished the book “Small Days and Nights” about a woman who discovers she has a secret sister with Down syndrome, then takes to caring for her and eventually grows to love her new (yet frustrating) life. I wonder what life would be like–for me, for my sister, for my mother lying in her bed most of the time now–if my brother with Down syndrome had lived. Who would care for him today? I did not think much about this until I was older. The book brings him to mind.
It so happens that I have booked two weeks in Maine at end of August, where he was born and where he is buried. I visited in 2018 and meant to return sooner, but there is so much we mean to do that we don’t get around to, and all kinds of reasons to explain our choices to ourselves. Some of them are true.
Ben is buried next to my grandparents. He is so far from us – from me, from my sister, from my mother. He is so far away that I cannot see how he could fit into our lives if it happened that suddenly, magically, he was here.
Whenever someone says “Ben” I think of my brother. My mother might be bittersweetly happy that he is alive in that way. I know if I tell her this she will respond with the story of when they brought him home from the hospital to die and that he lasted for seven days.
She often tells stories more than once. Sometimes I will interrupt to say I have heard this one before, and sometimes I listen to words whose endings I already know.
I listen about Ben
thinking that it might be helpful
that it might be like praying the same prayer twice
The sun is setting and it is almost time to place the poison again. Two brown California Towhees have flown down from the wall and are scratching through a small pile of leaves, while a hummingbird sits near the feeder, almost a silhouette of itself at this dimming hour. In a half-hour I will put on my gloves and try once more to protect my garden and the birds and anything else I still have.
Tag Archives: Nature
Autumn Trail
I went for more walks when fall arrived. One day the sparrows were flitting through the high grasses and the leaves were orange and crisp and would crunch if you were to close your fingers around them. At midday the shadows ran long beside the low sun. The end-of-summer creek in some places was not a creek at all, and the dry path stirred dust into my shoes; by the time I returned I had to shake them out.
I have come to this trail for eight years. I know where it curves and climbs, that there are three bridges crossing a seasonal stream, and what that stream looks like in all seasons. Most often they are a procession of smooth riverbed rocks with very little water running around their sides, eroded and edgeless after all their time out here.
Even in the dry season there is life. Once, horrified, I pulled a live hummingbird from the bullseye of a spiderweb it had flown into and had became stuck. I’ve found frogs beside the water and rediscovered the water striders that can walk across it. I hadn’t thought about them since I was small, but being out here always brings me back to other times. Life reflects life. This is sometimes the reason I visit; other times I need to look at things that are far away: hilltops and mountains and far-flung clouds if there are any that day. Sometimes I just need exercise. There is nothing complex about that.
One day while walking down in the valley I climbed up a nearby hill wanting to know what was at the top, and after the steep ascent and catching my breath, I found only more hills beyond that. A ho-hum finish line. But a person needs to satisfy curiosity where they can and never knows where there might be surprises, which you can find anywhere so long as you expect to find them.
I remember the few times I’ve brought friends with me to this path, but I usually come alone as it’s hard to coordinate gatherings and I’ve never been a patient person when I’ve gotten my mind set on doing a thing right here and right now. I imagine there are others like me who enjoy nature but might have no one to go with, and then they don’t venture out because they don’t like doing life alone. Many people become bored alone. It took me some time to absorb this, since I am always finding little adventures and joys wherever I stand and enjoy dreaming about what else might be out there; as a result I am rarely bored when I am by myself.
And perhaps not everyone grasps the importance of escaping to somewhere they can wander long distances without disruption from our modern world – all the surprises that you didn’t know came along with adulthood until you were wading through them. There is nothing to wade through out here. When I am out here wandering, if the day is not too hot, it is easy to feel that everything important is here and everything else is sawdust.
*
Now it is February. I sit writing at my bedroom window. The wind blows the tree outside in a gray scene that makes me think of Seattle, although I left twelve years ago. I reminisce about it from time to time in the way some people talk about family they aren’t close to anymore, babies they almost had, or relationships that seemed okay at first but left you bruised and so you left, never quite reaping the benefits you’d expected. But as much as a person can pack up and move from one place to the next, we cannot leave our stories behind like shoes or jackets if we decide they don’t fit us anymore; they follow, sometimes sleeping but occasionally shouting, wherever we go. We drown them out with new and better stories, and perhaps good food and books and sports and new people, until one day we can finally look back and can see the good parts.
*
Here I am in California, steadily growing older which is the one thing we all have in common. For a while I didn’t know what to think of all of it, but today I think that I am lucky. My proof is all the books on my shelves that I have loved and the sunflower seeds I set out for the birds in the yard and my dusty shoes showing that I have been places: a favorite canyon trail, a waterfront path from where I watch the bay, and if you can believe it a pasture out east where sometimes I’ll stand among cows and their calves and then come home as if nothing happened and for all anyone knows I have just been out running errands.
I once went to new places to escape old places, to replace whatever it is I thought I lost, the way some people use new lovers to replace old lovers. Unlike people, nature is neutral; your feet in their worn shoes may ache, but the sky and the river rocks and the hills with more hills beyond them will never hurt you on the inside. The natural world is a church of wonders, its healing balm is that we all belong to it – almost a religion. The simple sparrows in their grasses, the wonder at what might lie over the next hill – almost answered prayers.
The Water is Gone
The water is gone.
I tried to pool some into a cup, but
it is not there to be cupped.
I walk the forest
with last year’s stream in my mind
but the creek bed is dry.
Now I am upstream
and each turn is a lesson as to how
all sounds are echoes
coming through the hills
from somewhere further afield.
I think of walking on
although today
the further into woods I might walk
the further it seems to be.
Birding
A semi-legitimate concern upon
taking up the hobby of birding
is that I have waited too long
and as a result lack ample time
to learn who is who among birds
(there are many categories and
this alone is plenty to remember).
But, what does time have to do
with how we measure what it
might be worth to love something?
Hibernate/Rest
What do I do
with an empty wind
when the air hangs still
and the birds have flown on
goodbyes are made hours earlier
and the clinging leaves of summer
aren’t what they were when summer began
and now the leaves no longer try to stay
the darkwater lake laps up cold, quiet
and when the air picks up again
it is no longer a warm breeze
but tattered and flailing
a chill blowing
through us
Colette Kay 