Acair Fearann

The sun has set

Behind knife edged blue hills

Where skeletal ashes vanish,

Consumed by the pitiless starfire.

August in April scorches

The river’s modest bed,

Laid bare for the passerby.

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If one spends much time in the woods, one starts to learn what animal makes what noise.  No sound at all or no appreciable sound if a person is walking is, of course, the default.  However, they all can make quite a bit of noise. Squirrels and chipmunks are far louder than their size would suggest.  This is particularly true if they are chasing each on the ground, as they do not pay any attention to their surroundings.  Loud rustlings in the shrubbery, therefore, are probably very small rodents.  Deer don’t tend to make all that much noise, a deliberate four beat walk; unless they are spooked, at which point they tend to go crashing off through the woods.  Unlike the rodents, there is less rustling, more of a crashing sound.  Bears can sound exactly like a big dog, no surprise there.

Turkeys on the other hand…Generally very little noise.  However, they routinely sound like a person who is carefully threading their way through the trees.  It is exactly the same deliberate, two-beat walk.  Slightly creepy.

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One of the hardest things with a place such as Esperanza is stepping back and seeing what has been accomplished.  In the ten years that I, and even more so my parents, have been actively working on the property a great deal has been done…and yet.  It always seems that the harder one works, the more there is to be done.  The curse of a perfectionist, I suppose?*  Inevitably, I see every ill plant, every chipped bit of paint…

It doesn’t help that the weather has the Goldilocks Syndrome and in addition that dry Spring weather always sets me on edge; but I think the main part of it is that when one sees a location every day, it becomes extremely hard to see either positive or negative change.  Which is where a photographic record comes in handy.  Unfortunately, although tellingly, we have almost no photos of the property during the 1980’s and 1990’s.**  I keep reminding myself, when working on a project, to take ‘before’ pictures….I never do.  It becomes easy to second guess one’s observations: either you didn’t realize it was there/wasn’t there because you didn’t know to look for it, or it is there/isn’t there because you did/didn’t do something….and you can’t prove it either way.

The human mind seems peculiarly good at erasing information which has no immediate emotional import, and that is very frustrating for long term analysis. 

*Less Sisyphus and more Pwyll chasing Rhiannon.

**It isn’t just that they aren’t digitized…they Aren’t there.

Comments Off on Objective Observation (also known as whining)

We are now well past the equinox and the sun is clearly swinging towards the north.  One of the lovely things about Esperanza’s location is that it is only 3+ degrees off North in its alignment and the West Meadow is set the same way.  This means that at the solstices the sun appears to set about a quarter of the way up the north and south hedgerows while at the equinoxes it sets nearly in the middle of the field’s west hedgerow, sinking down across the distant hills.  The year turns, always and everywhere, but here you can watch it so very clearly.

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It is relatively quiet here, traffic on the road drops off almost completely late at night, leaving the background hum of the odd, distant car, airplane and mechanicals either in our house or the neighboring vineyard’s cooler.  Quiet enough to be able to track a motorcycle, say, coming up or down the hill for an easy two miles.  Sound carries.

However, there is still plenty of noise at night.  Squirrels or mice in the walls, the shifting of the house, trees in the wind.  In the spring, frogs in the nearby ponds.  Nearer to dusk and dawn there will be birds, a turkey looking for a mate in the grey light of a warm morning, perhaps.  The middle of the night is reserved for the predators: the rare times the owls or coyotes call to each other.  While weird, the coyotes are hardly spooky.  They don’t instinctively unsettle one; I listen, of course, and wonder what they are doing, but nothing more.  

On the other hand, sometimes the predator is revealed through its success.  Something the other night took a very long time to kill what sounded like a rabbit.  It was interesting to observe the deep-seated response to such a distress call.  You have to pay attention to such a noise, ignoring it is entirely impossible.  Somehow, that sort of sound makes one immediately aware that right outside the window is a very large, very alive nocturnal world for which humans are astonishingly ill-equipped.  We harnessed fire for a reason.  We also domesticated animals partly as a way of extending our senses into that world.  Dogs come to mind first.  But actually, I have found that the most effective early warning system is a horse.  Useless for people, of course, but for weird night noises excellent.  Coyotes far away, rabbits being hunted outside the window, no reaction from him at all.  A bear in the yard, dogs or coyotes in the yard, a definite reaction.  Unlike a dog, which will react to the rabbit, a confident horse only reacts to things that might be real threats to it.  In other words, an untrained dog will falsely raise the alarm at times, an alarmed horse is always reason for concern.  Now, if I could just get him to react to strange human activity…

Comments Off on Cries in the Night

The transition of fields from their late winter, washed beige to spring green is both imperceptible and relentless.   You don’t see it occurring, and yet it occurs all the same.  One day, everything is brown; on the next day there is the faintest hint of green, a few days later, where the grass is short or there is a lot of water, there are tongues or fingers of green reaching out farther by every hour.  There is no pinpointing the exact time* when the eye starts to see green instead of brown.  It spreads in pattern not unlike low mist or fire, and the land turns towards spring with sure, unhurried grace.

*I am sure with time lapse photography and running it through a computer to look at the spectrum you could…what would be the fun in that?

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on the part of the chickadee that is.  Window reflections are horribly confusing for birds, but I did have to laugh at this instance.  One male chickadee, very sure of himself, had claimed the Japanese Maple and lilac as his.  The problem was the Other male chickadee, the cheeky one that kept appearing in the window everytime he shifted to the lilac.  His reflection, of course, which would set him off every few minutes and send him fluttering up and down against the window, trying to drive off the other bird.  He persisted for at least two hours, until the light had shifted and the reflection vanished.

A good looking bird, but definitely controlled by instinct and hormones….

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Through the black hills

The sun burned down

Into the darkness of night

The beaten disc of fire

Thinner than the gold

Of forgotten empires

Was gone in a heartbeat

And time turned towards time

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