A Tide of Swallows

There is a smell to the early summer night, a certain loamy scent of the earth cooling from the naked sun’s heat, the warm air circulating the fragrance of cut grass, bark and pine as it travels leisurely between the leaves and needles and dances over the thinning lawns, the faint odors of cooking smells from open windows, and something else that is indescribable and sensual, fertile and yearning.  Friday nights are shifting a bit from the usual TV indulgence into open window connective and creative time – a chance to catch up on the week’s unclosed loops and make new plans for the weekend.

Fresh from the meadow overlooking the sea, where fat dragonflies buzzed and hovered and the speckled seal periscoped and then rolled back into the blue, on a shadowy forest road echoing with a hermit thrush’s spiral song, we stood underneath two juvenile barred owls as they watched us with curious golden eyes, bobbed their fluff-feathered heads to paint the world around them, shrieked out with hungry bellies, and after a long while launched themselves silently on massive brown-and white wings to vanish into darkness beyond. We decided to take an unscheduled road trip today to Washington Park and after fighting the holiday traffic, did all the best things – read on the bluffs, hiked in the woods, ate a tremendous dinner, sang all the way back home.

Dragonflies charted courses outside the windows, lifting off from broad leaves; the goggled, tiny pilots hovered to get bearings, then left the jungled garden in search of dinner as we sat indoors making our own plans.  I’m already wishing I had taken a long weekend and cashed in a vacation day, but it’s too late now to change and far too late for regrets.

Humans also undergo cyclical changes and tonight at dinner I noticed the open strides, the upturned and friendlier faces with recently sun-kissed eyes, the greater tendency towards play and flirtation as the freedom born of the fertile summer season’s emphases on body awareness and the easy access of outdoor experiences brings people closer to their natural states. A very challenging day both at work and in the living of the more mundane parts of life colored the evening a bit, and yet we always find our moments of connection and joy within it all.

The cabbage white butterflies cartwheel through the space above the flowers in a frenetic dance, pausing briefly to sun themselves on the cracked fence post, reminding me of childhood summer days in grass and dandelion that stretched far into darkness and happy exhaustion. We spent the Fourth of July on the porch, reading, journaling, stomachs full of crepes, planning our weekend getaway to Lake Crescent and avoiding any thought of the three work days in between.

As I leave the house, the heat radiates from the earth, the dandelions whiten, the ants busy themselves along the sidewalk, and the grass dries and browns along the verge and the hillsides as the heart of the summer begins. With a random Tuesday off from work, I’ve spent the day with no idea where I am in the week or what I should be doing, and so I plod forward into the next day.

I learned today that even though crows are urban wanderers, they sleep miles away in communal roosting trees, commuting sometimes up to twenty miles back and forth to their day jobs, and that these wonderful crows I’ve learned to know in my neighborhood are likely the same individuals I’ve seen during my entire fourteen-year residence. We get ready now for a weekend at Lake Crescent and there is much packing and talking about plans in order to maximize the magic to come.

The house spiders, the ladybirds, and even that tiny brown-and-white moth, corkscrewing in flight, landing with splayed wings on hard-to-reach surfaces are chased and scooped up and relocated outdoors.  Early to bed tonight after a long day of work as we prepare for a quick summer weekend getaway at Lake Crescent tomorrow, nearly ten years since we began a relationship that is still as fresh and new as it was at the start.

Standing in the lake, body numb from the cold, I leaned my head back towards the mottled cloudscape as barn swallows dipped and tumbled above me, as the Pine Siskin left his hidden perch to hop along the sun-bleached twigs and shore stones, as the Downy Woodpecker cocked his thick neck and tested the wood for treasure. Day one of our Crescent Lake weekend saw us up early with an easy travel and an expansive afternoon and evening in one of my favorite places.

After a night filled with demons, Raven croaks his benediction from the church of the pines as I stood underneath him bathed in sunlight. We spent the day reading by the shores of the lake I love so much, then headed into the East again to rejoin our normal lives.

My skin still hums from the brace of cold water and when I close my eyes, I can see the quick flash of a swallow’s pink belly, hear the creak of ancient wood, and feel the lake breeze riding the waves to the shore. And now back in life, my eye aches from some dry affliction, and the sudden onset of tasks and chores shocks me and makes me question oh so much.

The mountain spans the distance between the houses on my daily walk, looming in a shimmering haze on the horizon, dark rocky sides exposed in its summer melt, the cap of snow diminished. Back from the lake, there is just so much to do that it feels overwhelming, day by day in a routine from wake to sleep with uncertain anxious work in the middle.

I glimpsed the dark, flitting shapes through the window screen and left the house in wonder only to find myself standing in the middle of a dozen dragonflies with goggled eyes and iridescent wings converging on a single spot of our wild yard, swimming like tropical fish through the summer air. A productive day followed a less-than-stellar night sleep, but the chance to connect with a more spiritual path in the evening gave me a centered respite from the week.

A cold wind blew the cards over and goose-pimpled my arms and as I brought out my coat once again in the middle of July; I started to wonder if the summer heat, that of shorts wearing, ice cream eating, neck sweat and iced drinks would ever arrive. This morning, the swamp of my brain was intense and has stayed with me all day, which makes everything more difficult.

The world beyond the four walls of our enclosed life, beyond the shuttered windows of the self-involved mind, has the capacity to hold all burdens and lessen all suffering and I would invite you to visit it often for even the smallest of journeys, say a night walk on some Friday evening after a day of struggling to your favorite nearby restaurant. A hard day today, one of the hardest in recent memory, and yet I managed to find the center in it and speak out some hard and hidden truths.

I still get a spine-tingling thrill when I am suddenly cast into shadow by a large crow, fattened by wisdom with a head full of witnessed memories, landing somewhere in front of me on a wire or on a branch, preening blues and blacks and purples, shimmering with every moment until he leans forward with wings back and lets the world know he has arrived. It was a mixed day today, socializing with friends, discussing heavy topics, but with an expansive afternoon on the porch in the 70 degree weather that set my mind on a different course.

I left the house in the early morning darkness, turned off the porch lights and sat on the step, waiting for the Aurora Borealis as I have waited for it my whole life, only to find the soft night wind, an expanse of stars, and the silence of a hidden world. After a challenging Saturday, we abandoned our projects for the day and I read for hours and got lost in television until it was time to try my luck outdoors.

When I moved in, there were towering pines shading the walkway between the buildings, blanketing the path with pinecones, creaking at the top of the wind, and now there is just a single abandoned ten foot stump whose ivy has spread in a manifest destiny to engulf over all that stands before it in the luscious natural justice of wildness. Today, another Monday and the routine repeats as the summer makes it more difficult to make the long journey from the weekend back to the desk, the keyboard and the screen.

I cannot tell you what it means to me to stand at the bottom of a hill and watch a bloom of insects in the late evening sunlight, the dragonflies somersaulting in the chase and the violet swallows weaving the air together as they feed. We are entering a stretch of warmer weather now, and it always makes this easier and somehow the evening seems to have more minutes in it than it usually does.

There’s something about hollow wood echoing in resonance from the heart of the forest, the short staccato bursts of the tiny head and the curved beak of a Woodpecker hammering in search of food – a sound that seems ancient, primal and otherworldly, even if the wood is a telephone pole outside my window and the woodpecker is one of our neighborhood Flickers.  A very busy day left almost no time at all for thoughts of leisure or life, other than to finally say goodbye to heavy broken items that had been weighing us down for many years.