Image from Russ's Picasa web album

 

Instead of tea leaves, I've been reading the trailings left behind by rising floodwaters.  In one species' crisis, it seems, lies another's opportunity. While people are suffering from damage to their material world, plants are getting a chance to spread their progeny into new territory.

The thin sideburns of mostly vegetative debris that mark the highwater points in my neighborhood seem to be dominated by maple leaves. Some have traveled long distances downstream. Or maybe I'm just maple-focused and noticing them more. Baby trees from last year's crop are popping up in even the most carefully tended landscaping mulch--none of which is in my own yard, I hasten to add. I've let my yard go "free," so I don't see the seedlings until they've grown eight feet tall and come tapping at the windows. 

If you take a standardized test that asks you how maples transport their seeds and you pick "water" instead of "air" from the answer choices, you'll be marked wrong. But those wings can act as sails and rudders, too. Life is never a simple as multiple choice answers, and the more you observe the harder it is to pick one answer on the tests. Usually, the answer is "usually a, but sometimes b or c, you just never know." 

Teaching to those tests leaves a lot out. If you've ever read Michael Pollen's Botany of Desire, you can never see plants in quite the same way. Instead of pawns without will or intention, you see them as entrepreneurs who make use of any means possible to spread their kind throughout the world. You also know that Johnny Appleseed wasn't making farmers happy with the source of apple pie; he was giving them the means to make hard cider, something the settlers appreciated even more. Apples grown from seed are weird and unpredictable, lending themselves best to fermentation.

But back to maple seeds. I wonder if kids today have history with them as some of us do. Growing up in simpler times, we spent countless hours with those little helicopters, twirling them, pasting them on our noses, making tiny dolls with dancing skirts, or just looking through the intricate fiber network of their wings. Nature was a source of delight, occasionally fear, and always wonder.

 

Sometimes, if you eavesdrop on the hunters in my family, you'll discover the hidden reason for their trips: awe in the face of beauty.

If you've ever experienced wonder and the mystery of the northland, don't miss the last few days of the Tom Uttech exhibition at the Tory Folliard Gallery, 233 N. Milwaukee Street.

Nature art isn't usually my cup of tea. But this work belongs in a different category entirely. 

The paintings don't reproduce well. Go and experience them. The show ends Saturday, December 29.

Yesterday was such a bad day.

The highlight was when the Triple A guy who came to fix my flat tire said "Dang, M'am, but you sure do look like Diane Keaton!" Actually, I look like about two Diane Keatons, but I took it as a compliment.

"Um, wow! Oh. . . well. . .God! Thanks!"

Apparently he didn't notice that I also talk like Diane Keaton. Something to do with coming of age in the Annie Hall era, I suspect.

When I told my kids, they said "Who's Diane Keaton?" Sigh.

But today is another kind of day entirely. For one thing, I'm home, recuperating from some vague unpleasant thing that probably explains yesterday's badness: I was off my game.

I got to sleep in and then indulge in my spiritual practice, walking the dog.

Someone was practicing slow scales on the clarinet across Underwood Creek from the Oak Leaf trail, and on my side, children shouted on the playground. The New England asters have popped, purple and pale blue next to the goldenrod. The air smells clean, like walnuts, even so close to the concrete creek bed where sometimes, stench is too polite a term.

Idgy and I walked down to the water. I emptied the lint from my pockets and asked whoever it is I ask to be forgiven for my forgetting.

We climbed the bank. It's a huge year for wild grapes, and I ate a handful that grew along the bank.

On the paved bike path where we emerged, someone had scrawled in large chalk letters one word: "Sweetness."

Indeed.

I didn't know mosquitos could read the calendar. But apparently, they knew that if they didn't hatch en mass on September 1, the survival of their species would be endangered.

Boyhowdy, did they rise to the occasion!

Get out the bug spray that you haven't used all summer: you'll need it now.

And make sure you take the high road. Low places are murder.

This morning, I checked the sump pump to make sure it was still working (it was) and walked the dog sometime between the 7 and 8 am rains. Basement’s dry and the air conditioning’s on, mainly to suck the wet out of the air.

Wild dog Idgy's not the only one with pent-up nervous energy during this monsoon season. I can almost feel the lawn-mowing brigade itching to start their engines. One neighbor managed to mow down an acre of lush grass yesterday. I wonder how often he had to stop to ungum the works.

But these are small concerns. So many people’s lives have been disrupted, and a few lost, in this temporary over-abundance of rain. Too much of a good thing at the wrong time can be devastating.

* * *
Twelve days until school starts. Yippee! Summer’s expensive, and I can’t wait to get back into a routine. With teens in the house and variable work schedules, there hasn't been a lot of nighttime sleep going on. "They" say when you get older you think about sleep the way you used to think about sex.

Hmmmm.

The rains and good class schedules are making the kids a little more eager to return to school, too.

This year, they’re taking a course called Challenge. Maybe I’ll pick a challenge to pursue alongside them. Something in addition to getting the lawn mowed, I mean.

* * *
Hips. They're among the randomly occurring thoughts I've been having while sheltering from the storms. and not just because mine seem to be expanding. Should the Underwood Creek rise high enough to flood my house, I'm well-prepared with my own floatation mechanism. Fat floats.

But I digress.

Have you noticed that young women don’t have them anymore? Doesn’t matter whether they are thin or plump, they don’t have hips. They may have bellies, maybe “muffin tops,” but no hips.

What's up with that?! Hormones in the food? Adaptation to never wearing anything with waistbands anymore?

Go figure. . .

Maybe your vacations at the lake are full of water sports. I'm more the languid type--lazy, if you prefer. Some of the best parts of mine this weekend were spent flat on my back on a picnic table watching the Bayfield County sky.

Cable, Wisconsin is just three degrees latitude north and four degrees longitude west of Wauwatosa, but the sky there is like a black mirror lit by a thousand points of light, all different sizes and colors, and you can still see the Milky Way smeared behind them.

I had forgotten. Here we have a dryer lint sky, dull and fuzzy. There’s a handful of stars sometimes, but it’s easy to forget to look up to see them.

Saturday friend Linda and I got home to Bill's Lake Lodge late, or what amounts to late for middle aged women. We’d spent the evening in a half exposed basement that was the local watering hole, one of those smoky places with fish mounted on the wall and communal bowls of jalapeno peppers on the bar. Some of the “native wildlife” there were people she’d known back when all of us were shinier and newer. We talked about birthdays and Birkebeiners, God and road grading. Old times. Bar talk.

I was tired but went out to the dock to say good night to the lake. Suddenly, light started rolling across the sky. There was a cloud bank, but it was narrow and the light flashed and danced above and below, moving along a third of the facing horizon.

Northern lights.

The show went on for most of an hour. Talk about a nightcap!

We got home Sunday, stopping only to sample the pieman’s wares at the Norske Nook in Osseo. Traffic was bumper to bumper between Portage and Madison, and it was dark (or what passes for dark in the city) by the time I reached Wauwatosa.

I’d heard it was the peak night for the Perseid meteor showers, but you wouldn’t have known it. The show was hidden by the clouds -- and too much light from everywhere.

It takes imagination to see what’s really there, behind the way things seem to be.

Tonight is full of the sounds of summer critter symphony: cicada, cricket, and tree frog. The closer you are to places thick with trees, the louder the concert, and the more instruments playing it. It almost masks the constant whine of traffic on the freeway.

I was listening so intently while walking Idgy tonight that I almost didn’t see the couple lying side-by-side on the hood of the pick-up truck.

“Fireworks tonight?” I asked.

“No, just stars,” they said.

I looked up, something I’d forgotten to do.

There’s too much light from the city, from our houses and streets, to see much. You have to go to Wildcat Mountain to really see the night sky.

But even on 116th Street, above the last of the fireflies, you can see the moon starting to bulge, Jupiter with his steady shine, and Antares, a little red and twinkling.

Antares means “Against Ares,” the war god. That seems appropriate in the peaceful cool of the evening. Seems like the proper work of people at the end of the day is stargazing. Making love, not war.

Over the cicada tympany, an old song runs through my head. I sing it, even though there’s no one around to hear.

Are the stars out tonight?
I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright
I only have eyes for you, dear.

If you have eyes to see, look up. There's plenty to love all about you.

We were luckier in my neighborhood yesterday than last weekend.

The big winds acted as nature’s arborist in a fairly gentle way, culling the dead wood without inflicting much damage on rooftops or cars. Our power stayed on. The creek is high but the smell isn’t, always a good sign.

I knew our neighbors in Brookfield have been seducing orioles with cheap grape jelly, which they prefer to oranges. The birds, that is: I don’t know what the neighbors prefer.

But today was the first I’d seen those flashes of orange in a couple years. I’ll look for their sling nests in the willows and aspen next time I’m at the Underwood parkway.

Wildlife’s out in force. I’d like to keep it alive, so I’m trying to drive slower and more attentively to subvert their suicidal missions.

Yesterday, the dead bodies encountered in this area included deer and wild turkey. On Canal Street in the Menomonee Valley heading home, it was beaver.

Coexistence, not collision: that’s my goal.

A reader wrote about my sense of awe in the presence of backyard deer:

I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I have to take exception with your characterization of your evening guests. You may want to do something to keep the deer away from your home. Is Lyme disease a blessing? Should I have felt blessed when a deer ran into the side of my car to the tune of around $3K? We never found the deer. It likely was maimed and limped off to starve. Would it be a blessing if the deer decide they don’t like having you in “their” yard? They are wild animals, not pets. A few weeks back I saw seven “blessings” crossing 115 St. at Underwood Pkwy.

David's point about Lyme disease and the damage deer cause to people and property is well taken. Too many deer abound--probably because both of us have overpopulated the areas we live in. That creates mutual pressure, and it's not fun.

I don't think of deer as pets. That's part of the wonder of seeing them, suddenly appearing, suddenly disappearing. They're wild, and wildness is increasingly rare. I value it more for that. A world where everything's owned, controlled, registered, barcoded, and branded isn't very appealing to me.

Seems like the deer were here first. There must be better ways to coexist with the "natives" when we invade their territory.

I'm sorry about the car, David. It's a bummer. But you'd probably be a lot safer eliminating cars than you'll be eliminating deer.

But thanks for the reminder. I'll be checking for ticks. There aren't any guarantees of safety in this life, but we can all practice a little more caution, behind the ears or behind the wheel!

Last night the deer slept in our backyard. They do that sometimes, but never out in the open. Usually they bed in the thicket of old lilacs and honeysuckle, or in the space formerly known as a garden, now full of tall grasses and volunteer mulberry bushes.

Maybe they slept near the house because they blend into the brown lawn now that the snow is gone. I don't know. But it felt like a blessing to see their dark masses lined up along the line that marks the steeper descent of the yard.

I hear that Elm Grove is debating trapping versus sharpshooters to control the deer herds. This small gang of five probably spends most of its time on that side of the creek, where the shrubbery is more expensive.

I wonder if they know it's safer here in Wauwatosa.