#mondaydelights: the birds.

As we grind our way through winter (I’m trying to embrace it, but grey days and sleet make it hard), I’m taking delight in a newish enjoyment: watching, and identifying, the birds in my neighborhood.

I’ve long loved the sight of a cheery robin redbreast, and the squawks of a bluejay send me to the window to search out that flash of bright cobalt against the bare branches. I adore the cheeky house sparrows who perch on my windowsill, and I like watching the mourning doves who sometimes take up residence there. But lately, I’ve been trying to pay attention to other breeds as well.

I found an Audubon guide at a used bookstore last summer, and I’ve been using it to try and identify a few of the birds I see on my windowsill or on my morning runs: black-capped chickadees, bright goldfinches, the terns who swim in the harbor. The gulls and hawks are easy to spot, but so many of the smaller gray and brown birds (known, apparently, to birders as “LBJs” or “little brown jobs”) require a bit more attention. I’m not always sure I’ve gotten it right, but it’s fun to try and puzzle out the name of a new species.

The other week, on a walk with my friend Sharon, I stopped in Piers Park to watch a flock of birds on the water. We spent a few minutes debating: they were ducks, clearly, but what kind? We squinted in the fading light, studying the white rings on their necks and the little spikes on the backs of their heads. Sharon pulled out her phone, consulted a birding app, and we decided: they were probably red-breasted mergansers.

I get a little thrill from identifying a bird, as Mary Oliver describes in her poem “Bird in the Pepper Tree.” But I get a different, deeper satisfaction from simply watching: noticing, observing, trying to see these birds as separate from my categorization of them. I loved watching the flock of birds bobbing on the water, knowing some of them were mergansers but some might be other species. The snapshot, in my memory, of leaning against the railing with Sharon, watching their black bodies against the waves blue with reflected light, was better than knowing their names.

As Oliver notes, “a name is not a leash” – though it can be, or enhance, a true joy.

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Poetry Friday: Mary Oliver

What Can I Say

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

I found Oliver’s collection Swan at the Booksmith this fall, and this first poem stopped me in my tracks, especially the lines about where to take “your busy heart.” As we enter a new year, I am hoping to take my heart to all those places: engaging with the world, noticing and absorbing beauty, and taking time to be in nature and be still.

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#31things: noticing goodness.

Wrapping up the month—life is still a struggle, but it helps to name and celebrate the good. I’ve enjoyed this format and will keep looking for hope as April begins.

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Blue and gray and green

My favorite colors are the colors of the sea, blue and gray and green, depending on the weather. My brother William is a fisherman, and he tells me that when he is in the middle of a fog-bound sea the water is a color for which there is no name.

—Sarah, Plain and Tall, Patricia MacLachlan

When I was a child, I read this book – slim and spare, with a pale pink cover – over and over again. I loved the story of Sarah, who comes from Maine to the wide plains of the Midwest, to be a new wife for Jacob and a stepmother for Anna and Caleb. She brings her cat, Seal, and they all learn to live with one another. The children, who have never seen the sea, listen enthralled to Sarah’s stories about Maine.

My beloved Neponset river trail, here in Dorchester, winds along marshes and brush and through several public parks, with views of water and trees (and also bridges and roads). Nearly every time I’m out there, especially when it’s overcast, I think of Sarah’s words, the rhythm of them: blue and gray and green.

 

The water is sometimes blue, of course, though it’s often gray (the same goes for the sky). The grass and trees are greening up, right now, and the broken slabs of granite along the shoreline are always gradations of gray. Sometimes the sky glows pink or orange, streaked with sunset fire or smudged with purple. Sometimes, the light on the water glitters gold.

In the winter, the trail is often edged – occasionally submerged – with fresh white snow, turning the color scheme into blue and white and brown. But in all other seasons, it is blue and gray and green. The combinations shift, depending on the weather. I have run it in all seasons, in bright morning sunlight and pitch winter dark and every time of day in between, and I love noticing the changes, subtle brushstrokes shifting with the light and the time of year.

My favorite color, as most people know, has long been red – and I’ve not lost my love for a bright flash of scarlet or deep crimson. But my favorite landscape, these days, is blue and gray and green.

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E.B. White: a good noticer

From mid-September to early November, E.B. White’s collected letters lived on my bedside table. At nearly 700 pages, it’s too heavy to carry on the subway and hold in one hand, so I kept it at home, dipping into it morning and evening.

After reading a fascinating biography of White and then his essays last fall, I found his letters at the Brattle (complete with newspaper clippings from 1977 featuring an interview with White and a New Yorker tribute to his wife, Katharine, after her death). Intimidated by the collection’s size, I let it sit on my shelf for a year.

(Image from amsaw.org)

Once I finally picked it up, I found myself charmed again by White’s keen eye, dry humor and gift for understatement. His life may have been quiet, but it was peopled with fascinating characters, including Katharine; Harold Ross, longtime editor of The New Yorker; fellow writers; his family members; and Ursula Nordstrom, the longtime children’s editor at Harper’s, whose letters I also read and loved.

As I read White’s letters, chuckling at his witty observations (and frequently reading the choicest bits aloud to J), I kept thinking of a scene from The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. Polynesia, the Doctor’s wise parrot, is talking to the narrator, Tommy Stubbins, a boy who will become the Doctor’s new assistant. She dismisses his worries about never having been to school, but when he wonders if he could learn animal language, she asks him a vital question:

Are you a good noticer? Do you notice things well?

White often doubted his own skill as a writer, even as he wrote weekly essays and shorter pieces for The New Yorker, and worked on his three books for children. He never quite understood all the fuss people made over him and his work. He harbored a deep love for New York, where he was born and raised, even writing a gorgeous, elegiac essay about it. But as he grew older, he spent more and more time on his farm in Brooklin, Maine, raising chickens and pigs and various other animals, followed around by his dogs.

White was, at times, a poet, a social critic, a quixotic dreamer, a children’s novelist, a newspaperman, a humorist, an amateur cartoonist and an essayist. But at all times, in all places, he was a good noticer. His precise observations of daily life, his keen insights into human nature, all hinged on his powers of observation. His noticing, and the care he took in writing down his noticing, are what makes his letters so much fun to read.

Do you enjoy reading collections of letters? (I love them.) And are you a good noticer?

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