kathleengwhite.com

It’s on.

It seems a little early this year, but maybe it seems a little early every year. It’s certainly not something one looks forward to, like the honk of migrating geese, or the fluffier coats of pet dogs and saddle horses.

About a week ago I found my first truly noteworthy giant house spider of 2019: a medium-sized character, who suddenly materialized in my bathtub. I had been in there just the night before, so it was a shock to find this thing manifested, whole, dark, and motionless, extended across the bottom curve of the white tub, just, apparently, being.

Since then, a much larger one, probably female, showed up in the sink in the guest bathroom.  This time of year I keep a paper cup centrally located, ready for these emergences as well for as capturing wayward moths at night. The protocol is to either cover the spider with the cup and slide a paper underneath (better yet, some form of cardstock, which is less likely to suddenly crumple while I’m moving it) or if the spider is on an angle, nudge it to the side of wherever it is and then cover it–then take the thing out under the eaves of the house or over to the side of one of my sheds.  Research tells me house spiders really do only live in houses, and “putting them outside is like taking a human… and tossing them out into the middle of the ocean.”

Fine. But I am not highly evolved enough just yet to release them in another room of my personal living space.

I read up on this every year and find out the same thing: there aren’t more of them as the seasons change, and they’re not moving indoors, they’ve just gotten to maturity and full size, and—the articles tell me, they’ve already been here.  (Where?) All year.

What’s happening now is they’re touring around, looking for mates.  So while these creatures are seasonally tooling around my home trying vainly to find one another, they’ve paused to take up residence in one of my various basins, because like a lot of people, they do enjoy spending time close to water.

This morning as I came into the kitchen, still bleary from sleep, I spotted a couple of long, dark legs protruding from beneath a couple of unwashed dishes. “Okay,” I said, “we’re not doing this,” and the protocol was engaged and out we went.

Research also tells me that they do not come up through the drains. (so where was this jar-lid sized thing before it appeared in my sink?)

I am not by nature sanguine about spiders, though I’ve not been one to have the severe responses of many people I know. When I was pretty young, probably around seven, I remember my buddy Larry finding a daddy longlegs and taking it gently into his hand, and I don’t think he was doing the little boy thing of trying to scare me because he probably didn’t expect me to scream; he walked over and offered it to me: “They’re really cool,” he said, “and they won’t hurt you. See?” I declined, but I remember Larry standing there, down by a small creek where we hung out, letting the longlegs mince around his wrist and arm, before he shook it off into the grass.

Any time a spider was spotted in my childhood home, my mother would vault across the room with an anguished scream. Someone else had to dispatch the thing, either smashing it or scraping it or whacking it with a broom or I don’t remember what happened, I just know they had to go. Mother loved wildlife, though, and especially butterflies, so one year in an act of loving rottenness, my stepfather presented for her birthday a collection of small, state-of-the-art field guides, carefully wrapped:  she ooed and ahhed as she sorted down the stack—Birds of Midwest, Trees of Northern America, and then just before she got to the one on butterflies, his evil plant: Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders, which, predictably, Mother pitched across the den with a shriek, even though the cover photo was a ladybug.

I thought of that field guide shortly after I moved out here to Indianola, where I am surrounded by trees and woodsy spaces. After a year living here I realized my house needed to be stained, and, being moderately-sized, I figured I could do it myself. This meant I was all over it: across the sides and around the windows of course, but also under the eaves, and crawling under the deck, trying to cover all surfaces of siding.

I hadn’t really thought about it, but I came in contact—often face to face—with a lot of spiders—all. Kinds. of varieties. Small yellow ones, dime-sized two-toned kinds, tiny black ones, bulbous brownish things—and I wished I had my mother’s field guide, which despite her horror did remain on the bookshelf with the others.

I actually went looking for a field guide, but the university bookstore told me they don’t carry it anymore because there are so many types of spiders in the US (over 3,000?!) the guides aren’t all that much better than the old ones for children.

By the time I finished the house, I wasn’t in love with them, but I was hugely desensitized: it just wouldn’t have been possible to get the house done if every time I encountered a spider I had to stop, and trying to kill them all seemed ridiculous.

The giant house spiders, though, are a whole different ball game.

It turns out they’re not native. Like a lot of invasive species they’re European. What they really are is large. They are a shock to encounter, and sometimes (brace yourself if you’re spider-phobic) they’re zooming around. One of my first autumns here I was sitting on the floor, leaning against the couch and watching a movie, when I was distracted by activity about six feet to my right: a spider trying to sneaky-Pete his way across the carpet at a pretty good clip, and so large I could see him even in the half-light of the TV screen.

The research tells me the giant house spiders are harmless. In fact, the research always tells me that they’re beneficial: they’re busy eating flies and any other small insects around my house, and they don’t bite, and they don’t have any particular interest in people because they can’t really distinguish what they’re crawling on: “Essentially, you have the same chance of getting bitten by a giant house spider as your linoleum floor.”

Then the articles go on to mention the dreaded hobo spiders that are supposedly the evil twins of giant house spiders, but, once again, not only are hobo spiders not common in the Pacific Northwest, they live primarily outside, they’re much smaller than these things in my sinks, and they don’t have any intention of biting humans, either.

So why is it that we react the way we do to spiders? Why are they so much more alien than, say, bumblebees or mudpuppies? Why don’t people panic over the sight of starfish, or octopus?  And really, the most baffling when you think about it, humans go all moony when they see photographs of large animals—bears, mountain lions, hippopotamus—that really could kill them.

I didn’t come to my détente with these things because I’m so open minded and loving. The first few times I ran across one of these mondo-spiders, which must have been in some apartment in Seattle, I remember freezing in my tracks to try to figure out what to do: the spider was simply so huge that the idea of smashing it was more disturbing than moving it.

All I offer is a head’s up; if it hasn’t occurred yet in your particular domain, it’s that time of year: the giant house spiders are on the move. Take into consideration all these hopefully calming facts, enjoy the links below, and if you do remove them from your house, release them near some sort of structure (how do you feel about your neighbors?)

Do what you must.

McNamara, Neil. “7 Myths about Giant House Spiders.” Patch, 15 Sep, 2017, Updated 12 Sep. 2018, https://patch.com/washington/seattle/spider-season-puget-sound-myth-local-arachnologist-says.

“Spider Myths.”  Burke Museum, https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology/arachnology-and-entomology/spider-myths.

We have eight good inches of snow and the atmosphere is starting to rise above freezing. The weather report on my phone says that later this afternoon there will be more snow—or, what some sites are referring to as a ‘wintry mix’: snow beginning to turn to rain, or freezing rain, which should make this a very different reality.

Today is Monday, after a week of snow and more snow. The weather forecasters are starting to turn our thoughts to what will happen as it begins to thaw, which is predicted to start today or tomorrow. Still, there was very little traffic out this morning, and my campus all the way across the sound is one of the many schools that are closed, so I’m assuming that maybe everyone is staying in; not much seems to be going on out in the normal world.

I live at the top of a long hill: a series of steep inclines broken briefly by the cross streets. Ever since the snow started last week, traveling on the road has been changeable,and very tricky—not always because it’s slick, but because the house-bound kids and parents have been sledding:  plastic slide-things, classic Flexible Flyers, portable toboggans—all of them appear at intervals during the day, filled with brightly colored jackets of kids and parents.

Earlier today we had a small group of thirty-somethings out for a brief session. One of them has a lab mix my young female dog loves so much that she actually vaulted over the deckrail and into the snow after him, a drop of about ten feet.  She was retrieved and showed absolutely no remorse. Everyone, everything is just a little bit snow-wild.

About mid-day snow has started again and the temperature is 33, and my two dogs are agitated and not letting me get much work done. I decide to take them on their walk in this part of the afternoon, rather than get caught later in the nastiness of whatever ‘wintry mix’ turns out to be. Snow is coming down harder and harder but given the weather reports it’s possible to be our last walk in the sincerely beautiful tree-line roads, all frosted in thick layers of white. I dress for walking in falling snow and with the dogs on leashes, we head out.

It’s remarkably quiet. Even more than when the power goes out because no one is running a generator. I don’t see signs of any cars braving it today, though the road doesn’t seem icy, just snow-packed, and the descent from the top of the hill has pretty good traction compared to earlier in the week when I was afraid the dogs were going to haul me all the way down, involuntarily.

I’ve been using the daily dog walk to keep my eye on road conditions. Even I wouldn’t drive all the way down my road on my way out: like most everyone else I’d cut left toward the water to take the lesser incline there.

Walking down from the top of the hill I glance further toward the next drop, wondering if anyone’s attempted driving that today. I can see down to where the street levels out briefly before coming more steep again, and I see two trucks parked at the top of the next drop. There’s also an orange cone, indicating it’s blocked off.  My snow-watch sense, which has been triggered on and off all week, makes me both concerned and curious, so the dogs and I continue down that way to see if something unfortunate has happened.

The parked trucks seem to have been there a little while, though there’s tracks coming out of the driveway across from them, so someone’s been driving.  We pass the trucks and look down–into some sort of alternative universe:

The hill is dotted with small groups, holding or sitting on sleds, adjusting their children onto sleds, standing on skis—and at the perpendicular side street someone has set up a tent canopy, under which is a sound system and a full-on grill: the smell of cooking hotdogs and brats and the bass of the speakers waft through the falling snow and the voices of all the revelers. Couples are sitting on small rises in the snowy yards, carboard cases of beer cooling next to them in the drifts, talking and listening to the music. Then a young boy calls out and everyone clears the dogs and younger kids out of the way—he launches out from the rise of a driveway on a snowboard, slicing all the way down the long hill, dropping to the main road a couple of blocks away.

One of the beer drinkers says, “Well, no one’s going to top that today!” as I walk over to a cluster of neighbors and dogs.  “Who’s set up is this?” I ask, still amazed at the scene all around me, and she tells me, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. “This is amazing!” I say, more or less just out loud.  She toasts her beer and says, “Right?  I mean, what else are we going to do?”

Now a trio of snow-sleds packed with dads and kids go whipping past, all cheering and young ones happily screaming.  My dogs are tangling up a Labrador and a Jack Russell, and I disentangle them, smile and wave, and head way down on the side road.

I am met by another neighbor on cross country skis, another woman and another dog, heading for the festivities.  But it’s just a matter of minutes before the sound of all that’s behind me, and it’s just my boots crunching in the snow and the dogs straining to dive around in the berm of snow alongside the road.

We walk for an hour, all told. The snow has not let up, and it hasn’t turned into anything else—not rain, freezing rain, no shower of gold—it’s just snow, and lots of it, good and steady, as the afternoon light turns gray.

Walking into my driveway I see my immediate neighbor walking by, ask if she knows about the gathering downhill. “Oh, yeah, I was there earlier with the kids,” she says. “I wasn’t really cold, but I just came up to put on my snow pants. I’ve already taken down some stuff from the freezer.”  And, to-go mug in hand, back down the hill she goes.

After ten hours without power last Monday, we’ve been very lucky:  our little town has remained energized throughout the storm.  Not trusting it, though, I keep doing what needs to be done with electricity while I can, and I have a lot of work to do this afternoon.  Plus, as this all begins to melt and the heavy, wetter snow drops off the trees, it’s very likely we could lose power again.

The weather report says this will all start to wash away by tomorrow.  But as I sit here writing this another good three or four inches has fallen and it’s still coming down.  It’s bright in my house, and warm, and for now at least, the dogs are tired out and sleeping by the fire.  Outside it is snow-quiet, the muffled wonder of an atmosphere full of thick, dusty flakes.

It’s nice to be here, in the warmth and the light, surrounded by a cold, slightly blue twilight–confident that two blocks away,the heart of Indianola is still sizzling and happily in motion.

I woke up the other morning to a genuinely yellow sky: the kind of pale amber light that seems to only come in the autumn, and when it does, tells you that a change is coming in.

Within half an hour the rain started.  I went out on my deck and stood under the eaves. It was remarkably but not surprisingly soothing to stand there, listening to the rain; I’m far enough away from urban density that I actually hear the sound of it, not just hitting the leaves that are still left in the trees, but the rain itself, the water breaking out of the clouds, beads of water rushing and rattling down to the ground. It was the same when I went out to listen to the wind coming up the night before, long strands of whining air flowing off the bay and back up—and apparently blowing in this front.

The rain was steady, strong, and very clearly beyond  the control of anything human: it was the planet bathing itself under its own power and circumstances and in its own timing.  The rhythm was even but the rain was coming down hard, that rattling sound that suggests it might even be a prelude to hail.

The fact that I can be so aware of the weather out here is deeply gratifying to me, because it reminds me what the planet is really up to, rather than the human-created nonsense we all become so obsessed with.  Right now, in the face of the Midterm elections, each side is convinced the other is causing all the evil in the world, and also convinced that attacking them for it will make things better.  Social media is filled with falsehoods, friends all ginned up by writers or bloggers or media stars who really aren’t journalists but who want to proclaim a furor and raise their ratings. The end is near.  Act now and follow this line of thought or we’re all doomed. Honestly, if we are all doomed, I am close to genuinely believing that every one of us deserves it.

I do what I can, and here I can vote early, which I did. I can also turn off the media feeds of friends who are for whatever reasons momentarily poisoned by righteousness.  I can choose music instead, or, when I do want to know what’s going on, use the technology handed to me to select as many different perspectives as I can find, read what lets me feel like I know the basics, and then go on with whatever else I need to be doing:  working, writing, taking care of my animals, my household.  Standing outside, listening to the rain.

I don’t know when it occurred, but somewhere in the nine years of volunteering with wildlife my misanthropic view of humanity shifted a notch further. I remember one afternoon when a carload of us were off to release several juvenile cormorants, young black water birds the size of bowling pins who were rehabbed after either being booted out of nests by siblings or picked up by misguided, well-intentioned humans when the adolescent birds were just messing around on the ground, trying to figure things out. Somewhere along the way to the release site one of the rehab staff began describing the human population as a virus, and another joined in to say it was a species that had gotten out of control;  someone else suggested that the planet needed a flea bath.  When we got to the release site some of the little birds were so confused they tried to run back up on land, and we had to chase them into the water, but pretty quickly their connection with their element seemed to snap them back into reality, and off they went.

I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and say that if we really do care about our families and their futures, we really do need to learn to calm down and stop terrorizing them with our politics.  My experience is that family and friends are not given to us for extended, guaranteed periods of time, and we should all spend what time we have together with something better than social harassment.  I’m going to crawl out farther on the limb to point out that unless we pay more attention to the planet and its condition, it’s all going to be moot, anyway, and sooner than most people want to recognize.

So I focus on the weather.  I check how this limb is holding up, and back off  when it feels like it’s got too much play in it.

Human beings, really, are a pretty nasty species, sometimes seeming closer to jackals and wild dogs than to the larger primates we’re supposed to be most closely similar to.  If one wants to go to ancient and Biblical interpretations, we’re definitely more mud than we are God’s breath.  Ancient philosophers believed our challenge was to overcome that duality; most religions argue the same. Compassion.  Kindness. Doing what we can for others who have less than we do. Recognizing our powerlessness in the face of larger forces.  Those books call us again and again to these lessons because we need so much reminding that this is the higher calling.

Politics are human created sports, methods of trying to make sense of ourselves, and like so many things we do as humans, we get so much of it snarled. For whatever reasons, modern politicians and the media that reports on them has gotten mired again and again in the graphite and dirt, even as they’re insisting they’re only making this mess because they want to be part of the solution.  Within hours of me posting this, the election returns will be coming in, and there will undoubtedly be more noise: unending discussion of what has just happened and why, and how it will affect the future.  One could also put a pot over one’s head and bang on it with a stick.

Classical scholars point out that in The Illiad, Homer referred to the sky as bronze and the sea as the color of wine, and those sorts of references carried on all the way through the Old Testament of the Bible. There was no discussion of blue skies; one theory is that they really didn’t have a word for blue: the color rarely occurs in nature, and it was tough to get it as pigment for dye or paint—it just wasn’t something that came up much, something they needed to express. There are also theories that the colors looked different because people saw differently.  Early landscape painters often had as much yellow and gray in the skies as the crystal blue we think of now, and artists weren’t even attempting to paint realistically until as late as the 15^th century.

So much of what we believe or what we take as fact is actually shaped and affected by how we’re trained to perceive things, by what we’re told, and where our attention is pointed.

I know many people who find this time of year a little disturbing, because the days are getting shorter and the light is changing noticeably almost daily, especially up this far north.  It’s interesting to me how seasons take on different associations.  I know people who have an autumn sadness, often associated with dread of going back to school, or the shortening of the sunlight. But the barn dances and hay rides and Oktoberfests of autumn happened because this was the harvest time: the results coming in from the hard work of summer, back before summer meant trying very hard to do nothing.  Autumn was a time of bounty, for enjoying the fruits even as you were putting them up to help you through the winter.

The concept of feasting and settling in is hardwired into us: recently a friend of mine on a relatively suburban part of Bainbridge island looked outside in the evening to see her summer bee hives being raided by a large black bear. 

Neighbors were aghast—what were bears doing on Bainbridge Island? There were plenty of noisy posts on local websites.  But the next day my friend installed a hotwire around the bee hives and the bear has since left them alone, foraging elsewhere. Wildlife hates noise.

Harvest time is for bringing good things the from the earth and the trees back indoors with you, to keep them throughout the darker months, to continue to enjoy.

Will the elections make a difference?  On some scores, certainly, but these scorecards go back as far as written record and the tallies continue shifting. Will we all be any less awful to each other?  It’s up to us, I think.

Is this the rainy season, darkness and impending doom, or a time for savoring, and reflecting about things and people we care about?  Is the sky blue, or is it yellow?  Which is better?  Which is true?

I say stand outside in the weather with an open mind and try to come up with language that reflects what you see. I hope we all find and create words that will genuinely express our experiences and our hearts.

It may be rare to be exhausted by summer, but this year I was definitely there.

In the Pacific Northwest, summer pretends to start in May: warming temperatures and clear sunlight, but the weather will cool and even drizzle throughout June, ironically getting colder through the first half of July. Normally, though, August visitors are stunned by the wonderful summer temperatures and the crystal blue sky; they can’t believe they’ve heard so many stories about Seattle rain. If you aren’t interested in these particular visitors considering a future summer place near you, this is when you tell them the weather they’re experiencing lasts for about six weeks, and they really ought to plan their next vacation here in February.

But this year, instead of the usual nearly two inches of rain in May, we had less than twelve hundredths; in June, we had a third of our regular precipitation, and for the entire month of July we registered five one hundredths of one inch.

And it was hot.  Meteorologists are tangling over the details but most report this has been the hottest summer on record for the Puget Sound area, and records started in 1894.

There was a lot to love at the start: the sun, the green, the chirps of baby ospreys in a new nest down the road from me.

I was teaching a class on line and writing, and all of that was fine; in the relative cool of the mornings I could even say this was really a beautiful summer, a wonderful time of working at home.

At the same time, early in this very dry summer I also entered into a significant battle with dust. I swept the floor in the morning, wiped off tables and windowsills. By afternoon, though, when I crossed the floor I could tell it was back—and when I looked across a table I could see it—all back again, all over everything again.

Then, the temperatures usually reserved for mid-August showed up in July.

I found myself obsessively checking weather apps, to see if the temperature would drop enough at night to be able to actually rest, since like two thirds of the houses in the Puget Sound region mine does not have air conditioning—which meant leaving windows open, the windows and French doors open during the day, which meant more dust.

By late July, when the dogs started chasing each other out in the yard, a cloud of dust rose up six to eight feet above the ground and then just hovered there, suspended in the air.

August brought the addition of several weeks of smoke from regional forest fires, a creeping, sulphurous quality to the air, blue skies looking like they’d been lightly washed with turmeric. Mid-month we got a brief reprieve—enough of a pressure change off the ocean to clear it, and the temperatures dropped back to the low eighties. But apparently the winds changed, because I walked out a few days later to air that once again smelled like I lived near a pulp mill.

And because I was outside so much, because everyone was outside, there was more local hum: from neighborhood gatherings, groups of bathers scampering down to the beach, cars travelling up and down the dirt road raising still more clouds of dust. The young osprey were getting bigger, now screaming throughout the day because their parents, in an attempt to work them out of the nest, to get them to the water, were bringing less fish, and the fledglings were not having it.  By August they were out of the nest, all over the area, but still screaming. I was surrounded.

The dogs were hot and agitated. The large dog, getting older, practically grimaced with the effort to raise his body up off the deck, before he charged off to the perimeters the property, working overtime to keep his eye on all that was going on around us.

Spending as much time as I do alone, it’s possible to become too lost in the processes and meaning of living.  And any of us, these days, can get too caught up in the news, politics, the business of arranging something in our lives, even the business of business.  It’s no secret to anyone these are challenging times, and often it seems like everything and everyone is picking up the tension and conflict. The turbulence seems global;  maybe it is—but it’s also definitely another type of exhaustion.

And then came September One.  The temperatures had dropped some, but almost on cue with the turn of the calendar page, we began to get rain. It was very light at first, so with the incredibly dry ground it made almost zero difference to the plants, to the dust problem, to the animals.

One evening in the first week of September, I was thinking through a rough decision and went out to sit on the deck, where I became distracted, watching the season come in.  The sky suddenly developed a ceiling: we went from the flawless blue of summer, which had, frankly, started to seem sinister to me, to moody sheets of clouds drifting in, covering portions of the visible horizon, bringing night on faster. That night, the sky was slate-gray, with a slight breeze which had been completely absent over the summer.  It was also notably quiet; all the neighbors, all their children, seemed to have disappeared. Just the sound of the cooler, damper air moving through the high branches of the trees.

Nights like this it can be easier to remember I’m actually on the surface of a large ball, rotating through space. With no streetlights in the neighborhood, something about the night sky opens to look as limitless as it truly is; it’s easier to see how far the trees and buildings of our world reach up into space–how far we do not reach. Sitting with my problems I was aware that at the same time, through the tree canopy, along the ground, all over the skin of this planet, organic life is going on—and almost certainly unconcerned with our human issues. Plants are responding to the change in daylight; some creatures in the tree canopy are building winter nests; the night skies are streaked with clouds of migrating birds–the osprey, just now heading out for South America. They all move to the earth’s magnetic fields, to its rotation.

The contrast of the enormity around me and the smallness of my house, my deck, my chair, reminded me, somehow, that there have been very hard times before in human society, even in the recent past. Today of course we believe our own problems are more significant than the ones before, but at the time, those people believed the same. They felt the world was going to end, was ending—sometimes it may actually have come close.  Still, as I sat there then, as I write this now, the other life of the planet, the earth, goes on: creatures live, move, die, with all the ambivalence of the natural world. Ocean tides are coming in and going out; waves are rising and crashing, or rolling, like green or gray silk, not breaking, not making a sound.

The ball, the organic earth, is what keeps us: without it, without it breathing and growing and living the way it needs to, honestly, none of our issues matter. The seasons change because of the planetary tilt—and the light shifts, and we bring in harvests, and risk becoming ever more insular.

Watching the autumn come in, I reminded myself to take the time to be distracted by the trees, the wind, the changes of seasons and real changes they bring.  For all our complexity and conflict and self importance, the earth is what actually keeps us alive.

Step outside. Look up and detach. And roll with it.

When I was a teenager, for a lot of reasons and not unlike others of us, my relationship with my mother had become somewhat fraught. In fact, through those years I spent a lot of my time away from my family, at a barn on a three hundred acre YMCA camp in lower Michigan.  I and a small band of comrades who also were not living the perfect teen lives tangled with the horses, mucked around cleaning stalls and repairing fence and tack, and hung out with the tougher women there who stood in for mother figures as needed.  I also remember smoking a lot of cigarettes while playing a midwestern card game called euchre.

On one Sunday in May, sitting in the tack room I discovered from the others that this particular Sunday turned out to be Mother’s Day—which I had totally forgotten.

I tried brainstorming something to do for my mother when I returned home later. I have no idea why it didn’t simply involve going by a drugstore for at the very least a card and a box of chocolates.  Instead, one option we came up with involved trying to get one of the Shetland ponies into a friend’s pick-up truck and taking it home and putting it in the garage for Mother to discover, but we all knew  it really wasn’t really safe for the pony to travel in an open truck.  I don’t remember when I thought of going out and digging up a plant of some sort to take back home, a more typical gift and possibly perceived as a positive display of the holiday.

I went out into one of the back fields with a beat up metal five-gallon bucket and a shovel, to a stand of wild cherry trees.  I dug out a small one, probably sucker growth. Ever since I could remember my mother had been in a garden club, she loved working the garden borders in our frustratingly shady yard.  And she’d ecouraged me, when I was an adolescent, to plant fruit trees, though the hard winters wiped out my dwarf apple. The cherry tree made immediate and expedient sense.  Problem solved.

When I came back to the tack room, lugging the sapling in the bucket which had to weigh about thirty pounds with all that dirt in it, my boss’s friend Jo was sitting by the door, and asked what on earth I was doing.

“I forgot it’s Mother’s Day,” I told her.  “Thought I’d take Mom a tree.”

Jo was a cutting horse trainer who had seen a lot; one of those wonderful, calm women with a dry but essentially kind sense of humor.  “I see that,” she said mildly, nodding at me. “I’m not so sure I’d be glad to have one of those in my yard.  Wild cherry is basically an invasive weed.”

I must have shrugged and obviously I recognized what she was saying, but I did put the bucket in the back seat of the car I was driving—my mother’s—and took it home with me.

Mind you, I always came back from the barn relatively dirty:  sweat, grain bits or strands of hay, smears of manure, or I dragged my saddle home to take apart and clean.  One time we fit several bales of straw in the back seat. Mother had recently blown up at me:  “I got into my car Sunday morning,” she barked, “and it was a mess!”  I could just see her darting out in her church clothes, thinking she was just going to hop in the car and go make the 8:00 service, to find when she opened the door her seat was strewn with God only knew what.

Which didn’t stop me from putting the rough cut metal and dirt with the tree in behind the driver’s seat, and going home.

When I produced the cherry tree, Mother didn’t miss a beat:  she was delighted.  She told me she knew just where she was going to plant it, and plant it she did.

Our relationship improved tremendously after I got my own life in order a few years later, which took a lot of tolerance and insight on both our parts, and at some point in my twenties after I’d moved away I thought to ask her about the cherry tree.

“Of course I knew what it was,” she said.  “And yes—they’re awful:  the fruit is small, it draws a lot of birds, they’re basically dirty and tough to keep from spreading.”

“So why did you plant it?”

“Because you gave it to me.  Besides, I knew how to keep it small:  I prune it back every year, and so it’s just a lovely little shrubby thing on the windy edge of the house.  It’s still there.”

All that is a long time ago now, and I do not know why I woke up thinking about it this morning.  It’s a beautiful sunny day, here in the PNW, and I will call a couple of mothers I know and wish them a good day.  Then I plan to get out in my yard and rid myself of a few invasive trees that have popped up here: wands of big-leaf maple poking up through my rose bushes, some hawthornes back by the fence that keep spreading.

Motherhood is happening all over the place;  I like that if you study it you learn that motherhood in the broader natural world can vary—a lot.

For instance, mother opossums have their babies growing in a pouch.  They often birth more than they can actually provide for, and somehow, it isn’t an issue.  The babies will emerge at some point, and spend more and more of their smallest weeks riding around on their mother’s back.  Then, at the right moment, they will either be shaken off, fall off, or jump off, and simply wander out into the underbrush, to become more opossums.  She doesn’t go looking for them and they don’t check in.

On the other hand, there has been a strange eagle drama going on around my neighborhood for several months. I keep hearing a voice calling on the opposite side of where I know the nest to be.  It might be answered from the nesting site, but it makes no sense that one of them would be where I hear the voice coming from, unless they’re building a new nest, which it doesn’t look like they’re doing.  Then a week or so back I saw a large, dark bird shoot across the sky in that direction—at first I thought it might be one of the ravens but it was way too big, and then I noted the brown body, yellow feet.  This may validate a theory a friend and I had been speculating on:  a juvenile, maybe even from this nest, come back to wonder if maybe he might not get another year of hanging out with the adults.  But the resident pair aren’t having it.  They’ve been there for at least twenty years, and while I’ve heard babies in the past I’m not sure they did produce any offspring last year.  Despite continuing the routine of coming to the nest, sprucing it up and defending it to the death, they may no longer be able to make viable babies.  Doesn’t matter.  They have clearly planned on another set of eaglets this year.  Regardless of whatever its relationship is, this brown guy is not being allowed to get anywhere near the nest, though it periodically still turns up in the area, only to be chattered at and run off.  Of course I wonder if the juvenile is sulking.

Mothering is a varied thing.  A family of raccoons might hang out together in a pack for several generations.  If you reach in to touch a pet dog’s puppies she might try to take off your hand, though within the year she will not seem to recognize them.

Obviously, humans being primates brings a whole different set of child rearing techniques.  But our own organic practices are exactly the same biological drives as other animals, we’ve just happily dressed them up as cultural virtues:  feed the young, keep them safe.  Defend them against predators.  Make sure they launch in safe places.

But obviously there are significant differences in being human.  There are all those choices we can make, if we’re paying attention.

When my stepfather retired, rather than move to a comfortable locale in a warmer climate like most of the people they knew, he and my mother relocated to an island off the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  My stepfather told me he had to reason with Mother from going even farther into the woods. She was incredibly happy there.  They’d call with reports of bobcats in the driveway, hibernating bear within range of the house, three feet of ice on Lake Huron in the winter.

So the fact that I live my somewhat rangy life outside of the city, doing what I can to pay attention to the other wild things around me, I attribute in part to something I’ve come by honestly, maybe even biologically.

I have occasionally wondered if the cherry is still at the house in Indiana, what the people who are living there have done about it.  I was there in 2001 and did see the house and walk through the yard, but I was distracted by all kinds of things and forgot to look.

As I started writing this I wanted to double check about Midwestrn wild cherry, to see if what I remembered and had been told seemed correct, so I looked around at some internet sites at species information.  The University of Michigan says this:

“A common tree of fencerows and borders of fields and forests, almost anywhere that birds have deposited the seeds; can be very scrubby in rocky ground or dry open jack pine or aspen savanna, a fine tree in deciduous forests (oak, beech-maple, or others), attaining considerable size in rich hardwoods.

Several species of Prunus, especially P. serotina, are known as stock-poisoning plants, because of their cyanogenic glycosides that produce dangerous amounts of hydrogen cyanide, particularly in the succulent young leaves and slightly wilted ones and in the pits, which may fatally poison children.”

O-kay!

I also found a website for Porcupine Hollow Farms, somewhere on the northwest side of lower Michigan.  The farm grows Christmas trees and landscaping plants, and hardwoods for flooring and furniture. I like their description of the wild black cherry, which could very well have been be what I dug out:

“The leaves are simple, oval or oblong, tapering at both ends, wavy-margined and fine toothed, thin, shiny, dark green, bitter and aromatic when crushed, 2.5” long turning yellow in the fall.  The flowers in May-June are white, in long, close-flowered facemes, small, flowering later than other wild cherries usually when the leaves are half grown.  Fruit is pea sized berries, bitter when crushed, can be used in pies, ripening in August, fruit for birds and other game and also useful for yanking off by the handfuls to use as ammo when playing with the kids.  It can be messy in some yards.  It is a fast grower.”

They also point out it is a favorite tree of the eastern tent caterpillar, another good reason not to have one anywhere near things you care about.

As I go about my time in the yard today, and think about the various mothering going on around me, I will add one more determining characteristic to the human variety.

Mothers are creatures who will willingly take what is essentially plant vermin, given to them by reprobate daughters, and they will put it into their manicured, well-loved garden beds.

And they will make it work.

It is spring.  That weather again. Blossoms are starting to fire off throughout the neighborhood—the plum trees, the cherries, the fragrant daphnes, short pink tufts of early rhododendrons visible against the gray spring sky and the very green leaves.  And the eagles are doing amazing things: high parallel passes in the air, then picking up speed and then dropping, unbelievably accurately, one right after another into the nest hidden high in the neighbor’s Grand Fir.

But as far as seasonal thoughts go, right now I want to discuss jelly beans.

Around this time last year I was in a Bellevue drugstore with my friend Ruth. She was back in this Washington from where she lives now in DC, and just at that moment we were helping out her aging parents by running some errands.  While Ruth shopped for the very specific things her mother had on a list, I wandered the drugstore aisles, winding up as if by magic among the seasonal candies.  For all kinds of reasons, I find I rarely go through a spring without at some type of Easter candy.

Marshmallow Peeps are a subject unto themselves I won’t go into here;  I got involved with them later in life.  But standing in the aisle I gazed over choices that definitely were the building blocks of the 1960s baskets of cellophane grass that materialized outside my bedroom door on Easter morning.  Foil-wrapped bunnies and small chocolate eggs, speckled blue malt-balls, and jellybeans, which happened to be on sale at that moment. I don’t often buy jellybeans but I thought why not, so I scrutinized types.  The mystery flavors that started showing up in the ‘80s hold little allure for me, but the package of Brach’ s claimed they were “Classic” so I picked up a bag, nabbed two packs of peeps, and met Ruth at the checkout counter.

Many people have aversions to Peeps, but jellybeans aren’t strictly a seasonal candy anyway, and they seem to resonate with most of us.  I showed Ruth the jellybeans and was delighted when she immediately began discussing the flavors and colors.  I was not surprised that Ruth, like any sensible person with a memory of childhood, has strong opinions about which color jellybeans are the best.  But I honestly did not expect her choices: she hates the orange ones, is only lukewarm to the yellow, and has always preferred the white.  In fact, she was quite enthusiastic about the white ones.

I was stunned.  I think the orange ones are just fine—and I think I quite like the yellow ones, for that matter.  But the white ones, I said calmly, have all the allure of old moth balls, and I’ve never been sure what they represent.   Ruth answered very reasonably that it doesn’t matter what flavor they’re supposed to be, and that green jelly beans are poisonous.  We briefly discussed the issue of the purple ones, and I stated that the pink ones really aren’t any recognizable flavor besides pink.  We talked about that further:  what can they be meant to taste like, cotton candy? Strawberry?  Nothing we came up with seemed correct, but Ruth emphasized again, so what?  Who eats jellybeans to expect them to taste like anything but jellybeans?

Ruth and I hugged goodbye in the parking lot, and the Peeps and my bag of classic beans and I got into my car, where almost immediately I got into the cellophane.  Peeps have that exterior crunch of sugar and the totally strange marshmallow softness, and then disappear about the moment you realize you’re eating one.  I put the car in gear.  Before I got out of Bellevue, I opened the bag of Classic beans.

First, let me say that if you haven’t eaten the classic flavors in a while, or really any jellybeans, this is a sugar blast almost alarming to the adult palate.

Once in your mouth, a random handful of jellybeans produces the immediate sensation of smooth round things that crush quickly into a sugarfied paste, a mouth blur of sharply sweet flavors identifiable only as ‘candy.’  We are not talking about anything like a natural flavor.

And, almost as immediately, as I merged onto the freeway, I experienced a tension between my eyes that expanded into a light headache, apparently the sugar overloading my circuits.

But truly, these are the food of time-travel.  Like Proust and his madeleine, at the first taste of the jellybeans it is suddenly 1962, and like Alice, I’ve shrunk to under three feet tall.

Because for all their good intentions, and they were very good, what were our parents thinking? If your family did such things, Easter is the culmination of forty days of Lent—an observance where most children are urged to give up something they love, like candy, or at least chocolate.  So Easter morning arrives, and, depending on your church, you may have been supposed to have an empty stomach before taking communion.  But kids having seen their Easter baskets, my parents, anyway, couldn’t completely resist our pleadings, so we were allowed one or two pieces of candy before we left for the service.

Communion was an act I did not participate in until the age of ten, but there I was with the rest of them, empty and starving–except now surging highly refined sugar through my five year old bloodstream as I faced a full High mass: processional and recessional hymns, the whole choir leading the acolytes and priests, one wearing white-gloves swinging the burning censor,  bowling us over in the pews with thick waves of  the ancient-smelling, dusty, liturgical incense.

Empty body, queasy stomach and a slight tension headache, in the alien dress and little Easter socks and shoes, and even after it was all over when we walked out into the into the damp, possibly cold but still humid Midwestern spring morning, pausing to wish other parishioners a happy Easter before heading home to my grandmother’s brunch food—I still had that strange, floaty feeling crimping in my head, my stomach—you’re a child in new clothes standing beneath the waists of a group of chatting adults and all of a sudden you hate everybody and you really just want to lie down.

I haul myself back through the sugar portal and finish driving home, still trying to understand how such an excellent person as Ruth could prefer the white ones.

Now to be honest, at this point in my life I eat a lot of dark chocolate.  But a quick scan of ingredients tells me that gram for gram, jellybeans have three times the sugar content of dark chocolate, and the modern bag of jellybeans even comes with warning of a choking hazard.

After a high-protein meal, I get out the bag and sort through the colors.  It is time for a systematic adult analysis.

I lay them out in my own hierarchy:  Red, of course, yellow, orange, black and green—then the questionable ones:  pink, purple, white.  Classic.  I pop a red one in my mouth.

These truly are the flavors of the MidCentury.  While trying to discern what flavors they actually are supposed to be, I realize it will take more than one bean for assessment, so I lay out another complete row.  It might not sound like much but I don’t eat much straight candy at this point in my life, and a part of me looks at them all there on my dining room table, all sixteen beans, and something in my nervous system shudders.  

Red is, of course, the best.  Maybe cherry?  Whatever that red flavor is I’d say it has little in common with any actual fruit.  Mostly I’d just say it just tastes ‘red’.  Not overly sweet but certainly sweet; good body, nice bits of sour afternotes.

Yellow does have a distinct flavor of lemon candy:  very sweet but some tartness to it and a satisfying, gritty texture; definitely the same flavoring as lemon drops, or even lemon furniture polish.  What it has in relation to actual lemons is another question, but with this particular jellybean, at least we know what the intention is.

Orange is sort of fascinating.  Like the yellow ones, there is a clear memory of other orange candies—orange slices, for instance, those strange jellied wedges coated in granular sugar.  Is it anything like an orange?  This one may be the closest to an actual fruit flavor, but it’s still a stretch.  Which makes me think of Tang.  Apparently Tang originated in the late ‘50s, but I remember when it really hit its stride after John Glenn successfully circumnavigated the globe in a space capsule, and it became The Breakfast Drink of Astronauts.  (Just thinking about this has me jonesing for a bowl of corn flakes and whole milk)

Ruth is right:  green tastes something like sugared Pine-Sol.

Black.  Now here is something that truly is Classic.  The black jellybean tastes like absolutely nothing else but a black jellybean:  you know as soon as you’ve hit one that that’s what you’ve got.  Unlike true black licorice, these things are remarkably sweet, with that strange, tarry aftertaste.  My stepfather adored them, and sometimes fed them to our poodle.

At the purple jellybean we begin to markedly deviate.  Waxy, immediately artificial, and then there it is:  the unmistakable artificial ‘grape’ flavor, bearing no genetic markers whatsoever to anything from produce departments.  This is the grape of grape soda, of grape Kool-Aid, of Fizzy’s, which I once threw up (it might even have been the grape flavor.)  A purple jellybean is totally identifiable when it hits the tastebuds, but really, can you associate it with anything that isn’t the color of crayons?

Pink is another mystery.  I still have no idea what flavor it’s supposed to be, but boy, is it ever nostalgic.  It’s Pink.  Incredibly sweet, with strange hints of teenaged perfume.

After a sip of coffee to clear the palate, I pop in a white one.  Again, this is immediately recognizable as just what it’s always been–a sort of mystic, stale pineapple flavor with a hint of wax.  (Ruth, really?) I have never been able to understand this one, possibly because it was usually just the bad end of the sugar crash, since I would leave those and the pink ones, and the purple ones, too, now that I think of it, as the low residue of the Easter basket.

Yes, of course, I realize that there are other types and flavors of jelly beans. Famously, in the 1980s, jellybeans were the Food of Presidents, responsible, Ronald Regan claimed, for helping wean himself off smoking a pipe.  He was sent probably quite literally tons of   Jelly Belly’s—often in simple red, white, and blue themes (‘very cherry, blueberry, and coconut) but he claimed to like all flavors.  The Jelly Belly company proudly lists fifty flavors, and claims that the favorite flavor of all jellybeans in the US is buttered popcorn.   I refuse to believe it.

These exotic flavors didn’t start showing up until flavorists began to get them right, somewhere in the early ‘80s, and from then on jellybeans got more and more outlandish, even alcoholic.   There are cantaloupe and kiwi. Pear (pear?  Honestly, who ever wants a pear-flavored jellybean?) I scan the list past jellybeans flavored strawberry daiquiri and pina colada. I ask, why not tequila?  That certainly could have helped a few of us through Easter mass.

In the early ‘90s JK Rowlings started her first novel about Harry Potter, with the mention of Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans, which memorably include earwax and vomit.  Certainly not ones to miss an opportunity, the flavorists at Jelly Belly are reproducing Bottie’s beans, and I see flavors include grass, earthworm, and rotten egg–actually, a nice post-Easter medley.

But analyze anything too far and you wind up splitting atoms.  A few happy, headache-inducing jellybeans really don’t hurt anyone in the spring, and probably match up nicely with the discomfort of allergies.

The question is whether eating jellybeans is about having some random candy, which the modern flavors constitute for me and which is why I completely leave them alone, or whether it is checking in and reconnecting with very young parts of ourselves, who often remind us that simpler can be better.  In fact, can be delightful when you leave it as it is.

Sometimes life offers us really nice moments of return motifs, and two days ago Ruth texts to say she’s back again for another brief visit with her parents.  In planning to get together I mention I am writing about jellybeans.  I want to give her the opportunity to clarify what cannot be correct in my memory.  In return, I receive this:

“White, pink, purple, and pink are best.

Red are acceptable but inferior to the above.

Yellow, orange, and green are not fit to be eaten unless one is starving.

Black are equal to the ‘best’ category, but they’re in their own category because it is forbidden to combine them with any other colors, whereas the four colors in the other “best” category may be combined if the eater wishes.”

I look into the bottom of my bag after all this exhaustive research.  What’s left?          Purple, pink, and white.

I will take them to Ruth.

There are things that are absolutely worth getting out of bed for.

I’d come home past midnight from a quick trip up and back to Canada; a wedding– wonderful people I hadn’t seen in years, but a hard turnaround and I’m not getting any younger.

Five hours later the alarm is going off, the extra-annoying electronic one on my phone, which I use when I want to make absolutely certain I can’t miss it.  I nab the phone and pull it back into my bed.  Out beyond the blankets it’s black and cold, but I roll out and toward the clothes I’d put out the night before:  next to the cast off wedding blouse and pumps, a stack of jeans, thermal shirt, waterproof steel toed boots.

The black sky is just beginning to turn deep blue at the horizon as I drive down the road to the wildlife shelter, dark lines of trees on either side forming a long vee toward the east side of the island, where the light is coming up even more.

Lynne is already there opening the van and getting crates in place, and three or four of the volunteers, and Cate.

I fall in with Lynne.  “We’ve just got to get the two out of Ward D,” she tells me.

“Do you want me to get a blanket?”

“No, just the eagle gloves.”

And we head into the windowless space next to the hospital—mews the size of small box stalls, where we keep patients that should only have limited ability to move around.  These two had been in the full-size flight cage up until the day before, but were transferred here to make them easier to catch this morning.

Lynne flips on the very yellow light in the runway and I open the door to the first enclosure, and the dark body of the juvenile eagle thuds into the corner.

“Easy!” Lynne mutters toward the bird, “we just have to do this—“

“And then,” I add, “It’s all going to get so much better.”

She moves steadily toward the eagle, who stands nearly thirty inches high and is starting to open its wings like it’s about to try to fly again but she’s too quick for it:  she has it by the legs, at the same time trying to get one long, agitated wing folded up like a recalcitrant umbrella.

“Do you need help?”

“Head!” she says quickly, and I reach out fast to grab it from the back, turn the beak down and away from her, a good five inches of beak coming off of a head that’s the nearly the size of a soft ball.  Big baby.

We ease the bird into the large flight kennel we’ve brought, then cover it with a sheet, even as the bird begins thumping against the sides in protest.  Then we carry it to the van, and come back with the other empty crate for the eagle in the next mew.

The other four juvenile eagles were put in crates the night before, and now I walk up through the cold, still-dark morning to the building where they wait.  I open the door to thudding from three of the crates, even though each is draped in a colored sheet and they probably can’t see me, they just know the door’s been opened; the smaller, fourth crate is quiet, though, which shouldn’t worry me but it does, so I go toward it, but before I’m within three feet of it the whole crate erupts, bouncing, the bird inside warning that it’s more than ready to take me on.

These are not birds I’ve worked with much.  Several years back my focus became the shelter’s education program, less time in the clinic.  Unlike previous eagles, or the coyote pups we raised into packs that we later released, I have not fed these birds every week, cleaned their mews and taken away food scraps, tracked them from smaller, to larger brown juveniles.  I have, though, helped during exams, holding them while hospital staff tube-fed them when they first came in, later helping to check their body weight.  When these birds were ultimately all housed together in our largest flight cage—the one the length of my house—I did go in a couple of times to assist other stewards.

And there’s something unbelievable about being in that space with them.  We walk into the open, wood and wire room and the air suddenly fills with huge birds careening in different directions, talons swinging below them because the babies are so centered on just flying that they don’t think yet about tucking up their legs.  Helene, a volunteer of ten years advises new people, “If they’re moving, you stop.  Just stop.  Wait until they settle.”   You stay aware that at any moment one of these huge babies could come shooting back toward you, just over your head—or dive off one of the high perches and misjudge a turn and crash to the ground right with you in the way.  So you pass quietly and rapidly through the enclosure with the plates and plates of salmon, mixed with raw chicken or rabbit, the feathers and fur left on so the eagles learn that these are the things they’ll eat in the wild.  You do this for weeks, for months, maybe, larger and larger plates.

Cate is backing up her SUV and we load in two of these crates, then carry the remaining two to join the other pair we’d already loaded into the shelter’s van.  The rest of us drop into our own cars and carpool, and we all begin to caravan out of the gravel parking lot.

Light is coming through more now, the sky mostly deep blue dawn color.  We roll through the trees, seven thirty on a Sunday morning, no sign of anyone up, but I notice at the end of one neighbors’ driveway a yellow short haired dog, sitting, observing the vehicles passing with wilder creatures.

We get out to the main highway and head toward the ferry but the van pulls over to the side of the road, and I come in behind her:

Lynne rolls down a window:  “I forgot the eagle blood—I have to go back.”

“I can go back and get it, you all head on—see you on the ferry.”  And I haul ass back to the shelter, unlock the clinic, find the soft-vinyl cooler pack in the small refrigerator in the exam room, take it out to the passenger’s seat of my car.  On our way up I’m making a detour to pick up my friend Heather, who lives out of state, now, and is visiting her elderly mother.  Heather’s father was a beloved local veterinarian, and she grew up around all manner of animal husbandry.  I know she will be very happy to manage the eagle blood.

Any release is a good day for the wildlife shelter and its volunteers:  opossums, raccoons, single songbirds taken back to where they were injured and freed back into familiar territory.  Eagle releases are a special experience, but in the eight years I’ve worked with the shelter this is only the second time we’ve set out more than one eagle together.  These being juveniles, orphaned for varying reasons, they still need time around adults—so we’ve waited until the salmon are running in the upper Skagit River.  With more than enough food and more than three months ahead of mating season, territories and boundaries ease, and the adults won’t be irritated by these younger birds—who then have the opportunity to observe them, as they all come to this abundance of fish: the salmon finishing out their life cycle, the gathering eagles in differing stages of theirs.

On the ferry I find the crew gathered on the car deck, excited and energized by the cold, clear morning—a rare fall day in the Pacific Northwest where there isn’t any rain in the forecast.  We will drive nearly three hours, much of it on the freeway due north, angle east along a two-lane highway, then finally wind down through very small towns in the foothills of the Cascade mountains to a little park and boat launch by the river, where the Fish and Wildlife agent has directed us to go.  He will meet us there to pick up the eagle’s blood, which he’s using for some research.  He will also band the birds;  each eagle will have to be removed from the crate and held while the agent uses pliers to snap a wide metal ring around its leg.  Then the bird will be put back into the crate and carried down to the side of the river.

The first one is a large female;  Lynne holds the talons away from the agent, one leg in each of her heavily gloved hands, while with the inside of her arms she pins the wings to the bird’s sides;  still, at the sight of the open sky the eagle begins to kick and snake her head, so I step up again to hold it, keep it from stabbing at human soft parts. 

The Fish and Wildlife agent measures beaks, feet, calls out numbers to an assistant.

Then, rather than put this first bird back into the crate Lynne opts to let her spill right out of her arms:  a scramble of wings and struggling balance into the air, wings thrusting until the bird can feel she’s in control, and then the whole action becomes more rhythmic, and the big bird pumps up into the sky and sails over the river, flying to a far stand of leafless trees, dropping past our line of vision.

And on to the next.  

The process repeats again: measuring, numbers called out, band clamped onto the bird;  this time it’s another shelter staff member, Sarah, who hold the bird while the agent does his measuring, and this time the bird is put back into the crate, which is taken down to the river.  Another bird, and another—until five crates are lined up along the bank.  Then one of the crowd of maybe fifteen or twenty people who’ve joined the caravan, shelter supporters and volunteers, is asked to come over and open the first of these crates.

The door is opened and there is a pause—then the eagle boots out in a series of hops and into the air, eyes focused and racing to it doesn’t know where—it also lifts up, banks left, and crosses the river into the trees.

Another one isn’t sure what to make of it:  we open the crate door and nothing happens for a minute.  Lynne and Sarah wait, begin to consider taking off the top, but then he hops out onto the ground in a defensive, almost fencer’s posture—looks around himself, and springs into the air, wings beating furiously.

Two, three—number four, a small male, is the only one that flies behind us, spinning into some bare trees along the side of the park road, hanging there almost like he’s overwhelmed.  Everyone pauses to see what he’ll do—which right now is nothing.  He is roosting, considering what could possibly have just happened to him.

We go back to release eagles five, six, and then we’re all standing along the riverbank with a line of empty crates, looking across the river at the trees, the rise of hills, the browns and faded greens of the late October Pacific Northwest.

There isn’t much to do from here.  We start to pack up the van, collecting sheets and crates and gloves.  The Fish and Wildlife man congratulates the staff on the health of the birds.  Small groups of people chat quietly, everyone’s faces flushed from the cold and eyes bright from the experience.

Then one of us calls and we all turn to see something rise up out of the lacework of the tree canopy across the river—small in the distance it is a dark eagle, a juvenile, one of ours.  It flies up against the pale gray sky and follows the river a short way, curves and heads further into the next level of hills and tall evergreen trees, following the river through the mountains.

The Skagit is fast, shallow water, different from the Midwestern rivers I grew up with, and the combinations of trees are also different:  some brownish yellow here and there, but without the color of the Midwestern maples the scene looks more like late November because of the grays and browns and moss green of the ground cover and foliage.  There is the same pale sky, but here it all fades into the dark, wet, almost black green of cedars and firs.

I don’t know why the bleakness of this time of year is so dear to me, why I love it so much even as I feel its barrenness and challenge;  as I get older I’m much less likely to bother with why.

The eagles absolutely do not care.