kathleengwhite.com

It’s been a long busy summer, warmer and clearer than usual for the Pacific Northwest, and I’m still technically on my break.  But it’s also one of those years when, just as the last day of August clicked over to September, there was a marked change in the atmosphere, almost like the weather knew the calendar, or the calendar had actually been created with the natural world as a reference.

The other night around nine thirty I walked outside to get something out of the car, and the air had a sharpness it didn’t have just a day or so ago.

I stood there, taking it in.  A hint of moisture, but no wind, and surprisingly cool for being so calm, which told me this was wasn’t temporary:  We’re a week into September and circumstances are just different.

Dark sky, open enough above the trees to see stars.  A huge, beautiful waxing moon.

A friend called from Indiana this afternoon, and she said it had been 52 in the morning and 71 by noon, which was a welcome drop from the incredible heat and humidity that’s been going on back there.  They’ve been having weeks of swollen, intense storms with rain like they only get in tornado season.  But they got the tornadoes, too, so timing didn’t seem to make any difference this year.

The natural world seems to surprise us—repeatedly–especially moments like this.  It brings us out of our brain-noise and makes us notice, and it’s really sort of amusing that it does.  This isn’t just set decoration.  It’s the basic stage, the structural reality that makes any of our own psychological realities possible.  We may not think about it at all—or we may get irritated at being made aware of new toxins in the environment, discussions about over-development, the back and forth about climate change.  Then I walk outside on a night like this, and immediately it all becomes so very clear and simple.

Because of where I live, just a ways beyond city lights and noise, it’s harder to ignore the sky, the seasons, though I still give it my best—I descend into my brain and my emotions and burrow in.  But standing here I am brought back to the basics of circumstance:  no planet—no brain.  No consciousness or breath.

I went to a middle school recently with three animals from the wildlife shelter, and standing there waiting to start our program I wondered to myself how I could make this real for the students.  I remember being 13, 14:  so totally caught up in the chemical weather of hormones that I was completely detached, thinking only of the drama between my friends, the storylines going on in the hallways between classes, the small episodes that day in class.   Why should these teenaged people care about owls and vultures and opossums—about keeping garbage away from streets so the animals don’t come out and get hit by cars, about not shooting the big birds when they see them out in the country?  Why think at all about anything beyond their cul de sac?   They don’t notice the irony that the entirely biological reality of puberty detaches them mentally from anything but what is going on in their immediate ‘now’, which they thoroughly believe is generated from cell phones and the right tee shirt and name brand jeans.

So my colleague and I waded in to do our best, and we both know our secret weapons: that the best advocates will be the animals themselves, totally arresting the kids’ attention.  It’s up to us to give them the right introductions, but at that point just stand back and wait for the gasp, when we bring our arm out of the crate and the room is face to face with a live, silver, barred owl.

After the program we drove back.  To our own dramas, maybe less hormonal and certainly, we believe, more civilized—but we also drop back into the mental current of our own needs and immediate concerns:  whether or not to stop and pick up something for dinner, what to get done for work next week, what to get done around my property before the rains set in, whether or not to complicate my personal life.  It may seem like a contrasting urban, human perspective but it’s still just shelter, territory, love.  And it doesn’t care if I don’t recognize at this moment that these personal obsessions are the same concerns of every other creature living on the planet.

Out here in the Pacific Northwest the sky can have so many variations at the same time:  clear enough above to see the scattering of stars, more becoming visible the deeper you look, while at the same time, in the same sky, the moon floats in a gray haze, maybe clouds or some sort of mist from the water.  Tonight the nearly full moon is the color of pale cream, emitting a very thin silvery light.  It shines through a lunette window above my French doors, and until it rises fully I see it through a fringe of trees—which themselves, right now, are black cutout paper silhouettes, thin, almost seem like the flat stuff of a theater set.  Behind them the light, the silver  halo of light from the pale cream moon, light graying out into the broader darkness of the open sky.

We get so caught up in ourselves and our lives, and I suppose there’s no real reason not to. Still, it’s really such a simple equation. We are here because the earth is here.  Not the other way around.

Sometimes you don’t know when it’s going to show up, or that it was even on its way.

A couple of weeks ago I was standing in the wildlife shelter at nine AM, listening to our morning report.  It’s the off season, and the regular crew has winnowed down some, and that morning I think there were four of us besides the clinic manager, Brandy.

We were in the kitchen, the nerve-center of the hospital, which hadn’t yet been disrupted by preparations of fish and fowl for the raptors, strange mixes of things for the injured opossums, piles of leftovers for the two turkey vultures.  The census is low:  no babies yet, and the only raccoons coming through this time of year have been old and beat up, and like the cormorant with wings torn by fishing line, euthanized pretty much on arrival.  Besides the opossums our current patients are a couple of gulls, a pigeon waiting through a long, slow molt, and three red tailed hawks.  Brandy explains changes in treatment or feeding, non patient-care tasks to get done if there’s time, then, just to catch everyone up, a list of the creatures that had come through during the week:  a kinglet that was released, an adult squirrel, “Oh, and we had a goldeneye come through which we transferred, since our waterfowl enclosures are shut down right now.”

“What’s a goldeneye?” someone asks, and Brandy begins explaining, “It’s a small diving duck, they show up this time of year….”

and I sort of zone out over my coffee.   I saw the goldeneye when it came in –a pretty little brown-headed female.  And I know them because occasionally they’d show up on the river where I grew up in Indiana, on winter migrations; always a big deal when my mother spotted them in her field glasses.

Brandy is continuing, “They roost in trees.   In fact, sometimes they can really surprise people, popping out and dropping onto the ground.”

Suddenly something in me resonates like an old bass string snapped against the fretboard.    

“Wait,” I say to Brandy, interrupting.  “What do you mean, they roost in trees?  I thought only wood ducks roosted in trees.”

“Wood ducks do,” she says, nodding, “but a lot of other ducks will, too.  Like goldeneye.  And mergansers.”

I am 57 years old standing in the kitchen of the wildlife shelter in Washington State while at the same moment I am dropping down a chute in my soul to Indiana.  I am fifteen (It’s been 42 years?  How did that happen?)  and I am laughing, uncharitably, at Tim.  He and I have been experiencing difficulties, but in hindsight that’s not really surprising:  all of our small tribe of friends have been experiencing difficulties as our seemingly innocent and racy drug experimentation has led us to become cranky.

One place where we all feel safe and secure together is a small stand of evergreen trees, just off the street where several of us live, where another street veers away and creates a peninsula of greenery: somebody’s civic landscaping keeps the grass mowed, the shrubbery lightly clipped, but seems to ignore these evergreens.  They are planted in a cluster just apart from a set of tennis courts belonging to one of the big houses along the river;  it’s likely that this is all their land, too.

These trees had grown to be twenty or thirty feet high, with boughs all the way to the ground like thick skirts, and closely blended together.  Fir, spruce, maybe a cedar, I don’t know what they were, only that we referred to them as ‘the pines’  because one of us  (Tim, probably) discovered that if we crawled up under them, in the circle of their trunks there was a clearing, an open space — a den of sorts, in the very center of these trees, screened completely from everything else by the evergreen branches.

It suited our teenaged senses of irony and recalcitrance to be hidden in plain view.   So we congregated there in twos or threes, delighted to think of the cars rolling by so near to us but with no idea we were in there — possibly even our mothers, or someone else’s mothers in their station wagons.   At one point someone brought in a candle, bedded it into the center of the needles, I remember its low flame and the scent mixing with that of the needles as we all passed around a bong in the shape of a sitting gnome.   Overalls and oversized cardigan sweaters, young male faces with bushy full beards, girls with feathered earrings, the whole thing.

A slightly different take on wildlife.

The pines community didn’t last all that long.  Adults may have gotten suspicious, seeing the patched and rumpled teenagers springing over to and disappearing into this stand of trees, or maybe we were just afraid they had –though now that I think of it, when I was visiting and drove by years later, amazingly the pines were still there, but they had been pruned about three feet up their trunks, creating clear visibility from across the grass.  So maybe I didn’t imagine this.

Anyway, the time I’m remembering Tim was excitedly telling me,  “You won’t believe it:  I was at the pines, and I’m just smoking a cigarette, when something plops right down out of the trees—it just falls down at my feet.  And it scuttles away.”

“What are you talking about?  You saw a squirrel?”

“No,” he insisted, “I don’t know what it was, some kind of bird.”  He gestured with his hands, airspace the size of a football.  “It just plopped out of the tree,” he went on then, with a directional flourish, “and it sort of waddled off across the grass!”

“Leprechauns?”

He’s laughing with me, but I can see he’s frustrated, too.  “I’m telling you, I saw it!”

I no longer remember which one of us or when we decided Tim had seen a penguin.  Because considering our lives and our selves at that point, our recreations and his love of elaboration, it made more sense that Tim saw a penguin fall out of branches of the pines and scuttle away across the grass than it did that he’d seen anything at all.

Except that he brought it up again later:  “I’ve been meaning to tell you, my sister knows what type of thing fell out of the trees that time when I was in the pines.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She said it was likely something from the river—I think a coot, maybe.”

“A coot?  They don’t roost in trees.”

“I forget what it was, then, maybe she said guinea hen. But she believed me completely.  These things really do fall out of trees!”

The story about the penguin was picked up by everyone; I think we all knew it, it’s own shorthand reference.

We have remained in touch all these years, an old, tribal love between many of us – sometimes closer than others, but never losing contact completely.  Two years ago a couple of us flew in to see Tim marry his partner of nearly thirty years. (I offered to give him away, but he ignored me.  But the happy couple did buy me breakfast before I left the next morning.)

Tim has always loved holidays, was a generous boyfriend at Valentine’s day, and through the years boxes have arrived, unannounced,  full of amusing and delightful things.  “Tell me,” his card said this year at Christmas, “which of these brings up a small, shared memory from our youth?”

Was it the coasters with pictures of Janis Joplin’s mug shot?  The peel-and-stick computer key that said “Oh, shit”?  Not the set of demitasse cups, though we did drink a lot of coffee together.  The inflatable penguin, wearing a little holiday hat and scarf?

And here I am standing in the wildlife shelter, forty two years later, wanting to find you immediately and grab you by the bibs:

Tim, oh my god.  I was a grouchy, irritable teenaged girl who was feeling spurned;  I was tired of all of us being so high and unaccountable to each other, even as I was contributing to all of it myself.

I knew wood ducks roosted in trees, but I would also have been quick to tell you they hadn’t been seen on the river in ages.

And of course you really were capable of seeing anything in the pines.

But standing here in the kitchen of the wildlife shelter, a woman who hadn’t even been born at that point is telling me, forty-two years later, that you were right:

Tim, my dear old friend, I owe you an apology, a correction.  I want to atone for my crotchety, irritable, dismissive teenaged self.  It turns out that while you were standing there in the pines a duck-sized bird could very well have dropped out of the branches and scuttled away, just as you described.  It could have been a goldeneye, like the one getting some play time in the shelter’s bath tub this past week.  I realize now it also could have been a bufflehead, sometimes known to pass through Northern Indiana in the odd migratory year;  it could have been either type of merganser, common or hooded.

Tim, I need to let you know that I got it—I was a grouchy little bitch—and you were right.

I am so grateful for our years of affection and the heart-clearing chance to send you this, my valentine to you this year. 

Which life serves up sometimes even decades after the arrow’s been released from the bowstring.

A text message pinged on the phone as I was making breakfast this morning: a friend in Seattle, a print artist–  “I just heard that it’s Vulture Awareness Day!  Thinking of you!”

I was actually getting ready to leave for the wildlife shelter, filling in for a volunteer who was called east on family business.  The shelter’s primary effort is to rehab injured wildlife of all kinds and get them back out into their habitat, and we are coming through a record summer census, and what we hope might be the end of baby squirrel season.  The shelter also has an education program that goes out into any of the regional counties—to community groups, churches, public events, and schools, with non-releasable wildlife ‘ambassadors’.  To be a steward in the education program is its own form of specialization and within that program there are levels of training and difficulty, so when one of us is missing, the spot has to be filled by another ed steward, and off I went.  Getting the word that it was International Vulture Day just helped me focus:  first I would check in with the Princess, aka Remington, our resident turkey vulture, and get her out into the thin September sunshine.

In addition to two winning opossums, the shelter’s education program has two beautiful barred owls, red tail hawks from two different regions of the United States, a lovely, small and deadly female kestrel, and a peregrine falcon.  But the Princess is the largest, obviously, and in several ways the most challenging to handle.  I was delighted to be informed that today was her day.

Occasionally people will ask me, “Aren’t they just incredibly ugly and disgusting?”  Or better yet, “What do you feed the vulture?”  Seriously. This is a vulture.  What on earth do you think?

But I feel it incumbent to say that while the common impression of vultures is that they should be sitting on the left bank of the river Styx and no closer, Princess Remi is an excellent wildlife ambassador for the shelter, and an incredibly effective teaching tool.

The continental United States has two resident vulture species:  the smaller black vulture of the southern and gulf states, and the turkey vulture, which is everywhere else, including Central and South America.  For this reason they’re referred to as “new world vultures”—and yes, there are also Old World Vultures, but more on that in a moment.

When we schedule a program I try to get into the classroom before anyone else, as Remi travels in the largest size dog crate on a small cart, often with an assistant to help me schlepp the whole contraption up and around.  The students file in at the appointed time and we go over a few basic concepts:  the purpose of the wildlife shelter, the difference between domestic and wild animals, how even the youngest of them can help with the habitat, and some general facts about adaptation.  A few concepts can tell them a lot about what a creature is designed to do, and it can make studying them much more interesting and fun.  For instance, most birds have virtually no sense of smell:  they have the brain area for scent, but it’s not developed because they don’t need it, whether they’re eating seeds and insects, or a raptor hunting live prey with their very sharp eyesight.  This bird I am about to bring out, I tell them, is one of the very few that does have a sense of smell:  why would that be the case?  I might have to wait one, maybe two beats before an enthusiast in the back fires up at full arm’s length to get my attention:   “So they can smell their prey!”   “And what does that mean they would be eating?” I ask—“Why would it smell?”  Another hand blasts up.  “Because it’s dead–!”  and the crowd swoons.

I then turn to the crate and uncover  it to reach inside;  most raptors are solitary, though our education birds are used to crowds and very tolerant.  But vultures are a species that actually likes group events and gatherings in the wild.  Not only is Remington curious about where we are and who is out there, she has excellent timing:  having stepped up onto my gloved arm she emerges– shriveled little red head first, then the thickly feathered body, and then, when she clears the opening of the crate, she unfolds her giant wings, raised like the victorious stance of Eva Peron.

The crowd is amazed.

From there, we can talk about how beautifully this bird is designed for its place in the world:  the feet, rather than talons, so that it can stand flat on the ground or on carcasses;  the tiny, featherless head with the single hollow nostril, so that when it’s face is inserted in something damp or sticky the vulture has no problem shaking things off or blowing them out;  the broad, elegant wings for soaring great distances and riding thermals, using its remarkable eyesight to scout across open ranges for things immobile; and that ability to smell, which can detect something rotting, even if the vulture is flying over forests and tree canopies.Like albatrosses, the vulture’s wings are so long that it can’t take immediately to the air—thus it has developed its secret weapon to drive off any possible predator: the vulture simply vomits on command.

I arrive at the shelter just before noon and head out to her enclosure, met en route by an energetic and young aspiring education volunteer. “Are you going to get Remi?  Can I come along?”  Remington is sitting down on her perch and rises as we approach, and I notice she is shaking.  This can be because she’s responding to the change in seasons (it is still about 57 degrees when I appear) or she’s nervous, wondering what I’m doing there and why I’m bringing this young blonde person with me.  I enter the enclosure and she turns her back to me, which can either show willingness for me to put on her jesses or a way to block me—I can’t ever be certain.  She takes a couple of swipes at me with her beak, but she’s fairly compliant—I connect her leash, ask her to step up on the glove and she does, and we head out into the weathering area, then to the grounds beyond.

When we hit the first patch of bright sunshine the wings go out like mobile solar panels:  maybe she was cold after all.  But a few paces further and she starts the open-mouthed gagging behavior that means—yes, she’s throwing up–as a warning or out of nervousness or just to tell me how she feels about being taken out, it’s hard to say.  If we leave it on the ground, the vomit is not only going to draw flies but will smell worse and worse until it will be noticeable all over the area.  “I hate to ask you this,” I say to the volunteer, “but would you go get a surgical glove?”  and she does, the intrepid young soul—she comes back with one blue nitrile hand, gamely picks up the tart-sized wad of indistinguishably-digested something, and she pops back to leave it in the mew, where Remi will be happy to re-consume it later.  The smell is acrid and pungent, but now it will dissipate, at least from here.

The ph of a vulture’s digestive system is just one notch or so above battery acid, another wonder of these fabulous birds: diseased carcass goes in one end of the vulture, hits those juices, and comes out neutralized.  Vultures have been proven to eradicate botulism, cholera, anthrax, rabies, and possibly even ebola.   In the US, vultures are in no way endangered, but in Africa and India the use of new poisons has killed off large numbers of their vulture species and the surrounding populations of humans and farm animals are paying the price: these diseases have recurred to chronic proportions.  (African Vultures Declining at a Critical Rate:  http://www.peregrinefund.org/news-release/321).

When I take the Princess to a classroom, I can tell them all of this.  I can explain that while she may seem strange and off-putting to the unschooled eye, to those of us who have considered her design, she’s walking brilliance.  The Bacteria Stops Here.

This past spring, I took the vulture, and one of our beautiful owls, to a group of third grade classes in a small school district.  The kids gasped when they saw the owl, and made all the appropriate groans when I described the attributes of the vulture, and they asked great questions about each—and we talked about how each of these creatures contributes to the ecosystem—the owl keeping down the population of rats and mice, the vulture working as habitat sanitation.

At the end of the program, as I was putting the birds into their crates while the classes lined up to exit, a small cluster of kids stuck with me, asking more questions, telling me stories.  Then from the line of students heading out the door one little girl broke away and ran over—a pretty little dark-haired girl in a pink dress.  “At home?” she said, “we have a Morkie—that’s a Maltese and a Yorkie mix?”  I nodded.  “Her name is Princess,” she said brightly.  “But now, I’m going to call her Princess Remington!”    She grinned, and she darted back to join her classmates.   On the drive back to the shelter my associate and I had a fine time considering this little girl who decided to rename her fluffy white lap dog after our turkey vulture.

The Princess and I spent nearly an hour in the sun today, in the middle of a patch of strawberries and rose bushes beginning to fade with the season.  She had her wings extended with one across my back, and someone commented that it looked like a strange sort of date.  Other volunteers walked by and chatted, which she does actually enjoy: we can’t release her, but we can offer her our own community, whatever it’s worth.

At programs, we try to convey to the audience or the students that having these creatures in our area is a sign of good things—great things.  Wildlife, no matter how odd or off-putting, tells us that our region is healthy.  It isn’t the case any longer that we live in human communities surrounded by wilderness;  more and more of the world is expanses of suburbia encircling smaller and smaller areas of wild.  Some wild creatures have managed to adapt to human habitation—peregrines on top of skyscrapers, coyotes in the alleys of cities, hawks in city parks, eagles returning to waterways.  Others need more attention, and all the balances needs to be checked.  Maintaining their habitat, caring for these creatures will make a difference—to children and grandchildren and little girls with fluffy white dogs and every bit of this interconnected planet.

http://www.vultureday.org/2015/index.php

I don’t think anyone would describe me as a traditionalist.  While I came from a perfectly solid, four-square 1950s American upbringing, as we headed into the space-race 1960s with great energy and hope, we ran into some serious snags.  It happened to a lot of families: part cause and part effect of the uprising of young people that anymore is what “the Sixties” brings to peoples’ minds.  Without meaning to lay blame, I’ll just say that I was very early launched onto a trajectory that led out of my Midwestern Christian nuclear family, across some interesting landscapes, and has left me here on the west coast, living relatively simply with two dogs and a cockatiel.  Not the household reality that I was reared for.

This morning my reality includes waking up fighting back a cold, with a lot to be done today and a lot on my mind, and not much of it very clear or easy. Since I could, I decided to stay in bed a little longer, let my body rest, try to shake out my head.

I took up my phone and punched in the morning news and lay in bed listening to it, which can either help me drop back to sleep for a couple hours more, or if not, provide a little advance warning of whatever is going on outside of my bedroom.  Europe tracking extremists after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, anti-Muslim sentiments rising in Germany; Syria, and Boko Haram, the US Presidential Elections of 2016.  There is a piece about the Academy Awards nominations, another about an opera singer who has lost weight and written a memoir.

And then sports:  the Seattle Seahawks, preparing for a playoff this weekend.  I smile.  Coming away on the ferry last night, from the Space Needle to the stadium the city skyline was washed in blue and green.  There were blue and green donuts in the faculty office yesterday at work. There are blue and green lights in the doorways of two homes down by the post office in the little town where I live.

And the Colts, bless them—probably doomed against the Patriots, but who knows?  I remember when they were from Baltimore.  I remember Johnny Unitas.  I have been delighted to have the Colts relocate to my home state, so even though I am the most minimal of football followers, I rouse for this segment of news, the excitement and happy energy in the announcers’ voices an early bulwark against the impending threat of laundry and paper grading, local skies shrouded in filmy light and hazy rain.

Checking the phone I see the next few news items don’t look like a good way to start my morning, but I’m not feeling like there is any particularly good way to start my morning, and that presents its own existential problem.  I cast about in my mind, examine my soul, wonder why.  It is too early in the day for this, but here I am.

I turn off the news on the phone and go out to the kitchen to feed the dogs and myself, and as often is the case, I discover a thread of music turning around in my head—a couple of lines have drifted up on some synapse of the broadest sort of association: “It’s getting to the point/where I’m no fun anymore….”

Just this week a friend in his forties was making fun of me again because I still prefer compact disks to digitizing my music, but I am pleased now to put my oatmeal on the burner and go to the CD collection in my hallway.  I congratulate myself because I know I will find Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and that because it’s a CD, its sound quality will be better than I can probably even detect.  The disk goes into the CD changer and I turn it up a little more than the normal setting—and the guitar chords of “Suite for Judy Blue Eyes” come darting out like a troup of actors in a Medieval morality play:  vivid and familiar characters, breathing in front of me, promoting inspiration, a path and belief.

It’s been so long since I’ve heard this CD that this morning I am detached enough to simply listen, happily drifting through the harmonies and lyrics about values of love and the intensity of the young moment.  Its own sweet hippy dogma.

2014 was challenging in a lot of ways and I am looking forward to what’s coming in this year.  But as with the NFL playoffs, so much of todays’ excitement and confidence will be obsolete pretty quick.  And it’s never certain what will trigger large, serious global issues:  there’s plenty of genuine political tragedy on the planet right now, but the killing of twelve people at a sophomoric satire magazine has focused at least two continents, and I’m old enough and agnostic enough to believe that it’s important to pay attention to it.

As I grow older I have more and more respect for the pull of routine and convention, the benefits and good reasons for the forms of a traditional society.  I can see the wonderfully restorative quality in an annual return of rituals and events, the meaning inherent in a life transitioning from being young, to parent, to grandparent.  I see in my friends the many things that these roles can balance out, sustain, and effect.  Do I regret not having such a family?  As I grow older I am also more and more convinced that I was different from the beginning, and it would have been much easier for everyone involved if we’d all accepted that as soon as it started to be noticeable.  So, no.

This morning it would be helpful to have the structure of a traditional life, standard religious faith and practice.  I don’t.  What I do have is music.  I have warmth and surprise from animals, appreciation and devotion to the natural world.  I have friends to laugh with when I will ring them up later, on that magical phone. I do have a very deep appreciation of the moment.

At the end of this CD I tacked on a few extra takes from later albums that I loved, and now comes the opening of “After the Gold Rush:” which brings immediate, involuntary tears to my eyes, over forty years later.  Some of it is the young tremolo of Neil Young’s  voice, the song’s mythical concern about the environment.  It is also that this particular song drops me out of any present moment into immediate time travel: a dark basement bedroom with a couple of girlfriends, all of us too wired to sleep, very late on a full moon night, or morning.  Whoever was still awake was talking and joking.  But I lay there staring out the basement window at the moon.  I was frightened about decisions I’d made, worried I’d turned my back on the wrong person and what that would mean. I was fifteen years old and feeling tremendously empty.

Convention provides security and confidence to go on.  Faith is a blessing, no matter how it’s specifically defined.  Regardless, I wouldn’t change my life even now, in my small house that needs cleaning, with its stacks of papers on the counter and books on the dining room table–all these years beyond the promise and creative hope blasting out of these earnest, really quite young voices.

Be Sure to Hide the Roaches.

For reasons I have never entirely understood, Easter remains a powerful holiday for me:  regardless of what I am doing, I’m aware that it is Easter, which leads to memories of growing up in Indiana, in a family mix of Episcopalians and Catholics, warring for the souls of the grandchildren.  Easter is the smell of incense in the church and the organ roar of the recessional hymn—which led at last to going home to the egg hunt, of course.  Some years the grass was still a damp, icy crust, or occasionally full-on snow, but more typically it was a cool, humid spring morning.  There was something specific in bloom—a tree or a shrub that when I smell whatever it is now, instantly transports me to those back yards and my very small childhood—and the agitated, edgy feeling that comes with it tells me I have probably suffered most of my life from undiagnosed allergies.

This year I was invited to join a friend and his family for the complete celebration: egg hunt and large group meal.  Instead, I followed my own inclinations and kept things simple.

In the morning I went in to the wildlife shelter as I usually do on Sundays, to feed and clean the animals we use for education programs.  Preparing quail for a red tailed hawk, I remembered an Easter when I met friends at a fashionable Seattle restaurant for brunch, which came with hard-cooked quail eggs as a flourish.   I opened the bird to clean it, and found eggs—I put them aside for a kestrel, who would shortly take them from my fingers, she loves them so.

Which led for some reason to thoughts of the soft forms of my great-aunts from southern Indiana.  Some years they made it up north to where we lived, in their flowered dresses, bearing trays of deviled eggs.  Those Easters the big meal would be a brunch after church, with a lot of delicacies they’d brought with them:  sausage my great-uncle made from pigs he’d raised and slaughtered, which he then was not able to eat; eggs, homemade biscuits, succotash, and pies–the heavy, rich, and starchy foods of people who appreciated holiday feasts as the exception to the rule.

I had a boyfriend in high school who became what we then called a Jesus Freak.  He joined a radical Pentecostal church, had seen through organized religion, and he wanted me to come with him.  So he very deliberately deconstructed my family religion to the point of ridiculousness.  I dutifully followed his logic but could not follow him to the next step.  He is a fundamentalist missionary in Africa now, still fighting Satan and saving souls for Christ;  all these year later I remained deconstructed.

Which is why it’s all the more surprising Easter strikes me so regularly and profoundly.  I can go right to part of me that still feels the connection to my family—the love between those aunts and grandparents and my parents, the intention from my mother, ushering us into the pew in church.  I can still sing the recessional hymns.      

Resurrection of course is the main theme to this all, but maybe renewal is more in line with how I am feeling at this point in my life, and stewardship of the things that matter.  We had a ward full of orphaned baby animals at the shelter this morning, squirrels and possums and bunnies, along with the raptors and the other education birds, and the high school and college-aged volunteers bustled around preparing formula, cleaning cages.  There was a cool, Easter blue sky through the window of the mews as I watched Remington, the turkey vulture, delicately eat a mouse I’d given her the way a child might eat a chocolate bunny:  tail first, then the feet–then she goes for the head.

I came home to meet my also deconstructed friend, Eddie, for a walk on the beach.  Our conversations are always personal and global and complex, followed by talk about music.  Today Eddie had a bunch of second hand, hand knit sweaters in his back seat, and he insisted I take one:  pulled out an absurd blue and white triangle print and draped it over my shoulders:  “It’s Easter!” he said.

Walking back, I met the neighbor with the Westie named Poppy, contemplating pilfering a bit of rosemary from another neighbor’s landscape, where we were standing.  It’s a huge bush;  I’ve been admiring it and it’s made me think I needed to plant my small container rosemary into my own landscape.  I reached over and cut off a branch for the neighbor, with the pocketknife I still had from my shelter shift this morning:  she was surprised I was so open about it.  “I’m going to go roast a chicken,” she said heading off, waving the rosemary at me,  “and maybe drink a beer….”  I tried to imagine if I’ll care if anyone takes a branch or two from the shrub that will grow in front of my house.  Herbal karma.

I adjusted Eddie’s sweater, and came home to grill a fresh lamb chop and some asparagus, replaying conflicting, amazing thoughts and memories, shot through with gratitude.