One thing ends, something else begins. This year’s delayed changing of the seasons was condensed for me in the span of a few days last week, as on Veterans Day I shut off the outdoor shower after one last invigorating use, never having reached this deep into the calendar before.
It’s a sadness. No more stars, moon, or overhanging greenery as I scrub away the body’s fulsome effluvia, as Kurt Vonnegut once put it.
Just then, without realizing the significance, it occurred to me the yard’s bird feeders should at last be resurrected, which I did with seed by the enthusiastic trowelful. Moribund for half a year, the hanging tubes came to swarming life within an hour — downward-facing nuthatches, curious chickadees, cute tufted titmice, finches, cardinals, bluejays, mourning doves milling about on the ground — the usual suspects.
And that’s how I felt better about the world.
Especially when my daughter of high school age, who happened to be at the stove baking cookies, later texted me a video of a descent of grackles so thick she was unnerved. “Um, why are there so many?”
They crowded around the birdbath’s meager puddle in such numbers the disc nearly toppled.
Now back in feathers, I’ve even come to appreciate the ingenuity of the spring-action Squirrel Buster feeder, placed defiantly within claw’s reach of a rodent thoroughfare atop a six-foot stockade fence.
It’s a jungle out there in our Noyac backyard. We once witnessed a possum fooling the family dog by expertly playing . . . possum. But then, the pests. We recently had a dead but perfectly intact rat appear in the middle of the yard, as if dropped by the screaming red-tailed hawk that nests in the tall pine across the property line.
To say nothing of the industrious rodent tirelessly burrowing circuitous tunnels just beneath the grass across and around almost the entirety of the lawn. Creature, what could be the point?
Thus the conundrum: When do you stop being merely nature’s admiring bystander, and when do you bring the hammer down?
For now, when it comes to the burrowing, I’ll take my lumps.