Seruyange Ecosystem
... in which I write thoughts that I could never have had in my twenties.
I can't get over the fact that I own not only a shed, but the wagon wheel propped against it. Although this event is an abrupt change in my residual self image, it's funny but not amazing. What is amazing is the life around the house now that winter has finally been replaced by Spring. Perhaps two weeks ago we saw the female duck on our front steps. She was joined soon by her courtier - a drake with a multicolored neck and bright feathers. He wasn't a permanent presence at first; he'd swing by, like a guy who's testing the water with the girl he's chasing. A few weeks later, we figured it out: a nest below a bush where she's sitting, presumably on eggs of little ducklings we'll see in a short while.
I wonder if it's just me but these days I'm confronted all the time by things I've always known in a logical sense but have never seen naturally. Out of our western window I looked once, then twice before realizing I'd seen a woodpecker. I was still, as though my movement might scare it away or shake me out of a dream but there it was: a woodpecker. In a manner similar to the flashbacks people have when they are dying, it was a moment that seemed to last for a long time while I tried to recall what I knew about woodpeckers concluding that it was in its pathetic entirety from the cartoon Woody the Woodpecker. That and some people considered them pests although the motion of the bird was hypnotic. As I get older and become a bad birdwatcher, I wonder if birds live on a different timescale; in the microsecond it takes for me to scrunch my nose or blink an eye, the bird hops several times pecking on the tree.
Rabbits run free in the backyard. It seems as though they make their nest below an evergreen back there, but I'm not sure. I don't mind too much but I know that K's love for them will be killed when they start eating what we plant in the garden. Seeing rabbits isn't new though; I saw them all winter and wondered how they stay alive in temperatures that kill off so much. I understand fur and burrowing, but when we have stretches lasting in days where the temperature remains below freezing I still have to wonder.
What I like best in the Seruyange Ecosystem, however, are the two massive trees in the front of our house. In the prairie that so many characterize in their minds as treeless, flat, and barren it's a form of defiance that I'd like to relay. I live on the prairie, on a hill, with 50 foot entish trees as argonath for my driveway.
11:51:03 AM 
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