Many Happy Returns

Summer has just begun and it’s just like it should be.. Sticky with cricket songs. But let’s take a hard left turn: Imagine a New Year’s Day like we have in the north here on the American continent away from the coasts. Yes! like in Game of Thrones! Brutal and dry and skin-cracking cold. I like New Year’s when I’m alone, not so much as a holiday. I like it dark and freezing. I love it inside a blizzard. Inside The Lung, winter is a magic land. Forget giants and dire wolves! Do you have any idea how many types of frost there are here?! I hope I never learn them all, I cherish the mystery.

Sadly, I’m tethered to the Western mode of marking time and achievement. It makes me feel like I miss a deadline or a birthday every day and I’ll never catch up. I’m at least two seasons behind at all times. The dramatic movie in my head has me running on top of spinning logs in a churning river and it’s only a matter of time until I fall and my head is crushed between two massive Douglas fir trunks with sharpened, ripped spears where their branches used to be. It’s a prison of my own making that I was conditioned to make. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. It makes the years fly by. How can I slow time back down like when I was a kid? Time flowed more like refrigerated syrup then. I don’t want to go back to public grade school and relinquish my adult privileges to achieve the slower sensation, so what do I do instead?

I’m trying to actively notice things outside of time, but not necessarily outside of season. I have begun to realize “returns” are more the event than the “firsts” are. I can make "New Year’s” any day I want. The "first day" in January isn’t the Gregorian calendar first, but when I first notice the snow buntings have returned from their summer range far away. Small flocks of twenty or thirty birds erupt from snow banks at the side of the road along the edges of wide open fields as I drive by. They are little gangs of creamy white and grey-brown Arctic songbirds living on Saharas of New England snow. Lots of folks here have never noticed them, including some of the bird nerds! 

There are many, many other “Return Markers” I have begun to notice over the past decade such as, but not limited to:

Mid May-Mid June- Blackflies, possibly the worst of biting insects in the entire north. Tiny little shits with NASTY mouth parts. Swarming en masse they are actually dangerous and their bites don’t heal easily. The fact that they are an indicator species of excellent water quality makes me a little grateful for them however. I’m looking for similar caveats for mosquitos and ticks but I’ve come up empty. Don’t hesitate to pass on any GOOD news about these creatures.

Late May- The Jack-in-the-pulpits show their unholy stripes if you know where they are and bother to gently lift their hoods. To me, this is the most glorious flower on earth. Sadly it has the ickiest name on earth. It sounds like a pornographic church puppet from a Punch and Judy show, which I truly detest. Arisaema is it’s Latin name which works fine for now, but I look forward to finding more musical names for this gazelle of the plant world. 

Right around July 4th- Copper colored skippers! Thousands of dusty copper little butterflies that gather on the edges of drying mudpuddles. Sometimes when I head down the driveway and have to stop and get out when I see the shimmering cloud right in the middle. I like to walk through slowly to disperse them. They fly up around me like I’m in the dollar bill snowglobe booth on a game show.

I do go on. There are a trillion more; Red efts, Hawk moths, and plain old milkweed.. But I have to save more for later. I feel the joy in the return of things far more than I notice the leaving of them, save the glorious changing of the leaves in fall. Such fireworks, the whole cycle. The triumphant return of some things graciously covers the exit of others; a brilliantly choreographed, multi layered staging of cycles. 

So Let’s go back to the comforting cold and the Snow Buntings. I went on a search through some ye olde hardback books since the internet didn’t really have any hot gossip. Here is the soft, starched-collar affection I found.. E.L. Jordan wrote a lovely almost-poem to the little farmer’s helpers in 1952’s Hammond’s Nature Atlas of America:  

“They eat immeasurable quantities of seeds of pestiferous weeds” 

Read it in the past tense and it sounds like a respectful eulogy. Luckily snow buntings are not, at this time a “threatened” species, but perhaps a “largely unnoticed” one?  I chalk it up to their brilliant camouflage. They are a joyful return marker for me and I honor them as my New Year’s Day.