Wildflower Stew

I brought up my children in the country. Their playground was hills and creeks and rivers – a pasture where deer grazed in early morning dew, a creek that sometimes flowed and sometimes was dry and even had a mini flash flood one time, a one hundred year old live oak climbing tree that went down when a small twister passed over and became a horizontal jungle gym for a year before we sawed it up for firewood. They watched me devise ever more ingenuous traps for the marauding rabbits, deer and armadillo that threatened the garden that they had helped me plant and weed and harvest.

They all live in the city now and they take their children on country weekends and camping trips but it’s not the same. The kids know their home turf is the urban scene and that is where they feel comfortable. The country is strange, maybe fun, sometimes scarey – but not home.

I watched a Nature program on PBS with my grandson, Carlos. Carlos, who is 5, has always been fascinated with birds, something thankfully we still have in our urban scene. We would sit on the patio of his suburban home when he was younger and I would tell him the names of the birds we saw and how to recognize their song and we would look for nests and occasionally find a feather. The PBS program was about raptors. My wiggly, energetic 5 year old sat mesmerized for the whole hour – he was so thrilled to see these birds even on a TV screen. He certainly inherited the birdlover gene, straight from his Audobon great-great grandmother though his nature mystic grandma to him, skipping over generations like a stone, the love of wings carrying us on . . . .   “Paying witness is one of the jobs our generations have inherited — the world is as intact and complete right now as it’s going to be for a long time to come!” – Bill McKibben   

Yeah, we’ve got to stick together, even when we’ve got the urban blues. After years of living in beautiful remote places – near the Canadian border in Eastern Washington, in the mountains of northern New Mexico, in the Sonoran desert and along the banks of the Guadalupe River in the hill country of Texas, I find myself living in an urban apartment. Hopefully, this is a temporary situation. My nature mystic soul is longing for more earth touch than I can possibly get here but there is a unique charm about this situation.

With my nature connections so sparse, each one becomes a treasured moment. I have lived in this apartment for 3 months now. I am a devotee of informal bird watching. The birds of the air are my deepest soul connection. For the past three months my only companions have been the urban gangs of grackles and pigeons with the occasional modest sparrow or two thrown in. With two magnificent exceptions. One day when I was on the phone with a dear friend and she had just shed some light on a question I have been grappling with for years and in that moment of aha! a red-tailed hawk swooped past my second floor window! Whoosh!The second time I was having a passionate conversation with someone I am very close to and a great blue heron flew so close to my window his wing almost touched it. I gasped and it totally changed the course of the conversation. I took the picture of the little bird looking at his reflection from my bedroom window which looks out on the roofs of the buildings of the shopping center across the alley. Another precious moment.

I think about my grandchildren and how their lives will be so different from mine. I have been privy to the lushness of nature in all her abundance. I drank from rivers when I was a child. I walked on beaches for miles with no sign of human presence or contamination. I was able to walk in the last vestiges of a world rich with birds and animals and plants – the last unspoiled wildernesses. My grandchildren will live in a very different world. I want them to know that each bird counts.