#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Boy & Cormorant
The cormorant eyes me, beak uptilted,
Body-snake low — sea-serpentish.~ Ted Hughes, Excerpt from “A Cormorant”
Wave home this morning, i say hello, he says, Game on, Grammy. Game on. Well. I have been to the pool. I have been to the river. I have picked up branches and knocked dead branches from trees.
EASEMENT
Let’s say you have a neighbor who is in an argument with another neighbor.. Let’s say you aren’t in this argument, you’re just observing it and are frustrated about it. This can happen. A shared driveway and one of the neighbors owns the other neighbor’s easement. One day, for no good reason, the neighbor who owns the easement puts up a long, unattractive chain link fence along the neighbor’s front yard, just to make a very visible and loud statement, apparently, that they are allowed to erect an ugly fence, a fence that has no function, in front of the other neighbor’s house. Now everybody can see the ugly fence that is there just to be an ugly fence. Let’s say every day you drive by the new ugly fence in front of the house of your friends you feel angry and sad about the ugly fence that your friends have to look out on from their yard. It’s virtually in their yard. But it’s on the said easement. What if you believe in monarch butterflies: their necessity, their beauty, their goodness to the earth. What if you know the monarchs have only one food that keeps them alive. It’s a wild plant, milkweed. The monarchs need milkweed to survive. Let’s say you have planted milkweed on your property and you have watched spread, year to year. It’s a pollinator. It’s a flower and then a pod full of seeds that are fluff and this fluff floats on the wind and is carried to new places where it lands and if all conditions are good for this floating seed that lands then a new milkweed plant will grow. More caterpillars. More milkweed plants. More monarchs. In autumn, the pods burst open. Let’s say you take some of your milkweed stalks and pods of seeds and you take a walk along the driveway, along the easement, and you open your pods and you pull out your fluffy seeds and set them to the breeze and watch them float all along the the ugly fence, the whole length of the ugly fence into the dirt that’s still fresh from the planting of the ugly fence. The fluff flies along the fence. The seeds land along the ugly fence. If the conditions are right, a little miracle will take place in the wet earth, through the winter as the seed wears its coat until spring. New plants might just take root. And milkweed might grow along the ugly fence. It will flower. It will have caterpillars. It will have pods. And the monarchs will come to the ugly fence and perch on the milkweed. And the ugly fence will be there, but mostly what you will notice when you look at your friend’s house is the goodness of milkweed, the goodness of monarchs.