Accounting

Last Tuesday, after the last flat cat capture and the completed barricading of the deck, a lovely little doe came by to check my work. She wandered from the front yard and then slowly walked along, nibbled the lilacs, and disappeared as the fireflies started to tango under the maple. She had a beautiful reddish-gold coat that glowed. I haven’t seen a lot of deer in the neighborhood this summer, partly, I’m pretty sure, because two new fences have been built and two families have moved in that have dogs. I saw a doe cross the street one day a month or so ago as I went out to listen to the birds, it was a foggy morning and she sort of faded into the mist.

Because of the heavy rain forecast yesterday I had taken the hanging plants down and placed them on the porch. I’d also moved the pink begonia there last week after something ate the blossoms. Then this morning Jerry showed me this video from the Ring™: A visitor to our front door. A lithe nibbler tasting the plants. A bite is taken from the petunias and then a begonia and then a movement or noise is heard. I love how she just jogs away toward the lonesome pine. (Something has eaten a couple of sunflowers there; I’d watched a goldfinch out there the other day plucking petals and dining on the flowers, but a giant muncher has been at work.) The whole front of the house is overgrown right now, full of deep shade during the heat, it makes tracking birds fun. I have two hummingbird feeders out there and when the hummingbirds buzz away the only way to find them is wait for the red pulse at their throats in the shadows. I spend an inordinate amount of time standing and looking into the trees, waiting to see whatever is singing or has just flown up as I come around the house. Just a slow observation.

It’s something like what I do when I go into an office or business, except there it is more perverse, I’m not looking for an ah ha! or moment of beauty. There I am looking for what if: what if I need to get out, what if I need to hide, what if I need to run. I once went to a town hall in Klamath Falls where Senator Jeff Merkley was doing an annual visit. It was at the Oregon Institute of Technology auditorium, and I sat midway down and in the center of the theatre. A man came in, shadowed by policemen and they stood alongside the wall near where he sat. He interrupted the Senator almost immediately and when asked to hold his questions was visibly agitated. Someone behind me said that’s so and so, a name I recognized from the local paper. I got up at that point and moved to the farthest part of the room near a door that lead out into the hall and from there outside through another door that claimed to be alarmed; if I used it, I needed it to be alarmed. Anytime after that I made a more careful seat choice. (And he did approach “we need to watch this guy” status when he said “so maybe I just need to get my gun” … that’s when they escorted him out.)

So, I enter the world cautious, not on edge exactly, but paying attention to many waves of action and thought. Sometimes I do close down and only look for beauty, but it is almost 99% not human. Yes, I can run a finger over the maple seedling and then turn back to see the tree which sends its samara fluttering in the spring. Yes, I will bend as close to the cicada as possible to note its armor. Yes, I will lose myself in the yellow of the daylily or the bee buried in its skirt or watch as the dragonfly crosses the lawn, its wings catching and releasing the sun. This is just convalescence. It is just paying attention. It is attention that everyone needs to be allowed, but which even now feels like it is guarded. I don’t want to close down my humanity account because hate is corrupting it.

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I may rejoin the day I understand how an 11-year-old
knew to cover herself in blood to survive. Is it innate
now in America, under this intense wash of violence
to hide your body under death?

Maybe soon the children will become like teen
cowbirds who one day hear the call and gather
where they learn a new song, where they learn
what it takes to endure in the form they are.