My Backyard

The sunset is creeping up on us. We have lost about a half hour of daylight since the kids got out of school. Sunrise does not seem to be yet pinching in our day. It is a little, but you would only notice if you are like me up to greet the sun.

Three walls of my office are windowed to the outside world. The fourth wall is a slider to the kitchen. Because our house is sited on a sloping lot, my office is above the entrance to the garage and its deck is more than ten feet of the ground. When I am seated at my desk, as I am now, I am at the second story of the four-story maple tree on the west side of the office.

The maple tree’s canopy extends across my backyard to touch the canopy of the black oak that intrudes across the fence beyond the east southeast corner of the yard. From my vantage point the leaves mask the fields beyond the fence and the tree line across the power lines.

This is the summer view, but as the leaves turn and fall the horse farm across the way will be sketched into form, line by line engraved on that season’s sky. This will happened whether I observe or not and I choose to watch.

Only six or seven weeks ago, my first office task each day was to shade the east facing windows at five in the morning. The sun was up and climbing fast. Now it is an hour later in the day before the solar heat begins to build. The path of the sun’s journey is flattening out. The shadows lengthen each day. Come earlier each evening the cumulus clouds are tinged cotton candy pink, lighted from below by the rays of the setting sun.

If pen and ink or J. M. W. Turner’s engravings are the medium of autumn, the evenings of mid-summer demand pastels. Still, it is all about the light.

Audubon’s skills are most appreciated when you know the birds. Since we have a pup in training, my spouse and I walk the fields, sometimes alone but often together, at many and any hours of the day.

I am a woods guy, my wife is not but she is striding into knowledge of the fields and border woods. Her skills impress me and please her. She has learned to look for what does not belong there: to listen the same way.

It is she who sighted the hen turkeys’ heads bobbing in and out of view as they foraged in the tall weeds. It is she who counted the fledged out baby turkeys as the hens flushed and the chicks took flight to follow.

Yesterday she spotted her first deer standing in dense trees along the edge of the field. She said the first thing she noticed were its four legs in the light between the slender trunks of young trees. I wonder if she will learn to track when the light snow falls. Shortly, we will see.

Until next time.