Whenever its regal mother appears, the crows and the mockingbirds are the ones taking wing. It calls out, forlorn, as the mockingbirds and crows harass it endlessly, diving into the hemlock again and again, until the baby hawk lifts clumsily into the sky to circle a bit before settling in the tree again. The gaping nestlings lifted their heads in concert when I opened the box to check on them.Ī new-fledged red-tail hawk has taken shelter in my neighbor’s hemlock tree. But the bluebird eggs survived both the wren with egg murder on his mind and this year’s stifling heat. These parents are young, and experience matters when there’s a territorial house wren darting through the brush piles. These are not the same birds that nested there earlier this summer, and I worried when I saw a new pair moving in. Last week, four tiny bald bluebirds hatched in the nest box I had set out for them. We wonder: What has become of the languorous summer we longed for back in the sadness of winter? Where did the endless, grass-fragrant days go? The children trudge back to school under a blistering sun. The dog days of August crisp the spring-green underbrush to crackling tinder. How brief is the season of “splendour in the grass,” as the poet William Wordsworth put it, and surely summer is the time that brings such lessons closest to home. Life is a single wink from a single lightning bug. Life is the glint of light on rushing water, a flash of lightning. Now my father is gone, and my mother too, and I know that life is not at all a long process. “There’s still time.”īut that was long ago, when I was still young enough to believe those words of comfort. “Life’s a long process,” I would say, echoing my father’s reassurances. NASHVILLE - Sometimes I remember how I tried to comfort my children when they encountered a setback or were disappointed that a dream they were nurturing had not yet come true.

Rest of my days