Porch Song: September

I Loooove My Porch.

        I love to sit on my screened-in porch and observe things. It is, by both chance and design, a sensory smorgasboard. I have several gardens and a bird feeder. A variety of birds and butterflies flit about. Squirrels and rabbits are numerous and even an occasional chipmunk races by at lightning speed. Many of my plants are grown for their scent – rose, lavender, lemon verbena. A small fountain blends its trickling with bird-calls and breezy leaves. An open vista of sky extends across the alley, over my neighbor’s back yard, and on to the tall, 50-something aged trees along her street.
        It is the third week of September in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. As is typical for the area, the first week was a perfect autumnal temperature in the upper 70’s. Last week we barely survived humid, oppressive 90’s. Today it is high 60’s, low 70’s again. Until today I had only one hour all week of tolerable discomfort on my porch. And, I told you, I love my porch. So perhaps that hour is exaggerated by its rarity, but it was memorable. A tree waved at me.         

          One of those trees – about 150 yards distant and 3 stories high – waved at me. I don’t mean the trunk or the limbs or a branch. I mean a hole appeared in the wall of green leaves, and the leaves waved at me.

There was nothing visible inside the hole that opened among the leaves. Just  the leaves waved at me.

           Now, there was nobody else on the porch or in the yard between me and that tree. I think it was therefore natural for me to assume that the tree was in fact signaling ME. What remained was to figure out what that meant – to me and potentially the tree. My first instinct was to wave back. So I did. The tree waved again.

          The tree is alive, it waved, and I thought we had satisfied the needs of the moment. I had been gazing at its beautiful green leaves, the tree interpreted it as a friendly stare, and waved. End of conversation. A second wave must have another meaning, I reasoned, but what?  Cross-species,  first encounter – a cultural exchange?  I flashed the peace sign. The tree waved again. I grinned at the tree, and winked. The tree waved a fourth time.

           At this point I thought things were getting a little weird.

           I am, by nature, a fairly eccentric individual. The outlandish and quixotic are very welcome in my mental landscape. In fact tweaking my curiosity makes me happy to be alive. When there is something new, different, worthy of further exploration – Whee! Fun! But there seemed no way to investigate the waving of a tree, and no chance to ascertain its meaning. I sure wouldn’t find anything on Google - or would I?After a few tries, some sites on the web informed me that trees communicate with each other using fungi,  they have large auras,  they  want to communicate with us but they do so very slowly (like the Ents in Lord of the Rings) and we must rely on mental images and intuition to understand them.

           Nothing about trees waving.

           I was clearing my mind and opening it to intuitive knowledge from the tree’s aura when the damn squirrel stuck its head out of the leaves. The little bastard snickered at me from behind his tiny claws. So you say you saw that coming? Well you need to develop a greater sense of mystery, I think.
           Besides, I hate squirrels. Now if it had been a crow… I love crows. I think they can talk…