Porch Thoughts, 9 May 2014

Two adorable chickadees are checking out the small house in front of me, maybe 20 feet from my nose. One little black-hooded face is in constant motion making figure eights and 180’s while peeking around the post at me.  Such small eyes in that black hood – where are they looking? What is that tiny brain thinking?

“Human, not moving, never going to leave, GO AWAY, never mind, bug, leaf, wood house, right size.”

They come and go more frequently , taking turns hanging on the side of the roof while the other mate is inside. Their legs are narrower than toothpicks. And I might sit here for another hour watching.

You must have heard the sayings: “get back to the country, that’s where we all come from”; “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden”; “I went into the woods… [to] see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”  I grew up hearing those ideas and believed them, wholeheartedly. I got my love of untrammeled places from my father. He had been a hunter in the 1940’s and 50’s. He had gone off by himself at times to camp with friends or without in Lancaster County and more unsettled Pennsylvania counties. He had been determined to take my mother, sister and I up every fire-tower in every State Game Land we could drive to. We vacationed in an A-frame in one of the Pennsylvania state parks rather than the Jersey shore. When my sister and I were out of the nest, he and Mom vacationed in at least 5 of the mountain ranges in the U.S.  

Watching chickadees or gardening in my back yard are my only connections to the natural world today. Short trips to the beach or one of the professionally landscaped gardens nearby have been my attempts to see a larger natural vista than the 900 square feet of my yard.

But is a forest or a seascape a “deeper” connection than that of a screened-in-porch, a lovingly tended garden, or even a greenhouse?  Does my desire for a spiritual reunion with the Earth justify an expensive trip to sit at the foot of a Giant Sequoia in California? I will be surrounded by tourists and cars and carefully rangered trails. We will all be among the moneyed elite who can drop a couple thousand dollars to “get back to the land,” or pilgrims strapped for cash on their one vacation to the “wilderness” in our minds. 

And so I sit, befuddled, on my comfy outdoor couch on a warmish May morning and watch these stubbornly undomesticated creatures build their nest in a prefab birdhouse.

At least I’m outside.