Our back deck is now a neighborhood hangout for birds. With winter here, and the bears sleeping, I set up a new feeding station on our back deck. Within 24 hours of hanging a fly-through feeder filled with black oil sunflower seeds, I sat on the other side of our sliding glass door and watched birds alight on the feeder, or the rail, or the wooden planks beneath.
First the cardinals came. A dusky brown female with a flame orange beak inspected the new feeder from the deck rail it’s attached to. She cocked her head left and right, then hopped onto the wire mesh and dipped her head to pull out a seed. Then another. And another.
Next came a black-capped chickadee, small and round as a smoke grey tennis ball, with a smart black cap and a tiny triangle beak. It watched the mama cardinal from the rail before it hopped onto the feeder as well.
Then a male cardinal arrived and strutted scarlet along the white rail. Then another arrived. A few more males and females lined up on the rail. Their crests pointed to the sky, the black patches on their faces like little masks. They watched from the limbs of the oak that are just a few feet away from our deck. They dipped down to the feeder then flitted back up to the safety of their branches, streaks of bright red, pops of flame orange.
A tufted titmouse arrived, smaller than the cardinals, but longer and leaner than the chickadee. It had a jaunty little grey crest and a secret blush of orange under its wings.
Next came the mourning doves, crash landing onto the floor of the deck, four times the size of the cardinals, and with as much grace as my favorite, goofy pelicans who land in dramatic splashes on the surface of the sea. Once landed, the doves tucked their sprawling wings, bobbed their heads like their pigeon kin, and pecked seeds scattered from the rail above.
I sat at the table for probably an hour watching these funny animals. I don’t know what it is about getting old and watching birds, but it has happened to me, and I will own it. They bring me great joy. I feel peace when I watch them. Calm. The birds are real. They are themselves. They are true and natural. They are striking in their coloring, their body sizes, their beak shapes, and the long history of survival that led to their specific adaptations. I love watching their behavior: how they interact with the feeder, how they position themselves to have cover from prey, how they defer (chickadees) or how they dominate (blue jays, crows), who’s adventurous and will go first (cardinals), who will follow when it seems safe (doves), who will show up when everyone else has left (finches).
Later in the day, after I’d left the table and was no longer thinking about the birds, I saw our cat’s tail swish on our son’s bed as I walked by his open door. I poked my head in to see what Tubbles was flicking her tail about. She crouched on his bed, her front paws on the window sill, riveted to the activity at new feeder, which she could see from his window. I lay down on my stomach next to her and we watched the birds together.
Our Christmas decorations are put away for the year. The only reminder of the holidays are twinkling white lights on the front stair rail and my new Christmas mugs that I’m not yet ready to yield to storage. My fingers fit perfectly in the swoop of their scrolled handles. The mugs are larger than I usually like, but I love the way they feel when I cup my hands around them for warmth: they curve into the exact right shape, and the glazed porcelain is smooth against the skin of my palms. I find myself going for these mugs every time I make coffee or tea; they bring me delight in how cozy they make me feel. I’m not giving them up yet, even though they are painted with Night Before Christmas scenes, with Santa and reindeers, and it is now January 5.
I’ve got a fire laid in the fireplace. We’re expecting a winter storm tonight. Snow should start falling this afternoon, blustery and frigid, before it turns to sleet and ice. We had a load of firewood delivered in early December. I stacked half of it for my exercise the day it came, and Brian stacked the other half. I brought some in the other day to give it some time in the dry heated air of the house. It’s not as seasoned as our previous firewood. We have to start a fire with old wood, then add the new wood once it’s hot. I don’t know what I’ll do when we’re out of old wood; the new wood is hard to get going even when the fire is already hot. I guess we’ll have to use more kindling.
I’m happy about winter, even though the holidays are over. The holidays used to be the only redeeming quality of the season, and once Christmas was done, I was ready for spring. But I’ve come to love the invigorating air and the coziness of being indoors with books and blankets and steaming cups of coffee, of soups and root vegetables, of the quiet of a resting world.
Also, the bears should be hibernating now, and I can give a bird feeder a go again. I’ve been waiting for winter to arrive for this reason. In recent years, bears have discovered the bird feeder hung in our oak tree; the tree is on a slope, and the feeder hung low enough for me to reach it, which means bears could reach it, too. They’ve mauled three feeders, and I gave up last spring after the third.
Bear-mangled bird feeder
This has given me many months to think of a solution. I miss watching the birds. My first and simplest solution was to just wait until winter. Winter is my favorite season for watching birds anyway. There’s nothing else going on outside; all the plants in my garden, all the cute bunnies, chipmunks, and squirrels, all the buzzing bees and fluttering butterflies — they’re all tucked away, out of sight, resting. But the cardinals will come in their brilliant red coats, bright as berries against the bleak greys and whites of winter. Tufted titmice will come, and finches, and black and white woodpeckers with splashes of scarlet on their breasts and crests.
I think I’ve got a longer-term solution now, too, beyond just waiting for winter. I’ll try a bird feeder on the corner of our back porch, which is up a flight of stairs from ground level. I should be able to get a hanger that clamps to the rail. This will put the feeder high enough that bears can’t reach it when they come out of hibernation. And it will be even better than hanging from the tree because it will be closer to where I can see it, and it won’t be obscured by greenery when the oak leafs out in spring. The biggest unknown is this: will a bear climb the stairs to get to it? I guess we will find out.
I’m sitting on a giant outdoor futon by a turquoise pool in La Fortuna, Costa Rica. The sun is a smudged glow behind clouds, just above the trees that edge the river that runs along the property. The air is full of bird cries. High twee-twits, a melodious whistle twee twittle twee, a laughing cacacacaca, the cluck of chickens, the cock a doodle doo of a rooster, the hoowa hoowa of something dove-like.
The pool is edged with yellow and green variegated plants, and red and green ones too, along wtih something like a bird of paradise except that the flowers dangle and look like toucan beaks rather than lifting up to look like long sharp bird bills. At the end of the pool are broad-leafed plants almost my height and with giant showy iris-like flowers in lemon yellow and flame orange, and hummingbirds drank from them last night as I floated in a donut inflatable in the pool with a cold glass of white wine.
By the river, the trees drip with lime-green bromeliads and dangling vines that drop all the way from the treetops to just above the water’s surface. Insects whirr. A yellow leaf falls gently into the moving water and drifts downstream.
When we arrived yesterday and piled out of the Suzuki, we went straight to the pool and saw it sparkling in the afternoon sun, filled with inflatable floaty toys that drifted around its edges: two beach balls, two pink-frosted donut inner tubes, a fun noodle, two long lounging floats, and a giant pink flamingo you could lay your whole body on and be a foot above the water and stay completely dry. And a basketball hoop! Our son immediately began looking for a pool basketball.
This morning, when I came out here, the flamingo was dressed up. One donut was around its neck like a necklace. The other was around its back end and had the fun noodle stuck through it to give the flamingo a long arching tail. It had a lounger float under each wing like skis, and the yellow frisbee was on its head like a halo. The flamingo floats around the pool in this getup in the morning sunlight, and each time I see it, I’m tickled all over again by what I assume is Brian’s doing after the rest of us went in last night.
Saturday May 25, 2024. 6:15am
I swam laps for 10 minutes in the pool this morning. The water was too warm and I felt like I was overheating, even at 5:30am. It got me moving, though, which was better than not swimming. Now I sit by the water in the rising sunlight. The volcano is straight ahead of me, La Arenal. Black birds, probably grackles, squawk on tree tops. The monkey masks on the little cabanas around the pool look creepy with the sun rising on them.
Sunday May 26, 2024. 6:24am
I’m on a bench by the pool. Roosters crow from the farm across the gravel road. The sky is heavy with clouds. I can’t see the volcano or the surrounding mountains. It hasn’t rained at all since we’ve been in Costa Rica. We expected rain every day.
We saw sloths yesterday! After lounging by the pool most of the morning, and after Brian and I went into town to eat at Lulu’s soda for a casado, a local meal of rice, black beans, plantains, salad, a tortilla, a small wedge of cheese, and grilled fish, we drove over to a nature sanctuary, the Bogarin trail in town, where we took a mile hike through a forest and saw leaf cutter ants carrying leaves and flowers in long trails along the path. We saw lizards and a giant moth that was not alive but was posed as if it were; I wondered if the guides had put it there. The place we went offered guided tours for $50 per person; self-guided tours were $16. We did the self-guided tour.
We looked to the treetops so much our necks ached. We did not see sloths, nor did we really know where to look or what to look for. We wondered if maybe we should have done the guided tour, though none of us wanted to have to engage and be social and be led around.
But about halfway through the outer loop, either Brian or our son spotted a small sloth hanging from a branch. It was close enough that we could see it’s little face! It was so cute we all wanted to die.
The hike started pleasantly in terms of temperature — we expected to be sweating buckets, but in the shade of the green forest, the temperature was surprisingly tolerable. As the minutes ticked on, though, and my backpack smothered my back, I became slick with sweat. We went in the afternoon, maybe around 2pm, and we walked slowly to look for sloths. The sun sets at 6pm, and by 4, the light was getting low. Mosquitos began to emerge, and I soon was covered in bug bites and was ready to come home. Our stomachs were growling, too. So after seeing the first little sloth, then near the end of the loop seeing a message drawn in the dirt of the path, “SLOTH look up,” and looking up to see a big sloth, then going back to see the little sloth again, we hiked out.
Our son wanted pizza — “something smothered in cheese” — so we stopped by the Papa Johns that was on the way home and that we had previously laughed about looking so out of place. I drank chilled white wine and we ate pizza in front of the TV while we watched F1 qualifying for Monaco.
Now it’s time to move Airbnbs again. This time we move from the jungle house with the pool to the beach house with the pool in Tamarindo. Only 3 more days in Costa Rica. I’m ready for it to end and not ready for it to end.
We’re in flight on our way to Costa Rica. I’m in an aisle seat and our daughter is next to the window, her back to the oval shutter, her head resting sideways on the headrest, and her socked, Birkenstocked feet in the empty seat between us. The flight from Charlotte to Liberia is half empty.
I’m reading Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder again, and it’s so good. It’s set in the humid wilds of the Brazilian Amazon, where insects are mammoth and mosquitos carry fatal fevers. I hope our bug repellant works.
The plane is vibrating and the journal’s paper feels ticklish under my hand.
I also brought Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird to help me get in the mood to write. Right now I mostly just want to read, though. And eat. I wonder if there will be a snack service at least. American Airlines is not as nice as Delta, there aren’t even screens to watch on an international flight.
Wednesday May 22, 2024 5:11pm
I’m in our Airbnb at the first stop in Costa Rica, Playa Potrero. The kids and Brian walked out to the beach for a sunset swim, and I stayed back. My arches hurt from walking in sand. Also, I finished reading State of Wonder and now I’m grumpy because I finished my book, which was excellent and exactly what I wanted for being here, but now it’s over and I don’t have a replacement.
We saw monkeys our first night here, just running and swinging through the trees above our Airbnb.
We’ve been to beautiful beaches that actually have shade we can sit under and listen to the waves. Today I sat on the beach that’s walking distance from our house, and I drew. I drew the husk of a coconut that was on the sand in front of me, my flip-flops, a vine on the beach, the cliffs and water, and my straw hat hanging on a branch to dry because I’d soaked it when I swam out with our son and dove under a wave to avoid getting sucked under.
The sun is dropping and I want to go look for monkeys. I’m going up on the roof. Maybe I’ll see the sun set, too.
I’m going to read Bird by Bird again.
5:51pm
I’m inside the house in a little glass-walled alcove between the living room and our bedroom. I’m on monkey watch. I went out on the roof alone because the light was low and dusky, and I thought they might come out early; when we saw them Monday night, it was after we’d swum until the sun set, and then came up to the house, and then saw monkeys.
I stood on the roof alone about 15 minutes but saw nothing. I came back in after observing the neighborhood from above and snapping a couple of photos of a vine climbing a palm tree across the street.
There’s not a breath of wind out there. I’m inside because I’ve already showered and I don’t want to put bug spray on.
Thursday May 23, 2024 5:01am
We did not see monkeys last night. I waited by the windows until sunset, then went outside when Brian and the kids got home. I watched the treetops for several minutes outside. They talked about how it wasn’t guaranteed that the monkeys would show up again at the same time and place, but I really wanted to believe they would. I watched more from outside, then moved inside to watch, and I never saw any more.
We leave for our next Airbnb this morning. I’ve got a lot of packing to do. I completely unpacked my suitcase — I hung my clothes or folded them on shelves. I also gutted my backpack. The charts for my eye therapy are in the little glass alcove. My sketchpads, laptop, and watercolors are on the table in the alcove, too. My pen bag is sitting on the concrete island in the kitchen where I sat to write. I will need to put all these things away. Bird by Bird. My kobo.
It’s lighter out now. I’d like to sit outside to write. I’ll need to take the bug spray with me.
I’m outside now and stink of Deep Woods OFF. Gross. I can hear the pounding of surf on the beach, the cawing of tropical birds, the occasional gutteral growling of unknown animals.
A raccoon just passed through on the back deck. It looked at me and I looked at it. It walked on by while I remained lounging in the lounge chair.
I just heard the whirr of wings, like the sound I heard on the first night when large insects slammed into my chest in the dusky dark, large insects I imagined to be golf-ball sized cockroaches.
I’m eager for our next house. It has a gorgeous pool that I imagine spending a lot of time next to when we’re there.
There’s no breeze out here today; the air is very still. I wonder what it will be like in La Fortuna. Brian said the car ride could be bad. I felt sick yesterday when we drove to Brasilito and I sat in the back seat. Our neighborhood road is rocky and rutted and very bouncy in the car, and then the paved roads are winding and have intermittent sharp speed bumps, all of which are nauseating in the cramped back seat of the Suzuki. It’s not going to be a comfortable ride. We’ll go to the pharmacy next to the coffee shop to get motion sickness pills. I want another smoothie bowl as well.
Our son made us pasta last night for dinner. We had bowtie noodles, parmesan, and an under-ripe tomato. Brian and I drank some cold white wine with it. We all lined up at the concrete island on the too high barstools and ate it side by side while we listened to music on the bluetooth speaker Brian packed. I don’t remember what we listened to.
Brian’s out here now. He’s in the lounge chair next to me. He just clapped his hands together, presumably to kill a bug. A couple of minutes ago, we heard a crashing in the trees above us. I watched the swaying branches for a monkey, but it was just a squirrel.
I just rubbed my face, and I’m so greasy.
The squirrel is knocking things out of the trees and they’re thunking to the ground after rustling through palm fronds as they fall. I’m not sure what it is that it’s dropping. Maybe sea grapes, or pieces of coconuts.
8:30am
I watch the treetops across the “river.” I watch for them to twitch or sway. This is a sign of monkeys. In a densely leafed tree across the way, I see a black-brown lump turn a head and drop a curled tail, then move hand over hand on all fours to leap to another branch across the water. The limb dips low under the weight of the monkey, then straightens as the moneky scrambles to a thicker, sturdier part of the limb close to the trunk.
Now I see no movement. Even the single compound leaf that waved to me in some localized eddy of breeze has stilled. I hear the high-pitched whine of a shop-vac, the buzz of cicadas, the grind of a chainsaw, the squeak of someone rubbing glass that won’t come clean. Yellow butterflies flutter ditzily over the still water. Birds chortle across the way. If I listen hard, I hear the swoosh of waves on the beach.
My skin is sticky with sweat and bug spray. A fly lands on my shin and I twitch it away. I swept the deck yesterday, and the table out here as well, and both are littered again with tiny oval leaves the size of my pinky nails.
Something nearby is making a repeated “hwaa” sound. I don’t know what kind of animal it is. I hear the thwack of a nail-gun. I hear the sweep of a broom across pavers.
I’ve been in denial for a while. Our daughter graduated high school four days ago. When our son graduated, I processed through writing and blogging. He was our first to leave. With our daughter, I’ve talked about it with people I love, and how wonderful and freaky it is for our children to not be children anymore, and how empty our house is going to feel when they’re both gone in August. Our son will start his third year at the University of Virginia; our daughter will start her first at the University of Florida.
I didn’t blog about it because writing about it would make me process my thoughts and feelings in a way I’m still not quite ready for. I think I’m still in a talk-about-it-with-loved-ones place. So for now, I’ll just write about how we’re celebrating our daughter’s graduation and her acceptance into her first choice for colleges. We’re on a family trip to the place of her choosing: Costa Rica. And on our first night here, we saw monkeys!
Can you find the monkeys?
We’re staying at an airbnb in Playa Potrero on the northern Pacific coast of Costa Rica, about 30 minutes from Tamarindo. We’d walked out to the beach to watch the sunset, and when we arrived back at the house, we heard rustling in the canopy above us. Seed pods thunked to the ground as the treetops shook, and we looked up to see monkeys climbing and jumping from branch to branch like squirrels do at home. We saw baby monkeys carried on mothers’ backs, and I watched a parade of monkeys march across a long limb in front of the near full moon. The kids’ trip was made in just the first day.
We’re staying at the beach the first three days of the trip before we’ll go to the interior for another three days. The monkeys were fun, and I also love listening to the birds, which sound much different from ours at home: the bird calls here are deep-throated and emerge from the depths of broad-leafed, lush vegetation. The beaches are pretty gorgeous too. They curve in wide inlets protected on each end by rocky protrusions dripping with green.
And I love the coconuts. I can’t get enough of them. The kids loved monkeys on the first day. I loved that the cocktail I ordered — a Coco Bolo, with coconut water, lime juice, thyme, honey, and rum — was served in a coconut.
I stood behind my husband in Minnesota, rubbing his shoulders while he sat at our desk, focused on the screen in front of him. He was transferring all my files from our desktop to the laptop I was to take with me to Virginia.
I watched branches sway in the breeze, laden with the heavy weight of broad sumac lives, fingers of blue spruce needles, or delicate walnut leaflets. Our kids and their neighbor friends, the ones they spent eight hours a day with outside, popping in for a popsicle or an apple snack before dashing out again, tromped through the yards, all in a line, singing and pumping their arms like they were in a parade. They reminded me of the lost boys in Peter Pan.
I rubbed my husband’s neck and began, quietly, to cry.
The keyboard clickety-clacked while he loaded programs onto the dinosaur laptop, then stopped when he heard me sniff.
“Are you crying?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He reached up behind him and held my hands on his shoulders. “Because of the kids?” He watched them laugh and parade with the friends they would soon leave.
“Yes,” I said. “And because of the trees.” And the move. And the unknown.
“Why the trees?”
I pointed to the tallest tree on our lot – the one all the neighbors hated because it was tall and gangly and had been carved out in the middle of its crown to accommodate power lines.
“That’s a black walnut,” I said. “It is a host plant for the luna moth.” I wiped my eyes, thinking about yet another move. “I always wanted to have a walnut tree.”
The first time I saw a luna moth was nearly 20 years ago, before I married, before I had kids, when I was an ecology student in Athens, Georgia. It was night, and I had pulled into an empty bank parking lot to hit the ATM before going out for beers. I stepped out of my car, and as I slammed the door, something in the parking space next to me caught my eye. I looked down and there on the ground, two feet from my front driver’s side wheel, motionless with its wings spread flat, was a the largest moth I had ever seen. Luminescent green, it was more beautiful than butterflies. Had it crawled on my palm, its wings would have eclipsed my hand.
I forgot about the bank, forgot about the bar. I cared for nothing but this otherworldly creature on the pebbly black asphalt. The saucer-sized moth was the color of absinthe, and even with me standing over it, even after my feet crunched, and my ton of rubber and steel gravelled over pavement just inches from its body, it did not move. It lay there, basking in the light of a street lamp, as if in a trance. I had never seen anything like it. I stood there in that dingy parking lot, under the street light, in front of a brick bank, the most ordinary, paved over, non-natural setting, and experienced a sacred moment as I witnessed this gorgeous creature who had stopped time and space for me with its luminous glow.
Since that night, almost 20 years ago, I have hoped for the gift to see another. The only time I’ve seen one, besides in photographs on the internet or pinned in glass cases at a science museum, has been in a commercial for a sleep aid. Lunesta. I remember the first time I saw that ad, how offended I was that it had exploited such a special creature for the pedestrian purpose of peddling pills. It was like using God to sell toothpaste.
Ten years after that moth, when we bought a home in Florida, I wanted to cultivate a butterfly garden. I learned that you could attract local species by planting host plants for caterpillars (milkweed for monarchs, parsley for swallowtails, passionflower for frittilaries) and nectar flowers for butterflies (lantana, echinacea, goldenrod, plumbago). After successfully inviting multiple generations of monarchs and swallowtails, Gulf Frittilaries and zebra longwings, after watching the adults drink nectar, and their caterpillars munch leaves, and their chrysalises transform squishy larvae into winged butterflies between the slats of our wooden fence, I one day saw a tremendous, absinthe green caterpillar crawl across the our garden path. Its colossal size (larger than the largest swallowtail caterpillar I’d seen) and its luminous color (it seemed to glow even in daylight) immediately put me in mind of my magical moth, and I thrilled that it could possibly be a luna larva. I rushed in to fetch my camera and field guide, but when I reemerged and got down on my hands and knees in the mulch, trying to follow its trail, I could not find the caterpillar again.
Luna moth caterpillar: photo credit Dave Wagner, 2002
Having seen my only luna moth in the foothills of the Appalachians, it never occurred to me that I might find one in Florida. I researched Actias luna to find the luna’s host plants: persimmon, sweetgum, hickory, walnut. All large specimens. None in our postage stamp yard in Tampa. I searched the neighborhood for these trees but never found them, nor did I find another luna larva.
When my husband accepted a three year postdoctoral position in Minnesota, and it was time to move away from Florida, I made a wish board of what I wanted in our new northern home: 3 bedrooms, a big kitchen, good schools, a yard for the kids, and a host plant for the luna moth. I forgot the board during our rushed two-day house-hunting trip. All we were looking for was a place we could afford in the school district that offered half-day kindergarten. A place we could spend three years and be comfortable. We moved in November, and one month later had our first snow. We didn’t see leaves or earth until the following May.
In September, after ten months in Minnesota, our kids clomped through the mud room one Saturday with their fingers stained black. “What on earth?” I asked.
“There are these things all over the yard – I think they’re coconuts!” our son said.
I walked outside with our daughter and him to find a pile of lime-sized green globes they had collected. Some had tiny fingernail gouges in them, some were chewed by squirrel teeth until a black pulp showed, some were inexpertly shredded by child fingers, and some were broken open like to show fibrous husks like… coconuts.
“Huh,” I said. “I don’t know what those are.”
A few days later I was kneading dough in the kitchen and I heard a THUNK. I looked up at the ceiling where it sounded like something had landed on the roof. I kneaded the bread some more. THUNK. I wiped my hands, THUNK, and walked to the big plate glass window that looked out on the yard. I saw one of the heavy green globes plummet to the ground, THUD, and my eyes traced its path up to a branch in a tree. There, a squirrel nibbled the thick husk of another one and sprayed flakes of the olive green skin from its mouth as it chewed.
I walked over to a neighbor’s house and asked, “What are these things?” I showed her an intact nut. It was heavy in my hand, like a stone.
“That’s a black walnut,” she said. “The kids love to try to tear them open. Be careful, though – the black stain is really hard to get out.”
I remembered the wish board I had forgotten and thought, holy shit, my magical thinking worked: we have a walnut tree.
After I realized we had a host plant on our property, after I realized my wishful intent had come to pass, I thought, “It’s meant to be! I will find another luna moth!” In spring and summer, I searched for luna caterpillars, but the crown of the tree was too high, and there were no climbing branches. I couldn’t see the leaves way up there in the sky. I could not see if luminous larvae ate them. I checked by the porch light at night for adults and walked outside in moonlight through the neighborhood.
Season after season went by, and in the three years that we lived in that house, I never saw a luna moth.
When we left Minnesota and I stood by the window with my husband, I was sad to leave the tree so soon. Sad that I never got a chance to see my moth. Sad to leave what was known. Again.
We moved into our Virginia townhouse in December. The trees were bare when we dragged furniture up stairs and decided which cupboard would hold the plates, which drawer would hold the silverware. After settling in, we sledded in the neighborhood in January, bicycled past pastures in July, gathered words in the horticulture gardens in August. I forgot about the luna moth. Had given up on it. Did not wish for a host plant when we relocated, not (consciously) out of disappointment, but because I had moved on. Because my mind was on practical things: transitioning our children, affordable housing, school districts. Soccer. Swim team. The daily grind.
Summer turned to fall in our new home, and with September came the first day of school. As we did last winter and last spring, the kids and I walked through the park in our neighborhood to wait at the bus stop. We shuffled our feet in the few golden oak crisps that had already fallen, and when the bus arrived, our children looked to the windows and saw friends they hadn’t seen in three months. Little hands stuck through open rectangles, waving. A face popped up with bright eyes and a mouthful of teeth and beckoned them onto the bus. Our kids grinned and said hi to their driver and climbed on the bus with more excitement than they were willing to admit on the first day of school.
I was relieved to see them happy, thrilled to know they had already made fast friends, proud that they had not only survived the transition, but were now thriving in their new, not-Florida, not-Minnesota home. I walked through the park that morning with my hands in my pockets, kicking crunchy leaves, at peace. I was grateful for where we landed. Thankful that our family could finally settle down in a town we loved, in a town we wouldn’t have to leave.
I watched leaves fly fluttering from the toe of my shoe, and then I stopped. There on the ground, next to the curving brick path, among the brown leaves, was a husk. A husk like the ones the squirrels threw from tree tops in Minnesota. The ones that thunked on our roof and littered our yard in September. A husk the size of a lime, but woody like a coconut. I scanned a wider area and spread among the crisp oak leaves, like peanut shells at a picnic, were hundreds of these husks. The earth was littered with black walnut hulls. The park was full of walnut trees. I walked deeper into the neighborhood and saw hickories and sweetgum. Looked out over the Appalachians and realized in our forever home, in the town we wouldn’t have to leave, we didn’t just have one tree, we had a whole forest. Ridges and valleys lush with host plants. An entire mountain range of habitat.
My heart jumped, and I smiled at the trees, and I thought, “It is meant to be.”
Butterfly Mind 