3/7, 2pm 45F, cloudy and windy
Snowdrops are flowering in the neighborhood just east of Maple Grove. At the entrance to the forest preserve, a small flock of juncos is crossing the trail from south to north, gleaning insects or maybe picking little stones from the path to seed their gizzards. They move through briskly and systematically while a white-breasted nuthatch calls. Earthworms have tucked bundles of oak leaves into the soft, wet soil alongside the trail. Two deer are standing in the back lot of one of the adjoining houses. Brooklyn hardly gives them the time of day.
I am thinking about false mermaid, as I always do this time of year. I brush fallen leaves aside looking for it. Seedlings are growing patchily all over the woods, like handfuls of mung beans strewn around and germinating on the damp soil. The first green leaflets are spreading their stubby little fingers. I pull a few seedlings to look closely at their roots, which number about 6 at this stage and have short, spare, bristly root hairs that are hardly noticeable without a hand lens. They pull easily out of the mud.
The tips of trout lily leaves have begun to show above the soil’s surface. The leaves are pale green and tightly rolled. I dig one up and find it is buried to its chin, two centimeters of leaf-roll below ground arching scimitar-like upward from a blackened tuber that reminds me of a very large, muddy grapefruit seed. Its base bristles with roots. The leaves at this stage exhibit none of the mottling that will develop as the leaves unroll and begin to photosynthesize. They are not etiolated, but simply pale, the chlorophyll in place and ready but not yet abundant. Give them a couple of weeks.
An eastern bluebird is warbling from a low branch on a slender sugar maple. It scans the ground from its perch. Then it drops abruptly. I was about to say that it plops to the ground, but that’s not right. The bluebird is not the kind of bird that plops. It does not generally sally or soar or plunge, either. It is neither sleek nor fierce, but neither is it bulky. It is practical, descending diagonally and in control, not a stone falling but a sturdy bird moving easily and without fanfare. There is no showmanship, no more energy expended than necessary. Just enough to make the drop precise and effective. It is back up at the branch of a nearby tree within two seconds, watching the ground again. Broad-leaved wild leek shoots have broken through their sheaths.
A group of eight mallards is bumming around on the ephemeral pond in the middle of the woods. There are two hens and six drakes, and the guys don’t seem to know what to do with themselves. They are horsing around, quacking at each other. One glides toward a hen and looks like he’d like to say something to her, then he slides away and quacks again at one of the other guys.
Beyond the mallards are six wood ducks, four drakes and two hens. This is a more serious group. They are gliding around whistling. They are attentive. Something sets them off: a group of four takes off low through the woods, skimming the top of the water and following the slope closely uphill, navigating deftly between the trees until they gradually, gradually emerge over the tree tops. The other two follow them out, squeaking and whistling, sliding upward through the forest along the same low-angled, sinuous path between the trunks, as effortlessly as a bicyclist gliding between rows of cars stopped at a red light.
The ducks breach the canopy and circle over Maple Grove. Brooklyn has been sitting so patiently, but these ducks whistling overhead are too much for her. She sits at attention and faces toward home, whimpering. We leave.
3/8, 9 am, 40F, sunny
The next morning we pass the church parking lot on the way to Maple Grove, and a car exactly like ours pulls in. Brooklyn is nonplussed. She will not move for about 5 minutes, convinced that this is our car, and that Rachel has arrived to take us home from this walk which has suddenly, to Brooklyn, become the most terrible walk. No matter that the boys looking out at her are not our boys. Never mind that the man driving is not Rachel and also not me. This must be our car, and Brooklyn intends to go home in it.
We make it to the ditch with a little cajoling. Brooklyn plunges in and gobbles at the water. After a minute of this, she stands up straight and looks at me. I sense she is sizing me up. Then she runs out of the ditch and darts in the direction of the car. I call for her and she ignores me. She stops all of a sudden, conflicted: obey or head home? Brooklyn does not like to be far from any of us, so it upsets her to be caught halfway between me and the car that she is certain holds Rachel. Against her better judgment, she waits for me. She reluctantly lets me guide her back toward the woods.
It’s a beautiful morning. Robins, red-bellied woodpeckers, cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, red-winged blackbirds are all singing their hearts out. Hairy-leaved sedges (_Carex hirtifolia_) are arching upward along the trail, an inch or two out of the ground already. _Carex tribuloides_ shoots sheathed in last year’s brown and desiccated leaf bases are three inches tall.
A golden-crowned kinglet is whistling in the low branches above us, moving everwhere. He flies to an elm whose buds are swollen nearly to capacity, about to burst open. They may be open along the margins, because the kinglet is moving between them, apparently picking at insects. He is an efficient worker. He moves from bud to bud sequentially, then moves to another branch. He moves from base to tip. Then, somehow discerning that his work on this tree is done, he moves to another tree. I admire such single-mindedness.
The bullet-shaped shoot tips at the ends of every rhizome in a mayapple colony have pierced the soil and, together, demarcate the margins of the stand that will unfurl a few weeks hence and remain through most of the summer, shading the ground beneath. Wild ginger shoot tips are tipped with overlapping leaves folded closed like little envelopes. Spring beauties are developing backbones and standing up a little straighter. Their leaves are about an inch long.
Another group of mallards occupies the ephemeral pond. The wind is blowing hard and steady, and a tree bending back and forth over the pond whistles and squeaks like the family of wood ducks that was here yesterday. Woodpeckers are calling: hairy, downy, red-bellied.
As Brooklyn and I walk home, a flock of 17 or 18 cranes is heading noisily southward. They pivot and head back toward the north. Perhaps they were just giving the town a look. We arrive home to find our neighbors’ silver maple in full flower.