front porch

the chairs are finished. i have managed several hours a day (it's okay. you can be impressed) in my rocking chair on the porch. before anyone gets all critical, i spend my remaining time hiking, gardening, picking up rocks scattered all over the yard, mowing and dealing with small but energetic dogs. i get my exercise. but at least one hour during the day and usually several every evening around dusk, i sit in my rocker, sip some sort of beverage (tea, bourbon, hot chocolate- it gets cool here at night), breathe air that smells like the summer when i was eleven and knit pants for the supernatural or peruse our library of geekdom.

when we bought the house, we immediately furnished it with a field guide to wildflowers (north american), catskill region waterfall guide (where we found that nice trail featured in an earlier post), peterson field guide to eastern trees, and the national audubon society field guide to birds- eastern region. this is because once you become a homeowner, a landowner, you have to know what's on your land. and around it. and i do. mostly i use the books in my secret feuds with the tree guy. he does not know about these feuds. he says the trees in our fence row are chinese elms and i know they're rock elms, mostly because of the drooping lower branches. he says the woodpeckers destroying said rock elms are downy woodpeckers when they're clearly yellow bellied sapsuckers. i win these arguments entirely in my mind. the field guides are vindication enough. the tree guy is so nice i don't have the heart to fight him for real. although i would clearly kick his butt. but this is what i do. i sit on the porch and look around and need to grab a book every few minutes to establish my surroundings. biblical folk say god let adam name everything. i want to know everything's name.

like the hummingbird i saw the other night. i thought that would be tough. they're tiny and it was nearly dark when the thing zipped over to the tiger lilies (who were in the process of closing up for the night) and pranced around. i was secretly hoping it would get stuck in a closing lily, but those things are pretty quick. by the way, the fireflies were all around the lilies, too, and i was begging them to fly into a lily and light up. they absolutely refused, although one did hover just above a lily and set the whole thing ablaze. but the hummingbird. the hummingbird, indeed. tiny. dusk. impossible to identify. except, according to national audubon society, the ruby throated hummingbird (archilochus colubris, of the family trochilidae) is the only one living its frantic little life around here. good. because i have no idea how many centimeters the thing was or the color of its undercarriage. generally, the folks at audubon are pretty straighforward with their descriptions of voice, habitat, nesting and range. but not with this little critter. check this out: "nesting: 2 white eggs in a woven nest of plant down held together with spider silk and covered with lichens. nest is saddled to the branch of a tree." holy cow. just put a few line breaks in there and you've got yourself something sassy enough for a high school poetry journal. the thing is, the language is pretty, but i'm thinking, "how do they get the spider silk?" i know they're small and i know they're fast, but come on. you're telling me a bird with that sort of amped up personality can abscond with a spider web and then manage to use it successfully to cobble together a hobbit nest?

they're so sleek and shiny and small, the hummingbirds. thank goodness for bats. fat, fuzzy, disheveled looking. it's the bats i really love. since i was a kid. they're such a brilliant package. mammal. nocturnal. flying. sleeping upside down in caves. and then the echolocation thing. seriously? one animal got all that? cows must be pretty annoyed. regular birds, too. not me. i couldn't take all that responsibility. i'm nearly overwhelmed just taking it all in from my rocking chair.