Good Morning Jessicca

Letter to my Daughter
Sunday, 5 April

Good Morning Jessicca…

This is the time in each year nature sheds its hunkered down ways and revives itself to benefit from the launch of spring.  Friday morning started out cool and overcast, kind of like the June-gloom mornings I experienced as a kid growing up in San Diego.  I drove about three miles to the site of this morning’s browse.

I walked an abandoned road into the forest.

The creek was low, leaving a necklace of still ponds for tadpoles to grow.

Dogwood is in bloom.   Bees are here but it’s still too early for hummingbirds.

Some tree crowns filled with vine, looking like soaring bramble.

Thick and rope-like these vines grasp the nearest tree, catching a ride upwards.

Much of the area still has the feel of winter, but this will quickly change.

A derelict shed gives way to the incessant pull of earth.

Strewn wood waits for the services of fungus and termite to return it to the soil.

Two wild turkey flew into a farmer’s field and were quickly hidden by the grass.

North Carolina’s natural state is a carpet of forest.  Trees grow at the slightest provocation.

Ever wonder where the term tar heel comes from?  It’s what North Carolinians call themselves – like Hoosiers of Indiana.    I think it has to do with all these trees.  Old sailing vessels would put into this state’s ports for refitting because wood was so readily available.  The tar used in processing the wood for ocean voyages would get on the workers’ feet and they would track it everywhere.  It’s a nickname quickly and accurately given.

Love,

          Dad

© Tom Taylor   All Rights Reserved.

Good Morning Justin...

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 13 April

Cardinal

Good Morning Justin…

The past few weeks I’ve been taking casual note of life’s return to full activity following its annual hiatus during the cold, brief days of winter.  First came the yellow bloom of Daffodils and the white petals of Bradford Pears, even though the tree remained bare of its leaves and it was only early March and the weather was still the chill blast from a lion’s roar.  The nights routinely dropped below freezing and occasionally dipped into the twenties.  It didn’t snow, though, as the sky on these coldest of nights would remain clear with crystalline stars and maybe a sliver of moon.  When evening clouds did roll in they would provide a thermal blanket over the atmosphere and what precipitated would be a pattering dance of rain on the roof above.  It was too warm for even the slightest dusting of snow.

Robins began the month of March in a communal spread across muddy neighborhood lawns, searching among dead strands of last year’s leftover leaves for the first squirming specks of life that over the course of the day might add up to some kind of meal, not tasty but enough to keep one going.  By mid-month they had paired off and were busy building their nests in mostly secretive places amidst the thick brush or in the stretched limbs of towering trees overhead, safely out of reach from snakes and prowling fox but not from the hungry crow, which was already busy marauding the still naked arboreal crowns for delectable eggs and possibly a precocious youngster, naively rearing up its tender head.  Then, too, the adult bird had to always be mindful of the ever watchful Cooper’s Hawk, whose swift fatal strike would leave but a brief stir of feathers where just an instant before Mom was collecting bits of grass to add to her growing nest.

Male Cardinals were seen in twos and threes squabbling among themselves as to who would get rights to which choice piece of land.  There wasn’t room for everyone and less dominate males would be constantly kept on the move until they successfully fought off rivals for a stake of their own or were pushed beyond their desired habitat of thicket or woodlands edge.  Defeated and dispossessed, the outcast Cardinal would become weak from lack of food and would fall prey to any one of a number of predators or natural calamities.  By April the ants had once again broken through to the surface of the land and they could be counted upon to pick clean the bones of any animal that had failed to sustain the careful internal chemical equilibrium required of the living. 

April would also find Northern Flickers and Red-Headed Woodpeckers busy swooping from tree to tree and doing their rapid rat-tat-tat to break through the rough, cork-like outer crust of oak and other forest trees in order to use its long, sticky tongue to nab insects that had burrowed beneath the bark.  Black Carpenter Bees were also out in number, swarming about the now flowering Dogwood and the showy, dangling violet blooms of Wisteria – not the native kind but the exotic Chinese Wisteria that can quickly infest an area with its many runners that course the ground and use the framework of sturdier vegetation for climbing, giving it height. 

Still missing are the many hummingbirds and butterflies.  Presumably they wait in the wings for a more generous supply of nectar provided by the mature bloom of summer flowers.  Swallows from the Amazon basin probably aren’t due until May.  They’re expert at vacuuming insects from the air and, to date, there just aren’t that many around.  They’re coming, though.  Temperatures are now flirting with daytime 80s.  New kinds of walking, crawling and flying insects are making their appearance each day.  Yesterday, it was young, female flying ants.  This morning it was a small praying mantis.  The insects awaken and they will soon be here in waves – grand, fat morsels ready to feed a whole new generation of mockingbirds, robin, wrens, possum, frogs, lizards and the like.

Love,

           Dad

Good Morning Jacob...

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 6 April

Spring is all about the birds and bees

Good Morning Jacob…

It all seems to happen at once.  Sure there are some trees that blossom early like the Bradford Pear and some birds that get an early start on housekeeping like maybe the robins but, on the whole, spring waits till April to bloom.  Nearly every tree in the area has leafed-out over the course of this week.  Various insects are taking wing and the ants are digging out from their winter haven underground.  Large black carpenter bees are busy buzzing amidst the blossoms of the Bradford Pear, which are now rapidly losing their petals, having precociously first come to bloom during the early days of March.  Over the past few days it has been the turn of the dogwood to flower forth.  Other trees of the forest must also be in blossom right now as a fine yellow film of pollen is beginning to coat all the cars of the neighborhood that sit outside.  This flurry of airborne pollen will steadily build in intensity, aggravating the sales manager of Classic Chevrolet and other dealerships in the area as their gleaming new cars are transformed into the look of musty items that have set neglected on the shelf too long.  It means good employment for lot boys over the next few weeks as they start fresh each morning washing down all those rows of car to return them to their dazzling, spanking fresh, gleaming new car look. 

Of course, if you have an allergy to all this pollen you needn’t look outside to know that the air is congested with the cause of your annual sinus misery.  Isn’t this a fine howdy do, you must be saying, as the Earth once again reawakens from winter hibernation – your eyes watering, your head choking in all this grand celebration of sex among the foliage.  April becomes a rousing, stiff 5 a.m. for all the flowery stamen of male plants in the forest.  Why can’t they just leave it to the bees to deliver the goods?

Speaking of bees, I am surprised at the number of carpenter bees I have already seen crapped-out dead about the ground from overwork.  Clearly there are too few of them to handle the load right now.  I’m sure the queen is feeling the heat, as well, spending long exhausting hours laying eggs one after another.  There is no more demanding task master than Mother Nature.  I kid you not.  The enterprise that is life makes for a very stressful industrial environment.  Think about it.  From our relatively coddled human status as being top dog over the animal kingdom we can afford our Olympian view of nature as being a pastoral nursery, filled with life-rendering bounty.  Look about you more closely and you see all the animals, great and small, involved in a day to day struggle for survival.  Every creature is locked in competition for the basic necessities of life.  They are ever wary because a moment’s inattention may quickly result in being someone else’s meal.  Your fatal error was to become too absorbed in the sensual pleasure of feeding or napping or whatever it is that makes life special for you and not just an endless grinding process.  Your last vision of this world is that of your killer’s eyes registering its cold starring satisfaction at once again being able to momentarily curb its insistent hunger.  Make yourself over into an animal with four legs and fur or one with feathers and wings and you soon come to realize you survive by using your wits, surrounded and bedeviled by other equally cunning animals, ruthless addicts, driven by the fiercest of all instincts, that of survival.   

A brilliant cardinal makes its presence known perched on a limb near to where I am enjoying my first fresh brewed cup of coffee.  How wonderful is its merry song of greeting to the morning sun.  That’s what I’m thinking as I marmalade my biscuit.  In fact, the fellow over there in his red plumage is doing his earnest best to warn intruders not to steal from his family’s farm.  While the wife tends to the nest this home-owner actually spends considerable time squabbling with other male cardinals over property rights.  This is raising your young without the rule of law.  There is no benefit of arbitration.  There is no court of appeal.  Stay young.  Be fit.  Be always healthy or lose wife, family and home.  Eviction is just one cramped muscle away.

But relax.  We’re human and its spring.  Flowers everywhere will soon be in bloom.

Love,

           Dad

Good Morning Jacob...

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 9 March

I think I can . . .

Good Morning Jacob…

Life is often experienced with powerful emotions pulling you in one direction, then another, when you are a young artist.  You rarely pause long enough to appreciate knowing a middle ground.  You love intensely.  You hate bitterly.  You fall for beauty.  You face, stupefied, the bleak.  And since you are an artist you attempt to depict it all, in your own fashion.  There’s the glimmer of sun peering beneath the window shade drawn tightly down.  The room is smudged in unsettled blue.  The door is the color of a promise – soon it will open and she will be there.  In pictures of the heart, promises need not be kept.  I’m glad you are an artist but life is a precarious moth swooning round the candle flame. 

I’m drawing on my own ambivalence to create a picture headed nowhere.  That’s the theme:  ambivalence – intensely contrasting.  How does mine hold up to expression?  What degree of passion is revealed?  What imagery from life will be depicted and in what fashion?  What sort of caring results from my own ambivalence about most everything?

It was a cold rain for Friday’s funeral.  Lewis was the man next door.  He had a small, ink black dog with big bug eyes and incredibly long thin legs.  She looked like a whimsical character out of an old Betty Boop cartoon.  She found my very presence anywhere in her vicinity annoying and she would always come yapping after me.  Lewis would yell, “Miss Dale!” to call her off.  Lewis kept his red Ford Ranger pickup clean and usually parked it facing the street under his carport.  He had worked at least the last ten years at Sam’s Club when he died.  There was a stunning splash of flowers atop his casket when I went to see him at Whitley’s Funeral Home.  The suit he wore was perfectly tailored and he had the appearance of a highly regarded member of the business community.  His nails were expertly manicured and placed in lasting repose.  He looked dignified but gracious.  His wife, Kay, had slipped a small toy car, precisely centered, in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.  It had the number ‘3’ on the car’s doors… the number of Kannapolis, North Carolina’s home town hero – Dale Earnhardt.  Lewis was a lifelong NASCAR fan and he was always true to Dale and his son, Junior – number ‘88’.  The toy car was the one thing his wife chose for him to take with him to his grave.

The skies cleared the following day, Saturday, and temperatures rose into the sixties.  Birds everywhere made their appearance.  Maybe they sense the onset of spring.  The flocks of robin have been breaking off into couples and disappearing into the surrounding trees and brush.  The male cardinals are all dressed up in stunning new vermilion feathers to dazzle the local females.  Soon the ladies will be working dawn to dusk gathering material to build a nest, laying eggs, protecting their eggs, hatching them and then flying about the landscape gathering food for incessantly demanding youngsters, mouth wide agape and squawking.  Such is the price paid for giving in to the male’s display of love. 

I think I see bits of green breaking the ground into sunlight here and there.  A Carolina Wren searches eagerly for its first meal of insects, the precocious ones that will hatch and bravely step forward.  High up in the still bare branches of trees are large clumps of nesting material where soon the squirrels will give rise to another generation of families.  It will be sunny and clear once again today and I am set, ticket holder for a new season of theater brought to life by the lengthening days and renewed warmth of an ever climbing sun.

Love,

           Dad