August 7, 2009
It is only about 30 feet long and as many feet deep, and half of that deep is really hillside, so it’s not really much of a space, but it has more stories of life and death and adventure and wonder than almost any place I’ve been. It is my modest backyard garden, a sometimes flat, sometimes sloping plot bounded by my house on one end, plank fencing on two sides and deer fencing above where it meets the grassy and shrub and live oak –dotted slope. It seems docile, sleepy, sun-baked dull at times, but I know how much lives there and how much you can discover, or let discover you, if you are still, and you listen, and you watch.
Feeling sometimes overwhelmed by all that’s happened and continues to happen as I stumble and bump through life, I turn to this small patch for focus, solace, and the occasional magic.
Five minutes. In just that brief time I see a ground wasp cruising, hungry for moisture in the sucked dry earth outside my garden, then coming here where puddles cling to the base of geranium and lobelia pots perched on the low stone walls that bound the paved area where I sit. Puddles that are an ocean of water for an insect the size of my thumbnail. But in some of the relative damp and wet—compared to the parched Northern California summer hills around me--there is a trap here, the sticky-sweet liquid of my hummingbird feeder, dangling by my kitchen window so I can watch the hummers zoom in to feed. The ground wasps like to drink here too, but crawl through the tiny openings made for the hummingbirds’ needle beaks, and then get then fall in, struggle, and drown.
Dead bug bodies keep me making fresh hummingbird food. Four to one, water to sugar, for my tiny, jewel-feathered junkies. They are buzzing me now, zooming just above my head as they come in for final sips as the evening fog tumbles over the headlands and kicks up a chill wind. Time to get their last flights in before dusk, and time to be still. Even if you’re a hummingbird.
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