Mothers Day

The rhythms of our life together are easy and harmonious. For more than a week, my wife and I have moved in a steady cadence of digging, planting, sowing, watering, trimming, taming. We are tired but pleased with the overall effect. This year, being outside together has become a series of luminous hours, hours in which we are as rooted to our little soil & rock tasks as surely as if we were branched and barked and leafed ourselves.

Over the weekend, what time we didn’t spend gardening was spent on the back porch, where we took our meals, rested, and watched the cascade of different varieties of birds as they spilled down out of the woods and into our awareness. Or watching the pollen-packing bees and wasps as they went, serious as IT nerds, about their sweet life-giving business. Or laughing at the chipmunk in perpetual motion, hopping and galloping across the lawn with his banner tail held high, his agenda being ticked off as he went.

My eye was drawn again and again to a plant that Mrs. Orr bought during a trip to a nursery a few weeks ago. It’s called a fuscia, and it doesn’t even look real.It appears to be decked with little silken Chinese ornaments. Delicate and exotic, the hummigbirds are drawn to it as well.

I noticed that in the rafters of porch roof, a wasp had started building a nest. We’re not having any of that, I said to myself as I plucked it down. Then I stood for a long minute and marveled again at the beauty and symmetry of the hexagon chambers and the quiet, masticating care with which they were produced. May I never be jaded about the life and the lives swarming around me, most of them unseen.

Several times during the weekend, a bold little titmouse came to the back porch and gathered nesting materials. Her stuff of choice seemed to be the material inside one of my hiking boots, exposed by a small rip. She came again and again to the boot and purloined a beak-full, then flew east to the thickening foliage of the woods where she will raise the cheeping ones.

A female robin spent all day Saturday and Sunday hopping about and pulling worms from the grass. Mrs. Orr remarked on how she would hop, stop, cock her head as if listening, and then stab down into the green blades and come up with a worm. “I wonder if she can locate worms by hearing?” she mused.

So, being 21st century people, we looked it up on the internet, and sure enough, robins do use their keen sight and hearing to locate food. They can apparently hear the worms tunneling in the ground below them, a fact that stuns me as much as the eyesight of a hawk stuns me. So we watched her for two days as she tugged earthworms from their homes and took them back to hers.

The boys called with Mothers Day greetings and we talked about the grandkids and slowly eased our way into the evening and supper preparations. As the sun dipped down, our quiet conversation was interrupted by the robin, who was in a high state of agitation. She flew from limb to limb on a wild cherry tree that stands by the garden fence. Perk! Perk! Perk-perk! “Sounds like she’s upset about something. I wonder if that’s where her nest is?” I said.

My wife snapped a photo as I stared up into the dark emerald of the tree. After a moment, I saw something that didn’t look quite right. Something hanging down.

It was the tip of a snake’s tail.

I squinted and saw that a large black snake (perhaps he of the recently shed skin?) was completely coiled around the robin’s nest. I knew that he was gorging on her eggs. The mother bird hopped about my head on the low branches, and she was calling directly to me, looking directly into my face. I knew she was imploring me to help her, help her babies.

While I kept my eyes on the snake, Mrs. Orr ran and fetched our grabber, those trigger-operated things that allow one to retrieve cans or items from tall shelves. I got the ladder and mounted it and reached up through the branches. As carefully as I could, I seized the snake about a foot behind its head and pulled. Pulled hard. Out and down he came, annoyed and ready to fight, but I had the advantage. Jinx came over to investigate, and he did not like the looks of things. I tossed the snake over the fence on the other side of the house and returned to see how the mother robin was doing. She busied herself at the nest for a while, then resumed her worm-hunting. I whispered to St. Francis of Assisi, asking him to pray that at least one egg was spared. By the time darkness claimed the farm, the robin was calm and all things were quiet and holy.

Jinx prowled along the road in the dusk and pretended that snakes do not exist, or at least do not visit our farm periodically. I wonder if he knows that he is simpatico with a red-breasted robin?

~ S.K. Orr