Nature is Never Spent

Friday, it was overcast, breezy, cold. The clouds were quite dark and ominous looking, really. A lovely day. Saturday, it was exactly the same, but with sun, not at all ominous. It's so interesting how the light changes the colors and mood of things, even when you're not looking at the sky.





We get daffodils in February usually, or early March. Mostly I think they're the cultivated ones. But there are some jonquils, smaller and wilder, that get loose in fields and seem to prefer April. We've got them now.

Red. Not a rust or a burgundy, but a deep, vivid red. It most likely won't be native, but occasionally you will see it here. It feels vaguely out of place to me: the vivid red is too exotic, the deep red too opulent. But sometimes, at the height of summer when everything is so extreme that it's beyond the limits of your senses and begins to blur: the heat, the noise of insects, the glare, the smells of baked grass and earth and the soles of your shoes... it seems right for the colors to be heightened as well. So a hibiscus at the zoo isn't overly exotic, and a crinkled, velvety maroon cockscomb isn't too rich.

It was a rainy morning, which I prefer; even though it's super muggy, there's no glare. But when I trudged from my office across campus to my teaching building, and I turned around just before entering the building and looked back as I always do, I realized I missed my view of the morning light. At that time of day, the sun comes down to the floor of the square in ribbons, like maypole streamers from the tall upper story of pines and oaks.

In the evening... I know I keep saying it, but the cicadas are insane. They are so numerous and so loud. I can hear three distinct kinds of calls, so maybe they're not all cicadas (but they're not crickets). I tried to record them tonight on my balcony, but the traffic noise interfered. Sigh. The traffic wears on me in ways I don't always even realize. Well, the next time I go to the farm I should be able to find plenty of peace in which to record the decided non-quiet of the cicadas.

Early one morning last week, I was walking across campus. It was cloudy and a little breezy. In one gust of wind, I caught a sweet scemt that made me look around for someone who might have been wafting perfume. There was no one, and when I had more time to identify the scent, I realized it must be mimosa blossoms. Finally I saw them, at least 100 yards away across two parking lots and at the edge of the wooded creek that runs through campus.

From a distance, a mimosa tree in blossom looks like it has dollops of pink frosting all over its dark green feathery leaves. Up close, the blossoms are very exotic: a puffball or pompom of long, thread-thin stamens that are white near the base and pink at the ends.



They should look exotic, since they're from southeast Asia and apparently are more properly called the Persian silk tree, Albrizia julibrissin, though I've never heard that. They're actually a kind of legume and as such can fix nitrogen, but they were introduced here in 1745 as an ornamental. They've naturalized all over the eastern half of the U.S. as far north as New Jersey and are prolific. Each one of those blossoms eventually produces a long, flat bean pod which holds six or seven flat brown seeds. Young mimosa seedlings sprout easily, and if they don't find good conditions in one place in one year, they can hang around and sprout years later if they need to. I've seen feathery little mimosa seedlings coming up ten years after all the adult mimosas in the area had died of disease.

Mimosa blossoms are a strong visual and scent sense-memory for me. We had a few trees growing on our land when I was young, and they were short and spreading and made great climbing trees. The blossoms fascinated me, so I inspected them closely. My dad considered the trees a nuisance because of the way the dead blossoms would stick to and stain the paint on vehicles and the seed pods which clogged up the rain gutters in the middle of summer. The wood isn't even good for firewood because it's so light and corky. But I didn't know anything about introduced species and nuisance plants. I was fond of those trees.