Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

Spring is here! Sing Hallelujah! Go daytripping in the garden
April 12, 2006

The backyard is where modern Americans meet the wild. A garden designed for wildlife is a window into the natural world of local birds and butterflies. A backyard is not a static scene, for it is a place of living beings. A garden with drought adaptive and native plants is a place of countless stories and wonder.

Today I stepped into a secluded garden (out of the gale-force wind) and the sweet smell of algerita blossoms filled the moist air. Its flowers were bright points of light sparkling under the cloudy gray skies. The smell drew me closer. The blue trifoliate leaves hid the blossoms, but when I bent down closer, I could see the delicate blush of red on the backside of the petals. Bending even closer I could see the texture – the petals seemed to be made of a glossy ceramic material.

I carefully extended a finger, avoiding the sharp barbed leaves and touoched a bloom. It quivered and buzzed! A ground bee had spent the night in the bloom. I wondered if he was drunk on its sweet nectar.

Gardens introduces us to the “other,” to the lives of non-human beings. I take a walk in the garden every morning – sipping coffee and listening to the whitewinged doves call. Today two sat in an Afghan Pine, side by side and nuzzling, engrossed in each other to such a degree that I could stand a mere seven feet away, so close that I could hear their quiet “pillow talk.”

I live in the country, so I have a number of creatures to watch. Town folk have squirrels as their most visible mammalian neighbors, but this morning I met a skunk. She was very pregnant, very slow, and very focused on digging. As I watched she found a large beetle – a snail-hunting beetle with a flat keeled elytra and big mandibles. Such a beetle is capable of stinking, but she quickly snatched it up, with its head in her mouth. As she raised her head, she noticed me, and the stinky half of the abdomen fell to the ground. I could see her blink as the chemical of the stink from the beetle filled the air. She slowly eased away, walking at a 90 degree angle, making sure I was not a threat.

This time of year I love to look for the signs of returning growth. Not far from the skunk was a small bed of chives, and within the last few days of 80 degree temperatures, the chives had sent up soft green new growth (over 6 inches in a few days.) I was happy to see the growth – the growth stimulates my tastebuds --- I want to taste growth! There is something spiritual about harvesting and using the gifts of the garden. It is the gift of spring – this magic given to us by God.

I did not harvest any chives though, this morning. Instead, I made my way to the bog garden and plucked a sprig of spearmint. I ruminated, slowly chewing. As I did, I crushed another sprig and held it under my nose, and then rolled the sprig in my fingers until it was pulp. I dropped the solid matter, and then rubbed my fingers on my cheeks (from my upper lip to below my eye.) The oils opened up the pores in my skin, and my eyes moistened – I felt awakened!

A male cardinal dropped from the buttonbush to a large rock above a small pool in the bog garden. “Syrup, syrup, syrup,” repeated the cardinal. A female cardinal (until hidden near the water) raised from her morning drink. A mockingbird in the coyote willow sang its own song once, and when I looked up it was pulling on a fresh new leaf – the branches of the willow were fuzzy spring green.

A Bewick’s wren was below the mockingbird, excitedly dancing in the fork of some secondary branches. It was not agitated by my presence, for it was facing away from me. I studied it for at least thirty seconds before I realized that it was occasionally poking its beak into a crevice of the pressure ridges of the fork, where the bark had split from the stress of growth. I could not see what it was extracting. It was very happy about it – it began to “sing under its breath” with a quiet “whisper song.”

A screechy gurgle alerted me to a flight of grackles leaving town to forage in the fields out towards the Valley View church. I was sure they were headed for the same field where I had seen 500 sandhill cranes almost every day during the winter. The stalks of the sorghum had been left standing after harvesting so the wind would not carry the soil away. Grackles are interesting creatures, but they have a gang mentality – loud, mouthy, and spend way too much time posturing (strutting around and showing off for the females.)

I settled down in a rustic wooden garden bench and finished my lukewarm coffee and then set the mug on the armrest. Not far away is a 12 foot tall beavertail (or mother-in-law tongue) prickly pear cactus. The bitter 6-degree temperatures of early winter had internally damaged one of its branches, because sometime during the recent strong winds a branch of the cactus had broken.

It had fallen over a larger-than-life-size metal-art silhouette of a roadrunner. It is an unusual silhouette, for the artist had made a pom-pom tuft for its crest, which somehow captures the playful and prankish personality of roadrunners.

I looked at the passalong iris across the garden path from the roadrunner. A gardener from McCamey had given it to me. Her mother had brought a start of the plant during the big oil boom there 75 years ago. I found a bloomstalk among its fresh new growth.

I thought of the words offered in prayer during the feast of San Ysidro Labrador:

Te pido de corazon
Te mandes a mi sembrado
Favores y benedicion.

We ask with all of our hearts
That our fields be blessed.

We change the world by gardening. We change ourselves too. We enrich our own lives, for they are places of stories. Every garden contains not only the stories of all the visiting animals and bugs, but also the stories of the plants themselves. And here, we can also learn the stories of all the cultures of the people of the Llano Estacado.