Up Get Out Get Up

I love to sit in the wind on this hill and be blown on. We bathe thus first in the air; then, when the air has warmed it, in water. Thoreau, Journal, 5/15/53

Every so often the daily trail morphs into a multi-day way; I suppose that’s the difference between walking and traveling. Anyway, some upland research will take me to the White Mountains for a few days, where spring is much more various than our coastal version. The green “fur” of budding trees colors the valleys, but, even in this year of absent-winter, there’s still some ice up high. There the buds hold tight, waiting for warm air. So going uphill is going back in time, if only a little way. And then, from up high, you look down and see spring flooding into the valleys, working its way higher on the ridges, coming your way again.

Shuffling off into this various time feels contemplative – as the world hurries to announce itself, I slow down. Perhaps that’s what spring fever is, a little lassitude thrown in with all this springing up. At a time when green seems to gallop, I tend toward amble, and that may also be because the days stretch toward solstice. The light’s in under the shade before 5 a.m. and it lasts past 8 p.m. It’s enough to make me feel the stir of my Scottish ancestry, where short summer nights are only versions of twilight.

And that little stir creates a doubleness of sorts, and kind of here and there of self. Which, as I think of it, may be like molting, a mixed state of old and new, all in service of later flight. Flight is, of course, a project for a whole or complete being; no little bit of this feather or that one for a flyer – the whole set’s needed to parse and ride the wind. And now that I’m imagining feathers and flight, I know it’s not molting but rather fledging I have in mind.

In a million nests, one of which occupies the twig-wreath by our front door, the next generation of flyers grows its feathers. Even a glance at the nest every so often points to the race taking place within – will the feathers form before the nestlings jostle each other out of the now too-small nest? Will the parents, who must be down more than a pint of energy, be able to keep up the steady stream of bugs and other bits of food that build the feathers? Our house finches probably wonder this each day. It will be close.

The nest’s atop this wreath.

In a few days, when I return from the mountains, it’s likely we’ll be changed, the birds and I, winging suddenly into our fully-leafed summer lives. Every spring a fledgling; every summer on wing. That’s the hope our finches offer.