On a few small acres in the hill country of central Texas, we live by watching, feeling, and waiting. Together, we come to know by loving and love best when we care enough to understand. Our Loves: limestone, leaf-vein, scales, feathers, friends, and all their shifting reflections in the waters of a small Creek.
With some wetter weather, mushrooms, mosses, lichens, fungi, ferns and the rest all made their appearance on the hillside.
Leucocoprinus
September 2: One found along the trail beside the Pond. Possumhaw (Ilex decidua)
September 17: scattered about the hillside in stone and shade. Wild four o’clock (Mirabilis multiflora)
September 22.
Rhus virens: Evergreen Sumac
Also called Tobacco Sumac, Lambrisco, or Lentrisco. We read this from the LBJ Wildflower Center's site:
"Evergreen sumac is a shrub or small tree, from 8-12 ft. in height with spreading branches. Its shiny, evergreen, pinnate foliage is tinged with pink in early spring and maroon after frost. Leaves are alternate, 2-5 1/2 inches long, with 5-9 fleshy leaflets on stiff stems. The 5-petaled, inconspicuous, greenish or white flowers grow in clusters 1-2 inches long at the end of stout branches. When the fruit matures in mid-September it is red, broader than long, and covered with fine hair. Evergreen sumac can be used to make a nice, thick hedge or screen, but can grow tree-like with a long, straight trunk. Only female plants produce flowers and berries. It is fast growing, generally insect and disease-free, and drought-tolerant. Not a true evergreen – leaves are green through the winter, then are dropped, to be replaced within a week with a new crop.
USA: AZ , NM , TX Native Distribution: central Texas west to southern Arizona, south to Oaxaca in southern Mexico Native Habitat: Rocky hillsides, gullies, & bluffs. In Texas, found on rocky bluffs, slopes, banks, and dry hillsides in the Edwards Plateau and Trans-Pecos. "
No offense to the inestimable servants of the Wildflower Center, but observers on the hillside above The Creek would find the flowered bush anything but "inconspicuous."
Genus Opuntia. The tasty tuna of the upper hillside.
Food for bird, raccoon, jackrabbit, fox, squirrel, hog, and local tax payer. (September 12: found scattered about the limestone.)
Oxygen reduction firing results in this black pottery of Kate's
Open-pit firing under the big Oak Tree with a few losses and a few keepers.
Bag-o'-field: Just add water. (And did we ever!) October is grass-planting time for the sheep field.
About once a week, these bats fly circles around the yard and in and out of the lower deck.
Plenty of historic flooding down in Texas this October.
The extent of Creek-flow the beginning of September.
And by way of contrast (October 16).
Added for anyone keeping a Sky collection these days.
Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura, Latin for "cleansing breeze")
Well, "cleansing breeze" is just one translation. Others focus on the work of these vultures in cleansing the land of its rotting flesh.
Here above we have a display of the “horaltic pose," with a turkey vulture drying out its wings while warming in morning light above the Creek. About an hour after sunrise.
"Spread-wing postures may serve different purposes in different species. Anhingas, for example, have unusually low metabolic rates and unusually high rates of heat loss from their bodies. Whether wet or dry, they exhibit spread-wing postures mostly under conditions of bright sunlight and cool ambient temperatures, and characteristically orient themselves with their backs to the sun. Thus, it appears that Anhingas adopt a spread-wing posture primarily for thermoregulation -- to absorb solar energy to supplement their low metabolic heat production and to offset partly their inordinately high rate of heat loss due to convection and (when wet) evaporation from their plumage.
Cormorants, in contrast, apparently use spread-wing postures only for drying their wings and not for thermoregulation. Although cormorant plumage also retains water, only the outer portion of the feathers is wettable, so an insulating layer of air next to the skin is maintained when cormorants swim underwater. This difference in feather structure may explain why cormorants can spend more time foraging in the water than Anhingas, and why cormorants can inhabit cooler climes, while the Anhinga is restricted to tropical and subtropical waters.
Spread-wing postures appear to serve for both thermoregulation and drying in Turkey Vultures. These birds maintain their body temperature at a lower level at night than in the daytime. Morning wing-spreading should provide a means of absorbing solar energy and passively raising their temperature to the daytime level. Field observations indicate that this behavior is associated with the intensity of sunlight and also occurs more frequently when the birds are wet than when they are dry."
The Latin "atratus" means "clothed in black, as if for mourning." These are seen preening on a snag above Hamilton Creek.
This early afternoon when I was covered in mosquito spray, sunscreen, sweat, dirt, and something between the itch of grass and the irritation of chigger-spit, we took to the Pond and washed off the heat of the day in spring waters. And watched as two black vultures slowly drank in the shallows of a gravel bar a hundred feet away.
Drummond's Wild Petunia (Ruellia drummondiana)
The Ruellia drummondiana above was photographed by Dmel the first week of August.
Cottonmouth / Water Moccasin (Agkistrodon piscivorus)
The mid-August sweetheart on the stones above appeared gray as the dried stream bed until it wet its scales in what's left of the Creek (below).
The mid-sized rattlesnake above is the first we've spotted on the property. And just feet out back of the kitchen windows (as of last week).
The Creek mostly does not flow these days in mid-August. Crowded minnows swim erratically in warming pools no bigger than a three year old's plastic pool. And chunky snakes of the poisonous variety feed well. While we continue to explore the Creek, I'm more inclined this morning to think about the field between the house and the Creek. When we moved here, the Stonefield was hardly populated at all by the vegetation that's moved in today. Still, it's a field. Before we moved here, I thought more about fields than I did creeks. But I return to field-thought more and more. The sheep have made a field out of what was a brushy two acres. And at the top of the Hill, we've created a small meadow where there was a thick stand of ashe juniper. So fields go and come. It’s another record-hot summer, and according to a quick estimate, the eighteen hundred and twentieth Sunday morning since I quit going to church and started spending my holy day of the week outside among the marsh birds, wildflowers, grasses, cacti, pines, hills, fields, and creeks. Regardless my thoughts now concerning religion, one thing is for sure: Sunday mornings are sacred. I’ve occasionally tried working or watching television on a Sunday morning, but I cannot. Even the unchurched know what sin is.
So this morning I sat on the shaded west side of our little field and listened to wind in the big oak tree over me and watched sheep graze, titmice flit, and sycamores turn their leaf-undersides white in the wind.
I love wind in the morning. Not a “breeze,” but a wind (breezes are for Romantic poems—real air is a wind). Grass-stem and horse-mane wave to its prompting. The presence of morning wind is one of about ten ways I can know I’m really alive.
And this Sunday morning I know I am living well when I’m in the presence of a field--even a stonefield slowly being un-fielded by small walnut trees, sumach, and thin grasses.
A field like this is a sacred place carved out of an already good world of rocky hills, cactus, and juniper. It is to geography what Sunday is to calendars. Even within a natural world that I’ve come to love with an almost endless sort of love, a field can be a sacred place, set apart, sanctified just as one holy day is among many good days. Take a holi-day.
If you were pioneering your way the other side of the frontier, you could travel a long time through dripping woods in search of a suitable stopping place. But when you came across a sunny clearing in the forest, you would rein in the oxen and look happily into this open space before you. You may even unhitch the team. And if a clear stream or cool spring were somewhere near, you would be sorely tempted to stay here in this good place.
Perhaps one or two among your thirty thousand genes still intact from your ancestors’ days on the African savannah would have alerted you to hang out here in this open land where you once found refuge from the dark tangle of the jungle and the way it limited your vision.
Here on the edge of a miniature savannah you could imagine something. The world had stopped telling you what was there, and now you were permitted a space in which to dream and imagine. This field was a white sheet of watercolor paper inviting careful application of pigments laid down around the whiteness you would cautiously preserve here and there.
Or perhaps the field were a whitened pearl of great price. Paint it now by laying down colors all around it. You have your painted pearl by un-painting it. It is like a field, passively defined only by what surrounds it. Paint a countryside with fencerows of hackberry and vines, with limestone-studded hills, with oak and juniper woods, with sycamore-lined creeks. Now where ever these are not, you have a field.
My precious little ego would like nothing more than to brag on our field, to call attention to it as if we had a field like none other. But most fields do not flatter our egos, simply because a field tends to be that white space left over after the pigments have been brushed in. We can brag about our carefully tended garden, the orchard, the barns and house. But a field such as this is worth praise because we did nothing within it.
A wild forest is similarly wonderful because we left it alone, but a wild field is even more incredible because it is as if nature herself paused for a moment to practice the Taoist virtue of nothing-doing as well. Lao Tzu whispered to us the virtue of emptiness. The space within our relationships wherein we hesitate to speak or act. The space within our homes wherein we have room to live. The spaces within the wheel, the window, the earthen pot, and the womb. Something can be had in doing and in filling in the spaces, but nothing is possible without the original perfection of an uncluttered emptiness.
These are the random thoughts on this Sunday morning beside our field.
I’ve had other thoughts about fields, too.
A field offers respite from so many stimulants. True, one could find in any common field plenty of particulars worthy of careful study and extended contemplation. But a field is all that is good about emptiness.
Because of a field’s definition, we cannot help but see, too, the line of trees, the fence, the row of houses, or the orchard surrounding the field. A field is defined by what surrounds it (definition as the finite bounds), yet a field is exactly not its definition. In this sense, a field may be the only thing I know that is not its own definition. It is the emptiness within the definition. Within the bounds is the unbounded field, empty.
Whitman wrote that in a moment of ecstasy he is not bound between his hat and his shoes.
So a field can be a comfortable place in which to rest our vision, even if for a moment as we drive down a highway. Though we look across a field to that winding line of riparian willows and alders, it just may be that the beauty we see in them owes a debt to the distance the field sets between us and them. For distance determines perception as much as light.
About eight hundred years ago a church was built in England. When it was rebuilt by Henry VIII in 1542 it was far out in what were still fields between London and the City of Westminster and a convenient place for plague victims to be contained. It was famous as the “Church of the Ever Open Door” for its work with the poor, but today it is known around the world as the namesake for Sir Neville Marriner’s Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the ensemble I just happen to be listening to right now.
I used to be more of a collector or things than I am these days. At one time, I collected all things “field." I'd stop the car for any old field and photograph it for a pictorial collection of fields. Along the way, I began creating names for field types. If Tolkien could create a language, I could create a taxonomy of fields, complete with line drawings of fields.
Images of a field can be a bit plain. And the Latin planum, or planus (meaning flat, level, even) does indeed give us both “plain” and “plane.”
When I was in college, I lived in an old farm house in the middle of wheat fields and cow pastures. Nothing was so beautiful to me as these fields. I planted a field in a clear plastic cup--one easily transportable from one's desk to a windowsill or even to a pickup truck dashboard. I could bring my cup-of-field into any other geography if I wanted. This was actually the first field for which I assigned a Latin name. Bouchia minuti, or "small closed" field.
Portability and a field around which you encircle your hands. When you go out to help the old German couple feed their cows in your field, not only is your pickup in the field, but the field is in your truck. You watch heavy-headed angus beef concentrating their broad and stupid muzzles on broken bales of coastal Bermuda hay scattered in a circle around your truck.
I can still imagine back to those fields: evening barn swallows, Mexican free-tail bats, nighthawks, scissortail flycatchers, and swifts dip and dart through the meadow air, nabbing invisible insects. Dusk's rosy old fingers turn mercury colored. A thin slice of moon sets. Venus. And your cup-of-field on a dusty dashboard littered with gas receipts, forgotten to-do lists, wire cutters, the next day's essay to be handed in to a professor, and two disintegrating hand rolled cigarettes. Bouchia minuti to go.
The cows crunch the dried remains of last summer's field with such utter abandonment that you reach for the bite-size pasture in the plastic cup and run your palm slowly across the top of the field. Before it eventually dies too, you will make a note to take the Bouchia minuti out and set it in the middle of a conventional sized field for a photo-shoot.
You back away from the field in the field, go to focus the Kodak, and you begin to grow dizzy. No what do we say? The field is bordered by a field? Or is the cup-of- field absorbed into the greater field? You remember a conversation on the whole idea of trying to locate the soul or spirit: is the immaterial spirit in the body or is the body in the spirit? This makes taxonomy (to say nothing of theology) difficult if we don't know what's in what.
At any rate, I was no cattle rancher, but I did grow a field in a twelve-ounce plastic cup, and I photographed it out in a much larger field. “Bouchia minuti nesting in Vaccinium texana.” (That's the name I made for cow fields here in Texas.
When the rye grass in Bouchia minuti reached six or seven inches high, I took to mowing. With the pair of scissors I used to cut my hair a couple times a year, I harvested off the top couple inches until a neat level field remained. Then I tied the cuttings in a thin bundle with sewing thread and set it shock-style on the window ledge next to the cup. The sun shines. Ergo, make hay.
Even though our sheep still have plenty of forage in their field--thanks to a submersible pump, some one-inch PVC pipe, and a Pond full of spring water (thanks to our generous neighbors)--we continue to throw them alfalfa hay. Remnants of this morning's feeding remain on my white teeshirt. Hayfield.
Of course, we aren't the only species to make hay and store the harvest. All kinds of rodents do it. And insects. I've read about leaf cutter ants growing fungus gardens on hoards of shredded jungle cut and stored away under ground. Not far from where I'm sitting right now, I watched a western leafcutter bee harvest half a morning glory vine as if it were so many leafy fields suspended in air and tied round a post. The small black and gray striped. Megachili perihirta of the Megachilid Family is half an inch long and could easily be overlooked for its close resemblance to any small gray fly you've ever almost seen flying about the yard or lying dead beneath a window screen. I do not even know how long I failed even to notice the chomps taken out of the morning glory leaves and the incredibly industrious insect responsible. The bee buzzes slowly onto the leaf, sets the edge of leaf between two bee-knives disguised as mandibles, and in three seconds it has cut out an oval or a round piece of leaf the size of your iris. Then the bee folds the piece of leaf like an enchilada between its two sets of legs, three on each side. Often it then flies with its harvests to a nearby leaf, rests there for ten or fifteen seconds before buzzing back to a small space between the boards of the porch. Almost every leaf of the morning glory plant has at least one oval or round cut-out on its edge, and most of the leaves have six or seven. So in what shape does the bee stack its round bales of drying leaf, or in what manner does it ensile its crop? I never did pry the wall boards from the studs to find out.
It’s been said that hay made possible the movement of civilization from Rome’s Mediterranean empire to central and northern Europe’s less temperate latitudes, and as such, hay became as important as wheels, steel, and Google. The ox and the horse had to eat in the winter, too.
And speaking of the Hay Theory of History, physicist Freeman Dyson says that “Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.” (On a related note, our English word “hay” doesn’t originate out of Latinate roots but rather, and predictably, out of the colder Germanic word “heu,” from which we got also our word “hew.”) I would love to have been there one late summer afternoon when our anonymous inventor of hay stumbled in the middle of a meadow of tall grass, hacked him a shock of fodder, and had the foresight to save it for the otherwise lean winter hunger of the plow animal he could now bring with him into yonder north country. Obviously, the leaf-cutter bee would regard its ability to cut and store leaves as indispensable to its existence. But neither the bee nor the entomologist nor the history writer could name a day of the week when any species took to harvesting the absolutely essential leaf matter. There had to have been a time before its invention, but who can say when. So goes the Hay Theory of History.
Like I was saying earlier, it's been a hot and dry summer. And with that comes the many brush fires my friends have been fighting lately. Field-makers--that's what some of those fire are. The biggest brush fires and grass fires are the best.
Sometimes when I'm working on the ambulance, we'll get called to standby at one of the fires to supply rehab for the firefighters and make sure none of them die of heat stroke. While others are watching flames and smoke, I watch the tug of war between fire trying to create a field, and rain and time trying to crowd out the field with shrub and tree--I always root for the fire and the field.
Time does not like a field about as much as time and the rest of nature do not like dips and bumps, troughs and peaks. All things are filling up and tearing down. Every valley is raised and every mountain brought low. And every field braces itself against what it must see as a barbarism of sapling invaders. The field is strangled from all sides until a shade falls over the clearing.
But occasionally a cigarette butt, a blown transformer, a bottle-rocket, or an errant piece of lightening will catch hold of some August grass and, voila. If the volunteers are not fast enough, the fire will drive back the trees and the vines and slow the acacias, mesquites, hackberries, oaks, and juniper. And the grazing will be good. The old, tired grasses are burnt off, and from their excited roots grow fresh leaves with a new vigor not seen before the fire.
So from the back bumper of my ambulance, and often in a rain of ash, I feel the heat of earth laboring to birth a field.
And yet just as surely, there is something in nature that does not want a field, that's always extending roots or dropping mesquite, juniper, and wild grape seeds along fence rows and deeper inside the meadows' defenseless space. Fire seems to be nature's preferred method of clearing the field in the first place, but lightening strikes seem somehow more accidental than the carefully manicured set of genes in a replicating tree or a seed-eating and seed-defecating bird. Of course, though, Earth is not even aware of these open and empty spaces any more than you are aware of the beginnings of two freckles on the epidural field of your back. You did and you did not make those freckles either side of your knobby spine.
Since trees and shrubs need space in which to grow, and will grow into that space if not prevented, and because they cannot very easily grow one on top of the other, we have shrinking fields all around us. But there are exceptions. Rocks, drought, frost, wind, and salt--while no especially close friends of pretty little meadows--are obviously quite effective in opening up and keeping open some of the land.
Taxonomy. I was thinking of taxonomy a few minutes ago.
The eighteenth century Swede, Carl Linnaeus, is considered the father of taxonomy, having arranged every species known to him in a hierarchy from species on up through genus and family and kingdom and so forth while assigning binomial names to living things. Yes, the task of classifying all living things was Herculean and lasted a lifetime, but he liked his job and Linnaeus drew inspiration for his attempts from natural theology, which, as we all know, is an attempt to demonstrate the orderliness of the Creator through a study of the orderliness of the creation. Of course, though, whatever order we find in nature is determined by our own choice of how we wish to classify whatever it is we come into contact with. A scientist’s completed and detailed taxonomy of living things no more suggests a theistically ordered biosphere than the suggestion that the Dewey decimal system suggests an inherently orderly creation of all books.
But Linnaeus really loved nature. And if one is lucky enough to believe that his true love on Earth furthereth his eternal salvation, how blessed is that!
Before Linnaeus came the ancient Roman classifier Pliny the Elder who, like the Swede, held the Stoic belief that God’s creation was good and worthy of attention because its Creator was good. So Pliny devoted all of his waking hours to studying nature and to writing his thirty-seven volume Natural History. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, wrote, “The only time he took from his work was for his bath, and by bath I mean his actual immersion, for while he was being rubbed down and dried he had a book read to him or dictated notes.”
This amazing work, the Naturalis Historia, included descriptions of thousands of topics: the dimensions of the world, shadows, whales, fire, lightening, honey bees, elephants, vines, pine nuts, cotton, and something “Of a certain creature that hath no passage to void excrements.” His nephew wrote concerning his famous uncle’s obsession with nature study and writing his encyclopedia of all things capable of being described and classified:
"The only time he took from his work was for his bath, and by bath I mean his actual immersion, for while he was being rubbed down and dried he had a book read to him or dictated notes. When traveling he felt free from other responsibilities to give every minute to work; he kept a secretary at his side with book and notebook; and in winter saw that his hands were protected by long sleeves, so that even bitter weather should not rob him of a working hour. For the same reason, too, he used to be carried about Rome in a chair. I can remember how he scolded me for walking; according to him I need not have wasted those hours, for he thought any time wasted which was not devoted to work. It was this application which enabled him to finish all those volumes [of the Natural history]."
Pliny remained unmarried.
Incidentally, he also wrote that "those who have anointed themselves with the juice of chicory, mixed with oil, become more popular and obtain their requests more easily." From Pliny’s perspective, however, it helped to be a Roman army and navy commander, a friend of the Emperor’s, and really rich.
Vesuvius was in the process of regurgitating fire and ash into the sky when Pliny was in a boat just off the shore of Pompeii. While everyone else was running for cover, he calmly asked to be conducted to is bath, after which he dined peacefully amid the panic, napped (he snored loudly), and in short order was, of course, suffocated along with all the others in the noxious cloud of volcanic dust.
I’m still interested in the way humans have always named things, and as it turns out, the scientists’ binomial nomenclature in Latin is really the same sort of nomenclature that most all cultures have practiced all along. We tend to use an adjective-noun system, as in poison ivy, beach house, lager beer, Democratic president, cherry cheesecake, and Walt Whitman. Because of the nature of our language or our brains or something else, we cannot escape this species-genus way of naming and talking about things. On his first day on the job, Adam might simply have given the genus form. But by Day Two, the Garden was surely revealing additional levels of complexity and variety. Then what? One could invent a brand new name for each of the one hundred thousand or so species of wasps or the three to four hundred thousand species of beetle or the 2849 species of brown algae (as if Adam wasn’t proud enough with that name by Day Two). But pretty soon the names would get about as bizarre as thoroughbred horse names: An Affair to Remember, Daddy’s Overdraft, Pardon My Dust, or X. So as with first and last names of people, it’s largely a matter of differentiation wed to convenience.
Additionally, once we know a name, we seem to be more likely to find the thing in a crowd of look-alikes. If I know the difference between a fulvous whistling duck and a black-bellied whistling duck (the ones we saw flying over the Creek last week), I’m certainly more likely to notice the black-bellied variety than my friend is if all she knows is group of brown ducks that makes a lot of whistling noises. This, then, eventually translates into an heightened awareness of our existence—the fundamental difference between living and its alternative.
Toponomy refers to the study of place names, and toponomy is a branch of the larger study of names in general, the study of onomastics. Anthroponymy is the study of people names. Hydronomy is the study of the names of bodies of water. Oronomy, the names of mountains. Hodonymy, the names of roads and streets. But nowhere do I find any study or classification of fields. So here we are.
"...And behold a little stream checked my further progress, which, with its light ripple, bent the herbage that sprouted on its bank." So says Dante about his encounter with the river Lethe, the "water of Oblivion, which implies that the soul, which desires to attain to a state of innocence, must forget and cast behind it all those sins and failings that it has either committed or known, in order to attain to simplicity of mind, and to remove every incentive to sin." While not so convinced about the removal of certain darker incentives, I can vouchsafe that having reached this little Creek, much of my "further progress" was checked and I sometimes feel as if I have found some sort of "simplicity of mind" here.
Upsidedown
Winter Creek (January 5)
Winter Sycamore Leaf
Mac
Old and dried out stump up close
Peach blossom and the start of a spring garden (March 12)
April 3
Two Dead (April 10)
So, Mac the cat raided, killed, and brought to the kitchen door these two young opossums. I set them side by side.
Didelphis virginiana Alive (April 11)
The following day a third opossum was brought to the kitchen door, but this one was cold and barely alive. We warmed it and fed it a bit of applesauce and rehydrated lamb's milk. For the night it slept on a bed of paper towels set inside a plastic flower pot atop a heating pad. Next morning we found a local wild animal rehab couple and handed off the little one to them (they had just received another four-inch long baby opossum the day before). If I were to reach into the flower pot to pick up the young one, it would hiss like we've all heard older possums do when threatened. But as soon as it was in my hand, it would clutch tightly with its claws and climb up my arm and bury its face in any shirt fold it could find.
http://opossumsocietyus.org/
One learns all sorts of things from the Society's website. Say, for instance, that "It was once believed that the male opossum mated through the female opossum’s nose." Before I could doubt how anyone could imagine...I kept reading: "Observers had seen the female with an empty pouch one day. The next day she was seen with her nose in the pouch making sneezing sounds. Later, upon examination of the pouch, tiny embryos were found."
Less than common yellow paintbrush (April 11)
Garden greens and wild hog sausage
(The word comes from Algonquian wapathemwa meaning "white animal. ")
