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Archives for May 2017

Hope and Remembrance of the Poppy

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“My Dad Doug Brake had some strong opinions.  He was a sergeant in the US Army Infantry Rangers, 1st and 3rd Battalions in WWII.  Rangers led the way.  He took part in amphibious landings under heavy artillery and machine gun fire. (see Saving Private Ryan.)  He battled in North Africa, Tunisia, Sicily, Palermo, and Italy.  Anzio was where he was wounded and received a Purple Heart.  He didn’t speak about it, but I know that men he loved and fought next to were killed in combat, right by his side.  My Dad saw some of his buddies die violent deaths, painful agonizing deaths, bloody terrifying deaths, instant deaths.  That qualified Doug to have strong opinions.  He believed all Veterans deserve honor and respect.  Recognize them, especially on Veterans Day.  He believed wounded and disabled Veterans deserve care and compassion.  Give to the D.A.V.  Go visit a V.A. Hospital or Care Facility.  He believed Veterans killed in action or those who otherwise died during active duty deserve a Memorial Day.  That is their day of recognition.  One day for them and only them.”  ~Chris

 

Memorial Day or Decoration Day as it used to be called, has a long and somewhat conflicted history as to who or where it began.  After the huge loss of life during the Civil War, groups of women and later, communities would tend to the graves and decorate them with flowers.  In 1868, General John A. Logan called for May 30th to be Decoration Day to honor those “who died in defense of their country.”  

During WWI, an American pilot James McConnell wrote about the devastated land after the 1916 Battle of Verdun in France.      

“Immediately east and north of Verdun there lies a broad, brown band … Peaceful fields and farms and villages adorned that landscape a few months ago – when there was no Battle of Verdun. Now there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature. It seems to belong to another world. Every sign of humanity has been swept away. The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard; of the villages nothing remains but gray smears where stone walls have tumbled together… On the brown band the indentations are so closely interlocked that they blend into a confused mass of troubled earth.”

Major John McCrae, a Canadian doctor and soldier, wrote this poem for a friend who was killed in battle May, 1915 after noticing the brilliant red field poppies that grew and bloomed in the devastated land among the burials in Belgium.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Poppy on the old Somme battlefield

Three years later, a woman named Moina Michael saw this poem in the Ladies Home Journal while on duty at the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries headquarters in New York and was inspired to take up the torch to remember those who had lost their lives.  She vowed to wear a red poppy as a sign of remembrance and wrote a poem in response to Major McCrae’s.  

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.

She worked tirelessly for two years to have the poppy recognized as a national memorial symbol.  In 1920, the National American Legion agreed to use the Flanders Fields Memorial Poppy as the national emblem of Remembrance, and to this day, paper poppies are worn in remembrance of those who died serving their country.

Like many holidays, Memorial Day has strayed away from the original purpose of the day.  It has morphed into a day to honor and decorate the graves of loved ones, to honor all veterans, to begin the season of summer with barbecues, camping and family fun, and even to be known as a huge sale weekend for consumer goods.  Whatever your opinion of that metamorphosis, I hope you can take a moment to remember the original purpose of the holiday.  War not only takes our loved ones away from us—in countless many ways—but also murders Nature and sweeps away humanity, as James McConnell so poignantly described.  Thank Goodness for the hope, resiliency, and power of the Poppy, of Mother Nature, and of the Human Spirit.

 

Location, Location, Location

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I love this time of year!  After a bare, white and gray winter, the greenness seems amazing to my eyes.  From one year to the next I forget how many of our flowers bloom in May.  The colors, shapes, and fragrances are delightful to the senses.  This location we call home suits us well right now amidst the trees, among the flowers, and along with the wild creatures.

In a bird’s world, our yard and woods are a pretty good location to set up house, also.  There are eight pre-made houses to choose from, trees of all sorts in which to build a nest, a river nearby and various bird baths for water and bathing, and an endless supply of insects, seeds, and nesting material.  Unfortunately, in the bird real estate business, we have a tenacious bully.  The House Wren is an aggressive competitor for nests and will destroy eggs and young of other birds in order to take over that nesting spot.  Wrens are tiny birds, about five inches from head to tail, weighing only as much as two quarters.  Their exuberant, gurgling song is loud and persistent.  The Wrens show up a couple of weeks after the Bluebirds, who have already staked out the location that suits them best.  Wrens are the main source of nest failure in some areas for Bluebirds, Tree Swallows and Chickadees, but we witnessed some bold resistance to the real estate bully.  One of the wren houses hangs from the maple tree outside our dining room, and we happened to see a flurry of bird activity around the little house.  A male Bluebird chased the Wren into the house, then perched on the roof, seemingly daring him to come out again.

Then he even peered into the house.

Eventually the Bluebird left to attend to his own nest, and the Wren cautiously popped out of the house onto the ‘porch.’

A minute later, another flurry of wings–this time from a Tree Swallow defending its nest from the scalawag.

The male Wren will find a number of nesting spots and add twigs to them when he first stakes out his territory; later the courted female will inspect the nesting spots.  With all the negative reinforcement to stealing the others’ nests, the Wrens decided to build their nest in their hide-away place.  Both busy Wrens gathered twigs to add to the nest.

The ground below the house is scattered with small sticks that didn’t quite make it to the inside.

One of the most interesting nest-building practices of the House Wren is adding a spider egg sac to the final nesting materials.  It is speculated that after hatching, the young spiders eat any mites or parasites that tend to invade the nest when the young birds inhabit it.  Once the Wrens lay their eggs, the real estate battle abruptly ends; meanwhile, the Bluebird stands watch.

 

I’ve lived in a number of locations in four different states during my life so far.  Two of those states are birthplaces—mine and Chris’ and the kids’, which make them inherently special.  Each place also has a unique culture—Scandinavian, Pennsylvania Dutch, crossroads of America diversity, and German Catholic.  Each location has a beautiful ecosystem—prairie, foothills, rolling farm country, and lakes and woods.  Truthfully, I have loved them all.  Sometimes it’s not so much living in a place that suits us well but rather to become who we are supposed to be.  And places, cultures, ecosystems, and the people we meet there help us to do that.  We learn to attend to our own nests, to defend the things we hold dear, to stand up to bullies, and to watch over this beautiful, green Earth.

 

The Traveler

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I was a traveler when I was a kid.  We had a low-slung, wood-sided Mercury station wagon—no dvd players or cup holders and if it had seat belts, we didn’t use them.  Every summer the six of us would pack the car with a cooler of food, shared suitcases of clothes, a Johnny Cash eight-tack tape, and a little, brown, hard-shelled suitcase of coloring books, games, etc. to keep us kids occupied on the long trip from eastern Pennsylvania to eastern South Dakota.  We traveled almost 1400 miles straight through with my Mom and Dad taking turns driving and sleeping.  Most often we would leave on a Friday night and get to Grandma and Grandpa’s farm in the early light of Sunday morning.  Occasionally on our trip we would stop at a truck stop for breakfast, but usually we ate at roadside rests with individual boxes of cold cereal (a once a year treat) and picnic meals of cold, fried chicken or sandwiches.  It was a time to stretch our legs, run around, re-fuel, and talk and laugh together as a family.  

Last week when I walked to the ponds and wetlands close to our house, I saw a bird that I had never seen before.  It was some sort of shorebird with a long bill, white underbelly, streaked upperbody, and long, yellow-orange legs, which I later discovered were the basis for its name—Greater Yellowlegs!  There is a similar, smaller Lesser Yellowlegs.  Yellowlegs travel thousands of miles each year from their wintering areas in southern, coastal United States, Central America, and South America to their summer breeding grounds in sub-arctic forest bogs or muskegs of Alaska and Canada.  I was lucky enough to see this Greater Yellowlegs on one of the rest stops on his long, migratory route.

Yellowlegs eat small fish, frogs, insects, snails, worms and occasionally seeds and berries.

The Yellowlegs was busy looking for food, walking through the shallow water, probing the mud for bites to eat.  When he turned and saw me, he stopped.  Then he continued to walk while bobbing his head and kicking his legs back, behavior indicating that an intruder was seen.

Yesterday, May 13th, was International Migratory Bird Day.  It highlights the importance of safe, healthy sites along the migratory routes of the thousands of species that need places for rest and refueling.  These rest-stops are critical for the survival of migratory birds.

The quiet, shallow lake was a perfect sanctuary for the Greater Yellowlegs to stop and rest during his long journey, and I’m fortunate to have seen him.

 

I felt like quite a traveler when I was a kid, especially compared to some of my classmates who had never been out of the county they grew up in, let alone the state!  Those trips back to South Dakota each summer were memorable because of the excitement of traveling that long distance to see our relatives, to go back to our Home state.  The Greater Yellowlegs have a winter home and a summer home with lots of traveling between the two.  And whether for people or migratory birds, the rest stops along the way on our journeys are imperative for renewal, restoration, (sanity), and rejuvenation for the remainder of the trip and for Life ever after.

This Glorious Day!

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Dear Nature Lovers,

Just wanted to share this glorious day in Minnesota with you!  Spring is now bursting out all over the place in our yard and woods!

Love,  Denise

Hostas, Ferns, and Lily of the Valley

Brunnera

Hosta leaves

Virginia Bluebells

Maple leaves

Purple-Leaf Plum

Iris

Apple blossom

Pagoda Dogwood

Crabapple

Foam Flower

Jonquil

Ajuga

Larch tree

Dandelion

Epimedium

Ostrich Fern

Candles on White Pine

Bergenia

Oak flowers and leaves

 

Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm. 

 –John Muir

 

Transitions of Spring and Life

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One of the most poignant and difficult transitions in my life was moving from a household of five to gradually becoming a household of two again.  It was much more difficult than transitioning from two to five.  But it certainly followed the flow of Life, the reason for parenthood—to raise up offspring in loving care so they would become independent adults living their own lives.

Here in Central Minnesota, we are still in the Spring transition.  Signs of the old—winter dormancy and fall foliage—still are apparent even as the new green grows up around the old.  Most of the deciduous trees now have small, unfolding leaves, though still looking more bare than there.  The Wild Plum tree is white with blossoms, small pink flowers buds are scattered on the Apple trees, and the Daffodils are blooming in their fragrant, cheery yellow beauty.  Within a mile of our place are a number of small ponds and wetlands—some only hold water in the spring and dry up during the heat of summer.  Others are large enough or fed by springs and creeks that they are the habitat for many different animals all year round.  The first small pond had many cattails—old and new—and not much water.  But it was home to a solo-singing frog who was later joined by two other voices as I stood nearby taking pictures.

The next body of water I walked by was a small lake populated by waterfowl, turtles, and muskrats.  A pair of Canadian Geese swam together at the far side of the lake, dipping their heads into the shallow water, sometimes going bottoms-up in their search for food.

Like the bottoms-up goose, the Lily Pads uncurl by sticking up in the air before laying flat on the water’s surface.

A line-up of turtles were sunning themselves on a mud barge, happy for warmth after a winter of hibernating.

On the other side of the road from the lake was a small pond and wetlands where the new green grass was becoming dominant.

An old nest rested among the new leaves.

Pine-cone Willow galls, made last year, house pink, grubby larvae that pupate in the spring and hatch as adult gnats.  The old cone ‘houses’ and the new lime green flowers and leaves are the epitome of this Spring transition.

 

Transitions are always a little tough, whether going from Winter to Spring or Autumn to Winter, from health to sickness or injury to healing, from a busy, vibrant household to a quieter, calmer environment or from a carefree, me-and-you life to baby makes three or four or more.  With each transition of our lives, it’s good to take some time to appreciate the old way, to have gratitude for the things that served us well, and to learn from the difficulties that wrenched our hearts in sorrow or pain.  Perhaps that is why Spring is slow in its unfurling.  As the old way slips away, we make room for the new.  We are happy for the warmth.  We shed another layer of our childish ways to become more adult-like.  We build a new nest.  We join with other voices who know the song we’re singing.  With peace and renewed energy, we merge once again with the flow of Life.