Ink Tarsia: word mosaic

At the cabin, it’s finally summer.  Aspens have leafed out, filling the glen with quaking clusters of caterpillar green, a bright shade seen only in montane spring.  My mother follows me as we cross the stream, heading towards the bench set in the rustling aspen grove.  She bends nearly in half as she walks, stopping to examine mysterious new sprigs of bushes and wildflowers.  “A wild rose…” she says.  “And potentilla.  Is that…”  I smile vaguely, because I can’t identify much without a field guide. 

We settle on the bench, which invites us to look up, at pines and aspens that reach tall for the sun on the south-facing slope, along the narrow, flat clearing that adjoins the stream.  Or technically, the crick.  The stream runs seasonally, and seems dry now, though there must be water seeping under the litter of decayed leaves and pine needles, fed by small springs upstream.  Evidence of water surrounds us – green grasses stretching tall, tiny clumps of moss clinging to aspen starts, midges and mysterious insects that nibble at uncovered skin.  This is precious habitat in a semi-arid land of decomposing pink granite.  

 “Are there chiggers?”  my mother asks.  If there are, they’ll find me.  I’m particularly tasty to chiggers. 

 At bedtime in the mountains I’m reading Beyond the Aspen Grove by Colorado naturalist Ann Zwinger.  She tells me about the insects and fauna I’m missing while I sit on the deck and watch clouds, or stare at treetops, rather than look into a microscope and draw what I see.  Zwinger’s book describes years spent exploring her family’s land 40 acres north of Woodland Park, called “Constant Friendship”, after an ancestral home from the 1700s.  The cabin sits at nearly the same altitude as Constant Friendship, perhaps 30 miles away.   

Years ago I attended a Poetry West meeting led by Zwinger, where she handed out blank postcards printed with her plant illustrations.  She led a workshop on “postcard poems,” pieces short enough to be penned on a card.  I scribbled iffy stanzas in my notebook, and quietly stashed the blank cards in my copy of Beyond the Aspen Grove, purchased used from the Aspen Bookshop run by a friend.  I would read sections of the book, and long for the day when I might observe a mountain land as closely as Zwinger had.  With that book, I could carry a dream in my hands. 

At the end of the metting, Zwinger signed my copy:  “A sense of place is what ties us to home…Beyond the Aspen Grove is where I’ve found such a place.” 

My family eats lunch on the large deck.  One end of the deck is marked with caution tape while the deck’s precarious steps are moved and rebuilt.  The east deck drops abruptly into space, like a third-storey door opening to nowhere in an Albert Campion novel. 

My mother says, “Is that an eagle?”  A dark raptor with a white cap makes a lazy circuit over the hilltop across from us. Perhaps he is eyeing the burgers and peach cobbler on our plates. I’ve seen eagles here only when my mother visits.  As the eagle heads downstream, I see the lift of his wing structure, shaped like a longhorn steer, as he sails just over the tops pine trees. 

Not long after, I point out a spectacular red-tailed hawk follows a similar circuit, cutting a circle over the aspens and then continuing west.  The hawk’s wingspan seems particularly broad from this close vantage–7 feet? Perhaps it’s a female hawk, which can be a third larger than a male.  The sun straight overhead shines through her feathers, making wings and tail glow a translucent, rusty red as she banks into the light.  She is the color of red granite lit and soaring. Her wings are flat and fringed with black as she flies west. 

When I was a kid, my brother and I competed in the sport of cut-down:  May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits.  May the bird of happiness crap on your shoulder. 

In January, we returned to the mountain cabin to discover a bird had moved in.  Evidence suggested a small bird, what a neighbor calls an “LBJ,” a little brown jobber. The bird enjoyed several perches throughout the house, on nearly every piece of furniture except the kitchen table, and particularly the sham on my husband’s pillow.   

That afternoon, we heard a happy chirp coming from the master bedroom upstairs.  We crept quietly up the steps and peeked in the door, to see an LBJ sitting on the old pink armchair, singing in a patch of warm sun coming through the window.   

The bird was not afraid of us.  When the children sneaked too close, the bird simply disappeared by a convenient escape, to chirp merrily in another room–from a bedpost in the boys’ bedroom (nicknamed the Bunkhouse), from a kitchen chair downstairs, from rafters in the downstairs den.   

The finish carpentry for this log cabin is eccentric—the original owner ran out of energy or funds or expertise—and there are holes in corners, gaps between wall and ceiling, mismatched boards, strange configurations of space and storage.  Plenty of fix-up budget will be spent on finish trim. The cabin may have been built from a barn kit; it seems better adapted to horse stalls than bedrooms. 

My youngest boy loves the closets in our bedroom. Abracadabra, he can enter my closet, squeeze behind shelves set in the eaves, and exit through the other closet.  But the bird could slip from an east room upstairs to a west room downstairs  There are more gaps than we realized.  After allowing a single photograph, the wren would reappear to another room and continue singing.  Eventually the LBJ was shooed out a window missing a screen. 

We successfully evicted the Bird of Happiness. 

Not an hour later, we heard chirping upstairs.  This time my oldest boy was prepared.  He consulted his bird book from Grandma, and announced we had a house wren.  Wrens tend to nest in boxes.  This wren selected a heated, 2000 square foot box, and could move freely from outside to in.   

I enjoyed hearing the birdsong in the house, which I did not confess to my husband, who held a contrary view.  The sound of a cheerful song animated the cabin, gave it a heart, like the tick of a deep-toned clock.  Spring sound echoed through the home in a bitterly cold season—surely this was a good omen. Despite LBJ’s significant contribution to janitorial duties, I secretly wished the bird could stay.  We covered couches, tables, chairs with newsprint when we left, hoping he wouldn’t invite a mate, or a house party, before we could return to seal the points of entry. 

In February, my husband slithered through the narrow attic space to tack screening over vents and penetrations.  We didn’t see the wren that day, but learned he now preferred sturdy posts on the upstairs balcony under the skylights, and spent afternoons on the open door to the Bunkhouse.  In March, we found the wren had gone after a brief stay on the Shrader wood stove.  My boys muttered about the Bird of Crappiness as we cleaned the mess.   

Last weekend, there was no evidence of the wren.  I walked outside with the dog after 7:00 a.m., hearing many species of birds fill the glen with song as April sun paints the tips of rocks and pine trees.  I’d like to think the wren found a new home without much trouble, that he had not been trapped in the cabin.   

I’d like to think only one of my brother’s predictions will come true, and that this will not be followed by a plague of fleas.