Backyard Notes - March

Moving forward

Backyard notes is a monthly feature of A Note From Melissa. It explores the changing landscape of the outside world and our inner lives as we move through the year. I hope it encourages you to look in your own backyard for changes and patterns.

We’ve finally been seeing some warmer temperatures here in the northeast. Whenever we have a cold morning or a night that dips below freezing, I have to admit, I get cranky. I want the weather to stay mild. I love to walk outside without having to prepare myself for that shock of cold. It feels almost magical to have warm air on my bare arms.

I was surprised to see the bulbs I’d planted this fall beginning to sprout. I always assume the worst of our backyard creatures. Whether it’s birds pecking at newly planted seeds, squirrels digging for bulbs, or deer chomping at anything green, I am always cautious. (Even when flowers and plants boast DEER RESISTANT, I know better.) But there they had sprouted, along with all the other signs of spring. First the snowdrops and the crocus. Then the buds of the daffodils and hyacinths. And, finally, the forsythia, a ragged tangle of yellow along all the roads and paths.

This spring, a friend suggested we train to become vernal pool monitors, a new program through the Westchester County Parks. Each March, a yearly cycle I hadn’t paid any attention to, begins. After the first few nights of warm temperatures and rain, the spotted salamanders and wood frogs make their great migration across roads and yards and streams and woods to vernal pools where they lay and fertilize their eggs, a whole habitat forming again each spring.

Together, my friend and I have been walking the perimeter of mapped pools, charting their size, photographing egg masses, listening for the quack of wood frogs, and trying to spot a salamander. I’ve listened each night, as the fury of the spring peepers grow louder and louder, and I feel a new sense of knowing, waiting for the next phase of what we’ll find in these pools each time we go out.

I always feel centered in nature and, with everything going on around the world and in my life, I have looked to it for understanding. This month has felt a little crazy; packing up my childhood home, moving my father into ours, celebrating my mother’s birthday with family, the first since her death. There’s been an endless cycle of paperwork and administrative tasks, yearly mammograms and skin checks. I’m looking for part time work, reanalyzing my creative life and my finances, building my strength after injury, through a slow buildup of lifting and running.

Whether we want to face it or not, our country is, again, at war. Mass violence is against everything I stand for, especially when innocent people die because of the greed and ignorance of powerful men.

The other day, my husband texted me that two old men in the local diner believed the US should “bomb the heck” out Iran and I wonder about their entitlement, what right anyone has to “bomb the heck” out of anyone else, and how people continually rationalize violence and destruction instead of thinking about how to build systems that actually work.

I know it’s naive to believe in a more peaceful or supportive global framework, but it’s also frightening when we consider peace naïveté and violent aggression the norm. It’s important we interrogate that position.

While we remain “sheltered” from this particular aggression (for now), we see the result of unchecked power, while the government uses working Americans as pawns to try to pass lousy legislation, gas and grocery prices rise, energy sources are crippled, and innocent people die in detention centers.

This month we also saw millions rise up in protest with the hope that it sends a signal to others that they are not alone, that they can use their voice, and that things can change if we stand up before it’s too late, because there’s always too late, and we must be hopeful that we haven’t already landed there. We must continuously move the signposts until the bend in the road shifts.

This morning, I went for a 3 mile run. About 3/4 of a mile in, I had to stop to stretch my calves, which were cramping up. It was frustrating, after months of recovering from injury, to have a new issue to contend with, and I tried not to get too flustered.

I looked out to see a giant snapping turtle cross a wide expanse of someone’s lawn. Over the years, I’ve seen many snapping turtles cross our double-yellow-lined road. This one moved like the others, slow and steady. It looked like a ripped up car tire, dragging itself across the grass. I knew it would reach the road I had just crossed. I told myself I would make sure it made its way safely across when I looped back around.

As I reached the end of my run, having stopped, twice more, to deal with my “stupid” calves (as I had begun to call them), I found the turtle right beside me on my route. It had already crossed the road, had already made its way, as it does every year, avoiding the vehicles that could easily destroy it. It will lay eggs or fertilize them and it will make its way back and forth, just as the salamanders do. And the wood frogs. Just as the snowdrops come each year and the daffodils pop up.

I was so struck by the fact that we both got to the same place, no matter how fast I ran or how slow that turtle crawled, how many times I stopped, or how many cars sped across that road. It was teaching me something, of course, teaching us all something, about resilience and care and carrying forward, in spite of everything, with all that’s in our nature and our privilege to do.