Spring

A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head,—
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning’s ride.

I have a lantana bush outside my bedroom window that attracts hummingbirds better than any feeder on the market. It’s a pretty bush in the Spring-time, when it first begins to bloom, when it is bursting with red, orange and yellow flora and humming with a rich and varied assortment of fauna. Emily Dickinson would have a field day with it.

To mis-quote Cole Porter, birds love it, bees love it, and I suppose even educated fleas love it. Everybody loves it but me, I guess, when it becomes overgrown in the late summer and I have to crawl in there and trim it before it breaks something. Afterwards, my arms get all red and puffy looking, and itch terribly, but the effect is only temporary. The lady across the street gave the plant to my mother many years ago, when, like me, she discovered that she was allergic to it.

My little hummingbird especially loves that lantana bush, which is why I haven’t just dragged it out. Every spring for as long as I can remember, I have seen him there every day, hovering over the bush and spinning on an invisible axis like a little gyroscope, his wings beating at the speed of sound, his long proboscis focussed on a flower siphoning off the pollen. Then off he flits, in a rush of cochineal, heaven only knows where. Usually I wait until the winter to trim the bush back, but one year, thinking that he had already gone, I cut off all the flowers a little too early. Sure enough, that afternoon I saw him, staring confusedly at the nearly bare bush, but he managed to find one flower to pollenate, and then off he went. The next day he was working over at our morning glory vines alongside another old friend, the black bee.

When I was little everybody used to always tell me to be careful of the black bees, even though they don’t appear to have any kind of stinger. But I was always more afraid of the wasps that inhabited the hedge that grew between our house and that of Mrs. Hensley. It was a toss-up which was the meaner of the two – the wasps with their thin, jet-black bodies and golden wings, and their mud-daub nests, or the old woman with her sharp nose and dishevelled reddish brown hair. She was a widow, with two very attractive daughters, that she treated disparately different. Jane was a tall, buxom blonde, and Lorene a petite brunette. Whenever I had to get into the backyard, I would just duck my head and run for it.

After we moved into the house next door, I no longer had to deal with either the black wasps or Mrs. Hensley, but we did inherit a new wasp. Every spring I would find a new hive under the front eaves of the house, and one or two yellow wasps. I was leery of them, but over the years I think they have kept away the killer, or africanized bees. Every so often, I used to see strangely vicious, sleeker looking bees than the regular honeybees nosing about, and large swarms of bees on the move, but not anymore. I’m not sure if that is because of the wasps or the birds.

Over the course of a year a lot of different birds pass through our town, and some seem to be permanent residents. Each morning when I am in the bathroom, a family of sparrow-like birds that I recognize will gather out on the telephone wire. I think they like to hear me sing when I am in the shower. And when I go outside in the morning, I usually scare off one or two of the big black-birds that loiter there. One year, after a big storm with rain and high winds, I thought I heard a bob-white. And last year, for the first time, a little blue jaybird of some sort showed up in our backyard. He must have had a nest in one of the trees behind our garage, because every time I tried to go back there he would dive down and warn me away. Not long after that, I saw him sitting on the telephone wire, accompanied by a little replicant of himself. After that, whenever he saw me mowing the front lawn, he would venture out of the backyard and perch on the house, or the chain-link fence of our next door neighbor, and after I mowed each row, he would come along behind me and peck at the grass for any exposed insects. He and his family stayed around for most of the baseball season last year, and I hope to see them both again soon, this spring, when my hummingbird comes back.

~ by dobee on March 3, 2007.