Bringing Up Babies
On the way down to market this weekend, an opossum crossed the road, looking extra hefty. I thought she must be with child(ren) and nearly ready to give birth, when eight little sets of eyes turned toward me: the big rumbling, green road monster with a trailer attached to it. Have you seen how opossums tote their young around? Opossums are marsupials and once the babies have evacuated their mother's pouch, they routinely use their extra-grippy feet to cling to her back anytime the group is on the move. That is a mother right there, lugging her little ones to and fro! Here in front of me was one such champ finding her way to the family den to sleep off a night of foraging while taking care of her eight cling-ons. Where in the wilds of suburban Oakwood, Ohio is their den?!
It's that time of year when new life is breathed into the midwest. Plants grow at hyperspeed to flower for the butterflies who proliferate and lay their eggs in the nooks and crannies of the host plants that their caterpillar offspring will feed on before metamorphosing or falling prey to the myriad of birds who nest in the trees, looking for grub for their gaping chicks. In the spring winds that rip through the countryside here, the young mother birds' (and in some species father birds') nests are blown out of our trees. Those newer parents haven't had enough experience to account for the gusts that our increasingly dramatic springs generate. I always wonder where the eggs are laid in the meantime? Considering it only takes robins 2-4 days to cobble a nest together, in most cases, the resilient little fliers can likely rebuild before their brilliant blue clutch is laid.
Our sister beaglet mutts are inherent rabbit hunters. We don't hunt with them, but that doesn't stop them from sniffing out any rabbit burrows they can find. Since Peg and Roux can't help themselves following their noses, we have the girls on GPS boundary collars and so the smarter rabbits are burrowing outside of the dogs' confinement. It's there, where the subterranean space teems with young rabbits, killdeer nests, field mice, and groundhogs too.
And in our domesticated plots in between all of this wildness that came before us and which will persist beyond our tenure here, we've spawned a field full of plantlife, emulating the wild world around us. Rich and I study the cues, and the grand orchestration of the natural scene to understand how to best cultivate our own plant life...when is the soil warm enough to initiate the soil microbes and trigger the dandelions to blossom? When are there enough daylight hours for the fruit trees to flower? Agronomy pales in comparison to the complexity of the ecosystem that it exists within. And yet, if we heed the counsel of the natural world, we see a great abundance of life in our fields.
So many plant babies are reaching for the fickle, spring sun. And after the recent thunderstorms our canvas is being painted a lush green as they mature, dotted with a rainbow of wildflowers, robins eggs blue tucked here and there in the treeline, and underneath it all the rich ochre and umber of the soil that sustains it all. Not to be missed in the scene is our little boy in flashy green rain boots in pursuit of the cabbage white butterflies that descend on our field. He wants to send the next one to his great grandma up in Michigan in case the butterflies aren't visiting her yet :).
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