My Backyard

I’m strangely at a loss for words. I feel like I should be blogging about something, but I can’t seem to settle on a topic. I could write about the headlines: climate change, the latest tally of active Covid cases in New Brunswick, or the cult of Donald Trump and his inexplicably devoted followers. I have strong opinions on all of these things. Deep down, though, I realize I don’t want to write about problems we all face and can do very little about. Keep it real and personal, Joy.

I’m going to write about what I see out my window. There are two mature trees I’m watching. I wish I knew what they are. At the moment they’re loaded with berries. At this time of year those trees are also full of robins. A flock of some 60 birds congregates here. This is my fourth autumn and the birds always come to feast, filling their bellies before they migrate south. What I’m noticing this time are the baby robins, the young of the year hatched back in the spring. They don’t have their adult plumage yet and they’re smaller than the grown-ups, so they don’t actually look like robins. They’re also noticeably clumsy flyers. They land in strange places like the very end of a branch that’s not strong enough to support even their meagre weight, or right on top of a cluster of berries, instead of nearby where it would be so much easier to forage.

These robins are geniuses. Every autumn they eat every berry on the tree to the left of my window, but leave the fruit on the tree to the right mostly untouched. When they return next March they’ll have an easy source of food even before the snow melts. They’ve done this every year since I’ve been watching so it’s not a fluke. This amazes me.

In about an hour I’ll go out for a roll around the backyard. We’ve had a week of temperatures so balmy and warm you’d swear it’s August rather than October. A big windy blow halfway through the week has scattered most of the fall colour on the ground. In fact, the sidewalk is covered so completely with wet leaves I’m wondering if my chair will have enough traction to roll over them. There is a small pond out there and I’ll probably stop at the shallow end to visit with the frogs.

Update, one hour later:

My chair powered easily over the wet leaves. Around the corner at the deep end of the pond, I discovered an orange carpet of pine needles across a good 10-foot section of sidewalk. I adore the smell of pine and inhaled deeply as though I was out of breath. No frogs. I suppose any self-respecting frog would have already dug themselves deeply into the muck to sleep the winter away. Is that actually what frogs do? I can’t double check with Google because my Wi-Fi connection has been out for days. FRUSTRATING!

The natural world has done the trick to restore me, as it always does. There are indeed big scary problems out there, and my personal life just got a whole lot more complicated. But in my backyard, at least, the seasons are progressing as they should and winter will soon be here.