There is something about my deck… At the break of dawn I step out to greet the rising sun glimmering through the trees, rays dancing with the leaves. The birds already busy with the chatter of their morning congress. Such a symphony of nature’s instruments at play in the air. Two black crows squawk at each other, pitch rising and falling, now guttural now plaintive. They do this every morning. No rhyme or reason, yet it all makes sense. Bees and butterflied come. The hummingbird hovers before me in greeting then beelines for the flowers to drink the nectar emitted in the secret of the night. Which reminds me… There is something about my deck in the secret of the night… Skunks and rabbits come, field rats too I’m sure. All creatures great and small come for succulent leaves and flowers, even though I now only keep the bitters at ground level and sweetmeats hanging high from the beams of the upper deck. I’ve won the battle, but they still come, haunted by the memory of feasting on potted succulents down to the roots. A young deer making her rounds at dusk jumps the fence at midnight, alighting on soft-padded hooves. Thinks I don’t see her from behind my bedroom curtains, just standing still, gazing out to the grove below, waiting for her Romeo. The cats come too. The grey, the black, and the ginger, taking turns for bouts of solitary rumination. No enticing scraps of evening candle-lit deck dinners, but somehow they ruminate. The grey one perches on the railing, watching out for denizens of the dark. The black one, who runs from me in the day, sleeps on my deck chair at night. The young ginger sits hypnotized before my potted lavender. Every morning I check it out to see what I’ve missed. Bemused still. There is something about my deck that surprises. With the winged, the hoofed and the pawed, I too feel stretched here in this liminal space of containment and sanctuary tucked away at the edge of wilderness. Here we are called forth to be beyond what nature has intended. Birds legislate, crows make sense, hummingbirds greet, cats look within, deer enact the eternal love scene on the balcony, and I – I surf on sunbeams through the ridges of my mind, sail on moonbeams to the heart of secret gardens, balloon from one star of hope to another. There is something about my deck…Something. --Cristina Olsen, June 7, 2013.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:48:22 +0000
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