The Quiet Joys of Nature
A minor 60’s fad was buying a picnic table and benches. All these post-WWII families in suburbia had to buy a set so they could dine outside. Well, as you’ve seen, battling the charcoal usually meant daddy lost.
So, we hauled food outside when mom cooked it. This was doomed to fail, because this meant he had to get off his ass and schlep dishes outside. And condiments would be forgotten. Send the kid in to get butter, catsup, cream for the coffee, salt. etc.
After maybe two summers, we were not ordered outside any more–TV ruled all.
My mother was a woman of few desires. Not clothes , jewelry, intense hair treatments, purses, or shoes. One of her bucket list items was to have cardinals in her back yard.
She commandeered the useless picnic table and had me pull it into the center of the backyard. Then she bought a bird feeder and a huge bag of sunflower seeds. This simple setup defeated squirrels, since the table legs were not close to the edges. Our backyard had no trees. We had hours of amusement watching squirrels try desperately to get at seeds that were so close and so far.
It took a few years, but she persisted, especially in winter. I’ll never forget how excited she was to see a pair of cardinals pigging out on the table, their vibrant crimson plumage silhouetted against pure white snow. Washing dishes was less onerous when she could watch feathered friends, pausing only to keep the mean, nasty doves from chasing cardinals away.
Daddy could never understand why someone would look at birds instead of a TV screen.
Soon, we were buying 25 pound bags of sunflower seeds for the garage. She bought airtight bins to keep seeds in the kitchen closet. Daddy was not happy, but this was a rare dispute that my mother won.
The decaying shells made the grass underneath grow like Jack’s beanstalk. But since I was cutting the grass, daddy didn’t have to face the music on this one til much later.
In the eighties, mom hung spider plants from the front porch and (if you build it, they will come) eventually sparrows built nests. Mom watched for cowbirds and through the years, she disposed of several cowbird egg invaders.
This existential tale ends with me cutting the back grass in high school. I see a lump in the grass near the border of the field behind us. It was a severed head of a dove–clean, almost no blood. An avian re-enactment of Anne Boleyn in suburbia. The body was 2 feet away in the field. Whilst gagging in the house/fighting dry heaves, I explained and mom, bless her, disposed of the gruesome scenario. Later, when she took her kids to a field trip at the nature conservatory, a guide told her it was probably a barn owl. Supposedly, it was the only animal other than man to kill for the hell of it.