From my brother Steven's Archives: June 2000

"June has the feel of deep emerald forever amidst the whitewater rush of time. Activity and obligation are at a jumping, jamming peak. Streamside and hillside are popping with the scarlet stars of skyrocket, the blood-red dashes of penstemon and the carmine flames of paintbrush backed by blue camas, blue phacelia, blue flax and the deep, deep blue of columbine. Sweet wild rose and honeyed clover unabashedly offer themselves to the probing nectar-lust of the bee ensuring both their own present fertility and their pollinator's future and return. The songbird chorus still rings in the dawn air but is shorter and with less elaboration of theme and melody, as the voracious demands of nestlings consume the parents every waking moment. Sandhill cranes eggs are hatching into gangly appetites on stilts as coyote pups frolic at den's door impatient for their parent's return and hot mouse meat. In the lodge on the pond newborn beaver kits are demanding to be nursed while high in the cliff ledge aerie young golden eagles wait restlessly, eagerly searching with unequaled eye for the distant cruciform dot of the returning parent. The very air above the thick grass of the meadow and prairie shakes with chitinous stridulations of the orthopteran tribe-katydids, mole crickets, grasshoppers and locusts-as they raise their pulsing, rasping overture.
Yet in spite of all this noisy, fretful ambition and labor, the long warm daylight, the easy harvest of naive prey, and the sweet abundant salad of young and tender things provide a grace and easy respite found only in the generosity of ample June. Life remains serious, but there is still time for another family for the nest-robbed robin, for another fishing lesson for the young grizzly hard-pressed to finesse the stealthy swatting technique of its kind. Even that odd, overabundant, mechanically shackled biped ape that strides through the world as through an appointment book may feel the golden glance of sunlight on a warm, perfumed and buzzing afternoon and pause long enough to lose itself in a moment of still content, lingering knee-deep in the heart's ease and comfort of munificent and gentle June."

Copyright Steve Manning, Naturalist
Photo by MRoss

From my brother Steven's archives: May

From my brother Steven's archives:
"May is the flower-wreathed bride of the year. Lovely April and beautiful June are mere handmaidens to the dew-diamond radiance of May. The pledges whispered by the rattling seed in the dry husk of September are fulfilled now in the silk-petaled allure of the receptive blossom. The pure white drifts of Large-flowered Trillium like lingering snowbanks lying late in the woods, the sky-blue dappling of Baby Blue Eyes like spilled sapphires in the jade green shade of a live oak, the lascivious delicacy of pink enfolding white Bleeding Hearts nodding coyly in the sun shaft and shadow of the forest glen like a proper but unmistakable, irresistible invitation; all of this seductive art, the dance of May, is to bring the present generation to that terrifying and wonderful commingling that defies the separateness of individuals to produce the future generation's seed. It is a daring and dangerous strategy, but exquisitely successful and as seriously beautiful as this life allows, this life that culminates in May dances.
This May-time dance floor is tender-leaved. The oak, the maple, unfurls the bright green of youth washed with a roseate blush, an evanescent glow foretelling in its fading the inevitable emerald maturity to come. The lusty uprising of the lance-leaved grasses full of sunlight distilled to sweetness enrobes the land in shaggy velvet. Even the reserved and venerable conifers are just showing tips of bright, new-minted green like small cool flames that do not consume the branches but miraculously increase them.
And, of course, the May dances, in their pre-eminence, have the best music and biggest orchestra. There is the high woodwind skirling of the shorebirds-least sandpipers, red knots, curlews and whimbrels-as they move along the water's edge like nervous smoke. The piccolo trills of Spring Peepers are fading, replaced in the rapture of firefly evenings by the softly roaring cello and bass viol of the bullfrog chorus. There is the clear fluting of thrushes, the fuzzy harpsichord trills of the warblers, the bright trumpet blasts of the geese, the chuckling bassoons of coot and mallard, the racing liquid violins of the finches, and the majestic trombone fanfares of the cranes, As the ascending Sun heats the greened Earth dance floor, waterfalls crash like ringing symbols and deep in the distance the dark tympanic rumbling of the thunderstorm murmurs of risk and renewal.
This dance, this music, this month is life at its best, marvelous, mysterious May."
©Steven Manning from his newsletter of May 2000
Image by Michele Ross