At the park the grass is bleached out and bald, the color of sand, under the big pines. Several came down in last autumn’s bomb cyclone and they had the park entrance taped off with warning signs but of course we entered anyway. The trees were toppled over and flipped up willy nilly, a child’s log game. But now months later it’s like nothing happened.

Some deciduous trees are still green mostly but the tops are tinted pink and this makes them look fluorescent like a scene out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. It’s the contrast of the too-blue sky, too. And the pavements are now littered with leaf confetti, the opposite of spring’s first blooms. Some trees are leaning and look out of place or stilted like the kind you’d see on California’s Highway 1 (Sitka spruce, western hemlock). Others, the Doug-firs, are so tall you get desensitized by it living in the Pacific Northwest. But those are the ones you really need to watch out for in wind storms.

A family of mice emerged from a bush I was watering, one followed by another, each with that oh-crap, panicked look. I’m not bothered by mice unless they’re infesting the attic insulation or our crawl space, a horror show of traps. Then it dawned on me maybe they were hiding in the bushes from the evil hawks that had us all in lockdown with their traumatizing shrieks. I knew there were at least two hawks but because you can’t tell them apart it felt like half a dozen. They’d cordoned off the whole neighborhood. Part of me wanted to see a mouse get grabbed, to see it fed to the nestlings, their blood-stained beaks and beady eyes.

The cry of the hawk was piercing not only in tone but how its cries built, escalating in urgency and pitch. First a dry sound like a steam whistle, then a hoarse screech like an alarm sounding. I think the hawks were hungry and aimed to let everyone in our zip code know about it. I entertained the idea of feeding them, then immediately thought better of it. Think moles are hard to get rid of? Also noted there were like zero rabbits now.

With the app on my phone I could record the hawk cries and use the app’s database to also play back field recordings others had saved of the same species. So here was one from Colorado, with the date and name of the person who’d submitted it, and because the audio was so good on my phone and I had nothing better to do I tried to fuck with the hawks by holding my phone in their direction and playing back calls from their kin, to get a reaction. But whenever I did this in close range the hawk would look uninterested, a brief acknowledgment but then an attitude like leave me alone, I’m working.

Around 0230h. the owls start in now every morning and with it still pleasant enough to keep our windows open it makes for good late-night/early-morning listening. But if you’re a mouse you better not move a muscle. If it’s not one thing it’s another.

My dear friend Don used AI to help compose some music from blogs I’ve posted and shared a bouquet of them with me via text, here’s one called It happened too soon. I’ll share more in the coming weeks.

(Featured photo courtesy of my friend Don or AI, I can’t tell the difference.)

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Diary

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest