New Young Creatures and Life Indoors for a While

Maybe it's the time of the year, but I have not felt lured away from the Audubon work lately. Two mornings began with frost in the past few days, and we've had a couple of cold rainy days, which are not conducive to garden parties, but for a textual editor closing in on the last few of some three hundred Explanatory Notes, the weather is just fine. Besides, researching these Notes is much like spelunking, going fishing, prying up large rocks with a spud bar to look underneath, sometimes shooting fish in a barrel. Alison wins the prize for wifely companionship by listening to my tales of derring-do and high adventure in the wilds of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh.

The Audubon work did experience a minor cave-in a few days ago that produced some debris that had to be cleared away, after which new beams had to be installed. When the Beinecke Library finally fulfilled my request for a copy of their fragment of Audubon's 1826 Journal that I found in their holdings, it brought much more new information than I had expected. So, after a day of deconstruction, the new superstructure is completed and superior to the previous one. I forget just how Thoreau put it, but he thought of the mind as a burrowing creature.

Outdoors, though, there is much evidence of new, young creatures. A coyote chorus was full of the wilder pyrotechnic voices of pups out singing for the first time--no control at all, joyful noise with the bark on, Whitman on speed. The River bottom continues to inspire the Veeries, for which I am more grateful than I can say. Alison and I sit on the porch in the evening talking through our day, and the Veery songs roll up out of the alder and ash trees and in the most supple, fluid way fluff up the atmosphere we breathe.

The trail camera has been capturing the new wee ones. There's a pint-size porpentine, the teeniest twin fawns imaginable, and a young possum in its last moment of cuteness (they ugly up real fast). The fifth photo must show a ground hog, but it's only the process of elimination that gets you to that conclusion. The bottom three photos show the innate curiosity that young'uns have for the lens of a camera--with decidedly mixed results.