Badger, Rock, and Flower

In In the rows of photographs above, you'll see rocks above flowers and a badger burrow beneath them all. We live on glacial till here, which means I have to stop the tractor on occasion when mowing to dig up a rock that has just shown its face for the first time. A four inch circle of rock can become a forty-pound stone before I'm done excavating, and then there's a new cavity that has to be filled. Some of our boulders are too large for my neighbor's bulldozer to budge.

How long did it take after the glacier receded--leaving exposed a barren world of stones ground smooth and rounded, of other composites formed under unimaginable pressures--before enough soil formed over the rocks for flowers to grow, badgers to burrow, and deer to browse? That's the history that lies beneath our feet and runs away from us when we walk down the Daisy Slope to the marsh and river. And that's the history I distort and rearrange when I move rocks from all over our property to the pile I'm building. This is good, helpful work for a scholar. Thoreau thought of the mind as a burrowing organ, so I appreciate the badger that scratches through to the past below as I search through collections of manuscripts for new light on the old.

While Alison and I were away, the wild Bergamot came into bloom; I love its wild, shaggy head of orchid-like trumpets and the long stamens hanging out over the lip. The next phase of growth here has been the Queen Anne's Lace; before we moved out here and I had time to pay attention, I had never known about the sole purple floret at the center of the umbel. Everyone should know about this. All the Golden Rods are beginning to bloom now, just a little behind the Queen Anne's Lace. I believe I identified seven species of Golden Rod last year. That means that there are seven different reasons for Golden Rod to live in this place. I wish I could find them out.

In the family portrait above, the fawn is tasting the salt on his mother's lips; she has been licking the salt block I moved out there from the shed last week. The salt has become quite the gathering place.