Knowledge

There is so much going on, it’s hard to keep up.  The world has gone from black and white to technicolor. There are green fields full of sunshine-yellow dandelions and big yellow mounds of marsh marigolds.  There are daffodils everywhere, and the first slim, curving branches of forsythia covered with yellow blooms and bright green new leaves.  There are newly plowed fields with rich brown earth, some already sprouting grass and dandelions. Walking on Gulf Road we came upon a bank of dark purple/red trillium.  I saw one, and then I saw fifty all around it as soon as my gaze focused. Among the trees at various stages of leafing out there are wild plums with soft white blossoms. The hillsides are richly varied this week, and changing every day.  Some trees are still bare, some are covered with rust or brown or pink leaf casings, and some have new leaves from nearly maroon to deep green to yellowish or whitish green.  The pines and hemlocks that have stood alone among bare trees are now dark accents amid the new lighter greens. It’s a festival of life and color, changing so quickly as if the living things were in a huge rush to be done with the grey sleep of winter, done with being covered in snow.

Yesterday I walked the triangle that surrounds our property: north on Gulf Road to Scotch Hill to Manley and back to Gulf a half a mile south of where I started.  I have been thinking about this walk since we moved here.  It’s about three and a half miles, a good walk. I had walked several times up Gulf and down Scotch Hill as far as the yellow house we see across the neighbor’s pond, but with cold weather, it wasn’t very appealing to continue.  Yesterday I started under grey skies, but before I was half way around the sun was out and I had peeled off my jacket and vest. Even though we have driven this route, just to see it, the topology and views surprised me when I did it on foot. From Lucia’s house on Scotch Hill which is the nearest house to our east, our place looks closer than I thought it would, and the slope of the land from her place up to ours is gentler than I thought it would be, certainly gentler than our driveway on the opposite side of the house. Past her place our house disappears in the trees, and I didn’t see it again until I turned onto Manley.  Just at the intersection, there’s a modest blue house that we see from our place, but then with a dip in the road, a rise of the hill between us, and a lot of trees, our house disappears again and I can’t see it until I’m at our southern property line on Gulf.

It is both odd and satisfying to do the walk. It’s odd to see the house from different angles, as our neighbors see it, slightly alien. I’m not sure I can say exactly what’s satisfying about it. There is something about seeing how we are bounded, about seeing our border from the outside, that completes my sense of place. It gives me a peaceful, settled feeling. It makes it clearer what our place is. I realize that we could have walked the fence line around our Amenia property, and at various times we walked nearly every bit of it.  But I never did the whole circuit at one time, and I don’t remember hearing that anyone did.  Our border there was entirely in the woods, except for a small bit at the far end of our lake, and before Chris and Leslie built their beautiful home on the adjoining property between us and route 44, all of the neighboring properties were uninhabited except for a couple of fields where there were cows. I walked our fence line here on Sunnyhill on one of my first visits last year, but somehow seeing our place from the roads, across the distances of neighbors’ properties is different.

Erratum: I have written that I saw bobolinks.  My mistake.  When I was here last fall Peter and Aviva taught me two new birds, the bobolink and the eastern kingbird.  I went to my Sibley’s Birds East to see what the female bobolink looks like and I realized that I had switched the names. What I have been seeing is the lovely eastern kingbird who looks like he dipped the tip of his tail in white paint. I’m still watching for bobolinks, in part because they are also beautiful, but also because they are fussy about ecosystems and their presence is an endorsement of a healthy environment.  I gave a little thought to how confidently I told Jay that the bird with the white tipped tail was a bobolink, and how confidently I wrote about it.  It’s easy to be wrong. Peter or Aviva would have caught my mistake if I hadn’t caught it myself.  It’s a sweet, low cost reminder to be careful about what I’m sure of, especially recently acquired knowledge, and to check with friends even when I think I know what I’m talking about.