I can hear the red-winged blackbirds calling and that tells me Spring has come and soon school will be out for the Summer.
It’s so funny how some feelings never leave you. I can still recall being in my classroom at St. Mary of the Lake on an overcast day, the kind of day where you can feel the thunderclouds gathering long before they arrive. The teacher cracked the window open, the first fresh air that classroom had contained in months. That’s when I heard them, the red-winged blackbirds.
They nested in the Dunes in the place we called “The Valley” at the end of our street (depicted here by a bad cell phone pic). It was a small patch of sand dunes that formed a bowl, Lake Michigan to the North, the lagoon to the South, Marquette Park to the East and my neighborhood to the West. At the bottom of the depression was a marshy area that captivated me for untold hours as a child.
It absolutely teemed with life. Frogs, toads, even a muskrat. I still remember my neighbor Sue and I walking in the shallow water when it still had a thin layer of ice on it. Suddenly Sue looked down, “What is this against my leg?”
I looked over and examined the brown hues beneath the ice and said, “A log.”
“With feet?!”
We grabbed a large stick and tried to lift the legged driftwood up, breaking it though the ice only to find two bright eyes blinking at us before the muskrat regained his senses and scampered away.
I never did understand how he was so still against Sue’s leg. The only thing I can imagine is that he misjudged something under the ice and was running out of air but he certainly revived after our little escapade.
But back to the birds…they nested in the grasses and small bushes that rimmed the tiny patch of water at the bottom of the Valley’s bowl and persisted in dive bombing us at every opportunity even though we didn’t have the least interest in their nests. I never recall even be tempted to look in one. Mostely we hunted for frogs and did an awful lot of ducking as the birds scolded us nonstop.
I always took their calls as a sign that the frogs had returned to the bog and soon the muskrat pups would be playing on the shore and that I should return now, too. That it was time to go back home, to the river, where I belonged.
Recent Comments