Refugees wanted for hammock occupancy and squirrel observation

A September milkweed pod bursts open

It's strangely and wonderfully cool for a sunny day in early September in central North Carolina at 540 feet above sea level. The light is changing to a slightly more golden-green hue in the forest room where my little house is built. The tall tulip poplars are the earliest to leaf out in the spring and the first to change their colors and drop their leaves in the fall. It's not fall yet but the cat-faced golden and brown leaves are raining down with every fresh and clean gust of wind. Bright sun shining through waving leaves makes dancing patterns on the ground. Birds are chatting to each other or maybe they are trying to subtly communicate to me that I should fill up the bird feeders which have been empty all summer. Last evening I watched a flock of Canada geese fly overhead and heard their wild calls- most likely they are local residents that were returning to the lake nearby for the night, but that sound is the sound of my childhood, great flocks upon flocks passing over our house in New Jersey in the early autumn night, descending to the river across the street for rest. 

There is something about this season, the change of summer into fall, that has always grabbed hold of me and tells me to keep my eyes open. This is the time when beautiful orb weavers have grown large and, taking a cue from the gorgeous patterns on their backs the Creator has played with over the aeons, spin exquisite webs that stretch tree to tree and sparkle on misty mornings or (plaster themselves to unwary human faces on a walk in the woods). Tiny caterpillars have grown into long fat ones, looking for a place to pupate until the spring. The river oats are turning to gold, the goldenrods and asters are forming their flower buds for the royal parade of yellows and purples soon to begin. Milkweed pods are heavy on the plants, leaves tattered and full of chomping-holes; hopefully chomped by monarch caterpillars. This year's fawns are still dappled with white and doing zoomies through the back of our property while their moms patiently graze, but they are much larger than they were when they emerged shaikly in the spring, sticking close their mothers or curling up into tight, silky brown and white balls in the grass and leaves at the edge of the forest. 

Life in the outer world has its unending horrors, but I am thankful for this stability of change, the same changes occurring over and over again, somehow more beautifully every time I see them unfold. Living here under the trees in the great Eastern Deciduous Forest, under the poplars, oaks, hickories, sweet gums, dogwoods and pines, where cicadas and katydids, crickets and frogs, chickadees and wrens and hawks, woodpeckers and owls provide the soundtrack day and night... this is a refuge from our strange world where violence and cruelty and accumulation of manmade things are exalted. Why would you want power and plastic thingamabobs when you could have all the beauty of the natural world infusing your sight and sound and smell every day? I don't understand it. And I wish I could gather all those trapped unwillingly out there in the smoke and ruins into my forest refuge where things are still beautiful and the air is breathable and there is no sound of war or loud voices making demands and proceeding to ruin your life. I want to gather up the refugees and the traumatized and put them in my hammocks under the canopy of trees to rest and be restored by squirrels chasing each other around tree trunks while I cook for them and administer tea until they can function again.

Would that I could, and that I could give them back the beauty and nature of their own homes as they once were, so I could come and be their guest and drink tea under the fig tree and eat blini and chocolate in peaceful gardens where there are no bombs, just quiet, and the goodness of people who love.

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Kirstie Schraffenberger

goldfinchmeadow@gmail.com & kirstie.schraf@gmail.com