In A Rush the Season Moves On

So close the humid, warm breath of summer is exhaled against my neck like that of a fevered child. It seems as if the calendar is lying about it being the middle of May. Surely it is the end of June? The morning is quiet as if waiting for the next attack of some storm.  Even the Osprey no longer sits on her "virtual" nest pretending she has eggs.  She needs the wind under her wings and the coolness above the pulsing earth pretending to escape her destiny of being without young ones this year.

The air smells like a French bordello with the abundance of white and yellow honeysuckle blossoms that hang everywhere at the edge of the woods.  I am almost afraid to breathe.

Yesterday I heard the tentative bleat of a fawn coming from the dark shadows of the ferns in the ravine.

The Cardinals still visit the bird bath on a regular basis, usually early mornings and late afternoons when they bathe and throw the water everywhere never fearing that the bowl will not be replenished.  They do not yet look ragged from their parenting demands.

The wren, whose golden song was so clear and pure outside my window before the blast of the sun over the treetops this morning, has stopped her song.  She has returned to feeding her little ones quietly and efficiently as the morning warms.

The young bluebirds are getting their pin feathers and sit quietly in their box as if they were petrified from some prior time with their heads bent against the the wood.  They seem to have no energy to move.  Mom and Dad are perfect parents in their unrelenting visits with the abundance of new insects that have emerged.

I watch the midges fly across the rays of the sun up high in the tree tops like an army of tiny snow or bits of feathers caught in a gentle breeze.  Soon they will decorate the new efficient spider webs that lace between the tips of the tulip tree branches.  The cherry trees have already thrown their petals like fairy confetti at the end of this spring party and white dots land everywhere even messing the bowl of the nearby spider's web.

I hold tight in my mind to the delicate colors that were spring and now are green seed pods waiting to dry and reproduce.