In the Neighborhood of Crows
At a pond near the fjord, the world teems. Tall trees, elms and beeches, surround the pond, and a whole crow development has gone up high in the branches where the crows now perch near their enormous nests where the chicks have probably just barely hatched. Down in the undergrowth we spotted a moorhen, a black bird with a red beak and white along its wings and below its tail. The moorhen is a solitary creature, I've read, generally shy, nothing like its crow neighbors making a racket above. And in the pond itself we watched a pair of coots with their brood of five fluffy chicks. The adults dove and surfaced, snuffling away down among the reeds for lunch. If the chicks were close, when the adults dove, the chicks would bounce on the wavelets their parents created. Isn't that just the way with children, being buffeted, gently or boisterously, by their parents' pursuits?
It was in this pond that Arne and Anika and Otto found millions of frog eggs last weekend and retrieved a tub full to study in our yard. Now they've all hatched and are tiny swarming black sperms wriggling toward their tadpole selves. At the pond, we watched these tiny creatures, just one part of a busy community in and on the water: insects, a salamander, a snail, flying, swimming, striding, all busy in the sunshine. I watched a tiny perfectly round bright red something swim well below the surface. It never came up for air. I fished it out on a twig, but it was too small to discern the presence of legs. Was it insect? Back in the water, it went on about its zig-zaggy wanderings. I found myself wondering if this creature had a home. Was it headed away from home or toward home? Did it have a sense of direction, or was it wandering as its wandering took it?
Last weekend I made a whirlwind trip back to the US in order to share in celebrating my parents fiftieth wedding anniversary. In Morris, I stopped at our house to drop off winter coats and to pick up a couple items. The space was familiar, it was my house, but it did not feel like home. I wasn't coming home to that house, I was just stopping by. I drove around town and had the strangest feeling of this place being utterly and totally familiar, like looking at the back of one's hand, but in a couple days I was going to leave, and anyway, my family were not there. It was familiar; but it was not home. My sister and her sweetheart and I made a pilgrimage to our childhood home: 720 Minnesota Avenue in St. Peter, the house I grew up in from second grade until marriage. What had been home, the place I returned to, and in fact, sometimes still return to in my dream life, is no longer home. And of course, now I'm back in Himmelev, with my family, in our temporary home.
Perhaps we have told ourselves that the nest is all there is when we think about home. Unlike the tiny red circle of sentience with its few square yards of pond home, we humans today wander in a “home” that is huge, global, and yet we're failing to think of Earth as home. Perhaps that is the new story we're beginning to tell about ourselves. Earth is home, the only place we ever leave, the only place to which we return, wandering as we are within it, following where our wandering takes us.
