The Back Yard

Wistful. A good word for the last day of the year.

December 31, 2024. I stand in the cold of the three-season porch, watching snow flurries tumble around the backyard like new puppies.  After two days of rain, before the cold spell hit, the lawn was a sea of mud. Deer tracks sink down two inches. They visit every morning and evening, checking out dessert in my perennial garden. Right now, three turkeys are noshing in the dirt under the bird feeders. Those horny feet can scoop out a load of dirt and fling it aside in reckless abandon. They are mammoth creatures, and ugly, the stuff of a cartoonist’s nightmare.

God must have found some form and comeliness in them. I can’t. Not even in that jaunty young male with his tail all aflutter, wooing the feathers off a hen that outweighs him by fifteen pounds.

Actually, at the moment I’m standing before the wall of glass wondering whether backyard is one word or two words. And then I am forced to sit down. I fall a lot. And I’m not particular about place or circumstances. I have fallen in my garden. I have fallen in the living room when it was full of company. I have broken eight ribs in falls now, two of them at once when I tried to step into beach sand to feel what it was like. I couldn’t feel anything except my ribs cracking as I pitched over. 

Even as I stand here, pain crawls along the spine with its fractured and collapsing vertebrae, along its surgical scars, out to my hips, up to my neck and a million nerve endings. According to the Veterans Administration I am 80% disabled. I wonder how they got it so low. After all, they’re the ones who started it all anyway by drafting me and then flying me to a country where things went boom in the night.

And today—today is New Years Eve and I am about to go to my bed and thank God for the sheer, undiluted happiness I feel. If I kneel, I can’t get up. It becomes the disabled person’s cry of survival: Never go somewhere you can’t get up or out from. You never sit in chairs without arms. Never, ever, sit on a sofa. Never kneel.

It is good to sit, to watch flights of birds attack the feeders. A big northern flicker lands precariously on the finch feeder, his two-inch beak expertly snaring the tiny thistle feed. Two female goldfinches, now in their dusty gray winter coats, feed on the other side of the big bird.

For nearly forty years we have lived in this house. On every weekday until the little heater can’t drive the cold away, my wife and I have eaten lunch out here. We watch the bird traffic in the backyard. In the late summer several of my thirty-five roses stand over seven feet high. They stretch above the wire deer fence, and I let them. The deer will do some fine dining.

On a day like this, a line from an e.e. cummings poem echoes: “I thank You God for this most amazing day.”

A hawk perches on the fence and all the feeders fall quiet. The bird looks like a sculpture, cold and heartless. It probably knows where the fluffle of rabbits hides out and is biding its time. I have had to bury several half-eaten rabbit corpses left in the backyard. Contrary to the belief that hawks are dainty eaters, the ones around here are slobs. There is just too much food. Squirrels, rabbits, and small birds abound. Even a chipmunk or two for a late snack.

But I was well on my way to sleep by then. I can sleep at nearly any still moment, anytime, except at night. Strange impulses drive my limbs to flail about, much against my will. My leaden nerves are ornery, awakening at unguarded moments to torment me. I get up. I prowl around the house, fix a snack, read, until exhaustion creeps in and I head back to bed. 

So now I look through the back window and it is New Years Day, a morning full of snow and mischief. A flaming red cardinal huddles in the birch tree. He will sit there all morning, occasionally floating down to the snow under the feeder to filch a sunflower seed. One of my favorites, a tufted titmouse, is at the feeder.  So beautiful, it is the pinup bird of the backyard. 

The cardinal has barely finished his chorus when his dusky mate flies to the branch below him. They can’t mate in the cold, but they sure keep romance alive. The ruddy male swoops to the snow beneath the feeder, snatches a sunflower seed, flies back to his mate and feeds it to her. For all the world it looks like a kiss. 

A vast quiet passes over the backyard. Creeping feet quiet. Birds wait patiently. The verse in Psalm 46, “Be still, and know that I am God,” threads into my mind. I also think of the fact that Governor Winthrop had a granddaughter named Waitstill. The brain is devious, with altogether too much of a mind of its own. It is good to be still here, to wait on nothing quite so much as the whispers of the Spirit telling me that all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

It is a day full of hope, unwrapped like a gift before my very eyes. They are wide with wonder. The past recedes like fluid into the distant interstices of memory. Pain is annealed by the cardinal’s song. He is not shy. He lifts his head and heaven trembles at the sound. The backyard is made new by 5 inches of snow. Tulips and daffodils and roses are sleeping their long sleep. I have never seen them prowling around in the night. All is well.

Photo by Kevin Cress on Unsplash