Bernd Heinrich, The Geese of Beaver Bog

The best way to see migrating geese on the street where I live, in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, is to go up a little park perched on limestone cliffs. Then one climbs the steps to a monumental phallic monstrosity some misguided fool caused to be built in honour of the James Rumsey, soit-disant inventor of the steam engine. Once one reaches the top step, one has a panoramic view of the Potomac river. Early mornings and evenings, particularly in autumn, families of Canada geese and a gaggle of farm geese flock to old brick pylons--remnants of a bridge that has been replaced by a concrete horror with fake Parisian lamps. In the river, apparently oblivious to change, dozens of geese make a racket so loud it muffles the distant roar of cars speeding across the bridge toward Hagerstown, Maryland where villagers can roam shopping malls and buy things they do not need.

Geese care nothing about shopping malls and watching them one is likely to forget how very important are the contributions Borders, Pier1, and Starbucks make to global culture. It is particularly easy to become forgetful in autumn when Clematis virginiana bursts into blossom in whichever sections of the park the town crew forgot to douse with pre-emergent weed killer. Older Mill Street residents who remembered poetic bits of the Elizabethan English their ancestors spoke up on the Blue Ridge, used to call this type of clematis traveller's joy. By any name, this is a bodacious vine. It looks like nothing for most of the year, then toward the end of August it explodes in a gazillion tiny star-shaped flowers as fragrant as the sweetest jasmine. It seems to propagate miraculously, but in nature, miracles tend to have unpoetic agents such as bids who like eat clematis, digest it , and so on and so forth. No need to examine the digestive process of the local fauna in detail, is there, Alex?

Older residents of Mill Street built their houses on Shepherd's Meadow, where town founder Thomas Shepherd's sheep used to graze a couple of centuries ago. So did I build mine, a block away from Shepherd's grist mill. It is a simple house made out machine milled pine logs. Its garden has more weeds than I can count, but it also has old varieties of roses, swaths of wild sweet rocket, a profusion of Casablanca lilies and two miraculous traveller's joy vines. Nothing much seems to happen here unless once studies the ways of garden spiders, blue herons, racoons, and bluebirds. It is the right house for a time that predates the need for homeland security. Time flows slowly here, leaving one's roots undisturbed. It is only when the Canada fly by, morning and evening, leaving behind the farm geese for whom they had made space in their community earlier in the year, that one wonders if it is such a good thing to be planted so deeply in an old meadow.