Farice Julia

My Grandma Farice with my sister Jennifer circa 1989-90.

The dozer quit this evening.  Some DEF code out of nowhere left me stuck smack dab in the middle of a management unit. Just as I was about to start spewing some choice words, a bob-white called from the hill above me and thoughts of my Grandma Farice Julia rushed in out of nowhere. I was ten years old in 1993 when she passed. Ten is old enough to remember somebody clearly, but young enough that what you remember gets boiled down to just a couple of things — the things that mattered enough to a kid's mind to stick.

She had an entertainment cabinet stuffed full of romance novels, spines cracked soft from reading and re-reading. And she had a pair of nautical binoculars sitting right there on her dining room table for watching the birds that frequented the backyard.

I didn't think much of it at the time. It was just Grandma’s house.  But looking back now, I think those two objects tell you everything you need to know about her. The novels were about longing for something — for a story bigger than the day-to-day, for a world with more romance in it than what was right in front of her. And the binoculars were the opposite of that. They were about paying close, patient attention to the world that was right in front of her — the wrens and the cardinals and whatever else showed up in that backyard on any given afternoon.  I think a lot of us end up living somewhere between those two things. Between wanting something more and learning to really see what's already here.

There's a straight line, if you squint, between a woman with nautical binoculars on her dining room table and a grandson who ended up growing native plants specifically because the birds and the pollinators need them.  The nursery is full of things that pull birds in close: caterpillars and bugs, the seed heads left standing through winter, the berries on the natives everybody else calls "messy," the exact kind of tangled backyard chaos she'd have kept a pair of binoculars trained on.  Why? Because that, folks, is where the Wild Things are. 

The rocks, chairs, and benches around here are front row seats to a world that’s becoming harder to save; a place to forget about life for a while and just watch and listen to the natural world around you.  That’s what makes things different here – not the plants being better than anyone else’s – especially with the aphids on the milkweed and the skeletonized leaves left in the wake of Japanese Beetles, or the broken stems from the weight of the shade cloth that just couldn’t handle this evening’s 60 mph winds.  No, it’s not the plants at all but the access to the abundance of life that only they can provide. 

I don't know what Grandma Farice would make of today’s world, the dozer I just managed to break, or the reason why I was dividing a management unit in two for different fire regimes. But I know full well that amid all the virtual noise she’d understand a person choosing to sit still and pay close attention to the small and very real wild things in their backyard.  Some days I wonder if that's where it started for me — not with a textbook or a class, but with a pair of binoculars that were too heavy even for a husky 10-year-old, and a grandmother who never once made me feel like watching birds out a window was anything less than worth doing.

My Grandma with my Mom (far left) and all of my Aunts somewhere in her backyard.