Nature's Place

Rain came with the cooling of summer and the autumn has turned to a mild spring, as far as some creatures and flowers are concerned. And the sunshine at this time is lovely, bright and warm. Beautiful, in a word, though the word can’t hold it.

It seems some of the forms of life here can’t stand the heat of summer and hold off blossoming and mating until it ends. Walking in the nearby fields for a couple of days it became clear a new season had begun, not autumn or summer. Dragonflies are back in another wave, along with some bugs and many butterflies. Some flowers are lighting up the woods with bright yellow, a lovely sense of yellow, purple too. And small delicate white signs along the forest and fields floor.

I looked down the track for a distance and I could see all the signs of spring. Butterflies chasing each other in the warm afternoon sunlight, fluttering this way and that. Caterpillars climbing about the leaves, demolishing them as they go. Dragons darting about, taking rest in the last of the days sunlight. Ladybirds and ants climbing about the branches. Spiders, running and hunting.

So many little creatures, characters of the Earth’s intelligence. And flowers, aspects of the Earths beauty. Seeding silk grasses blowing wildly in the wind suggesting a new dawn.

In this ancient land the ‘seasons’ are all variations on summer.

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The other night I heard a disturbance played out on the wooden floorboards upstairs, a shouting, the sound of things falling and footsteps I didn’t recognise. I went up to see what was happening and found an alarmed human, a stricken cat that I was told had jumped four feet in the air off the bed – sensing something strange in the darkness of the night, and a possum looking a bit lost. Instead of presence, it seems, everybody took fright.

Until recently the back door upstairs had been left open for the cat to come and go. With the recent cooling and windy weather it had been closed. The possum that lives in the roof got hungry and broke through the flyscreen on the kitchen window but didn’t remember to go out that way and ended up in the bedroom where the cat sleeps.

When I got there and turned on the light the possum was wandering about the kitchen floor looking for a way out so I herded him towards the door and up the veranda post he went to the ceiling, cool as a cucumber. There I got a picture of him and he didn’t seem to mind at all, he only wanted to get away from the trouble and calm down.

So that’s where the cat food had been going. The habit of hunger satisfied drove him in. A habit to be broken.

© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge