Like many other valley residents and visitors, I had a bit of a whirlwind weekend, traipsing around to several of the numerous community events that were scheduled on what turned out to be possibly the most picture-perfect weekend of September.
As I drove home from the final event on my weekend calendar — John Sirois’s fascinating talk on tribal sovereignty hosted by the Methow Valley Interpretive Center — I realized that it was Sunday night, which for many people simply means the end of the weekend, but for me means “time to write my column,” in advance of my Monday morning deadline.
There’s no rule preventing me from writing my column earlier in the week, which would pre-empt the Sunday crunch, but if I haven’t had an idea throughout the work week, I tend to put it off until the last minute, hoping that inspiration — or, even better, a reader’s suggestion — will magically appear in the interim.
Regrettably, neither materialized, and when darkness fell I found myself staring not at the post-Harvest Moon, but instead at the LED backlit screen of my computer monitor.
Suddenly, though, my eyes slid back to that moon. I stepped outside for a better look, and in doing so found that the coyote chorus that has been serenading my neighborhood lately seems to be practicing in a new location just a bit north of me. Had I remained inside, I wouldn’t have heard it tonight. Neither would I have caught just the faint trace of skunk that hadn’t been detectable an hour earlier when I arrived home.
That made me remember late afternoon the previous day, when my husband and I dealt with the remnants of the aftermath of a bear destroying two of our beehives a couple of weeks ago. Above the angry saw of the cloud of bees annoyed by our meddling, we heard the trumpeting of sand hill cranes in the field beyond us. As I carried defunct frames down to our bee shed, I was watched by the wide eyes of the fawn twins who, along with their mama, adopted our shady lawn as an oasis during the worst of the heat and smoke this summer.
All this noticing made me think of something said by the author and conservation biologist Tom Fleischner, who spoke at the Winthrop Barn earlier this month. He said that he defines natural history as “the practice of falling in love with the world.”
It’s generally an easy world to fall in love with, but the Methow Valley makes the practice almost impossible to resist.
