Note: This was April, 2017, and I have to say that we were still thinking Winter was a female cat at that point. But one evening she (he) was washing her(him)self on the bed beside me and I became aware that we’d misgendered the cat who’d found us earlier in the year, walking out of the woods to join our household.
_________________
I dreamed last night of a stream filled with salmon smolts and on a rock in the stream, an orange-crowned warbler was dipping and doing knee-bends the way American dippers do. I was so close I could see the tiny russet-y patch on its head. When I woke, I was in a sleepy state of wonder. Such abundance — thousands of little fish in a clear stream, a bird I see sometimes foraging for insects in a wisteria beyond my study window, its dull olive feathers a foil for the beautiful crown it wears and which is rarely seen.
I think my dream was the result of a conversation we had at dinner last night. We were drinking the last of our Desert Hills syrah, dark and jammy, and a joy to have with roast lamb. At our table, facing the west, we’ve seen sunsets and dense fog. We’ve seen the trees fill in over the years, so thickly that a couple are going to be topped in a few weeks, not just because they obscure the view but because they lean to the house in wind. Sitting and talking with that deep red wine in our glasses, we started listing the wonders we’ve seen here over the years without ever searching them out. Was it luck, we asked, or coincidence? Maybe they’re the same thing? Maybe if you live in one place for 35 years, you will see everything there is to see?
Snakes mating. Northwestern alligator lizards mating. 6 chestnut-backed chickadees taking their first flight one after another from the cedar nesting box on the arbutus tree. A black bear sow passing within a few feet of the living room window with two cubs ambling behind her. A least weasel entering a narrow passage of our metal roof in search of mice and the same weasel on a branch of dog-rose, peering in the window as I drank my coffee in bed. A doe and her twins coming most mornings and shimmering in sunlight like gods. A margined burying beetle slowly carrying a dead mouse away to bury it. A coyote pup coming day after day for a week, pausing one morning to enter a dog-house (its original occupant long-dead), turn around, then sit in the entrance looking out at the world. A western toad sending out a sticky tongue to take sowbugs from my hand. A huge bull elk running into the woods, its antlers shedding their golden velvet.
Yesterday I was doing something in the vegetable garden and I saw Winter, the cat that came out of the woods in January and decided to live with us, crouched by a tangle of daylilies, thatched over by montbretia leaves. Something was in the tangle. Her body was quivering and alert. Then I saw a mouse come out of leaves and go up to her. It stopped about two inches from her face. It went back into the leaves. Then came out again and did the same thing, pausing for several seconds. Winter is a good mouser — we see evidence on the patio, on the decks… — so I was surprised that she did nothing. She seemed taken aback (if that’s not too anthropomorphic an explanation). It was a moment I’ll never forget.
I think now of my dream, the salmon all swimming quickly in the silver water, and I know it was about wonder. To stay alive to it.
“Ripples on the surface of the water—
were silver salmon passing under—different
from the ripples caused by breezes”A scudding plume on the wave—
a humpback whale is
breaking out in air up
gulping herring
—Nature not a book, but a performance, a
high old culture— Gary Snyder, from “Ripples on the Surface” (No Nature: New and Selected Poems)
...Theresa Kishkan 