Owls in the Garden

Last night the teenagers, out to walk the dog in the dark, discovered -- well, all right, not owls on the backyard grass, but an owl, to be visited by which is to be brushed sufficiently by the wingbeats of mystery, don't you think? I didn't see it. They watched it, holding on all the while to a dog who had decided to feel protective and unfriendly, until at last it went away, with the aforementioned wingbeats of mystery. It was huge, the teenagers told me, the size of a toddler, and its wings shadowed the grass as it flew.

I should not share this information with my friend K., who has a small dog and lives in fear that some bird of prey will stoop down someday on her garden and bear Pegotty away into the eternal blue stratosphere. As my dog weighs sixty pounds -- more, probably, since he's taken to climbing into the compost bin to eat the eggshells and coffee grounds -- this is not a worry which keeps me awake at night, and so I am glad to know that an owl visits my yard in the after hours, when no one is abroad but my teenagers and (see dog, above). It's like being visited by . . . well, not an angel, and not a ghost, not something that would walk over your grave, but by the reminder that complex and intelligent lives go on on the periphery of my own, which of course lies on the periphery of theirs. Being visited by an owl, I feel the way Helier did when we read a book about microscopic life in a drop of water. Pages and pages of amoebae and protozoae and euglenae and so on:  he listened stoically enough, but later  he came to me and said, "Imagine. Whole other worlds, all around us."

If the natural world is like this, invested with mystery, all on the plain of the purely material,  then it's hard to see why belief in things like angels, for example, or heaven, is such a stretch. I have a harder time believing that the bus will come on time, or that the rest of the soccer team will show up for practice (today they didn't, but that was because I'd gotten the day wrong), than I do believing that unseen presences walk with us, or that our beloved dead are nearer than we think and knowable to us, as we are knowable to them. Things go on beyond our imagining;  why shouldn't we imagine them, and more?

Meanwhile, like everyone else I'm fed up with summer. After longing for it, after shuffling around my house in layers of clothing and huddling by the open over door in the mornings, for month upon endless month -- geesh, I can't write things like that without breaking a sweat, even with a box fan blowing full in my face. And yet it's not the heat so much as the longing for order that strikes me about this time every year. The fireflies have gone away, and now children running around the yard in the dark strike me not as icons of joy and freedom but as hooligans who need to be jailed for their own good and that of society:  jailed and read to, ten chapters of Swiss Family Robinson every night. Some of their friends went back to school today;  others will go next week;  we are making one last trip of the summer, to take Epiphany to college, then it will be all up for us, too.  There's the winged mystery of the great dark sultry night, and then there's the orderly daylight mystery of what we might do together this year, given enough books and some nice rain outside.

Oh, and this cicada who's been flying into the window behind me for the last two hours? Whenever I'm tempted to feel, for whatever reason, that I've been wasting my life on one small pursuit or another, I do well to contemplate the fact that some creatures wait seventeen years for the privilege of trying to fly through glass before they die.