The the cold gathers around us, adding an undeniably gorgeous crispness to the gilded monuments of Paris. I have days of liking it, and curling up with a good book and a hot cup of tea, and I have days of missing Paraná, where it is now late spring and beginning to be quite hot.
The jacaranda will have finished blooming, as will have the yellow ipê, but the tiger's claw and the golden medallion trees, with their red-orange and their yellow blossoms will be in floods of colour. As I read with incredible sadness that even the little house sparrow is disappearing in Europe's cities, I recall how much I delighted in Paraná at the abundant flocks of parakeets that would sweep and dive overhead as if a large scarf made of green birds were being spread and twirled above the trees. Their screeches always made me laugh and the children in the library run to the window to see.
We arranged to go to the countryside last weekend. It is a long drive, and we always arrive too late and too tired to be happy that we are there. The house was cold, as usual, and we had to rush about finding electric fires, and building and lighting a fire in the grate, checking for dead bats and mice, all the first arrival chores. In the morning, it is always nicer, the house warmer. Saturday morning was cold but sunny, and the woods were golden with about half the leaves still on the trees.
There were sparrows, to be sure, and great tits and blue tits. I feed them all when I am there. How long will they endure? My worry for nature extends even to the countryside for, the summer before last, there were no bees in all of France. It felt like the beginning of the end. There was no fruit in the shops, farmers had none on their trees or in their gardens. The many lavenders in our garden are bee magnets that usually fill the air with bees of all sorts, but there were none. Locals talked of nothing else. No one, not even the ninety-five year old granny on the farm across the dale, could recall a year of no bees. In all of my years of concern about global warming, pollution and the underlying cause of it all - overpopulation, I had only ever been angry. That summer was the first time I was frightened.
It was warm enough on Saturday afternoon for me to go about in jeans and a light shirt. I was on a ladder, tying the strands of climbing roses when I heard the most remarkable clatter above. I looked up and saw what must have been fifty or sixty storks in a scrambley flight south. They flew high and called to one another with an odd sound and they were many! In the 1970s, this bird was down to so few couples that extinction was a serious possibility, and it is back from the brink, not in plenitude, surely, but not so near disappearance as it once was. It was so beautiful and so hopeful, that very simple little event of nature, that I rejoiced. It will not be easy to save this planet's life forms, but there is reason for hope.
©2011 Anne Morddel
Seasons South and North
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