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Mid-May, With Wrens

Comical fledglings now appear out of the striped planter (kind of like this, only deeper) in which they’ve been nesting. I watch them blunder into the ivy and try to fly out of it.

These are house wrens with a vengeance. The planters sit inches from UD‘s front door; the birds seem positively to want my company.

You could say wrens are dull. A poet picks up a dead wren, and when he lets it drop

my hand changed for a moment
By a thing so common it was never once distracted from
The nothing all wrens meant

But my wrens sing beautifully, even meaningly; and they have an alluring Madeleine Albrightesque insistency about them, emanating from their sharp eyes and puffy chests. They certainly mean to reproduce, and to express themselves – which covers a good deal of what anyone does…

May is busting out all over in Garrett Park; the wren nest is one of several in UD‘s front yard. Yesterday a caterpillar worked its way along Mr UD‘s arm as he sat on the deck reading. Rabbits of course are everywhere.

I’ve been spraying the front steps to get rid of wasps in the brickwork. I’ve been poisoning the poison oak. My neighbor Caroline has installed elegant high black fencing to keep out deer. Only a bright red door in the fence gives you access to her back garden.

We are all trying to hold back, even as we invite, the natural world.

Margaret Soltan, May 12, 2015 1:28PM
Posted in: snapshots from home

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2 Responses to “Mid-May, With Wrens”

  1. Contingent Cassandra Says:

    Robert Lowell got wrens right, at least based on my experience with the ones who nested in the enormous American holly entangled with the porch of my childhood home. In “For the Union Dead,” Lowell describes Colonel Shaw, as depicted on the monument, as having “an angry wrenlike vigilance,/a greyhound’s gentle tautness.” It may be relevant that, at the time, we had indoor/outdoor cats, and let them in and out through the door opening on the porch. I seem to remember a good deal of scolding of unaccompanied humans as well, but maybe there was some guilt by association involved.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Contingent Cassandra: “Angry wrenlike vigilance” captures it.

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