The bullheads lolling in the muddy shallows of Connecticut ponds aren’t big on concepts. They aren’t the thinking sort. These catfish don’t contemplate the arc of their lives, the way we do. They just spawn, eat, and die, never once leaving the sensate stream of right now.
So it was left up to me to wonder about the last few moments of a particular bullhead’s life last Friday morning. I had pulled over on my way to work to watch a great blue heron go about its early morning routine at a roadside pond. The heron claimed the pond as his own early this summer and seemed to favor the watery vegetated margins of the west side of the pond, which is where he was standing, stock still, that morning.
From the bullhead’s perspective, the long reedy heron legs rising from the muck looked rather ordinary against the cattail backdrop. They may have been the last ordinary sight he saw. The heron’s S-curved neck lunged like a lightening bolt, and its spear-of-a-bill lanced the unsuspecting catfish, jerked him up into the air, and after skillfully juggling the fish into position, swallowed him whole. If there were bullhead philosophers, I imagine they would fashion some fantastic end-of-life myths from this common scenario.
Great blue herons have the look of mythological birds, probably because we have seen them portrayed glyphically by the ancient Egyptians, who represented the mythological phoenix or benu, “the ascending one,” as a heron. In the floodplain of the Nile, the bird was associated with the sun as it would glide over the waters, or roost high up in the trees. Thus it became connected in spirit to the sun god Ra and was revered. It was created in the fire of a holy burning tree, according to the myth.

In the predawn darkness of October mornings there is nothing.
That is how it seems when Kate and I venture out for our early morning walk. Typically a passing cloud has come to rest for the night on our hill and will not rouse itself for another hour and a half, when the sun will rise and prod this foggy presence into evanescence with rude and ruddy fingers. But for us, earnest walkers, it does not stir. We are wrapped in its muffle and must make our way as rapidly as our fearlessness and familiarity with the road will allow.
From the nothing of such foggy mornings, the world reassembles itself — pebble by pebble, leaf by leaf, building by building — to reveal what another night has wrought. So by breakfast, at the kitchen table, it literally dawns on us that the world will continue pretty much the same as it was — though not exactly so: the leaf litter beneath the ancient maples has piled up a little higher; a nocturnal visitor (the opossum most likely) has buckled a sunflower stalk and scavenged the fallen seeds; and there’s a beer can in the road.
These are among the few new verses of the history of this hill left behind after the retreat of the dark and fog. None, however, are so elegantly written as the new web of the orb weaver spider in the top of the privet hedge. These circular intricate webs reach their biggest size at this time of year in the last few days and weeks before the hard frost, which irrevocably separates one spider generation from the next.

My fellow office workers know it is late September because they must confer blessings upon me a dozen or more times a day in the swirling wake of my sneezes — usually two or three in quick succession. Feeling a little too sanctified for the line of work I’m in, I encourage them to collectively convey a blanket blessing for the season and be done with it.
It’s just that I have an ample and sensitive nose, and the early fall air is a stew of stuff: pollen, leaf mold, and the plain old “dust to dust” of New England’s molting deciduous biomass. It is just too much to take in all at once. A few hearty sneezes clear the head and, if the indelicate truth be told, season the stew.
If you get out of the office and walk through the countryside, you will see nearly every wild plant is in the process of casting off something. It is the time of year when growing things loose patience with their rootedness and make travel plans — some more ambitious than others.
The hickory tree in my yard drops nuts in the shade of its own canopy. It can improve its range with a lucky bounce into the street and down the hill, or with the help of a forgetful squirrel who carries it to a distant stash it never finds again. But for the most part, its fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.

With the intense residential development of land in southern New England and especially in southwestern Connecticut, wildlife is on the move. Partridge, quail, fox, bobcats, and other birds and animals keep moving just ahead of the excavations and constructions, leaving behind only their names on street signs.

There are some creatures who have made their peace with development, however, settling into an easy cohabitation with people. Raccoons and the occasional black bear come nosing around garbage bins and birdfeeders looking for easy pickings, and deer have a notorious appetite for human horticulture. But few creatures are finding life in community with humans as easy as the Canada geese. It is for them, quite literally, a walk in the park.

Canada geese are especially fond of lawns and ponds, and suburban Connecticut has provided them with plenty of both. Countless manmade farm ponds have been absorbed into residential areas by creeping development, and fields and pastureland have been replaced by parks and manicured lawns leading right to the water’s edge.

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

So begins “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. Rereading this poem is, for me, the perfect way to unwrap the winter season. Start with the ribbons — great flocks of blackbirds twisting in the early November sky.

Nothing brings stark definition to the pale light on the cold side of the equinoxes quite like blackbirds. Stevens, himself an odd bird with a poet’s heart stuffed inside a lawyer’s dark suit, stuffed inside an insurance office in Hartford, saw this so clearly. He got it all down in 13 quick stanzas — an odd dark number — that perfectly captures the strange dance of animus and bleakness that is winter. Some of it is achingly beautiful.