Morning Musings

ProfessorRoush owes his readers an apology.  You see, I tried to blog yesterday, but I couldn't find my muse anywhere.  I have so much to tell you, two days spent in the warm embrace of my garden and yet the words just wouldn't come tumbling out.   Wait, that's not right; words were spewing forth from the keyboard but they were missing a certain je ne sais quoi, missing a theme, missing a purpose, missing a soul.  Sometimes, if I wait, if I keep pecking away, if I have the right photo or subject to write about, inspiration strikes, but yesterday evening I was at the keyboard for over an hour and the passion just wouldn't come.  There was no blood in the writing, no lyrics in the language, just three unconnected pictures left unpublished and disharmonious random paragraphs that didn't sing to me.

But it was waiting for me, my muse, waiting to gently guide me into the prose, the spirit of the garden biding time until I saw it.  Did you see it, waiting still in the photograph above?  Two inches of rain last night and I was out at 6 a.m., checking the rain gauges and allowing Bella to continue killing grass in "her spot".   And there it was, right in my front bed, surprised at my early intrusion, a shy muse hoping that I wouldn't notice her, moving just enough so that I would.   

My senses are not nearly so attuned as Bella, but Bella was oblivious that she wasn't alone in her mandated morning micturition and was being watched from fifteen feet away.  Dogs, and especially pampered mongrel Beagles, are triggered by smell and sound, finely tuned to things that normally escape my notice, but I'm reminded again that Man is a hunter, "motion-activated" as it were.  Our eyes are forward, binocular vision judging distance and speed in an instant, always ready to flee or fight as only a savannah-born hominid can be. I don't know how many times that I'm watched in stealth and silence in my garden, but senses born from millennia of being stalked in the tall grass, of movement in my peripheral vision, always grabs my attention.  The fauna I find in my garden are nearly always moving; the long-tailed lizard darting away, the slithering prairie garter snake alarmed by my presence, or the running rabbit unpetrified by my nearness.

This one, this quiet rainy-morning rabbit, didn't stick around for my questions after posing for the photo.  I don't know what it was up to, hopping among my landscape, and it didn't want to be asked why it insists on eating my young roses or the early daylilies, nor wanted to be challenged for shunning the catchweed and the catmint.  I give it a home here, safe cover and quiet places to nest and grow, and is it really too much to ask that it limit its diet to the flora I call "weeds"?   Some gardeners, secure in their castles with armies of hired help, philosophically hold that weeds are just a plant growing in an unwanted place, but I realized this morning, fresh from two days spent weeding garden beds, that timid rabbits are still smarter then some garden writers.  Even rabbits have plant preferences, choosing the delicious and defenseless over the bitter and barbed.  My lesson from the garden this morning is that taste in plants, literally as well as figuratively, cuts across species.  That is not to say that I am ready yet to see this rabbit's admiration of my garden as an affirmation of my own good taste, but at least I can now allow that it has love for my tasty garden, rather than malice, in its rapidly thumping heart.