The Clearing

If you've already been to The Clearing, the "folk school" and artistic retreat in Door County, Wisconsin founded by Chicago landscape architect Jens Jensen in the early 1900s, the place needs no introduction. If you haven't, check it out at www.theclearing.org. These photos are from 2007 and 2010. What a place of serenity and bliss!

The Prodigal Newshound

The Sunday paper arrived at my house this weekend, tucked into its plastic delivery box just a little to the right of the rusting mail box. I carried it in with my groceries, thinking that it’s gotten a little lighter over the years, despite the raft of advertising inserts. I felt like I was bringing an old friend back to my house for coffee after an awkward estrangement.

This shouldn’t sound like a big deal, but it is to me. The newspaper box had fallen into disuse steadily over the past several years as I scaled back my newspaper reading from a daily schedule to the Sunday paper…and then to none at all. It became a convenient drop off point for unsolicited grocery store fliers, and home to the occasional family of large, black spiders.

Blame it on the Internet. Seriously.

Newspaper reporting was my first “real” job. I’m not counting the cocktail waitressing that paid the bills during my first three years of college. I started my journalism career as a stringer for the Milwaukee Sentinel, a large metropolitan daily, while I was still a college student. I then bumped up to the staff of the even bigger Milwaukee Journal after I graduated. There was a thrill and an immediacy to what we did as reporters back then. Of course feature articles took longer to percolate, and special investigative series could take weeks or months to put together.

But the bread and butter, the meat and potatoes of what we put into those column inches that appeared in print only hours after we phoned in our stories came with an adrenaline rushed, pressure-cooker immediacy. In the days before everybody and his mother had a cell phone, the ability to locate a pay phone in a courthouse or at a gas station somewhere in the middle of nowhere meant the difference between getting your story delivered to the copy desk before deadline and blowing it entirely. It was a thrilling, vital business to be part of. Woodward and Bernstein, the guys who broke the Watergate story in the "olden days" of typewriters and telephones with cords and dials, were our heroes.

People read newspapers on a regular basis for the actual NEWS, and then talked—or argued—about what they’d read. It was a shared experience, though who you shared it with depended on whether you subscribed to the morning paper or the evening one. Kind of like the way—before cable TV came along and fragmented the viewing public’s short list of what to watch—a lot of folks watched the same shows on the big three networks, and connected over the water cooler the next day.

The last time I remember having a conversation with anyone about something I’d seen on TV the night before, Tony Soprano was contemplating rubbing out another liability without much finesse.

As newspaper reporting gave way to motherhood and freelance writing, I eagerly awaited the arrival of the afternoon paper as my portal into what was going on in the world. Let’s face it, having toddlers around isn’t terribly conducive to sitting and calmly watching the evening news. But the kids started to grow up, and I switched gears and went to law school, and suddenly I got introduced to the world wide web.

Life got even busier, and the daily paper went unread more and more often, piling up in a corner of the kitchen in huge stacks to be hauled to the recycling center…or used to polish the glass doors on the fireplace. I scaled down the delivery schedule to weekends, then just Sunday. As I got more adept at navigating a computer keyboard, I flitted from website to website for the latest headlines—CNN, the New York Times, my local daily—a dozen times a day. I started to notice that the stories I’d seen on the internet were turning up in my local paper…the next day. The whole “deadline” quality of the print media seemed to have become a quaint anachronism n an age of instant updates and a twenty-four hour news cycle.

When even the Sunday paper started to pile up unread for days, I finally pulled the plug, letting my meager one-day-a-week subscription lapse. I must have gotten a dozen calls from the paper’s circulation department in the months that followed, trying to entice me to return, but I breezily declined. I was just too busy to read a newspaper right now, and besides, I got all my news on line. What could possibly top having the New York Times instantly at my fingertips?

I felt guilty every time I hung up the phone, like I’d spurned a faithful lover, but a combination of thrift and impatience and practicality carried the day. Reading a newspaper became a rare indulgence, relegated to killing time in airports or long road trips when someone else was driving.
And then, one day, I realized the things that I’d missed were things I couldn’t find on a desktop, and I couldn’t find in an instant. I missed the tactile pleasure of handling the pages and sorting through the various sections of the paper. I missed the three-dimensional element of reading deep into a story, and turning back to the front page to review some detail I wanted to ponder some more. I missed reading deeply into a story, period. I recognized, a little late in the game, that I never got more than two or three paragraphs into any story I read on a flat screen. I just hit the highlights and moved on, my curiosity sated, always cruising for the next interesting tidbit. Such is the nature of effortless instant news. There’s a lot of deep, meaningful stuff out there to be read, but my attention span for reading anything on a computer screen is a mile wide and an inch deep.

And doggone it, even though I’m over forty and I still missed the comic section!

My local paper came a’calling again recently, and this time I took the invitation. I felt a flash of spit-in-your-eye defiance as I wrote the check, but I felt a warm glow of reconnection too. I know the print media is hurting, and the future of many major dailies and newsmagazines around the country is a truly scary unknown.

But damn it, I’m glad I’m back on board for the ride.

Bluebirds of Happiness, Dandelions of Regret

The bluebirds and the dandelions are a package deal at my house.

If you’ve ever seen a bluebird fly past on sunny day, you know the feeling of being awestruck by a flash of color that looks like it couldn’t possibly have come from nature. That electric, neon blue never fails to make my heart leap with joyful recognition. For me, it’s what seals the deal that spring has finally arrived, bringing the answer to the eternal question, “will the bluebirds come back to the yard this year?”

They’ve nested in wooden birdhouses in the backyard for the past twenty five years, and the sight of them still stirs my heart. Males wearing coats of brilliant blue, females a duskier brown, they perch on tree branches and rain gutters and the swing set, eyeing the lawn beneath them, swooping down for one tasty bug morsel or another from the short grass, then lightly flitting back up to their perch to savor the meal. They are grace, and color, and precision in motion.

Dandelions, of course, need no introduction. A gorgeous, deep buttery yellow, they turn the front lawn into a carpet of cheerful golden blooms virtually overnight. The warm fuzzy feeling of seeing that many flowers in one place lasts about three days, maybe four. Then the cute yellow flowers turn into leggy, ugly stems with seed-heads spewing dandelion fluff everywhere and the plants themselves start to flourish, making the lawn look like a ragged salad patch for rest of the entire summer and fall. The first snowfall finally puts them mercifully out of sight.

The dandelion profusion has been working its way over years around the back yard too. I’d like to nuke them into oblivion and start over with sod. Or at the very least, hire some firm with a large truck full of chemicals and a well-designed ad in the Yellow Pages to sprinkle the yard with toxic fairy dust to make the weeds go away and replace them with lush grass to tickle my bare feet.

It’s been a fantasy of mine for years. In fact, pretty much every spring as the snow starts to recede and the faintest hint of green begins to shade the landscape, I survey my domain and say “yup, I’ve gotta call a lawn service one of these days.”

And then hesitation sets in, in the form of that little voice whispering “but what about the bluebirds?” Do I really want to see them cheerfully scarfing up a smorgasbord of tasty bugs basted in weed retardants? And then I know I’ll wait and see. Again. And if they show up, I’ll put off the whole chemical fairy dust solution for one more year, and just enjoy the bluebird show.

I wasn’t always a birdwatcher. Growing up in Chicago, the birds I remember pretty much consisted of the occasional duck paddling in a park pond, and the thousands of pigeons who strutted their stuff on the sidewalks of the Loop downtown, dodging foot traffic and taxicabs, a faint lavender sheen gleaming off their staid grey and white topcoats.

But marriage was followed a couple of years later by a move to the country, fields and trees in abundance. We followed a pretty traditional division of labor back then—he left in the morning to go to the office, and I stayed home with the baby and the dog, changing diapers and making dinner. There is just not much conversation you can get out of a toddler who’s under the age of two, or a dog of any age. And so what was outside my kitchen window started to catch my eye.

And oh, what a glorious profusion of things were waiting to be discovered! I found a small telescope somewhere among our belongings, and stood at the window over the kitchen sink like Captain Ahab astride the forecastle of the Pequod. I got a Roger Tory Peterson guide to the birds “east of the Rockies” and started to identify the residents of the countryside around me. Red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures, cardinals, chickadees, goldfinches, nuthatches, the variety was infinite, the amusement factor high. I didn’t need a bird guide to identify the red fox vixen who moved into a nearby woodchuck den with her four fluffy kits tumbling around her in the sunlight. I just felt a tug of maternal sympathy as she stoically sat, stiff as a ramrod, while the kits tumbled and played around her and nipped at her tail.

Eventually I got a pair of good binoculars for Christmas, and I parked them on the kitchen counter, between the microwave and the dish rack. They still don’t get to collect much dust.

Somewhere along the line when we first moved into the new house in the country, my father-in-law bemoaned the fact that when he was a young man, bluebirds had been common, but that he hadn’t seen one now for years. I wondered whether I could fix that. An article in the local newspaper about the efforts of various nature groups to provide bluebird nesting habitats steered me to a place to buy a couple of suitable nest boxes. I never knew birds could be so picky!!

Then, while killing time in a doctor’s waiting room, I skimmed a nature magazine and spied a short photo feature about someone who had reasoned that if you could decoy a duck, you should be able to decoy a bluebird. He’d cut a rudimentary bird shape from some plywood and painted it the right colors, and then snapped a picture of a male bluebird sitting atop the fake. It was one of those “eureka” moments, and I asked my father-in-law, whose retirement vocation was working with wood, to chisel me a three-dimensional decoy or two.

I can still hear his response, equal parts laughter, scoffing and incredulity. Still, he delivered. I dutifully painted one with my best imitation of nature—creamy white underside, rosy red chest, blue topcoat the brightest blue I could find. As soon as the paint was dry, I set the decoy atop the birdhouse closest to the house, with the most unobstructed view from the window over the kitchen sink. To be honest, that’s where most of my birdwatching takes place. My rule of thumb is…if I can’t see it while I’m washing dishes, it’s just not there.

Five minutes, tops. That’s how long it took for a gorgeous male to check out the new digs, discover that his rival was just a piece of furniture, and decide to move the family in. Some serious nest building followed, a tidy swirl of dried grasses mixed with the occasional long strand of hair from one of the horses’ tails. My father-in-law was truly impressed.

I’d bought the style of nest box that had a side door I could pull open and peek inside with. From everything I’d read, I’d learned that a pair of nesting bluebirds were unlikely to be spooked by the occasional visit from a human, and watching the pair’s progress as parents was fascinating. Day by day, one tiny blue egg was followed by another, then another, until the count was up to five and Ms. Bluebird started to settle in for the long haul. Sometimes when I opened the nest box door she blasted out of the hole in front, other times she just looked over her shoulder at me, unflinching, one busy, preoccupied suburban mom to another.

One pair of bluebirds or another have been raising their chicks in that same next box now for a quarter century. Well, not exactly the “same” next box, the originals finally fell apart a few years ago and when I went looking for replacements, found that the boxes with the side doors went for about thirty five friggin’ dollars each!! I paid it, though not without grumbling.

Being able to look into the nest is more than half the fun! There’s the anticipation of waiting to see when the actual “building” will start. Then guessing how many eggs will show up this time. The then chicks themselves—freshly hatched, eyes closed, impossibly tiny bundles of dark fluff and spiky little wing feathers with pale yellow beaks. They grow by leaps and bounds from day to day, until they’re speckled and plump and bright-eyed, jostling and jam-packed so tightly into the crowded box that they resemble a car full of clowns in a circus.

There have been dramas along the way. English sparrows, notorious for displacing bluebirds in violent fashion, had come to the yard in abundance for several years, drawn by the horses and the grain in their feed. They booted the nesting bluebirds out of their nest one year, but not before killing the babies. I was heartbroken.

Yet another year saw a freak late-spring six-inch snowfall just after the female bluebird had started to sit on her clutch of eggs. She bolted from the nest. I made quite a sight that morning, in a pair of snow boots and a long pink chenille housecoat, sprinkling a handful of mealworms from the bait section of the corner gas station on top of the next box to lure them back to the nest. It took them a long time to return.

I had my local ornithologist’s phone number committed to memory by this time, and I called him for advice. The eggs were most likely frozen at this point, the embryos dead, he said regretfully. There was nothing that could be done other than let the female return to the nest and brood them until she realized that none would hatch. Couldn’t I just rip the nest out and let them start over? I asked. No, he replied. Let nature take its course.

The next few weeks were torture. My heart broke for this little bird, who was doing such a diligent job of keeping her clutch of eggs warm, tragically unaware of the fact that they could never hatch. I called my ornithologist weekly, pleading for special dispensation to step in and rescue her from this empty exercise of maternal duty. The answer I invariably got was “no.”

Then, one sunshiny day, there seemed to be more activity at the nest than usual. I dutifully slogged out there, cutting a path through the tall grass to the box, which stood about eye-level on a metal pole. I popped the door open and looked inside, pessimistically expecting to see a melancholy tableau of motherhood denied. Mom wasn’t in the nest, but five tiny nuggets of fluff raised their heads at the intrusion, eyes sealed shut but curiosity still strong .

Against all odds, she’d done it!! I mentally saluted the universal tenacity of motherhood in the face of impossible odds.

I wonder how long bluebirds live, and how many generations of the same family have made a home in that same nest box. Bluebirds are known to be territorial, and generally require a distance of about three hundred feet from the next nesting pair to be comfortable. How do they divvy up the occupancy rights to this prime piece of real estate? After migrating south for the winter, do the kids come back to the old neighborhood just to visit where they grew up? Who gets to live in the old house once the folks have passed on or moved away?

Every fall, when it’s just before migration time, I’ll see the pack of this year’s crop of nestlings, with youthful speckles and bellies so huge from gorging on a bumper crop of summer insects that it seems unlikely that they could fly for a block, much less fly south for a few hundred miles. They mill around together, four or five of them, hanging out on the swing set or the back porch, checking out the bird feeder full of sunflower seeds, sampling the hulled seeds out of curiosity, just to see what was drawing in every other bird in the neighborhood.

They are a captivating, feathery link to the past, and a fond link to my late father-in-law, and a perfect joy in the present, and a source of hope and optimism that, at some time, it will be spring again. And for at least one more year, I can pretty well predict that while I may again think of calling a lawn service to finally kill off my dandelions next March of April…the smart money will still be on the birds.