Journal Entry #10– Backyard Wilderness

This morning I sat in the backyard to get some sun and write in my journal. I closed my eyes, grounded myself in the environment around me, and listened. 

I noticed the Carolina Wren two trees over, singing louder than he is big. The squirrel chattered at me from another tree, frustrated that I haven’t refilled the bird feeders yet. 

The Starling flew back and forth to the nest in the vent opening of the house with insects and tufts of grass. Earlier, I heard the thump-thump of her feet in the ceiling as she hopped down the vent tunnel to her babies. 

The sun is bright and the sky is blue and clear. The sun seems extremely bright today, and the leaves of the tree that hangs over the yard bounce the light back while also casting a deep shadow at the fence corner below. 

The backyard is small, perhaps less than twenty feet in length, but holds a wilderness of clover, young saplings, and patches of bare dirt. 

The black dirt is still a little moist in the shadows from a light shower that came through a few nights ago, but everywhere else is dry. We are under a fire danger from the low humidity and high winds. 

I wonder if there are any four-leaf clovers in the patch? Or five, six, or even seven-leaf clovers? I recently read about a boy who found six-leaf clovers in his yard, and another boy who found a seven-leaf clover. I decide I will look later today at this patch when I fill the bird feeders to please the squirrel.

I’m looking at the carpet of dried leaves that cover the black dirt when a stray brown leaf flutters down on the breeze and lands on my journal page. I pick it up to study it and draw it. The veins remind me of my own blood veins. The veins on the dried leaf spread out from the center line towards the edge but before touching the edge, they curve back to connect to the next vein above it. 

The sun fed the leaf as it also feeds me as I sit here absorbing the rays. I wonder, what tree is this? The leaves are small and long oval in shape. The bark is skin smooth with bands of green and dark greenish-brown. 

It is home to the Green Anole Lizard I watch every afternoon on his routine walkabouts down the branch, down the trunk, and drops down onto the fence rail. After a series of pushups and flaring his dewlap, he ambles his way across the top of the rail until he hops over to the next yard. 

This tree is a perch for the Starling before she flies up to her nest in the house. It’s a resting place for the mob of sparrows that bustle through on their way to somewhere else. It’s home to the tiny ants that will trail down the branch when they discover the new hummingbird feeder hanging below. 

The tree reaches across the yard, stretching toward the sun, and almost touches the roof. It shadows the corner of the yard below and filters sunlight between its leaves to the clover patch below, their tall stems pushing up snowball-like clusters of white petals as high as they can. 

A skink trots out of the mini-forest, a brief shimmering band of turquoise glints along his back as he tilts his tiny dinosaur head up at me and looks me in the eye. We hold a gaze for this moment, and then he turns and trots back into the forest. 

This brown leaf, that landed on my journal page, dried up in a curl of dark gold and brown, once held the essence of all that I just noticed and is now returning to the black soil to feed once again, the soul of this little backyard wilderness.

Comment and Subscribe!

What new things have you noticed this week? Tell me in the comments below! And be sure to subscribe to the newsletter.