Life on the Ranch, Still Amazing

The monarch butterflies are tending to business and the passion flowers are in bud as I see them on my way in the mornings through the swamp to pick up the newspaper.

Late spring here in Central Florida, most of the trees except for the hickories are in leaf, and the woods are now a delicate and delicious light and lacy green. The big cypress trees are in leaf and I can even forgive the oak trees for spitting out so much pollen.  With all the unexpected rain for this time of year, and with no freezes during the winter, nature is in full blast.

With every year I live here, I notice hundreds more wildflowers and, on my morning inspection I see the tracks and scat of the animals who share this place with us.

I am beginning to be able to name so many of these creatures and plants whose ecosystem I share. I never want to see another zoo. Far better to get sightings of a bobcat, a fox, a fox squirrel, two snakes, too many deer to count, the alligator in the pond, the cranes and their two chicks, so many birds! All this in one day.

Sleeping with the windows and door open, I often hear the barred owls chuckling and hooting(now in mating season), and I hope to hear the whippoorwills that I used to hear a few years back. After the last cold snap we cleaned out the fireplace and closed the damper because it's time for the chimney swifts to return. They have always come just a month later than the hummingbirds, and now it's time.

I notice some subtle changes, even in the seven years we have lived here full time. Not so many birds in the night jar family, no wood storks for several years,  fewer ducks on the pond, not so many goldfinches, more hummingbirds who demand service. Fill those feeders, now!

It used to be that the only sounds of modern life we heard here were the train horns and some airplanes. Now, more often, we hear helicopters, and from the next door ranch, the noise of sports events. Google Earth has its eye on us. More of our neighbors seem to be shooting guns, and we hear that. The sky is increasingly more polluted with lights from distant football games, encroaching development, and neighbors' giant security lights.

Wrens have nested in the barn and in the glove box of the golf cart and in the tractor, and who knows where else? They are constant.

 But still, I can go outside right this minute and see clouds racing across a half moon and Orion trying to be seen in the wake of a weather front, and fireflies low in the palmettos. In the words of Walt Whitman, these things adorn the parlor of heaven.