Light of heart

I have been increasingly and ridiculously lighthearted lately.

I have resumed my mid-afternoon gigglefests at work. My coworkers have once again begun saying to each other, "There goes June, must be about 2:30," before they check the clock.

I have become a madwoman with my variegated hosta. I come home every day and rip into the big established clumps to separate them and spread them out to make the garden border continuous. The frenzy always starts with my simple intention of digging out one or two dandelions.
And then I notice, eye, the bare spaces in the edging around the shrubs, and think, "Oh, just this one clump."  And in half an hour my fingernails are packed with dirt, my palms black, my neck cramping and my head aching from the chilly breeze. There follows the self-congratulatory promenade to admire my work, to envision how the transplants will look in a few weeks when they've become accustomed to their new locations and round themselves out into hearty and fluffily exuberant bunches. Forgiving plants, hosta.

So many earthworms! Finding them inches deep in the dirt, I feel sorry to have disturbed them at their work, and carefully try to dig around them so as not to cut them into pieces. Not always successful with that, I hope that the ones that get . . . damaged . . . will be able to regenerate their missing parts; some can, if cut in the right places. I school myself not to think about it. I pick them up and set them aside, throw some damp dirt on top of them for safekeeping, and then replace them as I place the new planting. They're doing me a favor with their existence in my garden. I'd hate to look a gift earthworm in the mouth . . . or really, in any other orifice . . . should I be able to find it.

Here's a piece of new self-knowledge:  I like the singular feature. 
The wild trees along my route to my job are beginning to be a solid mass of new green.  I love seeing the spread of new growth, but part of my heart misses the odd one pale green tree, spring's sentinel salient among the gray and brown.
The graceful spare shadblow is blooming, sparse flowers among the indifferent disorderly brushwood. My mother called it shadblow. Its semi-formal name is serviceberry (dressed up in whitetie, Amelanchier). Maybe the ones that are cultivated . . . planted as decorative landscape trees . . . are serviceberry or Amelanchier. The unbound ones, I think, should always be called shadblow: the name suits their nature.

Image borrowed from Saratoga Woods and Waterways

Driving slowly up the hill to home, the car's tires scrabbling and shifting on loose small stones in the dirt road, I came upon a bird dawdling across the road. Unperturbedly aware of my approach, he sauntered, stopped, sauntered, so slowly that I was able to examine him through the driver's side window as I passed: a funny little banty-chicken-looking thing with a long thin neck and a little pointy crest on his head. I have seen ruffed grouse only a few times in my life: I had to come home and check my Audubon book to be sure that's what it had been.

Photo borrowed from A Passion for Nature, a blog I'll have to keep track of...

Wildlife North America has pictures of the male displaying, something I've never seen. Such a tiny thing exhibiting himself so proudly, exactly like a big wild turkey, is endearingly precious.