An Iowa Garden

Today, in a bright as a button morning, I was out wandering about the garden rather aimlessly (had you asked, I'd have told you I was surveying the day's projects). The neighbor- over -the -hill's tuxedo cat had ambled into the garden, and was sort of following me about at a respectful distance. He knows he's really not supposed to be down here, so everytime I'd look at him, he'd take a sudden interest in inspecting his toenails. Suddenly a mournful cry was heard, and repeated. At first, I thought it must be the cat, and thought perhaps he was crying for our two grey tabby and white kittens, who were absent, as early this morning I had taken them into the V-E-T to get S-P-A-Y-E-D (actually they may be better spellers than I've given them credit for, as Punkin' disappeared lickety-split around the side of the garage when I called them to put them in the truck). The cry that I heard in the garden was repeated again, and I realized that it was coming from the direction of the pond, and was a bird cry. Now, I've always been somewhat of an aficionado of lonely bird cries... nothing epitomizes the wildness and freedom of nature better. I love the clear, high call of the red-shouldered hawk, and the shrill whistle of the broad-winged hawk. Even the plaintive honking of a flock of Canadian geese, circling in the evening solitude, can make my heart beat faster. The call I heard today, however, was neither hawk nor goose... it instead brought back memories of fishing on Canadian lakes with my boyhood pals, Tom, Acie, and Jer-dogs... it was the call of the loon. I had heard loons crying many times out on the lakes in the far north, but had never heard one in Iowa, and was quite surprised to hear them today, as it just never occured to me that they obviously must migrate south in the winter, and therefore might show up on our pond in the spring or fall. So many of the things I see or learn in nature are things that are very obvious, but had just never occured to me before, or that I had never really consciously accepted as fact before. It's kind of like when I was younger, it never occured to me that my parents would ever have engaged in sex. Eventually, though, the presence of my older brother and sister, and myself, forced me to realize that my parents indeed had sex together three times... well , maybe twice, as my brother and sister were quite adamant that I was too goofy to have ever been cut from the same genetic cloth as them, and they had me half convinced they were right. I think it had something to do with a phase I went through, where I would quack like a duck all the time instead of talking. Well, anyway, it's awfully nice to have loons on our pond, with their shivery calls echoing up and down the wooded valley, if even only for a few days.