Reading Our Region
Essays from a Regional Writer
Susan Charkes enjoys hearing and telling stories, especially those involving the environment, farming, and sustainability in our region. Discover her poetic view of the outdoors and be inspired to visit the places she describes. Learn more about Susan, her writing, and even hear her podcasts at www.susancharkes.com.
Sample these selected writings:
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Winter Paths
by Susan Charkes
From my window I look down on the narrow backyard, a scroll of blank snow that over the course of the day records and reveals purposeful movement. Tracks appear where juncos, sparrows and finches on seed-gathering expeditions have traced paths on the back porch up to the coir welcome mat, around the flower pot, on the railing across the short gulf from the pole feeder. Through the yard they go, up and over the oak tree stump, along the fence, under the azalea and around the garden statues. Each is a record of intention, the shortest distance between multiple points: a complex algorithm that incorporates relative risk from watchful cats and potential reward from the steady supply of the feeder or the chance that new windblown seeds are hidden under the mat... the likelihood of meeting a competitor, the safety in numbers of the flock vs. the potential bonanza of the lone grubstake. Not just tracks, but graphs of probability and possibility, the calculus of a life lived.
The forms of trees stripped bare of leaves are tracks as well, journeys in search of light. Time has etched the path of yearning into static shape, a trail of decisions made, neighbors accommodated, opportunities taken. A complex calculation is at work within the tree, too. A tree is a single organism but also a collection of chemicals that interact with each other, a communications network. Information about the availability of sunlight and nutrients is conveyed throughout the tree by hormones that either stimulate, or inhibit, growth: every new branch will use resources that the tree could otherwise use to grow taller, and vice versa, but new branches, with all their additional leaves, also represent potential sources of new energy. Shoots start growing from buds only when the result of the multivariate branching equation says “now.”
Winter traces the paths of water into solidity. Drop by drop down the tree branch, the rock face, and the rain gutter, dripping water slows to a halt; little by little the icicle forms, suspending water’s inevitable passage to ground. …High above in the sky, vapor finds a drifting particle of dust; water molecules spin and turn, aligning themselves into orderly crystals: the unique shape of each snowflake represents the path that each molecule took and the atmospheric conditions of its journey. …. Exhaled breath is a cloud of droplets, the hidden constituent of air and the body, now made visible as life lends energy to that which gives it being; the beat of time exposed as a series of clouds.
Winter is when time slows and stops, when the eternal present finds itself surprised by evidence that it is now past, when the promise of the future hangs in a drop of frozen water at the end of a tree branch: a seed, a flutter of wings.
© Susan Charkes 2010