Temporarily Blue

Temporarily Blue (see in Gallery / Store)| Image by Bruce Harris

The other night, my daughter said she saw a red fox on our backyard deck as dusk was going dark. More goldish eyes glowed from the border of the woods. She turned to get her phone. The foxes were gone.

I thought of this when I saw a bluebell where the fox brood had been. A single plant with a few strands sprung from between the wide leaves of a mayapple grove and dangling near an equally singular columbine. Lonely creatures. Neither had been there before.

The mayapple creates a shin-high green canopy, and now in spring, their shy white flowers hide in collective shade. It is clear how and why the mayapple has grown, each fortified by the other. But the columbine, like a wick’s last sparks, weathers the weather high above. The bluebell had given way just days ago. Ten months of earthbound rest for two in the sun. Their seeds came from somewhere I don’t know.

Chipmunks and mice, squirrels and sparrows, even just the wind, could have brought their seeds to this one spot in our yard where sun and shade and frost and rain made it the perfectly imperfect home.

I hear the coyotes howl at midnight on the golf course down the road. Hawks find an occasional perch. Owls with their echoey calls are close and unseen. Fox is new to me, and likely us to it, but little else is competition for the small meals scampering around our yard. Perhaps they will find our little plot oddly perfect and stay a season or two. Like the Columbine, like the bluebell, both reaching above the fray, together and alone.