The Particulars of Place

My wife and I sleep outside half the year in a screened room with a transparent vinyl roof. Each morning, not necessarily at the same time but from the same direction, a flock of bushtits comes a-foraging past our bedroom. It’s a lovely example of a lovely phrase that Freeman House (author of Totem Salmon) uses: “engaging the particulars of place”. The existence of that bird route is “invisible” to anyone who doesn’t stay engaged with one place for an extended time. Learning of it makes the place a little more wondrously patterned and makes one’s existence within it a little more knowingly blessed.

A similar thing happened with my students. I was working with a first grade class, showing them many examples of how flowers develop into seeds. We were examining a patch of gumplant (Grindela) when one of the kids noticed two insects in the dry, empty receptacle of one plant. They were mating. I looked in others and found another pair. I had kids start looking and probably 25% of all the empty receptacles had a pair of mating Hemiptera. (Reminded me of box elder bugs.) The next week, I was with another group in a different place with gumplant at a slightly different developmental stage. Kids started examining them and discovered large larvae in the seed heads eating the seeds. Could these be the larvae of the bugs we had seen mating? We brought back some seed heads. Two days later, kids in Alysia’s class noticed the larvae coming out of these classroom seedheads and crawling up and down the stem. The ensuing discussion inspired Alysia to walk the class back to the patch of gumplants. The kids found larvae curled up around the stems beneath the seed heads of 50% of the plants. (At some point in time, this might lead to a discussion of what effect does this insect have on the gumplant if the larvae eat 50% of all the seeds?)

We look forward to special holidays. And as we learn more of nature, we accumulate more special days such as the return of the salmon or the first swallow or the first monarch. As we continue studying the place, more and more special days accumulate until, presumably, every day many uniquely spectacular things are happening.