Chicago Cultural Center

While I was in Chicago for the National Federation of Press Women's annual conference, I moseyed over to the Chicago Cultural Center, which in fact is the original Chicago Public Library, dating from the 1800s. Since I'd never been inside while I was a teenager growing up in the Windy City, it was the perfect time to get acquainted and appreciate the absolutely marvelous architectural features and accents.

Prisms, Perspectives and Paperbacks

It was a dark and stormy night…

Well, I don’t remember if it actually was stormy, but it was definitely dark, and it was most definitely night. Dead of winter, in fact, the perfect time to settle in with a fire snapping in the grate, a blanket on our laps, some popcorn, and hot chocolate with kahlua and whipped cream and a sprinkle of nutmeg.

The movie playing Chez Mary was “Where Eagles Dare,” a winter WWII classic released in 1968 and based on the novel by Alistair MacLean. We settled in for an evening of sure-fire drama, adventure, entertainment, and, lest I forget to mention, Richard Burton with those mesmerizing blue eyes and crisp Shakespearean diction, and Clint Eastwood looking impossibly young. With the beginnings of his trademark squint… but no crows feet yet.

The puzzle box of a plot involved English and American intelligence agencies, a captured American general involved in planning the invasion of Normandy, and an impossible attack on an impregnable German fortress located high in the Bavarian Alps and accessible only by heavily guarded cable car. I’ve seen the movie at least a half-dozen times, and trust me, lots of stuff blows up. The body count is impressively high. I’ve read that despite Clint Eastwood’s reputation for cinematic violence in his other films, his character hit a personal record in this film. It’s very much a “guy” flick. Oh, but did I mention, it’s also got Richard Burton. Sigh...

Scenery, atmosphere, danger, betrayal, suspense, fireballs, murder, mayhem. Where else could my mind possibly wander? But it was something else entirely that caught my eye as the camera panned the snowy village streets at the base of the fortress.

“Man,” I said as I sat up straighter and took notice. “Would you look at the size of that pile of firewood!”

We both laughed. I’m sure it’s nothing that Alastair MacLean or the film’s director ever anticipated while writing the scene or framing the shot. But I look at split sections of hardwood with a new appreciation these days. And at the same time I was digging the irony of finding—if just for an instant—a pile of sticks more riveting than the demise of the next Brit in the lineup, I was remembering something journalist Bill Moyers said in an interview about twenty five years ago.

It was about how our perspective comes with a past.

Over the past several years I’ve come to grasp first-hand just how much work goes into cutting down a tree, sawing it into logs, lugging the pieces across the yard to the log-splitter, stacking the split logs in the garage for winter, and hauling all the spare cracked branches to a bonfire and burning them for hours. Now I look at every cord of split wood with new appreciation. And a pile of split logs the size of a bus in a German alpine village was indeed, to my eyes, epic.

Back when I was covering public television programming as a freelance writer, I had the good fortune to interview television journalist and author Bill Moyers for a magazine article. Moyers was promoting a series, "The Power of Myth," based on interviews he had done with philosopher Joseph Campbell, best known for his studies in comparative religion and comparative mythology.

Moyers had worn many hats in the course of his career. He was a respected journalist, but he was also an ordained minister. And at one point, he had served as fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson’s White House Press Secretary. I asked Moyers about whether it was difficult to keep his objectivity at times.

And the answer that he gave me, that we inevitably see life through “the prism of our own experience,” has stayed with me since then. I thought about it when my eyes lit up so unexpectedly at the sight of stacked cordwood.

It came back again recently in a completely different way. But, I think sometimes, you can come to see things through the prism of someone else’s experience too.

For the third time in six years, I was attending the “advanced writers workshop” at the artist’s retreat known as “The Clearing” in Door County, Wisconsin. The first time I had gone there I signed up as a regular student, dutifully trying to keep up with class discussions and assigned readings and writing activities. The second and third time I registered for “independent study.” This meant I could attend as many classes as I felt like—and play hooky as often as I felt like—and not feel guilty if I didn’t write a line that had been was assigned.

I admit that I skipped a couple of afternoon sessions to nap on a sandy beach, feeling my soul replenish to the sound of the waves and sea gulls nearby. And I blew off one day of classes entirely, taking the ferry boat over to neighboring Washington Island with my friend Paula.

But one thing I always looked forward to was hearing every word that came from our Master and Commander, Norbert Blei. Norb is a legend in Door County, and in his native Chicago’s writing circles as well. Poet, writer, journalist, instructor, he has long conducted these writing workshops at The Clearing. I know that every time I sit down at one of his sessions, I’m going to leave it with a few more windows opened in my mind, and with a new sense of wonder for some writer or form of writing that I had never contemplated.

Another one of Norb’s cornerstones is his small publishing company, Cross+Roads Press . Over time I’d bought a few of the books he’d published—one from the back of his car, in fact, at The Clearing. But I can’t say that I really paid much deep attention. For starters, when it comes to reading, I’m mostly addicted to state-of-the-art modern suspense novels. Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, Bernard Cornwell’s modern sailing thrillers from the nineties, a book’s got to have a strong whodunit element (and some righteous retribution) to keep me reading. Or even to pick it up from a shelf in the first place. I want an author with a reliable track record, some positive blurbs from major newspaper reviewers, and a catchy hook on the back cover to draw me in.

And then…well, I don’t know what else. Just go back to “the first thing.”

This time was different, though.

After an absence of a couple of years at The Clearing, Norb was back at the helm of the writing workshop. The group that assembled was largely a collection of familiar faces, writers who had been coming to Norb’s sessions for years for inspiration, guidance and fellowship, wrapped in the environs of a wonderful, thoroughly care free week in the piney woods by the shore.

Norb had been going through a very rough stretch in his health in the months before this year’s workshop, and the extent of his participation hung very much in the balance. He has since made a spectacular turnaround—read his recent essay about thanks and recovery and second chances in N.B.Coop News —but from the moment he walked into the first class, there was a stifled gasp and a collective holding of breath from the assembled writers at realizing what a tough road he had traveled. And how much uncertainty still lay before him.

As the week went on, Norb visibly drew strength from being back in his familiar seat, enjoying the give and take of challenge, and encouragement, and reminiscence, and providing our introduction, once again, to new frontiers.

But one session in particular seemed to have an echo of personal urgency, as Norb spoke at length about the importance of the “small press” in the publishing world, and his own efforts to give previously unknown writers a voice. With his own future a sea of dark and uncharted waters, he seemed a man determined to put on record, before this group of close friends and admirers, the gentle ferocity and depth of his devotion to this realm of art.

He spoke of his individual authors and their personal stories and voices and visions, of course. But he also described the complicated creative process of finding just the right design, just the right paper, just the right format, just the right art, to frame these voices and channel them to a wider audience. Not that much wider, since typically a press run topped out at perhaps 500 books, period. But words in print, nonetheless, available in eye-catching three-dimensional form to be picked up off a shelf and pondered, purchased, dog-eared and ultimately shared.

He described the evolution of one of these projects, a collection of poetry and prose called “White Shoulders” written by Wisconsin poet Jackie Langetieg and published in 2000. The book, a series of complex conversations between the author and her dead mother, is now out of print. But before it even saw print, an artistic decision had to be made as to how to showcase the words themselves. Langetieg joined in the discussion here, and described how she had envisioned a homespun sort of cover art. I think she mentioned something about a porch and a rocking chair.

Norb, however, had his eye on higher, finer things, and his vision and belief held sway. The book’s cover is stunning in its power and simplicity—white, with a symbolic close-up of classic white marble statuary, one figure resting its head on the shoulder of the other, a set of fingers relaxed and languishing at the back of a neck in casual embrace. Langetieg said that when she opened the box of her new books and saw their power and beauty for the first time, she wept.

And I finally “got it.”

The prism of my experience shifted right there. I began to look at “small press” books as labors of love assembled from many directions. Individual treasure boxes full of passion and hopes and dreams and unique talents. That surge of wonderment stayed with me, tumbling in my head, for the entire drive home, mile after mile accompanied by a sense of wonder and newfound recognition. It stays with me still.

The next time I manage to escape to a bookstore, I don’t expect I’ll be in such a hurry to blow past the smaller stuff to get right to the rack of mega-selling paperbacks. There’s a bright new pleasure I’ve discovered in exploring this different realm, seeing not just the words themselves but the passionate belief and creative energy that physically set them into print.

Kind of like how I can stare now at a neatly stacked wood pile and value it right back to when it was still a tree standing in the woods.

Just like your favorite eyeglasses...it’s good to get your prisms adjusted once in a while.

Garage Archeology

The old leather bridle was stiff in my hands as I tried to pry open buckles and ties that hadn't been touched in more than fifteen years.

It was a hot, muggy summer afternoon, and beads of perspiration ran down the sides of my face and dripped off my chin and down my chest. A good time to sit in the shade, sip a glass of lemonade over ice, and watch the goldfinches alight at the thistle feeders.

Instead, I was dismantling pieces of my past on a beastly hot day in an effort to make more sense and order of my present. In other words, I was cleaning out the garage.

A project like this is almost never my idea, and that was certainly true here. But the man in my life has held sway on such epic undertakings for several years now. Once we'd finished the patio--okay, that one was my idea after twenty years of yearning for a patch of evening shade next to the house--reorganizing the garage was next. It was an offer I couldn't refuse. How often do you get help that's both eager and willing on such an awful task?

Plan "A" had been to rent a dumpster for a couple of days and spend a weekend joyfully pitching all extraneous clutter that had built up for a quarter century. Most of it not traceable to me. It had started out as a three car garage. At the moment it barely had room for two. Upon learning that a dumpster rental would cost me $350, however, I recalibrated and went to Plan "B". That considered that my own trash pickup service would work just fine if I made the effort to diligently recycle everything in sight.

We knew that this stage of things would require a more delicate hand and a finer sense of traige, so for the first two days of creating order from chaos, the field was mine. I knew I would inevitably be going back in time. I just didn't know how far.

The first order of business: I put an ad on Craigslist for the log-splitter with the hydraulics that were shot. I got thirty replies in 24 hours. It was gone in sixty seconds. So far, so good.

The first few hours of "pitch and toss" were like opening miscellenous door prizes. What on earth would I find? Two unopened Kleenex boxes dating from 1997. A cassette tape featuring Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake." Post-It page markers and a copy of a 2001 issue of Smithsonian Magazine. (Nowhere near my personal record of the 1987 copy I found when cleaning out the bedroom closets, but worth putting in the bathroom reading rack nonetheless.) Two itty-bitty pocket knives with itty-bitty scissors, and a pretty good magnifying glass. A "Magic 8-Ball" pen that still wrote.

I tried to look at the place like a newcomer--asking myself, "what doesn't belong here?" The child-size fainting couch with velvet upholstery missing two of its four legs, for one thing. The styrofoam tombstones that get put on display in the yard about every third Halloween. Where to put them? The extra basement, already cluttered nearly to the brim from emergency cleanings. I took one rusting children's bike to the end of the driveway and propped it against the trash can in hopes that the local "garbage fairy" might take it off my hands. By morning it was gone. I walked a second bike down to the end of the drive. It disappeared too.Inevitably, though, as I worked my way toward the far walls, the discoveries became less trivially amusing and more personal. In a collection of assorted papers, I found a watercolor of a bird I had painted in high school, illustrating some words in French I no longer remembered how to read.

I picked up a polyethylene grocery bag that had a lumpy profile and turned it upside down. A jumble of empty, clean plastic peanut butter jars and lids cascaded into the red garden cart. That one made me scratch my head for a minute ... until I noticed that the lids all had tiny holes drilled into them. Butterfly cages! Though not exactly.

But evidence that I'd spent years looking through fields of milkweed plants in summer after summer with the children when they were small, turning over hundreds of leaves to find Monarch butterfly eggs shaped like tiny pearls or nearly microscopic striped caterpillars munching away on fresh greenery. We brought them home and installed them in the jars, feeding them an ever-fresh supply of milkweed leaves, watching as each tiny caterpillar doubled and doubled and doubled in size until it was roughly the size of a little finger, then spun silk and hung itself upside down from the lid, transforming into a shiny green chrysalis with a row of tiny gold spots. Then waiting, and watching, and waiting, and watching, until one day the green chrysalis started to darken and turn black before, voilà, a butterfly emerged, wings cramped and crumpled like tissue paper, body huge and filled with fluid that would slowly pump into the wings until they were taut like kites over a frame. We set them free on the flowers in the garden and nearby trees, giggling at the scratchy feel of tiny butterfly feet clinging to our fingers as we searched for a good "takeoff" point.

Behind sets of rusting golf clubs lay a collection of plastic beach toys. They were covered with dust and spider webs, but sand from long ago still clunging to their crevices. I smiled and remembered blissful days of summer picnics on a blanket by Lake Michigan, a cooler full of bologna and turkey sandwiches, Doritos, Capri Sun juice bags with their colorful foil wrappers and tiny strawsm, Chips Ahoy cookies, seagulls hovering comically for scraps. No recycling bin for these. The beach toys were set aside for a good scrubbing with soap and water. I have hopes that some day I'll take grandchildren to the shore with a picnic lunch and an agenda of moated castles to build.

After disposing of the cumbersome and long-unused "grass bagging assembly" for the lawn tractor (Craigslist again, halleluiah!!), I finally reached the long neglected section that held my riding gear from when my horses and kids were both still young. My first saddle, bought when I was only eighteen, sat on a metal tree, miraculously intact. I pulled out a long-handled black horse whip with a longer braided tail--called a "lunging whip"--and it suddenly took me back to the age of twenty when I was training my first horse. Many sunkissed evenings pleasantly went by as my young buckskin gelding walked and trotted in thirty-foot circles around me at the end of a long line, guided by voice commands and the occasional tiny crack of the whip whistling in the air behind his haunches. Those days, and at that age, the world was still new and anything was possible.

I used to be pretty good with that whip, I remembered, able to clip the heads off daisys with precision. I stepped into the yard and took aim at a nearby dandelion. It had nothing to fear from me. A few more flicks of my wrist, and the dandelion was still standing, laughing at me. I gently stood the whip against the garage wall next to the saddle. Some things I would never part with, the memories they held were so rich.

But when it came to the bridles, this was another story. The bits and buckles had gone rusty, and the leather grown mildewed and stiff and dirty with cobwebs. And so there I stood, conscienciously dissassembling them so that the metal components could get recycled and some shred of usefulness in the cosmos remain. I felt a sense of my own history passing, and tried not to get impatient at how long the task was taking in the ferocious heat. Two bridles into the project, I took another direction.

Beside the saddle, a long flat cardboard box was resting across two saddle trees. It was addressed to my older son ... and it was empty. It took me a minute to conjure the meaning, but this took me back to another beach and another vacation. For several years we had taken the kids to St. Simons Island on the southern Georgia coast. During our last vacation, we had bought several "wake boards" for some beach fun.

A couple were made out of styrofoam, and it was no great loss to leave them behind. But my son had acquired one made of plywood, with a marvelous shark design, and didn't want to leave it behind. Besides, he was the only one in the family who could balance on a wakeboard instead of landing flat on their backside in the water. It was too big for carry-on luggage, so what were we to do?

Necessity being the mother of invention, we improvised as we drove to the airport. We found a K-Mart or something like it, and I ran inside to buy strapping tape, a magic marker and a cutting tool. Then we drove to the back of the store and scavenged for scrap card board. The package we assembled was more tape than cardboard ... but it did the trick, and the airline accepted it as checked luggage. Those were simpler, more innocent times in so many ways, not just for us but for the world. When you could walk on to a plane with a box cutter in your purse and nobody thought twice about it.

As I worked my way deeper into the corners, the excavation took on an air of real mystery. In a secret compartment of a forgotten workbench, I found what appeared to be the legendary long-lost "mouse graveyard." I whisked the tiny skeletons up with my newly purchased shop vac, but not before saving one as a souvenir...just for the day. Finally, there was just one opened bag sitting in a corner, large, silver, with contents that couldn't be determined by nudging from the outside. I opened it a crack, and the unmistakable awful scent of generations of mice and their leavings wafted up. Phew. Was this was Howard Carter was thinking when he first opened King Tut's tomb?

I heaved the bag, still closed, into the wheelbarrow, and took it outside where fresh air would make the sorting task less intolerable. I took a small peek inside again. In the musty gloom I made out the spine of a book that dated back to my teenage years on the farm. Oh my god. What a fitting denouement. This last bag was a portal to the years before my ex and I build this house or garage, a cache of relics I had grabbed from the farmhouse before my parents sold the place.

I pushed the wheelbarrow into a patch of shade, and pulled up a comfortable lawn chair. A treasure trove awaited me among the mouse doots. A four-album set of Benny Goodman records ... playable at 78 r.p.m. Homework from my sixth grade class at Maternity B.V.M. Catholic school in Chicago. I had never kept a diary or a journal when I was a young girl, but in looking over a program from a high school concert, I learned just what day I was on stage playing a Beethoven sonata at Immaculata High School near Chicago's lake shore. There were more watercolors, again, and high school group science reports, and a rusting egg separator. The mice, I noticed, had demonstrated discriminating taste when it came to books. They had cheerfully gnawed and burrowed their way far into a collection of plays by William Shakespeare ... but had left the tales of Edgar Allen Poe largely untouched. "Classics Illustrated" versions of Black Beauty and Robinson Crusoe were likewise well appreciated, along with a serious leather-bound tome of the world's greatest paintings. A book of fairy tales, on the other hand, didn't hold their interest. To my eternal gratitude, they left my Nancy Drew mysteries unmolested.

The last bag finally emptied, I returned to the garage to assist in the homestretch efforts of sweeping and cleaning together, building a new fireplace rack, and loading the pickup truck with items that were so large ... or hazardous ... that they drew a separate trip to a waste disposal site. By the time night fell and the garage was transformed, I was so tired I could hardly walk.

I'm all cleaned off now, the heat and the sweat and the exhaustion of the weekend starting to fade in memory. But I look forward to a time sometime soon, when I'll sit on that new patio with a glass of lemonade in the evening shade, watch the goldfinches and hummingbirds alight on their feeders, and take another, more leisurely walk back in time with Nancy Drew and "The Secret of the Old Clock."

Chicago by Boat

My German cousin Ingrid and her husband, Reiner, recently came to Chicago to visit for the first time ever! We started the sightseeing by taking in an architectural boat tour on the Chicago River. I can't think of a prettier, more relaxing way to get introduced to the city where I grew up. And of all the historical and architectural talks my aunt Mary Therese Griffin took on after she "retired" from being a history teacher, this particular tour, with its lake breezes and soaring skyscrapers and colorful background, was by far her favorite for many years. You can book a tour of your own at www.chicagoline.com.

The Clearing

If you've already been to The Clearing, the "folk school" and artistic retreat in Door County, Wisconsin founded by Chicago landscape architect Jens Jensen in the early 1900s, the place needs no introduction. If you haven't, check it out at www.theclearing.org. These photos are from 2007 and 2010. What a place of serenity and bliss!

The Prodigal Newshound

The Sunday paper arrived at my house this weekend, tucked into its plastic delivery box just a little to the right of the rusting mail box. I carried it in with my groceries, thinking that it’s gotten a little lighter over the years, despite the raft of advertising inserts. I felt like I was bringing an old friend back to my house for coffee after an awkward estrangement.

This shouldn’t sound like a big deal, but it is to me. The newspaper box had fallen into disuse steadily over the past several years as I scaled back my newspaper reading from a daily schedule to the Sunday paper…and then to none at all. It became a convenient drop off point for unsolicited grocery store fliers, and home to the occasional family of large, black spiders.

Blame it on the Internet. Seriously.

Newspaper reporting was my first “real” job. I’m not counting the cocktail waitressing that paid the bills during my first three years of college. I started my journalism career as a stringer for the Milwaukee Sentinel, a large metropolitan daily, while I was still a college student. I then bumped up to the staff of the even bigger Milwaukee Journal after I graduated. There was a thrill and an immediacy to what we did as reporters back then. Of course feature articles took longer to percolate, and special investigative series could take weeks or months to put together.

But the bread and butter, the meat and potatoes of what we put into those column inches that appeared in print only hours after we phoned in our stories came with an adrenaline rushed, pressure-cooker immediacy. In the days before everybody and his mother had a cell phone, the ability to locate a pay phone in a courthouse or at a gas station somewhere in the middle of nowhere meant the difference between getting your story delivered to the copy desk before deadline and blowing it entirely. It was a thrilling, vital business to be part of. Woodward and Bernstein, the guys who broke the Watergate story in the "olden days" of typewriters and telephones with cords and dials, were our heroes.

People read newspapers on a regular basis for the actual NEWS, and then talked—or argued—about what they’d read. It was a shared experience, though who you shared it with depended on whether you subscribed to the morning paper or the evening one. Kind of like the way—before cable TV came along and fragmented the viewing public’s short list of what to watch—a lot of folks watched the same shows on the big three networks, and connected over the water cooler the next day.

The last time I remember having a conversation with anyone about something I’d seen on TV the night before, Tony Soprano was contemplating rubbing out another liability without much finesse.

As newspaper reporting gave way to motherhood and freelance writing, I eagerly awaited the arrival of the afternoon paper as my portal into what was going on in the world. Let’s face it, having toddlers around isn’t terribly conducive to sitting and calmly watching the evening news. But the kids started to grow up, and I switched gears and went to law school, and suddenly I got introduced to the world wide web.

Life got even busier, and the daily paper went unread more and more often, piling up in a corner of the kitchen in huge stacks to be hauled to the recycling center…or used to polish the glass doors on the fireplace. I scaled down the delivery schedule to weekends, then just Sunday. As I got more adept at navigating a computer keyboard, I flitted from website to website for the latest headlines—CNN, the New York Times, my local daily—a dozen times a day. I started to notice that the stories I’d seen on the internet were turning up in my local paper…the next day. The whole “deadline” quality of the print media seemed to have become a quaint anachronism n an age of instant updates and a twenty-four hour news cycle.

When even the Sunday paper started to pile up unread for days, I finally pulled the plug, letting my meager one-day-a-week subscription lapse. I must have gotten a dozen calls from the paper’s circulation department in the months that followed, trying to entice me to return, but I breezily declined. I was just too busy to read a newspaper right now, and besides, I got all my news on line. What could possibly top having the New York Times instantly at my fingertips?

I felt guilty every time I hung up the phone, like I’d spurned a faithful lover, but a combination of thrift and impatience and practicality carried the day. Reading a newspaper became a rare indulgence, relegated to killing time in airports or long road trips when someone else was driving.
And then, one day, I realized the things that I’d missed were things I couldn’t find on a desktop, and I couldn’t find in an instant. I missed the tactile pleasure of handling the pages and sorting through the various sections of the paper. I missed the three-dimensional element of reading deep into a story, and turning back to the front page to review some detail I wanted to ponder some more. I missed reading deeply into a story, period. I recognized, a little late in the game, that I never got more than two or three paragraphs into any story I read on a flat screen. I just hit the highlights and moved on, my curiosity sated, always cruising for the next interesting tidbit. Such is the nature of effortless instant news. There’s a lot of deep, meaningful stuff out there to be read, but my attention span for reading anything on a computer screen is a mile wide and an inch deep.

And doggone it, even though I’m over forty and I still missed the comic section!

My local paper came a’calling again recently, and this time I took the invitation. I felt a flash of spit-in-your-eye defiance as I wrote the check, but I felt a warm glow of reconnection too. I know the print media is hurting, and the future of many major dailies and newsmagazines around the country is a truly scary unknown.

But damn it, I’m glad I’m back on board for the ride.

Bluebirds of Happiness, Dandelions of Regret

The bluebirds and the dandelions are a package deal at my house.

If you’ve ever seen a bluebird fly past on sunny day, you know the feeling of being awestruck by a flash of color that looks like it couldn’t possibly have come from nature. That electric, neon blue never fails to make my heart leap with joyful recognition. For me, it’s what seals the deal that spring has finally arrived, bringing the answer to the eternal question, “will the bluebirds come back to the yard this year?”

They’ve nested in wooden birdhouses in the backyard for the past twenty five years, and the sight of them still stirs my heart. Males wearing coats of brilliant blue, females a duskier brown, they perch on tree branches and rain gutters and the swing set, eyeing the lawn beneath them, swooping down for one tasty bug morsel or another from the short grass, then lightly flitting back up to their perch to savor the meal. They are grace, and color, and precision in motion.

Dandelions, of course, need no introduction. A gorgeous, deep buttery yellow, they turn the front lawn into a carpet of cheerful golden blooms virtually overnight. The warm fuzzy feeling of seeing that many flowers in one place lasts about three days, maybe four. Then the cute yellow flowers turn into leggy, ugly stems with seed-heads spewing dandelion fluff everywhere and the plants themselves start to flourish, making the lawn look like a ragged salad patch for rest of the entire summer and fall. The first snowfall finally puts them mercifully out of sight.

The dandelion profusion has been working its way over years around the back yard too. I’d like to nuke them into oblivion and start over with sod. Or at the very least, hire some firm with a large truck full of chemicals and a well-designed ad in the Yellow Pages to sprinkle the yard with toxic fairy dust to make the weeds go away and replace them with lush grass to tickle my bare feet.

It’s been a fantasy of mine for years. In fact, pretty much every spring as the snow starts to recede and the faintest hint of green begins to shade the landscape, I survey my domain and say “yup, I’ve gotta call a lawn service one of these days.”

And then hesitation sets in, in the form of that little voice whispering “but what about the bluebirds?” Do I really want to see them cheerfully scarfing up a smorgasbord of tasty bugs basted in weed retardants? And then I know I’ll wait and see. Again. And if they show up, I’ll put off the whole chemical fairy dust solution for one more year, and just enjoy the bluebird show.

I wasn’t always a birdwatcher. Growing up in Chicago, the birds I remember pretty much consisted of the occasional duck paddling in a park pond, and the thousands of pigeons who strutted their stuff on the sidewalks of the Loop downtown, dodging foot traffic and taxicabs, a faint lavender sheen gleaming off their staid grey and white topcoats.

But marriage was followed a couple of years later by a move to the country, fields and trees in abundance. We followed a pretty traditional division of labor back then—he left in the morning to go to the office, and I stayed home with the baby and the dog, changing diapers and making dinner. There is just not much conversation you can get out of a toddler who’s under the age of two, or a dog of any age. And so what was outside my kitchen window started to catch my eye.

And oh, what a glorious profusion of things were waiting to be discovered! I found a small telescope somewhere among our belongings, and stood at the window over the kitchen sink like Captain Ahab astride the forecastle of the Pequod. I got a Roger Tory Peterson guide to the birds “east of the Rockies” and started to identify the residents of the countryside around me. Red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures, cardinals, chickadees, goldfinches, nuthatches, the variety was infinite, the amusement factor high. I didn’t need a bird guide to identify the red fox vixen who moved into a nearby woodchuck den with her four fluffy kits tumbling around her in the sunlight. I just felt a tug of maternal sympathy as she stoically sat, stiff as a ramrod, while the kits tumbled and played around her and nipped at her tail.

Eventually I got a pair of good binoculars for Christmas, and I parked them on the kitchen counter, between the microwave and the dish rack. They still don’t get to collect much dust.

Somewhere along the line when we first moved into the new house in the country, my father-in-law bemoaned the fact that when he was a young man, bluebirds had been common, but that he hadn’t seen one now for years. I wondered whether I could fix that. An article in the local newspaper about the efforts of various nature groups to provide bluebird nesting habitats steered me to a place to buy a couple of suitable nest boxes. I never knew birds could be so picky!!

Then, while killing time in a doctor’s waiting room, I skimmed a nature magazine and spied a short photo feature about someone who had reasoned that if you could decoy a duck, you should be able to decoy a bluebird. He’d cut a rudimentary bird shape from some plywood and painted it the right colors, and then snapped a picture of a male bluebird sitting atop the fake. It was one of those “eureka” moments, and I asked my father-in-law, whose retirement vocation was working with wood, to chisel me a three-dimensional decoy or two.

I can still hear his response, equal parts laughter, scoffing and incredulity. Still, he delivered. I dutifully painted one with my best imitation of nature—creamy white underside, rosy red chest, blue topcoat the brightest blue I could find. As soon as the paint was dry, I set the decoy atop the birdhouse closest to the house, with the most unobstructed view from the window over the kitchen sink. To be honest, that’s where most of my birdwatching takes place. My rule of thumb is…if I can’t see it while I’m washing dishes, it’s just not there.

Five minutes, tops. That’s how long it took for a gorgeous male to check out the new digs, discover that his rival was just a piece of furniture, and decide to move the family in. Some serious nest building followed, a tidy swirl of dried grasses mixed with the occasional long strand of hair from one of the horses’ tails. My father-in-law was truly impressed.

I’d bought the style of nest box that had a side door I could pull open and peek inside with. From everything I’d read, I’d learned that a pair of nesting bluebirds were unlikely to be spooked by the occasional visit from a human, and watching the pair’s progress as parents was fascinating. Day by day, one tiny blue egg was followed by another, then another, until the count was up to five and Ms. Bluebird started to settle in for the long haul. Sometimes when I opened the nest box door she blasted out of the hole in front, other times she just looked over her shoulder at me, unflinching, one busy, preoccupied suburban mom to another.

One pair of bluebirds or another have been raising their chicks in that same next box now for a quarter century. Well, not exactly the “same” next box, the originals finally fell apart a few years ago and when I went looking for replacements, found that the boxes with the side doors went for about thirty five friggin’ dollars each!! I paid it, though not without grumbling.

Being able to look into the nest is more than half the fun! There’s the anticipation of waiting to see when the actual “building” will start. Then guessing how many eggs will show up this time. The then chicks themselves—freshly hatched, eyes closed, impossibly tiny bundles of dark fluff and spiky little wing feathers with pale yellow beaks. They grow by leaps and bounds from day to day, until they’re speckled and plump and bright-eyed, jostling and jam-packed so tightly into the crowded box that they resemble a car full of clowns in a circus.

There have been dramas along the way. English sparrows, notorious for displacing bluebirds in violent fashion, had come to the yard in abundance for several years, drawn by the horses and the grain in their feed. They booted the nesting bluebirds out of their nest one year, but not before killing the babies. I was heartbroken.

Yet another year saw a freak late-spring six-inch snowfall just after the female bluebird had started to sit on her clutch of eggs. She bolted from the nest. I made quite a sight that morning, in a pair of snow boots and a long pink chenille housecoat, sprinkling a handful of mealworms from the bait section of the corner gas station on top of the next box to lure them back to the nest. It took them a long time to return.

I had my local ornithologist’s phone number committed to memory by this time, and I called him for advice. The eggs were most likely frozen at this point, the embryos dead, he said regretfully. There was nothing that could be done other than let the female return to the nest and brood them until she realized that none would hatch. Couldn’t I just rip the nest out and let them start over? I asked. No, he replied. Let nature take its course.

The next few weeks were torture. My heart broke for this little bird, who was doing such a diligent job of keeping her clutch of eggs warm, tragically unaware of the fact that they could never hatch. I called my ornithologist weekly, pleading for special dispensation to step in and rescue her from this empty exercise of maternal duty. The answer I invariably got was “no.”

Then, one sunshiny day, there seemed to be more activity at the nest than usual. I dutifully slogged out there, cutting a path through the tall grass to the box, which stood about eye-level on a metal pole. I popped the door open and looked inside, pessimistically expecting to see a melancholy tableau of motherhood denied. Mom wasn’t in the nest, but five tiny nuggets of fluff raised their heads at the intrusion, eyes sealed shut but curiosity still strong .

Against all odds, she’d done it!! I mentally saluted the universal tenacity of motherhood in the face of impossible odds.

I wonder how long bluebirds live, and how many generations of the same family have made a home in that same nest box. Bluebirds are known to be territorial, and generally require a distance of about three hundred feet from the next nesting pair to be comfortable. How do they divvy up the occupancy rights to this prime piece of real estate? After migrating south for the winter, do the kids come back to the old neighborhood just to visit where they grew up? Who gets to live in the old house once the folks have passed on or moved away?

Every fall, when it’s just before migration time, I’ll see the pack of this year’s crop of nestlings, with youthful speckles and bellies so huge from gorging on a bumper crop of summer insects that it seems unlikely that they could fly for a block, much less fly south for a few hundred miles. They mill around together, four or five of them, hanging out on the swing set or the back porch, checking out the bird feeder full of sunflower seeds, sampling the hulled seeds out of curiosity, just to see what was drawing in every other bird in the neighborhood.

They are a captivating, feathery link to the past, and a fond link to my late father-in-law, and a perfect joy in the present, and a source of hope and optimism that, at some time, it will be spring again. And for at least one more year, I can pretty well predict that while I may again think of calling a lawn service to finally kill off my dandelions next March of April…the smart money will still be on the birds.