I have moved from the pasture to the townhouse, where the food is more abundant and delicious, the company more worldly, but ruder, and the cat more bold. I have returned like Prospero to Venice, like Orsino from Arcadia. I’ve left the greenwoods of Barnesdale for the cobbles of Nottingham, like Robin going to the party in disguise.

This is NC Wyeth’s classic endpaper illustration for the Paul Creswick Robin Hood of 1903, which is available in its entirety (except of course for shiny dustcover, lovely old-glue smell, cloth binding and old timey faux-cut pages) at Sacred Texts of all places–folklore passing into myth, myth into religion?

This is Boston from Peter’s Hill, at the south end of the Arboretum. In the middleground is the conifers section, I think: larches from Europe, Douglas firs, even a couple of dawn redwoods from China, mixed in with our local hemlocks and pines.

The availability of green space, to my surprise, is not all that much diminished. Instead of Mt. Sugarloaf, I’ve got the Arboretum. The Blue Hills replace the Holyoke Range. Instead of Mt. Toby, the Emerald Necklace. Of course, it’s all rather more well-traveled than I’m used to, and the forage isn’t nearly as good, what with all the groundwater being contaminated with oily city ick. But I’ll manage, I think.

I don’t get nearly as many weird looks as I’d have expected for walking around town with a big stick. No more than I did in the Valley, anyhow.

Maize God, like Count Dracula, can travel the world only with his feet planted firmly in a fragment of his native soil.

This is about half of what I potted and brought to live on my new front porch: basil, rosemary, sage, wormwood, lemon balm, lavender, and one habañero pepper.

Dolichonyx oryzivorus, summer plumage. Upland meadow, Graves Farm Sanctuary, Haydenville, MA

Mycena leaiana
On a rotten hemlock log across a brook, Mt. Toby Reservation.

The new camera, for those who care, is this, not a digital SLR but a budget 12 MP Kodak point and shoot the first thing I did on which was reset the resolution to 10 MP. It has a big long zoom that, without stabilization, shockingly works not all that well, and a wide angle that lets me be 3 inches from the mushroom, which is old hat to most people but is new and wonderful to me. I’m still learning the semi-klunky interface, but it takes a nice picture when I let it.

Time erodes all things, and new things, harder things, spring forth from their remains.

Old Maize God was made of orange-painted plaster. I bought him for a dollar from a wandering huckster kid at the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá and couldn’t work up the guts to toss him in the sacred cenoté. For three years, he guarded my garden from the likes of hungry wabbits, storm-felled trees and marauding bands of centaurs. But the winter of 2010 wormed its way through his plaster flesh, and he crumbled.

Young Maize God is carved from green-black jadeite, heavy and resilient as iron. I found him among the mazelike convolutions of market day in Chichicastenango, in the Guatemalan highlands. He’s done his best to take up the mantle of the old god—but come August, he and I must bid farewell to our much-loved little communal plot in the valley and travel east, back to the city, where fecundity will be restricted to a forest of pots on the back balcony.

Who knows what other change may come? Not I. Not he.

Happy solstice.

Wild columbine, Aquilegia canadensis, West-facing cliffs, Mt. Toby Reservation, Sunderland.

My camera died. Rest well, Sony Cybershot DSC-F717. You came from the factory with all kinds of defects, your autofocus algorithm was dated and finicky, but you were good to me. You let me recollect beauty in millions of colors. One time you pretended to be a handcannon to protect me from poachers. Curse the loose screw that killed you. I wish I had treated you better.

My old Powerbook G4 12″ has gone the way of the dire wolf and the dodo. Funes, you kept me alive. You ate through rechargeable batteries like a radio-controlled Mechagodzilla. Your touchpad didn’t work for shit, forcing me to wield a retro-aesthetically superheroic rubber ball mouse from my original iMac 233 circa 1998. I was ridiculously, unhealthily attached to you. I am beside myself at the prospect of letting you go—but all things must pass. With any luck, you will only sleep awhile and return from the shadows, like the coelecanth or the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Now I got me a handed-down white dual 1.8 MacBook, christened Ilom, for which I shall remain eternally grateful to parties who know who they are. It stands out less from the coffeeshop crowd than poor old Funes; on the other hand, it can run Illustrator and iTunes at the same time without destroying itself and has carried me forward into the video age. Will I ever learn to love it as much? That’s a question best put to Time.

“They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.”

—Robert Frost, In Hardwood Groves

I fear this may get mushy. If you’re not in that treehugging mood, look away.

The Holyoke ridge, looking west from Mount Tom.

This is maybe my favorite prospect in the valley, at my favorite time of year for prospects: when I’ve had six months to forget how beautiful the leaves are, and they come forth again as though for the first time in that pale, infant color and texture soft as skin. I think it has to do with contrasts. Over my shoulder to the right is Easthampton, with its towering old brick smokestacks haunted by nesting swallows. Over the mountain’s shoulder to the left, subsided metropoli full of factories similarly moldering and grey populate a long gradient into haze: Holyoke, Springfield, Hartford, New Haven. Behind me, the summit of Mount Tom, with its ruined Victorian hotel now surmounted by buzzing icicle cellular towers, satellite dishes and wry suicidal graffiti. But right here in front of me is this rippling swath of pastel-green, unpopulated nothing. What’s it doing there, looking like it just erupted from the fingertips of god? What right has it to go unlogged, undeveloped, undecayed?

Unlike pretty much every other place in this valley, I’ve never really had the chance to explore this particular nothing. Maybe that contributes to the mystery. Maybe I never will explore it, just so I can get this same feeling again every spring.

On the way back down across the sandy cut where the hotel’s telephone wires used to run, I ran into a Northern Oriole female–nothing special for most of you people maybe, but for some reason around here I rarely see them. I didn’t take a picture; there’s times when it just isn’t called for. But I crept up to within a few feet and we chirped back and forth at each other for awhile, heads cocked and frozen still. Then I thanked her and went on my way.

Roaring Brook Falls, on the Mt. Toby reservation in Montague, MA. These icicles taste of moss and mineral salt.

Porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum. This guy lives on Graves Farm Reservation, the northwest side, where there is a maybe 100 foot deep ravine that has tons of broken rock and moss all up its sides. I love that ravine–I swim in the stream at the bottom sometimes–and I have met this porcupine there often. He never seems to like me any better, but he’s slow.

He is my mascot of the moment. Prickly!

Caiman crocodilus

This caiman lives in one of the network of ancient, man-made reservoirs that once supplied drinking water to the Mayan city of Tikal–number three, I think, on this map. He’s little, only three or four feet long, and he spends his days pretending to be a log (pictured), in hopes of preying on the egrets, rails, ducks and other marsh birds that venture too close–and when he can get them, probably on those chihuahua-sized, tailless rodents I kept seeing scurrying about in the underbrush.

For this, my last piece of Guatemala ranting at least for now, it seems appropriate to bring back my favorite Mayanist quote about the end of the world:

“The word for eclipse in Maya is chi-bal-kin, literally ‘bitten sun’, and it was the ancient belief, which persisted until fairly recent times, that at the time of an eclipse the sun was bitten by a serpent.”

–The City of the Sacred Well: Being a Narrative of the Discoveries and Excavations of Edward Herbert Thompson in the Ancient City of Chichenitza T.A. Willard, 1910

An awesome book, by the way, which can be had for free on los eeenternets, here.

Next week, it’s back to chilly, wind-blown New England.

Ocellated Turkey, Meleagris ocellata

Great egret, Ardea alba, in the breakwater swamps inland of Monterrico.

A black vulture, Coragyps atratus, on the ruins of Temple 1.

I think this is a tyrant flycatcher, Tyrannus verticalis. They nest in the western US in the summer.

And a gray-necked wood-rail or chiricote, Aramides cajanea. These were super hilarious to watch walking around with their little tail-feather tuft and their bizarro backwards knees. They are lowland marsh birds, no doubt prayed upon by the caimán–of which I have a picture somewhere.

Getting to the end of the Guate pictures, though. I’ll save that one for last.

Fine thing about these Guatemala pictures…I get to gaze on their green jewel-eyed wonder and not think about how spring is not yet here and there’s still snow in the hills. Going to the Smith Bulb Show this week–another ritual of anticipation.