Today is the first day of Fall. It is also the Fall Equinox. Today, the day and the night are exactly the same length. From here on out, the days will grow shorter, the nights will lengthen, and winter will come. We’ve seen many signs of the changing season. The monarchs are making their way south, not in the hordes that we saw this past spring, but in a stream of ones-and-twos. They flitter through the yard, or across the road while we are driving, and before we can gather to look, they are gone. On the move. They’ve got things to do and places to be.
Sometimes those things to do are laying eggs. We know this because our neighbor has much milkweed in her yard and we’ve seen monarch bodies in the wood chips. We’ve learned that after they lay their eggs, they die. We even took one in for the night, her wings shuttering in the almost freezing temps, thinking that maybe she wasn’t on the edge of expiring. But she was. And that was okay, because we did our best to make her comfortable–
we gave her a warm place to be for her last night–and because we knew that next spring her eggs would hatch and her baby caterpillars would eat and spin cocoons and turn into butterflies and the migration would begin anew with many new sets of wings. We are starting to see that all exists within cycles.
We know well what’s next in the cycle of the calendar: Pig Party Season, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the winter holidays. We love this time of year and we anticipate the cooler temperatures, the changing leaves (which we’ve already seen this past two weeks visiting the mountains for a fall festival at Copper Mountain), and the earlier nights (which we are anticipating because we’ve got our first ever Night Games scheduled with friends in a few weeks). But, as always, within the cycle of what we’re expecting, something unexpected always falls.
Isaac found a vole in the yard a few days ago. She was alive but confused, she was not underground, and she did not try to hide from Isaac or from us. We caught her in some tupperware and we placed her into another vole hole in the yard. But she didn’t stay there. She came back above ground and slept out in the open for most of the afternoon. Tessa named the vole Abnorma Diggerly, and Mom explained to us that Abnorma was acting sick or poisoned or drunk. She wasn’t acting like a healthy vole. And if Abnorma wasn’t healthy, she would probably die. So Mom prepared us for Abnorma’s early end. But this was the very day after our butterfly friend expired in the kitchen, and Riley cried at the thought that the universe was sending animals to our house to die, so we all kept our fingers crossed. We let Abnorma hang out where she wanted to be, but we kept a close eye on her. And after a lengthy nap, Abnorma woke up and got to work. She dug. And dug. And dug. And while she dug, she let us watch.
We saw how she used her huge front paws to tear into the packed earth and how she anchored her little body in her ever expanding tunnel while she dug deeper and how she pushed the extra dirt out the front of her hole. And, finally, when her tunnel was so deep and so long that we couldn’t see her, she came to the mouth of the tunnel one last time. She hung out while we got very close to her and watched her fat nose twitch and took a last look at her long nails, and then she closed her front door and we wished her well as she went on her way.
Tessa thought that maybe the universe didn’t send Abnorma to us to die, but instead the universe sent Abnorma to us to make better. When we first put her into another vole hole, the hole she didn’t remain in for very long, she had a little snack. She ate some of the tree root in the hole. We watched her do it. Tessa thought that maybe that was all she needed to get better from whatever was making her sick. That same tree, after all, is the tree we hug when we are angry or sad or feeling sick ourselves and it always, always makes us feel better. So why, Tessa thought, wouldn’t it also help Abnorma? Whatever Abnorma had going on, we are glad to think that Abnorma is digging deep tunnels in the yard, deep enough to keep her warm till the long winter months end and she emerges from her tunnel just as Ms. Butterfly’s children emerge from their eggs.
We will be watching for all of our animal friends from now until next Spring. But first, Riley will turn 8! And Emmett will turn 9! And Tessa will turn 7! So, although we move with the changing seasons, and even if we anticipate what’s coming, there is much fun that will punctuate the wheel as it turns, much fun, and we eagerly await each day’s arrival.
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