The countryside, quiet? Nope

Drama is endless outside our windows

I’ve lived in bucolic rural areas for more than 30 years. But don’t be fooled. Those who think that there is nothing going on here aren’t paying attention.

The drama that occurs outside is absolutely endless.

I divide my time between reading the four newspapers to which I either subscribe or are addicted to and worrying about America’s government, which is an idiocracy sliding into authoritarianism. Then I become fascinated by the goings on of the furred and feathered animals in our neighborhood.

Guess which preoccupation is more relaxing?

Because no matter what happens, Mother Nature doesn’t give a damn about what we think is important. She cares for neither our priorities nor the anguished public hand-wringing of the day. She is not at all interested at what is in The New York Times or on Fox News.

But drama, she’s got. She has floods, fires and famine. She has murder, mayhem and tender love stores. And at least some of it is going on outside my barn office windows.

Since early spring we have been the happy landlords for a few ducks, who dabble in our pond undisturbed. For awhile we hosted two couples. Then one pair found a better place and moved on, perhaps one with a doorman or a health club.

Abandoned nest, now in our window box

Then, suddenly, there was only one. One male. All alone. Swimming in circles in the pond. Where was the female?

For awhile my husband and I worried about what happened to our duck friend. There’s a lot of critters out here, after all. The reeds and meadows look harmless, but hide predators galore.

Then the answer became obvious. Motherhood happened. The female duck returned to the pond, with five little ducklings swimming after her. Sighs of relief! She was absent because she was being a good mom, guarding her clutch of eggs.

Given the carnivores in this area, both Pete and I were surprised the little ducks managed to survive. Even as we admired them, a red tailed hawk swooped by. They are extremely territorial, which we found out one spring when three hawks fought over the area encompassing our barn and farmland. Every morning for a week they screeched at one another, diving, soaring and doing the raptor equivalent of pounding their chests, until two gave up and left, or the biggest one had driven them both out of the area. Then things settled down.

The country isn’t quiet all the time. It’s just that our noise is different.

Instead of honking horns and traffic, we have honking geese, screeching hawks, hooting owls, howls of coyotes… you catch my drift.

The coyotes unnerved me when I first moved out to the country. I thought coyotes were only found in Western states and knew them only as a backdrop to cowboy shoot-em-up movies. That changed the first week of moving away from a city. Connecticut is the third-smallest state in the United States, but where I live, far from the gold coast near New York City, trees and valleys abound. Plenty of places for the “American jackal” to settle and flourish, and they have. Their howling still gives me the creeps.

Another country vs. city revelation occurred three months after we first moved to rural Scotland, Connecticut, a little town tucked like an Easter egg into the lush hills. I was passing our living room reclining chair when I did a double-take. There, on the chair, looking ready to ask me for a beer and just about to reach for the TV remote, was the biggest spider I had ever seen outside a zoo. I am not afraid of spiders but this was big, hairy, had stripes and - I discovered later - eight eyes. I put a jar over the arachnid to remove it from its comfy perch and called the local university to find out what on Earth had gotten into my house.

“It’s a wolf spider,” said the calm professor over the phone. “They are typically shy, but great to have around to keep down the mouse population! Be sure and let him go.”

I did let him go, far away from the house, but it made me rethink the joys of living in the country. I didn’t like the idea of living near spiders big enough to eat mice. Would such spiders’ visits be a regular occurrence? I wondered. In that case, what was I doing there?

That was 35 years ago. I have not seen a wolf spider either in the wild or in my house in all the days since. Not even once. Maybe the incident was a hazing ritual Mother Nature inflicts on city people aiming to tame the untamable.

Finally, there are the smaller dramas, but dramas all the same.

We had someone out to work on our gutters last week. It was apparent they were no longer working well, and it was time to hire someone to do the repair work. One of the men on ladders 30 feet above the ground found a problem right away, and very gently, brought it down.

A nest. With eggs. He couldn’t bear to toss the nest and eggs away and neither could I, so he put them in a window box, hoping Mama would return.

She hasn’t. And probably won’t. Another example of the life-and-death drama outside my window, and now on my window box.