I like to look out the window at the neighbour’s lilac tree and watch the life therein. I positioned my desk well even if the “back to the door” of my chair occasionally gives me heebie-jeebies.  

Sometimes, life watches back: the squirrels and chickadees are infinitely curious about what’s going on behind the monitor and I swear the hummingbird wants to start something.  

I’d take him up on it but I’m busy not being a troll on Twitter.

It’s not that I want to evil.

Okay, I kind of want to be evil. It’s the anticipated guilt that holds me back. It would be satisfying to tell someone their brain is expired tapioca but then there’s escalation and elderberries. I embrace the blandness of moderation to sell logic and reason.

I don’t understand determined wrongheadedness. And because it’s social media, it’s easy to get pointed, judgmental, and edging-towards-aggressive about it.

And someone should study the occasional passive-aggressiveness of the meme.

*

I’ve been thinking about pruning the lilac. I should ask first, I suppose. What with it being not my tree and all. But I look at it and they don’t and based on their yard, they have more tolerance for poor arborism. The suckers and center growth gives me eye twitches and the mental reminder that trees manage on their own in the wild is being drowned out by the counter-argument that trees in the wild don’t have to live with bad haircuts.

I’ve also been thinking about hanging a bird feeder in the not-my-tree. That would up the critter observations. Unfortunately, that particular tree is bear-accessible. When it comes to Ursa Americanus, I’m definitely not ready to rumble.

I upped my deck-feeder game instead. I hung a suet feeder and was rewarded in short order with bushtits and downy woodpeckers. The latter are adorable and the former makes me giggle because I have the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy and said “tit”.

No bear worries on the deck though.

No stairs.

I got a second hummingbird feeder too, to put out on days when the first one freezes up. What would they do without me?

Survive, most likely.  

We won’t. That’s a piece of the climate change data that gets glossed over a little too much.

It’s not really about saving the planet.

That would be nice. It’s an excellent side benefit. It would be lovely if we suddenly and collectively decided to take care of our things. 

It’s about saving us.

If we don’t stop our whinging, if we don’t clean up our act and make significant and sweeping changes to the way we live our lives and to the economic models we’ve embraced, the earth will be fine. Different, certainly, but fine.

The earth will endure. People, however, at least as we are incarnated now, will get pink-slipped.

photo credit: Gisèle Benoit