what magic may occur (for JC)
Sandhill Cranes are an ancient species.Theirs is a song that echoes, that rises into the touch of the wind, that defies our notions of time.
I have been on this land twenty years. I am small, but the cranes here, at first, flew off at the sight of me. I could watch them from afar, strolling the ancestral Florida hammock; hear their quivering call echo the oaks.
After some seasons, there was a pair; they strolled the paddock, and their bonding duet caught me too. Sometimes, we would stand, many seconds standing and staring at each other, space between us too far to see each other’s eyes.
As seasons became years, as the crane pair saw me filling the feeders for the songbirds, as they saw me in my small daily doings, they seemed to learn me; they knew the moments of the day I was feed scoop human and they waited at what was truly the most polite distance; the tinkling of seed into the feeder and my moving away and moments passing, moments of their elegant stride , and then they bent their slender selves to what I had put for them.
I learned to know that their trilling call was a language that was older than roads and fences, that the sound of it rode the rivers of air that eddy at the roots of trees and rise to surf the flowers.
One spring, my pair paraded two leggy bits of yellow fluff in a nearby follow of smaller mom, who stood when she saw me, turned her face to me, watched me watch her children. Crane babies have a fragility in the months of their flightlessness; their gentle parents have flight as their only defense and the babies spend spring as fuzzy walkers learning the details of the land. When mom finds her nest violated, when mom finds her babies murdered, her voice rises and rises, the note of grief is visceral, universal, wrenching.
There was a winter when suddenly there was a hard freeze—rare to Florida then—and the cranes congregated in the neighbor’s pasture; small for them at eight acres, but the only open land undisturbed by human doings that winter. The pasture was home to a chestnut hued bull and his family of Angus moms and mixed babies. The cranes danced and called and cleaned the grass, while the cattle slept under their pecan tree. For a fortnight, the flock arrived at first light, they sang at parts of the day, left at sunset in groups that rose as one and flew diagonally to each other to some spot unseen. If they were our species, we would have understood this family reunion, known who proudly had surviving children, seen the cotillion of the yearlings, seen the family’s future.
My pair had, with excruciating politeness, asked me if they too could live on this land I call mine. It had been their ancestral land, yet they asked me—stood twenty feet away and waited as I went about with the feed scoop. Of course, of course, coexist, of course. I bought them cracked corn, and seasons passed. Once, I was out doing silly human things and my friend brought me home a bit late for supper. We were greeted by a number of beings, rather formally standing in their positions: horses at the gate, cranes at a polite distance from the feed shed. My friend laughed, called me mom, drove away carefully and I became the feed lady once again.
My pair did not migrate. We became a part of each other’s lives. Their distance to me remained polite, always. One day, the daddy accompanied me to the bird feeder, step for step, at a distance of lead line, of a dog’s leash. One day that became all days, I was allowed to hear them speak to each other, their private language of coos and nickers. Some summers there were children who did not live to find flight.
I anguished for them. I anguished for the corpses of racoons and possums on a once-quiet road, knowing them by markings, knowing their now bereft families. I anguished as farms were paved, as the land was lost to them.
And the seasons passed.
One winter, maybe the one before this one now, my pair were joined by another, some cousins of a kind; they came to eat in twos, discrete and polite, always. At about Beltane, there was a baby, one leggy puff of amber, closely warded by mom, with dad in a sentry position, always in proximity. This baby grew taller, the soft spring became summer, and the baby became more dove gray…and called out too, called out in a high trill an octave above, an echoing trill of utter innocence.
In fall, I saw the baby fly.
Yet, the next day, they awaited their cracked corn, four adults and the child. Migrations of other avian species came by and the cranes stayed. The seasons became harsh, the tropical plants stopped recovering from the polar storms, the temperate ones burned in increasingly extreme heat. There were fewer lubber grasshoppers eating my amaryllis, and twice a day the cranes queued for their corn.
The autumn is always a sadness of leaving light and last flowers. The human holidays mark a more ancient date in the arc of the sun. This year, when the light had given us steady more minutes each day, the Sandhill Cranes started their party. At first, my little family was joined by a few enterprising bachelors who were happy to gobble up a feast. There was a fearsome winter storm and all the green life burnt. When the day dawned without such violence, dozens of Sandhill Cranes stood the centerline of my little grassy knoll. It was my family of them who showed the rest how to come eat. I watched them in their clusters, dipping their elegant necks and the bob of their head for each seed, each seed on their thin black tongues, a peck for each seed on the tongue. I could hear the baby’s high trill still when all the other voices rose in an opera of eating. I was the host of the flock. They had seen my diligence, and decades dedication; we had watched each other, living together on this slip of land the county records as mortgaged but mine.
Today dawn is teasing a spring still subject to arctic invasion.
I go about in a ski-jacket with my feed scoop as the solar orb crests the eastern treeline. There are three birdfeeders in a copse I planted: small seeds for the warblers, for the delightful surprise of red-winged blackbirds, cracked corn for the cranes. The cranes wait in a gaggle, with the studly ones very red in the crest. I am putting corn and tiny seeds in a line, and a crane approaches me. I let the full feed scoop spill cracked corn at arm’s length in front of me. The crane walks up a step at a time. He is lead line length from me. We look at each other: he lets me look into his orange eyes, turning his head from left to center to right. We regard each other.
The moment is ours. The other cranes are silent, watching, I see them watching. But this daddy crane bends his elegant neck and begins to eat. I see his tongue and one grain each on it. The little bob of his head. I watch him eat. I note the details of his feet, how his face seems to have dried blood on it. I watch him eat. The others stand away watching us and I wait, I let my crane eat, I do not move. Sometimes he looks at me, but he keeps eating. There is no time now, the hectic noises of automobiles and airplanes is unimportant. I watch him lick up each kernel of cracked corn until he seems to stand a moment, deciding. I see him swallow. I watch as he turns away from me, walking with slow deliberation toward the others.
It is then that I too turn back to my life.
Su Zi is a second-generation eco-feminist, poet-writer , artist and equestrian, with a specialty in traditional(not commercial) carriage driving. Endeavors for permaculture gardening, and often uses direct, plain-aire, botanical motifs in art. Has lived in Florida for decades and has seen the reoccurring ecocide first hand. Feeds birds. Since Covid, lives reclusively. Books incl. Transgression in Motion, Building Community & the art book Pillar of Salt. Twitter: @xsuzi00
Banner Art: Cranes, an image by Robert Frede Kenter.
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