Summer is upon us. And aside from our customary charges (Ignatius the spoiled-rotten hamster and about 20,000 honeybees), we’re now managing our neighbors’ menagerie while they’re away. New wards include snails, guppies, tadpoles, three dinner plate-sized turtles, and Olive the Bassett Hound.
The poignant part of caring for all of these critters is that we’re reminded of God’s immense imagination as well as His sense of the strange. As warm weather sets up shop, there is hardly anything odder than watching three enormous turtles vie with each other for bugs, or spying tadpoles transforming themselves from fish into frogs. And Olive the Bassett Hound (her full name…she demands formality) is an education in herself; she snuffles the moist morning vapours, inspecting every blade of grass and each new scent she encounters along our creek-bed walks.
Summertime reminds me of how little we know about the world around us. This Middle-earth is filled with glorious glens and deep leafy dells, each flush with unnamed flora and fauna. It moves in odd rhythms: stillness by swollen streams at dawn, followed by the rise and rout of thunderheads in the heat of afternoon.
Summer is cicadas and crickets and katydids, each with its own distinct dialect; and lightning bugs, called by northern folk “fireflies” or “glow worms”, that first appear high in branches, then descend as the days ripen. As children, we would catch mason jars full and leave them as fairy lights on our windowsills at night; then release them and start the game over again the next day.
Even after I developed a Tolkienian disdain for fairies, I always found deserted country lanes and fields to be pregnant with mythological possibilities. I would sit still on the verge, chiggers notwithstanding, and listen intently to every sound issuing from the forest. I sat still as stone and waited for wayfarers. I was rewarded time and again by squirrel, chipmunk, opossum, ground snake, and even deer.
But what I really wanted was to spy out a Hobbit, or a wood Elf. A knight on his charger or a passing angel also would not have been taken amiss. But none of these came. For them, I resorted to mind’s eye or to paint and brush.
But the important part is that all of these _could_ have come; when summer sports, all things are possible.
I’m like Puddleglum in C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair. If told that in this world there are no Elves, or Hobbits, or knights in shining armor, if someone presumed to prove there were no angels or saints, then we would all be beggared. A world without these would drown in despair, and my heart whispers “deceit” when a Christopher Hitchens brays on his bugle.
Years ago, long after I had first consciously assented to the tenets of the Catholic faith, there came a point when my heart caught up with my head. There came an overwhelming maelstrom of emotion, as I realized, to the core of my being, that all that I had read in the Bible was fact. I almost gasped out loud as I grasped that angels and demons, saints and the Savior, were not some delusion developed to tame toddlers, but literal truths.
And life seemed infinitely dearer to me with that realization; the universe itself seemed to expand as I pondered such power, such potential, such promise….
But now, summer is again upon us. Enigmas abound. Guppies are growing and tadpoles transforming. Now is the time to return to the woods in search of Bilbo and company. Now is the time to mimic the brave and chivalric knights and to seek out adventure in sunny dales and glen’s gloaming.
At the sounding of the Solstice, angels abound…don’t let them pass you by….
May your summer be blessed with infinite imaginings….
Lovely piece, Jef. Your childhood sounds much like my own–the better part of it, anyway.
Someone–can’t remember who–in a StAR issue a few years back referred to Tolkien’s magic as the “re-enchantment of nature.” Just so.
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