Until two weeks ago I had never seen a chipmunk off the ground. Now they are elevated. Here's one eating the seed heads of statuesque Silphium perfoliatum, reached from a handy pin oak perch in Prospect Park.
Last week I saw a chipmunk chomping on spicebush fruit, hunting the ripe red drupes along the slender branches. I suppose they have always done this. But suddenly I am noticing it.
I walked in the nearby park with the Frenchman, recently. He was hunting migrating hummingbirds with a new camera lens (we found them). But before we did - in a patch of jewelweed - we visited Lookout Hill, where in late summer a small, fenced-in meadow is filled with the season's rough flowers: Joe Pye-Weed, a giant persicaria, golden rod, and daisies. I see this hill several times a week, because I run up it to counteract sedentary evils. But no matter how familiar I think it has become it always shows me something new.
The tall flowers were bobbing and bending with seed-eating songbirds.
On our walk home the baseball fields were filled with masked children and parents, warming up for complicated pandemic schooling.
The park is all things to all people. Now, more than ever. And that can get complicated. But most people are trying.
Our New York City city parks require New York City funding, and the local government has never been generous. And now the parks' budgets have been slashed. They rely on private funding.
The parks feed our souls.
And what is that worth?
The old saying " money is the root of all evil" springs to mind here. Man will never have enough of it and everything suffers when they garner as much as they can. How much healthier and content would we all be if just a fraction of the wealth could be spent on the natural world that sustains all life.
ReplyDelete