Evening Green

Albizia julibrissin

Microclimate even was too large a word for the cloud of what had just been and was still being shaken loose from the newly arrived mimosa blossoms by an early evening drizzle, which was small enough to completely traverse by bike in the space of one full breath. It’s been so rainy here this week, and seven days later those mimosas had faithfully multiplied, their blossoms had multiplied, too, and this evening I couldn’t help but notice that what before was a tiny cloud had expanded to easily contain every breath on my thirty-minute bike ride. I never stopped breathing them out, and I never stopped breathing them in.

Mimosas are technically invasive, and it’s true I’ve seen them spread. They’re in the bean family after all. At least they aren’t aggressive like tallows or willows or pears. And what would be so bad about a forest of mimosas anyway? Well, all the parts have to puzzle together, so when something new comes along that means something old has to go. This rule of the forest is as simple as it is unbending: not everything can survive. One more mimosa means one less native red cedar, or one less native sweet gum, and that’s where the loss occurs, in the loss of that nativity, and the various insects and animals that puzzle into that nativity.

The cliff swallows were circling and swooping over the bayou, cheerfully eating and singing. Did they really come out from under the bridge and start circling over the bridge to greet me, or was I only imagining it? They seemed really happy to see me. There’s a concrete bridge over Bayou Mercier now, but I always feel the ghost of the old wooden one when I bike across it, and it seems the swallows remember, too. They make mud nests under the crossbeams of the bridge, and every sunrise and sunset, or whenever insect traffic is heavy, they circle, swooping and eating. They once made mud nests under the old wooden bridge, too.

Traveling through the bayou landscape by bike is a good way to notice how the pieces come together, how a bridge provides a home for generations of cliff swallows in the form of a modified cliff, how a zone at the edge of the forest between the dogwood and the asphalt creates a space for a small patch of primroses to flourish, and how that space provides another piece for animals to puzzle into. A flock of honest ibises highstepping through the primroses. A narrow hallway of cypresses along the edge of an unnamed coulée I always see winding into obscurity, dry since last September, but now, after all this rain, so beautifully, poetically wet.

I bike through a young forest on the island every day. I say young forest, but maybe it’s more accurate to call it an almost-forest, several acres of once-farmland that have been reforested with long rows of equally-spaced oak trees. I’ve been watching those saplings grow for the last twenty years, and they’ve finally reached the height where their leaves can interconnect and form a single canopy. This is the first year where, rather than a collection of individually planted trees, the trees have come together to form a coherent woods. When I biked through this evening something about the birdsong densely woven into the tissues of the oak leaves made the link between forests and birds so crystal clear to me—they rise and fall together not unlike a common breath.

Heron fluttering up from the ragweed, and midway down the chaintre, as if to say now this is the swamp coming alive, an alligator thrashing in the coulée, camouflaged and furtive enough to show only the tip of its tail abovewater before slipping into the brown dark. When you get a good rain here, and we’ve had almost ten inches this week, the ground comes alive. Green tree frogs. Bullfrogs. Spring peepers. Temporary pools appear. Screaming insects take over the upper register. Cicadas. Katydids. Crickets. I think the twilight tonight was as loud as I have ever heard it, that green shrieking crust of the earth. Woodpecker climbing, circling up the trunk of a vine-strung pecan tree. Owl to my left. Owl to my right. Mid-May, mimosa time, cool as California, when all the leaves that will arrive have finally arrived, and everything gets greener overnight.