Spring
- We begin with a pontification on the English language—what, that's not how you celebrate spring, you non-Pulitzer winner? Odd.
- As a child, Dillard thought all words in other languages were analogs for English, that all you had to do to learn a language was memorize words.
- When she took her first French class and realized she was wrong, she was devastated.
- Anyway, here's what she does when she gets bored with the bird she's studying, because this is a woman who's always studying a bird: She imagines watching it go backward through evolution until it's a lizard.
- She thinks about what birds might be trying to communicate with their elaborate songs. She wonders why birdsong is beautiful—how beautiful does the transmission of a message need to be?
- Here's how birdsong relates to language: There's no direct human translation of birdspeak. The fact that humans find it beautiful is coincidental; only birds will ever know what it means.
- Anyway, so it's April, and Dillard usually gets a little impulsive and/or compulsive in the spring. She'll take up new hobbies, usually a game of some sort, and get so obsessed she forgets to eat. She's going to try to keep it together this year, though.
- The praying mantis egg case she tied to the bush outside her window got attacked by ants, but the ants didn't make it through to the eggs. For now, the baby mantises are safe, but that being-a-bug thing can turn on you pretty quickly.
- Tinker Creek is all about the salamanders these days. Dillard discovers that if she sticks her finger in the water, a random salamander will nibble it. So basically, she's the Newt Whisperer.
- The specific gravity of newts makes them float just beneath the surface of the water, so their legs dangle. (We can't decide if that's adorable or terrifying.)
- The woods are full of flowers, and Annie wonders if any creatures eat flowers—she's never seen it happen. There are lots of flowers and trees… and oh hey, let's talk about trees.
- Here's a thing about elms: They make up to six million leaves in a season.
- Dillard gets a little obsessive about standing over a tulip tree waiting for a tulip to bloom. The grass turned green overnight, and she doesn't want the tulips to go blooming behind her back. She wonders—as one does—if she could grow grapes in her mouth if she swallowed some dirt and seeds.
- Onto the Eskimos. Not that there are Eskimos at Tinker Creek; just Eskimos in general. Apparently Eskimos appreciate the coming of spring, but look forward to the coming of winter. Spring melts the ice, which causes a lot of havoc, because there's a lot of ice. It's easier to strap on your snowshoes and walk around in the snow than cross a body of water.
- Good point, Eskimos.
- Another subject jump: Jean White's horse. Jean is a friend of Dillard's, and when her horse died, there was drama getting rid of the body.
- They tried giving it to a local fox farm (yeah, as in fur coats) for the foxes to eat, but surprisingly, the farm already had enough dead horses.
- Ultimately, Jean got permission to dump the horse in a landfill, and if you've never dumped a horse in a landfill, it requires a dairy farmer and a crane.
- There's more watching of ducks and frogs and creeks—you know the drill—and then we're on to plankton. See, Dillard's been sampling the pond water.
- Apparently it's all good fun looking at cute microscopic crustaceans until a redworm comes thrashing across your slide. Whenever it happens, Dillard almost has a heart attack, because it feels like the thing's in the room with her.
- She thinks about the fact that crustaceans have whole crustacean lives, like birds. You could say crustaceans spend their lives just sort of milling around, but humans kind of do, too, right?
- Now that she's aware of plankton, she has to give consideration to their lives. The curiosity's been sparked, and she's got her thing to obsess on for the spring.