Life is Healthy

It’s been almost a year since a Great Horned Owl killed a skunk in our back yard. The owl was probably perched in our neighbor’s pine tree, saw dinner, but with its poor sense of smell, didn’t realize he was diving right into a skunk. One whiff after he killed it, he was outta there, leaving us with a carcass and sheets, blankets, shoes, clothes, towels – anything within 50 feet of the back windows – reeking of skunk. It took a month to air out the back half of the house and rid the smell from our linens and clothes.

Skunks are attracted to bird seed, I found out after searching “How to get rid of skunks without killing them.” We have three feeders in our back yard and so with great sadness, I stopped feeding the birds in mid July and will not put feed in again until mid September.

I’m so lonesome I could cry.

I miss the cardinals, sparrows, finches, cowbirds, catbirds and even the mourning doves and blue jays. Every day there was a feeding frenzy at the feeders, and I had a great view whether I was washing dishes or sitting on the deck.

I still fill the bird bath, and once in awhile a cardinal or robin will stop by and take a dip, but it’s not the same.

So I’ve taken to observing bees. They love the salvia and phlox in my garden, and now that the mums have bloomed and the sage and oregano have flowered, bees are everywhere.

Bees break all the rules. Man-made rules, that is. Within our current understanding of aerodynamics, bumble bees shouldn’t be able to fly. However, says Dr. Galapagos on the teacher-oriented website The Flying Turtle, “…not fully understanding how something works does not mean the explanation must then be magic (nor does it mean the only possible explanation is aliens from another planet). A violation of the normal laws of physics would be magic or a miracle.”

Many times I’ve wondered why the scale has gone up or gone down when I haven’t done anything out of the ordinary. I read bloggers and comments from people who ask the same question: “I ate the same thing, worked out the same way this week and I gained three pounds? How does that happen?” All I can say is, “I don’t know.” We can try to explain it, like scientists trying to explain the physics of bumble bees, when maybe all we need to do is trust that our bodies are simply working within some physical laws we don’t understand.

Statistics suggest I should be gaining back the 170 pounds I lost. Unfortunately it’s what most people do after getting to goal. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s like “my” birds. I have to trust that even though I haven’t filled the feeders for six weeks, they’ll be back in September. I trust that the salvia and phlox and other flowers will return to my garden next year and so, too, will the bees. I trust that if I keep doing what I’m doing with my body….it will stay the same. Relatively speaking.

This reminds me of the song by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes: “If You Don’t Know Me By Now.” For all the things my body and I have been through together, I should understand it, right? Just trust in it. I’m working on it. Always working on it.

Wouldn’t you know it? As I type this, I smell the faint odor of skunk. Not in my back yard, but somewhere nearby. I can only trust that skunk won’t find its way into our yard. I’ve done everything I can to safeguard the place. But as I know all too well, nothing’s 100 percent.

So I’ll just take some solace in Harold Melvin’s appearance on Soul Train. (Props to Simply Red and his version of this song. I love it, too.) Body, I dedicate this to you:




************************
Side note: I got an email from Marsha from the Fit Woman blog over at the weight-loss retreat Green Mountain at Fox Run in Vermont who said their account was hacked into a few weeks ago which caused a loss in their rankings on major search engines. Just helping them get back in the groove by throwing out some searchable words. Gotta love technology, don’t ya?