Spring And The Senses

I need to get to the tractor that is parked in the very back of the barn. We push the huge doors, opening a black square in the cellar’s concrete façade. The building is low and deep, so even the direct morning light cannot shine in. With the cold engines, the powerful ones, the question is always whether they will start. Most do. They’ll take a few startled breaths, run a little rough and then gather themselves at idle. One after the next, we back trucks and tractors out and stage them across the lawn.

At one point, we need a jack; at another, a jump-start. We holler and coordinate until the barn is nearly empty. It’s a ritual of sorts, a dance-like effort that symbolizes almost every job that will need to be done before first frost—and we haven’t yet seen last frost.

The senses, as we like to call them, inform how we interact with our environment: hear, touch, taste, sight, smell. These automatic tools for survival also give us great, poetic pleasure. We are known to hedonistically pursue them, making an industry of food and music, perfume and velvet. Tourism.

The starlings make better use of the houses than the owners do. They are the true year-round residents, so they have their pick of the place. They have adapted, sort of, to our buildings, and they like architectural embellishments, too, especially the oversized chimney details common in these parts.

If you covet a place on Gibson for just two weeks of the year, imagine the good fortune of the starling that is living there now. Chimneys on Gibson Beach—to-die-for 360 degrees of fabulous views.

Now, the birds march the palatial rim. Keeping watch of this view, one pauses at the corner and with a dry whistle implies ownership of a place.

Far at the other end of Sagaponack, deep in the kettle holes of the moraine, frogs have awoken in the midday heat. They almost sound like ducks, excited and chortling, carrying on like ducks do when they find food.

But the frogs show no restraint. The kettle hole is the green frogs’ amphitheater, and here their sound can easily be felt. The amphibian’s song is not melodious—it is an exhibit of taut force, his yellow throat thrum is concussive and successive. The noise bounces off the bare trunks of trees and all of the slight hillside is sent lightly vibrating by their calls.