Timothy

Cigar Ruminations No. 3

not an Eastern box turtle

It is late afternoon on a Sunday when I step from the front porch, a cigar in one hand and a notebook in the other. The cicadas are calling to one another in overlapping waves, rhythms that rise and fall, never repeating but eternally the same. A car on the highway below, its sound mercifully muted by the music of the cicadas, speeds around the blind curve before fading once it passes Cook’s Mill.

As I open the double gates leading to our wooded lane, I glance over my shoulder and see that the leaves of the tulip poplar out by the barn have begun to turn. Seasons do not arrive or depart on schedule, punched in and out like a time clock. Instead, changes are heralded by both the large and the small, disregarding the meteorologist’s (and the farmer’s) best projections. The large—poplars, sweet gums, and black gums (last to put on leaves and first to shed them)—are the weathervanes that alert us to change in the air, while in the fields the small forages—the ubiquitous broom sedge and other fall grasses—rise to dominate. In another month the sedges will wave their reddish-orange stalks in a breeze to signify the field’s need for mineral sustenance.

I walk the familiar wooded path to the lane’s southern end, settle on my usual rocky throne, and light my cigar. A slight movement in the fallen leaves a moment later catches my eye. An Eastern box turtle ten feet away has stuck its neck out to sample the new shoot of an emerging tree. He (it has the longer tail and red eyes of the male) then takes a single slow step and stops, as if thinking “don’t be hasty; you have all day.” I agree with and admire such patient wisdom and smoke unhurriedly.

For the next three-quarters of an hour the turtle methodically crosses below my perch, right to left, where I sit watching his occasional navigations around a twig or small branch. We are fellow travelers on a journey this blessedly cool afternoon: he in his careful searching for the best path and I in more complicated fashion aspiring to the same.

I decide to name him Timothy, of the-tortoise-of-Selbourne fame. He seems unimpressed with the new sobriquet when I voice it aloud. Instead, he sniffs out a caterpillar, spends the next few minutes chomping it down, and then takes an unexpected five bold strides and slides under the boulder upon which I rest.

Having resolved little, I close my notebook, stub out my cigar, and quietly descend from his roof. If I have realized anything today, it is that in this place, this small patch of forest where the box turtle sleeps with a stone roof over his head, fed by a bug, a leaf, and the occasional intimate encounter, his needs are met. I retrace my steps through the woods, my patch of earth, to where my own shelter awaits.

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Current bedtime reading: the collected short stories of Miss Marple and Poirot (A. Christie). Each story is around 15 pages, which is about the perfect length to read before sleep.

Also reading and gazing at: The Color of Hay, the peasants of Marramures (K&H McLaughlin). Text and photographs by husband and wife team regarding a vanishing (vanished) peasant culture in Romania. A bit pricey but a beautiful book to own about a true agrarian culture.