Rose and I left our garden behind last workweek to go shell and birding on Sanibel , Captiva and Cayo Costa . We follow a routine , repeated for a workweek or two every February . We patrol beach for shells and the J.N. “ Ding ” Darling National Wildlife Refuge for fowl .
We learn the name of an abundant variety show of shell and birds and palpate sure-footed that our mental acuity may not be as unsound as we cerebrate . We palpate good about ourselves for a little while .
It is only a mirage .
White Ibis at the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge in Sanibel, Florida.
By the spring equinoctial point , the names of much of what we see a few weeks before will be forgotten , another looting of the memory coin bank .
Rose and I are in our late LX , not quite over the hill , but poised perilously at the top of a steep one .
The weather has been gay , and the temperate mostly warm . Rose ’s brother Milton joined us , along with Heather Spencer and Charles Murray , our good friends from Asheville , NC , who are great observers of lifespan .
White Ibis at the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge in Sanibel, Florida.
I have never found a four - leaf clover , and when I ’m in the company of anyone with shrewd eyes , I often take , “ What is it , what did you see ? ” Charles spotted more big cat paw seashell than he ’d view before . At the Ding Darling , Rose got tiptoe off on a wood stork ; Charles saw a yellow - crown night heron , and Heather spotted a reddish egret .
I keep secure company , and enjoy plenty of sightings , but out alone I would feel lost , stuck in a metaphorical brushwood of impenetrable mangroves without my talented agent of nature .
White Ibis at the J.N. “ Ding ” Darling National Wildlife Refuge in Sanibel , Florida .
Then there are short - term memory lapses , plagued by random hard - to - callback nouns .
Nouns ?
“ Pass the thingy , ” while point a finger toward your target object on the kitchen table , may be the best you could do when salt shaker is nowhere nigh to the tip of your lingua .
I ’m not the only one in this floundering boat of nouns .
Poet Laureate Billy Collins riffed on a like state of mind in his verse form , Forgetfulness . Here ’s a helping .
The name of the author is the first to go
keep abreast obediently by the title , the secret plan ,
the heartbreaking close , the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never translate , never even hear of ,
as if , one by one , the retentivity you used to harbor
adjudicate to retire to the southerly hemisphere of the brain ,
to a picayune sportfishing small town where there are no telephone set .
And , thus , no phone apps .
Heather , Charles and I visited the Corkscrew Sanctuary last Friday . Heather introduce me to a remarkable phone app , Picture This , which identified the viningAster carolinianus . ( At last , I ’ve found , if not the Fountain of Youth , at least a phone app that may save me from saying , “ Oh , it ’s that thingy . ”
Heather held the Picture This telephone set app toward bark , flowers and leave .
Eureka !
We come across a slew of spongy denudate cypress stump covered in Boston fern , and seldom was the app stump .
I had n’t expect to see this oddball aster in a soggy woodland in Southwest Florida , growing with pond cypress tree ( Taxodium ascendens ) , sabal thenar and wax Vinca minor . ( I ’ve come across the vine in gardens farther northerly but never in the wild . ) We also learned , through this app , that the Aster is a disaster — well , as far as botanical terminology goes . The name has been cruelly mutate toAmpelaster carolininanus . Other asters were re - anointed with clumsy genus name likeDoellingeria , Eurybia andSymphyotrichum .
Do n’t worry about it .
If you ’re in the garden , or in the wild , andAster carolinianus , wax aster , or even aster , is all you could remember , it ’s all right .
We ’ll puzzle out through this together .
We ’re in the same boat .
See you soon .
Allen
