looduskalender.ee

The woodpecker, by the way - let this be hammered in – isn’t distracted by neither low nor high pressures, it just goes on hammering on the ancient pine trees, somehow by this underlining the ancientness of the trees, with which also doubtless go some dead – according to our everyday understanding – branches. But how dead can they be when the woodpecker knocks and knocks there.

The woodpecker isn’t a boxer who bangs its head against the fists of an opponent just for the sake of it. Or a footballer who doesn’t find any better way to knock his head about than against the poor patchwork ball, or at best the right foot of the opposing team’s left back player. The woodpecker doesn't knock about just for the sake of it, that is quite clear.

But sometimes a miracle happens. The ordinary flat greyish December morning turns sunny and reveals an unexpected four-dimensionality. Three of them outside you, but one inside. A sunny December morning is as a travel pass abroad, into January.

That gets through to the miraculous many-coloured butterfly too that suddenly flutters around in the room. Now, it is something quite else than the old friendly but rather tiresome spider that comes every evening - just as you have dropped into bed and picked up your book - and suddenly climbs on to your head. The backyard potterer cannot see why the spider necessarily must climb on to his head, when spiders otherwise never get into heads.

Even she-cat Ooper is seriously fed up with this spider, although she normally would even hunt flies. But the butterfly flies to the window, where the sun’s winter face shimmers behind the glass panes, closes its wings and so disappears from sight - as a room that has lost its three dimensions.

Mathematics indeed. Mathematics is easier to grasp in winter. Mathematics is the Sunday of the brain, the Sabbath Day of science. And getting there is most natural now at the winter solstice when nothing else is left to do than to shovel down snow from the roof and make fires..

One of man’s most distasteful invemtions is the electrical fire with artificial leaping flames – in the name of Edison! Artificial candles for the Christmas tree were once a sensation in New York; now, alas, we have gotten used even to them. Real fire – why do we say live fire when it can both sustain and destroy life; flaming, glowing embers in a fireplace, the changing lights of flames creeping up a piece of firewood – perfectly reflects the real face of our fractal, self-mirroring world. Youthful fire is replaced by restrained glowing, searing heat with tamed warmth.

In December too it is necessary to get out to the dunes at least a few times, to be assured that the sea exists. It is pleasant to get that assurance  by sight, and not directly. Which still seems to be the way preferred by the swans swimming around at the river mouth over there, and the geese or whatever they are. Who can remember the names of all those birds, butterflies and spiders, to know the difference between spider, bird, butterfly should be good enough.

Already in 1880 90 % of the town children in Boston didn’t know what a wheat field was, and 75 % didn’t know about the seasons. Even the ones who knew that milk comes from cows had only seen cows in picture books and so thought that cows were the same size as mice.

The backyard potterer has a friend who as a child read the book of old Estonian tales and sayings, "Üle õue õunapuu –  Prettiest apple tree” and from the pictures in it for a long time believed that mice wear folk costume skirts.

Sometimes December turns bright and cheerful and fulfils everyone’s wishes for a White Christmas. And even more benevolently it multiplies these wishes by themselves, and then raises them by some powers for good measure.

So then the storming and milling begins, and the snow only keeps coming and coming and coming. And coming, until some weatherman who predicted a black Christmas and by now is going mad with regret invents a female name for the whole happening. Such as Monika.

The snow gets thicker and thicker. The water vole somewhere deep down there under it all becomes a snow vole and the black male cat Kitikat who has a snow-white bow tie under his chin climbs into the snow to measure the depth of it.

And then, suddenly,  all goes quiet. Silence, isolation. No more falling snow, and no more electricity, no water in the tap, no Internet, no washing machine. The backyard potterer doesn’t know what to do with himself. So dependent have we grown to our mesh of machines and spotlights and networks.

No more to be done about it then than to go out. You walk, and suddenly see a man working away at a giant tree stump, fabulously thick and as high as himself. It must really be cold in the man’s rooms! The orderly pile of firewood in his own backyard rises before his internal eye: all beautifully regular,  of the same length and height, like the palm trees on the Ivory Coast.

But – beware! There on the Elephant Tusk Coast horrible things seem to go on. And the more solid world and weather become, the faster the woodpile melts.

By the way, now two elephant species live in Africa, or so the backyard potterer reads in the science journal. So what will those scientists think of next? No matter how long it took – oh, well, some three million years – but they got to know, they did find out, and put it in print and published it too. Just consider – until now we all thought that there was just the one kind. What an unutterable  shame. Whatever did the elephants think of us.

There are scientists in Estonia too. At the University of Life Sciences they don’t discover elephants; but they decided to start making wine from Estonian-grown grapes. And it seems to have turned out quite nice, even so that the tasters didn’t confuse it with raw moonshine. What an export opportunity! But woe and damnation, the foxes and the raccoon dogs got wind of the thing and devoured  all the berries. Sour grapes aren’t always sour.

 

After these musings New Year’s Eve arrived. The Backyard Potterer thought that he might treat the backyard to some bubbly wine. And with bangs such that woodpecker and crow, water vole and tit, nuthatch and cat, and even the weird whining bug that suddenly had landed behind his ear, would all fall over on their backs. And so would destroy the backyard scenery.

Would derange it so badly that there would be no alternative but to flee into the well heated sauna. Sauna in December, when you proudly step from the hot sweating bench into a snowdrift reaching up to your breast – no better sauna exists anywhere. Never mind that the birch besoms got made only just before the leaves fell, there is still the snow. After all, man isn’t a fish to leap from the sauna straight into ice cold water. Man’s place is in the snowdrift, that is for sure.