Yes, the election season nears, but I’m not talking about those votes, ones we hold close, or sometimes make with noses pinched against the scent of politics. No, I’m thinking here about neighbors, fellow creatures, who, in their daily rounds, are always selecting, in a way, electing the places they value.

On a recent summer-thinking-about-fall morning, I set out for a brief walk, turning my usual left at driveway’s end. That set me on course for pleasure No. 1: our neighbor’s front yard. The yard does not sweep ponderosa-like up to their manor, which then might look haughtily down on you. It is, instead a mild confusion of color, sound and motion, with 11 raised beds of flowers and vegetables. Much is always afoot or awing there, and I always slow to take it in.

On this morning, the usual happiness of many colors, but also, lots of motion — it too colorful and easily IDed: a flutter of monarch butterflies. I began to count. Eight, no 11 (prime number, prime wonder) finally, once I’d sorted their looping flights, all happy, I assumed, with the garden’s offering of milkweed. But then, as if suturing these flares and arcs together, quick, quick motion — hummingbird one, no, two…Oh! There’s three — dancing before the red blooms along the house front.

Yes, by now I was only standing, inert in wonder at the color and collage of this garden-yard before me, its 11 raised beds, each tended by a less sun-favored human neighbor. It was clear to me that the butterflies and birds had already spoken. “This is THE place, they said, voting with their wings. I restarted myself, walked on to see what other votes my winged neighbors might cast.

Endorsement

Going out, whatever the day’s weather, is chief reward for whatever seated work has come my way. But, at times, I may need a bit of encouragement before I walk, and yet I know better than to step outside, where one winged or leafy distraction leads to the next. How to both satisfy and contain this need?

Solution: let someone else do it. In this case let the blogger known as Whirlwings (or Carolyn) determine my distraction and break, while I remain safely in my chair.

So, no, this is not that sort of endorsement. This column doesn’t do politics … unless the local watersheds ask for them. Here instead, on offer for free many days, is a place to visit and marvel … at more landed wonders.

Whirlwings is my favorite bird blog, and like many of the best sightings we’re offered, it too is free. The hummingbirds above put me in mind of it, and I went to see the recent offering. It — and I am not making this up — was about hummingbirds. Small warning if you are a purist: the birds on this blog talk, often talking back to, or at, the blogger, who clearly talks to them … often.

As someone who talks to all manner of animals, I enjoy this. But if you are anthropomorphically allergic, perhaps beware. Or, perhaps, join the family. Wryly funny, subservient to the birds she serves, Whirlwings simply improves my day. Here’s the address that may improve your day, too: whirlwings.blog/2024/08/18/go-away/

The watersheds do ask this

The other day, in the aftermath of the recent chemical spill at Brunswick Landing (reported ably and thoroughly by the Times Record and Press Herald), The Mere Brook Steering Committee, charged with overseeing the improvement of said brook from its current urban-impaired status, met to review current and near-future work on the brook.

The spill, to be clear, did take place in the Mere Brook watershed’s eastern sector. And the stormwater ponds and drainages heavily affected drain to the brook’s main stem, just above and then into Harpswell Cove. This is already old, familiar toxic ground that will now be even more heavily studied and worked over as this spill works its way into and through the area’s waters.

What I ask for also is continued, really redoubled, attention to Mere Brook’s western branch, the run our brook and its tributaries make through our town’s streets and neighborhoods before the flow reaches Brunswick Landing. These are the rills and eddies of “our brook,” the neighbor-water I can see, for example, by stepping out the door and looking downslope to a profusion of green.

Here, in this western watershed, with our plantings, our beauty preferences, our casual citizenship, we make daily offerings to these waters. To date, our offerings, whether pesticides, fertilizers or driveway runoff, have deeply compromised the brook’s ability to clean itself and support basic macroinvertabrate life.

But we, the town and citizens, are working to change that, to bring life back to its waters as complement to its still vital population of a prize Maine fish, the brook trout. I hope you will join your daily life and its choices to this effort.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick, Maine resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, chair also of The Mere Brook Steering Committee, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com