This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature

By Joanna Brichetto

Nature isn't only in a park or wilderness. It’s right outside our door. Sometimes it’s on the door or comes inside to find us. Nature is the jumping spider on the screen, the assassin bug in the shower, and the cluster of ladybugs at the lamp. It is the moss on brick where gutters spill, a sycamore sprout in the storm drain, and the trash can lid turned into a bird bath.

Joanna Brichetto is a neurodiverse, late-blooming naturalist with a sharp eye. Despite having chronic illnesses, she spends much of her time exploring nature and has an infectious, almost zealous love for the flora and fauna near and in her Nashville home. In This Is How a Robin Drinks, Brichetto weaves observation, reflection, and commentary with unsentimental wit and an earthy humor into an urban almanac of fifty-two short lyrical essays.

Each piece offers a sketch of everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss. Nature is the dead sparrow in the pickup line at the elementary school, a full moon over the electric substation, and the cicada chorus that doesn’t make a days-long migraine any better (but doesn’t make it any worse either). Nature is under our feet, over our heads, and beside us—the very places we need to know first. Arranged by season, the pieces in this collection celebrate nature—just as it is—on the sidewalk and in the backyard, the park, and the parking lot.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terra Firma
• Release date: Sep 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781595343000

Joanna Brichetto

Joanna Brichetto is a certified Tennessee naturalist and writes the urban nature blog Sidewalk Nature: Everyday Wonders in Everyday Habitat Loss. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, Short Reads, Ecotone, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, the Hopper, Flyway, the Fourth River, and elsewhere. She lives in Nashville. 

Book preview

Summer

Vocation

In fourth grade I narrowed it to three: detective, librarian, naturalist. Naturalist explained why I spent all my free time in the yard or under trees, down the bat cave, or where the cow bones floated ashore.

But then puberty happened. I got distracted. And then blah, blah, the usual story: I forgot what I loved; I lost myself in a boy, and had I been a better detective I never would have married him. To my credit, I did find a job in a library.

For maybe fifteen years I didn’t wych my way to the nearest water or any water. Bugs were for killing. I didn’t hear birds, didn’t bring home a single leaf, didn’t pocket acorns. Not even one sweet hickory, and those are good eats by any standard.

Then I found a man in that library, and although this too is the usual story, our version bore inspection. It checked out. And I remembered.

The first clue—the clanging moment I knew my fourth-grade self was climbing her way back in—was when the man and I were on a walk and I pointed past the streetlight and spoke aloud a thing that surfaced as true and welcome as yellow cow bones in water weeds. It might have been a prayer, or a poem. It was this: Before I met you, that was a bird in a tree. Now it’s a blue jay in a hackberry.

And this explains why I spend all my free time in the yard and under trees, looking around: investigating, cataloging, memorizing what and who are in the wide world with me. Because I narrowed it to one.

Dragonfly, Secondhand

At Goodwill last August, a thing flew past my face. I was near the however-many-toys-you-can-cram-in-a-bag-for-$2.99 table, which is where one might expect to meet projectiles, but the thing was not a Hot Wheels car or Nerf bullet. It was alive. And I was the only one who saw.

It perched on a T-shirt.

Goodwill tends to sort clothes by color, especially T-shirts. The men’s T-shirt section is a vision of order. Only if hung in rainbow sequence could it be more beautiful. The flying thing aimed for the well-represented whites of the T-shirt spectrum. Right there on a shoulder seam: a dragonfly. Gorgeous. White body with black-striped wings in perch position: all four straight out and still. I kept still, too. When a shopper wheeled close, the dragonfly flew and I followed.

It perched on a ball cap.

Let me describe another merchandising tactic at which our Goodwill excels: ball caps. Above the highest wall rack around the perimeter of the store is a frieze of finishing nails. That many nails are necessary to accommodate donated caps because this is Nashville, and who doesn’t have at least five caps at home and two in the car? I don’t mean caps for ball games, although there will be some, but caps for every day: trucker hats. Mesh in back with snap closure, poly-cotton billboard in front with a logo. They are taller than athletic caps. Plenty of room for a dragonfly.

This dragonfly had found a white cap. It paused. I paused. Were those wing stripes more brown than black? Hard to tell under fluorescent lights.

Here I fretted someone would notice me acting weird, someone would notice the dragonfly, and someone would smack the dragonfly with secondhand sporting-goods equipment. But I was helpless to the chase. I tried to chase more casually.

Next it flew to color-coded ladies’ short-sleeved sweaters and found another white shoulder. Then back to the white cap. What was up with all the white?

Not that color was my only question. Why was there a dragonfly in Goodwill? What kind was it? How could a dragonfly get out of Goodwill? How could I help a dragonfly get out of Goodwill?

I already knew that every day, dragonflies throughout the world are losing habitat. I knew that in our own neighborhood the one storm sewer with a prayer of supporting semiaquatic life got drained years ago. We found a baby snapping turtle there once, and another time—directly under a streetlamp—we watched an orange salamander toddle across a driveway. This was when we still had puddles, before grade improvements. After the grading, no wildlife, but SUVs in the driveway keep their tires clean.

One of my Goodwill questions was answered later, with a field guide: common whitetail (Plathemis lydia), male. Known for perching on mud or on anything at all, known for basking in sun. Females lay eggs in shallow ponds after mating with the male, which patrols the favored spot. Adults eat flying insects, can fly far from water, and do not live long—maybe a month, maybe more.

There is no mud or sun at Goodwill. There is no water, unless one counts the Scary Bathroom We Never Use. There is no prey but the odd moth or mosquito. There are only shoppers hunting for bargains.

If my family is wearing clothes (and we usually are), the clothes came from Goodwill (or Target), period. My clothes are even thriftier: they come from my kids’ hand-me-ups, which came from Goodwill (or Target). I get classroom materials at Goodwill. I get soccer cleats. I get housewares, books, bedding, toys, office supplies. Once there was a pair of rubber hip waders flopped all by their lonesome on top of men’s dress shirts, and had they been remotely close to my size I would have bought them so fast my wallet would have been the flying projectile that day. Which goes to show that, though thrifty, I am not immune to impulse.

Impulse must explain why the dragonfly flew in. The shop is part of a busy city grid, but the two glass doors face a railway easement across the street: a mini wasteland of exotic thistle, bindweed, johnsongrass, and whatever else can survive railroad herbicides. Maybe those weeds looked like home. Maybe those double doors—so shiny when they open and close, open and close—maybe they shimmered like water. Maybe the male was on the hunt for new territory to patrol. And once he made it through the waterfall (double-glazed glass), he basked on pale mud (T-shirt, cap, sweater) to get his bearings.

When the dragonfly perched again on the white cap, I eased a neighboring cap off a nail and sidled toward him. I don’t remember being self-conscious at that moment. I was predator, he was prey, and we were all that was. My trucker hat ate him in one go, and with my other hand I swooped his ball cap under and in. I racewalked toward the door but detoured to the cashier nearest it to gush, I hoped intelligibly, I’ve captured a dragonfly in these hats and I’m going to set it free outside and I’ll be right back. Because at this point, with my prey caught, we were no longer all that was, and I felt I had to explain why I was leaving the store with two hats I did not stand in line to pay for. The lady raised her chin as an Okay, whatever.

The waterfall parted with a push of my hip, and I stopped at the edge of the concrete porch. I faced the easement and the sun. I straightened my arms and lifted the trucker hat from the white one. The dragonfly shot toward the little field, away, completely. Gone.

I wanted to look for him, to scan the railroad weeds for a pond or even a puddle, to see that he stayed completely gone, but I was too nervous about stolen merchandise so I turned around.

The doors looked like doors.

I had a smile ready for the cashier when I would tell her It was fine, the dragonfly was free, and thanks, but she didn’t look up so I didn’t say it. In that crowded store, I was still the only person to see the dragonfly.

What if I hadn’t been there? What would have happened? If a dragonfly falls in Goodwill and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Slow now, and tired, I stepped past customers and children and carts to loop back to the frieze, to hook the hats on their respective nails. And then I perched. To get my bearings. I stood in an aisle—any aisle, I can’t remember which—and basked in fluorescence, trying to think what I’d come to Goodwill for in the first place.

Naked Ladies and Cicadas

Whoever planted our surprise lilies is gone, but her lilies aren’t. For twenty-three Nashville summers they’ve surprised us in the front yard: pink megaphones on a stick. Hummingbirds love them, but I didn’t until now. Other names for the plant are resurrection lilies, which my family is too Jewish to say; and naked ladies, which we think is funny. They are nekkid. The leaves that ought to clothe them come and go in spring, months before fleshy flower stalks stretch.

I must have asked my neighbor what they were. Mrs. Neal liked to chat from her porch as she flung Lean Cuisine leftovers onto the grass (for the birds). She had been at the house next door for forty years. She would have known the name naked lady, and would have cackled when she said it.

Ours surprised me two days ago. I forgot them, as usual, until pink unfolded.

A cicada found that first bloom a day later. As I bent to stick my nose in the flower I saw an empty skin clutching the lowest petal. It was a big annual dog-day cicada. And at that moment, as I squinted over my glasses in search of the curly white thread inside a cicada’s split back—part of its breathing apparatus—right then, morning sun shot through it. The husk was a conduit. Sunshine poured through the eye bubbles, sluiced from the front claws, pricked each chin whisker, and lit the whole miraculous thing on fire. What had been dry-mud-brown burned amber, burned my eyes. It was so gorgeous I could not move except to toggle myself toward the best angle of sun through skin.

Exuvia is the proper word: the cast-off outer skin of an arthropod after a molt. Exuuuuuuvia. An exuvia exalted.

The nymph had tunneled during the moon-thin night, up through soil soft from a storm, and scaled the first vertical thing it met: a naked lady. When it reached the top, it stopped on a petal to do its own disrobing. Scratches show where clawed feet scrabbled for a hold. Cicadas, like butterflies, have to hang just so to give new wings space and gravity to straighten, fill, and firm. Surprise: a nekkid bug, resurrected.

Does anyone plant surprise lilies anymore? Lycoris squamigera is an old flower in old lawns. In our neighborhood they still show up, but only in yards not yet gentrified by sod. They thrive on neglect and will not survive weekly mow ’n’ blow yard crews. My family is lazy, so we are ideal hosts.

Our fallow yard is good for cicadas too. They spend most of their lives underground sucking roots, not doing any harm. Depending on species, they’ll stay two to seventeen years in the dark, then emerge to molt into adults: to fly, sing (if male), mate, lay eggs (if female), and a few weeks later, die.

I worry about the collateral damage new construction wreaks on cicada populations. Nashville is booming. We are a city of cranes. Excavation kills cicadas outright, but my Twilight Zone nightmare is an image of Nashville’s thirteen-year periodical nymphs tunneling to the surface to find no surface. Instead they bump whiskered chins against new infill houses planted two per lot, against zero-setback additions and new mixed-use high-rises: obstacles so deep and wide any bug left alive would not feel its way to an edge in time.

After Mrs. Neal left, six successive owners renovated, landscaped, flipped, and otherwise improved her property. The side porch where she welcomed us to the neighborhood with buttermilk pie is behind a six-foot privacy fence. Surprise lilies (deliberately) and cicadas (incidentally) were grubbed out years ago.

Yesterday’s cicada was male. Where is he now? Did he stay? Is he part of the buzzing chorus in the hackberry trees, singing his chainsaw booty call for any female within cicada earshot?

Males start calling as the day warms. They sing and sing from tymbal tums, some with vibrato, some tremolo. Vibrato changes pitch, but tremolo—like a guitar pedal, like a Purim gragger—stays the pitch but pulses it. Sometimes a cicada waves a pattern in 2/4 time: the downbeat a ratcheting socket wrench, the upbeat a rest. They all crescendo, quicken, fade, repeat.

At dusk they quiet. Except one, maybe, and maybe he’s mine: my naked lady cicada. He stays up late to solo in trees already black, even as robins tut tut last call from tonight’s roost. And if dark comes early because of cloud cover, fooling the rest of us, he will sing even as big brown bats start their turn in pewter sky. He will sing with the moon, but I have his skin, which once held the sun.

Walking Onions

Walking onions walk. Mom, never one to visit empty-handed, showed up with a muddy bouquet in a sack unasked for, unexplained. I liked the name. By the next year, or the next, or maybe the one after that, my garden had little else.

They walk by gravity. A green strap spears up—tall, more than halfway up the chicken wire—and the tip swells into a manila paper bunting of babies: bulblets with spears-in-waiting tiny as pine needles. The needles grow, bulblets fatten, and the collective family leans, creases, and pivots to the ground. The babies root a foot or more from where they started or tumble even farther. They walk, true to name. They take a step, and another, and so on across the garden into the grass.

Chicken wire is no barrier to a peripatetic vegetable.

They crowded the parsley, the chives, the basil, even the chickweed and ground ivy, but at least I was growing something. And besides, they were from Mom.

They gave me a surprise, those onions, because of the paper wasps. One summer I kept hearing something: a dry scratchy something. Curiosity finally pulled me from the hammock to the garden. To the walking onions. To the paper wasp on the paper of the walking onions. The wasp did not mind my giant face stuck up in her business of scraping paper. I could see jaws working the fiber, planing it top to bottom, not side to side; tucking it in a hidden cheek to fly back to the nest where she would spit a new wall, slobber a tight hexagonal nursery.

Paper wasps were the only things that chewed those onions. They did not taste good raw, fried, marinated, grilled, souped, chived, baked, or roasted.

I finally mentioned this to Mom.

She said that’s why she got rid of hers in the first place.

And, apparently, why she walked them to me.

Paradise in a Parking Lot

I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete.

It’s so f--kin’ heroic.

GEORGE CARLIN

In summer twilight before dawn, Orion the Hunter wakes up here, in the vacant lot. Fresh from the horizon, he’s lying on his back, but his bow is aimed at the Bull who with every ticking moment pulls him upright and west. The Bull’s route is the ecliptic, the same route