How Should One?

How should one observe the Wampanoag Day of Mourning?

I lacked this name for the day until a little ago.

I have felt the usual nonchalance about Thanksgiving. It arrives, then goes. Being far from other family, and lacking the community of friends that made it a memorable day in the calendar in the 1980s, in my Beloit years, Martha and I observe it as a harvest-fest feast day — in our relatively small-appetite way.

Yet what I have done so far today to observe Thanksgiving may mesh with thoughts of mourning the prior caretakers who lived on and with this land.

In my routine before breakfast — when at dawn I put out seeds for birds and a few peanuts for squirrels or, often, jays — I wedged hazelnuts, in their shells, into a maple tree's bark. I added sunflower seeds and dried currants to one birdfeeder's safflower seeds.

Not long before writing this I took a piece of corncob, with dry corn on it, to throw into the farthest-back yard, beyond our tiny woods — thinking of the crow, should one chance by. Smaller birds have been feasting all morning. They include house sparrows — our Eurasian, invading counterparts beneath the feeders.

From the basement steps I pulled a never-eaten but homegrown squash from a year ago‚ to toss into that little wood — in case any creature might still want the seeds within, sometime during the cold ahead.

For these must lie ahead: the cold, paired with a want for warmth within tiny bellies.

I think upon these things and wonder how one might turn our blighting Eurasian presence to a blessing — in a way different from and better than the way in which we nourished this invaded land with spilled blood before 1621 and in all these years since.

With autumnal cheers . . .