skunks

the fields were mowed last week, and the skunks have begun to spread out their pit digging further and further across the now accessible ground. It does indeed look as if someone flew overhead and dropped large invisible marbles onto the bare ground, leaving little pits everywhere; there isn't enough milky spore out there (that I would be willing to apply) to cover 6 acres of field in a futile effort to eradicate japanese beetle grubs. However, I am beginning to think there are enough skunks, moles, and birds that will do it quite nicely. Go, skunks.

magic

Im not sure just how it happens, but now and then I find a writer who writes seemingly mundane stuff, and at first I think, well, okay. So he was poet laureate, so she was a big deal.
This is boring. And I keep reading, suddenly stunned by something that really has no words to express it-- a link, a connection, the way the words fit together, the spirit, perhaps,
of the writer that lingers in the poem--

Someone writes a simple, 12 line poem about snow, and I can see that snow, feel it, Im in the middle of all of it. I read a poem about walking across a yard in early spring, and there is the yard, that feeling of damp, the smell of soggy hay, of mud, of a much too warm south wind blowing at me--and I think, what just happened here? It has to be more than just the words on the page, more than the fact of celebrity, or skill with words; hell, im a poet myself, and I can't understand it, even though now and then I find myself reaching that same place in something I write, something that resonates for someone else.

In some way the writer enters his own poem, and leaves bits of himself in there for the rest of us to find.

Ted Kooser, thank you. Jane Kenyon, thank you.

Barnes and Noble blowout

We went out to eat last night and ended up at B&N. By the time I was done I had bought six books and one CD, possibly more than I have ever bought at one time except at book sales, which are a special category all in themselves... two poets I have read but never extensively--Ted Kooser and Jane Kenyon--a deeply discounted Spenser novel, Now & Then, a deeply discounted Sue Grafton mystery, T is for Trespass, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad--one of those books someone says I 'should' read but somehow have never gotten to--and a book for my mother-in-law who reads only particular authors, this one by Kathleen Woodiwiss, who writes historial fiction.

Also stopped off at the Best Buy and recycled an old dot matrix printer; I recently found out that all the BB stores will take electronics, from TVs to printers, mouses and keyboards, and my little recycled soul wept with joy at that. All in all a satisfying, if expensive, night out...

Lope (cool link)

http://www.lope.ca/

a series of images, once you get into them they become almost like a Rorschach test--I keep thinking, what do *I* see in this...and if nothing else, just fun to move through, one at a time.

when we go back we expect
our old life to still be there
waiting for us just the way we left it.
Mother on the front porch reading,
Daddy asleep in his chair
by the fireplace.
The old dog thumps his tail in greeting,
even though reason insists
that no dog could live forty years,
even for you; all your friends
where you left them, at street corners
and in doorways, leaning against cars
and motorcycles; nearly grown, waving hello
and goodbye as you drive past: Tommy
alive and sporting that new beard,
Ruthann still slim and waif-like--
Armena with a bright new diamond on her finger.
As they were, uncluttered, unfettered by change,
as you were, for a little while.

Storm Tracking

It's that time of year, and this is a very cool weather tracking site with good graphics, a lot of interactive buttons, and it lets you check out other areas as well without too much work.

http://www.stormpulse.com/

Today I wrote a letter

no, i mean a real letter to a friend, on paper, words on de page, the entire thing. She sent one to me last week, because she was having trouble making her computer do what she wanted it to,
and figured it was time she remembered how to do this thing.

she bought paper, an ink pen, and a stamp. The least i could do was send her one back. I had the pen, but had to scramble for paper, and luckily had a few stamps on hand. It was interesting, seeing as how it's been nearly ten years since I sat down and actually wrote a real letter--date, salutation, the whole bit.

I was a bit nervous, not sure if i could actually form complete sentences and write at the same time (you laugh, ha ha, try it, it's not as easy as it once was), and make the lines even. It was like being nine years old again, writing to my best friend.

I am ridiculously proud of re-finding a skill I thought had been lost to the computer...

Hurricane Danny

well not surprisingly we are getting the edges of this one, lots and lots of rain (always welcome this time of year) but not much wind, which is nice, too. They figure maybe three inches, and from the way it rained all night, we got that and maybe a bit more.

The mister spent yesterday and Thursday mowing, getting ready for one of our neighbors to come take the hay for his horses. It was a close thing, (it always is), but they got it baled and we helped load it on the trailer, got done just around 5 pm. Im always glad when this is done with for the year, and this is one of the major reasons I never wanted to get into farming. Weather plays such a huge part of it, and you are always haying with one eye on the clouds, racing whatever is up there heading your way.

the tomatoes are a volunteer that simply took over, and it has at least a dozen small fruits--the potatoes I dug this morning because the leaves were looking less than healthy, and came up with 25 pounds--the man who sold me the sets said they should yield 10 to 1, pound-wise. I bought two pounds , and have already exceeded the limit. One more box to dig. if the others pan out as well, I may get a 15 to 1 yield...

and yes, at last, the reason for the title

two years ago, almost exactly, I went to the ophthomalogist and was told my new vision problem was a monster floater, and that I would, basically, have to learn to live with it. Few surgeons understandably will touch them, since it involves major surgery way down there in the eye. He also said, if there are any changes to the eye, let me know.

Three days later what i thought was the floater descended, and in three days more the eye had become a grey haze, utterly distorted. Wow, I thought, this is a mess. But I never went back. partly because I figgered he'd tell me it was there, and to get used to it. Partly because I wanted to see how this thing was going to play out, too. The distortion was incredible, and over time the eye became darker and dimmer. I could see in natural sunlight, but aritificial light was worthless.

Today I had an appointment at his office, and it turns out that two years ago they had not told me that what often follows a major floater like that was a detached retina (which is why I went in the first time around). The doctors at that point discussed it without me being present, but all I was told was to go home and get used to the floater. (This is why today, two years later, I exercised my privileges as a 63 year old woman, and suggested gently that the next time something like this happens to someone, to TELL them what to look for so that they have full knowledge to work with. I called it a learning experience and I suspect he'll get the message. )
And I found out today I did indeed have a detached retina. Those are supposed to be treated very quickly to keep them from getting worse. Not knowing I had one, meant two years have gone by. Im going to see a retina specialist in September, since they said I do have some vision left (oh joy in the morning) in that eye, even though there's not a lot of hope for repairs at this point.

sigh.

I do wish doctors would learn to trust their patients' intelligence and ability to handle stuff, rather than playing god and making pronouncements from on high--while you nod and smile and go off into the world not realizing you have an aneurysm, or a detached this, or a fibrillated that, waiting to change your life. Oh, they say, when you end up in the hospital, I was afraid this might happen. We didnt tell you because we weren't sure, and didn't want to alarm you...

tomato tomato

I wasnt planning on planting tomatoes for two reasons this year--one, we had such a glut of them last year I figured it would take two winters to finish them up--and two, Im not supposed to be eating the things raw, anyway.

And yet the plant out there right now, a volunteer, doesnt know all that. It's like a cat we had once who didnt know he was a stray, and moved in one night just like he lived here. The plant is now five feet high and taking over the space alloted, plus a few feet more in all directions. It has at least a dozen fair sized green tomatoes, and if the frost holds off another month, I just might get a few fresh ones. (don't tell anyone)

I bought four bell pepper plants last spring. They are all doing remarkably well, except for one which didnt want to be a green pepper, and has decided to be a banana pepper instead. Hey, im flexible.

pet peeves for august

people who take photographs of flowers, birds, insects, etc, and post them in a huge collection, hundreds and hundreds, carefully labeled sometimes as to where and when, but not a single
identifying clue as to what those birds, fish, insects, ARE. no names.

I found an image in one of those groupings that was a mate to an insect I had taken a shot of, here in the yard. Utterly useless, except to tell me that I don't have a rarely seen bug. I was so annoyed by this, I actually wrote to the guy and suggested maybe a bit of research would be nice--if you're going to bother to take the picture, you should take that extra step and find out what it is. He said he knew a lot of them, but never got around to putting up the actual names.

Yep, that's useful.

The other peeve I have about photos is lifting stuff from the net with no acknowledgement or identifying clues, just because you 'like the photo'. At least identify what it is, or who it is, when you post it, if it's got markers.

blowing my own tin whistle

http://www.universityreviewsonline.com/2005/10/top-100-poetry-blogs.html

(#69, thankyouvery much)

Silent August

Last night I stepped outside to see the Perseids; I know they're around other than last night, but that was supposed to be the peak show. The fog, however, blocked the sky, and the only thing putting on a show was a bajillion crickets, all across the fields. And a lone barred owl at the edge of the woods.

In August I am sharply reminded that even though the garden is still showing off, the goldenrod is beginning to bloom, and the milkweeds are forming their fall seed pouches. It's half way to September, and except for a few crows and jays and the woodthrush, bird song has just about stopped. No more mating serenades, no more territorial warnings. Some of the swallows have already gathered and left, without much fanfare, off to the wilds of Tierra del Fuego for the winter.

In a week or two the sparrows and warblers will start packing it in for the summer, too, and there will be clouds of them out there, ferreting out every seed and insect they can find. It's a wonder they can even lift off after all of that *g*

But the crickets, now. We still have them, and that's not so bad, after all.

Car whines

I was going through new car sites today, seeing what's out there. Mostly curiosity, since Im keeping t his little car until it's time to give it to the junk man...and one of the things that convinced me, was the number of cars touted as having "great gas mileage" and then you read the numbers. Best of the lot, in Honda, anyway, was 30 city, 34 highway. Excuse me? And for a price tag somewhere over 20K. The hybrid, which is usually way too expensive for what you get, trumpets 40mpg. wow. What no one ever factors in is the cost of that brutally expensive battery, and what recharging that puppy will cost in electricity every time you recharge it. Of course you're saving money at the pump, and saving gasoline. But the electricity you use to charge that up at home uses oil at the other end, to make electricity.

I did the math on this once, and it turns out that to amortize your expenses you would have to own that car for ten years. and if you figure in how steep car payments are these days, make that twenty years, since the interest rates on an auto loan usually double the original cost of a car by the time you're paid it off.

In addition, the batteries are brutally expensive, and need to be replaced every three or four years. I found out today that what is IN those batteries comes from an open pit mine in canada, and is truly toxic stuff. Sounds better and better, don't it.

but we can fire up our hybrid cars, ignore the whirring of the electric meter, and feel good about saving the planet. god bless america.

Pet Peeve time again

Last week my husband was carded while trying to buy O'Doul's Beer, which has less alcohol in it than most cough medicines. Now, this is a 65 year old man with a grey ponytail and a nearly white beard. The woman insisted that he could not buy beer unless he could prove he was over 21.

it's all well and good to be careful, but caution does need to be tempered with common sense. In this instance I think stupidity won out. And all she had to do was LOOK at him to see he had met and passed the legal drinking ago decades ago...what makes this even more bizarre is that a year ago he was carded for the same offense in another store. sigh.



In the supermarket today I actually focused on the cigarette display, which these days is not a wealth of various brands and styles, lining the checkout counter aisle, but a locked and god help us chain-padlocked display behind heavy glass. It looks eminently unbreakable. I suppose at $6+ a pack they would want to keep those valuable little containers safely tucked away, but there's something slightly chilling about such extreme measures--and then you realize that a child seen holding an unopened pack, or even an unlit cigarette, can be arrested--and then you think, if they're that dangerous (which in a way they are) why are they even sold at ALL?

If Uncle Sam could find a way to legalize for profit cocaine, heroine, and marijuana, you can be sure it would be done. The only reason cigarettes are even sold at all is because the government gets a great deal of money out of the process.


and last week on a heavily traveled two way highway I saw a young woman in the breakdown lane, roller blading. Cell phone glued in place. it would have been okay, but the breakdown lane there is fairly narrow, so every left footed stroke carried her over the white line and into the traffic coming up behind her. Everyone had to swerve to miss her, and that meant oncoming cars had to swerve as well, to keep from hitting the cars that were... well, you get the effect--I cannot tell you how much I wanted to ease her back off the road with the passenger side of my car...really really wanted to. So I laid on the horn, just for something to do, and she turned to look at me with this blank expression that had "whatEVER" written all over it, the facial equivalent of the finger. One of the very few times I have EVER wanted a cell phone, *g*

There seems to be a certain level of entitlement with people like that, they really dont give a rip about the people they're endangering, or discommoding. And if she did manage to zig into another car's zag, it would immediately be his fault, not hers.

I really really wanted to. oh yeah.

Age Hath It's Perks

you can forget stuff, and it's okay. When a plant comes up in the garden that you never saw before, even if you have the tag that says you planted it, it's always a pleasant surprise. and when a volunteer plant appears, you can take full credit for it being there.

You and your friends can tell each other the same old jokes as if they were new, and everyone laughs as if they never heard it before, probably because they have no memory of having told it to YOU three days ago.

Books read years ago, so long ago that the plot resolution is a gentle surprise, are always fun. What isn't, is realizing your favorite books are now the books of a much younger person, and no longer even readable.

You can be cranky, and its 'cute'. You can actually think, if not say, "now see here, young lady", and know that in five years or so you can say it too.

You don't have to keep up with new technology. And if you do, people are startled, which is always fun.

The day I realized I was older than most if not all of the doctors, dentists, and policemen, I stopped being nervous about any of them. We are now eye to eye.

Younger waitresses are often so unsure of how close you are to Senior Discount time and so nervous about insulting you, they often give you the discount anyway. I LIKE that one.

mystery solved

Suddenly this week-- which has been blessedly too hot for a change, the Japanese beetles have begun congregating like swimmers at coney island...then yesterday I noticed several dents in the ground, it looked a lot like the mark a deer hoof would make on soft ground. Didnt think much of it. Then today the mister mentioned it, said they were all OVER the place--so we went on a tour of the garden and sure enough there were at least two or three dozen little post holes, all diggy places maybe two or three inches deep.

Then I remembered that skunks are prodigious diggers, and they love japanese beetle grubs. A little online checking, and that's it. They also apparently like carrot tops, but only the sturdiest ones--it does no harm to the carrot, only to the greenery.

Between the skunks above ground and the moles below ground this place is going to resemble a miniature meteor strike zone. But no grubs.

Better late than never

Saw our first Monarch of the season today--considering the lateness of the year, this could well be one of the guys heading back they way they came last spring...it was a new one though, flying as all beginner butterflies seem to, with great joy and swoops up into the trees and OVER the roof and bumping into people--
We run a sincere butterfly patch here, and it's nice to know at least one will get to enjoy it this year, for however briefly...

Saving Face

http://flashface.ctapt.de/

Garden

Potato Woman reports

Planting potatoes is an act of faith, in many ways, and waiting for them to reach the right size can be almost unbearable, since they are buried so deep you really have no clue from the tops as to how things are going down there. From experience with other vegetable crops, Ive learned the hard way that the fancier the foliage, often the poorer the yield, tomatoes being one exception to all of this--possibly because the fruit needs the leaves for shelter, shade, and to bring nutrition to the tomatoes as sunlight.

Peppers prefer one over the other, and usually good leaves and tall vigorous plants mean a really good harvest of leaves but not much else.

And today I decided to pull up one of the sadder looking potato vines just to see what kind of progress was being made. and up came one very small potato and one apple sized potato. this being the end of July, i would say with luck I might get a fair yield out of what I planted.

Garden stuff July edition

Yesterday I was picking flowers for the house, and wanted it to be a nice mix of various colors of Beebalm, which almost all blend well together. I noticed a color I don't recall from last summer, and thought, well, maybe I picked something up in my last summer's greenhouse shopping frenzy--then off to one side I saw a smaller, dusky orchid, darker than the rest, and realized this too was no color I'd seen before.
aha, I thought, you don't suppose beebalm cross pollinates? I know daylilies do, and columbine, which is why I now have dark purple, white, and a muddy pale lavender columbine mix...and sure enough, one online flower site said that beebalm "cross pollinates like horny bunny rabbits".

Pulled our first carrots yesterday; it was a huge relief to find that there really were carrots down there, and not the dreaded orange strings I half expected. The radishes went that way, due, I think, to lack of sunlight on the leaves, and that made me fear for the potatoes and carrots as well. Raised beds for root crops is the way to go, you betcha. In this ghastly New England hardpan/stone mix, a nice six inch deep former compost bin produces amazing veggies.

The potatoes seem to be almost totally insect free (cold summers are not a bad thing, sometimes), and yesterday the first pair of Japanese beetles appeared. I shouted at them, and flung them to the ground.

If you gotta have a wedding...

this is the one to have.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0

warm puppies got nothing to do with it

happiness is opening the fridge and finding a forgotten piece of pie or the second half of the mushi chicken or last nights pizza, at exactly the right time.

happiness is knowing no one else will eat your favorite food because noone else likes it.

On my way out today...

I passed a small church in Chichester which always has interesting messages on its marquee--for nearly a year it proclaimed, baldly, "BLESS GOD, AMERICA!" which seemed a nice blend of hubris and enthusiasm. Im sure God appreciated the help.

Today the new one proclaims, "IF YOU DO RIGHT
YOU CAN NEVER DO WRONG"

which gave me something to think about for quite some time--it bothered me, at some level, and then I realized why. Who decides what 'right' is? Equally important, who decides what "wrong" is? Im sure all those good-hearted earnest missionaries at the turn of the last century believed to their very core that what they were doing in Africa, saving all those heathens from damnation by giving them smallpox and Jesus in equal measure, was 'right'. As one of them put it, "They may die, but at least they're going to their Maker."

Cog Railway--there and back again

We reached an agreement, finally. The Mister has always wanted to ride on the Cog Railway, a slow train that travels up and I do mean up the side of Mt.Washington by means of a special kind of wheel that doesnt ride on the track but is more of a toothed gear. Most of the trains at this time are coal/steam engines, with one diesel. I so did NOT want to go, but I felt bad about him making that two hour drive alone. So we compromised. I went with him, but he took the train and I had three hours to go elsewhere. it worked out very well...
This is how the train looks. Going up the mountain, the engine pushes. Its tilted to accomodate the steepness of the climb.























this is the path that goes over that far ridge and on up to the summit.




















Almost back to the bottom again.

On the other hand, I got to see this (mystery) hawk...so I'd say we both enjoyed ourselves, and had stories to tell one another later. All in all, a pretty good trip.

Ruminations II

Thinking about what i wrote yesterday, I am reminded sharply of those people who say, "the past is the past, it isnt important now. I never look back." It could be that these are the people who keep repeating the same mistakes and wonder why. Or do something that puzzles them, never realizing it has roots maybe 30 or 40 years old.

If you never look back to see where you came from, and what propelled you forward, how do you know where you are now? Of course, there is a fine line between people who dwell there, like cave creatures, barricaded from all personal progress, those who refuse to look back at all, (perhaps afraid of what they might find lurking), and people who see what was, and try to understand what happened then that makes now what it is.

I don't necessarily subscribe to reincarnation, an afterlife, or heavenly hosts. Much of that is talking into the dark to comfort us on the long nights. How much easier to believe in heaven than it is to know we only have one very short life and darkness afterwards. That, my dears, is truly terrifying.

But also, feeling that we truly only have one shot at all of this, I think it behooves me to do the best I can, leave as few bad footprints as possible, and realize that you do touch people along the way. Even people you might meet only a few times who remember you. Or you them. If this is all we have, we need to tread lightly.

Part of that light tread, at least for me, is being able to understand if not forgive what came before. If I can figure out What Happened and Why, then i have a measure of insight into my own reactions and behaviors now. Granted, poetry and writing makes a lot of insight possible, it tells me things I never knew I knew. But still, there is always more that surfaces like bubbles in a swamp, surprising the hell out of me.

That's when I go back to the mental photo album, and eventually find the section that explains much if not all. Not that it will matter much in the long run (which is getting shorter year by year), but it matters now, and to me.

Ruminations

its been a good life, with more than a few bumps and heavy winds along the way, but good nonetheless. Looking back with that damned Yankee common sense and logic, I can see that it's probably a better life, in many ways, than it could have been. I'm in a place-- both physically and emotionally-- that works, and that's not bad. Im not ungrateful nor am I unmindful of that, and of the other side of the coin, possibility wise.

We don't always get what we want, and sometimes what we want is not what we should have, like the kid who wants to eat dessert instead of veggies all the time. But sometimes, like now, when the weather is cold and dreary and looks to be that way on into August, the mood dips a bit lower than usual and all those maybes and regrets start to surface.

"What would have happened if..." is a scary place to go, and I try not to go there more than I can help. But as an exercise in emotional logistics, it has a certain grim fascination. Whatever paths you take, no matter if you chose them or they were chosen for you, have no way back. The life lived is the life experienced, and you can only take one road.

continuity and connections

One of the things that's lacking these days is continuity between the current generation and the next, and the next. We are all sort of clumped together with invisible walls of memory separating us.

at this point the only thing that binds us at all is shared music. Many kids listen to and really dig "grampy's music", and many older people can find something in newer stuff that appeals. However.


One of the biggest boons to connecting the generations that I can remember was the TV. Not because of the inane programming that gave us the Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, but the fact that TV was so new no one had anything to put there, so they plugged in an Afternoon Matinee and a Saturday Matinee and on Sunday you would get a classy movie on Hallmark Hall of Fame. no current ones, there was some sort of time differential there and the studios were reluctant to part with the good ones just yet. There were weeks when you could probably watch four movies a day and two at night. That is a LOT of movies, folks.

As a kid I watched any movie that was on TV--all the way from silent movies with Charlie Chaplin and Ben Turpin to Mae West seducing a very young Cary Grant to Hepburn and Tracy. Even something called "Hitler's Children" which was apparently about eugenics and quite chilling. What it gave me, and any other kid who watched these things, was a sense of what it was like before us. Oh, granted, prettied up or dramatized, but the clothes, the styles, the way the world looked, and mores and morality, even the way people talked, all sunk in. This was different, this was what it was like, and we understood that things change, and a lot of it was familiar on a personal basis because of our parents, grandparents, and even older sibs. The connections stay with you. Movies don't create stuff, they mirror it, and it's the small details that resonate.

We looked at the family photo albums, pictures of groups of women ('that's Aunt Alice and Aunt Sarah and I'm in the middle, didnt my hair look funny") that turned out to be your mother and her sisters, or a little boy who grew out of his knickers and leather cap, and is now Daddy. We sang songs that had been sung for lord knows how many generations, and all of these things connected us.

I saw an interesting ad not too long ago, suggesting that the family that uses electronic 'toys" is a close knit family. However, if you study the ad you will see that the boy is at the computer, daughter is texting someone, mom is on the cellphone, and daddy is watching TV. Being in the same room with three other people is NOT bonding, not if you are all doing something that requires your full attention elsewhere.

And where once your family included the very old and all the ages in between, sometimes right next door or across the street, now more often than not you grow up never having truly interacted with anyone over the age of, say, 35 or 40.

We've lost something important, and that's kinda sad.

Something important is happening here

http://mikesnider.org/formalblog/?p=736

This is in response to Mike Snider's post, linked above. In it, he states that poets don't strive for the 'big poem' or the meaningful one any longer--and I think he has taken note of a very important trend, perhaps without realizing what he's seeing (although knowing Mike, he sees very clearly, sometimes); when a culture teeters on the edge of Being Over, as Im pretty sure this current Christian culture is, what goes first is the creative stuff--art, music, sculpture, poetry.
It's still produced, for a time, as good or better than anything that came before, but as Mike pointed out, after a certain time the creation slows and then stops, simply because the patronage has disappeared (as much as we dislike knowing that, it's a fact) and then the impetus to create dries up too. It becomes an "Oh what the hell" attitude, and we pass off what we do as modern art, language poetry, creative architecture, and dissonance. Put a large enough price tag on it,
and people will buy it. After all, it's art, right? It must be our fault if we don't see what the artist intended. Art with attitude, I guess you can call it. And artists of any stripe who work this way have a way of suggesting that it's you the viewer who is missing the point.

And it may be a two edged sword, here. Write the meaningful poem, the Big One, and it gets rejected by magazines who prefer something less deep, less Important. Or prefer Language over Coherence or Ordered thought.

Those of us who do care, who do strive to write an important poem (rhymed or unrhymed) about what matters, find it's a one way stream and we seem to be heading the wrong way

garrison keillor link

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Barred Owl

Mother and child, they were so nosy about my car they nearly fell off the branch. One thing they like to do is swoop down over a car on the road, right in front of the windshield, and then swoop back up into a tree, like this. I think they see their reflection in the rear window or the roof, and take it to be another owl.

Owl Music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55SSd5MUKus

Gravity 1, Cuffy 0

There was a scrabbling on the kitchen roof (my computer overlooks the roof), and realized Cuffy was making his morning tour of the premises. One of his stops is the kitchen roof--by ladder-- where he has a good claw on the plywood I left there for just that reason--he peers in the windows, startling the hell out of any cat who happens to be napping there--but this morning he discovered the bathroom window, which has no roof under it. it's a tidy leap from the roof to the (insert whimper here) screen, and after he had scared the bejeezus out of isabel, who was napping in the window, I went in to find him clinging to the screen with a slight look of oh oh on his little furry face...he looked at the roof Over There, and at the ground Down There, said something in cat, and the next sound was a hard thump on the leaves.

He's fine; Isabel got over the shock by noon, and I doubt if he'll try that trick again. always best to be sure you know where the exits are, or even if there are any...

and about time, too.

Something for the Solstice

SOLSTICE/LIGHTNING

There is no mystical significance
to the longest day of the year
no one ever died because a meteor
streaked across the heavens
and a howling dog is just a dog
left out too long on a cold night.
Lightning can come without warning
from a cloudless sky, and has been known
to strike the same spot more than once.

And on those blue-sky days
as I watch the sun rise on one side
of the earth and the moon sink
beyond the trees on the other
it helps to remember this,
that perhaps the names I choose for things
are not always the names they should have
but I do the best I can
from this distorted window
through which I view the falling sky

Use it or lose it

Sometimes you learn not by watching someone do it the right way, but the wrong way. When your turn comes to be stupid, a little memory gets triggered and you think, aha, not the way to go, here.

Years ago I read of a woman who had lost everything in a fire. Clothes, furniture, everything. She mentioned in an interview that she had also lost an expensive bottle of perfume that her husband gave her years before. She had never opened it, never used it. But, she said, as soon as she could, she was going out to replace that bottle with another just like it.

I thought, all those years that poor man was waiting for her to use the perfume, so he could enjoy it too, and she never would. She didnt want to waste it.

My dad would get a nice flannel shirt for Christmas; he'd hold it up and exclaim, "Now that's the kind of gift I like! That's a great shirt!" and two years later it would still be in his dresser drawer (along with all the others he was saving), waiting for "best", while he hung around the house in a ratty baggy old sweater. One Christmas my mother took one of his shirts, put it in a box, wrapped it, and gave it to him that morning. Yep. "Now that's the kind of gift I like! That's a great shirt!"

There are thousands of old ladies in this country with a drawer full of good nighties. What on god's green earth are they saving them for??

Which is why when I get a bottle of perfume it gets opened and worn. Which is why we have supper on the "good dishes" every night, and why when someone gives me something I wear it. Life is too short-- and sometimes if you don't do it now, you never get the chance.

Peonies etc

two years ago I transplanted about five different peony bushes to replace the killer quince bush that had been growing there. last summer the peonies all sprouted, and set buds, but I noticed a curious thing: they were all leaning and I do mean leaning, away from the apple trees to their north. Then I noticed that growing between the apple trees was that huge 60 foot ash tree, and it truly loomed over everything. It didn't cast much shade, being on the north, but I had a feeling that the Peonies were uncomfortable with it there. Plants need certain things, and they will show you very clearly what is working and what isnt.

So. This year while we were in chain saw mode, I said, let's take down that huge ash, it's crowding out the apple trees, it drives me crazy trying to mow around it, and think the peonies don't like it there. He's a patient man, my husband, and quite forgiving of what Im sure he thinks are my weird notions, sometimes.

However. The peonies this year are no longer leaning away, they're growing nice and straight and tall without a hint of distress. Whatever works, and this seems to have done the trick. Go, Peonies.



Today I had determined to go shopping, intent on replacing all those jeans that overwinter have shrunk to unmanageable sizes. You know how that is...all that cold shrivels 'em right up, and I am down to one pair that seems to fit all the time, no matter what the scales say. But as I was cruising goodwill and the Salvation Army for replacements, I realized that I was doing this backwards. Instead of spending money to get bigger clothes to fit me NOW, why not just lose the damn weight back down to where the clothes I already have will fit again? It was so obvious, and so simple. And I think it was just enough to get that silly diet rolling again.

Mt. Washington and back

The steps up to the actual summit seem innocuous enough, even though there are entirely too many--and then you realize your legs are aching, you're gasping for breath, and your heart is pounding--oh my god, you think, this was a mistake. heart attack heart attack. Then you remember that Mt. Washington is 6628 feet above sea level, and you are suffering from a mild case of oxygen deprivation. gaaaassp gaaaaasp

this is what I call a driveby shot, he drove by, I hung out the window and took the picture. Mountain in the middle is Mt.Adams, and what you do NOT see is no guard rails, and a very long way down into the valley. That long white snowpatch to the left is on Mt. Jefferson. We hiked to that one year, on the fourth of July, so my husband could ski on it. We slept overnight up there, wedged against rocks so we wouldn't slide down the mountain. Three miles in, three miles out.

They chain the buildings to the concrete, to keep them from blowing off in high winds. In some cases, with the taller structures, they use actual nautical chain that's used for huge anchors. It's very impressive.

Looking down over the edge, into the valley a mile below.

On the way home we stopped here, at Glen Ellis Falls--not as impressive, perhaps, as Arethusa, but the walk down in is even steps, and I managed the whole gig without whining. In itself, no mean feat.

Tomorrow we take our semi biyearly triannual (meaning I have no idea) visit to The Mountain, so my husband can take photos of wildflowers in the Alpine Gardens. I have no objection to this, what I do object to is that we did this exact same event several years ago, and I spent most of the time huddled on a piece of shale, trying to keep low enough so that the 40+ mph wind didnt knock me flat.

I also object that I get to go.

sulk.

Where this stuff comes from

I have a garden. Fulla flowers. Only in the last few years have I been able to allow myself to Go Out and Cut Them for us to enjoy in the house.

I finally realized why. When I was in my late teens and between jobs, I volunteered to help my folks out by keeping up the house while they cut brush one fall. I so did not want to get into brush cutting-- it was a nightmare, for many reasons. Anyway. I cleaned, I cooked, I polished, took out the coal clinkers from the furnace, mowed the grass. Supper was waiting on the table when they came in.

One day in early fall I noticed that the marigolds my mother had tended all summer were blooming, and thought, wouldnt that be pretty, to have those on the table as a centerpiece. So I cut a few, and set them in the middle of the table. My dad walked in and said, oh don't those look NICE. My mother saw them and said, "what did you DO? Why did you cut those flowers? Now no one will have anything to look at when they go by the house."

I was stunned, and hurt. I also realized at that point that mother didn't do anything for her own pleasure, she only got pleasure from people telling her how pretty her dress was, how nice the house looked, how pretty the flowers out front looked. She only saw things through other people's opinions. The fact that a handful of marigolds had been cut and brought into the house meant that a handful of marigolds was hidden from the people who mattered. *g*

She asked me, more than once, why I bothered with a flower garden up here, since "no one can see you from the road". I said, "Mother, I can see it, and I'm the one I plant this for." I truly think she just didnt understand that point of view.

But it explains my own gentle reluctance to take shears in hand and cut flowers to enjoy inside.

Balancing Act

For two or three years we have had a horrendous influx of japanese beetles, nassssty little brutes that can wipe out a just bloomed rose in very short order. Two years ago the black aphids arrived, and this year the African daisies are being devastated by red aphids. Not all of them, since I have two varieties, one of which is vulnerable and one is not. I hope.

The problem is, moles eat the beetle grubs, as do robins and other larger birds. Yummy snack foods. I dont know what eats the aphids. But as I am friends with the moles (they are nature's earth movers, much like earthworms, but on a greater scale), I hate to limit their supply of treats. They LOVE grubs. Someone said, get rid of the grubs, and you get rid of the moles. And if you lose the moles, the grubs come back, but maybe not the moles.

About 20 years ago there was a truly devastating visitation by gypsy moth caterpillars. You could hear the chewing, it was that bad. People went to pieces, to the point of nailing up collars on trees already infested with the caterpillars, which was silly, since once the worms hatched out they ate their way to the end of the branches, dropped to the ground, and wiggled away, ignoring the collars. In three or four years they bred themselves out of business and have become another unsightly but manageable bug.

This becomes one of those "money where your mouth is" deals; if I natter on about the balance of nature, then I have to live with what nature slings in my face. More or less. I did put out milky spore last year regardless of the directions on the back of the bag-- which had nothing to do with the directions on the front...again, what survives, survives, and that's sort of what it's about, isn't it. If you have a viciously expensive shrub that gets eaten by strange bugs the first year you put it out, then it wasnt such a good plant to start with. Predators usually go after the weak, the sick, and the already ailing plants, animals, and trees.

We strive for perfect lawns (don't get me started on that one), "wildlife management" which means guys who get to kill things legally, and pesticides that do more harm than good. All of these things upset that balance incredibly.

And I guess where I am now is aiming for that kind of balance, both outwardly and inwardly. Beyond a bit of mild tweaking, it feels right to just let most things work themselves out. I dont know if that translates as wisdom or laziness, but it works for me.

The June Garden

in spite of the ridiculously cold May we just had (some people in the lowlands are now replanting), everything still seems to be about two weeks ahead of last year, in part because the snow cleared so quickly, without any of nature's little reminders, the kind that leave you a foot of flurries here and six inches of ice there...

What is always an endless pleasure is the way the same plants keep doing the same thing every year, and still have the capacity to surprise the hell out of me. I discovered this year that russian sage (the vicks vapo rub plant) spreads, if you give it enough room and time. It is borderline invasive, but it also means I can spread the joy to all my friends, six plants at a time *g*. And every year as I weed and mulch I find new surprises--often it's something I planted last year that got lost in the summer growth, often it's something totally new, like the lovely orchid phlox that just appeared in the middle of everything and Queen Anne's Lace, the loveliest of wild flowers--something most people have too much of, but this is the first Ive seen in 37 years here.

Some things I knew about last year, but have totally forgotten what they are, at least until they bloom and I can look them up.

All the potatoes are up, the first planting of carrots is into real leaves and if I look very closely I can see teeny baby pepper flowers getting ready to bud out.

Now if I could just find my grass clippers...

Point of View

---------------------------

Having gained dominion thus of this rough hill,
and having climbed the final hundred yards
gasping but triumphant,
there is nothing left to do
but turn, go back the way we came.

For you the challenge lies in the ascent,
in breaking out at last above tree-line
just before the final rise--
and in the evening burying yourself
in maps and charts and detours
while this day's climb lies all but forgotten
except as notes in the back of a book.

For me the pleasure comes
from the memory of the mountain:
that, and the view from the top,
is why I came along.

Arethusa Falls

It's the highest waterfall in the state, and yes it's impressive. What else is impressive is the hike to get there, especially when neither of us have been on a hiking trail in three decades. I remember why, now.
It's a beautiful walk, but with one bad knee and one wonky hip and a so-so back the trip up isn't nearly as bad as the trip down, but it's damn close. 1.5 miles each way. We met and were overtaken by two brothers-in-law, one of whom was using canes and when I watched him move realized he was on artificial legs. God love him, and he outpaced all of us. We both stopped whining about aches and pains at that point. *g*

On the way down my husband wanted to try an alternate route and I took one look and said, um, I'll meet you at the bottom. When he got down he said it was much steeper, much more treacherous and he finally realized that he was Alone Out There, if anything happened. I suspect his inner 20 year old just grew up a bit. I encountered several couples trooping up the path, including one young pair who were dressed in summer clothes and flip flops. oh my sainted aunt. I said, you'd do well to rethink this, the way down is going to kill those feet...they laughed, ha ha. I wonder if they got back down.



and this was a chipmunk of the Scavenger Clan, who visited us for lunch. yes, he got some. It's also a pretty good shot of what most of the trail looked like. Think "up" and rocky and "down" and rocky...

The Balance of Things

There is an old snowball bush here, snowball viburnum (as opposed to the kind that is actually a hydrangea); it belonged to my husband's grandmother, and has bloomed repeatedly for decades.

The problem was, it was covered with little green aphids, which meant I could never pick the blooms and bring them inside, because of my house plants. But they never seemed to harm the plant, and short of spraying (and killing the bees), there was little I would or could do.

some years back some new japanese ladybugs were released into this country, and I suspect there are few people who have not been treated to them in the fall, marching across the computer screens, queueing up for snacks (I use apple sections) in winter, and in some cases coating, literally, doors and walls and porches.

They LOVE little green aphids. The summer after the new ladybugs arrived the little green aphids were gone, and haven't been seen since. Now it gets interesting. Two years ago I noticed my nasturtiums were covered on the underside with smeary black microscopic aphids that looked more like soot than bugs. yueuuuwww. Then I noticed that the snowball bush was too. within a week the fifteen foot high plant became a skeleton, all the flowers gone, and the leaves just totally destroyed. I sprayed the ground under the bush, cut it back, and it seemed okay last year.

It has just breathed its last. The black aphids are back, the last of the flowers has turned brown, and the leaves are gone, all in three days. Tomorrow we are uprooting it and putting it on the brush pile at the end of the field. What I think happened (and this makes sense, clear to the ground) is that the little green aphids had a kind of symbiotic relationship with the snowball bush, and the balance was even. When the thousands of new japanese ladybugs arrived, they took out the green aphids, leaving the bush open for attack from anything out there. What was out there were the utterly devastating black aphids, who have no qualms about the bush, and then move on to other things.

The balance has been disrupted, and I'm not sure replacing the bush is an option.

Most of our problem plants and insects come from the far east, where over there they are part of a very different organic structure, and are kept neatly in their own niches. When they arrive here the climate is different, as is the soil and the way we grow our plants and crops. Fresh meat, they gurgle. oboyoboyoboy. Our own native plants have their own relationships with insects and the soil, and when something new shows up they have no defenses against it. Japanese beetles, asiatic beetles, (not to mention the Asiatic lilies we buy apparently just to feed them), gypsy moths, etc etc.

I think, on a very small scale, this is what we keep doing on a very much larger scale, and never learn from.

Unread Books

It may be partly because I don't have the time left, in years, anyway, to read all the books I would like to read, or the patience to struggle through the ones that seem to be written in Exclamation Points or sludge.

Some years back I realized that a book that hasn't gotten my attention by the end of the first chapter is probably not going to be worth the walk through the rest. I was reading a book at that point in which the hero "shirted and panted himself" (now there's an image to take with you) and this arch style of writing--which seems to have foretold the advent of the verbing of America--so annoyed me I closed the book and took it back to the library. It took me four tries before I finally understood that I will never read "Vanity Fair", no matter how I try. I have started and abandoned "Hard Times" at least that many times, and even though I have read and enjoyed most of Dickens, for some reason i always lose interest at exactly the same spot in this book, every time.

The idea has always been planted in our heads that these authors worked very hard on this stuff, and it's almost sacriligeous to start a book and never finish it. Like taking two bites out of a piece of cake and then throwing it away. It's the equivalent of the Clean Plate Club, which only fosters guilt and fat. And once I understood that no one was going to suffer if I didn't finish a truly dull book, and someone would if I did (me, usually), life got just a tad simpler.

I will admit to a pang of guilt when someone loans or gives me a book that they love, and I can't even wade through the first chapter of it, but that passes. One truly disappointing book was Barbara Kingsolver's "Prodigal Summer", which, by the end of the first chapter had degenerated into a cross between "Girl of the Limberlost" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover", and since it also was turning out to be a Save the Animal Story (which I cannot abide), I quietly retired it to the giveaway bag.

Life is too short. Read what you like.

We seem to be regressing, here

it was 41 degrees this morning at what was probably dawn, and by noon it had warmed up to 42. At this point, we are just 10 degrees shy of snow. It's still raining, the cats refuse to go out (Albert went out after four tries and came back soaked, smelling like wet wool socks), and in my one trip across the garden at top speed I noticed the poppies all wearing small finely knitted wooly hats, and there was a hint of gloves and sweaters among the pepper plants. Who could blame them.

oh its raining

What a lovely deep chilly rain. The temps never got above 45 all day, and Ive been running a low fire of wood chips (which come with the wood we buy, in huge quantity) all day, rather than
dip into next wintah's wood.

I love the way potatoes sprout, they sort of boil up out of the hill already green and leafed out, ready to do battle with the elements. None of this wussy 'first delicate shoots' stuff, nossir.

Havent had much chance to tend the garden this spring because of the wood cutting we've been doing, but when I went out to the compost bin earlier, between downpours (well, almost) I realized that all the work I've done over the past few years means it now tends itself the way I think a garden should without being micromanaged into neat (read boring) weedless rows. I admire people who can do that, but I'd not want to be one.

Garden stuff among other things

we survived a near frost last night; 34 deg. when I got up at 5:30, and apparently the peppers survived, as did the day lilies.

The potatoes are sprouting, go potatoes, go...

The last of the four cords of boughten wood came yesterday, and what was almost an empty woodyard is now, once again, a full wood yard. Sigh.

Found an interesting article in the NY Times (not sure which edition) about a woman who is attempting to "reduce her carbon footprint", and along with other things has gotten rid of the refrigerator.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/garden/05fridge.html?fta=y&pagewanted=all

if you have to make frequent trips to the store and throw out food because you have no place to store it safely, and if you have to cook food in AN OVEN or on a STOVE you are using more energy rather than less.

When I bought a new fridge two years ago I bought a low-end no-frills refrigerator freezer for not much more than I paid for my last one 30 years ago, incredibly. I could not see one bit of energy difference in the fridge touted to be "green' and energy efficient and the old one that wasn't. But the important thing is, if I had bought an electric stove, my energy bill would have probably gone up by 25%.

In a way it's like buying a car that uses alternative sources for power. A Green Car. If you factor in the cost of recharging mr. battery every night, and possibly having to carry a spare battery with you, it turns out that the savings in energy will kick in in about, oh, ten years. And if you pay full price for it, and use credit, you may never recover the cost.

New toy for the word addicts

Thanks to Gary Blankenship's blog for Visuwords, which is pure interactive word play, with a bit of discovery thrown in.

http://www.visuwords.com/

woodstove

A good friend of mine seems unable to receive anything from me with images in it.
But he's a faithful reader, bless him, and wanted to know what my cook stove looked like. Here you go, Harvey.

He takes good care of me

makes sure the axe is sharp, the chopping block is cut flat but with a slight tilt, reminds me when it's time to clean the chimney. Good man. Today he brought home a new pair of lopping shears to replace the old ones that are probably as old as we are, and have been used hard and often. These are longer, lighter, and with a cutting edge that only Fiskars could manage.

He even went down to the edge of the woods, took out a few maples that had been uprooted, and let me have my way with the clippers. No more excuses, nossir.

THIS IS MAY??

The weather elves declared what I had been thinking for about two weeks--it's damned cold for May, where's the balmy stuff?

We are still having at least morning and evening fires, and yesterday kept the kitchen stove on a low fire all day. This morning at 5 AM the temp was 34. I did the Good Thing late yesterday and covered over everything out there that was coverable, with plant pots and such, and a large plastic sheet over the day lilies. I've waited far too long for those things, and I refuse to let them freeze at this stage.

I fully expected to look out this morning and see the entire garden frosted in white. We had a 'flurry' some years back on the 18th of May, 8 inches of flurry and the sorriest jonquils you ever saw...

Garden Stuff

the radishes are up, the carrots are planted, as are the pepper plants and entirely too many hills of potatoes, but I thought Id give 'em a go this year. I found two onions sprouting in the crisper and thought, well, if they want to that badly...so they are out now, well planted, and we'll see what they look like come summer.

In the herb garden I now have last year's tarragon, spearmint, sage--and added two kinds of lavender, lemon mint, portulaca against the stone wall and something called armeria (sea pink) which is also referred to as a 'ground cover'. Usually that's garden talk for "you'll be SORRY...". Im hoping in a few years for a gentle blended effect, but knowing the vitality and attitude of most mints something tells me it will be more of a battle ground.

That's half the fun of gardening, seeing what happens further down the road, and how things play off of each other. One of the most important things I learned is that there are almost no color combinations or plant groupings that don't work, at some level. The secret is to moosh them all together and let them sort it out themselves.

Messages From My Father

Just finished up a book that has been on my bookshelf for far too long--a slim, read-in-one-sitting book by Calvin Trillin, called "Messages From My Father"--charming, funny, and wry; not, I suspect, unlike Abe Trillin himself.

http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=0374525080

Eureka time

Lightweight plastic snowshovels are absolutely perfect for spreading compost in a nice thin layer on the garden, for moving small amounts of dirt from this place to that, and for cleaning out the flatbottomed garden cart right to the corners.

They also work very well in a garage or shop if you have quantities of sawdust or whatever that you need to move, and a regular shovel or dustpan just isnt big enough to be efficient. I don't know why I never thought of it before.

What I did on my summer vacation

Brushpile 2009

------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, it's big, but ain't it purty. It got too high to add to, so we started another one elsewhere.

How to Find a Human...

in the world of automated companies.

Several years ago I needed to contact my insurance company by phone. Up until then there had always been a person on the other end of the line and we did just fine together. Suddenly I am confronted with a "menu'. A very long menu. Press one for English, press 2 for Spanish. Press one for account information, press 2 for billing, press 3 for policy information, on and on into the depths of the system.

After the third try (most of these responses are actually bots telling YOU what you already know about your policy, your account, etc) I started over and hit 2 for billing. Immediately there was a woman at the other end. Oh my. I said, "Im sorry, I must have hit the wrong button, Im looking for someone in Accounts." She laughed and said, "let me transfer you." It was that easy.

Next time I needed to talk to a Big Company about Important Stuff I tried the same thing, figuring that any company needs a human in billing to explain that yes you did pay that bill twice...It worked again.

Last week a friend was having trouble connecting to anyone in her own insurance company, so I told her to wait for the "Press X for Billing" and see if it works. The next day she called me and said, "it worked like a charm, I got right in."

stat counters--read ALL the words

over the past two months I have been experimenting with stat counters, with varying degrees of success. The first one, WebStat, is by far the best I've found. However, after the free trial, it can cost anywhere from 5.95 to 9.95 a month. That's a lot of bread to lay out, no matter how curious you are about who reads you, for only maybe 50 visitors a month. The last one i tried, StatCounter, turns out to be free but buggy as all getout, and it seems to deteriorate over time.

In reading about it online, there appear to be some software problems, and the site itself has been hacked into more than once. I finally removed the program when I could no longer access my account without signing in every time (and being told "I must have done something"). And after removing all the bits of it on this site, I found last night that it has still been attached but invisible at the bottom of the page. Gone should be gone.

I think the best way to find out about such things is to type in the name of the program you're interested in, and add "problems" or "forums" in the search line. This takes you not to the site, necessarily, but often to a list of user forums where the disgruntled and the pleased sound off as to how well it worked, and how much they love/hate it, and you can decide if this is the program for you, or not.

Labels belong on soup cans

When we label someone, either positively or negatively, it often places a burden on the labelee to either live up to the appellation, live it down, or try to escape the whole mess entirely by denying what is so patently not them.

Hell, i dont even like name tags.

Labels are meant to define things. They belong on packages, soup cans, and book covers, so we can tell what's inside. They set up expectations about the contents. People are not soup cans, and they are a hell of a lot more complex than a can of chicken noodle soup. Slapping a label on someone whittles him down to one or two things, and everything else hangs from that.

Call someone a senior citizen and suddenly our attitude toward them (and toward ourselves) changes. Senior now covers anyone over 50, and it allows younger people to smile kindly (nay, benevolently) at us, or diss us, because, as one charming young man online told me, "you too old for everything". It also sends a message to younger people that old age is just beyond the 49th birthday, and old means useless and senile. Subtle, but deadly. It also colors our own perceptions of ourselves. We are living longer, and living better, nutritionally and medically, than any other generation before. Yet the bar has been lowered so that over one third of our remaining life is under that dreadful appellation, "Senior".

My closest friend is 87. She is just starting to get acclimated enough to where she lives, now, to try some new things with her very extraordinary art. I told her, once, when I grow up, I want to be just like you. she laughed and said, so do I...

Where I live

We've lived here for 37 years. The first time I saw this house, sitting like a dusty shabby jewel in the middle of a field in the middle of the woods, I knew, even at 19, this was where I wanted to live.

As hard as the first 10 years (or thereabouts) were, physically, not once did either of us ever say, maybe we could spend the winter with my folks--or your folks--or some place in town...it simply never occurred to us to move out, even temporarily.

My husband was a little boy here, he learned to run his dad's tractor when he was maybe 11 or twelve--rite of passage, apparently, for farm boys; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjVPD48Lcos

And as hard as it can still be, 37 years later, I can't imagine living anywhere else.

The Year of the Woodpile

After nearly three weeks of relatively intensive labor we have managed to cut down and limb out three large maples, one oak, half a chestnut tree, one black birch and assorted limbs and stuff that had broken off or were just hanging there. The brush pile is eight feet high and growing, and the wood i've managed to throw in and stack so far is over a cord, with more to come. Not next winter's wood, but the winter after.

Considering what it cost us last year for wood (somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 a cord), this is found gold. It does look like this will be my main industry this summer, ticks and blackflies notwithstanding.



------------------------------------

The kitchen cupboards are all but finished; one more door, and then paint next fall when there's time for it. I don't really like latex paint, it tends to dry too fast on large pieces, and it simply does not smell like real paint. The only advantage is that it's easy to clean the brushes, so you don't lose that terribly expensive brush to too much paint in the bristles and not enough brush cleaner.



I guess it's all about settling, balancing what works against how much effort you're willing to put into what you really want/prefer.

Last week I was reading a women's magazine (something I do about once a year)--in it was a short snippet of advice (along with many many more) for women who are overweight: it said, women who are overweight tend (as I do during my fat years) to wear loose clothing that makes them look larger than they are. It would be so much more attractive if they chose clothing that was more form fitting, to give themselves a better line, visually.

uh, huh. this sounds like it was written by a woman who has never been more than two pounds overweight in her life. Women of size wear loose large clothing not to try to fool anyone into thinking they're skinny little things, but because large loose clothing is much more comfortable. Nothing binds. No restricted arm movement. And most importantly, it nicely hides the rolls and droops and tummies and such that no one (including ourselves) wants to know about anyway. As soon as they slip into that 'form fitting" stuff they realize there is probably going to be a full corset in their future, and all the other uncomfortable things that go with that. And frankly, women who are frankly overweight tend to look--and feel-- like stuffed sausages when they get into clothes that "define" their curves. Oh, please. Spare us.

addendum: one of our local shopping malls has its food court directly across the way from the Lane Bryant store. As you are chowing down on chinese or pizza or ice cream, there are all those huge posters of buxom young women, wearing the latest in xxl underwear and xxl sweaters...

It Won't Last

Stepped 0utside a few minutes ago to try to find my wayward black cat Isabel, who is having none of this inside stuff on a nice warm evening, no siree...

In the front field the peepers are suddenly much louder than they were, and beyond them what sounds like barred owls calling to one another across the woods. Up the hill I can hear a truck with its backup sound, probably our wood guy doing something with his equipment. And one of the neighbors has his boombox out there beside the above ground pool; on a still night like this sound travels across the fields and through woods the way it does across water in the dark.

It's warm out, even for a May or June night, and as people like to say around here, "it can't last, don't get used to it". True, but I like to savor it when i can. I suppose you could say that about anything out there, from seasons to winter storms to a house being built or even living. 'It won't last, don't get used to it." Some folks like to take the zip out of everything, don't they.

Well, we were warned...

First day of tick season. This is the time of year when you are allowed to collect a bounty on each tick found on you, your spouse, parent, child, or animal. Right now I'm three cents to the good and the ticks I collected are swimming to freedom. Or so they think. bwahahaha

Put the screen sash in the storm door this afternoon, the temps are over ninety outside and barely seventy inside. I am always a bit leery about changing the storm sashes, we inevitably get a spell of nasty cold weather soon after and i am too stubborn to give in...

Life Lessons

My adopted dad was not an easy man to live with; these days he would be called bipolar, manic depressive. Back then, he was known to have a quick temper that flared, did considerable verbal damage, and then was gone. But as critical and difficult as he was, I learned some valuable things from him that I still use today. Most of them have to do with hard work and how to make it manageable.

He would tell me, don't look at the whole job, just the bit in front of you. If you spend all your time looking ahead, you'll be so exhausted and discouraged you'll never even begin.

It works. It works whether you're clearing a bit of land, planting/harvesting a garden, painting the fifty-foot fence, or writing a poem or a short story or a three hundred page novel.

This week and last we have been confronted with a huge amount of wood draped all over the lawn, the stone wall, and other trees. It's a slow, seemingly endless job, but taken in manageable chunks, one bit at a time, it gets done.

my how we've changed. i hope.

I was talking with a group of friends yesterday, and the subject of early TV shows came up. We are all old enough to remember the early fifties, and what was interesting, we all were in total agreement as to how awful, how demeaning, many of the top rated comedies and shows were.

The Honeymooners, which actually had a very short run, with Jackie Gleason as the verbally abusive bus driver husband was known for his charming insecurities and his anger, which he took out on his sarcastic wife, with the phrase, "To the MOON, Alice, to the MOON". And she would just ignore him or say "you and what army?"

The Lucille Ball Show, beloved of a lot of people, even to this day, makes me cringe when I see it. yes, I know it was the fifties. yes, I know it was considered funny. It also showed women how to get around their domineering husbands by lying, trickery, and cajolery. Ricky Ricardo, of course, pretended to be surprised, and 'forgave" his wife who then responded with "awww ricky" and all was happy again.

A few years later "All in the Family" which was loosely based on a British show of the same name, but took its cues from the Honeymooners, had Archie Bunker in a constant battle of put downs to his idiot son in law, his ditzy wife Edith, and most of his neighbors. This was not funny.

Sid Caesar was abusive, arrogant, high strung, and he and Imogene Coca seemed to be of the same ilk as Lucy and Desi; dumb wife, domineering husband.

Seen in the social context of the fifties, this was not unusual, but seen in the context of the past twenty or thirty years, it's appalling.

rain

Rain tonight, and depending on the early morning temps, rain tomorrow too. Right now the thermometer is hovering around 35 degrees, and by morning we could have a dusting, or even a foot of flurries, or nice icy slick roads. yippee.

When I opened the door to let Cuffy out awhile ago you could hear the faint, almost dog-whistle caliber sound of spring peepers, down in the run below the house, where it stays wet long enough in the spring most years for them to become grownup tree frogs, most less than an inch long.

Cuffy has been with us almost exactly one year. I keep thinking of all the new things he found this year, from hay piles to cool tractors to sit on, porcupines and turkeys, deer and a warm place to sleep. Food on demand (well, until he hit 14 pounds and Something Had to Done). He is utterly fearless about machinery, and will happily hop on the log splitter (manual not automatic) for a slow ride, or trot alongside the tractor, oblivious to the huge tires...needless to say, "where's cuffy" is a very important question around here.

Spring has sprung

Some time ago I realized that no matter what season we are actually IN, we are always planning ahead for the next one. Or even two. Right now, with spring erupting all over everything, I am actually stacking wood in the shed for next winter--this is the very green stuff we've been bucking up, and it's the best way I know to actually KNOW how much there is of it. But I am also planning how things will look this summer as to vegetables out there, and will the butterflies come back...

What worked for cleanup in the garden last fall has been noted. By summer I will be ordering the winter's wood with an eye to leftovers for the year to come. Always nice to have a bit set by in case of emergencies.

And of course all winter we are looking at the woodpile as it shrinks and hoping we don't have to dig it out of the snow outside. Oh, we've done that, and it's not pretty.


And after all, isn't that what we do, all the time? Graduation isn't the end, it's the Next Step. Highschool, College, PhD, job, etc etc. Dating leads to relationships and occasionally marriage, and then there's the kids, and here comes graduation again...

Everything, just about, is done with an eye to the next stage, or a new start. As George Carlin once said, there is no "now", only a past and a future. the minute you start thinking about Now, it's gone. So we think about what we did, and plan for what we will do--all the while balanced precariously between the two.

dry spells

Despite the insane amounts of snow last winter, we are having a very early dry spring; only two days of heavy rain in a month, and now that the trees are about to bud out it makes the drought more serious.

In a lot of communities the sign in front of the fire department warns about outside burning, and the forest fire danger is up there on the chart. This is once again a heavily wooded state, despite mall builders and their best efforts to pave every square inch of pavable earth, and when you live in close company with acres and acres of trees, rain becomes an important part of your life.

We live on ten acres of land surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest, ours and the neighbors', and I think every one of us has become expert at automatically sniffing the air when we go out.
I value the free time without rain in it, for the outside work--but I'd gladly give a bit of that up right now for two days of steady rain, just to wet things down a bit.

So far, so good

We are and have been about two weeks ahead of schedule this year, if bloom times count for anything...the jonquils are just beginning to show off, last year it was the end of April--I notice other plants beginning to sprout, too.

If they are two weeks ahead, that means i am two weeks behind already. yikes.

Most of my outside work this week has consisted of helping buck up the amazing amount of downed and hanging wood just in the yard alone. My husband works the chain saw, I limb out and drag the stuff off to the brush pile. We lost a LOT of rock maples in the yard, not the tree directly but the tops were destroyed in the December ice storm, and they are as dangerous as they are ugly too look at. The only way is to cut the whole tree. Not really a loss, as trees go, since the yard is full of them and I've wanted to open that section out a bit anyway, let the light in.

As they say, be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.

Connections and Isolation

It does seem that the more intensely connected we are online, the more isolated we become in Real Time. By online I also mean cell phones, ipods, texting...anything that increases our social interaction but isolates us from the people we interact WITH.

This is not necessarily a good thing, here.

Life does funny things sometimes

Was reading over some older email stuff to and from a good friend with whom I have lost touch, both emotionally and otherwise. Makes me sad, and I'll never quite know what happened, but know that it does, from time to time. So this is where my boat floats this morning, becalmed, a bit, drifting the way the waters drift.
_________________________________

Life is not safe, it's not predictable.
It's not something you can plan for
much beyond buying a large notebook
and a pen, and filling in what just happened
rather than what you would like to have happen.
It has weather in it, and love,
Bad Things and Good Things. Most times,
the good stuff makes the bad stuff bearable.
And no matter where you go
there will be rocks to trip on, roofs that leak,
and surprises that spring up to poke you in the eye.
Some of those surprises will put your eye out,
but some will just clarify your vision, if you let them.

Feelin' Peevish

Pet Peeve #3,782: people who carefully and laboriously back into mall parking spaces when driving through to the other side would have netted them the same advantage with a lot less work

Pet Peeve #3,783: Toyota Scion

Pet Peeve #3, 784/5: Safety caps on meds designed for the elderly--who often have eye problems--with the instructions on how to open printed in white-on-white on the cap. and the instructions on dosage and possible side effects printed in grey on white in pt 2 type on the side.

Those damned sealed inner lids with the 'easy grip' pull tabs that require the strength of a brick layer and the grip of an orangutan to open. Arthritic meds and joint medication (such as glucosamine) are notorious for this. I mean, REALLY...

Easter

my mother-in-law is having Easter dinner. She called me last week to confer about what we should have. "Anything but ham" she said. I agreed. "A little ham goes a very long way with me." I said, and she agreed. We pretty much decided on maybe a nice pot roast or roast beef.
Oh good, I thought, we don't have to deal with ham.

We're having ham.

A small thing, in the greater scheme of it all, but...

Shelves, cupboards. Soon. Trying to maintain my Yankee stoic calm, here, but it's been thirty years of pillar-to-post kitchen storage, in a house designed for people who owned four pots, two pans, ladles, and a fireplace.

Perhaps not up to Martha's standards, but mine. By god, mine. The nice part is, most of it was lumber left from other projects, rather than $2000 worth of ready-mades that just would not suit either the house or me.


film, as they say, at 11.

No is the answer

Women in general have a hard time saying "no". They say maybe, or probably not, they get coy and say "maybe later" or "another time, perhaps", or "I don't think so". Another woman gets it. A man doesn't. He hears "probably not' and translates that into "maybe". He hears "I don't think so" and hears the uncertainty and not the emphasis.

Men and women interpret the language differently, in much the same way they percieve colors differently. There is an old cartoon in which the lady of the house says to the painter, "I want this room to be painted a nice robin's egg blue, but not too much green in it, just a hint, and a warm cast to the blue, and for the bedroom, a nice warm cream with just a bit of pink in it". He turns to his assistant and says, "blue for the living room, white for the bedroom."

Older women especially learned or were taught that an outright "no" is harsh, masculine, and rude. This is a hard lesson to unlearn, and yes, it's hard to learn how to say such a simple word without qualifiers, without sounding like a shrew, without looking as if you are about to have a tantrum. I learned the trick by magic, one night when I was tired and weary of the arguing at a meeting, and was given a job to do that I hadn't asked for and knew I would do poorly. I no longer cared. So I just said "no". No qualifying "No, I really can't" or "no, I don't think I could do a very good job at this" (both of which open the door to argument). "no", she said. Silence.
Someone else got the job and I was off the hook.

Afterwards I thought, what just happened here? No one argued, no one asked why. It was amazingly freeing. And it isnt rude at all. Hell, men do it all the time and no one tells THEM it's rude...

Contentment trumps vanity

A friend of mine sent me this URL last night. It's a test on vanity, self-worth, narcissism. There are, as the text says, no right or wrong answers, only your own sense of how you answer. At the end there is an evaluation chart. The results may be a bit unsettling, especially for older people--took me awhile to understand why four of us, all near 65 and over, did as we did (way below what the man calls the 'national average').

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-03-16-pinsky-quiz_N.htm

This is a test slanted (all tests are slanted, depending on the demographic, arent they) toward younger people, who are still goal oriented. They haven't got there yet, and are still reaching for the brass ring, or the next brass ring. Once you get to a certain age group you are now backing off a bit, having reached your goals or stopped trying so hard. A certain level of contentment or realization (which may be good or not) creeps in, and your priorities have usually become vastly different than they were when you were twenty, or forty.

The test has value, even for us old guys, since it showed me that instead of a striving for the next goal, we have turned all that energy into personal private goals that have little to do with what the neighbors think or getting a raise next quarter.

Not such a bad deal, after all.

How did we ever survive

This morning in the local paper there was a fairly extensive article about our highschool--it seems that in the science lab yesterday someone broke a thermometer. By the time it was over they had involved the hospital, the ambulance, the police, a haz-mat unit from the fire department, the school was evacuated, fans were quickly installed in all the lab windows, and the kids in the class were tested for mercury poisoning. No one at this point is even sure it WAS a mercury thermometer, but someone said it was.

There was a photo of one of the local cops holding the double-bagged pieces, about to be sent off for further inspection.

A great time was had by all, apparently.

My one thought is, how did we ever survive our own childhoods?

The paint had lead in it, there was, until the 70s, lead based inks in all the books and newpapers, and even the toys we had were painted with lead based stuff. We were told not to lick them. Not to eat the paint, and to wash our hands. By today's standards we were walking in a field of grenades and all the pins were loose...the irony of all of this is that the quantity of 'safe' school yard equipment, from swings to jungle gyms, are often made with pressure treated lumber, which up until recently was treated with arsenic as part of the process. Someone is not paying attention, here.

Of Trees and Ice Storms

just spent the last two days trying to salvage something out of the mess that last winter's ice storm left us. The biggest casualty was this tree (seen here in fall mode) which split at the base, and having a brittle kind of wood--much like sumac--lost several of the branches that arched out over half the lawn. Last year we measured it (this is, by the way, a hybrid Chestnut tree) as having a branch span of 38' and it was about that tall as well. Much of that has gone.

Im still deciding what to do about it, since a few of the upright branches are still whole, but I don't want it to look like a hack job--Im thinking, cut off the broken stuff, and prune whats left into a decent symmetry and let it fill in as it will.

This is a Chinese Chestnut/American Chestnut cross, developed by a botanist neighbor, Elwyn Meader, some years ago. He gave anyone who would take them as many of these as they wanted, in the hopes of rejuvenating the chestnut tree in new england. It has grown and thrived here for nearly 25 years, and Im hoping it thrives, in one shape or another, for a hundred more...

The druid in me weeps, the optimist knows it will come back.