Good fences make good neighbors...

It was late last winter when I first met the wife of the couple who bought the house next to the microwave tower. This fence separates their property from the church yard. They are probably our closest neighbors on this side of the highway as the crow...
err... vulture flies.
No.... no.... turn to your right... you're headed in the wrong direction. Uhhh... on second thought, let's don't follow the vultures. At least 5 more vultures showed up, and they all swirled around for a few minutes. I couldn't get myself arranged fast enough to take a photo of them all before they floated away off over the woods in a large swirl.
And there would be the straight flight path from the microwave tower to the telephone pole by our back porch. At any rate, moving right along. Our son found their dog's collar in the cleared area (well, it used to be the cleared area) under the power lines that are strung across our field, also visible in the above photo. The dog had likely gotten caught on some brush, jerked to free itself, and the collar broke. The tag announced that this was Blackie, an appropriate name for a black Lab. I called the phone number that was engraved on the tag and Blackie's person, a woman in her 70s (I'm guessing), came and picked it up. She seemed nice, and I thought I should try to get to know her better. But I didn't follow through with that. I did get to know Blackie a bit better, however. He chased my car down the road one day not too long after he got his collar back.

The man came into the church a couple of weeks ago during Sunday school and said he was planning on redoing the fence line. He wondered if we (the church) would mind if he cleared the trees and brush away from the fence? We (the church) said we didn't mind. Well, I minded, but I didn't say anything.

Richard and I didn't realize that they also own the land that borders our field. Most of the fence was either on the ground or sagging badly because of rotted fence posts, so he hired some guys to put in a new fence. For about 2 weeks off and on, there was a lot of ...
rummmmmm.... RUMMMMMM.... rummmmmmmm... RUUMMMMMM from the chain saws... and clanging.... and banging as they drove the metal posts.

And then once that commotion died down, we got to smell lots of smoke as large piles of downed trees and brush were being burned...

and burned.

And a few days ago she knocked on our door and said she was very sorry, but the guys who set the fence discovered they had made a mistake. She said her husband had called out a surveyor to confirm the property line and they were 13 feet across the line on our land. So, they redid the fence, and more banging and clanging commenced. Had they not told us, we probably never would have realized the mistake, at least until we went to sell the land.
Our pond is somewhere on the other side of those trees. And I was wondering if they had done something to it.

We were now rather anxious to see the fence line, so Richard fought his way through the brush to the bridge over the wet weather creek, but was stopped by the poison ivy, which he is horribly allergic too. Yep, there is a bridge there, and if you click on the photo to enlarge it, you'll see it.And the other path I used to take to get to the pond when our son was younger (note the rusting hulk of our old satellite dish) is impassable without some serious trailblazing activities.

However, yesterday morning I put our son to work clearing the brush and lo and behold, a bridge.

Once the poison ivy dies back, maybe we can fire up the gasoline-powered brush cutter and get out to the pond and see for ourselves. I remain curious to see whether our new neighbors are going to ask us to pay for half the cost of putting up the fence.

Take a virtual stroll...

While this is automatically being uploaded at 5 a.m. today, I will probably have already been up for an hour and will be calmly and carefully going over the checklist one last time to make sure I have not forgotten anything before we calmly and carefully walk to the car by 5:15 so that we can arrive at the airport, which is 100 miles away, in time to catch the flight. I am thinking only positive thoughts that the flight will leave on time so that I can make the connection in Dallas/Ft Worth to travel on to Los Angeles.

Seeing as I can't stand to waste anything, I guess I'll take y'all on a stroll through the field behind the house to the edge of the 150-acre woods, which is the western boundary of our land. I took these photos maybe 10 days ago, and they probably won't be"good" by the time I get back.

The field has become overgrown with pine and red cedar. And the boundary between the woods and the field has grown fuzzy now that the hickory and oak trees from the woods are beginning to slowly creep farther and farther into the field. Most of the color comes from the sumac.

There is quite a bit of sumac in the field. It produces red berries that are popular with the birds, which poop them out. The seeds sprout, and the sumac spreads.


It is a lovely patchwork of gold and brown to see the rolling Ozark hills from the window of a small airplane. Even though this area is sort of off the fall color radar, there are occasional blips.


There used to be barbed wire fence between our land and the woods, and a very important fence it was too. The owner had two big draft horse that were old and retired, but they still had quite a bit life left in them and once when the fence was down, they both came through the woods and onto our land. I was very afraid they were going to saunter out onto the highway and cause a terrible accident. And then I heard his voice calling them from the woods, and they turned around and galloped off home. And he fixed the fence.... but that was a long time ago, and now it is once again on the ground.


The woods are not particularly beautiful in terms of fall colors...


Oh, there’s a bit of brilliance here and there from a Virginia creeper up in a tree or small dogwood lurking at the base of an oak, but most of the trees here are the variety of oak where the leaves simply turn brown and fall to the ground. So, I can't begin to compete with some of the photographs of glorious fall colors that are appearing on the blogs, but I like the woods all the same

Because I will be on vacation until Oct 29, I guess the blog is going on vacation too, unless I change my mind and do something from my folks’ house.

In the meantime, that Wild Woman in Pennsylvania has given me an award. I am honored. I will think about who I want to pass the award on to and do something about it when I came back..

Remembrance of Things Past, Wherein Nature Runs Amok

Vacant lots appear here and there along the roads leading into town and among the town itself. Houses have caught fire and burned to the ground; the owners have died and the house stays abandoned for years and begins to fall apart, and pretty soon someone comes along and tears it down, or the volunteer fire department torches it as a training exercise and then the land is cleared. On the road to town is a large cleared area where a house and a church once stood. It was demolished last year, and scattered clumps of daffodils are the only evidence that someone’s home once stood there. Indeed, on our own land, an ancient stone-bordered flower bed very near the state highway right-of-way produced daffodils and iris for years and years after the house had been moved for the original highway bypass around the town. This continued until it was wiped out by the highway expansion in the late 1990s. Another victim of the highway expansion was a house across the road. But again, there is no evidence now that a house was ever there, except for the wisteria that someone originally planted to grow along the fence at the back of the property. The fence is still there, and so is the wisteria, but as this plant is prone to do (from personal experience, this is the plant from hell), it apparently grew tired of the fence and has spread... everywhere. It is a most amazing thing to see. And this photograph doesn’t do it justice. It has climbed way up into several large trees and has produced a mass of drooping clusters of purple flowers. It is truly gorgeous.

Remembering…

 I have always been fairly confident in my ability to remember things accurately. At least I was. And then Judy said I just had to read “the gorilla book.” 

 The book has startling things to say about us humans and the way our minds work. We can look right at something and not see it at all. We can remember something that never happened. It was a hard book to deal with, and I have talked about it with Richard probably more than he would like. Our brains play tricks on sometimes, and I no longer trust very much my memories of the past. Judy and I refer to these as “gorilla moments.” 

 

The book presents two very public people who had “gorilla moments” with their memories. One was Hilary Clinton, who got off a plane having been to Bosnia and talked about things that she experienced at the airport that video footage showed never happened. Another was President George W. Bush, who said he remembered seeing some of the events of 911 that he could not possibly have seen in real-time because he was reading a story to some children in an elementary school (this, of course, played right into the hands of conspiracy theorists). Neither person was telling a deliberate lie. Their brains had played tricks on them. They were having “gorilla moments.”

And I came right up against my very own “gorilla moment” a few days ago.

The tumor in our son’s brain was removed on June 7, 2010. On June 8 at noon they moved him from the neurology ICU to the ward. Late in the day on June 8, the radiologist came into the room and said “melanoma… spread from somewhere else….” I left the hospital in the early evening and drove home with those horrible words ringing in my head and heart. Knowing now what I know about the gorilla and the problem of "distracted driving," that I was able to make it home without killing myself or someone else is something of a miracle.

The next morning, June 9, Richard left and drove to the hospital and spent the day with our boy. While he was there, the neurosurgeon came to check on our son. Richard and the surgeon went out in the hall to talk so that our son could not hear them. He said to Richard:

This is a very aggressive cancer. We will throw everything we have at it, and we will lose.

And two years later, as I was thinking back on that week, I thought that the surgeon had told us that when he came to see us immediately after the operation was over. I was convinced of it, until Richard assured me that I definitely was wrong. He was by himself with the surgeon in the hall. I was not there.

A gorilla moment.

But then in that blessed way that He has, another memory scuttled in to give me something else to think about.

Parts of the wood scaffold that Richard built against the side of the house several years ago have started to drop off. And at about the same time 2 years ago that Richard was hearing that dreadful prophecy in the corridor of the hospital, I happened to walk by the fallen board and I saw this fellow basking in the sun. 

A fence lizard, who very patiently sat still for me while I went in the house and got the camera and fumbled with it trying to get it to turn on and focus and get close enough to take his picture.

Yes indeed. Seeing this little fence lizard sent me on another much more pleasant trip into the past… 

 

A memory I absolutely trust. Or most of it. I think. It was summer and our family was visiting my father’s sister, Betty, and her husband, John in Carmel Valley. He had to go tag fence lizards for a project he was working on as part of his job as the director of the Hastings Natural History Reservation run by UC Berkeley. I have no idea what the project was about. I am sure he told me, but I don’t remember. It may have been simply counting them to see if the population was healthy. In any event, he let me come with him.

He had slick technique for catching the lizards. He had a fishing pole with fine line and a noose tied at the end, and he would slip the invisible noose over the head of the unsuspecting lizard and jerk, and the lizard was his. I am not sure how he marked the lizards he had already caught and tagged, but I am almost sure he used nail polish (go away, gorilla).

If I were keeping score, I’d guess the gorilla is slightly ahead.

In a precarious place

The place where I walk with the dog in the early morning or in the afternoon when the weather is not quite so hot is a long paved loop that connects at both ends of a church parking lot and wraps around a large pond in front of the building. It is a safe place for us to walk – no cars to dodge. For me, I am not afraid of falling because the road is clean -- there is no gravel or rocks or debris to stumble over. The asphalt is sort of dicey in some spots but easily negotiated. There are plenty of things to keep the dog entertained, from hunting small mammals that scurry around under the tall grass to barking at those big things in the pastures. Ah yes. Barking.

Behind the church is a large pasture that curves around to the east and then comes down the hill and stops at the pavement. Living there are 20 young heifers and steers of various breeds of beef cattle: Black and Red Angus, Herefords, black ones with white faces, and some white and cream colored ones that may be Charolais or Simmental.

I love looking at these cattle. They are on open pasture, so when they lay down to chew their cud in that mesmerizing circular grinding motion, they are not laying in a slurry of excrement and mud as they would if confined in stockyard pens. They are clean. Their hides are glossy and beautiful, especially the Black Angus.

Molly loves to bark at them.

Mostly they ignore her, but occasionally they become curious about this small gray thing bouncing around and making noise at them, so they will come up to the fence and stand in a line watching her.

And then on the opposite side of the loop is the back pasture of a small farm where a herd of goats lives, guarded by 3 big Great Pyrenees dogs.

The dogs know we are there as soon as I slam the car door, and they come trotting up to the woven wire fence, letting us know in their low big-dog voices that they are on the job. They and Molly bark at each other, trading insults, issuing challenges, and explaining how tough they are. She doesn’t seem to care that they could easily be 60 pounds heavier than she is. She lets them “have it.”

And then there are the Killdeer. As soon as we start to walk past the area where I think they have their nests, one will begin running in front us on its twiggy stilt legs, piping continuously as it goes. If the dog stops to sniff something, the bird stops and waits for us and then resumes leading us away from where its eggs are.

Killdeer prefer to nest on bare rocky ground and there is no real nest as such, just a small cleared area. The eggs look like gray stones. They have a habit of choosing very unsafe places to make their nest.

This one sits inches from the asphalt on the frontage road we drive to get to the main road into town.

She has been sitting there for a while. When cars pass next to her she will get up and spread her wings, but I fear one of these times the jerk who deliberately swerved off the road to smash the turtle 2 weeks ago will try to do the same thing to her. Pretending to have a broken wing is not going to stop him. I hope her eggs will hatch soon and she will be able to move her little ones to a safer place.

Read to me, Mommie....

There were lots of things I loved to do as a little kid that I almost remember -




...fishing was one, and being read to was another. I remember many trips to the library with my mother, coming home with arm fulls of books, and being read too.

And one of the books I still remember her reading to me is A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Lewis Stevenson.


Of course it was not this particular book. I got this one from the library a few days ago while I was camped out there, thinking about what to write about my mother, and working on the laptop because a severe thunderstorm took out the power.

Thumbing through this book is like turning the clock back.... back.... back.... the memories....

At the Seaside....

When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore...

I am told that among the first words I spoke were "Ocean water, go beachy."

Where Go the Boats?

Dark brown the river,
Golden is the sand
It flows along forever
With trees on either hand...

I remember making walnut shell boats and floating them in the gutters on rainy days...

The Swing

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

My uncle, who is holding me in this picture taken with my mom, had made an amazing swing from ropes.



I remember swinging in that... up, up up.... And seeing that fence behind them reminds me of the time I was climbing on the fence and I got a huge splinter -- a skewer -- in my leg. My mom was so calm and cool and collected as she pulled the spike out of my leg and doctored me. I wonder if I would have been so calm had my son come in with something like that.

The Land of Counterpane...

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow hill
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane...

I was seldom sick, as the child described in the poem, but I remember making hills and valleys of my blankets on summer afternoons when my mother insisted that I take a nap, but I was stubborn and refused to fall asleep...

My Shadow

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me;
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see...

Who has not had fun playing with their shadow?

It almost broke my heart when I turned to the back of the book and saw that the last time this book was taken out was in 2004!!! Why are not the mothers reading these lovely, lovely poems to their little children?


Happy Mother's Day to you dear mother.

Serenity and cacophony

Yesterday we decided to take a break and celebrate the tax return being done and so we headed off to Springfield for some R and R (and then wondered if it wasn’t something of an oxymoron to link “Springfield” with R and R in the same breath).

At any rate, our first stop was at the Mizumoto Japanese Stroll Garden (there are lovely pictures of it here and here in the Spring).

This park is part of a huge park complex outside of Springfield. This is a lovely area, with winding paved paths through pine trees and Japanese arrangements of plants and rocks, and a huge koi pond with lots of interesting little bridges and stone pathways, and trickling waterfalls and a replica of a Japanese tea house, and one of those meditation gardens with the combed gravel. Just lovely.

We fed $1 into the machine and bought a few handfuls of food to feed the koi...

And then all of a sudden here comes a turtle – a much larger version of the sort of turtle little kids used to be given as pets.

 It came right up to me...

and I tried to give it some of the koi food, but the fish were too aggressive.

Now, to set the stage for what happened next, the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners is in Springfield, and as the name implies, it houses Federal prisoners who require medical treatment or who have mental health issues. Occasionally the prison makes the news -- John Gotti died there, the man who shot the Congresswoman in Arizona is being sent there.

The lovely Japanese stroll garden borders the back of the prison -- there is a large open area outside the main prison fence where there are various outbuildings and then a chain link fence separates this from the garden. We were enjoying our mosey on the path that meanders around this lovely pond and its artistic plant arrangements, we start hearing this funny-sounding amplified woman’s voice echoing. A tram tour of the parks is offered on certain days of the week and I thought perhaps was one of the trams with someone giving a guided tour.

Richard listened a bit longer and said, "No, that is a gun range." A gun range? Sure enough. As we continued to move forward the voice became clearer, and she was giving instructions to people who were about to shoot guns. Everything was quiet for a few seconds.

And then it sounded like we were in a war zone.  

Ka-bam, blam, blooey, bang bang bang.
We could smell the gunpowder wafting in the morning breeze.

We made our way through the row of trees blocking the view of the back of the prison from the park,

and there was a line of people shooting at targets. Probably prison guards or perhaps Springfield policemen.



We had to laugh -- this is exactly the sort of thing that happens to us regularly -- nothing like a little gunfire to add to the ambience.

Anger Management

I am not prone to anger, but when I do get angry, it tends to be an “outburst” – and even then it is usually low-key. I get it over it very quickly, and then I go on my merry way. Well, a few days ago I found myself in a situation where a very clever essay by Jamie Buckingham, “Things That Go Squish In the Night,” immediately came to mind. This piece is in his book The Last Word, a collection of columns he wrote for a newspaper and other publications.

He relates an incident where he shut off a valve that drained water from his heating system so he could divert it to a spigot and wash the car earlier in the day. Evening has come, it is getting late. He has told his daughter to hurry up and take her shower and has gone to bed. Just as he is falling asleep, he hears a sound and realizes he has failed to reopen the valve. Now water is now flooding the back yard instead of draining into the pond. It is pitch dark outside, he grabs his flashlight, sloshes through the water to the well house, shuts off the water, and then heads off through the backyard to the cement-lined hole where the diverter valve is located. He sticks his hand down there and touches something slimy, which he can’t see in the dark. He leaps up, forgetting that he is kneeling under a barbed wire fence.

“The result was disastrous. When I became a Christian, I lost most of my old vocabulary. This robs me of the necessary safety valve to handle such emergencies. So, instead of cursing, I threw my flashlight, which landed in the pond, leaving me in total darkness. Ripping myself away from the barbed wire, I staggered backwards away from the fence. I stepped in doggie-do. Hopping around in the tall grass, I ran a thorny briar between my big toe and the toe right next door... That which I lost I suddenly found–and a torrent of expletives issued forth...”

Jamie Buckingham is now late, having died in 1992, so I guess we will have to wait until eternity to enjoy any more of his witty writing. At any rate, what happened to me wasn’t quite as dramatic, but the effect was much the same.

Earlier in the spring, R fixed up a half whiskey barrel planter for me at the side of the porch so I could plant a clematis and have it climb the trellis on the porch. The local greenhouse where I would have found a clematis shut down, and not being able to find one at Wally World, I planted pansies, violas, and johnny jump-ups around the rim and left a spot for the clematis, should one turn up. The flowers survived the hard freeze we had in April and were thriving and just beautiful.

Two weeks ago, I found a beautiful burgundy passionflower fine at a street fair and planted that in the spot where the clematis would have gone. And I was happy. I have never been very successful at growing flowers.

Then a few days ago, I returned from aerobics and started up the back steps, and glanced down to look at my beautiful pansies and saw that they were no longer beautiful. Some “thing” had gotten in the barrel and tore it up. All the plants on one side had been pulled up, and the plants on the other had been covered in dirt.

I was enraged. To echo Buckingham, “that which I lost I suddenly found.” We too are out in the country so nobody was around to hear me, except R. Fortuntely, what ever got in their simply uprooted the plants and did not destroyed them, so I quickly replanted them all, uncovered the ones that were covered up, and gave them a good watering. And they seem to have bounced back.

Buckingham closes his essay with the thought “...God is more interested in what we become along the way than whether we arrive. I am not sure what I became. But one thing is certain, I have not yet arrived.”

Me either.

A helping hand..

I am so thankful that my parents did not train me to be afraid of nature. There were only a few “animal fears” that I remember having as a child. The woman across the street kept banty chickens – little, tiny things, and those little roosters were ferocious. I remember one chasing me and pecking my legs. I remember being chased by large, booming tom turkey on the farm of mother’s childhood friend in northern California.

Worst of all was the my fear of Weimaraner dogs, which came about because there were several behind a chain-liked fence that I had to pass every day on my way to school, and they seemed to wait for me, charging the fence with apoplectic fury, hatred in their creepy yellowish eyes, as I walked by, cringing away from them. I have never really gotten over my dislike for those dogs. There was man who became quite famous taking pictures of his Weimaraner dogs dressed up in clothes. I was never fond of those pictures.

Mothers have such an influence over how their children view the world. My mom kept her opinions about snakes and lizards and frogs and those things to her self. She encouraged us to be curious and interested in nature and the creatures that live in with us.

So, when we were bringing up our son, I tried very hard not to train him to be afraid of things that were not harmful and to instill in him a respect for life so he just didn’t automatically kill some wild creature he “didn’t like.” A lot of people in this area have the attitude: if it moves, shoot it; if it is in the road, run over it. Especially if it is a snake. We did not want him to become that sort of a person. And he hasn’t.

He has become my eyes and ears outside these days. We send him out early in the morning to do odd jobs in the yard before it becomes too hot. And he sees things.

A week or so ago, he came in my office and said “Mom. There is a speckled king snake outside. It is really cool.” So I leaped up and grabbed the camera and out the door I went.

Sure enough…. 

There was a really cool snake outside.

A few days ago, we put him to work tearing out the old, rotten lumber we had used to make in a raised bed for our vegetable garden years ago. A little while later he came in with a big grin on his face, gently cradling something in his “I-don’t-have-an-office-job” hand. Mom, look what I found while I was digging out the wood!

It was very calm in his hand….

And then it began to slither off...

and so he let it down near where he had been working and off it went.

A rose by any other name…

I think one of the signs that recovery is moving forward, even if there are a few backward steps along the way, is a renewed interest in reading the blogs that have given me so much pleasure in the past.

I read two blogs written by Australians, including the one by Cathy. I enjoyed so much seeing the beautiful pictures of her roses in a recent post.

My mother loved roses, but I do not remember seeing rosebushes in the yard until we moved to the second house we lived in – and where my father still lives – in the early 1960s. Then many rosebushes began appearing in the flowerbeds as the years passed. One of the few presents that I actually remember giving my mother was a rosebush with lavender-colored blooms for her birthday or maybe Mother's Day.

When we moved here, I did not attempt to plant a rosebush at our house, but I didn’t need to.

A previous owner had planted a climbing rose – an old fashioned “heirloom” type, on the wooden fence that used to separate the “yard” from the “pasture.”

It has come back year after year after year, even though the fence, and the trellis we later put up, disintegrated years ago. Now it climbs up into the sumac bushes.

I had totally forgotten about this old faithful friend until I happened to read Cathy’s blog, and so I thought I would check to see if it was blooming this year.

And indeed it is.

It is not big and bold and brassy, it has a very small,

unassuming flower...

but it is sweet and I love it.

Blazing a trail

It seems only yesterday (a child came out to wonder....) that he was a boy playing in the dirt with Big Kitty.


And the seasons go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down....
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came...

So the years spin by and now the boy is...*

A man who goes off each morning to a job, thank the Lord for small mercies, and exactly month from today he will be 32 years old.

At Christmas, one of the machines at the mill broke and they couldn't get the part--or a repairman to fix it--for several days, and so our son was off work longer than he expected and was sort of climbing the walls with boredom.

So I handed him the lopping shears and asked him to please cut a path out to the pond. And it took him hardly any time at all to blaze a trail through the forest of cedars. I asked him to take me on the path he had cut.




And a few more bare limbs need to be removed.


Back when he was a little kid and Big Kitty was still alive, on sunny winter days, we would bundle up and grab a handful of small rocks from the driveway and walk out to the pond. The cat always came with us. And we would skid the rocks across the ice and Big Kitty would chase them and bat them with her paws, and arch her back and go nuts. It was hilarious.


I never realized cats who are allowed outside went for walks with their slaves. Squeaker happened to be outside, and so came with us--of course--and is walking along the edge of the water on the left. At this time of year, the pond is a sorry site. It looks lifeless, but the view is made even more dismal by the fact that the fence builders, who made a mistake about where the fence line was, cut down the fringe of sugar maples on the south rim. I am a little angry about that, but there is not much I can do about it now.


Squeaker does not understand the chase-rocks-on-the-ice game, and besides, the ice was very thin because it has not been that cold and there were no more trees on the south side to keep it in the shade.

It warmed up to almost 70 degrees not too long after I took this picture, and I am almost sure I heard one of the little frogs that lives here peeping that night. Before too long, it will be Spring and the pond will come alive with frogs and dragonflies and...life

*Copyright © Siquomb Publishing Company