Huginn/Muninn

Here in Illinois our large mammal population is pretty disappointing.  No wolves, no bears, nothing approximating a predator excepting coyotes, who have worn out their welcome based on what what is being reported locally.  ( I couldn’t even read the whole story, but if you’re interested, click here. ) That leaves deer.  Hardly formidable.   And beavers.  Yep, beavers.

Okay, so they’re not predators unless you are a tree.  Or are they?

Laugh all you want, but beavers can be damned scary.   In a trout steam, Mike is intimidated by them, while Ephemera is downright scared.  My dad as well had told tales of beaver induced nervousness while flyfishing  but as he is also freaked out by cows staring at him, I must discount his beaver fears.   I made a good deal of fun of both husband and brother for their decidedly unmanly attitude about these creatures until I really got a good look at one.  Which is not easy to do.

Castor canadensis swims with nothing but the top third of its head above water thus hiding the fact that it is,  relatively speaking, enormous.  Up to four feet from tail to nose, weighing in at somewhere between 40 and 100 pounds, and possessing both horrendous eyesight and teeth powerful enough to down a 25 foot cottonwood in a single night, they are something to be reckoned with.  Matters not that they are herbivores.  The big tooth/bad eyesight combo is disquieting.    Further, they are capable of swimming at 4-5 mph (rather speedy relative to size) and submerging for up to 15 minutes at a time.  And man, are they quiet in the water.  That’s the unsettling part.   I have seen my brother become visibly uncomfortable as a beaver swam towards him on his home waters.   I don’t believe it had intention threaten him, but he maintains that the beavers know exactly what they are doing when they swim, completely submerged, directly at him while he’s fishing.   Beaver intimidation.   To be fair, he’s invading their space, although after stepping into the same river every day for over ten years, it would seem they’d be used to him by now.  And he them.

Kola is no less bothered by them.  Their tail slap can be heard from a quarter mile away and the sound never fails to incite her fury to locate the source.   She jumps in, swimming frantically to find the offending rodent but usually gets called out by me before she can come nose to nose with it. We rarely see a pair together, and even when we do come upon one, it’s unusual to be able to watch for more than a minute or two.  If we hear the tail-slap, it’s too late–they have already disappeared, Nessie-like, to pop up five minutes later a quarter mile downriver.

Lodges are built into the river and creek banks, further disrupting  root systems already compromised by floods which occur a half dozen times a year.   Based on Kola’s disappearance into a lodge under a bankside cottonwood last week, they must be huge indeed.  One minute she was involved in a preliminary investigation of the doorway, and the next all I saw was her tail disappearing into the cavern.  I did a little healthy screaming at her (angry, surprised beavers and a fearless Lab don’t seem like a good mix) and when she came out she did so nose first.  The house she invaded was large enough for her to turn around upon exit.  Just how many beavers were in there?   Possibly a lot.  Kits live with parents for two years after birth and assist in the rearing of the next year’s  litter, which can be up to six per season depending on food availability.  Fortunately for Kola no one was home at the time or the family was in another chamber when she visited.

I am afraid that this spring our resident population is in for some unpleasantness.  The number of trees they have downed in the last three months is going to make the Forest Preserve idiots angry and I fear  they will begin trapping them.   Every few days another two or three trees are girdled or felled, creating a bizarre maze of naked-to-the-waist trees.  Once the trees are on the ground (or near it–it is rare that their chosen target actually makes contact with the soil–instead nearby trees trip up the fall and the lengths of wood are suspended four feet up) they strip off as much bark as they are able and snap off the branches within biting reach and leave piles of grooved shavings everywhere.  They prefer the cottonwood, maple, and willow growing along the river and creek adjoining it, and are truly changing the landscape this year. If they keep it up, within another year there will be nothing left to hold the soil in place and no trees left on the banks.

If I could warn them about what may be ahead I’d do it.  Tell them to lay low for awhile until things quiet down.   But they must do what they were built for.  Strange that their hard-wired, genetic responsibilities– speedy and irreversible landform rearrangement, forest demolition, ceaseless natural resource consumption, frequent construction–should make the human population so annoyed.

Sound like any other species we know?

Someone flipped a switch.   Though I have been paying attention, quite intently, I missed it.   The robins, cardinals, and few goldfinches who stuck around this winter, have come alive and started telling us things.  I am not sure what they are saying, but it sounds to my ready ears like they are gurgling about spring.  Though the cardinals began their springsongs in January I ignored them, knowing they every year begin calling for mates far too early to really mean anything.  Optimists.

But last week, while traversing new river territory, I caught the sound of robins singing in the way only they can.   And each day since, they have been coaxing the new season along on the thread of their golden tongues.  Goldfinches, who for unknown reasons stay in our yard all winter, added their voice this afternoon while I filled the feeders, talking about summer and nestlings, open water on the pond and hollyhock seeds.    I am listening.

Visually, things are slower to show themselves.  While buds are swelling a bit on the maples, there is little other sign.  Earlier in the week we spied a fly of some kind, looking like a shrunken cranefly, resting on the snow in the woods.  I know nothing about the provenance of flies such as she, so have no idea if she hatched off the water, out of a log crevice, or has been hibernating all winter.  Matters not, though; the joy of a seeing a winged insect was enough.

On a welcome 40 degree afternoon last week, my eye caught movement in the sky, black forms high up and laid against the blue.  Six crows were quite obviously playing in the air, chasing one another, making great earthbound swoops, picking up the next thermal, and lifting again into the sun.  I was jealous of their open disdain for the name of the month and their lack of need to stay on roads.  The  sky was theirs and they made good use of it. I did my best to drive and pay attention to the road and the birds at the same time, but kicked myself later for not just pulling over to watch.  Did getting home ten minutes later really make any difference?  Kola would be waiting at the window either way, and what might I have witnessed if I had tarried a while to watch?     I am sure they were crows from home–I see six together quite often within a two mile radius of the house–I have seen them bothering a roosting red-tail, wandering a soccer field for lunch, leaving their roost as I drive to school, and chasing a Coop across a busy intersection, one lined up behind the other oblivious to anything but their game.

Alas, come Monday morning, with an expected 10 inches of new, unwelcome, and heavy snow to bust through, I am going to have to shelve my spring thoughts for awhile.    Yet, with each day of sun and afternoon of birdsong we creep a little closer to the real deal.

On a completely unrelated note, I received some revelatory information from Greta recently. Her Saturday volunteering hours at a close friend’s avian rehab facility result in countless bits of intriguing information, but this is by far the best yet.  Woodpeckers smell like rotting logs. After some thought,  it made perfect sense, but was nonetheless completely fascinating.     She was sad to say that the information came secondhand, as she has never personally smelled a woodpecker, but doing so is very near the top of her “to do” list.    And now, thanks to her, it is also at the top of mine.

A note from Ephemera…..

Sis….well done. Fine writing. Fluid and touching. I am thankful to have the opportunity to walk with you through the woods and ice of winter in the beloved haunts of our roots. As for Kola…she is a sweet hound. Her spirit betrays the war wounds that decorate her. Five is young and where we currently reside. Life is rather more in the moment, than in the age. A child could see the face of god and an old man may still see love in its purity. Age matters not. For none of us. It is the spirit with which we live life that matters and such a thing cannot be measured by years. But by moments. May we all have them in surplus. And may we all recognize their purpose, when we are touched by them. Once again, thank you for the words. Keep writing them. Reflection of the grandeur is lost when kept only by its owner. Share…share. Peace and Grace. Your Brother.

Mike, the great equalizer and voice of reason, tells me that dogs get ugly with age.  Kola, Queen of the River, seems to be doing just that.  She is sprouting lumps here and there, a wart now and then, and at six, limps after too much outside work.

And so it is with Winter as well.  What two months ago was a magical transformer and a boon to the spirit is getting mighty unattractive in her advancing months.   Our consistent multi-inch snowfalls have melted away leaving three inches of bumpy, slick ice behind.  The little snow left on roadsides is black and pitted.  The cottonwoods along the river were ringed with tables of ice a few weeks ago, making the whole place look like a fairy world, missing only teacups and vases of hoar-frosted goldenrod on their shelves.  What remains at the river are planks of ice extending beyond the banks, over the water, inviting human or dog to peer over the edge into depths far warmer than the air.  I am seduced daily there, onto the six inches of ice which look as if they could support a tank, but are in reality fragmented, uneven, and treacherous.   The continual flooding, freezing, receding, thawing and re-freezing has created massive platforms of ice with  twelve inches of nothingness between them and the frozen soil.  We never know, with each step we take, when we’ll be on something solid and when we’ll crash through to earth, usually in mid-sentence, tongue between teeth.  I have learned to walk through winter with my mouth shut.

We’ve been in the belly of it since Thanksgiving, when our first snow fell.  Relatively speaking, that’s not a long time.  Two months.  And what’s ahead of us is a lot–we’ve only received half of our expected snowfall, and have another eight weeks before we can really count on the end of sub-zero nights.

But, as the weather gods are intuitive gods indeed, they knew we were tired of Winter and sent us  40+ degrees over the weekend as reminder that the world will one day come un-frozen.   They didn’t give us much, but it was something. And the world, in response, sent up a collective cheer and went outside.  I found a goldenrod spider dangling from a line of silk in the woods, and though I warned her that she was too early to come out of her hiding place I  guessed she was just testing the air and  basking in the promise of another Spring, as were Kola and I.

There’s a lot to look forward to in the coming weeks.  I will be able to force buds and then flowers out of forsythia and crabapple branches in a few weeks.  Thanks to Naomi’s phenological work, I know that by the 5th of March the Red-winged Blackbirds will be back .   The males, noisy and welcome, show up in my cottonwood and pussy-willow in late February most years–and if i pay attention, I may notice the females return a week or so ahead of their mates.   Maple buds will be swelling by mid-February, and Great-Horned Owls will be on eggs by Valentine’s Day.  A scant four weeks from now Red-Tailed Hawk pairs will start flying together again, whoever of the skunk and raccoon people is yet asleep will wake,  and there will be new squirrel kits in their nests.  And the crows……they will let me know Spring is truly waiting when I see them wheeling through the sky together, rolling and diving their black-winged way toward the sun.

The sign stands, a hole punched through its center, a beacon and invitation to some and a warning to the rest, in the middle of a newly cleared corner of our two roads.  It proclaims its intention, calling to any who have the means, hinting at nothing of the ruin.  Secretly we wish swift and terrible loss to any who might be contemplating its promise. Clearly the plan is laid out, partitioned, intersected, and plotted. We are all quiet about the inevitability–acknowledging the possibilities make them more real for all of us.  The children, even the ones who cannot yet read, know what it means; illiteracy is no escape..  We understand what lies ahead, and that it is just a matter of time.  Land for Sale.

One hundred acres, completely unremarkable save the fact that forty are still in timber.  Some farmer a couple hundred years ago either tired of the toil in clearing the rest or ran out of the funds to do so. I like to think that he wanted something left to sustain the wildlife he was driving out with his plow, but the most likely he fell short of time, money, or both.  The fields are rented, plowed, and planted by a neighboring farmer, and sprout soybeans in some years, corn in others. When they are planted in corn they are mazes for all our children, cool green forests of symmetry.  When it is a year for soybeans, they wilt in the August heat and are ignored until fall when it becomes a game after harvest to find the pods left on the ground behind, some soggy and empty, others still full of beans and ready to be eaten.  Something no child wants to eat on a plate is rendered exotic and magical when found in an October field.

This however, has been a year for corn; the walk across the field is bumpy and littered with the ears the deer have not yet found .  Left behind too are the impressions made by the roots in the soil, tender fossils waiting for a thaw to release them again into the mud.  The treeline looms, tangled and wispy in the late afternoon sun.  As usual, the dogs are way ahead of me, alternately running, glancing behind to check my follow and sucking in the olfactory mysteries of the earth.  Approaching the transition between field and timber, where the goldenrod still stands, a lone antlered yearling buck bolts from the cover and makes his way across the field, aiming no doubt for the woods across the road.  Dogs and I turn and follow. We all three know treasure awaits.

Within minutes of sighting it, the deer is forgotten.  What had started as a hunt for the missing antler has morphed into a pilgrimage to the pasture.  The wind was too loud and chilling to stay up top anyway.  For the nearly twenty years I had known this family, I had never understood why anyone called it pasture.  In the suburban pathways of my brain, pasture looked like a grassy place, full of clover and daisies.  This place had no clover, no cows, and looked suspiciously like the woods.  But once it was all those things, save the clover.  Time and and cowlessness had changed it into a wonderland of oak, wild roses and pokeberry. The stream, surely once muddied and fouled by the livestock, is clear and quiet.  The snows of late have melted, but not contributed much to the watershed.  In places it is knee-deep with undercut banks suggesting a time of high water, but mostly it is rocky and shallow, stones littering the water’s path.  Here and there the deer roads cut through, leaving a trail of mud on either side.  The dogs take their drink and fuss in the water, run the length of the stream until they are forced to land by an impassable downed tree in their path.  Looking into the water for signs of some life I see nothing.  It’s there, under the surface, waiting on spring, but invisible to me.

Walking one’s own land is a mental as well as physical endeavor.    Thoughts confront me there which would not while exploring territory owned by others whether the ownership is by friend, family, or government.  Public lands feel never wholly mine, no matter if I am alone while walking them.  Knowing that the rocks and soil, the forests and waters are tended by someone else somehow diminishes them, if only subconsciously.  A matter of trust, I guess. The problem, I think, lies in the ‘tended’ part.  Nothing here is improved, nothing cleared, made neat and comfortable.  The trees rot where they fall, the roses claim the space they can.  While I love the land that I have a right to by citizenship, it is not mine.  Hiking with my brother in his southwestern deserts is discovery, surprise and wonder, but it is not mine, not my history.

Walking here, in the microcosm of my acquired family, I find the stones that have lain for hundreds of years, the trees not cleared by my husband’s people, and the knowledge that my path, which today I  borrow from the coyotes and deer, is the same path that the people who lived and hunted, prayed and danced here, walked for ages.  I am not wracked with lust to fill my pockets with stones and moss the way that I am in other places, always a vain attempt to make the land mine, if only by theft.  The rocks strewn throughout this stream are pocked with fossils—each one a certain stowaway in my pack were I anywhere else.  Here they are companions, landlocked captives that I am comforted to know will not leave in anyone else’s  pockets.  I can let them lie because I know that they are mine, that they may stay in their eternal homes because one day I too will make this place my home, if only in spirit and dust.

Memory too, is the binding agent between this place and I.  I do not know if it is truly a genetic memory, brought on by my bond with this soil, or simply one conceived by the victories and lessons wrought in these woods.  Each step reminds me of what we, my husband and children and I, have found and lost here.  The found list is thankfully longer than the lost list.

In the field above me now is the place we found the owl, mortally wounded and dazed.  The place I stand is where we tended to her, hoping to patch her up and send her on her way for the evening’s hunt, and there is a spot not five minute’s walk from here, the exact location known only to my husband, where she was given back to the earth at his hand.   Where the two creeks come together is the place we have lain under an early May moon, listening to the howls and screams of the owls until the new light came, when the day was given over to the cardinals.  This spot too, where I roam looking for signs of our owls, is where many thanks have been given; by Mike for the deer he dressed and carried back to the house and by the coyotes for what he left behind of her, steaming in the November dusk.  Back in the field is where Mike’s father and grandfather found the arrowheads, turned up by their groaning tractor. This is the place we brought our children to camp for the first time, the place where our old dog napped, dreaming of her youth and rabbits, after an afternoon of exploring.   Up the hill are the morels, climbed to and discovered by the children; down the creek are the skunk cabbage whose scent fascinated them, and across the stream are the giant roots of an oak that made a perfect resting spot for a little boyspreading around him like great lazy arms.  Blocking the creekbed farther along is the Big Rock.  Five feet tall, three times as big around, it is impassable by water or human.  The granite is mottled by lichen and pocked by age; a constant source of wonder for all of us.  The nettles are asleep now, but come May they will surprise us again with their bite and delight us once they are carefully picked, steamed and eaten.  Yet further along the deer roads, down past the roses and through the trillium, dutchman’s breeches, and wild ginger, is a barbed wire fence, beyond it someone’s land, but not ours.  The edge of the earth.

As much as I try to resist the thoughts, I cannot help but wonder the value of this place; I know its value to me and my people, but to an outsider, seeing only space and prosperity, I wonder…..how much would all of it fetch?  One hundred acres, plowed and tiled, ready for tract (or better yet, custom) homes could mean a windfall to us, even after splitting the spoils.  It could mean financial security, a new house, a bigger car, or simply more land, somewhere else.  Bigger, better land to leave to our children for them to sell, divide and conquer.  We could have the place across the mountains we talk about, the land for our old age, the spot for new rambles, different treasures.   But to what fate would we be leaving this place?

I am nudged from my mental wanderings by the crows calling to me from over the ravine, speaking in a language I do not yet understand, or have somehow forgotten.  I cannot make my way to them fast enough to find out what they are yelling about, but know that they have found their day’s treasure too.  Mine is not the shed antler I had hoped for, but a soggy and compressed package of fur and bone.  The dogs have shown it to me by way of exaggerated grunts and snuffles.   Before it can be ravaged further by their noses I scoop it up, turn it over and gingerly slip it into my pocket.  It will be a present for the children, a mystery to be either saved, whole and unscathed, or dismembered and forgotten. It will be up to them what to do with it, but I like to think they will marvel at what it holds, yet leave it as it was found.  We carry on, the dogs and I, me noting the coming dusk and deepening cold and they beginning to think about supper and sleep.  The walk back to the house, which now glows warmly from the far side of the fields, is uneventful but happy.  Supper for all three awaits us as well as the giggling of the children and the sound of the tea kettle humming.  The next time I walk here it will be spring and the bottom will be grown up again, barely navigable and thorny.  The stream will be full and the birds will be nesting.  There is still now, the time when I will climb the steps and pull open the ancient door that does not lock, wipe my boots and ready myself again for family. Tenderly, I will pull from my pocket the afternoon’s treasure, pass it to whichever child greets me first, and hope for the best.

……………………………………………………………….

Since I wrote this two years ago we’ve lost one dog to the gods and two parcels of land have been sold.  A house has appeared on one.  Two years in a row now we’ve found poached deer dumped in our ravine just off the road. This year the dumper also left beer cans, liquor bottles, a motorcycle magazine, and receipts bearing his name and address.    Antlered and unmolested, the sight of the two bucks senselessly, wastefully tossed onto our property was more heartbreaking than the selling of the adjacent land.

The world continues to confound me.

So my dear friend  Naomi nominated Huginn-Muninn for an award.  I am not a frequent winner of awards, so naturally, I was intrigued.  The only issue I have with this particular award is that I really don’t get it.  I suppose that I understand the point of the award, but I don’t understand the name.  I would bet Naomi doesn’t really get it either, but she’s polite.   I am not going to make this a point of contention but rather express my gratitude for the honor.   Unfortunately, I have to do more in accepting than just say “thank you”….I have to nominate other blogs  as well as tell the world ten (interesting) things about myself.   This is really the hard part.  I don’t much care for talking about me.    My initial impulse was to reveal every horrible vice, character flaw, and hang-up that I harbor, but that seems unhealthy for everyone involved.   Additionally,  being limited to ten items makes choosing from my myriad (sorry, Mike, I know you hate that word) flaws  exhausting.  So I’ll just figure it out as I go, I suppose.

Anyway, here’s what Naomi had to say about the Honest Scrap award:

1. You express your gratitude, Oscar-style, at getting the award and you credit your nominator. You also paste the Honest Scrap picture on your blog.

2. You tell 10 honest, interesting things about yourself in a blog post. For some bloggers, that may be simple (or hard because they already reveal everything about themselves in their blogs). For me, it’s “hard” because my personal idiosyncrasies are really not the purview of my blog — I mostly keep my other pursuits out of the internet world. Also, I am not predisposed to brag on myself, but nor do I wish to disparage myself in public (as it were). But this will be an atypical entry, I suppose.

3. You choose 7 other blogs to nominate for the award, and notify them, so they can do the same thing. (I read anywhere between 7 and 10 nominations, but I’m going on the low side due to point #3 below.) Of course it’s optional, and I almost didn’t do it… but then I figured…. why not? It’s cool that people — or at least one person — wants to know more about me. And I enjoyed reading her 10 things, so…”

And at this point she goes on to reveal ten things about herself, a few of which were news to me.   My favorite is the revelation to the world that she is a reality TV whore.  Kind of a strong word, but I think she would agree with its use.  I also didn’t know she had major calendar issues–I gave her one of the calendars she is referring to, and now know she will never receive another from me since she isn’t using them properly.

Anyway, here are the seven blogs I do sort of follow, or at least check in with every month or so.

1.    Nature Nerd…A Phenology Blog One of the two I read daily.  Even though I talk to Naomi every day, sometimes she saves the really good stuff for the blog.  Her drawings are amazing.

2.  Chicago Gardener’s Journal The second blog I check each morning…..Chris keeps the world updated on what’s going on in his head, his garden, and his kitchen.  Oddly enough, he also has four calendars in his house which currently show the wrong month.  Bizarre.

3.   Fractured Thoughts I love reading the Veteran’s progress as a somewhat new naturalist.  I also enjoy the fact that he has diverse interests and isn’t afraid to write about them–progressive rock posts married with fungi posts is definitely a good thing.

4.  Greentangle What a great quote he uses in his header….I stumbled upon this blog and was compelled to read just because of that quote.  I was was happy to find that the rest of his blog is just as interesting.    His picture reminds me a bit of Edward Abbey, which also makes me like him.  I must remember to list in my ten revelations that I am impossibly shallow.

5.  Rurality Just plain fun to read.

6.  Rocky Mountain Photography I don’t remember how I came across this photography blog, but the photos are incredible.  Cody makes the life of a wildlife photographer sound exactly like what it is–hard work.  I also realize, after perusing Cody’s photographs, how incredibly sucky Illinois wildlife is.  No elk, no lions, no bear.  We do have chipmunks.

That’s it.  I am supposed to have a 7th blog, but I don’t.  Six is all I can handle anyway.  I think reading blogs is part of the reason for my inability lately to read actual books.  My attention span which was short to start, is getting shorter.  On that note…..

1.  I don’t like salad as much as I should.  I also like salad even less when I have made it myself.

2.  I secretly love People magazine.   I can’t really even explain this.  Nor do I want to.

3.  I like Kola better than most people.  And if you knew her you would feel the same way.  My children call me a Dog Hag.  I don’t know what this means to them, but I find it amusing.  There are worse things to be called.

4.  I didn’t finish college.  I am not proud of this and it is a source of daily regret.  I am however, proud of the fact that most of what I do know, I taught myself.    But no-one is going to give me a job I  because I read some books.  They’re all looking for that special piece of paper which I don’t have.  This might be okay right now though because what I think I want to do changes from one day to the next.

5.   I talk to birds.  This really irritates the children, but I do it anyway.  I say good morning and goodbye, ask what they’re doing, how they’re feeling, if it’s cold, how the hunting is, etc.   It seems like the right thing to do, so I will continue.  I don’t care that they don’t answer me.  Someday, one of them will.

6.  I can do a lot of things, but none of them expertly.  I should pick one thing (fly-tying, jewelry-making, tanning, photography, writing, drawing, gardening) and work to do it really well.  Instead, I do a lot of stuff, and all of it half-assed.  There are too many great things to do in the world and I hate choosing.

7.  I was not my fully formed self until I was almost thirty.  I spent a good deal of time being outside as a kid, but I don’t think I loved it.  It was a source of irritation and embarrassment for a lot of years (as in, why are we going to a forest preserve when everyone else is going to an amusement park over Spring Break?) and I let it fall away for a long time.  Sometime after our son was born I picked up a copy of  Desert Solitaire for a reason I cannot remember, (possibly because my dad had been badgering me about reading Ed Abbey for years) and that was it…..I have not looked back since and my only regret are the years (five of them before we had children) we could have been camping, walking, climbing and wandering.  Strangely enough, Mike also did not become his real self until around the time I did.  I am glad we moved together and in the same direction though. It would have sucked if I wanted to be nature girl and he took up gambling or hot-rods.  Or, conversely, if he wanted to camp and I started getting manicures.  Now that I think of it, my honeymoon was spent in a one-room, no running water cabin in Michigan, and I was horrified.   That gives a good idea of how different I was.  A honeymoon that sounds like a dream now, but eighteen years ago, I was not down with it.

8.  I enjoy the occasional Gordon Lightfoot disc.  And I had a rather brief, yet thrilling conversation with him on the radio at the age of 11.   Gordon was the first record I ever owned, given to me by my dad.  My musical taste continues to be somewhat odd.

9.  I either love or intensely dislike everything–there’s not a lot of in-between for me.   I’m also not into moderation, except for weather.  I hate it when it’s under 20 or over 85.  I have 65 degrees in which I can be happy.

10.   I wish I was a runner. I have dreams about running about as often as I do about crows, which is at least once a week.  I probably won’t become a runner, but I sure wish I would.

11.  I’ve had to employ Mike to get this list finished, and his last offering is that I have fingers resembling those of  a tree frog.

So that’s 11.  I had no intention of adding the last item, but Mike thought it was too hilarious a fact to leave behind. He also gets credit for remembering the Gordon Lightfoot thing.  I hope I did this right–I have not informed the bloggers I nominated, but I will do so soon.   Which leads to #12…I have a procrastination problem.

The last time I posted, it was August.  August 18th, to be exact.  Meteorogically speaking, summer was on the wane, but from a practical standpoint it had really just started.  The temperatures behaved in a summerlike fashion for a few weeks and then either spring returned or fall came early, depending on which of these two chilly seasons you prefer.  I can’t remember everything of the last almost three months, but I know a few things.

The grape harvest in September was rather disappointing.  We pruned the vines too hard last winter and had far fewer grapes than we would have liked.  This was especially unhappy for Naomi, who had her eye on the grapes for jam purposes.  Mike harvested every last bunch when none of us were around, and sent all to the freezer for winter consumption.  By the end of the summer, however, we had strawberry jam, salsa, pickles, and tomatoes put up for the winter.  The only problem being that I gave away most of the jam and salsa before September.   Naomi’s larder, I believe  is yet full, as she was far more dedicated to farm-wifery than I and ended up with at least six varieties of jam and a lot of salsa, pickles, pasta sauce, applesauce, apple butter, as well as a whole mess of other canned and frozen goodies.

Hen of the Woods season has come and gone.  Mike was of the opinion that the season starts when we have a few cool nights followed by rain, but we determined that those conditions do not necessarily produce mushrooms.  The season was short and we never had the motherlode of fruit we have in past years.   We ate mushroom suppers two nights in a row, sent a bag to the freezer, a bag to friends, and that was it.

Goldfinches, who were just finishing raising their broods in August, are now elsewhere.  Robins flocked up, ate like crazy, and are mostly gone as well.  Red-Winged Blackbirds are still hanging around in limited numbers–they became vocal and numerous about a month ago, making me think it was spring again.  Each time I heard their trill, my brain said “Spring!”  and I was momentarily fooled.  I never realized how much I associated their song with late March.  I am happy they’ve quit their attempts to confuse me because it was a bummer.  Juncos are back from wherever it is they spent the summer.   Starlings, though they never left, are everywhere.  I don’t know what they do all summer, but they thankfully are absent from my yard until October, when they show up in the Cottonwood each morning  in very large numbers.   The Blue Jays, also non-migratory, are insane lately.  They appear in the tree out front by 7am and begin yelling like mad.  From inside the house, I interpret this yelling as “Bring us peanuts!” and do their bidding.  I don’t know what they are really going on about, but my translation is working so far.   They are smart enough to arrive before the crows and end up eating a pound of peanuts before I re-fill the dish when the crows do finally make their morning appearance.  Both jays and crows have been having their peanut meals in the front of the house for the last six weeks–probably not a good idea on my part.  Neighbors may not enjoy pulling into a cul-de-sac littered with crows.  There are seven of them all told;  they prowl the sidewalks and generally make themselves known. While six eat and goof around, the seventh perches as sentinel to watch out for everyone on the ground.  I’ve lost a lot of time on Saturdays watching them when I should be cleaning the house.

Trips have been taken, though sadly, none by me.  Mike has backpacked and fished in Canada, hunted dove somewhere downstate, taken Kola to South Dakota for pheasant, grouse, and prairie chicken,  gone to the farm for a deer.  The fish have been consumed, as have a good deal of the grouse, pheasant, and prairie chicken.  The doves will be eaten this evening, baked with cornbread dressing, roasted root vegetables, and morel sauce.  We are, however, venison-less so far this season.   Both Mike and the boy returned from trips to the farm empty-handed, and Mike has decided to take a few years off from deer, for reasons which remain his own.   This weekend husband, son, and dog head to the Champaign area for pheasant, and there has been talk of a January trip to Kansas for some upland bird, though I don’t remember which.  Pheasant are my least favorite eating bird, but their numbers seem most numerous and thus appear in our kitchen more often than the preferred grouse, woodcock, and prairie chicken.

The garden has been overhauled thanks to the efforts of Chris and Naomi.  After listening to my whining about the inefficiency and nightmarish quality of the vegetable garden, Chris drew up a plan to fix everything.  We spent a beautiful October day (when Mike was away gallivanting through South Dakota with Kola) working, and the result is beautiful and functional.   We put 25 cloves of garlic in one bed and have plans for the other beds–as soon as seed catalogs begin arriving in January I will start the mental planting.

I now feel like I have caught up, at least to a degree.  While I put a lot of thought into at least a dozen posts over the last ten weeks, the combination of work, family, dog, cooking, etc., made completion of anything nearly impossible.  I never meant to quit, but there were days when I really thought I would never get back.  Though things have not really calmed down, the slowly closing window of good weather does add a little time to each day.  For the next few months (realistically, more like six) I won’t be outside for hours except on the best of days.   For now, though, temperatures are still in the 50’s and the days of rain have stopped.  Most of the trees are bare save their fruit, the prairie has gone brown, and the sunsets have taken on their winter characteristics.  While summer sunsets are beautiful, nothing can compare to the way the evening sky looks in late fall and winter.  Maybe it is only the absence of color in the rest of the landscape which makes the winter sky so magical–matters not, though–it’s something to look forward to while we wait for whatever the rest of the season holds.

When life releases its grip on me I’ll get back to Huginn-Muninn.  For now, everything is too crazy and I need a few weeks to catch up.  I hope there will be someone patient enough to stick around ’til then.

” What I would do for wisdom, ” I cried out as a young man.  Evidently not much.  Or so it seems.  Even on walks I follow the dog. –Jim Harrison, from Braided Creek ,  A Conversation in Poetry

 

 

Star Trails Above a Fire…

 

 

 

For all my whining about not having enough time to write during the last six months, I have done an abysmal job of keeping up the last six weeks.  Life has been busy, but time has not been a factor in my not posting; motivation, or rather timing and inspiration have been the culprit.  I’ve learned what most real writers have known for ages–that when the mood strikes everything must be stopped to favor the muse.  All summer the inspiration and the words have come in the middle of the night or in the middle of a walk.   I haven’t once  gotten up at 2am to answer the call; instead I have tried to tuck it all away until a more convenient time and thus found that it’s gone.  What flowed easily in the dead of night is like moving rocks the next day.  So I am left with a tangled mess of ideas, thoughts, and half written but ultimately abandoned essays on everything that I’ve encountered since the end of June.  I’m doing my best to squeegee the windows of my brain of the residue.  About all I have left are the pictures–and the best of them are not even mine, but ephemera’s.   Here they are.