Elegy for a Shagbark Hickory

Missouri's eastern forests are oak-hickory forests and the trees on occasion die and fall, or get struck by lightning (you'll know that from the charred pieces left). The Divine Yard's mature oaks and hickories are slowly losing their juice and often, during storms, with earth-shaking thumps throwing whole limbs to earth or clubbing my roof. Stripped of all that was graceful about it, once in a while a very dead tree will lose its grip and plunge face first onto the lane -- wham! -- blocking entry and exit until we get it sawn apart.

But ye know not the day and hour a tree will fall. I have learned that trees groan and whine before falling -- the way metal whines when it's fatigued and set to give way. If in the woods if I hear that, I make myself scarce because to be killed in the woods by a falling tree is just too ironic, although Demetrius liked to stand there hoping to see the spectacle.

The shagbark hickory pictured, as long as I've known it, gradually offered up all its limbs to storms and winds. Its indwelling tree nymph moved out, and now the tree is really, really dead. Plenty of dead trees are standing on the property waiting to keel over, but only this shagbark hickory, should it fall, threatens the dwelling. Having its carcass cut down will cost less than being forced to move should the tree -- northwest of the house, where the winter storms come from -- tip over and crush the roof. Arrangements have been made. I took its photo and informed the tree nymph, who has since found a new place.

I hope and believe that the earthly body of this tree will one day sprout delicious mushrooms. Amen.

Don't Look at These Dead Snakes, Part 2

The futon is to the left of the non-working stone fireplace and last night lolling around reading about celebrated idea-people and profound thinkers I happened to peripherally see that the brass fireplace frame had been re-molded with swirls and stuff, like Baroque or Louis XIV, and for a nanosecond wondered who installed that and when, and then I see they are dead snakes.

I already told you I taped the fireplace edges so snakes bred in the hearth would stay there, but tore the tape off in April yet some adhesive invisibly remained, and it trapped these four small Prairie Ringneck snakes, who died of dehydration. The top one has its head lifted. Death be not proud.

You'd think after one had been trapped there the others would avoid the area, but they think differently.

After I got over the shock I wondered what to do and am still wondering. In the Divine Cabin 16 years I have never seen the like. I don't mind live snakes, but the idea of peeling off dead ones (how stuck are they?) and tossing them (where?) makes me feel unwell. And then the adhesive must be scrubbed off.

But I can't just leave them there!

(The first thing I'd thought was that they were art!)

I Set a Tomahawk Trap

Friday night the creature sprung the Tomahawk trap and got away with the peanut butter, stupidly placed (not by myself) on a piece of foil. It grabbed the foil from the outside and moseyed it along out of the trap without triggering the trapdoor and then left the trap yards and yards away in tall grass.

Disgusted for the whole day after that I decided then, after dragging concrete blocks in front of the hole in the wall, to set the trap, but never having set one before I pulled and yanked this way and that for about 15 minutes, before reasoning that:

1. A man probably designed this trap.
2. Men do things the easy way (such as leaving me the trap on a Friday so I would have to set the trap Saturday and Sunday).
3. They can figure out very clever ways to do things the easy way.
4. Man stuff, such as car engines, motherboards, etc., looks much more technical than really is, and is simpler than it looks.

So I went on YouTube and learned in two minutes how to set the trap (lift, push, pull), this time dolloping the peanut butter (a lot of it, to appeal to the greed of the little xxxx) directly on the platform so there would be no shenanigans. Am waiting to see if it works, but I think an actual tomahawk would be better.

What Time Is It?

Mom was in the bed she died in, in the living room because no other room had enough space for that rolling hospital cot. She'd been washed and shampooed by the CNA and my sister when she quietly breathed her last, while I was getting on the plane to Phoenix, and when I landed and switched on my mobile data saw my sister's text that the funeral-home people would hold off on taking Mom's body until I got there, if I hurried.

Mom and I had built a good adult relationship and I visited often in the past few years, knowing that parents don't last. In May she'd been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer that she was suffering from since March. I was glad she'd been released from it; and parents die because that's what parents do, sadly. I had no last-minute beggings and forgivings like so many people seem to have, at least in movies. Dad had passed suddenly and shockingly of a heart attack in 1982; now, that gave me what we call PTSD, then called being hysterical and messed up, and agoraphobia (the sidewalk bounced like a trampoline, it really did!) and feared mirrors and electricity and was terrified I'd never be sane again. I'm older now, and so was Mom. She was 82. Stepdad survives her; he's 98. This time he's the traumatized one, with good reason. "I never believe this gonna happen," he said, in his accent.

I'd planned a week's stay and it turned out perfectly aligned with Mom's death, funeral, and burial, and 118-degree days and 95-degree nights. I wrote the obituary because that's how I could serve, and gave the eulogy because the eldest child does, while my sister who is the executor did paperwork and phone calls and the other sister hosted and poured drinks for our many callers and guests. Besides going to the funeral home and picking out the casket, etc., I couldn't be of much service so I simply worked as I usually do, beset by deadlines, except retiring very late and rising very early and speaking some Serbian. Here, I'll teach you: "Bozhe, Bozhe, " literally, "O God, O God," and only older people say it because it connotes: "God, I've seen a lot of s--t in my time, but this takes the cake."

I asked my sisters what was Mom's biggest gift to them, and we all agreed it was her work ethic so that's what the eulogy was about. I didn't write it; I spoke. I get handed a lot of "Read the eulogy I wrote for my parent" and they are all the same. Mom didn't look like herself in her coffin simply because she was lying down and still. Only her hands, folded, looked like her. We all agreed that was not our mother.

So I came home to some kindly friends, thank God, and when I was alone realized that whenever under stress or really excited I'd called my mother to tell her about it. I actually turned to look around for the phone before realizing.

The Design is Perfect

All I found was one moth wing. I carried it into the house and folded it into a piece of paper until I had time to study it. Its owner was a Cecropia moth. I especially loved the transparent porthole "lens" in the center of the wing's "eye" that prevented the wing from being a total blind spot and was designed to look to some predatory creature like a hungry snake's or owl's eye. Here you see the wing's obverse and reverse.

Cecropia moths live only to reproduce. They don't eat; they don't have mouth parts. They live two weeks. I would like to know and feel what its life was like. Is it possible that we who are much more complicated creatures do know or can know? Could I ever articulate it?

The wing is furred, colorful, beautifully shaped, functional, and despite its delicacy isn't fragile because it survived its owner and two weeks out on the porch. I'm so glad I found it. It's a reminder that nature's design, behind it all, is perfect. We simply have a blind spot about our own perfection.

Going to the Chapel

....the tin-roofed, open-air chapel at the Black Madonna Shrine not too far from here, and St. Joseph' head served as a perfect perch for a singing Barn Swallow, cheerful since I've been coming here rather often lately to discuss with God some painful things undergone by friends, family, and myself (pinched nerve, yow! making it impossible to sit and write, and grounding me for three weeks) and lighting eight-day votive candles for those, alas, whose candles are going out, like my mother and father, ages 83 and 98, both deathly ill. There is no death, though. It's an illusion. The bird said so.

Draw a Line Through His Name

Nearly six years Demetrius has been gone. He is most present in the garage, in his gardening tools. His massive old wheelbarrow I gave to the first person who could move it. In the garage he left rolls of plastic, and vinyl-coated concrete discs and 2x4s, and two fishing reels still in their packaging. (Fishing is about hope.) When dragging 50 pounds of rock salt or oilseed, I sometimes ask him aloud, "Why did you leave me?," and walking where we used to walk, I say, "Where are you? Are you okay?" I thank him for the ramp he built it from particle board, allowing me easily to roll the portable dishwasher into the kitchen; I won't be able to replace it if it breaks. I tell him, "I remember the retired lamplighter" he knew when he was a boy, because that lamplighter will live as long as we remember him, and "I'll never forget Polka the Giraffe," a character in a children's book he was writing but didn't finish. He perfected one short story, about a farm laborer, I'm still sending to literary magazines. In his final months he dreamed that the closet door opened onto a polar landscape with warm furs and a sled and sled dogs waiting for him. (He liked biographies and stories about polar explorers.) In January he rode Amtrak to the Rocky Mountains, bedridden all the while because he'd forgotten about high altitudes. He returned skeletal, angry at everyone, and lived 12 more days, dying less than 5 miles from where he was born.

Seed catalogs still arrive with his name on them, as do letters and newsletters from the radical organizations he so much wanted to be a part of. I write on them "Return to Sender," draw a line through his name, and write "Deceased Feb. '09."

River of Death

Someday when chips are implanted in all of our heads, officials will be able to keep folks from playing and swimming in said River of Death, the Meramec River, subject of this vivid new warning sign at Castlewood State Park, formerly a summer resort for the wealthy of St. Louis. Each year a family or a troop of kids comes to a Meramec River beach or bluffs, often at Castlewood, and tries swimming across, or swings over the water on a rope, having no idea that the Meramec (called by the Indians "river of ugly fish") runs more fiercely and deeply than its appearance would betray, and has powerful and temperamental currents. Somebody, usually a child, struggles horribly and drowns. A Fox-News-televised search (with weeping parents among their beer cans) commences, with the body being discovered downstream in a day or two. Common sense being scarcer now, and because people are no longer trained to read rivers, signs such as this must be erected. "Rio Mortal," people. The river is so lovely and summer so hot, but please, take the young ones to splash in a stream. The Meramec River, while ideal for canoeing and tubing many miles farther upstream, is not a swimming hole. If it will help deter anyone, the Meramec is home to eels--big ones-- and in addition to drowning the unfortunate person pictured will probably become eel food.

It's Already Happened

My heart was squeezed dry like an orange today by news from a friend about her daughter's MRI and biopsy; the daughter's got holes in her bones; they can only wait for the test results, available Thursday; she told me, "Pray" and "You know what this is like."

I sure do.

A friend has a leaky heart valve that's leaked for a while and now it's time for open-heart surgery and repairs; his wife got skin cancer on her eyelid; her father committed suicide two years ago at age 94. They do not deserve this. Another friend sleeps in her clothes in case her husband has another heart attack and she has to take him to the hospital; about every three weeks there's a false alarm. Another friend died because her lungs hardened. It was genetic; there was nothing anyone could do.

I am grateful for the things that have already happened to me. I used to lie awake terrified of cancer, poverty, bereavement, job loss, debt, aging. These things happened and continue to happen; my only advantage is in having no children to lose. I am glad to have some first-timer's agonies over and done with. Having made it to the other shore, I can try to hold out a hand or a light to maybe help someone else across, or just stand there to let it be known it can be done.

Every Feather Tells a Story

On the gray-brown carpet of fallen oak and hickory leaves, flashes of blue caught my eye. Treasures! Feathers! Iridescently blue; how lovely and refreshing on these cast-iron January days!

I picked one up and admired it, then saw more of them and couldn't help but collect them, and then grew uneasy. One feather on the ground, all is well, but this many feathers in one place always signifies a fight to the death. I hoped otherwise, but sure enough there was one bloodied feather as evidence. Nature has taught me not to feel sorrow over dead anything, but I became solemn realizing I was at the spot where a beautiful creature parted from the earth, to serve some greater purpose, I hope, or at least I want to believe.

Poor Cardinal

The enormous "thunk" against the window late yesterday afternoon must have been Lady Cardinal. Window accidents happen around here about every four months or so; most of the time the birds survive. But this fatal impact knocked her about twelve feet to the side of the window, next to the stoop. Of course when I found her it was far too late and I could only study her as I usually don't get to study my live cardinals. At first I thought the downy feathers indicated she was a juvenile, because my cardinal pairs have been prolific this season, but that's not so; she has a cardinal adult's red-orange beak. Downy feathers are just the secret vest beneath the elegantly understated suits that female cardinal birds wear. I got to see the gradient of gray into red. I didn't know cardinal birds had such relatively large but fragile-looking, straw-colored feet. Then -- saddest words in the language -- I buried her, near a tree she seemed to have liked. And when I opened the garage door to put away the shovel I got a surprise -- a live turtle was there, apparently got in while the door was open, and it was waiting right on the threshold for someone to raise the door.

Guess Who Came to Dinner

A good rain with thunder came yesterday, so today I went to Waterfall #5 to get waterfall glamour photos; It's just off the lane, down a wooded slope, and opposite a cliff 15 feet high. At the bottom of the slope I saw a mound of fur with no body. Thought it might have been an opossum. Wrong. Bones and legs showed that something trapped and feasted on a small deer there. My guess is a coyote, but many creatures could have joined in. Not too far away was a mound of fur on a log, suggesting a hawk or other winged predator might have helped pick it clean.

In other local news, the one day of heavy rain breached and wiped out the beaver dam, in part because the dam created a wide pool with a narrow neck. Rushing water would have passed over and through the dam with great force. Now the creek is left with an excellent swimming hole.

Three Dead Mice

One morning this week I woke up and just outside the bedroom a small mouse was dragging itself across the carpet. It didn't run from me. It looked sick and just about to drop. I put it out of its misery, bagged it and emptied the bag outside for the ghoul squad.

In the kitchen fixing breakfast, I saw a small dead mouse curled up almost beneath the stove and did a double-take. I had just dumped a mouse outside! It couldn't have fallen from the bag on the way out; I saw it plop from the bag into the grass! Using barbecue tongs, I put this body outside. Went about my business. Later in the living room, I smelled that funny dead-mouse-rotting smell, as if it were right in the room. Looked with a flashlight beneath the couch and such. Nothing. Hoped it would go away on its own, knowing it never does. I went out all evening, and back home went straight to bed.

Today, opening the shade in the living room I looked down among the computer cables and there's a little dead mouse curled up there and that's what stunk.

That first mouse looked poisoned, but I don't use mouse poison any more, precisely because poisoned mice die in inaccessible places like the attic or beneath the water heater, and stink for as long as six weeks. I use traps. So what's going on? Was there a nest? I can't find it. Were they family? They were pretty well grown, completely formed and furred, able to make their way; why aren't they surviving?

A Better Mousetrap

I didn't want to buy the new kind of mousetrap (on the right) but it was the only kind at the hardware store, and I really needed them, and found it's a genuine improvement on the classic model at left. I catch a mouse every time I set one -- last week, four days in a row, so often I began to feel a little queasy. The new model has a large yellow plastic bait platform that supposedly looks like cheese (the instructions in Spanish say "queso"). This is supposed to attract mice without the use of bait. However, I never baited with cheese because peanut butter works so well. So it's not the fake cheese that makes the new trap better -- it's the size of the bait platform. On the original model it's less than an inch long and only 3/8 of an inch wide and so sensitive it was hard to put it on the floor after it was set --  the slightest tremor made it SNAP! The new model's trigger tucks under the cheese platform quite firmly and stays there while I place it in my meese's favorite spot (beneath the sink, where they used to nibble at the food traces on my potholders in there, and chew 'em up; I bought silicone potholders to confound them, but they come there anyway).

There are other mousetrap manufacturers but I like this brand, stamped "Woodstream Corp., Lititz, PA USA," because of the mouse-head graphic inside the red "V". It just gives me that thrill of blood lust.

Taking My Self to Lunch

I only wanted to get the heck out of the clinic for bone scans and blood draws and after fleeing what I call the "Casino" (where you bet your life) I wanted to live it up, so I stopped at a Cracker Barrel on the way home and bought myself a double order of trout plus fixin's and coffee. I sat across from myself and said, "You've really accomplished a lot this past year. You took some chances and I am proud of you. You helped people out. You saw your family and friends often. You passionately loved. You've taken blows and punches to the gut quite gracefully, or if it was proper to fight, you fought. The mistakes were okay. It's all good. How lucky you are to be healthy and not dead yet like some folks. The best is yet to come. Shucks, I even like you a lot, and other people do too. You know, if I was you I'd be pretty happy."

I recommend that you take your Self to lunch soon. Or to a candlelight dinner. Tell yourself how good-looking you are and how much you love your Self. (Don't hesitate: It's the only Self you've got.) There's only one catch: Your Self has to pay the check.

Deer Teeth

Found this back in my woods; it's a deer's jaw. Much bigger and sharper teeth than I thought. Of course they eat a lot more raw greenery than humans do. Left it where it was.

Stilled Life

Warm, cloudy day. Down by LaBarque Creek admiring the wonderfully clear water I saw something large and feathered on the creek bank, and was very much taken aback to find a Great Egret, dead just as you see it. Looks as if it was ambushed. It was in a tight spot, and an egret, with its five-foot wingspan, needs room and time to lift off and get away. So its life ended here.

This egret (Casmerodius albus, identified by its black legs and huge black feet) might also have been a migrant. This first waterbird casualty I have seen on this property is very sad. But if I reported and showed you only beautiful and cheerful things about rugged rural Missouri I would be dishonest. Of course we are all on the side of life, but now and then I get a reminder that Nature is not a "she" or a "mother" but a force, completely impersonal, overwhelming us with all we can stand of both beauties and horrors.

Closing His Estate

I am/was Demetrius' executor, or personal representative, and yesterday went to the bank to have the notary stamp the papers that closed his estate and bequeathed me what was left in his account after his doctors and attorneys were paid. If you can choose, don't be anybody's executor or personal rep. This small estate took two years to close and its file of legal papers is two inches thick.

Oddly I was not happy to get this out of the way. My eyes filled. (I berated myself, "Don't cry in front of a notary!") Because the involvement with my friend of ten years is now truly over. When we met he was 49 and things had happened to him that I will never know. For two and a half years he underwent gruesome tests and treatments, having to realize that his early death was inevitable and largely his own fault and he couldn't do s... about it except rage and yell. In a fury he informed me, "Dying is NOT FUN!"

But I'm inclined now to quote to myself James Baldwin: "Thou knowest this man's fall; but thou knowest not his wrassling."

And now I have the money, which is soulless, without memory, which will never write, have a name, or be angry, and it's very strange to have it not having anyone to thank.

Wasps in Between

These wasps were born trapped between window glass that's indoors and plastic that is stretched in a frame that serves as an outside storm window. The indoor window -- original to the Divine cabin -- is sealed shut. The outdoor window can't be reached, at least by me. I could pierce the plastic and free these anxious wasps -- not because I like them; they have ancestors and cousins who have stung me when I dint deserve it -- but because their 11 expired bodies will lie between those windows where I'll have to look at 'em.

Wounded

Walking on steep Timberstone Trail I saw a yellow item in the road. It was a turtle, about six inches long, on its back, squirming but unable to turn over. As I approached it pulled itself inward, scared. I saw the wound to its plastron. I turned it over. Scarlet blood flowed from a deep crack in its shell; it had been run over but not killed. I took a photo too sickening to show you, and deleted it. I lifted the turtle from the asphalt and placed it among some roadside plants. Thought it might prefer to die there instead of in the hot August road. Hope I didn't hurt it worse. Felt very bad that there wasn't any hope for its survival.

This is not the usual Three-Toed Box Turtle one sees around here; this turtle unquestionably has four toes. It does not have the brown streaks on its plastron which would firmly identify it as an Ornate Box Turtle, Terrapene ornata ornata, but in Missouri it must be either one or the other, and it is probably an Ornate. Its normal lifespan is 32 to 37 years. Every summer I see a couple of dozen turtle bodies, all sizes, littering the roads.On our narrow, steep, curving or shoulderless roads it is not always possible to swerve to avoid them. I would grieve except that I know there are many more turtles who survive in this area, where there is abundant conservation land. Whoever is responsible for that, I thank fervently.