August Night, September Morning

About three days ago a stony chill manifested in the atmosphere, day and night, regardless of temperature. It introduces the change of seasons, and normally it arrives around September 20, when summer is truly technically over. That should be the significant date in the "living out here" calendar, but it's August 31, turning at midnight with the flip of a page into September, that erects a whole new defensive rather than celebratory mindset. What kind of winter is coming? How to prepare? What didn't I do this summer that needs doing? (Say "Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits" at midnight for luck.)

This is Late Summer. It won't be autumn until September 21. Yet I've begun having soup at every meal, stockpiling what I "feel" is enough coffee and examined the fleece bathrobe to see if one more year might be wangled out of it. Trees in the understory are faintly yellowing. I don't want to be this way. (And in December, in winter's grip, I always light the firebowl and think, "This isn't so bad after all!") Several work projects require other people to make the next move and I'm waiting. I've waited for a couple of years on some of them. Wish progress were as constant as the changing phases of the moon. Here's the August 2019 full moon. May it be so: September 2019 will be greatest month of our lives.

The Gall

Here's my new bae Andricus quercusstrobilanus, Mom. He's a fake pine cone that is in fact a gall, the space station of a gall wasp parasitical on oak trees. Fairly rare to see them so fresh and orange; usually they're seen and photographed in the dryish brown stage. I was just lucky, I guess. It was my moment. Their months are July and August and they seem to like wet, steamy weather. Is that more than you wanted to know, Mom?

Mom, did you ever imagine that your kid (nay, the fruit of your womb) would be curious about, like, strange growths like fungi, galls and slimes? Kind of be a geek about them? Wondering what the heck this planet has in this walk-in closet called reality? Remember spanking me with a hairbrush?

That Is Our Choices!

Above: from the town's official newsletter

Pardon that I'm breathless, weak in the knees, I am so relieved. I fixed the dishwasher. It has taken all month. Please understand that the Divine kitchen sink -- a single sink -- is an inch too narrow to hold a nine-inch dinner plate. I'm not exaggerating. There is no space for a rack or drainboard. The dishwasher solves this. Otherwise I do dishes by washing and immediately rinsing, drying, and storing each piece before I can wash another; or do them outside.

After installing first a new latch and then a new motherboard and the dishwasher still wouldn't start, I put off and put off installing the third new part after it arrived. I couldn't face failure, nor $125 for an appliance-repairman housecall (that doesn't include labor and parts) after the $207 already spent on new parts; or a sickening $750 for a new dishwasher. Buying a used model would need a truck and friends to haul the used one in and haul the fritzed one away -- to where?

Fed up with being responsible for everything, absolutely everything, with yet more snakes wriggling out of my fireplace (!), I cried while unboxing the third new part and facing the screws and wires and pressure of high-stakes better-do-it-right -- without knowing how! Why not just call a repair place?! I almost did.

Yet if I installed the part and the machine didn't work, I'd be no worse off than I was. I gave it one last shot. It worked. The stress in my body released all at once. Shaking, I carefully placed a single dish inside, and sat next to it reading a book for two hours as it cycled, in case it flooded (flooded the new kitchen flooring and all the related, detailed wood-filler, paint and caulking?! I would die!) or exploded, etc. Works great.

I had promised myself ice cream if I repaired it. Actually, I promised myself fine pearl earrings but that money went for replacement parts. I was, and remain, too spent to go get ice cream. And so ends the month of Clean It Up, Fix It Up, Paint It Up -- the City of Pacific's motto. That is our choices!

DIYing is an Art, Like Everything Else

I lowered the Maytag's top onto an exercise mat, sliced into the dishwasher's bottom which is mere cardboard covered with foil, and used my voltage meter seeking weak electrical links. Taped it up when I found nothing wrong. Then it remained to lift the dishwasher upright. Tried and couldn't. (100 pounds? 150 pounds?) I wondered who I might call and what I should pay them, and imagined the gossip they would spread. Disheartened, I left it this way for four days.

The fifth day, after morning coffee, like Popeye on spinach I righted the dishwasher on the first try, a miracle. Then with a star-nosed screwdriver I removed the inside of its door, exposing wires both live and dead. Online forums and YouTube videos recommended a new latch, $12, as a first step toward repair. This didn't fix it, and God arranged a minor electrical shock to further humble me. Second-tier solution: a new $125 motherboard. While waiting for its delivery I dismantled and cleaned the machine's interior, down to its motor. Reassembly left me with two extra screws. I knew this was not right. Cue up the circus music, because I had installed a part upside down. Five or six days passed before I summoned the heart to undo and fix it.

A 1990s course called "How to Build a Computer" taught me it is insanely easy and no parts inside electronics are fragile, so replacing a motherboard does not scare me, plus YouTube demonstrations showed repairs on machines similar to mine. Installed the new motherboard. Now all the wires were hot. Still the dishwasher wouldn't start.

Online fix-it forums revealed arcane knowledge about secret codes for resetting dishwasher programming. Tried all of these codes. Glory be, three of the green LED lights lit up. Much heartened, I pressed the dishwasher's Start button but in vain. YouTube sages indicated a possibly malfunctioning touchpad. Paid $72 and the new touchpad is on its way.

Wouldn't it be nice if that fixed it? A new dishwasher is $750. I have learned a lot. A lot.

Out of a Fireplace

In mid-August, quite well grown, they're leaving the nest in my fireplace to find more mice to eat than are available in a fireplace that's capped and sealed. From the inside, the snakes might work at loosening the tape for two days before emerging. Sometimes they're blacksnakes, sometimes northern prairie ringnecks (Diadophus punctatus edwardsii) such as this one. With tongs I peeled the tape from the fireplace, snake and all, and put it outside on gravel where it had a chance to work itself free. The film is one minute long.

I'm Self-Adhesive, Are You?

Feeling that I couldn't possibly make it worse I bought some self-adhesive fake tiling for the bathroom backsplash area. My spatial skills are poor so it took time to figure out how the four sheets of fake tile fit together, even though they were lettered "B," "C," "D" and "E" -- where was "A"? And the walls and fixtures are themselves crooked. I did the best job  I could. I've seen much worse in photos of pre-World-War-I Eastern Europe -- and I like the stick-on tile very much, maybe just because it's a change.

So enchanting was the stick-on that I decided I would do self-adhesive tiles on the kitchen floor. There is no way I could make it worse.

I watched every YouTube about laying down self-adhesive flooring, and measured, and bought 50 tiles (you buy extra in case you mess up a few) and the right kind of grout and a putty knife for the gouges and ragged edges that currently expose the concrete floor just beneath. With the floor prepared and cleaned it is perfectly okay to lay down new self-adhesive flooring on top of it. Yes, that bruised and cracked stuff is my old kitchen floor. It's not dirty; it's as clean as I can make it. Even my amateur DIY can't possibly make it look worse and there is a chance it might look better.

I chose this gray-green flooring (68 cents per tile) because it's called "Basil" and will show neither white dirt nor black. I haven't laid it down yet. Am still mapping and visualizing the work the floor will need. I can't move the fridge and stove until I find a magic lamp and a genie comes out who will move them for me, so the whole kitchen can't be self-adhesive floored until then.

You might wonder why no one is helping. Or maybe you aren't wondering. It's because I'm self-adhesive. And nobody else I know would think this is fun.

Let's You and Me Do the Local Paper's Crossword

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1 TNM

2 lecturer

3 Belfrance

4 phlegm

5 inacting

6 fairy

7 bitch

8 LatviaCity

9 Ace

10 pit

11 dick

12 writer

14 jagger

17 gaming

18 rich

20 austriahungary

23 lipoed

24 shutup

25 tacky

26 dude

29 forsale

30 narc

31 criticized

32 leaves

35 nothing

36 Syria

38 Jew

40 salt

41 bidet

42 holler

43 busy

44 thataway

45 finally

46 wait

47 fox

Nothing Bit Me All Summer

"Lavender is an insect repellent," the Lavender Farm nearby had advised. That place, of happy memory, lost its lovely scenic lavender crop from alternating years of flooding and drought. But when their brand of lavender oil ran out I bought a 16-ounce bottle from Amazon and have used it ever since as insect repellent, pre-treating myself against bites and bugs before stepping out and meanwhile smelling pretty good.

Somebody told me that lavender oil at the Amazon price I paid is probably not real lavender oil but swill from big tanks of chemicals in China, but I just couldn't see letting that ruin my day. The darned stuff, no matter what it is, works just as well, whether cloudy (it turned cloudy) or clear.

Caution that lavender oil as a bug repellent doesn't serve everyone. I drenched a friend in it before we went bushwhacking. Chiggers still bit him and so covered him with those volcanic bites that he was bedridden with nausea. Usually he deserved bad things to happen to him, but not that time.

Mo License Plates

My Life

Once in a while a sight moves me to the core for no reason and I take a photo and think, "My life. I've just captured my life." And so it was, with this vista of a wildly gorgeous August sky as a cool front drove storm clouds away from Ste. Genevieve, and my happy reminder reflected in the corner of the windshield. My life. . .is a highway. I grade it A. I've made it to the junction of 55. Ahead is open space, an open road (and full-grown corn). The sky's the limit. Things are always working out for me.

Pink Things You'll Find on the Ground in August

And they just left it there in the grocery's parking lot. . .

Laetiporus sulphureus (good mushroom to eat!)

"August is a September month"

What Would a 17-Year-Old Do?

6:00 a.m.

It's August, perfect weather. Zero chance of rain. Time to put up the tent and sleep outside.

-I like my bed. I'll just open the bedroom windows. That's almost like sleeping outside.

The meadow was just mown, it's perfect.

-Nah. Then I have to put a mat in it, and sleeping bag, and pillow, and there are chiggers in the meadow. . .

Why'd you move here 15 years ago?

-Because I loved the cabin and the land and the woods on sight. I actually slept in the woods, in that cave-like area behind the waterfall; I built fires there; the woodpile is still there.

Don't like those things anymore?

-I love them more than life itself.

Remember when you were 17? You had passion and recklessness, a commitment to art, loved and believed, and dreamed of one day living in what you could call your woods, with a stream, cabin and everything: stargazing, animals, morning mists. . .

-Okay. The tent's up. The pillow and blanket are in it. Having rinsed my chigger-attracting legs with a 5 percent bleach solution and pulled athletic socks halfway to my knees, I bid you good night.

-And a good morning.

Jaws

Opening a drawer I found a fat mouse who'd shredded my gift wrap and done numbers one and two on a year's worth of greeting and birthday cards. I think only moms-to-be would be so sneaky, persistent, and destructive. They chewed through particle board into a cabinet, left piles of sunflower-seed hulls and dried beans on the mantel and in my shoes, and turds in my apron pockets. I wept. With weather cooler than normal for August I thought to bake a cake, light and not too sweet, and share it like a good Missourian, and opening the oven where pans are kept I saw enthroned in my cake pan a mouse nest clawed out of oven insulation with, fortunately, no mice in it. After my nausea passed (instead of baking, I hosed down all the pans and set the dishwasher on "sanitize"), I sent the landlord a photo and demanded he address in all seriousness the plague of mice I've had since spring. One or two in winter is normal in a country house. But five or ten in late summer, openly running along the baseboards: no. Worst in 14 years. So bad I stopped feeding the birds.

Enter Tim the handyman with the familiar blue Tomcat poison saying, "You just gotta hope they die outside," and when he set eight of these new kind of traps I wailed that these mice were too smart for traps, and he joked, "You just gotta get out the ol' .22." They're baited with a dollop of black gel -- the mice have been so bad I have two peanut butter jars, one for my mousetraps and one for me!! -- and one got caught along a major mouse thruway. With these I needn't touch the dead ones. Outside along the foundation Tim placed larger traps containing immense cakes of poison and said to refill them in two weeks. I said, there must be a hole there, why don't you find it and patch it up? Guess whose job that's gonna be.

Doing the Deeds: Father Dunne's Camp

This property I live on was owned for 45 years by the Father Dunne’s Newsboys Home and Protectorate, a St. Louis Catholic charity that prefigured the more famous Boys Town. Dunne’s boys lived in the city but had a summer camp of 100 acres here. Dorm and dining facilities now in disrepair were dedicated in 1957, but exactly when the camp started, and who gave the land, was a mystery that sent me to the Jefferson County assessor’s office this morning, where I did the deeds, finally, after 14 years living here.

At the Registrar of Deeds, I found that the Father Dunne Newsboys Home and Protectorate’s camp had been sold for one dollar to the current landlord on 21 January 1986; the digitized records went back no farther. The older, oversized, weighty books of legal records, handwritten or typed, bound together by year, were in the archive. That room is chilly, and after the clerk copied me the 1986 deed, she pulled up on a monitor the digitized microfilm of all the Jefferson County deeds back to the 1860s and showed me how for each year I should search all the entries that began with the letter “F.”

She’d worked with many historians and seekers. “People get cold in here, so if you need a sweater,” she said, then pointed to the coat rack where a lone cardigan hung, “use that one. That’s the ‘house’ sweater.” Only in Missouri.

The "house sweater" in case historians get cold.

Father Peter Dunne, an orphan who became a parish priest, sheltered his first homeless newsboy in 1906 and the shelter was running full tilt when Father Dunne died in 1939. “Old Newsboys Day,” Father Dunne’s fundraiser, is still held annually in St. Louis. Pat O’Brien starred in the RKO bio-pic Fighting Father Dunne (1948). Can’t find the movie. But I did find facts today about this 100-acre property:

-The house I rent was built circa 1935. It is 1070 square feet. The second house on the property was built circa 1960. There was a dorm-like building on this property in 1954, according to an Army Map Service topographic map.

-On March 31, 1941, Herman H. and Lillie M. Oberhaus sold 67.19 acres to Father Dunne’s Newsboys Home and Protectorate for $100. It would have been 80 acres total, but in April 1937 the Oberhauses had sold 12.81 acres of it to James R. and Gladys Murphy for $800. The price suggests that the Murphys bought a house on that property. In November 1938 a 15-foot easement was granted to Union Electric for electrification and tree-cutting.

-On June 26, 1942, William D. and Marie B. Walsh sold 40 acres to the Father Dunne Newsboys Home and Protectorate for $100.

As of June 1942 the Protectorate owned 107 contiguous acres and maybe established the camp then, but that doesn't explain the 1935 log cabin, built for summer residency. Perhaps the camp rented.

The property records are kept here.

The land was cheap because it’s good for nothing but a camp. Terrain is rocky, with dropoffs and steep-sided ravines and beneath an inch of soil is clay on sandstone. It’s so difficult that to this day AT&T refuses to extend its cable here.

Before today I knew only “lore” passed down through two previous tenants of my house (1986-91, 1991-2001), saying it was built around 1930 as the camp gatekeeper’s house. The keeper held the keys to the dorm, dining hall, and the gate, to which I held the key until it was dynamited for road widening in 2002. The camp closed in the 1970s, it is said because lots of little black orphan campers caused nearby residents to complain. Or maybe it was cost-prohibitive to remove the asbestos or bring the wiring up to code. Priests still used the camp’s pool as a vacation getaway in the 1980s; the first lease I signed required me to maintain the pool, covered and abandoned years before. The newer house on the property, my neighbor’s, is nicknamed “the monsignor’s house” and I need other records to learn who lived there.

Coincidentally, a friend had been a Father Dunne’s (later Catholic Charities) charge, living in the shelter downtown, and camped here in the summer of 1962; he was 12. Their baseball diamond was on LaBarque Creek floodplain now grown over, its backstop having collapsed completely about five years ago.

One day a man drove up saying he added the bedroom to the house in 1969. (It looks very 1969.) Another day an older priest drove up and wanted to revisit the property, if I said okay.

When the Jeff County assessor’s staff learned I was unraveling the story of my adorable house, they came forward with old files and photos that helped me more, plus the names of local historians, and which library held the books most likely to be helpful.

Notes on Barbecue

• My favorite barbecue place is Super Smokers and I'm so satisfied with their pulled pork with the applesauce side I never order anything else. I sauce it with Texas Hot.
• Texas Hot is their only sauce not available in stores.
• My personal sauce recipe: half Hunt's (and only Hunt's) bottled barbecue sauce, and half medium salsa. Hunt's because it is the least sugary of the commercial sauces. I don't understand Maull's or Pappy's or Kansas-City-style any other bottled sauce. I don't want corn syrup on my barbecue.
• I never ate barbecue until I moved to Missouri. In Wisconsin and in upstate New York "to barbecue" meant "to cook on the grill" weenies, bratwurst, and hamburgers.
• I buy a half-pound or pound of pulled pork, sauce it and heat it up a bit, and toss it in green salad.
• I'll settle for barbecued chicken if that's all there is, but it's only good until you peel the skin off. After that it's not barbecue.
• Invite me to a barbecue.
• Don't buy the ready-to-eat pulled pork that's in the supermarket meat case. The meat's tough and fatty.
• I took two really classy Perry-Ellis shoes-made-in-Paris Cafe-Napoli-in-Clayton Ph.D. friends for barbecue, and they loved it, proving everyone can love it.
• Bandana's, once a favorite, has gone downhill.
• I don't, myself, make and serve barbecue, believing it's best left to professionals.
• Re the bumper sticker: radio station KPIG in California plays rock, country, and bluegrass.

The Afterglow

Toward sunset on a simmering-hot day, a day or two ago, a storm came. According to radar it was a big 'un. Violent. So I put on shoes, rounded up my purse and crucial belongings such as earrings, phone and charger, and hid in the the only room without windows, the bathroom. (Cabin is built on a concrete slab, no basement.) Yet the storm just skirted here and didn't even knock the power out. So I crept out and saw, in the east where the storm was heading, the strangest orange sky. Glowing orange with a touch of gray. Tried photographing it, to capture the color. And in the photograph I saw a ring thing (lens glare, I thought). I looked up higher in the actual sky and saw layered onto this eerie orange background, a rainbow. From hearing reports, I learned it was seen all over the area.

The Happy Couple

The smaller one, the male, is using his special little set of pincers to clutch his female partner for a minimum of 3 hours and up to 3 weeks to make sure he and no other male is transmitting his genes to the next generation. These two walking sticks (Diapheromera femorata) were doin' the wild thing on the garage door, and so as not to disturb them I used the other door--after I took my purely scientific nature photo. They are a favorite food of wild turkeys.

Just Another August Morning

Just another day. . .the usual hassles and b.s.. . .just another day. . .I bought $60 worth of poetry books this week, I must be crazy. . .How long can I ignore that bill they keep sending?. . .Stuff isn't finished. . .my reputation is at stake. . . just a bit more coffee, just a bit . . .I can't stand what's happening in the Middle East . . .I really need to sew fleece curtains for all the windows for the winter. . .darn, the jar in the fridge tipped over, what a mess. . .I don't know who to call next. . .everything's such a gamble. . .these chicken franks were a waste of money. . .why hasn't so-and-so been in touch?. . .get a birthday card for my sister, she's 50, it should be a special 50th-birthday card. . .I need a haircut. . .The novel needs rewriting, but it always does. . .what's blasting the air-conditioning going to cost me? . . .I should go to the gym. . .I saw some leaves falling and it scared me. . . .I forgot my sunscreen. . .it's August and I haven't camped even once. . .I want a 20-inch waist like Audrey Hepburn. . . better take a walk because by 8:30 a.m. it's fainting-hot. . .I have 19 students each needing my full attention. . .what are those yellow flowers in the field, Brown-Eyed Susans? Guess so. . . aren't they pretty? Their lives are so simple. . .

Propane and Anti-Pane

August is the best (cheapest) time of year to fill propane tanks; and having previously spent $880 for a fill three years ago, I had saved $1000 toward this new tankful.
I hated my propane company, so I phoned the company the lady at the copy shop recommended and asked what the stuff was going for.

"One ninety-nine a gallon," said the clerk, "and one eighty-nine a gallon if you pay within five business days."

I hadn't heard a price this low in a decade. Before signing up on the website I beheld a referral program that gave the referrer a $50 credit--and, unbelievably, $50 credit for me too! So I hurried to the copy shop. "This isn't about copies," I told the lady. Together we filled out and submitted the online form; they phoned within two hours. Three days later the tank-truck driver checked my furnace, stove, and regulator, and cleaned out the squirrel's nest that has occupied the tank's cap for years, and showed me how to shut off the valve in case I had to. They'll also monitor the supply and top it off. Thank you, God, for making me smart enough to relinquish control of my propane supply.

The total for 300 gallons: Abut $570.00. I then went hog-wild and bought a new-with-tags suit on eBay for $30 and two pairs of white double-layer socks. (No, I won't wear the suit and socks together, but there's some folks who wouldn't be surprised if I did.)

A Companionable Spider

All summer I welcome daddy-long-legs into the bathroom; they arrive even without a welcome, so why not. This orange-brown one, my companion for several days now, first hung out in the plastic container I keep combs and hair products in; then it spent an evening on the sink’s edge, and leg by leg it poled away when I came in to brush my teeth. Here it’s enjoying a bath towel. It seems to like exploring the variety of bathroom surfaces and landscapes—like a European tour, except for spiders. I carefully dried my hands on this towel’s edge so it could keep its footing. It’s so companionable now that it doesn’t flee. What does it think of the giant being who enters and brightens the bathroom (a room with no windows) at intervals, steams it to a comfortable humidity, and leaves it in peace?

I hear many folks bemoaning the end of summer, but summer lasts until my summer companions are gone.