The Floor

In the spirit of "cleaning for the maid" (so she won't see such a messy house) I cleaned for the asbestos removers the living room and bedroom after all the furniture had been moved out. With vinegar spray, dish soap and a long brush I scrubbed walls and baseboards I hadn't seen since 2001, and also the windowsills, alone for the final time with the carpet that carried the DNA of every visitor since 1986. And in the carpet appeared a favorite earring, tiny-tiny and given up for lost months ago: a 4mm pink coral cabochon in 14k gold, undamaged by dolly wheels and big movers' boots -- in perfect condition! Conscientious crazy-cleanness has its ecstasies.

During carpet removal, asbestos removal and then during the required inspector's visit I stayed in a motel, returning home before the carpet installation to see my rooms as I'll never see them again. Took a picture for the record. An eye-watering smell of glue or glue remover. The hearth from which innumerable snakes were hatched and crawled out in front of me and my guests is now well-sealed. What you see is a clean floor stripped of old asbestos tiling.

Divine Cabin built in 1935.

Hummingbirds Have Dirty Beaks, Etc.

Socializing on my porch are three people watching hummingbirds at the feeders. Two of us discover that one is married to a hummingbird expert, now retired, who volunteers to band hummingbirds for the Department of Natural Resources, and does it at state parks where the public is invited to watch.

"People can band hummingbirds?"
"Trained and licensed people with very steady hands."
"Why are they banded?"
"To track survival and how the same ones come back to the same spot year to year."
"Do the bands have radios in them?"
"No, they are just very small pieces of metal. They can't be more than 4 percent of the bird's body weight."
"How do you catch hummingbirds to band them or check them?"
"With a feeder that has a trapdoor you pull."
"That must [annoy them a lot]."
"You have to know how not to stress the birds."
"I fill the feeders with one part sugar to four parts water, boiled together, then cooled."
"You don't have to boil. Just dissolve the sugar in warm tap water."
"I thought boiling was doing the hummingbirds a favor."
"It's not necessary."
"I thought it helped control that black guck that grows in the feeders during warm weather."
"That guck comes from bacteria on the end of the birds' beaks."
"Isn't it like they're sipping through a straw?"
"No. They have an upper and lower beak. The beak is long because it holds a long tongue. It's their tongue that goes into feeders and flowers."
"How come I never see their mouths open?"
"Because having feeders you see them only when they're feeding."

These Rocks Speak Dust

This is what 1000 pounds  or $130 worth of gravel looks like after I made a path to the road. The planned task is not complete but a spare $130 it will bring it closer to finishing.

Wore a breathing mask when I poured this last 360 lbs. Hosed the rocks to keep the dust down. Still inhaled some gravel dust, but less than before, and this time was further educated when I saw the coating of gravel dust over the car. The whole car, back to front, a thin even coating. I understood the nature of this dust now. These rocks speak dust. And feeling gritty all over meant I should shower it off right away and wash the clothes.

This project hallowed this June that slipped away so quickly, and will recall this hallowed month whenever I look at it.

I Travel for Gravel

Before

240 pounds later

The gravel apron in front of the Divine Cabin over the years has been scraped and washed away and grass grows there now hiding ticks and chiggers that bite me, and for four years we have asked the landlord for fresh gravel, because the road needs some too, but it never came. In despair I phoned the gravel mine and they'd deliver a cubic yard for $215, $75 of that delivery charge, and dump-truck the gravel in a pile as tall as I and I'd have to hire someone with a spreader or spend years spreading it shovelful by shovelful, alone.

So every summer more bugs bit me and I didn't even have to go into the woods but simply step outside. Mowing helped, but now I haven't a mower and have asked the landlord to supply one as the lease requires. They don't want to. Phoning mowing professionals got me estimates I felt ashamed I could not pay.

It occurred to me, in my misery, to buy and spread my own gravel and choke off the grass, solving at once the chigger and the mowing and the apron problem, and went to Home Depot, a 30-mile round trip, because they would load my car for me, and bought 8 bags of 30 lbs. each for a total of $31. I thought it was named "Viagra stone" (a dirty mind is a perennial resource). Said nothing of this to the teenager dragging the 240-lb. cart out to my car and loading it, as I could not. As an employee he may not take a tip. But I said, "You're not taking it; I'm giving it," and dropped money in his apron pocket.

Doesn't it look like Viagra stone?

With my own labor I could buy five more such loads before hitting $215. Hefting each bag I dropped them at strategic intervals on the apron, slit the bags, dumped and raked a while and was pleased as heck with my result but there was much more apron to cover.

Now I had big plans. About to return to Home Depot to reload I thought to try the nearby Walmart. An elderly employee said to go to the checkout if I wanted their bags of gravel, but the garden area checkout, at 8 p.m., was closed, and the young employee said he did not work in this section and could not cashier, so I just went home.

I thought it would amuse me to shop at every gravel-selling retail around here and score them on how well I was served. My work on the apron is satisfying as a long-lasting solution to a frustrating, expensive problem.

Janitor of Eden

After two weeks away, the first thing to do is empty the mousetraps. Very fortunately there was only one mouse cadaver, fresh thank God, because had it been two weeks old it'd be stuck to the floor. I'd left May 20, just when there's so much to do to ensure a good summer here. Like:

• repair the porch screen. My sworn enemies, the squirrels, chewed through it and gnawed the plastic gasket from the metal step-can I store those delicious sunflower seeds in -- but failed to get to the seeds. Nyah, nyah.
• buy basil and dill plants and soil for repotting into the pots they'll occupy all summer, pots carried into full sun every morning and sheltered next to the house at nightfall, because otherwise the squirrels overturn and uproot them out of pure spite.
• clean and refill hummingbird feeders. I almost didn't want to leave for two weeks because the empty feeders would disappoint the hummingbirds, but I'm hoping my extra-sweet nectar recipe will persuade them to return and trust me; I don't intend to leave them again.
• retrieve the seed feeder from the underbrush where raccoons had dragged and left it; soap and rinse it, dry it in the sun. Acquire a poison-ivy hickey on my left leg.
• greet new young turtles and rabbits who have no idea I live here too.
• witness a high-speed chase: Miss Turkey in hot pursuit of a hefty blacksnake sidewinding itself across the grass at top speed and beneath the propane tank, thus winning that round.
• pull and dry the spring onions before they form heads.
• refill those clever little outdoor mouse-poison dispensers with green-turquoise blocks of mouse poison. They work; they've cut the indoor mouse war by 75 percent.
• approach the bluebird box to clean it. Yes, one must clean one's bluebird box. I didn't want to. Last time I looked, the nest held three baby chickadees and a baby bluebird. This is unusual. I feared finding the nest holding one or more dead. With gloved hands I unhooked the box and pulled out the nest. It was empty. Everyone had fledged! I was overjoyed.
• inspect the forest floor where the summer mushrooms grow. Despite an inch of rain, found nothing. It's still quite early in the season. On the way, saw butterflies enjoying the blossoming milkweed.
• check blackberry brambles for incipient blackberries, due in about three weeks. There are indeed little blackberry bullets. Last year's drought meant we had no crop. This year I hope for better.
• buy at the fruit and vegetable stand every sort of fresh tasty thing: beets, apples, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, kale, berries, mushrooms, red onion, bananas, peppers, grapefruit, romaine -- to refill the fridge and to purify myself after two weeks away. And oh, yes, buy a bottle of wine, a rose, but I won't admit to that.
• clean the picnic table; apply a tablecloth.

All this activity was joyful. Give me a new computer stand and I'm in Eden! I'm so glad to be home, among the plants and creatures.

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.

Why Healthy Oaks Drop Branches

Heard it about 11 p.m.: Slow cracking and then a whoosh and thump. This is the third time in 14 years so I know what it is, and outdoors with a flashlight--stepping very carefully in case any copperheads are out lounging on the gravel like before--see that one of the twin oaks, tall and very old but thriving, has dropped a huge live branch, blocking the lane but causing no damage. I text the handymen and they chainsaw it up the next morning.

Before they arrived I had a good look at it and wondered why well-leafed oak branches drop and found an excellent online article by Heather Hacking (a fine name for a reporter interested in botany) who interviewed arborist Scot Wineland:

"Trees draw up a tremendous amount of water during the day and release the moisture through their leaves. The process is known as evapotranspiration.

If you tied a plastic bag around a potted plant, the bag would become cloudy as moisture is released to the air. If the tree hasn't had a chance to shed some of that moisture, the "phenomenal weight" of the water can bust a limb.

Sometimes a tree will have an ever-so-slight defect, or a crack. Perhaps woodpeckers or squirrels damaged the limb in a way that leads to a larger crack over time and later decay.

When the limb gets too heavy with water, that crack can lead to a break. There can literally be buckets of water that flows from where the limb breaks, the arborist said."

See the entire article here. It's from the Chico, California Enterprise-Record. Maples and other trees have limb drop, too.

I didn't see any water in the morning, nor any black ants at the core of the fallen branch, but that doesn't mean they weren't there, because my eye is untrained. I am relieved the 25-foot branch didn't fall on anyone or anything.

July 1

Always a special day in the middle of the calendar year, very early summer, delicious, paradise, dreamed about all year, and not yet so hot or droughty that it makes us lax or gives us headaches or the cicadas keep us up all night. So with appreciation, here's the creek and its creekbed wildflowers, Queen Anne's Lace and phlox and junk lily, and also an Allium head that's past peak but still beautiful, like so many people we know.

Fruits of the Earth

Summer solstice, the fullness of the year, and the very best gifts of the season are its wild foods. You see the first crop of chanterelles, both yellow and cinnabar, from the rain-soaked Divine woods, used to fill a morning omelet, and the first few blackberries from the meadows and woods' edges, used to make berry scones. There's also fresh basil in a pot. Christmas CANNOT compare, not for one minute.

A Star in My Hand

Not often seen. . . the Earthstar (Geastrum saccatum) mushroom, with a spherical spore case about 1" in diameter that blows its top like a volcano and shoots brown powdery spores everywhere. The spore case sits on top of a lily pad of "leaves," once a covering, that split open and peeled back to form five or six rays. Edible? No. Earthstars dry well and as keepsakes are said to "make good conversation pieces" -- if you're really hard up for topics to talk about.