What If I Said Yes?

I let errands pile up until I have four or five, then drive to town to do them, and yesterday, as the snows melted in the February sun, came an impulse to pick up a takeout salad. Oh, man, how I fought with myself, turning in the direction of the place, then turning away, then turning the car around and back because I could make salad at home. I shouldn't spend the money, because when I'm old and shivering I'll wish I'd saved it . . . But gosh, I can't ever treat myself? And the portions are big enough to make two meals . . . I overthought a Chicken Caesar salad. I wanted it all readymade, with potato chips and a cookie. It's been months since I've had a bag of chips or an oversized greasy coffeehouse cookie.

Thus they were made manifest, bagged, and passed to me through an open window and as the day neared noon and 60 degrees -- a full 60 degrees warmer than the previous week -- I thought it ideal for the year's first picnic. I added a plate of sliced apple and a beer. (Beer: It's not just for breakfast anymore!) My in-laws always know when they visit to bring a case of Wisconsin beer, and because they visit twice a year at most and less so this year, I hoard my beers for special occasions, like the first day of 2021 warm enough for porch dining.

Salud! Then I had a nap.

Preparing for Polar Air

In a log cabin the logs get chilled all through in deep winter and then radiate cold -- indoors. That's my least favorite part of living here. Then I use my extreme-temp strategies. There's no gym, church, coffeehouse, library, club meeting or anywhere to escape to this year, so:

 

• Wear over-the-knee wool socks and long underwear under fleece-lined sweats, and maybe leg warmers and headgear. Indoors. I do mean it.
• On the weekend, place the closed car or other vehicle in the sun (if there's sun). Let the sun heat it up real good. Go nap in it. Warms your bones.
  
  
• Eat higher-calorie food to sustain body weight. It is not healthy to "get thin" because of cold temperatures.
  
• Curtain or shade all windows, or tablecloth your window, as I did this morning. If possible, tape the curtain's edges to the walls. Science says a curtained window loses 25 to 35 percent less heat. 
• Take vitamins and eat citrus daily. I like water with lemon. Here are lovely honeybells (cross between grapefruit and tangerine. Their skins "unzip" very neatly).
• Make and consume soups and herbal teas and lots of water. That sounds counter-intuitive. It isn't. Single-digit temps and indoor heating bring very dry air, dry air means dry and vulnerable membranes. Intersperse intake of caffeine drinks or alcohol with glasses of water.
  
• Set and patrol mousetraps because furry company is likely to creep in seeking shelter.
• For the duration, forget economizing. Use all resources.
  
• Leave a stream of water running in the slop sink so the pipes won't freeze.
• Exercise will warm cold extremities.
• Find an active, distracting household task: Ironing, long recipes, repairs and alterations, dusting, cleaning the oven or the ceiling fan blades, shoe and boot care, and so on.
• Don't complain or call people to complain that you need spring or summer. Move to Florida if Missouri's too much of a challenge for you.
  

Still Life

This rare (of course!) neurological thing lets me walk and sit just fine but my legs tremor when standing and they demand I lean on something or sit down. At last I know why hour-long exercise classes wore me out, why I leaned on walls at parties. Mom had a more common and disabling tremor; fortunately she didn't live to see mine. I can stand for a while, more with a cane, but then the legs tremble and I widen my stance (this is called "the Frankenstance"), and widen and widen until I either have to start walking or sit down. I carry the cane to show folks I'm not drunk. It does not hurt, nor is it fatal. Neurologist (my first ever! He's really nice!) can only give stupefying anti-seizure drugs. There is almost no research because no public figure has anything resembling this except Germany's former chancellor Angela Merkel.

Well, I never wanted to stand in lines anyway. So I carry a collapsible stool or wheel a handsome, top-of-the-line  folding rollator (a rolling walker with built-in seat) that I have named The Bolt, or carry a featherweight aluminum folding chair I took fishing. On hikes and mushroom hunts I can sit and rest and then keep going. It was news to me, but the act of standing takes big bandwidth in the brain, and one tires easily.

There are some benefits. People are helpful and kind. If I must seat myself at the hardware store while discussing what wrench I need, the clerk will squat so we're face to face. When I unfold the portable stool in the checkout lane people ask why didn't they think of that, or where did I get it because they need one too, and they tell me why. And in the woods today while sitting for a minute I saw a perfect little still life of oak leaves and the side of the acorn cap that looks like the iris of an eye, and one tiny hopeful green February shoot.

Another doctor prescribed physical therapy, and the exercises increased my strength, balance, and standing time. Exercise holds this thing at bay. If it thinks I am an easy mark, it's mistaken.

Irake

Before this world turns green, it's taupe. And this portion of meadow was covered with fallen oak leaves all the way along this tiny flagstone path to the back area where stands the bluebird box.

Bluebirds begin hunting for homes in late February, but  won't settle anywhere that's covered with leaves. They need bald earth, mown grass, or plowed soil -- because they seize bugs and worms and pin them to the earth, and that's how they eat. No bare ground, no bluebirds. Last year, after securing the bluebird box in a concrete foundation, I was too lazy to rake and had no bluebirds. As you know, they bring happiness. Thus raking equals happiness.

This might not look raked, but on the photo's right see the carpet of fallen oak leaves I've cleared away. The gray brushy stuff needs a chainsaw or, better, a controlled burn. The white things on the left are opaque ground cover held down by jugs of water. Ground cover will retard the growth of grass and weeds on those spots so I might plant collards there.

So this is really a picture of potential. In my mind I see it green, blue, and thriving.

I'm No Longer Going to Save You From Yourself

Friend has heart attack but still smokes. "I've cut way down, to about five a day." I say, "We so much need you to stay with us on this earth. I will help you quit smoking any way I can." He still smokes.

Sometime friend can't sleep because a belly the weight and size of five bowling balls suffocates him when he lies down. He buys a new ultra-super-duper mattress but still suffocates. He phones the mattress dealer demanding a refund because he's heard that sleeping on a bad mattress causes weight gain and his weight is the fault of the mattress.

Friend, age 50, has never seen a dentist. Complains about and shows me a painful infected wisdom tooth. I said, "I have a great dentist, right in this neighborhood." He says no thanks, it really doesn't hurt that much.

Person pays me to edit a book manuscript so it will be of publishable quality. I do it. Then he asks me, is there one button he can push to undo all the edits, or does he have to reject each individual edit manually?

Friend who has lived in apartments all his life buys on Zillow a $200,000 house in Maine, where he has never been, from its owner. "Don't you want to go see it first?" I said. He said, "It's perfect, exactly what I want, only half a mile from the ocean."

Friend writes a brilliant book manuscript and I say so and am so excited I look up names of agents. "Thanks," the author replies, "but I know the critics will tear this book apart, I'm such an outlier, they don't want to hear what I have to say."

"I have such terrible stomach pains," said Mom. "Have you called the doctor?" I said. "Oh, doctors. They don't know anything. All they do is take your money," said Mom, who finally goes to ER two years later, in March. It's Stage 4 and she's dead by June.

Friend tells me, "Eskimos eat only fatty meat and they're very healthy and never get fat, so I will eat only meat, no carbs, and ketosis will burn my fat off," and I say, "Fat cannot burn in the absence of carbohydrate," and they say, "What?"

Friend says (this is the condensed version), "My daughter moved back in with her baby and the house is chaos and she is never home, and here I am at 60 forced to parent all over again." I say nothing.

Acquaintance says, "My son punched in all the sheetrock in his room again this week after I just had it replaced. I got mad and he started breaking my stuff and screaming he would strangle my parrot, and I don't know what to do." "How old is he?" "Thirty."

Friend says, "I am so sick, but I won't take this poison the doctor prescribed, and I'm using essential oil in my diffuser but it doesn't seem to be working."

Demetrius, panicking, shows me blood blisters in his mouth after he eats grilled hot dogs or Spam. He develops esophageal cancer. With surgery, radiation, and chemo, it is cured. He resumes eating, in secret, pounds of bacon, bologna, ham, hot dogs, and black licorice. Died 11 years ago this week.

Six of these people I never see anymore. Feel kind of sad I couldn't save them from themselves. But I see now it was wrong of me to try.

Worth the Effort

Rain saturated the earth this month and after 10 winters (or more) the 2x6 holding the bluebird box tilted in the softened yellow clay. Despite my many shims, finally it fell and I let it lie there until reminded by an online post that male bluebirds in Missouri start seeking their housing in late February. And I panicked. I need bluebirds.

Only one solution: Quik-Crete concrete. Never tried it before. At the hardware store the smallest bag was 50 pounds. Stunned when it was carted out to the car and I saw 50 pounds of Quik-Crete is no bigger than a party-sized bag of potato chips.

At home I slid the bag out of the back seat onto an old shower curtain and dragged it to the site. Oh my, it really was 50 pounds. Thinking I might have a heart attack I prepared by securing the phone on my person and then opened the garage door so I could crawl into it, shut the door and die there without being eaten by coyotes the same night. Then read the instructions on the bag.

Shoveled most of the water out of the hole. Dug wet mud out until it was two feet wide. Shovel caught on some roots somehow growing through the clay; clipped the roots out. Took breaks, gasping and sweating. Frantically drinking water so as to keep my blood volume. Bluebirds are among the two or three things beautiful enough to die for. Dropped a shovel full of gravel into the hole's very bottom. Unable to figure out how to hold the post upright while pouring, I dragged the trash can into the meadow and leaned it. Now then. Donned breathing mask, gloves, long sleeves and eye protection as the instructions recommended.

The YouTube video guy poured the Quik-Crete directly into the hole, so instead of mixing it and then pouring I wrestled the bag to the lip of the hole, slit it and let the material pour in, fast as possible, face averted from its dust, then poured in water measured into my watering can, meanwhile holding the post upright until the Quik-Crete hardened (mere seconds!) and then fled to the house to shower, leaving tools, bag, mask, etc. in the yard because surely the dust would turn to concrete in my lungs. Relieved to think I would never have to do this again. Now I know why people leave stuff to rust and rot in their yards: They are too exhausted to pick it up.

Fifty pounds of Quik-Crete exactly filled the hole and now it's perfect.

I Heart Frozen Mix

In months without foliage the bedroom window shows me the T-intersection below the cliff and about 200 yards away--dangerous during the best of times because from both ways the county highway curves and comes sharply downhill. On snowy/icy/sleety nights when hearing the snowplow thundering my way to shear snow from the road, I get up to see its lashing yellow lights briefly pass then disappear, thinking: Someone's taking care of us. And someone is hoping he comes home safely and soon.

No one else here voluntarily drives in this weather, so during snows a vast silence is broken only by the plow, usually. Tonight's big wet flakes the TV weatherman called "hamster-sized" (welcome to Missouri), ticked the roof like cornflakes. I went out to take photos with my newish phone, not realizing its camera had automatic flash until back indoors when I saw how the camera flash captured the trails of falling snowflakes, a phenomenon otherwise invisible.

This is the first real winter in several years, with snow days (four or five now) and frozen mix -- my favorite. It really is like driving in that frozen mix of peas, cubed carrots and green beans you buy in the freezer section -- my worst nightmare. So I appreciate the plow and like watching it come up one side of the road and down the other. Beats seeing ambulances and cops converge at our crossroads as happens about once every season. I am told that when I was a kid I did not want to play with dolls but with trucks.

Yes, Yes, Yes!

Which day of the year tops them all? On March 21, spring equinox: Joy! April 24 the hummingbirds return, on the dot, and I run around screaming 'cuz I just won the lottery of life? All of June, the most beautiful month? July 4, when we create loud stars in the sky like we are God? July 25, the ripest day with the richest night sky? Thanksgiving Thursday, everybody's holiday? On December 21, winter solstice -- and the days begin lengthening, oh thank you, God! There's the day the spring peepers awake and sing (depends on precipitation, and they began on February 16). Or -- the first crocuses. They aren't wild; they were planted. By us, maybe 15 years ago. Earliest recorded appearance: Feb. 6. This year: Feb. 25.

Rain ended, yesterday I trekked over the property to watch brimming waterfalls, see ferns unfolding, look at buds on trees, step ankle-deep in mud, breathe in the most delicious, cleanest, laundered spring air and whitest sunlight, cleaned up trash by the creek, checked the cabin roof bashed (whomp! whomp!!) by thick oak branches broken off by Saturday night's windstorm -- the roof is okay -- and then bent to clean storm debris from the lane and around the cabin. That done, I was about to photograph the wonders of some velvety little buds when I looked down and saw in the sunny sweet spot at the house's southwest corner, these!

They never fail! If I were a flower, I would be a crocus (from the Latin word crocatus, meaning "saffron yellow"). Crocuses are not just the promise of spring. They are the signature on the contract!

Creek is Rising

8:30 a.m., 24 Feb 2018

Dry winter has given way to about three days of rain. On Thursday it rained enough to brim the creek, LaBarque Creek. Then it rained that night. The next day I didn't look at the creek; I lolled. This morning after it rained all night (and another bout of rain approaching, according to radar) I was curious, because if the creek rises enough, it could be we're about to be cut off from the rest of civilization. The LaBarque was out of its bed and moving swiftly. I will post updates.

Cabin Fever and Catholic Fish Fries

Yesterday I abandoned the cabin because I could lie on the bed or the couch, but that was all. Not even read or watch Netflix. I could do nothing but loll. They say you can always clean, but the house is too dusty and messy to clean. Unable to do a lick of work I drove over the ridge road to the Little Ireland coffeehouse where I worked all afternoon,  enjoyably. Because it does not have music, you can hear yourself think. It has a couch, but I didn't loll on it. They already know my order: Bottomless cup of black coffee, please. But only half a cup, and when I drink that I will return to the counter for another half cup, please, and perhaps another half cup, because I like it steaming, and the coffee does cool off if work absorbs me.

Then it's past 4:30 p.m. and I want dinner. What to do? Why, St. Bridget's Church is just a block away and it has a fish fry every Friday during Lent, $10 per plate for adults. Liked it; there's retro cool in having dinner in a school gymnasium ("Go, Shamrocks!") among tables full of strangers. Please note at the right of the photo the peach pie in the plastic container.

See, it's a slippery slope into decadence, February style: cabin fever, coffeehouse, a fish fry, pie, then at home I open a bottle of pinot noir and loll myself to sleep.

About This Winter

Only dustings of snow. Only brief intermittent frozen rains here, not enough to endanger us (downstate was a different story). It's as if (so far) winter here has hesitated to speak, out of politeness, so as not to interrupt our important activities.

Yesterday I led our "spiritual group" on the topic of raising our vibrations to attract our "perfect mate." We had fun listing the many fine qualities of the him or her just about to arrive, who is looking for someone just like us. I brought unicorn and princess valentines enough for all and wished everyone Happy Valentine's day.

Only one sprinkling of salt has been necessary on the concrete steps this winter. And. . . already the bluebirds are back, very active, and they love to have families in my bluebird box and I can hardly wait. Happy Valentine's Day. Happy day every day. Love is everywhere and spring is gaining momentum.

The New Firebowl

New firebowl

The firebowl I dug and built, obscured with brush and fallen wood, was a disheartening sight because I love a nice fire for myself and guests; it's just fun to watch and poke at while enjoying adult beverages. Unable to clean it up--and I wanted it moved a couple of feet over--without a chainsaw, I hired Patrick to do it, and not only did he dig and build a handsome new bowl out of stone I'd thrown behind the garage, but chopped and stacked all the fallen and mostly rotted wood, and I will burn some as soon as it stops raining and the wind dies down and I rake for quite a radius beyond the firebowl because there's fallen oak leaves an inch thick from autumn. I don't want to catch a spark.

The property could actually use a controlled burn to eliminate briars and brushy understory, but that won't happen. Meanwhile I'd cogitated on the fact that I'll probably be home more often during this administration and entertain more people, and the firebowl is a fine enhancement as well as potentially useful.

Old firebowl

Here are "after" and "before" pictures, with the "after" picture first, because if I put the "before" first nobody would know what it was. The old firebowl was encircled partly with sawn hunks of wood and partly with concrete and stone. Patrick, camera-shy, would not pose with his handiwork.

New firebowl with woodpile

Seduced by Pink Light

These warm and cloudy days create a world of pink light between 5:15 and 6:15 p.m. "Pink light" is a woo-woo thing you imagine when you want to send people long-distance love and protection. Always enraptured and outdoors to see it, I was seduced into thinking about spring and summer. Before I knew it, I was:

1. finding the gardening gloves and the trowel.
2. raking and weeding, and saying hello to worms.
3. fertilizing and then paving a small area with old shingles to smother the grass and weeds to prepare the earth for planting.
4. at Lowe's buying seeds (hard to find!) for collards and turnips, two hardy vegetables that my bunnies and deer won't eat. And buying a garden hose.
5. contemplating the Totally Tomatoes catalog and circling about 20 different tomatoes I want to grow, to be narrowed down to two with three plants each. (Totally Tomatoes sells both seeds and plants.)

This is either patently insane behavior or it's human. Thanks to the wildlife, of the tomatoes borne on these plants I will probably actually get to eat only one or two. I'm not a gardener. I'm kind of a make-believe gardener. That is okay. It's the journey, not the destination. . .

The Inauguration Store

Happened to be in the Baltimore airport where an Inauguration Store (remember, it's not far from D.C.) sold clothing with slogans including this sweatshirt ($27.99) at 50 percent off. I pitied the sweatshirt. I could have bought a pink tee that said, "I Suffered for Eight Years of Obama, Now You Can Suffer Eight Years of Trump" but resisted the temptation, even at 50 percent off. I don't have the nerve to wear it sarcastically. I believe America will be great again, because all around me are people stunned into political activity.

I went to a conference where I missed and longed for my quiet stone porch and the signs of spring. The ocean was right outside the door. No interest. Thinking only of spring in Missouri.

Northward Migration

Lady Flicker, Wikimedia Commons

Yellow-Shafted Flickers stop here for suet in late January and early February, flying from southern Texas and northern Mexico to their summer breeding grounds in Canada. I watch them compete with the lordly Pileated Woodpecker for the same suet cake. The much larger Pileated who lives here year-round flaps his wings and waves them away, but the flickers are clever, and they simply wait beneath the suet cage for pieces that fly down to the leaf carpet while the bigger bird drills and gobbles his share. The Flicker is the only woodpecker who will eat from the ground.

Yellow-Shafted are the easterners, and Red-Shafted are the
westerners. They are in my view the most elegantly clothed of all the migrating birds. Wish they lived here all year round. The goldfinches at the seed feeder are still their winter olive green but now with a mention of yellow. The smaller picture shows a little Downy Woodpecker, in a flutter of striped wings, boldly trying to nip the suet while the male Pileated clings to the suet cage with his big crusty feet, and I decided after trying hard and getting no decent photos that this is the year (after 15 years) to set up a bird camera with remote shutter control to capture not only their individual beauty but their interactions.

Signs of Spring

The "secret pond" area below the cliffs, swampy at best, is LaBarque Creek floodplain, and the post-Christmas flood covered a great deal of it with sand, silt, and matted driftwood, and as I descended into my annual early-spring exploration of the area -- impassable because of mud in winter, and in summer and fall with the thorny shrubs, green and succulent, eager to rip your face off -- I didn't know whether to expect mud, water, drowned animals' bones, or what. I'd heard that the silt and sand might cover and suffocate this year's mushroom community. So I looked with hope for the Scarlet Cups (Sarcoscypha austriaca), always the first fungi of the year around here, at maximum about 5cm across. This is the only place on the property where this Sarcoscypha, with its white rickrack, grows. As usual the cups, although small, were hard to miss, fresh and vivid, growing on rotting fallen branches among last autumn's leaves. Spring is about a week early, but it couldn't come fast enough for us.

I had not spent a whole morning outside in months. I forgot what it was like to spend a  morning outside, and what a refreshment the air could be, and how pleasant the sun if I sat down and took it in, and the trees taller than I remembered. Hawks were calling; they're seeking mates right now. In the coming days I will get photos that will tell more of the post-flood story.

Spring Afternoon, Winter Morning

Woke at 5:30 a.m. to clomping noises on the roof. It’s still dark. Maybe the roofers, who were said to be coming to work on the cabin this week, begin early, I thought; some workers do. But I heard no voices. I know roofers talk, unless one of the roofers was out last night with another roofer. But no voices. Got up. Big, thick, wet snow, on the border of frozen mix. No trucks in front of my house. My Hughesnet won’t work. I tinker with the modem and router. It occurs to me how good I am at this. But no dice. Through the Verizon phone connection I see the weather radar. Yes, a big snowy mess, eastern Missouri style—frozen mix burying the crocuses.

At full light, I suit up, go outside, feed the birds, and see good-sized branches fallen everywhere, from the oaks and even from the little redbud, and they’re still breaking under the weight of continuing snow.

The old redwood picnic table, over 15 years repeatedly repaired and C-clamped, which I’d petted the other day and thanked for staying upright all winter, had finally given up the ghost. Moment of silence (thump, plop). I broom the slush off the HughesNet dish. More branches breaking. I drag the largest tree limbs out of the road. Thump. Thud. They’re still falling. I add my tracks in the snow to a deer's. Then a branch whomps on and rolls off my roof. It occurs to me that a random limb might fall and crush not only my roof (glad the roofers are scheduled) but my head, and I’d better go inside until all the thumping stopped. I’m shy of it because during yesterday’s high winds, the trash-can lid flew up and gouged my nose. It’s 32 degrees exactly. But in Missouri, we never say we've seen the last of the snow until April is over.

Snake Awake

I raised the garage door with some force, because it's solid wood, very heavy, and takes momentum as well as strength to thrust it up past the point where it will click into place. No problem. Then I see something moving.

It's in the tracks where the pulley wheels run. It's a snake.

OMG. Was it crushed? Is it dead? Half dead? What kind of snake? Is it angry? I can't see its head, only part of its belly. It moves for a while, and then stops.

I killed it. I didn't mean to! What are the odds a snake will be in that door track in a two-door, two-car garage, right at that moment? What a horrible death. I'm sorry!

Then I remember to take a photo.

It begins to move. Slowly it draws its latter half up and out of the mechanism. It's black on top, with a lighter belly, checkered white and light brown. It vanishes.

It's been winter so long I forgot that around this time, creatures are waking up. It was 75 degrees today. Please excuse that the photos aren't that clear. I was trembling.

Poultry in Motion

In the road I saw, in last night's rapidly melting snow:

and decided I'd follow the track back to its source. The wild turkey had crossed a frozen creek, a little tentatively. . .

and before that, had stepped over this log. The melting snow made the tracks more difficult to trace, but they led to a known game trail. The turkey had crossed paths with a rabbit:

and the tracks ended in the canopied woods, where the bird had scratched up leaf litter not once but twice, seeking food. And before that it probably spent the snowy, sleety night in a tree. Breeding starts very soon.

The White Sand Beach

And the object of crossing the creek was to get to this beautiful and secluded LaBarque Creek "beach" and find a perfectly smooth spot and lie there in the sun, in sand so silky it doesn't stick to your clothes. It also makes great quicksand, which I've been caught in only once, in the LaBarque beneath a highway bridge.

Fortunately I'd previously read about quicksand. The impulse is to put all your weight on one leg, hoping to pull the other one out. But instead of helping, that leg sinks deeper, and vice versa. It's impossible to describe the sensation of suction from which you can't free yourself. 1) Don't panic. Areas of quicksand are mostly no bigger than a puddle and no deeper than a knee. In very slow motion -- don't tread or churn, it only makes it worse -- free one leg, and feel around with your foot or hiking pole until you find solid ground so you can -- again, slowly and steadily -- haul the other leg up and out, or 2) if that doesn't work, having tossed aside your backpack, lie back -- and either you will locate solid ground behind you or you will float. Yes, you'll float in quicksand; it's sand suspended in water. Lie back and your legs will eventually float upward. Then use extremely slow and gentle swimming motions to get to solid ground. Better yet, use your hiking pole(s) to test for firmness before stepping in unfamiliar wet sand.