No Such Thing

When will I learn that when an old item crumbles or won't come clean, it's time to buy new? Towels I bleach and bleach until they fray, or rubber gloves with two fingers fused with hardened LocTite are still serviceable, I say, and keep using them. Then the day comes when my eyes are opened, like people's are in the Bible. Today while lying on the folding mat that I loll on daily, indoors and out, a foam mat used for 25, maybe 30 years not only for lolling on rugs and concrete and grass but for exercise and camping and blissing out and suffering agonies (just the normal agonies of any lifetime, no big deal) and napping, I realize that little acid-green crumbs, the mat's core, are coming through the pink, and they're not bugs.

The thing has worn out.

 

I use the mat daily, often more than once. In summer it's hosed down, washed with soap and a scrub brush, and dried in the sun. It's thinning out, and the edges curl. I slept on this mat the night I moved into the Divine Cabin, before there was furniture. It was June. Warm breezes wafted through the screens. I was in such ecstasy I thought I might not sleep.

The manufacturer I assumed must be long out of business since their mats last 25 years. So I spent an hour looking at possible substitutes. It is thicker than a yoga mat, and its top is not sticky but sueded. (When I bought it there was no such thing on the market as yoga mats.) Those crash mats covered with vinyl; one can't loll on vinyl. I don't want one I must roll and unroll and tie. One (I guess literally only me -- there is no such thing even on Amazon!) wants a mat one can fling open the selfsame second one is seized by the impulse to loll or do push-ups.

 

Oh hell, I thought. I'll google the brand. Amazing: It's still in business! But they're down to royal-blue mats only.

 

I will take it! This pink one I will repurpose for gardening or seating.

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.

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.

The Survivor

I admit trying to kill this red-cedar tree for the sake of the native oaks and hickories the invasive red cedars are displacing. Baby cedar trees plant themselves mere inches in front of baby oaks, choking off  their sunlight and selfishly drinking all the water. In spring I chop down or uproot any young cedars endangering the oaks.If they're too big to chop, I might strip some or all branches so at least they won't block sunlight from the other trees that deserve to live here.

I learned from red cedars that everything in nature wants the best for itself and will do all in its power to survive.

Don't recall exactly when and what I did to this tree, but it outsmarted me. It looks very happy and blithe. As you see, there are still plenty of grown red cedars around for them that likes 'em.

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.

Spring Green

After this winter we are all starved to see anything green, so I went walking to find and feast my eyes upon every possible green thing. It's too soon for leaves, but chives grew on the forest floor, Christmas ferns hung from the bluffs, and lovely spring green moss [pictured] grew over the thin rocky soil, and patches of algae lay submerged in the creek, its water made glass-clear by melting snow. And in the creek I saw, shooting by, a small half-fish half-frog: a tadpole! So I decided to take a chance and waited until dark and then opened the door to the porch and listened, and heard, for the first time this year, the spring-peeper chorus. I just about collapsed with joy and relief. Spring isn't quite dressed yet, but its music is playing.

Welcome to the Cabin Fever Breakfast Bakery

Looking for New and Different, something really really Different, because otherwise I'd go nuts in this stubborn winter weather, I tried baked oatmeal. Add eggs and milk and sweetener, load it with nuts and dried fruit, sometimes chopped apple. Spread it in a loaf pan or divide it into "muffins" and bake. Eat hot or cold -- and this recipe has a twist: espresso powder gives a mocha touch. To eat: as a muffin, or place in bowl and pour milk over it.

Maple Espresso Baked Oatmeal (makes 12 "muffins")

2-1/2 cups rolled oats ("old fashioned" on label)
1 tablespoon espresso powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 ounces unsalted butter
2/3 cup real maple syrup
3 eggs
2/3 cups milk
1 cup nuts (pecans, walnuts)
3/4 cup dried fruit (raisins, cherries, craisins)

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Melt butter in a heated pan until it browns slightly and smells nutty. Set this aside to cool. In large bowl, combine oats, baking powder, espresso powder and salt. In medium bowl combine maple syrup, eggs, milk and melted butter. Then add liquid ingredients to the big bowl, mix well and let it sit 10 minutes while you butter the loaf pan or prepare the muffin pan: Use liners, and grease them.

Then spoon 1/2 cup of mixture into each baking cup, or pour all into a loaf pan. Tamp mixture down. Bake "muffins" 30-35 minutes; loaf pans 50 minutes. Eat warm or cold. I like it chilled -- tastes like bread pudding -- but it's so much better for you, and the espresso wakes you up.

Ticks Don't Die

Planned to list here the good things about a snowy subzero winter, and the first thing I thought was that a hard winter kills ticks so summer will have fewer.

I didn't recall who'd told me that, but facts found on the Laboratory of Medical Zoology site say deep cold will indeed kill the ticks who are above ground--but most winter below ground, sleeping in leafmeal, and when it thaws they'll latch on to the first available warm body. Ticks are always aiming for a place on your or an animal's head or neck, where blood circulation is abundant and good. That's the bad news. The good news is that a tick who's been on you less than 24 hours is unlikely to have transmitted a disease. So the city-dweller freakouts I've seen when my guests find a tick are unwarranted (but fun to watch).

It's fleas who are killed by cold. But their eggs, wherever they laid them, are just fine and can take as long as three years to hatch.

So: One good thing about a miserable winter (sneeze) is that ticks are inactive.

Second good thing: Snow is picturesque. Photo is of my pumphouse this morning. That little plastic table I got from LaBarque Creek when it flash-flooded. I've never opened that door, having witnessed bees and wasps disappearing beneath its eaves into the pumphouse interior, maybe forming a whole colony. I can only tell you that it works and that its water is tasty but very hard. I've lived here 13 winters now and the pump (electric) has never frozen.

Sudden Nationwide Propane Shortage

Propane heating was mysterious until I moved here and learned how to handle a propane tank, gauge, gas line and supplier. A propane tank is considered "full" at 80 percent capacity, and at 20 percent one should phone the supplier for a refill. The truck shows up in three to five days. Wait too long -- below 10 percent on the gauge -- and pay an extra $100 for emergency propane delivery. The bills (paid on delivery) are never cheap: my minimum has been $400, my maximum $880, and I fill twice a year. One hard year I sold my wedding-ring set to buy a tankful.

This cold nasty winter I've been burning that propane so yesterday I phoned for a delivery. Darn, the line was busy, and busy again and again. So I left a message and this morning at 7:55 the propane supplier phoned back and I requested $600 worth.

"Six hundred dollars will get you only about 100 gallons," said the clerk, "and our minimum delivery is 200 gallons."

"What?" I said, thinking, That's outrageous!

"We've never seen it like this," she said. Me neither! I asked if it'd be better next week. She didn't know. I refused delivery at that price and she advised me to conserve. Immediately I turned my thermostat from 64 degrees F down to 55, conserving my 25 percent (down from 80 percent in late October), and set my electric space heaters on High.

The news says propane wholesaled at $1.75 a gallon last Friday and hit $5 this week due to a sudden "nationwide shortage" that's not an actual shortage -- fracking has increased the supply. The papers say blizzards and bad roads have kept the supply from getting to the Midwest. The news also blames farmers who used a lot of propane last fall drying their wet corn (?).

I say it's a gouge, like the "energy shortage" of 1973-77, when supposedly the earth was drained of all its oil and a sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter called for sacrifice. I figure I can last two or three weeks and maybe ride out this "shortage" which will end, poof, when the state's Attorney General looks into it, which he's doing Monday. There are 5.5 million people in the US heating with propane. If the shortage were real there wouldn't be a 200-gallon minimum.

Hungry Pileated Woodpecker

This male Pileated was hungry enough, in the seven inches of yesterday's snow, to allow me to stand in the open porch door and take his picture while he breakfasted on suet. His mate was nearby, but it wasn't her turn yet to leap onto the suet cage, clutch it with her long black toes, and eat. Not only that, but when they fly back to the tree trunk they wipe their beaks on the bark like it's a napkin.

Toward Winter's End

This winter waited until the third week of February to really snow, and then a week later it snowed again, and the first week of March it snowed and then snowed again. The grape hyacinths are blooming, the robins are passing through here, the geese are flying north, I saw them all yesterday evening; then this morning it snowed once more. The lane where I, all bundled up against the wind, took my daily walk was crossed with arrow-like turkey tracks. May this be the last snow, so I can get to weeding and planting!

Winter Drops Us a Postcard

Our most significant snowstorm since January 2011 began with frozen rain about 9 a.m., just as I ran outside to spray Pam on the satellite dish, recommended by the satellite people to keep it from icing over and cutting off my contact with the world. It worked well. After the sharp pellets of frozen rain came snow, about four inches of it, covering and stoppering everything, closing the schools, the TV warning us all to stay home. I gladly complied with this order, and spent time installing a fluorescent light beneath the kitchen cabinets, practical for lighting the area and also for raising seedlings. It gives the kitchen a very 1970s aura. In many ways this is the best time of the year because everything wonderful lies ahead, but not too far ahead, and the Catholic church has Friday fish fries.

The snowplow came about 9 p.m., after the storm was over, and the state snowplows scraped and beeped all night along the highways which today were perfectly clear and dry. A walk in the snow revealed deer tracks and tracks of one hefty wild turkey. A frozen crust atop the snow prevented smaller animals from leaving the tracks I find so entertaining. I like knowing I am part of all this. Does this photo look like a Jackson Pollock or what?

This Year's Birthday Gift

Each year on my birthday I am sent a fabulous bird, so I get up early and wait for it. I know northern migration has begun because the Yellow-Shafted Flicker appeared last week, which was earlier than usual, but I haven't yet seen my Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker, who sometimes is my birthday gift. Instead appeared the Master of the Woods, the Pileated Woodpecker, screaming and enjoying suet (pictured) and pecking on the old TV aerial because it makes an exciting noise like mallets on metal (that reverberates throughout my house). Some mornings if the suet isn't there when he wants it, he's my alarm clock. Wow, do I ever have serious problems! Lucky me!

$10 Ultra Wash

Drive-through car washes are a seasonal treat because in warmer weather I wash my own. This is the car wash I usually patronize in winter, a sort of skin tag attached to the nearest gas station, but it's not the old ordinary steamy and soapy tiled shower anymore; somehow they've invented psychedelic multicolored car soap, and made red tornadoes out of the whirling sponge whips; and just sitting caged while this dance of the seven veils engulfed my car, and me in it, like, blew my mind, man. And the car (she's pearly white; when she was new I called her "The Bride," and now, after six and a half years, she's "My Wife"; I don't go anywhere without her) is spectacularly clean and glossy after this, the $10 Ultra Wash with Bottom Blast, which was much more worth my $10 than the recent remake of Anna Karenina. You know, sometimes the Midwest can be all right.

Meet Farmer Bob

He'd just got there and parked, because his truck bed was full of dozens of eggs, in miscellaneous cartons. (Who decided eggs should be sold by the dozen? It's the perfect number: a brilliant, immortal idea.)
I screeched the car to a halt. The brown-egg man on the side of the highway again!

This time approaching him I did better. He said, "Hello, young lady." (Always the salesman.) I smiled and said hello, and we exchanged how'er you, good morning, i'n'it a pretty spring day, and shook hands. He held my hand in his own cold hard hand and looked me square in the face. He said, "I've seen you before." I said yes. (My rare and elegant Turkish nose is unforgettable.) He got around to asking me how many dozen eggs I wanted.

"Just one," I said.
"Just one?" (Always the salesman. He isn't standing on the road shoulder for his health.)
"I only need one. There's only me," I said.
"Only you? You mean a lovely young lady like yourself i'nt married?" (Always the salesman.) "Why is that?"
Keeping things simple, I said, "He died."
"Sorry to hear that. There's only one place to take those kind of troubles," he said, "and that's to the Lord." He said more and I just said, "You gotta have faith." It's a sentiment that nobody in Missouri objects to. (I've discovered only one other such statement: "Freedom isn't free." When I wear my "Freedom Isn't Free" t-shirt, people from all walks of life, in the bank, the drugstore, the street, read it and say, "Damn right," or "That's a fact.")

I thought about the friend I was on my way to visit and said, "Better make it two dozen; I know someone who'd like some fresh brown eggs."

He said they'd been laid just yesterday and crowed, "Any fresher and you'd have to be standing in the henhouse."

It took a long time for him to count out change in dollars and fives worn thin as toilet paper. "Can't see without my glasses," he explained. I asked his name. It's Bob something (a truck was roaring by and I couldn't hear the last name.) I asked if I could take his picture because I knew you'd like to see it. He's holding a carton of eggs he's bagged for me. He promised in the summer he'd bring his truck back full of homegrown tomatoes, pickles and more eggs.

Bring It On!

This sign surprised me. When people plan to hike a trail in the woods in rugged rural Missouri nowadays, do they really need to be warned in writing that they might experience, like, "natural surfaces"? It must be a liability issue. But then it should warn of bugs, poison ivy and mushrooms too. How about rattlers and snapper turtles? How about squirrels that might pelt you with acorns? Why not just stay in your car and watch a DVD?

Cabin Fever

You know how spring gets you thinking about home-improvement projects? How about this rec room makeover for family fun?  Beats a ping-pong table. From The Pistol Shooters Treasury, 2nd edition, 1973. Ahh, the olden days....that looks like a Ruger Mark II in his hand. He can't be shooting larger caliber than a .22 if he's doing it at such short range, one-handed...I can't think of anything more ludicrous or dangerous than a home basement firing range. A figment of somebody's cabin fever.

When Birds Aren't Pretty

Squawk! Scuffle! This morning I saw my homie the Downy Woodpecker and the visiting migrant, the Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker, sparring and threatening each other on the suet cage. Not one minute later, when the Yellow-Belly was pecking at the suet, came a Starling, his shawl still peppered with white stars; he and his big buddies all wanted some suet. Flapping his wings scared off the smaller Yellow-Belly. Meanwhile, Hairy and Downy woodpeckers clung to trees at a safe distance, and songbirds, such as Blue Jays and cardinals, and a row of Starlings, waited, clinging to branches...a perfect lunch counter for the Red-Tailed hawk perched on a cedar branch high above the feeder just waitin' to snatch somebody (he likes pigeons).

Then came the biggest woodpecker of all, the spectacular crow-sized Pileated, king of the birds around here, and everybody let him have as much suet as he liked. As soon as he was gone, the fighting and sparring began again, and I wondered (exasperated, like a parent) if I shouldn't just take the suet indoors until they learned to stop fighting and share.

P.S. I replaced suet for a few days with a chunk of shortening, an ingredient in many "make your own suet" recipes. Birds no matter how cold or greedy did not like it at all.

Stolen Goods Retrieved

Raccoons grab and steal the wire suet cage that I fill and hang outside for my birds -- that is, if I don't fetch it in at dusk every day. And they drag the cages up to 30 feet away, chop-shop 'em, and gobble the suet meant for my woodpeckers. Of course the little thieves don't return the empties. When the grass is tall, and the ticks, thorns and poison ivy are full blast there is no way I'm going to march through several hundred square feet of that to look for a dark-green suet cage. I buy a replacement for $1.

But today, just before everything goes green (we hope), I tromped through the brushy slope of rugged land just south of the cabin for the first time in a couple of years, looked hard, and retrieved three missing suet cages in various stages of decay. I plan on marking them with neon-orange tape so that when raccoons make off with them they won't take four years for me to find. Needless to say they were all very very suet-free.

Boy Bait

I hated selling Girl Scout cookies. I still hold the record for selling the fewest boxes – six – for Troop 114/Racine County, WI, set during the 1969 cookie season. The troop leader chewed me out. I never got over it…

So whenever I see pimply, fattish, greasy-haired, pasty-faced, bespectacled, saturnine, truculent little Girl Scouts such as I was out in front of the Sav-A-Lot or the Wal-Mart, I buy their cookies. The above photo was taken on top of my car because I keep them locked in the trunk. In the house the Peanut Butter Patties would not last four hours. I don’t care for Thin Mints, but everyone else loves them. Ladies, these are major Boy Bait. Give it to the right Midwestern man and he will chase you around the table, if he’s a spry one, or just propose marriage if he’s lazy.

Girl Scouts camping experience gave me my love for the woods and country and rocks and birds and brooks, and that is why I now live in my dream home that has all these marvels and delights on its 100 acres.