I Do Wrong, and Then I Do Right

A plump bumblebee buzzes bounces all day in front of my door every spring and summer, upward and down, and then moving laterally, persistently, and I understand that its "dance" is communicating with other bees. A second bee, this one, joined it, but I'm having guests and I don't want hovering bees, about 18 inches from my front door, to scare them. The bees live in this burrow in the little wooden canopy above the door (with plenty of holes in it), and the slenderer bee, this one, has been going in and out of the perfectly round little hole, about half an inch diameter, and what's in there I cannot guess.

So about 1 p.m. I got scotch tape and the stepladder and taped over the hole. Fixed!

Oh. This bee worked for an hour trying to get back into the hole while its friend the bumblebee bounced around in what looked like a panic. It probably felt as I did trying for hours to link the Mac's new Big Sur update to a 2010 Brother wireless printer that until Big Sur worked fine. I remembered that we should be good to bees. Wasps are another story, and they've stung me, but bees, never.

 

I realized I had been thoughtless and had done wrong to creatures who lived here all season every spring and summer and had never done me wrong. After an hour and a half this bee was still trying to nudge its way past or through the scotch tape. I got on a stepladder and stuck a chopstick in there to break the tape. The hole was open, but not wide enough for the bee to shoulder its way through, although God knows it tried. Bringing the stepladder once again, I reached up and clawed all the tape away from around the entrance to their home/office/palace/nest. There now.

 

We all feel better. I had to buy an updated printer, finding out after calling everybody that Big Sur simply does not and never will support the printer I had.

A Mint

Wild mint is fun to find and harvest. There's a type that's poisonous, with white flowers on tall stems, but roll a stem between your fingers, and if the stem is square -- you will feel how it's square! -- you can have free mint leaves. There are six kinds of mint in Missouri. Although this is ordinary "ground ivy" (Glechoma hederacea) it smells wonderful. I found it creekside, in the hollow of a tree stump, its tree gnawed down by beavers long ago.

 

I had made a favorite India-themed pink lentil soup, and the recipe recommends a garnish of mint leaves. In winter I do without. How lucky I am in spring to simply walk down the road, onto the path I cut, and there was my mint, presented artistically for nobody's eyes ever, unless I happened to seek it out.

Jack's Pulpit

Yesterday I led a quick guest tour of the property, including Waterfall #1, Waterfall #5, and "the beach." Sloshing our way up a rill to Waterfall 5, the mud nearly pulled the boots off our feet. I've posted photos and video of our waterfalls, but never a Jack-in-the-pulpit because the last time I was in the right place at the right time to see this awesome dramatic springtime wildflower, I didn't have a smartphone, so we are talking before the year 2008.

Jack-in-the-pulpits are in fact rare plants.

 

Every spring since then I have hoped to see one. While the guest photographed the waterfall, I knelt in the soggy loam to photograph the Jack-in-the-pulpit. At home, after a shower, I looked my photos over. None were razor-sharp; none expressed the Jack's imperial presence.

So today after a morning's work I suited up in bad clothes and trudged back. Rain had fallen overnight so the mud was muddier. I didn't see the Jack. Was it one of those flowers that last only one day? I sat by the rill and let the view settle around me and in five minutes found the Arisaema triphyllum. All by itself. There wasn't another.

Determined to get an expressive photo (the majesty of the thing!) I took pictures of it for half an hour. The flap over its top meant getting the camera down so I could shoot upward. I sat down in the mud. Then lay down in the mud. Mom always said I was determined. And I wasn't about to let you down.

Bluebells by the Acre

Did you want to see bluebells growing in their native sort-of-swampy habitat, during the peak of blooming? Me too. Today I took happy advantage of the creek-side path I personally cut through the woods in fall and winter. The farther I walked, the more bluebells (Mertensia virginica) there were, to the left, right, ahead, behind. Golly!

Good Morel Character

If you live around here -- east central Missouri or thereabouts -- get out and go looking, because now, now, now is the one week of the year you'll find morels. Look near paths or lawns or streams or game trails or parks -- any place that the earth gets regularly disturbed, because fungi like that.

I've been patroling for a week the strip of land where I found eight morels on the property last year. Twice a day I looked. No dice. Yesterday, enjoying some spring sun, I found a game trail not too overgrown; while cutting brush this past winter I'd opened it up a bit. Brushed my way on in there with my folding stool and had a seat where I'd never sat before. This is a wooded clifftop area. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but this nice fat good-sized morel. Just one. Only one. 

Normally you'll find morels in groups. Believe me, I looked for more; there were none. I figured this was a gift from the gods feeling sorry for me for looking so hard, walking up and down, finding zero all week. Here's a glamour shot. I sauteed and ate it within the hour.

Now stop scrolling and go out and hunt!

They Can, I Can't.

Last week 0 degrees. This week 70. That's better than the other way around.

Anytime I try to do something, I just can't. Have to go inward for a while and fix this. Am glad to have crocuses around for inspiration. They're blooming in the stony little rock-garden microclimate just outside the kitchen door. First seen March 2. Crocus day is always the real first day of spring. They've also already attracted honeybees.

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.

My Retirement Party

I cannot resist a sign saying "Pond" with an arrow pointing the way; "pond" is one of my favorite words. It snowed yesterday, about two inches. It snowed four weeks ago, two inches. That is this winter's total snowfall. Today, a quartz-crystal, unworldly January day, about 31 degrees, I took my first real exploratory hike in many moons.

After months of calculations and arrangements today was the first day, after 50 years, I no longer have to work, although I will continue to work because I like it. So I'm not "retired," but merely began drawing on retirement savings, easing up a little. My feelings were quite new and mixed, as if this were not an end but a beginning. I phoned my sister to sort it out. She said God's timing is perfect.

"The money should be in your account at the end of the business day," the money man had said, music to my ears. Back at home, lunch. Then what? Ideally I'd give a party. Can't in a pandemic, and if you live on rural roads no guests will come to a party in January anyway. Yet I desired to do something special. Chose a hike at a once-familiar place not visited for more than a year, maybe two. Thought as I trekked about how a year from now I may fish in Missouri without a license. After half a mile of beaten trail mine were the only footprints in the snow. I saw the word "Pond" and the arrow and walked uphill to a pond with the sun thawing a thumbprint into its ballroom of ice.

It remained only to give myself a retirement gift. What I have (embarrassingly) wanted ever since somebody gave me an insanely delightful three-month subscription 20 years ago was a full subscription to Fruit of the Month Club. I couldn't think of any reason why this would be bad.

On the Beach

Never cared for taking almost all my clothes off by the waterside, joining a bunch of strangers similarly undressed and all either yelling or playing dead. Can't swim and don't care for tanning. Given a beach (I have seen some marvelous lake and ocean beaches) I, in long sleeves and long skirt or pants, will hunt for shells or fossils, or take photos, or watch birds or other creatures. This on the shore of the mighty LaBarque, at one of its bends, is my ideal beach. It's private, the sand is soft, its crystals rounded; it doesn't stick to my parka and winter hiking pants when in January -- secretly overjoyed that the wheel of the year is turning toward spring -- I beat the bushes to get to my white sand beach, look for fossils on the water's edge for a while, sit down, sigh, and lie down on the sand that contours perfectly with my frame, viewing the sky up through the bare trees. Then shutting my eyes. Ahh.

Did this two days ago and attracted a big buzzard that flapped noisily away when it saw I was alive.

The War On Shrubs

Armed with the lopper I cut through thickets of invasive bush honeysuckle, starting with the path to the creek (wanted to take a friend there). My muscles grew as I spent a couple of hours per day lopping the fountain-like woody shrubs despite having to do it seated, and I proudly finished the path of about 150 feet to the creek's stony little "beach" where my friend and I basked, six feet apart, in the late-autumn sunlight.

 

That was such a tonic I tackled the invasive honeysuckle surrounding the house, sipping nutrients and water away from the oaks and hickories that rightly grow here. Yes, the cream-colored honeysuckle blossoms in summer are pretty, and so are the red berries on them now. But the price of pretty was the next generation of native Missouri trees. Birds don't care for honeysuckle berries; I understand they are low on nutrients, like candy. One morning I saw a cedar waxwing bite one and then fly away.

I can lop shrub trunks and branches an inch or less in diameter. Hired a man with a power saw to cut the rest. Before he arrived, I tied red ribbons on the young oaks and hickories I didn't want cut. I explained this, asked him to cut only the honeysuckle, "the fountain-looking things." He kinda-sorta did. There were plenty left. Spent this morning clipping and stacking the one-inch-or-less honeysuckle branches. The berries in the second photo are the fruit of the shrub in the first photo.

 

Invasive honeysuckle is truly removed either by ripping it out of the ground, roots and all, by fire, or by painting the cut stumps with Roundup or Rodeo herbicide (no other herbicide will work). Can't do any of those. When the shrubs grow back, though, they'll mostly be an inch or less across. Then they'll face the business end of my lopper, its blade sharpened daily, and I'm just as persistent as they are.

Sassafras Magic and Lore

Pluck
the mitten-shaped leaves from the sassafras tree, then snap their stems and inhale the warm spicy sweetness. Once a guest here dug up a root and we made sassafras tea and talked about how root beer, made with sassafras, used to be actual alcoholic beer, and that sassafras twigs used to be toothbrushes, and it's good for lots of other stuff. Like what, I wondered today, and looked up all sorts of lore:

• Every part of the tree is fragrant.
• A ship, boat, or bed made of sassafras wood will keep evil spirits away.
• Tuck a leaf in your wallet or business till to stretch the money you already have. I tucked leaves between the checkbook's and account book's pages.
• It's lucky to carry some dried sassafras root with you when seeking a job.
• Rub the leaves on wounds or skin eruptions as an antiseptic and anti-bacterial treatment. That'll probably work better if the leaves haven't turned their autumn yellow.
  
• Sassafras tea is a "toner," meaning it will enhance health. The U.S. banned it in 1960 but it has been legally available since 1994. The safrole in sassafras was carcinogenic in rats given huge doses. It is now thought that no human can ingest that much safrole even if they tried, and nutmeg contains safrole too. Most store-bought sassafras drinks use artificial flavor.
  
• Dried sassafras leaves, ground up, make that "file" stuff without which gumbo is not gumbo.
• Woodpeckers and wild turkeys like the fruits.
  
• There used to be a huge sassafras industry: American sassafras was exported to Europe, where the tree is not native. Europeans liked the wood for ships and furniture. They also used sassafras as a cure for syphilis.
• Germans used to call it "fennel wood."
  
• Sassafras is the "triple goddess" tree because any one plant can have three kinds of leaves: ovate, single-lobed, and multi-lobed.

You read it here first, or second!

Why Hollyhocks Are Old-Fashioned Flowers

"Old-fashioned beauty," "old-fashioned Southern favorite," "definitive old-fashioned garden plant" -- why, when someone says "hollyhocks," does "old-fashioned" precede it? These yesterday were on an island in a strip-mall parking lot: showy, heart-colored; perhaps the popular "creme de cassis" color. I want some! Blossoms the size of a face! I want to meet whoever planted them for our enjoyment. And I want to know why they're old-fashioned.

My brother-in-law just phoned and I told him "hollyhocks" and he said his grandmother mentioned hollyhocks in one of the poems she wrote.

They're originally from China, where they're called "shu kui." Google Translate says "shu" means "book" and "kui" means "God," "chief," or "serious"; Wikipedia says that in Chinese legend, Kui was the inventor of music and dancing. In 15th-century England the plant was named "holyoke." They are neither holy nor oak, but it is said, who knows if it's true, hollyhocks arrived in England from the Holy Land.

Ancient photos show the house I lived in from birth to age 7 (house built 1887; no longer standing; it's a parking lot!) had a tumbledown white-painted arched wooden trellis, with two seats.

Me and Aunt Anna in Sunday best. The car's four "ventiports" identify it as a Buick.

Photograph taken summer 1958 is of me and "aunt" Anna Savin (nee Weiss), a German who during the war dug ditches in Russia. The trellis held morning glories in season, and behind us, outside of the fence, on long bare stems, are hollyhocks. Alongside the house in spring grew violets and lilies of the valley, and in summer,  "four o'clocks," cradling smart black seeds; we also had peony bushes. A lilac bush and orange lilies bloomed out back. My parents planted none of these. All these flowers are still designated "old-fashioned" perennials. There were rambling roses, because I remember the scent and thorns.

Those are all old-fashioned flowers because they're English cottage-garden flowers, and there must have been a time when English was the type of flower garden for a Midwestern householder to have. In the language of flowers, hollyhocks mean "ambition" or "fecundity."

I remember as a kid crumbling between my wondering fingers the corncob-like stamens of the hollyhocks. The flowers in the parking lot in 2020 I did not touch.

Bunny 2020

This bunny is in its Eden. Always as the sun sets, a couple of bunnies enjoy dining on the part of the lawn kept mown. The day had been one of those stunningly blue and temperate June days (I think today is another). For a while this property was low on bunnies, but this year young ones were born, too young to know enough to run away from me. They grew up. So I know bunnies are thriving as they should. The second bunny ran as I approached, so this one looks lonely, but I assure you it isn't.

Territory

It's a young turtle if its shell is vividly and clearly painted and shines, and surely a young one if it's crossing a road, likely in search of a place claim-able as territory. With great self-possession -- animals seem to have more confidence as humans have less -- it held its pose as I sidled near and snapped the camera. In the background is my own home, my own protective shell. So this is a picture of what's important to us both.

On this walk just a few minutes before, yards down the road, I met a pencil-slender baby copperhead snake lounging on the gravel in the exact spot copperheads in summer quite often lounge on the gravel. Recalling well the first time I met a copperhead -- full-sized -- at that spot and nearly stepped on it, on every walk year-round I glance down at that point on the road, and step lightly. Perhaps I bring them into being by imagining them there. Happy summer solstice.

Violets on Earth

I have not much to say today that springtime can't say for me. First, April has had numerous sunless days. After several sunless days, turning into weeks, of no visitors and no visiting, fewer phone calls because we're all in shock and can barely mumble, and all aware we are all in the same waterlogged boat, and this is real life -- a sunny day and noticing violets at my feet felt like spiritual sustenance. I don't grow these. They're 100 percent free random grace.

Happy Earth Day!

Muscling Up

"You start losing muscle mass in your 30s," the senior-yoga-class instructor told our class, "and lose 10 percent more every year." I called out, "That's not fair."

The instructor ignored me and advised us all to work with weights and to up the poundage every time we got good at it. Don't get old, get strong.

She's right, but strength, I secretly think, is secondary. Priority goes to keeping a somewhat youthful shape, and especially knees not draped with crepe-y flesh. So, telling myself it's about knee strength, I started with the "quad" weight machine and related exercises. The "quads" are the long, tough vertical muscles in front of the thighs.

Two weeks, three weeks: The crepe went away! Now that's motivation!

Coincidentally, this is the season the quite common and ordinary Russula mushrooms, such as the one pictured (about 3" in diameter),  muscle their way out of the soil, displacing it if they have to. It takes Russulas about two days to fight their way to standing and you can watch their progress. They lift with their stems and caps more earth than I can with a shovel from this tough, packed, weed-choked soil. They get scarred. They don't quit. What inspires them? Maybe they wanted to be up in time for the autumn equinox. Happy equinox today!

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.

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.

What I Did on Summer Vacation

Things are different up north.

So my sister and brother-in-law unexpectedly agreed to come with me "up north" -- that's all we've ever called it -- this summer and visit a few childhood sites I wanted to see after 51 years. I said, "To see them one last time," but truly wanted to confirm whether I live exactly here because I was imprinted for life by the landscape and farm in Ashland County, WI, where Mom was born and our family had visited with hers maybe five times, certainly in 1958 and 1959 and a few other times, ending in 1968. Neither had my sister, three years younger than I, seen those places since.

Ashland County, WI

I remembered the place was at a crossroads and we drove 15 miles up the main highway but did not find it. The motel keeper gave directions and we drove four miles out of town on a nearly exact copy of a road not a mile from the Divine Cabin, one I nicknamed "Memory Lane" because it matches my ancient memory. "I am imprinted! I am!" I breathed. My grandfather's tavern, built of stone around 1930, still operates under the original name, "Maple Grove." Contrast this with a bar called "The Ripsaw" we passed in a godforsaken dust-bunny of a town half an hour to the south -- northern WI was once all sawmills and turpentine. Now it's all fishing lakes and taverns. In our grandfather's tavern at a crossroads I drank a beer in the same dark and thickly varnished interior, the stovepipe in the wall gone, though, and two flat TVs tuned to sports.

On this late Sunday afternoon there were three other customers. My very Christian sister and brother-in-law, who never drink, were clearly uncomfortable -- brother-in-law, age 61, ordering Pepsi for them both, confessed he did not know how to sit at a bar or when to pay. So we stayed only the length of my beer -- having driven several hours that day -- and I took a few snaps with my sister. I said to the bartender, a man slightly younger than we who looked as if he'd enjoyed a lot of good rock 'n' roll music, "Our grandfather used to own this place."

"What was his name?"

I told him and said our uncle had later owned and run the tavern, and he said, "I used to work with Dorothy (our aunt, who long survived our uncle) at La Croix," manufacturers of the world's finest fishing rods, its factory and factory store in the next town over. Outside of La Croix a machine vends bait. I said I would take its picture for my blog. My sister, who left the workforce in the 1990s to stay home and be a mother, asked "What's a blog?"

In the pouring rain I did not try to photograph the tavern's unique exterior, but we briefly slowed to look up a gravel drive at the farmhouse where we'd slept a couple of times -- I remember waking to see frost on the window's inside -- and the house, barn, and silo sat as we'd left them a half-century before. Brother-in-law was willing to drive up to the house (because it didn't serve alcohol?) but I told him strangers shouldn't do that. I didn't feel I could ask my sister and brother-in-law to return the next morning, after the rainclouds cleared, to take exterior snaps of the bar, because now I wanted the favor of seeing the local lake I'd never seen, where my mother said she had taken visitors out in a boat to fish. (She'd told my sister that, but I never heard it.) We went. There I took a picture and said to the pretty lake, "Hi, Mom. Thanks. We have not forgotten you."

"July 29, 2019"

The previous entry discusses a painting titled "July 25, 1949" and I couldn't imagine its landscape, with that spit of land all wooded with evergreens, being based in some actuality, but as luck would have it, in Ashland, WI on July 29, on Lake Superior, I saw that landspit, with hills in the background too, which I photographed at once, noticing that if the painter, John Wilde, a notable painter and lifelong Wisconsin resident, had been painting his painting outdoors, from life, he would have been standing in what is now a lakefront park, so it is entirely possible, except now the sandy flats have been filled in and a concrete walk laid down for lakefront strolls, and anything resembling a dilapidated wooden shack with a handbill affixed is long gone.