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!

Piety

Autumn brings church-sponsored come-one-come-all suppers of chicken, ham, roast pork, pork sausage (at Catawissa Union Protestant Church, $3 a pound to take home), and beef, advertised in the Events section of the local paper. I never like to take photos of food at these plentiful church suppers because it gives me away as an intellectual, but absolutely had to photograph this dessert table to show you, no matter what anyone thought. (The secret of life is: Nobody's thinking about you. Nobody's looking at you. They're all too busy worrying about themselves.)

Yet how to choose? Pumpkin, seasonal, one of the pleasures of late fall? Lemon, 'cause I get it so rarely? Berry pie, because the summer drought meant no berries in the meadow this season? Cherry, because it's always great? Peach, because you never know what you might be missing? Apple, because that's American? Exotic entry, Amish Pineapple pie? Coconut, or chocolate silk, or pecan pie? Custard? How about a slice of each? How about Union Pacific lays some railroad track out to my house and delivers me pie every day by the boxcar full? The only thing they didn't have was Concord grape pie, a New England regional specialty I liked to make from the purple grapes I and my friends liberated from abandoned grape arbors in upstate New York. I make a good one when I want to do the work.

On my deathbed I just know the pies of my life will pass before me.

If this photo does not make you want to go to church suppers than nothing will.

Change of Season

Always there's a September dawn that isn't a summer dawn, and its clouds are like this: purplish, like bruises, but with holes for powdery light. Not chilly cirrus clouds, they're still cumulus--but different. They don't drift or sail. They part and ponder, commanding attention and my silence. We are facing something. I keep the windows shut at night now. The air dries out and the linoleum on the floor turns cold. Often when this day comes I feel sad: The summer left without me. But it's better to say it this way: I left and moved on, without summer. Took this photo down the road at the horse farm.

Keeping Down Appearances

On warm mornings I wear my pajamas to walk to the mailbox; if it's cooler I'll sling on my bathrobe. If it's night and I'm throwing a mouse's corpse into the meadow, what's the problem if I do it in my briefs and Maidenform? In winter I work outside wearing ludicrously paint-stained sweatshirts, hunter-orange stocking caps, and holey gloves. If my hiking clothes are possibly poison-ivied or full of ticks or chiggers or mud, I'll strip down on the stoop before entering the house. Can't do that in the city.

In the city I had to comb my hair and put on a bra and clean clothes that matched before I left my  apartment building, or children would point and laugh. And I amused  my fellow urban dwellers with my white T-shirts that somehow almost always turned a faint pink, broadcasting the fact that I did my own laundry and was a moron. Heck, I wasn't throwing away good T-shirts because they turned a little bit pink!

I like living here because it allows for appearance improvisation. There's no sense washing my hair if I'm cramming on a ball cap to clean the garage that day. But then if I must go to the hardware store for something, I'll pretend I don't have greasy hat hair, and  -- I don't feel judged, because most everyone looks just like me. Except middle-class moms, who put on yoga clothes in the morning and wear them everywhere, dawn to dusk, because from any one point it'd be a 15-mile trip to go home and change. See, we have our reasons.

Except on Saturday night and on Sunday. Then, if you're gonna see people, you have to clean up. Paradoxically, those are the times that city people get to be slobs.

Rabbits Return

Relieved and pleased to see wild rabbits again in my yard. For two years I wondered if coyotes and feral cats got them all, but I had been spoiled because the huge garden before then attracted them like iron filings. I won this one over after only two days of approaching him (or her) bit by bit for a photo. Bunny story: One day Demetrius was out mowing with our monstrously loud old lawnmower. A rabbit stood alert in the grass near the propane tank and we were amazed that no matter how close Demetrius got with his awful machine it would not scare.Later we figured that it had to be a mother with some young nearby. A mother won't move. Treasure any bunnies you see; they are universal symbols of pluck and luck. P.S. Happy June, my favorite month.

A Five-Day Houseguest

The club chairman asked for a volunteer to host a distinguished astrologer in May and nobody raised a hand so I said, "I will, but it'll be the weirdest experience of his life. My house is Green Acres. And it's 35 miles from the city." The club didn't listen, was merely relieved that somebody would put up this stranger, a Minneapolis man of 67 with a national reputation, while he gave talks in the area and read horoscopes for clients.

I prepped my place with 2 spring cleanings and stocked the fridge with man food: beef and beer. After the cold wet spring, Missouri was suddenly blessed with perfect weather full of lilacs and irises. He said that in Minnesota trees don't have leaves yet. Cardinal birds, bluebirds and hummingbirds amazed him. My woodpeckers drummed on the old TV aerial (sending metallic ringing throughout the house) early each day to wake me up to feed them. Fortunately he had a sense of humor.

Unfortunately he was tall and my guest room, a former garage, is low-ceilinged, but he was extremely gracious -- after all, he'd elected to stay in a stranger's home, not knowing whether I was a nut or neat freak or nympho or what. Fortunately I am none of those and enjoyed his companionship and cooking for him and he gave me a free three-hour horoscope reading. He said he liked horses so we walked to the horse farm (in the photo). He said, "You live in paradise." I said, "Yes, I know."

A city friend asked, "A strange man in your house? What if he tries to hurt you?" I said I'd shoot him. But he was a perfect gentleman and a mensch, into ice cream and fine bakery, and we indulged in these as well as dark beer and spiked lemonade.

He was one of the rare guests that after he had showered and shaved you could not even tell he had been in the bathroom (a very obvious sign that he is married). The old saying is "houseguests, like fish, stink after three days," but he spent five days here and I actually wished he would have stayed longer.

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?

Brown Eggs with Value Added, Part Two

He said when the moon is waning and gives light all night, I can expect the tomatoes I'm raising to ripen faster. I believe him. Farmer Bob, whom I met in December and last posted about in early spring, sits beneath a canopy on the roadside every Wednesday and Saturday next to his 1988 Dodge pickup, selling brown eggs and now summer vegetables in the hellish summer heat. He offers customers a seat in the extra chair he sets out for socializing, and almost always when you drive by there's somebody sitting in it, sometimes me. We've had several conversations on life and gardening.

The eggs are great, although he raised their price to $3.50 because of fuel and feed costs. He knows that's high. He said, "The eggs in the store for 99 cents are okay if you want to bake with 'em. Mine are for if you want to eat 'em." He said he eats eggs and bacon every morning and he's been married four times. I told him I'd phoned a witch and asked her to cast a magic spell for me. He said I didn't have to call a witch, that Jesus was always there to help me.

Yes, Your Honor

This local vegetable stand is unattended. Choose and weigh and bag and pay for your choices (mostly tomatoes, but sometimes potatoes, squash, or jars of salsa) and nobody (or at least nobody I ever see) watches you open the cash box to make your own change. It's an honor vegetable stand, open every summer for years now, an amazing sight in the year 2012. I like its assumption that most people are honorable and decent and don't cheat and deceive, and I like proving that its assumption is still correct. Fear the karma if you are ever tempted to steal. It's fast and and tailor-made for the transgression. In my salad days I once got $10 too much in change and told myself, "What the heck, it's not like I robbed somebody; I will keep it." Shortly after that someone stole my $10 in quarters, all I had with me, stranding me at the laundromat I'd walked through a snowstorm to get to, and I had to drag heaps of dirty clothes and linens home again. That learned me.

How I Got to Live Here

A typed 3"x5" file card tacked up on a bulletin board at the university where I worked said a rural rental property was subletting for a year at $400 a month. I'd been living in a low-rent (bullet holes in my windshield) area of St. Louis for a decade and pined for change. I'd also been visualizing my ideal home: in the woods, near a creek, where night looked like night; I'd even taped up a picture cut from Reader's Digest. Given my situation it was a foolish impossible pipe dream. I phoned. A Dutch physics professor and his artist wife about to tour the world for a year said they sought someone clean and neat who'd occupy the house and care for their cat.
I drove 35 miles from town, increasingly enchanted by the hills and greenery. It was April. Found a little white house with green shutters and door, shaded by old hickory and oak trees (at that time I couldn't tell them apart). I glanced through the kitchen window at the porch and fell in love. The original three rooms of the house was a log cabin. Awkward additions had been tacked on. It came with 100 acres of Ozark foothills. My first night here was in June. I had no bed yet. I lay on the bedroom floor on blankets, the windows open wide to hear everything. The house is on a sandstone cliff, so when I looked out I saw starry sky. The cat was a sweet companion.

After 14 months the couple returned. I asked to be informed if they ever moved away so I could ask to be next to rent it. Moved back to the city and two years and two months later, on Oct. 1, 2001, I moved back into the Divine Cabin and they will take me out feet first. In order to stay here I have refused offers of good jobs and marriage. This old, drafty, complicated house requires hiring people to help me out but I'd rather do that than live somewhere with fewer challenges. The gorgeous stone fireplace doesn't work. The moldy, leaky, ugly, 4x8 bathroom (yes, it's the only bathroom) with the rusted hot-water heater got torn out and updated just this past year. (There's still no bathtub.) Nearly every morning from March through late November I have morning coffee or tea on the stone porch. It is my box seat on the universe. In the city, Summer Solstice meant nothing. Here it means everything.

Happy Summer Solstice June 20 at 6:09 p.m. CDT. Please celebrate anytime that life on earth is a peak experience. This is a meadow celebrating itself, across Highway F, not 50 feet from the LaBarque Creek.

A Sound You Don't Hear Anymore

...What's That Smell?

I had just served fresh pasta and hearty Italian tomato sauce to an appreciative guest, and stepped out on the screened porch where in February the opened bottle of wine keeps cold between pours, and --God Almighty-- a skunk had gotten into an altercation nearby, and the fumes made my my sinuses throb. My city guest called to me, "Zare a skunk out there?" The stink invaded my dining room although I slammed the door shut fast. Angel cake ala skunk suddenly became dreadfully unappealing.

I lit a scented candle and said, let's go into the living room and watch Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. The skunky atmosphere crept in and we kept our breathing shallow. See, my city friends love to come out and visit, but I need a disclaimer that I'm not responsible if a skunk has a bad date with a coyote just outside, or a blacksnake is hunting mice in the bathroom. What is the etiquette if a skunk (the animal, not the human kind) ruins your evening? Do you politely pretend it doesn't reek to high heaven although your eyes feel bathed in onion juice? Do you ask pardon? Do you feel freer to expel your own gas? How about, "I know you want to get the hell out of here ASAP, so at your leisure please feel free to take the opportunity"?

Brown Eggs with Value Added

Saw this pickup today where Bald Pate Road meets the highway. Never saw it before. Turned around, pulled over and trotted up saying, “How much for brown eggs?”

The tall thin older man, wearing flannel and a farm cap (more squarish than a ball cap), extended a very dry, cold and toughened hand. “H'are you today?” he asked. (In the country you don’t run up and demand to do business right away. You greet the person. You look into their eyes and get to know them. And you give value-added. City habits still plague me.)

I said, “Your hens laying already?” (I know they start laying in earnest very early in the year.)

“Mine do year round,” he said. “These eggs yesterday morning and the day before. Three dollars for one dozen.” His egg cartons were a miscellany from all sorts of places and there weren’t many left. He opened a carton and showed me the eggs. I wanted only one carton. But I got my value-added. “What you do with these,” said the farmer, holding the carton and demonstrating, “is turn ‘em upside down and leave ‘em that way every seven days, if you remember to do it, and the eggs stay fresh for 30 days same as now.”

“I never heard that,” I said, appreciatively.

 “I grew up on a farm,” he said, “and my mother and me went to seminars, and if you listen,” he said, tapping an ear, “you learn somethin. Don’t hard-boil these. You’ll never get the shell off.” (That’s true when an egg is too fresh.)

He thanked me for my $3 and wished a Merry Christmas to me and my family, and I wished him a Happy New Year.

Robertsville, MO

General Store, Powell, MO

"Twenty or thirty years ago" this general store in Powell, MO, closed. Along with it, at the center of town, is an abandoned Baptist church (no steeple) built of stone, and a DX station, its roadside sign now tangled in treetops. Another way to describe Powell is that the post office is open although no one works there, and there's a place that publishes gospel music and has since the composer of "I'll Fly Away," Mr. Albert E. Brumley, lived in Powell. He wrote the hymn in 1929, truly Divinely inspired, because it's been recorded by every gospel artist worth mentioning including Andy Griffith, Aretha Franklin, Crystal Gayle, Johnny Cash, and Kanye West. Brumley also wrote 600 other songs. Powell is in the far southwest corner of Missouri where there's not much but scenic Ozark beauty and farming. You'll have to drive 17 miles to buy a Snickers bar. I'll put up some more Powell pictures, but first, this fascinating and unique storefront sign made of horseshoes. That's Divine inspiration too.

Wild Turkey on the Wing

I love wild turkeys. This year's Divine Property flock is 2 moms and 7 young ones who by Nov. 1 are nearly grown. Walking up Timberstone Trail I saw the flock crossing the road, gobbling and wobbling. Excited, I lifted my camera and then, hyper-aware as they are, they saw me and fled into the woods. The last one out of the woods, startled by my approach, shot up into the air and flew. Clicking the photo will give you the best view of it.

Joys of the Rural Mailbox

Having a rural mailbox was the deciding factor in me moving to the country 10 years ago. It's a Pandora's box of joy and mystery. Six days a week someone puts surprises in it. Never know what I'll get. Oh, some items aren't fun, but golly, I've unlatched my box--so much better than those mean little slots in the city--to find checks, postcards, packages, magazines, personal letters...and they just keep a-coming. Whether I'm good or bad, I get mail just the same. Everyone gets mail. It is a type of unconditional love. I love my mailbox as others love a pet. I have walked downhill to it in steaming hot sun, or in starlight, or heavy snow, either to pick up mail or-- this is really neat--put mail INTO my box, up the little red flag and have it taken away! Ten years later, I have not gotten over how great this is, and the only extra I could ever want is a mailing address that says "Rural Route," or, better, "Star Route." Maybe someday.

Yes, these boxes pose challenges. I have to step into the road to get my mail. Others have it worse and have to actually cross the road to their boxes. For me it's a long walk down and a steep one back up. Sometimes, if I've put the flag up, I use binoculars to check it. Mail gets baked, or soaked if the boxes rust or leak, or the latch gets iced shut or fails and the box hangs open like a mouth right on the highway where anybody could reach in (and sometimes, desperate people do), or kids in cars bash them with baseball bats. But I LOVE my mailbox. When the flag won't stay up I repair it (with duct tape). When it's warped I hammer it back into shape. I love all rural mailboxes. But my own I love with a passion that is unlike any other. Mine used to have morning glories twining up its post; divine; after 2002 and the cliff-blasting and road widening, no more. Still I love it just as much. Photo is of a box down the road with natural, native Tickseed Sunflower (Bidens aristosa) growing up on it right now. Prettier than mine. But so what.

Ebony Jewelwing

A stunning sight: blue/green titanium body and black velvet wings. It's not a dragonfly; it's a damselfly, Calopteryx maculata, the Ebony Jewelwing. First saw it in the jungle-like road shoulder a few days ago. Recalled a short course with a professional nature photographer, who said, about photographing wildlife, "If you've seen it there once, wait and it will come back." So this evening I took the camera, but thought this elegant insect was too amazing ever to see again. Saw it, couldn't believe my luck, eased myself down into the road shoulder, promptly slipped in the water at the bottom and fell and scared the thing off. Waited quietly about a minute, and it did come back.

How to tell dragonflies from damselflies: Dragonflies at rest extend their wings to the sides; damselflies fold them on their backs, as you see. I feel truly privileged to have spent some time on earth with this lovely creature. Its beauty and getting to share it with you is worth all the gasoline in all the commutes I have to make because I live out here, and it is worth the time the car slid off the road in the snow, and worth an uninsulated bedroom that tops out at 50 degrees in winter, and worth hornworms eating my kale and ticks and chiggers up my pant legs. I hope you understand me. There are some things money just can't buy. The Ebony Jewelwing is most often found in the Ozarks. How lucky.

Wildflower Week: May 11

For a long time I thought this spectacular floral firework was a "passion flower," but it's a Horsemint. Blooms briefly, dries out quickly. I love the purple freckles. In the same family is a quite similar flower, better known, called Bee Balm. Latin name of this one: Monarda bradburiana. Unforgettable.

Wildflower Week, May 5

It's phlox. But it's different. The petals are lobed, not separate and defined. That's because it's creeping phlox, Phlox subulata. I love the blue flowers.