Hired Help

I heard that Debbie is decent and honest and "a cleanin' fool," so I phoned. My house, at any level I'd have to stretch to, has not been well or fully cleaned for over a year. She has no car so I picked her up in the city.

She was great. She scrubbed the kitchen ceiling and fan, the walls, cabinets inside and out and tops, back of the stove and beneath the sink. She took down the kitchen wall clock and re-set it -- it had been an hour off since late March. Also dusted walls, mopped floors, vacuumed, etc. Total of eight hours. All the while drinkin' coffee and Pepsi. Meanwhile I mowed the lawn, pulled weeds, cut back some creeping poison ivy, and cleaned out the garage.

I woke up this morning and thought, Glory be, my kitchen was clean, finally clean enough to suit me. We had even folded up the living-room daybed -- a job I couldn't do alone. In the bed position it only reminded me how much of 2007 I had spent laid up with three torn muscles that are now so scarred up there's places I can't stretch to.

Debbie has long Missouri roots and grew up near the Black River. For a long time she was a housekeeper for the elderly, she said, until government funding for that was cut. She was also caretaker for her grandmother, who died last year at 91. I worried that she might secretly hate cleaning and me for asking and paying her to do it. Oh no. "Cleaning is my livelihood," she said, and she offered to come back and clean for a day whenever I wanted, monthly or every other month. An irresistible thought.

I am over 50 and Debbie is the first hired housekeeper I have ever had, probably the first my squeaky-clean family has ever had in the three generations I know about. Thought long and hard before finally deciding there was no shame in hiring help.

Learning from Well Water

Before the electric pump draws it up into daylight, the well water here has had a long and mysterious career. Fabulously icy, and stony-sweet, it’s divine -- and as hard as nails. It's taught me this:

1. For calcification around fixtures, spray with 50 percent vinegar, let it sit, wipe like you mean it, and then – wearing eye protection -- use a kitchen knife to chip off what remains.
2. Rinse hair and face with bottled water or rainwater to stave off ratty “stonewashed” hair and ashy skin.
3. A “stonewashed” effect will suffuse all your fabrics eventually. Laundering them inside out will help them last a bit longer.
   
4. Drinking glasses will look like you just drank milk from them unless you use a dishwasher armed with Jet-Dry. Alternately, buy drinking glasses by the case, or explain to your company that the glasses aren’t really dirty, that you honestly did wash them, that the hard water clouds them up. Hard water also wears out glass so that it breaks more easily.
5. Use a filtration pitcher for most of your drinking and cooking. Your coffeepots and pans will last longer. Filter the water you give to pets.
6. In your sink or washtub, detergent will look not sudsy but like scum. The harder the water, the less suds you get. But the detergent is still working. The fact is that sudsing agents are added to detergents and shampoos merely for show. Hard water fights on the side of reality. I find that fantasizing about luxurious lather is almost as good as the real thing.

Hard Times & Noble People

This sign is in front of a small-business auto-exhaust shop in town, and it speaks of the times. Many more people shop now at the no-frills grocery: all three checkout lanes are busy. People carry their groceries home -- walking.

There are more new employees at Wal-Mart, working very strictly, as if they have master's degrees from Wal-Mart University. Rummage sales, church suppers, food drives, fundraisers, foreclosures. Fewer doctor visits, less travel and dining out. Higher bills for everything. With gasoline $3.68/gallon (today -- who knows about tomorrow?) every soul feels pinched. (Thanks to a certain P------t of the United States whose name we don't mention.)

All the same, there's an atmosphere: everyone making an effort to hold their heads up, hide their worries, keep their dignity and put on a smile, and think to themselves, "There's some that's got it a lot harder than I do."

Hail, Hail

Screwy late-April weather, even for the Midwest: 75 degrees. Then 35 degrees overnight. Then sunny. Then big clouds. Then pea-sized hail (pictured, in the grass); within 10 minutes it's sunny and all gone. Now 60 degrees, partly cloudy, with strong chilly wind. Never a dull moment.

His Lordship

"A spectacular crow-sized woodpecker," says the Peterson Guide. It's rare to see pileated woodpeckers on suet, but pairs live here year-round and come to dine and entertain me from December to May, and again from July (when they train their sons and daughters to eat suet) to September (when the parents take a much-deserved vacation). They live for up to 12 years, and dwell in "singles" apartments in hollowed-out trees. The male has a red "mustache." They all scream for joy. The well-known cartoon woodpecker was modeled on a pileated woodpecker. Photo taken today!

Bird Migration News

Seen yesterday: a Yellow-Throated Warbler. My first! Now he's gone. So spring migration is finally in full swing.

Spring's first hummingbird this morning at 7:30. In 2007, first sighting was on April 12.

Anticipated soon: Baltimore oriole and Rose-Breasted Grosbeak. Pictured is last year's male oriole, on the suet. It was May 6. He and his mate mostly drank from the hummer feeders. The orioles stayed two days so I got a photo. Last year's grosbeaks stayed so long I'd hoped they'd settled, but they moved on.

To be fair to everyone else sighted around the food and water today: Pileated, downy, hairy, and redbelly woodpeckers; white-throated sparrow (with the unmistakable song!), chipping sparrow, jay, cardinal, bluebird, crow, chickadee, nuthatch, pigeon, towhee, and cowbird. The cowbirds just got here. The juncos went north last week.

Biggest Quake in 40 Years

Bed was quaking like it was strapped to a motorbike. This woke me up. Must be I had a bad dream, I thought, but I was wide awake and it kept going. Stuff started squeaking and clinking. The clock said 4:40 a.m. "This must be -- an earthquake!" Checked beneath the bed just to see if anybody was playing with my perceptions. Nothin there but the rifle. Looked out the window to see if other lights in the hills were snapping on. Didn't see any. 

Then I did what I learned to do when Nature is reminding us who's boss: 1. Put on shoes. 2. Find purse, load it with medicines and checkbook. 3. Sit tight in the room with strongest walls and least windows. 4. Remind myself where are the shutoff valves for water and propane. 5. Switch on TV or radio. On TV, there was only Cops, so I went online to see if anybody knew anything, but it was too soon, and then at 5:00 a.m. the newscasters came on and said it had been a 5.2 Richter scale earthquake centered 100 miles east of here. I've felt one other quake, in 1989. That one felt like a truck passing in the street; didn't last 20 seconds. This one was larger and lasted about 40 seconds. Aftershock at 10:15 a.m. Felt disgusted (what, is this quake stuff going to ruin my day??). Biggest quake since 1968. 

Exactly on 102nd anniversary of San Francisco quake! Fortunately not big enough to create fatalities. Of course we'd all heard about the New Madrid Fault line that made a horrible quake in 1811, when the Mississippi River flowed backwards and killed about everybody on it. But this wasn't even the New Madrid Fault, it was another, smaller one where Illinois meets Kentucky. Just a reminder for us all of who is the boss.