another big dead tree

Behold the lolling loblolly

Observances

another big dead tree

New Year’s Eve winds knocked down another big old loblolly pine across the nature trail, and so I had to start the year by playing lumberjack. This pine was just big enough to make a lot of work with the bow saw and just far enough from a power supply that my electric chain saw was no help, but it was rotten enough that the work went quickly. Two-thirds of the way through with the saw was enough, and then a good whack with the poll of an axe finished it off. I wasn’t about to repeat the process unnecessarily, though, so a freshly sawn cross-section of pine the diameter and height of an eight year-old’s head watches you coming round the bend.

Our woods are at the age when the first-generation pines are dying off and being replaced by hardwoods, but in this little section of woods the secondary succession is going slowly, with only two skinny sweetgums in an area several yards square. That section is lower than the rest and stays wet much of the year, and I wonder if the trees in the surrounding woods simply don’t propagate well in such damp bottomland, or whether saplings are more easily felled by vines (we are overrun by fox grape and, until I started ripping it out last summer, oriental bittersweet) when their roots have only loose wet earth to cling to. Come spring I may try clearing out the tangle of vines and pine stumps down there and transplanting a few saplings that won’t make it elsewhere.

Meantime the trail is clear, even if alongside is still a bit of a mess — but that’s the wild woods, and by June the foliage will have hidden it all anyway.

Monday morning

Observances

The weekend’s storm tore the remaining leaves from the trees: in great clouds fluttering like blackbirds taking wing, were the world turned upside-down. Lonely survivors cling to their branches while the bodies of their brothers, summer’s corpses, lay strewn on my windshield. I should put dimes on their eyes to mark the season, but they have none, and there are too many. The wipers flash, tick-tick, and it is winter.

baby snowpeople

Let it snow. No, really

Observances

Saturday we had significant snowfall for the first time in four years: only an inch and a half, but enough that I no longer need fear that the Monkey will begin to think the stuff a fairy tale, like Santa Claus and supply-side economics. In a normal winter we get a little snow — seven-plus inches is the annual mean — but it hasn’t snowed as much as an inch since 2004. Having grown up with doorknob-high drifts and blanket forts on snow days and twice-layered jeans that soaked through sledding and left crimson cold burns on my thighs, I’ve had to lower my standards for “significant snowfall” these latter barren years. Now I get excited by flakes no bigger than my dog’s dandruff, and my daughter, having no standards at all, makes do with whatever she finds: the five inch-high snowperson adorning our porch rail attests to the determination of a child who can read chapter books about polar bears but has never set foot in snow deeper than the tread on her boots:

baby snowpeople

Sad, but one has to make do with what one has. I filled the bird feeders, gave the ducks fresh straw, checked to make sure I still owned a snow shovel, and settled in to enjoy the show. Even the basset hounds, who had never seen snow either, loved it — a clean slate for scents, I suppose — although if we get a real snow one day, I am going to have to knit poor Everett a jock strap.

puppy Everett

Welcome, Everett

Observances

We lost both our dogs last year, and although Sadie, the new girl, is a wonderful dog, a house isn’t a home without at least two basset hounds. And so:

puppy Everett

This guy happened to be available five days before Christmas, and so here is is. We named him Everett, after Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but should maybe have named him Marvin, as in Starvin’ Marvin, because he approaches a bowl of food like a Visigoth to Rome. When not hungrily eyeing herds of cattle he has a quiet confidence that I think will make him an excellent dog, and he seems to be pretty smart; at ten weeks old he will already sit on request. (Not “command” so much because he’s only ten weeks old, and also because he’s a basset hound.)

Sadie adores him and has played with him constantly, when she isn’t sleeping on the couch with him. They’re already Best Friends Forever. One dog is a pet; two and you really are sharing your home with another species. I missed that. Merry Christmas to me.

Incidental lumberjack

Observances

Mid-afternoon a tree fell in the yard. No wind, no rain, only the slow crescendoing crack of something gone very very wrong and then a rustle and — wait for the thud, but no thud. The tree hung over the yard, balanced precariously in the crotch of a low shrub and, twenty feet higher, a branch of a poplar. From the house its support was invisible and the angle of its pause impossible, as if it had thought better of its fall once begun. A heavy tree, dead for some time but unrotted and still solid, and if it was coming down soon enough one way or another I preferred it not fall on the dog’s head or on mine, so I dragged out the chain saw and trudged through the underbrush. I had to cut the tree on the upstroke, the saw at the height of my head, to keep it from crushing the fence when it fell, but it split neatly and the two logs fell on either side of the fence, one only slightly bending the wire. We need to rebuild a couple of our garden beds if we intend to use them again and now we have logs to bound them, and the work made me feel sufficiently useful that I felt justified in having a Manhattan, with two cherries, before dinner.

Over, gracefully

Observances

Hiking the hills above the Eno River. By a stream that feeds the river the long stem of a wildflower, heavy with blossom after a sudden rain, hangs in a gentle arc a foot over the path. Sadie pauses to sniff. She could go around the errant stalk or shove its petal-weight aside, but she hesitates a mere moment before leaping like a cat, quickly, delicately, her basset legs splayed briefly along the curve of her body, the flower undisturbed.

Feynman, heavier built, could never have lept a twelve-inch obstacle from a standing start, but could she, ever the showman, she would have glanced up at me afterwards to make sure I’d been watching. But from Sadie there is no glance, no need for my applause. She lands with less drama than her bulk would imply and trots on, nose to the ground, content, her moment of grace meant only for herself.

We are what we don’t discard

Observances

Cleaned out the shed that doubles as storage and workshop, the workshop half mostly theoretical the past few years as the storage expanded and my time contracted, and was unable to explain the choices I made about what to keep and what to throw away. When I was in graduate school and had less stuff, less money, more time, and a need to compensate for my endemic uselessness, I saved everything — odds and ends of hardware, bits of rope, scraps of wood, the wheels off an old lawn mower. And I used most of it, the lawn mower wheels finding their way onto a moveable grazing pen for the ducks. But no shed is infinite. Four lawn ‘n’ leaf bags await next week’s garbage pickup.

Discarded:

  • a step stool that I built in 1998; I designed it badly so that it tips over whenever you step on it, and haven’t used it since the turn of the century
  • staining rags, work gloves, and knee pads chewed by mice
  • two broken lamps that I don’t like but have been meaning since 1994 to fix
  • the balls from my childhood croquet set (the mallets are long gone)
  • sixty or so egg cartons purchased when the ducks were still laying regularly (actually I composted these)

Kept:

  • countless pieces of wood too small to be of any use
  • five dozen mason jars, in addition to the dozens actually in use in the house
  • four gallon bottles of antifreeze, each more than half full

I can admit my failure to build a decent stepstool and that the ducks are getting old and won’t be replaced, but I can’t shake the vision of endless shelves of pickles and applesauce and sauerkraut I know perfectly well I don’t have time to make. But I like the idea that I could, just as I like the idea that I could build a desk or some bookshelves in my newly accessible workshop.

I could write the shed as metaphor, that when you are young a shed is twelve by sixteen feet of possibility, that the junk in it is not junk but the physical manifestation of your experience stored as raw materials for the future, and that at some later age you reach a point where your accumulated past chokes the life out of the future. But that would be silly. It’s just a shed.

The words we leave behind

Observances

1. Ordered descent

On the wall by the stairs of my grandmother’s house she hung trivets of the kind you might find at a tourist trap. Rough cast iron, self-consciously old-timey, painted with whimsically tacky messages. Four of them in a line, so you could read as you descended:

Come in, sit down, relax, converse. Our house doesn’t always look like this. Sometimes it’s even worse.

and

I’m not a fast cook, I’m not a slow cook. I’m a half-fast cook!

When my grandparents packed up the house and moved into a retirement community I asked for the trivets, but it was only after she died that I noticed the penciled notes she had made on their backs: LT. END, LT. MID, RT. MID., and RT. END. Removing the trivets from the wall to paint, she had labeled them so they could be returned promptly to their proper position. Whimsical, but ordered. They are scattered now, one in my office, one in the kitchen, two boxed in a closet. But I like to think they will be reunited someday, and I will know how to arrange them when they are.

cherry tomatoes

American dream in an envelope

Observances

cherry tomatoesWith the end of the holidays the seed catalogs arrive. There may be nothing more American than a seed catalog: it is both the song of nature and the promise of perfectability, conveniently packaged for a low low price. It lures us with photographs of plump vegetables in green gardens and plump children in green grass, the fruit of the earth and of our loins, the promise of spring and of a new generation. Beneath swelling tomatoes and glistening heads of broccoli captions proclaim Hybrid! They are bigger, stronger, more durable, better tasting, more nutritious, longer growing, the wonder of technology. We can make the world better; just add water and warm sun and hard work and clean living. It may not be uniquely American, this promise of technology and commerce to grant us natural wonder and old-fashioned virtue, but it is American. An American dream in an envelope. In the pit of winter it is irresistable.

Feynman and I sledding

Feynman, 1994-2006

Observances

Feynman, our first basset hound, died yesterday. She was twelve. A tumor burst in her abdomen, but she wasn’t in pain for long, and we had time to say goodbye and buy her one last cheeseburger and some coffee ice cream.

She was my first dog. I don’t even know where to begin. This is the best I can do.

  1. She was a horrible puppy. She chewed up our wedding album, books, CD cases, chairs, carpeting, and four straight pins that after a night in the hospital she passed without incident. We still have the straight pins, in a plastic jar in the closet. I can maybe understand one; but four?
  2. Despite all that, and despite our obedience trainer’s joke that as a basset hound she would be her “special ed student,” Feynman was certified as a Canine Good Citizen when she was two. For years I had the certificate framed on the wall over my desk. I never hung the Ph.D., just the CGC.
  3. We used to watch a lot of TV, because we were in graduate school and avoiding work. Sometimes we were desperate enough to watch rodeo, and Feynman sat on the couch and watched with us. She was a rodeo fan. If I changed the channel, she would look pointedly at the remote control, then glare at me.
  4. You might not think a dog could glare. You might not think a dog could have a lot of expressions Feynman used daily. When I did something she thought was stupid (like put up a Christmas tree or bring home a puppy) she looked at me with a combination of guilt-inducing sorrow and something close to pity for being so thick.
  5. She could balance a Milk Bone on her nose, flip it up, and catch it in the air. She gave the impression that a lot of things were beneath her dignity, but food talks; dignity walks. Thanksgiving will never be the same without her.
  6. She had a working vocabulary of over a hundred words. We counted them, once. Her favorite was “waffle.”
  7. She once outsmarted my mother-in-law. She pretended that she needed help getting up onto the couch, and when Kathy’s mom got out of her comfortable chair to help her, Feynman leapt up into the warm spot on the chair. There was no getting between Feynman and her personal comfort.
  8. I could talk about her as the noble dog, and in fact she could carry herself with an air of nobility. But she also thought the litterbox was a snack bar and the cat a vending machine. So I won’t.
  9. When we brought Toby home from the breeder Feynman, the pampered only dog, knew immediately her gig was up. I have a photo framed on my bookshelf of her on that day looking at us as though we had sold her to the redneck neighbors. She growled at him, she barked at him, she wanted him dead. She stayed surly for a full year, and then they were best friends for eight years after.
  10. If you referred to them as “the dogs” and told them to do something, she ignored you. What, me? Toby was the dog. She was, well, Feynman.
  11. When Kathy found a kitten starving in the drainpipe under our driveway and brought it inside, it decided that Feynman was its mother and tried to suckle off of her. She kissed him so much that we had to take him away from her; he was soaked in basset drool. We didn’t want a cat, but we kept him. Now we have three. I blame her.
  12. One Christmas when we were visiting my parents it snowed and we took Feynman sledding: grabbed her, held her on the flexible flyer, and careened down the icy hill. At the bottom she leapt away, shook herself off, barked at me, then raced to the top of the hill to do it again.
  13. This summer when she came with us to the farmer’s market every week, limping around the lot on her arthritic hip, she made so many friends that there are people who changed their Saturday morning schedules so they could see her.
  14. There were times when she seemed nearly human, but she made me a dog person and taught me to be a dog, and that’s as good a gift as anyone has ever given me.

Feynman and I sledding