Everyone seemed to like my garden yesterday, so you get more pitchas; and I get to knock off early today, and accomplish a fatherly and achieve a paternalistic and break the daddified tape and so forth without much additional effort. The search for lack of additional effort required is a mark of the breed.
So reader and writer and all-around swell guy westsoundmodern commented yesterday:
Sheesh! From the way you’ve described the place in the winter, I had in my minds eye a vision of standing at the north pole and turning a 360.
Okey dokey, Butch. Let’s say you’ve got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals. You go see an abandoned house in Uppastump, Maine, Decemberish, and you look out the back window and see this:
I triple-dog-dare you to do the mental arithmetic that produces this, a year later, in your mind’s eye:
Well, you know me; I deserve a Fields Medal for mental arithmetic, but that’s way, way past my best shot. You need the Rainman love-child of Salvador Dali and Martha Stewart doing your mental arithmetic to get from there to here.
I hope all you dads get sommodiss in your garden today:
Fie On Thee, Horseflies, gets a handful of visitors every day. I’ve had more people read single essays I’ve written, of course, but this one is my intellectual leaky faucet. Sorry the item is written so poorly, people; as the old man said, if I’d have known I was gonna live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.
If you’re new around here, I live in a swamp. I know I’m supposed to call it a “pristine wetland,” but if you don’t mind, I’ll call it the bog-to-hell-and-gone instead. Everything comes out of that swamp all the time, sometimes to delight us, sometimes to bite me and give me a fever of 105. The swamp will kill you if you let it. It would pull my house apart in a decade if I ever stopped mowing the lawn.
The worst thing the swamp produces is the horsefly. It’s not actually only one kind of a beast; there’s a handful of types. They appear after the midges and mosquitoes, but before the poison ivy, generally. They’re the most vicious thing I can imagine. They attack like kamikazes, and get a blood meal from you with scissor mandibles. They make the end of my yard miserable for five weeks or so in the summer. Let’s kill them.
Go down the basement and bring your heir and your spare.
You need a plan. It should contain all the information you need to build the thing, plus a list of all the items you need to purchase to make it. It should be a loopy looking long-haired- equation looking thing like that.
1/2″ plumbing pipe, a clear plastic one-gallon jug with a screw lid, a funnel, a roll of 4 mil plastic, some punky wood strapping I dumped behind the shed 5 years ago.
The kids like the tinkertoy vibe of the plumbing pipe. I like the kids.
An 8″ square of MDO left over from windowboxes.
If you can’t use things for what they’re not intended for, you have no business on the Internet.
You buy a 20″ beachball at Wal-Mart, put a blessed halo around it with duct tape, leave a tab flap to pierce and hang the ball in the center with kite string. Spray paint the thing black while it’s hanging.
Horseflies are dumb. They see the ball swaying in the breeze and think it’s a spherical cow or something. When disabused of this notion, they always fly straight up. They eventually make their way through the funnel and die in the heat of the clear jug. No bait or poison is necessary. The trap is a little more than a week old and the jug has thousands of the nasty bugs in there. For Amityville spectacle, some of the beasts lay their eggs in the corpses of their brethren before perishing, and the little sluglike larvae hatch and crawl around in there too. For a while. Hence the breeding cycle is interrupted, and next summer is made better now.
What do you know. It works. The kids can play in the yard again. If I’d have known it would work, I would have made a better looking one.
“If I’d have known it would work, I would have made a better looking one” would make an excellent epitaph for my grave, now that I think about it.
We got a little summer cabin fever this last weekend. I was plain weary, and my wife was weary of all of us men in our little home, and we had to go somewhere else. Anywhere.
We often find ourselves going to places most people would call “anywhere.” Our friends describe vacations and sporting events and concerts and so forth that sound like everyone’s idea of fun. Sometimes I find myself describing our activities to our acquaintances and family and I see an expression come over their faces that I’ve seen on people that are hearing about eating broccoli when they’d rather be given directions to a steakhouse. I’m sorry, we can’t help ourselves.
We went to the Heritage Museum and Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts. The four year old will go anywhere and look at anything, so he’s not a problem. But a twelve year old? He can be bored, and boring.
He invited one of his schoolmates to come. That made it better. They were a pack of wolves all by themselves, and the world was their flock of sheep. We gave them a cellphone and let the line out a little on the invisible string we keep on our children. We were essentially alone in this place anyway.
The place is a big landscaping show, but late summer has few things to recommend it flower-wise. My wife and I were grateful to see a patch of grass that didn’t need mowing and wasn’t crabgrass, so we didn’t care. We went inside that windmill, and heard the docent, perhaps only slightly older than the revolutionary war vintage structure itself, lecture the few of us on the who what when where and why of it. My four year old smiled at him and the docent turned the thing on for him. The rest of us would have got bupkis. My four year old could get a dog off a meat truck. We watched the canvas sheets pass by the dutch door for a good, long, time.
The place is pleasant, and everybody that works there was more than pleasant, but it’s got no real rhyme or reason to it. And it gets a little less coherent as time passes. There’s a reproduction of a huge round shaker barn, and it’s filled with antique cars. I enjoy both things and find them interesting, but there’s a kind of incongruity to such juxtapositions that I can’t shake.
The older boys were jazzed to go because there is a an enormous reproduction sort -of-Fort Ticonderoga loghouse there, and it was filled with an interesting and compelling collection of guns and weapons and Indian artifacts and lead toy soldiers. I say “was filled,” not “is filled,” because we went in and it was mostly gone, and replaced by a rather tepid display of memorabilia from the Cape Cod Baseball League. There are only so many pictures of future big leaguers looking gaunt because they haven’t figured out where to buy human growth hormone yet that you can stand to look at. And what’s it doing in a fort? Bring back the guns, will you? We saw a few shunted off into little niches here and there. The baseball museum could have fit in a phone booth.
But the big boys were not deterred. Boys are never deterred. They walked back out into the blazing sunshine and the breeze from the nearby lake, saw me and my lovely wife sitting in the shade of an enormous oak, sized up the beauty and utility of intervening grass, and knew what it all was for.
Is there a spot in your world suitable for quiet contemplation?
I find it’s become a rare thing. You don’t have to be away from the whole world to achieve it. Just the opposite. Being all alone out in the wilderness is not restful. Even a tiny urban dooryard used to have the potential to serve the purpose I’m referring to, or the small parks that would dot the urban landscape. But exterior spaces are mostly too busy or barren, and so suburb or city or exurb, they don’t serve the purpose anymore.
There are fads. Decks, hot tubs, elaborate grilling devices, pools, tennis courts, swingsets, treeforts, bocce, horseshoes… I could keep going, but you get the picture. There’s a great deal of hardscaping in the exterior world these days. I am mostly ambivalent about most of those things. They are either useful or not according to taste. But they are not what I am talking about.
I’m talking about a place that is designed to place a person at ease outdoors, sheltered enough from hubbub to stop for a moment and contemplate the outdoors and your place in it.
I am not often on the lookout for things to do. I have too many things to do. I am looking for a place to do not much of anything for a pleasant moment.
Put a garden in your yard. Put a seat in your garden. Enclose it enough to be private. Give it a view through to something else that is pleasant to look at from a distance. Open it to the sky but dapple the sunlight. Get out of the wind, invite a breeze. Stay on the ground if you can, but get out of the dirt.
Keep the fun out of there. It’s too much like work.
[Editor’s Note: Rerun. The guy’s busy making things besides text. Besides, you all have “Internet Alzheimers” and can’t remember what you read last week, so what’s the diff?]
{Author’s Note: Notable in my mind because it’s the first time my Intertunnel friend Pastor Jeff read my blog and marked the occasion with a comment. A decent sort of fellow, that Jeff. P.S.: I think we just coined the term Internet Alzheimers. And there is no editor.}
We had snow yesterday at daybreak. The light was so faint, and tinged with blue, that the whole scene outside the door seems under water. I took a picture to try to catch the light:
Pine, Oak, Maple, Holly, and a few others mixed in. There are geese and ducks in the water just past the first row of trees. This is the kind of snow we get here in the southcoast; not enough to plow, generally, but enough to soften the barren look of winter a bit.
It’s funny to consider that, according to statistics, what you’re looking at is farmland “lost” to development. This was all a pasture meadow, for ruminant animals 75 years ago, when sturdier folks still tried to cadge a living farming in New England. The old surveying documents use what few trees were here previously as markers, and they were chosen because they were conspicuous for their lonesomeness. The soil is acid and there isn’t much topsoil over the sandy subsoil. You could mow it flat and plant cranberries, but there’s such a glut of cranberries that the government pays farmers not to grow them now, after attracting them to the industry by guaranteeing their prices previously.
My deed actually still allows me to drive my livestock across the road onto my neighbor’s property to water my herds if I need to; but the cats just drink out of the little dishes under the potted plants, so there is no need to take them up on it.
The land we own covers five acres. About three quarters of one acre is lawn, house, driveway, and plantings. The rest is wild, and will remain so. It’s surrounded by thousands of acres of river, fen, swamp, bog, forest, more swamp, brambles, poison ivy, nettles, ticks, and mosquitoes big enough to make you put lead diving shoes on your toddlers outside, lest they be carried off.
Farmland “lost” to development; I think not. Looks like “reforestation” to me. And last time I checked at the supermarket also built on “farmland lost to development,” the shelves are filled with the flesh of the creatures that formerly grazed in what rapidly turned into our little pine jungle. They must have found some of that lost land somewhere else, I expect. Or used less land to generate more food is more likely.
Are the cows any sadder, unable to drink my swampwater? I don’t know. But the ospreys like it here now. So do we.
Tag: gardening
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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