Birds of a Feather

In regard to chickadees and bird feeders, I've come to the conclusion that humans may be just as startled by wildlife as wildlife to humans. My experiment with the chickadees has been going well. Today whole flocks came to feed alongside blue jays and a pair of flickers. I stood with seed in my outstreached hand as still as possible at the feeder, waiting with patience and the sound of fluttering wings above my head. Twice the chickadees came to the feeder with me standing there and both times I was startled which in turn startled them and off they flew.

Winter goal

Since my earliest memories, I have despised talking animals. In the childhood years you get the typical Wind in the Willows and Charlotte's Web fare with toads and pigs conversing in their lingua franca nonsense while attempting to illustrate the higher social good that can generally be found in most children's books. All of this animated blabbering seems to lead reminiscing adults to engage with those talking dogs and cats that creep into the yearly offering of television commercials and greeting cards and any other medium for such nonsense. To my mind, the talking animal seems to be one of the more ridiculous human conceits - humans included in most instances.

But since my earliest memories, I have held a special fascination for people who could "commune" with the animals. In the old fairy tales these people are always quite good and pure and wholesome and as a child I generally aspired to be such a person but when the animals failed to appear I figured they were in the know somehow. As an adult, I have given up on being good and wholesome, but I still have this odd fascination with people who can draw wild animals to them. In Chicago I watched in awe as pigeons flew from blocks around to greet the bird man of Lincoln Square and more recently I read of someone so calm and relaxed they could take their fish from the pond to pet them.

Well call me crazy, but I've decided to indulge my long-standing fixation. Today I set up a bird feeder in front of the cabin with the determination to entice a black capped chickadee to feed from my hand by winter's end. Supposedly this is not an incredibly difficult thing to do and does not require any special goodness or extraordinary calmness. A little patience and tolerance of the cold should be enough, as the chickadee is a friendly and social bird.

But no talking please. If anything, I will learn to speak a little "chickadee" and really set my cap on crazy.

"Just browsing around ma'm, browsing around"

Many years ago, I read about an entire classification of people who do not see the bright light at the end of the tunnel. Instead their near death experiences are conducted in a vast and seemingly endless library: row upon row, shelf upon shelf of books. Well, if I have any choice in the matter, you can be certain I am raising my hand to exit under that "sortie" sign: heaven or hell, come what may.

The relaxing quietude found in browsing through library stacks holds a unique and subtle quality, as calmness is simultaneously joined by an expectant stimulation and time seems to slip into itself as you wander through the limitless reading possibilities, gathering and discarding. It sure beats tunnels and bright lights...

But living in a cabin in the middle-of-nowhere Vermont with a one year old Little Miss, places distinct limits on browsing around. Of course, it isn't that Vermont is without libraries. Montpelier's Kellogg-Hubbard library, a rough hewn granite building with oval windows tucked beneath its eaves is a beacon of warmth and light on a cold winter's evening and I've come to enjoy the small-town atmosphere where the librarian knows my name and I don't even have to show my card to check out books. But the library is small with a limited selection of popular titles and browsing the shelves is necessarily curtailed and frankly not terribly enjoyable.

So I've taken up the next best thing: inter-library loan. Inter-library loan is not particularly new to me. In fact, my sister and I once crossed interlibrary wires when we both wanted to read the same relatively obscure book so we could talk about it together as we were reading. I was living in Baltimore and she in Iowa and when she received her copy she realized that her library had requested the copy from the Baltimore Enoch Pratt Library, essentially "stealing" my copy from beneath my nose.

Nevertheless, I've never been too keen on waiting for a book but in a few days time I should receive my limit of three books requested from The University of Vermont's Baily Howe Library. I may have to wait and may only be able to browse the online card cataglogue, but I couldn't have more anticipation for some "real" books. Books that I am actually interested in reading. It has been a long time.

Momento mori

The past two days have produced five jelly jars of grape syrup (intended to be jam), some blackberry vinegar, one pitcher of apple juice (squeezed from our own rustic apparatus) and innumerable jars of apple butter. Meanwhile we are eating tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and chard from the garden along with the few remaining blackberries from the late bushes. All this succulent food makes you wonder (good and hard) what in the name of the gods is so terribly wrong with the food from the grocery store.

The flavors that we've been sampling seem to burnish the mouth with a rich complexity of sensation and are impossible to compare to the food fraudulence we are pretty much forced to consume the rest of the year. What, pray tell, is wrong with the world when food no longer tastes like food, taking on the qualities of recycled cardboard, instead.

Okay, I know this is an old topic. You can read countless books published in the past decade that will enumerate the heart-wrenching problems with food production in the U.S. but when the real hard-won harvest comes in, it is difficult to refrain from complaining in earnest all over again.

So, I've been setting a few flavor samples aside for the coming winter months as a momento mori of summer as well as the eating sensations that are lost to us by agribusiness. For some reason trying to capture these taste sensations reminds me of the smell-o-rama machine that produces the "olfactory banquet" in the movie Harold and Maude. And if you follow along with me on that theme, I suppose the rest of the grocery-shopping year would be likened to the odorama scratch-and-sniff of Polyester.

Creation and Destruction

Today saw the last of the logging trucks leave the clearing. I had been planning to pelt them with the ripening apples from the trees as they left, in a sort of variant of the ticker tape parade, but alas I was cheated of my fun by their surreptitious leave taking while I was at the grocery store. Bah to that, but I'm glad they finally made an exit.

And to remain on a hopeful note I can report that I'll be getting a new phone soon to replace the one so cruelly abused by the darling Little Miss. The poor dejected old phone has lost some buttons and the earpiece dangles out from its side as if attached to a slinky. I've been thinking it's a shame my new phone couldn't have a few Dali attributes to keep the Little Miss at bay or better yet, skip the applications and the web connection and any other buttons I no longer use on the mountain. I need something that makes a phone call with decent reception and is practically bomb proof. Although, come to think of it, such a request might put me on some Federal list somewhere or worse. I had better stick to the Dali method and try my luck.

Which reminds me that the same darling phone smasher incurred her first library fines for a torn book the other day. Yes, yes, it was in part my fault for leaving it within reach, and I suppose I was taught my lesson well enough. The librarians gave the little culprit a mocking "what for" as she stared at them with her big blue innocent eyes and that was that - after paying the fine, of course.

Well destruction always hastens the cycle toward creation and so the tomatoes and cucumbers are finally ripening in the Vermont September garden. Little Miss and I are eating them by the handful from the vines. I find it curious that she calls the tomatoes blackberries even though I've told her numerous times that the little red balls are, in fact, tomatoes. But it seems that our earlier blackberry foraging, when more blackberries made it to our mouths than the basket, has set a precedent in her language acquisition. Anything you pick from a green growing thing and eat while standing around under the big blue sky has been transformed to blackberry. And in the Little Miss' creation of the world "it was so."

Untitled, (to Keats), 2010

August sure did stir the pot, rock the boat, switch the cards, or fill in the blank with your pet phrase to indicate change and transition. Now, the first day of September has nearly passed (and with it, summer), and I remain firmly entrenched in that liminal place we all must occupy from time to time, trying to orchestrate new responsibilities, while also attempting to maintain a small space in time for the development of the "self".

I suppose the finest I could aspire to at the moment is a "negative capability" described by Keats as the ability to "be within uncertainties, mysteries, or doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Within this perspective I am wholly certain it's only the irritable part that I've managed with any success so far. Perhaps I should devote a little more attention to Keats and far, far less to my chaotic domesticity.

Regardless, September should be an interesting month. Here goes it.

A Show of Hands

Last week, I killed one bird with two stones when the middle finger of my left hand was smashed between what seemed like two boulders, provoking a free form dance of pain and forcing me to forego any Birch Bark Papers for a while. The bird is in working condition again, although it is a little fuzzy-wooly, but the most lasting effect is the constant awareness of my hands and how I use them.

So as I flipped through a book today, an image of Gertrude Stein's hands gave me pause. They were roundly plump but stolid and seemed to indicate as much about her personality as the lines of her face. Looking down at my own sad hands I realized they reveal a great deal about my life in Vermont: bruised, scratched, scared, calloused, and often slightly grubby. Well, as Scarlett O'Hara says to her sister in Gone with the Wind, "I guess things like hands and ladies don't matter so much anymore."

Throwing Stones

Nobody much cares for the smug self-satisfied individual. So, fair warning dear reader, you may want to detour from this garden path.

But a finer path could not be had.

I found every last stone.
I hauled every last stone.
I dug the dirt for every last stone.
I placed every last stone.

Alright, alright you are more than justified to throw a few stones. I know the smug look on my face is wholly intolerable.

If Walls had Ears and Stones Could Speak

Some places seem to have an animated echo of the people and events that have come before, as if the walls or stones or trees hold fragments of another memory. Over the year, I've lived in a few places where the past seemed interwoven, quite nicely, with the present. But for all my interest in the history of the places I've lived, I've never been curious enough to do any research - until now.

Perhaps it is the steep pitch of the road, the lack of electric lines, or the length of the Vermont winter that provokes a sense of camaraderie with the hapless souls who have set a stake here, but whatever the brand of madness, I've developed a keen interest in learning more about the people that have made this mountain their home.

This past week I took to the mountain with an old undated map that listed families and their long abandoned farms as well as marked the spot of an old mountain schoolhouse. Of course, the summer months are not ideal for seeking out old foundations. Blackberries are at the height of thorny lushness, ferns have grown above my head and beneath all the green growing things, unseen things lurk in wait to twist an ankle. Nevertheless, off I went, roaring up the dirt road on the ATV like a nineteenth-century archaeologist in search of the prized find.

With a little guess work I stumbled upon a small rectangular stone foundation set back from the road about thirty paces. As I walked along the overgrown foundation wall I easily conjured up the children sitting at their desks in the below-zero normality of Vermont. Little faces focused on their slates as their cold fingers marked out pesky sums. The spirit of the place was there.

But so were the circling horse flies and the swarming mosquitoes. And after finding myself engulfed in a thicket of blackberries and having to pull out the thorns from my hands with my teeth I decided that perhaps the spirit of the place was inciting me to go a bit too native. I will have to wait for another elusive spring for more foundation hunting.

Shards and Fragments

On Plants:

The bobbing-in-the-breeze color of the poppies has activated the mental litany of a line from a Neruda poem. "Your mouth, a poppy."

When it rains, the round saucer leaves of nasturtiums collect polished pools of water, rolling around the leaf in the wind as madly as mercury.

On Frustrations:

No sooner do I get the lawn mower working, it begins to rain. Gone are the days when all I had to do was sweep the balcony, dead head the flowers and open a bottle of wine.

Out of bed. Boil a kettle of water. Dump coffee in the French press. Pour the boiling water into the French press. Wait for the coffee to steep. Pour a cup of coffee. Add cream. Take first sip of coffee. Without fail, the Little Miss wakes up. Top of the morning!

On Language:

Word of the Day in our household; bug, bird, ball, baby, mama, papa.

And the acquisition of "bug" and "bird" have put in check my masculinization of the natural world. For ease in description, it has been decided that we are now creating all bugs and birds female e.g. she is a nice bug, look at her. But not with the intent of objectification... I suppose I should reread the French feminists on this point.

On Realizations:

Montpelier has its full share of crazy nutters, like anywhere else, but at least they are not all lying in wait on the train, because there isn't a train.

A certain Little Miss "stole" a pair of $2 flip flops that she had been chewing on in the store and then dropped on the foot rest of her stroller where they were forgotten at the counter. I have decided that I actually enjoy wearing stolen flip flops. Like prostitutes in Ancient Greece who would inbed the soles of their sandals with a come hither calling card that left a trail behind them on the street, there is a small sense of the naughty in my new shoes.



(Image: Kiki Smith, Tattoo Print, 1995, Screenprinted tattoo on machine-made paper, 17" x 27")

Vive la Revolution

Although I'm not much of a flag waver, I do love the French and Bastille Day with its waving tricolor is a favorite from the pick of holidays. Storming the Bastille, eating brilliant cheese, drinking good wine and toasting my long standing crush on La Fayette makes for a fine celebration.

So I started the day with a cafe and croissant at the Red Hen Baking Company http://www.redhenbaking.com. (How they manage to make croissants that melt in your mouth seems to be a mystery this side of the Atlantic, as I've searched long and hard for that particular taste memory of Paris with much cardboard disappointment. But Red Hen whips them up without flaw. So perfect, I will dare to say their croissants are even better than memory because they are only fifteen minutes away.)

Later after a shopping stint and a whole load of books (more on this later), the husband and I hungrily feasted on brie and baguette while Little Miss poked and picked the brie off her soggy baguette with a wry little face.

The only thing lacking to our fine celebration was a bit of accordion playing. (As unlikely as it may sound we do have a beauty, although I will kindly say that other instruments are more successfully played around here.) And truthfully, I only think of the accordion in recollection of a particularly fine Bastille celebration at La Creperie http://www.lacreperieusa.com where a friend and I were serenaded by old French men in striped shirts and berets while we dined outdoors on pate and crepes and drank plenty of fine French wine. Eventually and after many renditions of La Marseillaise, we took a late night taxi ride home. Vive la France.

At Last, Optimism

It is a rare day that you will find me sitting around on the sunny side of the street, plucking silver linings from the clouds while sipping lemonade, but a few days ago, after fuming through the last seven weeks of the precious Vermont summer laid to waste by chain saws and logging skidders, lightening finally struck.

At last, a practical benefit from the logging occurred to me. So, geared with a rake and an old wooden bucket I set off on a collecting expedition.

A rare and pretty picture I surely made, surrounded by logs and raking away, but those bad boys had been ripping through the hemlock producing bucket upon bucket of top-of-the-line wood chips that, I am pleased to say, are now being used as a fine organic mulch for my kitchen garden. It is anyone's guess how many more weeks will be given over to the logging , but I'm hoping for at least five more buckets worth for my cucumbers.

Feasting for Days

When you live in the city shopping for food is an integrated element of daily life. Coffee is purchased at the cafe on Sunday mornings, sausage and cheese at the German deli two doors down from the bookstore and bread can be had from across the street. Once a week you may make a trip out of the neighborhood for the freshest mozzarella and some great produce or stop at the supermarket for a few things, but overall, food is something you pick up from here and there in the manner of hunter gatherers.

Well, on a scorching hot day, when the asphalt seems to heave and hiss down city streets, you won't see many gatherers out and about schlepping around a heavy haul from the supermarket, which is exactly why I had completely forgotten about the simple summer pleasure of watermelon. Watermelon with a crusty sprinkling of smoked sea salt to pink the sweetness is as fine a feast as any. After all, it is high in iron, (more than the leafy greens of spinach), high in zinc and other trace minerals, as well as a first rate source for Vitamins A & C and few things taste as fine that are so good for you.

So, in the cornucopian food shopping of country life, I've discovered the benefits of hauling in the bounty with a motorized vehicle. I still miss the German deli and the fresh mozzarella, but I've been feasting for days on watermelon and intend to ride out this heat wave doing very much the same.

Self Help Anyone?

I once read somewhere that Frieda Lawrence was known to throw plates at D.H.'s head - whole sets of fine bone china crashing at his feet. To my mind it's a shame that he never wrote about these incidents, as he always seems to capture the ephemerality of the senses so well and his description of the sound would be worthwhile.

Nevertheless, Frieda's technique for dispelling aggression is probably ill advised for the average coupling. It's far too messy to clean up afterward when you don't have a housekeeper and it might be misunderstood.

So, I wish to suggest an alternative method for the diffusion of aggression or frustration or whatever you want to call it, politely. It's pretty simple. "Take out" something that needs taken out i.e. at least be productive., which leads to my unlikely segue onto the topic of burdock.

During my first summer on the mountain, I would cut the purple flowers from the massive stalks of the great burdock for arrangements in the house. The flowers are not the most delicate or enchanting but they do have their interest, if, and only if, you are unaware of their true potential.

My herb encyclopedia claims that burdock was greatly valued during WWII when traditional Western medicines where being directed to the battlefields and continues to be highly prized by herbalist today. Well, with burrs the size of golf balls that latch onto beautiful wool sweaters or the backside of the dog with a greater tenacity than velcro, these monsters are the Monsanto of the third grade lecture on seed dispersal, and you won't find me cultivating these beastly bullies in my gardens.

So with a little more of an understanding, I am out there this summer with my aggression and clippers, hacking away at the burdock in leu of plates or anything else easily found at hand. Thankfully, the burdock has a drawn out carrunch when cut that lends itself quite well to satisfaction.

Oh, and I promised some general self help. So, if you should lack either burdock or extra china, which I am assuming you do, I suggest cleaning out your desk without any forgiveness for the slips of paper that hint at important things to remember, or ruthlessly attacking your inbox with the delete button. Or simply, pick up Lady Chatterley's Lover and remember Frieda. Now there was a woman with some spirit.

A Theory and Discovery

Yesterday, while driving around on one of our little jaunts in the countryside, I was able to test a little gardening theory. We were about an hour-and-a-half away from the mountain in the North East Kingdom and came upon a little town where all of the houses, without exception, had beautiful cottage gardens. The plantings were not the typical-to-Vermont mass of lupines with a clump of old, rusting, metal things thrown in somewhere prominent for good measure. Rather, there was plant variety and artistic composition involved in these gardens.

Well, it's a one, two, three in deduction. When a tiny little town is situated thirty-five minutes from a grocery store, with a forty-five minute, siren-blaring drive to the emergency room that certainly helps to enforce Darwinian law, and the town has been digging in the dirt, en masse, with the success of a garden show, then a pretty solid conclusion can be drawn that a first class nursery is nearby.

Happily, my theory proved correct in this instance and, quite by chance, we turned down a dirt road and happened upon a nursery that put the truck in quick reverse. Perennial Pleasures Nursery of Vermont http://www.perennialpleasues.net offers a delightful selection of green growing things in their nursery but they also host a Garden Skills Workshop and a Garden Tour of their stunning display gardens every Sunday.

So baring a deluge to rival Noah's, I'll be following the dirt roads north again in the next few days. Obviously, Perennial Pleasures has taught the town of Greensboro Bend a thing or two about gardening and I want in on it.

Silence

After a solid month of enduring the logging triage planted directly in front of the house, which includes a 7:30 am wake up to heavy machinery and chains saws, we are leaving the side of the mountain for a little peace and quiet. Imagine three tour buses idling outside your house in concert with a full blown city crew repairing a geyser of a water main break and you will have a fair sense of the animated picture we are escaping.

It's a shame because I will miss an amaryllis that I've been waiting to flower, but gardening while wearing noise canceling ear muffs isn't exactly how I want to spend the whole month of June and besides, I look ridiculous. So off we go toward civilization for some silence.

I'm not seeking the Sara Maitland type of silence where you go off like any number of biblical crazies for forty days and forty nights. (An experience that released her from inhibitions, created soaring feelings of bliss heightened her sensations of taste, and touch, and produced halucinations.) The silence of living in the middle of nowhere on the edge of sanity is what I do on a daily basis, I don't need to do any additional testing on that point.

The silence I am looking for will have running water, electricity, good company, much wine and I won't have to wake up before 9:00 am if I don't want to.

You don't say...

"Well that's quite a change, living in the middle of nowhere from Chicago." Yes, and some days worse than others... They stand there looking at me expectantly.

My road has become busy, class-four-road-in-Vermont busy, and I'd rather it not because the etiquette baffles me. There seems to be a number of different protocol that, frankly, I don't care to acknowledge. The most common being a wave, as if you know the particular party passing, but are in a rush and so can't stop and say hello. (My only concession to this is a nod of the head.) Another is a stop-and-chat, which, of course, is the least welcomed.

Today I was relaxing in an adirondack chair in the front lawn playing with the Little Miss and a box of rocks when a foreshortend armada of jeep and jacked-up truck came up the road and stopped in the clearing across from the house. Alright, that's vexing, but I'm not queen of the road yet, so I ignore the intrusion. The crew get out to stomp around a bit and then from the corner of my eye I see them tromping my way. Good gods what next. I really want to sit in peace on a Saturday afternoon without offering tea and cucumber sandwiches.

No, they want directions to a camp - Dustin's camp. No, I don't know a Dustin and there aren't any camps farther up the road. Okay simple enough. Such as, "Is State and Jackson that way?" or "How many more blocks to the Heuttenbar?". Off you both go, glad to be helpful and with some sense of direction. But no, it is not that simple in a skulker's market. The trompers proceed to ask questions about the conditions of the road. Talk about the weather. ("Fine day, indeed.") Ask me about my "camp".

No, I live here year round. Oh. And then they goggle at me.

Perhaps, that's the time I should offer the tea and sandwiches?