Road Trip

Remember how I said that Maria and I did not buy a loom in spite of being with Papa? Well, that was true when I wrote it, but not for much longer. We mentioned a loom listing we’d seen to a friend of ours in NC who lives very near the second-hand store that had it on clearance, thinking she might want to check out their sale for herself and if she did, maybe she could report the condition of the loom. The store was moving to a new location and trying to get rid of as much stock as possible in order to make that easier. Susan talked them down even lower to $80 and brought the loom back to her place until we could come get it. Susan is just as dangerous to be around as Papa, apparently. 🙂

Susan is a weaver herself and was able to ascertain that all the necessary bits seem to be there and just need to be cleaned up after long storage. Now we have to learn how to use them.

So, we are off to the Asheville area to visit with Susan and meet our new loom. It looks heavy, and Adam needs driving hours still, so he is coming along, too. I’ll see you when we get back!

Contentment

You’re fired!

No matter how big a tree gets, it is only the outer layers of bark that are alive, the xylem and phloem run just a little under the surface in the greenwood. If the bark is fully stripped from the entire circumference of the trunk, the flow of sap stops and everything above the ‘girdle’ dies. When trees are young, like our willows, the bark is tender and easy to strip.

This tree has a chance because the connection from root to twig never entirely broke, but I will definitely be pruning some branches off, both to root replacements if needed and to take some of the responsibility off that little bit of living trunk bark it has left.

In the meantime, the mowing crew has been furloughed, maybe permanently fired. Certain goaty members have too much taste for willow.

Amplexus

Some words are just fun to say. One of my favorite words is crepuscular, which refers to twilight, to dawn and dusk and so is used to describe animals who have their main periods of activity not in broad day (diurnal) or full night (nocturnal) but at the edges, in the twilight. It just sounds like raccoons sneaking around garbage cans, doesn’t it?

Amplexus is another one that is not only fun to say but memorable once you hear it because it fits so perfectly. It refers to this:

The male frog- or in this case toad- holds a female in a tight embrace so that he is well positioned to fertilize eggs as she releases them. Male toads have a fun trick of vibrating their sides if anyone tries to do the same to them in the crowd of a spring pool. Females vibrate their sides when releasing their eggs to signal their clingy partners. Amplexus.

This particular male held his lovely large lady all day and then sang loudly all night long, hoping to lure someone else to the fire pit. (Inspired by amplexus, the toad broke his crepuscular habits and sang through the night. 🙂)

“The Song of the Toad”

At ease he sits upon the pool,

And, void of fuss or trouble,

Makes vesper music fit for kings

From out an empty bubble:

A long-drawn-out and tolling cry,

That drifts above the chorus

Of shriller voices from the marsh

That April nights send o’er us;

A tender monotone of song

With vernal longings blending,

That rises from the ponds and pools,

And seems at times unending.

A linked chain of bubbling notes,

When birds have ceased their calling,

That lulls the ear with soothing sound

Like voice of water falling.

It is the knell of winter dead;

Good-by, his icy fetter.

Blessings on thy warty head:

No bird could do it better.

-John Burroughs

Joshua the Terrible

Reverend Cortney brought her boys over on a beautiful day to meet the critters they’d been hearing about. Her four year old was not terribly interested; he would rather be inside doing puzzles and math problems than petting strange animals, but he was a good sport about it.

The one year old was in heaven, getting right down in the hay and mud to be closer to them.

The funniest part, though, was the reaction of the animals to the toddler. They were terrified! The conkey calmed down after a bit, but the sheep stomped and ran away every time he approached, and Eunice was completely nonplussed. I have never seen her react to anyone that way. She is generally more like the dogs, just barging in and assuming she is who people came to see. I guess one-year-olds don’t count as people. They count as some kind of threatening alien.

He’s awfully cute for a threatening alien.

Scratching post

A while back, Jeff made a scratching post in the barn out of a rough welcome mat and some scrap wood. It gets plenty of use. They have just about gnawed and scratched the lower half of the welcome mat off.

It was originally built with goats in mind so when Betsy uses it, the whole thing flexes and bends which makes for a less satisfactory scratch. Trees are better at standing up to cow scratches and she takes full advantage when the crew is on lawnmowing duty.

She has rubbed most of her molt off her neck this way and our trees are sporting a strange new lichen- a nice fuzzy layer of cow hair

Chicken math

This is like one of those logic problems that were on the GRE test. If you have six chickens and four nest boxes with box 2 being most desirable and chicken A cannot be next to chicken C…

Do you see the chicken under the black one? The best part is, the nest box at the end of the row nearest them is empty but the two waiting in line to squish themselves in somewhere have not considered that an option yet.

A treasured mistake

One of the first things we did when we moved here a decade ago was break the well-known rule of not doing anything to your landscape until you have watched it for at least a year to know what it is like in each season. It was not long into that first hot, dry summer that we removed a not-so-cemented-in bird feeder from just outside the back door, thinking it would be a good place to sit around a fire pit. The previous owner had passed off a tile line sinkhole as the work of a groundhog but was somewhat honest about the birdfeeder spot, telling Jeff to be careful mowing there as it could be wet. It wasn’t too wet that summer. Jeff dug out a hole and lined it with landscape blocks we found and made a lovely fire pit. I am so grateful that we were that silly.

The fire pit filled up with water the very next time it rained and has been wet most of the time since. It soon hosted an assortment of insects, including diving beetles- always fun to watch. Then came the amphibians. I don’t know if this spring’s frog is the same as last year’s. I think it is a little bigger, but that does not rule out a repeat visit. Green frogs can live about six years in the wild. I love seeing little bulgy eyes peeking out from our ‘pond’ as I walk by, or the ripple left when I have gotten too close for comfort.

Back when I was studying biology in college, these were Rana clamitans. Now they are Lithobates clamitans. Judging from the equal size of the eardrum and eye, this one is a female so unless she finds a friend I won’t hear their banjo-string call as the weather warms. It is the male frogs that cause all the spring racket. Green frogs look a bit like small bullfrogs, but those are even squishier and don’t have the dorsolateral ridge running down the back from the eye. They eat just about anything they can catch and that will fit in their mouths from algae to insects to minnows to smaller frogs. She will at least find plenty of bugs here.

As a kid, I always hated and feared making mistakes, and that part of me is still there, just a bit quieter as I get older. But this one? I love this mistake.

Holes

Scarlett is back to digging holes. She is still moody as ever, running away from me but then snuggling up under my chin if I insist on picking her up. I did so yesterday because it had been too long since she had gotten out for exercise.

For the first time since she’s been back home, she set to work digging. She starts with her teeth, biting the leaves and grass and moving them aside so she can get to work with her claws. In one day she dug a hole large enough to stick her whole head and neck in. I guess she wasn’t done yet when it was time to go back to her box because she dug one more hole in my shirt as she resisted being carried.

So what?

I like oranges. Why are you looking at me like that, Jill?