Julie Zickefoose on Blogspot

Liam is Ten!

2009-11-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday, happy TENTH birthday, my fine, sweet boy, who loves lilacs and all things that smell

who loves bones and bison

and checking bluebird boxes

and all things mysterious

who loves his sister Phoebe

and pawpaws

but persimmons, not so much

baseball, same deal

who loves trains

Chet Baker

hot springs

horses

Harry Potter

pizza

making people laugh

his daddy

and his mommy too.

You are the most wonderful boy we could ever hope for and we are looking forward to seeing you become a wonderful man. That doesn't mean you have to go away, although, being a boy of great passion, you probably will.

Barn Wabi-Sabi

2009-11-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

Maybe on our next walk we'll ford the creek and poke around this gorgeous barn. We had miles to go, so we forged on.

The next barn was close to the road, and we dove into the detail on its old sides.

I'm not sure what this material originally was--rubberized cloth? but it had aged into a fascinating, fungal texture.

Oh, I loved this sign. You can't make a sign like this. Time has to make it. Time, and some yahoos to shoot it for you.

There were some Herefords just across the fork. Chet was all a-tremble, but at almost five years old, he knows better than to go after them.

No leash necessary, just a warning word. Good boy, Chet. Keep moving.

Mether, someday I may go round those cattle up when you are not looking. But now you are looking. And you are right. I am not a cattle dog. I am a chiptymunk dog. Until someday when you are not looking.

A field daisy defies the frost. I can't remember seeing a fall with so many blooming daisies.

Are you coming, Mether? Or are you going to crouch down by the flollers all day?

Yes, Chet Baker, but I have a few more flollers to crouch by. These milkweed pods will do nicely.

It is tricky keeping the horizon straight when you're crouching. Or maybe I'm drunk on rural beauty. Or maybe it's that these barns are all off true by more than a few degrees. Everybody's staggering here.

Not least me and Shila, at the end of the five or six miles. But there's more to come. We're only a quarter of the way up the road.

For those who are still wondering, wabi-sabi is a Japanese concept of beauty through age, weathering, imperfection, impermanence. It is a scarred and twisted bonsai, a wise and knowing face, a beat-up ballerina's foot, an old Ohio barn.

The Best Things in Life...

2009-11-04T13:56:00.000-08:00

photo by Shila Wilson

As I think about this blog, it seems to me that much of its mission statement is holding true, even four years later. "I hope to show what happens when you make room in your life, every day, for the things that bring you joy. Strange--most of them are free."

Walking is free. Autumn is free. It's free to take a dog along; it's free to sit down and eat lunch under a pale lemon sun, free to take hundreds of photographs and sift through them. All these things take is time. But the joy that comes from one good hike in fall...priceless.

Shila and I couldn't wait to find out how bad the road got beyond where I almost got the Subaru stuck. We wanted to know whether we could have gotten through had I not dropped a wheel over a precipice. We were not to be disappointed.

I'll organize the post as the walk unfolded, so you feel as if you were along with us.

Chet Baker was stoked about the squirtle and chiptymunk possibilities. He got bizzy right off the bat. (Note his trim waistline. Subnote: I take better care of my dog than I do myself. Mmm, Almond Joy.)

Shila and I were stoked about the decrepit outbuilding possibilities.

Being in a progressive state of decrepitude myself, I am fascinated by the process of decay as manifested in old barns and outbuildings. I love to imagine what's under their roofs. I love to wonder if there is some wonderful glassware or tools or one-lung engines. My dad didn't wonder--he waded right in and started throwing tin and boards aside. He carried a crowbar in the car for just such things. I got that gene, fer sure.

Traces of man were everywhere. But there were no men. Here's a mossy ladder, leading up the side of an oil storage tank that's probably been abandoned for 20 years.

Dean's Fork rushed by, making little waterfalls, with shadders of minnows darting. Streams are called forks around here.

Two barns stood sentinel in a pasture still used by cattle. The late autumn tapestry made a beautiful backdrop.

Shila moved on ahead, the walking stick a wise bringalong in case we came upon any territorial dogs. (We didn't).

I wonder if this barn was made of chestnut, the dominant forest species before the blight. Many were, and it has wonderful longevity. Whatever the wood, the width of the boards merits a second and third glance. Beautiful.

Beautiful! She's leaning back into the hillside, taking a well-earned rest.

Now, that is one I'd like to poke around in.

We watched the road as we walked, noticing that it got a little worse the farther we went.

We looked back upon the barns, loving the scene, loving the silence.

A Room Crammed with Summer

2009-11-03T11:42:00.001-08:00

The Rex begonia "Looking Glass," from Ohio's own Glasshouse Works. Well, I got a plant there about five years ago, and this is probably its great-great-great-great-great grandchild.

It's only 9' across, maybe 12' high, not a lot bigger than a phone booth, but there is no other 9 x 12' space on the planet that brings me as much happiness as the Garden Pod.

I am a sentimental sort and seeing my plant friends die with the frost undoes me, even as I know I cannot haul them all inside for the winter. They wouldn't like it, I wouldn't like it, and the bugs would love it. If you scrutinize the photo above, you will see that I made an exception for the huge pot of Fuchsia "Gartenmeister Bonstedt" on the greenhouse floor. I just could not let it die. Later on in the winter, when it's loaded with whitefly, I'll leave it out in the snow for the polar bears, and nurture the two cuttings, already blooming, I've got going. But for now, it's got a home. This was the only plant I found for sale in 2008, and I found it many miles from my home near Dayton, and carried it over in the greenhouse. I didn't find it in '09, which mystifies me, since it is, in my and the hummingbirds' opinion, the best fuchsia in the universe. I have just finished a painting of it, in fact.

So I take cuttings in August and sometimes I take cuttings in October if the first August batch didn't root. My garden friend Nancy turned me on to vermiculite as a cutting medium and boy, what a difference. Vermiculite is free of the myriad molds and bacteria that plague potting soil, so cuttings have a fighting chance of throwing out roots before they rot. Everything I tried to root in the last October cutting harvest succeeded! Uh oh. I am definitely going to run out of room this winter. Here's one of the geranium cutting groups:
Who needs a 10-foot high red mandevilla, loaded with aphids, when you can start a little cutting like this one?
How dear of it to bloom. The nondescript looking plant in the white pot below it is the world's tiniest fuchsia, which just burst into teeny pink bloom today. Its flowers are no longer than a grain of rice, but perfect and sweet. It is a fussy plant that likes the greenhouse best. It threatens and threatens to die all summer long, as fuchsias will, and burgeons as soon as it gets in the moist heat of the Pod.

Abutilon megapotamicum, a mallow from Africa that I love. All my cuttings rooted, uh oh. Big plant. Better be giving some away.

Geranium "Bolton," developed in a town next door to sister Barbara's in Massachusetts.
One of two variegated bougainvilleas, zany plants that sulk outdoors all summer (not hot enough!) and bloom like crazy all winter in the greenhouse. Just when I need them most!
A new hibiscus, one I saw at the grocery store late this summer and snapped up like a horticultural crocodile. Now I need a big ol' hibiscus like a hole in the head but that COLOR. Please. Tangerine. Never seen it before, hadda have it. I do love my mallows.

It makes me smile and holler. Meanwhile, Mary Alice the hibiscus tree is taller than I am, with a 2" thick trunk, and she's in the living room. A cutting of Mary Alice is blooming for the first time today in the greenhouse. Nancy rooted it for me, in case Mary Alice goes south. And so it goes, on and on. Plants are banks of precious DNA, which you can split off and propagate and downsize and start over indefinitely. That's one of the reasons I find gardening so satisfying.

It's probably illegal to propagate this brand-spanking new tangerine hibiscus. No kidding, plant growers are patenting everything as they bring it out. Pah. I am a notorious scofflaw where plant propagation is concerned. Come and get me, lock me up. A plant this good should be spread around.

Time to water! Gotta go! Nothing like a warm, humid greenhouse on a dreary winter day. If you've even been thinking about getting yourself one, just do it. And you, too, can face the first frost without dread, and cackle when you open the door on your little room crammed full of summer.

Halloween in Marietta, Part 2

2009-11-02T13:35:00.000-08:00

I stood slack-jawed at the adorability: A baby skunk, doling out candy for the revelers, and almost bringing me to tears for the echoes of toddler Phoebe she conjured up.
Her mother confessed, "I keep weeping, she's so sweet, and she takes it all so seriously, making sure everyone gets a piece of candy."

I had to use flash on her, just to try to capture those apple cheeks. But oh, I love shooting without flash, and seeing what happens.
The images got progressively spookier as it got darker.
something about the blur makes Liam look like a toddler...going back in time, as Phoebe morphs into the real Hobbes, or Krazy Kat...
They meet up with their wonderful Granny and GeePop, who always put on the dog for trick-or-treaters, with the scarily realistic and locally famous Witch of Warren Street taking over for Elsa as GeePop plays spooky arpeggios on the organ just inside the parlor.
A zomb0-lantern
My favorite jack-o-lantern of the night. His wife says he always carves the same one, every year, and she's tired of it. I'm not! I made sure he knew that I thought it was brilliant. It's so...hopeless.

Our jack-o-lanterns at home. Liam's design, Bill's pig, and Phoebe and my zombie hamster.
Counting out the loot with cousin Gus.

Now that's scary!

I'll leave you with some of my favorite captures from Halloween night.
You had to go up on this porch and get your candy corn. There was nobody there, just the house's eyes staring out at you. Eeeee!

I loved this cat on this porch, and I caught Liam in the porch light.

And then something really weird happened, and Liam became something Other, something slumping off Goon Island.

It was a magical night. And it smelled so delicious.

Halloween '09

2009-11-01T17:56:00.000-08:00

Oh, it was a lovely evening, after all. It was as if the saints all smiled at once, parted the clouds, stopped the rain, and let the children play.

Calvin and Hobbes, ready to go!

Halloween's weather did not bode well for us. It poured all morning, never got out of the 50's, and the forecast was dire: rain, with a low of 38. Yow. Phoebe with a scratchy throat and full sinuses, Liam with a fervent desire not to ruin his costume with a coat...a mom's dilemma. We multilayered long underwear beneath the costumes, packed umbrellas, and went. And the rain stopped and it stayed about 60 degrees, and it was luverly.

First, to suit up and get to the elementary school Halloween party, which was small and thus much more sufferable than usual, thanks probably to porcine flu thinning the ranks of little revelers.

Electrician's tape came in handy this year in our costume-making efforts. There is always tape involved, since I am nobody's seamstress. I was worried that Liam would find his Calvin "costume" too prosaic, but some hair wax and a sign on his chest helped. He never complained. He just wanted it to be true. He IS Calvin, in his mind.
Jessi and MacKenzie were crayolas.

Daddy kept having to re-do Calvin's spikes. Ow ow ow!
Phoebe's sisterly tenderness toward her younger brother, which extends to teaming up with him for Halloween, and attending his elementary school party and competing in the costume contest, never fails to melt our hearts.
They didn't win anything but our hearts. I kind of doubt the judges knew who Calvin and Hobbes are, but c'est la vie. It didn't hurt their feelings, and that's what matters.

We drive the kids into town to trick-or-treat, since there are so few homes out our way. I always forget until the moment we get out of the car that Marietta smells absolutely amazing on Halloween. The sweet gums and sycamores that line the streets have an intoxicating, spicy scent that is more intense when the fallen leaves get wet. I go into an instant state of rapture and stay that way as the evening comes on. Between the scent of wet leaves and the feast of visual images of trick-or-treaters and front porches and jack-o-lanterns lit in the night, I am in heaven.
Two little bugs compare their wings.
Sophi and Oona, our treasured little girlfriends.

Eyob and Abel, surprised by the flash, and trying to figure out what in tarnation is going on all around them.
The warm light of porches, the friendly smiles, the ghoulish masks...
The folks who go all out...
A tiger's stripes, melting into buttermilk.

I will continue tomorrow. I'm overloading on visual and olfactory memories, not to mention Almond Joys.

Roads Not Traveled

2009-10-30T12:17:00.000-07:00

I knew it was the last bike ride of summer. The kids knew it, too. On a fine Sunday, threatening showers, we took off down Dean's Fork, one of my favorite roads around here. It has a beaver pond and natural gardens that defy belief. It has grass growing down the middle, even in the well-traveled upper part, which should be your first clue that you don't take your new Subaru down there.
Nevertheless, Dean's Fork has an allure that calls me every day, because I don't yet know what's down there, a situation that, by the time you read this, will have been remedied.

We timed it just right for the Joe-Pye weed, for the tall ironweed and the jewelweed and the tickseed. These photos just don't do the late-summer tapestry justice, but you can get a hazy idea how spectacular all these weeds, jumbled together in a wet meadow, can be.
Joe-Pye weed is the misty mauve stuff. Tall ironweed is the brilliant royal purple, and tickseed sunflower is the yellow, and jewelweed is the orange. Mmm. Late summer tapestries.

Needless to say, there were ruby-throated hummingbirds in the jewelweed, an embarrassment of riches.
We rode and rode, stopping every now and then just to consider the green halls of summer.

A hay musk ox was lurching along in the meadow below the beaver pond, but he froze stock-still when he saw us coming, like the Marsh Man.

Brief digression: This is the Marsh Man. He looks like a willow bush, but he's really a man, who lurches over the marsh. But when you look at him, he stands stock-still, and looks like a bush again.
His wife is the Marsh Crone, who makes a brew every spring that wakes up the birds and animals that gets them thinking about making more birds and animals.Written and illustrated in 1960 by Ib Spang Olsen (why can't I have a name like that?) and given to me and my sister Micky by my sister Barbara sometime in the 60's. Only about five inches tall, it is one of the books that stayed upstairs, one of the gold standards of children's literature, far more magical to my mind than many of the books that get all the attention.

I am so excited. Today, Friday, it's supposed to hit 75, and the moist dark air at 6 AM holds a warm promise of Indian summer. Bill called Shila up last night and talked her into rearranging her schedule so she and I could take off on a girlhike.* Ever since we almost ran into ruin on Dean's Fork, we've been itching to conquer its 7 or 8 mile length by foot. We want to see how bad it gets; we want to see who and what lives down this forgotten trace. So we're parking a car at either end, packing lunch and lenses and dog cookies and Chet Baker's leash (because there are bound to be cattle), and walking the whole durn thing. I cannot wait.

Zick + Shila + Chet + cameras + unexplored territory = fun

I hope we can't get into too much trouble riding shanks' mare.

*Bill is very good at talking girls into things.

But back to the late-summer bike ride. The kids were very, very tired when we finally got home.
I trailed behind, as always, and this is what greeted me when I came up the driveway. Corpses.

Chet Baker knows what to do when people lie down on the ground.
He gives them doggy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until they giggle.
Chet Baker, I hope you are up for a much longer walk today.
I am game, Mether. I will walk twice as far as you and Shila, because there are bound to be squirrelts.
Walking with my family is my favorite thing.
Boston terriers: small dogs with giant kisses. It's as if they were bred for it.

Chet Loves Spaghetti

2009-10-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

I continue to spend my days cleaning. Cleaning out the old. Making room, not for the new, but for us. Killing about 10 billion dust mites with every sweep of the vacuum cleaner and sponge. Having cleaned both kids' bedrooms of 13 and 9 years of crap, respectively, now I am infected with the certainty that the rest of the house, if I were only to peek behind its figurative curtain, is even worse than their closets proved to be. I chip at it, bit by bit, knowing that I could and should keep at it until things are back under something resembling control. And do nothing else for the next couple of months. On the top shelf and in a chest in Phoebe's closet were my hospital release papers from her birth. Instructions on how to deal with a leaky postpartum body and a book on breast feeding. And she is practically old enough to...aggh, I can't even think it.

So I walked into the studio today and looked at the unit next to my old desk computer which was sold to me as a "desk organizer" but which in reality is a plastic support system for a giant haystack, a cornshock of contracts and papers that at one time, oh, say three years ago, were very important, vital, even, but which have aged to a point where they can now be thrown away. Permits, contracts, signed agreements; anything that smacks of legality or permissions goes into the Amish-style cornshock. I did find the contract for my current book, which I perused with some bemusement and replaced. Most everything else I threw out. Ahhh, that felt good. But purging it is something that I can only bring myself to do triannually.

Thank God Shila is in the same deep-cleaning mode, and we call each other and have hour-long conversations about throwing crap out and how somebody should really come in with a snow shovel and help us out here. We can talk and throw crap out at the same time.

All of which is to say that I am posting about Chet and spaghetti because my life is pretty colorless right now; well, no, it is the color of dust bunnies.

We really don't have many rules for Chet Baker; he is such a gentleman. Don't eat the hamsters is a new one. But most "dog people" would be shocked to see us allowing him an occasional seat at the dinner table. Big no-no. We also play tug 0' war with him and he snarls and growls ferociously at us. Thus far, these flirts with anarchy have not produced a slavering were-beast, a severed artery, or anything remotely near it. They are just things Chet Baker does, and the world continues to spin, and he remains our adored pet.

Sometimes Phoebe shares a seat with him. When there is spaghetti, he is usually up in her chair before she can get there.
He studies the spaghetti with such longing, mingled with regret that it is not going into his cakehole.
He watches each bite as it travels to its destination.
And at the end of the meal, he gets a little spaghetti sauce over his kibble. I've all but stopped buying the Cesar meals I used to moosh into his Royal Canin to increase its appeal. The gravies and roasts and sauces I make taste ever so much better. Whoops, am I breaking another dogrule? Thought so.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go let Chet in, because, having completed a chiptymunk patrol, he is barking and leaping against the screen door. I gave him a prophylactic spanking on his firm little rumpus as he trotted in. Just in case he might do something naughty.

Stuff, Bittersweet Stuff

2009-10-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

Stuff. We get rolled under our stuff. Never is that more apparent than when we are forced to move, or to paint a bedroom. You look at a kid's bedroom and you think, "There isn't all that much stuff in there, he's just a kid." And three days later, after you've been sitting on the floor going through the endless junk in his closet and bureau and bookcases, after you've found the tiny knit cap they plopped on his blonde head the day he was born, after you've found the two lost and expensive library books he incorporated into his bookcase and those long-lost lecture scripts you were dumb enough to put in one of his Spiderman folders, you realize that we all accumulate stuff, a bit here a bit there, until there is so much it takes three full days to sort, organize, give away, and/or toss it all.

Bill decided to give Phoebe's room a makeover, and Saturday morning waay too early, considering we had had a gig the night before, he began moving her stuff out into our living room. Liam was sad. Nobody was making over his room. So in a fit of equality, I decided to get new carpet for him as well as Phoebe. Which, I realized a little too late, meant that both of their rooms would have to be emptied. I thought it would save money to have the installers do two rooms at once. I did not fully appreciate what we were getting into. Bill worked like a dog to get Phoebe's room painted, all four walls a different bright color (!)

I'm waiting for the installers right now, and they had jolly well better show up this morning, because four days of living with two bedrooms' worth of stuff jammed into our living room has been about four days too many. It looks like something you'd see on COPS, clothes draped on everything, stacks and boxes of junk...arggggggh

and I have been bereft, inwardly wailing like a banshee wandering the moors, unable to settle when my house is upside down. It reminds me of the mood I was in when our kitchen renovation took 4 1/2 months. When I was cooking on a hotplate in the living room, all our food in boxes.

But these are the things you do when you make two more people and work them into your world. Their stuff becomes your stuff, becomes your problem to keep or dispose of. I sat on the floor doing children's book triage, separating the wheat from the chaff, smiling as I remembered stanza after stanza of those perfectly worded bits from Miss Rumphius and Goodnight Moon and The Napping House and The Polar Express and all the Beatrix Potter books and yes, Where the Wild Things Are; they are all there, now boxed and labeled in the basement, along with two big boxes full of Thomas the Tank Engine books and puzzles and three huge totes of trains and tracks. Things that served us well, things I realize with bittersweet pain that he's never going back to, not until he makes another person and works that person into his world.

And that will be all too soon.

More Glories (who could resist?)

2009-10-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

The morning glory was so surpassingly beautiful that I found myself photographing it whenever Bill and I were on the deck birding. This photo is soft, due to rain and low light, but it's the only one that seems to capture its unbelievable shade of sky blue.

The compositional possibilities of heart-shaped leaves and saucer blossoms were intriguing.

I think I loved it best in the rain, because the colors were truer, and the blossoms lasted all day, sometimes even into the next morning, before shriveling into pinky purple balloons and disappearing.

But oh, when the sun came out, the bud and petiole shadows played across the flowers' canvas.
And the light came through their gossamer tissue, never the same blue from day to day or moment to moment, always going through the spectrum of blue to lavender
and Wilhelm Langguth and Bolton and Grey Sprite seemed so happy to be blooming alongside this miraculous plant.

One day Bill saw a bumblebee go in a flower and he grabbed my camerajust in time to see the bee tumble out, the way bees do, which is why they're called bumblebees--because they're so heavy-bodied they are a bit clumsy. But they seem to do fine anyway. They aren't aware that by human calculations, the physics of their wing loading actually contraindicate their becoming airborne. So they fly.

these two by Bill of the Birds

Chet loved them, too.

Morning Glories

2009-10-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

This was the view out our raised deck sliders all summer. Oh, I miss it so. When you can have color like this for practically nothing, why wouldn't you have a few planters out every window? We do!

This spring, I planted eight seeds in a little plastic eight-pack. Four were moonflowers, and four were Morning Glories, "Heavenly Blue" variety. They all came up, but the moonflowers never were able to shed their seed coats; the cotyledons rotted inside. The same thing happened to three of the morning glories. It was too darn wet for them, raining and raining, and morning glories and moonflowers hate wet feet. But the fourth morning glory survived, and when it got its first true leaf I planted that little plant down below our deck and watered it now and then.

It writhed around on the ground for awhile, throwing out tendrils, and then took a hint in the form of a trellis and began twining up, up, up.

The kids really didn't notice it until it started peeking up over the deck railing. At about that time it started blooming from the bottom up.

And Phoebe and Liam would go out every morning and count the blossoms. One, five, eight, 17, too many to count. They'd run back in with today's count. I miss that, too, now that they're getting up in the dark to go to school. We would go out into the back yard by Liam's willow just to gaze on it, this tower of flowers.
All from a single seed.

Plants give us so much, if we let them into our world.

The Tornado and the Rainbow

2009-10-25T18:45:00.001-07:00

I don't know whose photo this is. (Now, thanks to Mike McDowell, I do: Eric Nguyen, the late and incredible weather photographer. It's real, too.) I don't know where it was taken, or even if it's real, and I'm breaking tradition to post it here (I always use my own photos). I love it so much, because it perfectly captures my soul these days.

Bill got a bee in his bonnet this weekend, and even though we went to bed around 3 AM Saturday morning after our Orangutangs gig, he got up at 8 and started moving stuff out of Phoebe's bedroom so he could paint it. Each wall is a different color: Sunrise Beach, Fruit Punch, Dusty Aqua and Ocean Mist. It's like a Caribbean dance party in there. I was charged with running to town for supplies and buying carpet to complete the makeover. Poor child has been staring at white walls for 13 years. She's more than due for a room in the colors she picked. God bless her Daddy for taking the initiative. There was stuff in her closet from the year she was born, for Lord's sake, from 1996. I am not kidding. Stuff about how to breast feed your baby. And now she's practically old enough to have her own baby, and she still had all that crap in her closet.

However. This means that until the carpet installers come Weds. morning, all her bedroom furniture, clothes and crap are in the living room. Which sets my orderly soul a-wandering, tearing its hair. Doesn't bother anybody else much. But I am like a banshee on the moors, wailing, when my house is all upside down.

Well, Liam moped and moped around because nobody was painting HIS room so I bought a carpet remnant for his room at the same time I bought Phoebe's, and then I realized that that meant that we'd have to put the contents of BOTH their rooms in the living room, which actually can't be done, and that also meant that I'd have to weed all his crap and clothes and books out before Wednesday. So I spent most of today, a perfect blue and gold fall day, doing that. And all I got done was the books. He has a LOT of books. And most of them break my heart to give away so really all I did was weed and sort them, and box up the ones for the basement, the Goodnight Moon and the Blueberries for Sal and the Letting Swift River Go and the Miss Rumphius and the Nuts to You, all the ones we know by heart.

By 2 pm I had had it and I called Shila and we decided to go on our own little fall foliage tour. And we took our cameras and Chet and had the most wonderful time photographing dilapidated barns and horse noses and the like. And no, I'm not posting those photos now because I am tired and it is late.

But Shila and I had a hoot exclaiming and freaking out over every little thing, it's like we're high all the time, but we don't use anything but beauty. It's good to have a friend like that, someone who can fully freak out over a sundog or a caterpillar or a certain slant of light through the veins of a leaf. It's not good, it's great to have a friend like that.

So the light was dying and we turned toward home where Bill was making us a homemade pizza. mmmm. And we were going up County Road 12 and I saw a sign for Dean's Fork Road and thought, wow, wouldn't it be cool to take crappy scary old Dean's Fork all the way up to our house? Everybody says it doesn't go through but my new Subaru has all-wheel drive and so does Shila's RAV-4. So I hollered back to Shila, "Hey, you wanna try to take Dean's Fork all the way home?" and her eyes lit up and she said "YEAH! Let's try it!"

Which was the MOST ridiculous thing to try, because everybody knows Dean's Fork is a piece of crap of a road. There are leaves all over it and it's barely wider than a forest path. And I had never been on the lower end of it. And we probably had ten miles of it to navigate.

The thing about off-roading is that the first few ruts and puddles you hit are bad but not that bad and the road just leads you on and on and before you know it you are mushing through the most gooshy and dangerous ruts and puddles, lakes, really. And you're telling yourself, "Hey, this isn't so bad. Look how far I've made it. What a car I have!" but inside you're biting your psychic nails because each puddle and rut is just a bit worse than the one before and you are that much farther from civilization. But I was emboldened by Shila right behind me in her Toyota and I kept mushing on. And I do mean mushing.

Finally we came to a lake in the middle of the rutted path and I knew it was probably my Waterloo so Shila and I got out and mucked around a bit and decided we had better back out of it and try to turn around and get the hell off Dean's Fork before pitch dark, which was in about 20 minutes. So she backed up and got up on terra firma and I backed up and my rear wheel went smack into the worst deepest rut which threw my front into a sashay and all of a sudden my left front wheel dropped off into nothing. I stopped and opened the door and that wheel of my precious new Forester was hanging off in space over a six-foot drop into Dean's Fork Crick. Oh, sh------t. Oh Shila I am so screwed, I am so screwed look at my car look at my car somebody's gonna have to pull me out of here! Aggghh I am panicking. I am envisioning my new car rolling slowly down greasy side up into the rocky creek bed, me and Chet in it. And Shila gets out of her car and points out that three of my wheels are still on the ground, albeit gumbo mud. "Have you tried backing up?" she asked and I said, "No, the only thing I have tried is panicking."

So I throw it in reverse and breathe a prayer and gun it and that car just backed out like Bossy out of her stall. So I did a twenty-point turn in the narrow road with Shila coaching all the way and we made our way back, refording all the puddles and ruts, until we were on pavement again. And pavement never, ever felt so good.

Shila has a bumper sticker on her car that says, "My Other Vehicle is My Imagination" and I told her I want one for my car that says, "My Other Vehicle is My Stupidity."

When Shila and I get together we are like a couple of hunting dogs, egging each other on, running wild. When I thanked her for coaching me out of that horrible jam, she said, "Well, you're welcome, but there's no way you would have taken that road if I hadn't been along." And I had to admit she was right. But it's good, no, it's great to have a friend like that.

The Hubbub and the Healing

2009-10-22T16:29:00.001-07:00

I've just returned from a road trip to West Liberty, West Virginia, just north of Wheeling. Three weeks ago, I visited a Zickblitz upon the campus of West Liberty University,

giving a library talk, a luncheon talk, a Hughes public lecture, and hanging 46 of my paintings from Letters from Eden in the school gallery. (Art professor Robert Villamagna and I hung them all in about two hours using a only a hammer, nails, a length of string and our eyeballs, the finest measuring device known.) There was a public opening, and there were a couple of dinners, too.

All this happened over a four-day span. It was really fun. I talked a lot, interacted with students and faculty, stayed in the fabulous alumni house on campus:

Yes, that'll do. Just fine, for a few nights.

I felt so honored to be invited, so delighted to share some stories and paintings with interested, like-minded people. I love being caught up in the current trend of honoring area artists and writers. It's smart; it makes sense, and I thank English professor and Hughes Lecture Chair Peter Staffel for thinking to invite me. Let's face it: it's more affordable than bringing someone in from another state or foreign country, and it sends a message to students that there are creative people worth engaging all around us. That sends a message that they have permission to grow up to be one of those people; that they don't have to flee their homes in order to make their mark. If nothing else, at least I can offer them a living, breathing example of someone who lives in Appalachia and writes and paints about that life.

I can function pretty well with a lot of hubbub, and I enjoy it, but there comes a point when it's time to recharge the batteries. I'm a textbook introvert. When called upon to be an extrovert, I can rise to the challenge, but my resting mode is introvert. I'd guess that most writers are introverts, and many, if not most, artists.

Although there's kind of a stigma associated with being an introvert, I don't believe that it's any better to be an extrovert. It's just different. As Murr points out, it's about from whence you draw your energy. Extroverts draw it from other people, from the hubbub. Introverts draw it from within, and they must flee the hubbub to recharge.** Extroverts accomplish a ton of good things, giving of themselves on boards and committees, gathering others around them, sharing their vision. But I think that a lot of good things come from people who like to work and create by themselves. If the world was composed of only extroverts, we'd all go crazy. If we were all introverts, it would be a really quiet, boring place. We balance each other, even if we don't always understand each other. Right, Dearest?

**thanks for this crystallization, Murr.

Along about the last morning of my stay, it was time to walk. I wished I had Chet Baker with me. I've found that being alone with him is better even than being alone. He fits perfectly into that special space where I'm delighted to finally be still and quiet and alone, but I'm just a tiny bit lonely, too. He doesn't analyze or criticize, go off on tangents or make any background noise. He just keeps me company.

I drove north up Route 88 toward Bethany and took the first right turn I found, which is Garrison Run Road. I had seen it on my first evening and made a mental note to check it out. Oh, was I glad I did.

To my eye, this looks like a place which has been strip mined and recovered. I may be wrong, but I think that's why it looks like it does. Which is pretty ironic, because I found it heartbreakingly beautiful with its forest dress taken off.
I don't know. Maybe it's just hayfield. Let's call it hayfield. That's a mighty old barn. Maybe it pre-dates strip mining.

There is actually a palm warbler in the middle of this shot. I didn't bring my telephoto lens, d'oh! because I didn't think I'd have a chance to sneak off and be in nature.
There were migrant meadowlarks singing their little hearts out, too. Oh, what a balm that was to my ears.

There was a big clump of foxtail growing up in the bend of the barn roof, catching the morning sun. I'd never seen that before!

In this landscape, you can see some of the taller buildings on campus, nestled in the forest. It's such a beautiful place to go to college. If I studied or worked there, I'd come to Garrison Run as much as I could. I wondered if any of the students knew to come here to get all fixed up again.

Soon I plunged down into the woods, leaving my car a couple of miles behind. It was so golden, so alluring in the morning light. I could have walked down that road all day.

Oh, pardon me! I didn't realize...

May I ask what exactly you two are doing?

They weren't talking, and I still haven't figured out what these two sugar maples, which appeared to be from separate root systems, were up to. Whatever it was, it was pretty sexy, so I left them in peace.

I walked awhile longer, having a conversation with a redtail and some song sparrows, and then it was time to go back to the surreal world.

As I came up out of the woods, the light played across the hayfields

and the chicory set its blue up against the sky and asked me to pick which I liked more

and neither of them won, really, because they were both beautiful in their own way, and I loved them both the same.

Heartfelt thanks to West Liberty University, and especially Peter Staffel and Robert Villamagna for making it all happen.

Terrier TV

2009-10-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

As the hamsters go about their hammy bidness, Chet Baker watches and salivates.
Mmm, meals on wheels.

The first two days we had them, he did almost nothing else but stare into the hammy tank. It got so bad I had to put them in a bedroom so I could have my boydog back. Now, he’s attuned to their schedule, and only bothers to watch them when they’re active, although he does check on them throughout the day, as a diligent terrier will.

Nobody watches anything like Chet Baker watches those hamsters. Their every move is fascinating to him. He loves it when they run on the wheel. HEY UR DOIN IT RONG

He loves it when they pop out of their little Kleenex box house or their toilet paper tube. He really loves it when they eat. Mmm, cornbread.

Chet is hell on chipmunks. In fact, having these hamsters around to fantasize about has increased his hunting acumen by about 300%. Since the hamsters came, Chet runs off excess energy and hunting desire by making dozens of laps around the house each day. He’s in terrific shape, since he runs at warp speed, zigging and zagging. The chipmunks are on red alert all the time. The deer are looking over their shoulders. The rabbits only come out at night.

So what could I have been thinking, bringing two small defenseless baby rodents into the same house with the lean, mean hunting machine that is Chet Baker? Well, I was thinking it would all work out. The eternal optimist, with an asterisk**

**ready to make it all work out.

There have been two incidents in which Chet forgot that these are not doggie hors d’ouvres, but cherished family pets. The first was when I heard a shoving sound and found Chet pushing the hamster tank with his paws until it teetered on the edge of its little table. Ai yi yi. A couple more lunges and it would have tipped over and …

He got a spanking, a big spanking for that. No lunging at the hammy tank, Chet BAKER.

The second incident was the very next day when Phoebe walked into the living room, hammy cupped in hand right under her chin, and Chet Baker leapt straight up in the air and nipped her finger in attempting to make the hammy his own. A startled yelp from Phee brought me around the corner like a mama bear. That was an even bigger spanking for Chet, one he has not forgotten.

It’s important that Chet understand that infractions will be severely punished, without exception. And after that second spanking, he got it. Now, when the kids are cuddling their pets, he pointedly walks out of the room. For the first two evenings, he walked into the kitchen, jumped up on a hard wooden chair, and curled up in its seat, as if he were giving himself a doggeh time out, removing himself from temptation. It was beyond adorable, rolling eyes and all. Of course, he got lots of extra kisses and bits of cheese for coming up with that idea all by himself.

He’s settled down very well. That’s not to say we’d ever let the hammies out of their cage out of our sight for a half second. The rule is, they have to be in their cage or in your hand if Chet is in the house. We shall see how it all works out. It is a severe test of a terrier’s trainability, to be sure. I am waiting for your essence...

It is a character building experience. But if Chet Baker has anything, he has abundant character. With the help of a couple of spankings, he is the Perfect American Gentleman.

The Why of Hamsters

2009-10-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

Bill of the Birds asked, “So. What’s the point of this animal?”

I’ll admit that Bill of the Birds is not alone. That the whole idea of hamsters eluded me for a long time. Regular readers of this blog know that I really don’t need a whole lot more to care for. I won’t bore you with a list of current denizens. Two hamsters threaten to tip our house into the realm of menagerie. I’ve never been that enamored of the idea of a small rodent that runs on a wheel. But Chinese dwarf hamsters are really, really cool.

To start with, they’re cute in an undomesticated way. They look most of all like a young white-footed mouse who’s had a tail-abbreviating incident. They’re a gorgeous smoke gray with a dark racing stripe down the back. They are not as bug-eyed as Syrian hamsters or mice.

They’re unexpectedly fun to watch, especially in pairs. Our sisters—Phoebe’s Vetiver and Liam’s Verbena—get along very well. They even do tandem runs on the Silent Spinner. The technology of small animal keeping has improved quite a bit from the squeaky metal cage wheel days when the critters had to be kept in the basement lest they keep the whole house awake. Silent Spinners are the bomb!

They give a young boy something small and helpless to look after, to feed and clean up after.
But most of all they cuddle spectacularly well. Being nocturnal animals, they get jiggy somewhere around 11 PM, and they’re still going strong, streaking around their tank like lightning bolts, when Phoebe leaves for school at 6 AM. But when the kids get back from school, dog-tired, the hammies are sleeping, and are perfectly happy to go on snoozing in the warm hands of a child. Oh, they’ll wake up briefly and do cute things like clean their whiskers and feet while sitting in the palm of a hand
Which is disarmingly adorable, just seeing this creature going about its private grooming regimen in your hand.
But mostly they sleep.

Please.

How can a little animal be this adorable? How can it trust me, this enormous carnivorous primate, so completely as to fall back to sleep while I cuddle it, stroke its belly with a gentle fingertip? Dunno. They just do. And that is the magic, the point, of Chinese dwarf hamsters.

I have other ideas about the point of hamsters.

What About Those Hamsters?

2009-10-19T12:57:00.000-07:00

It is time for hamsters. Magnificent scenery has its place, but so do small furred rodents in this big old goofy world.

It’s not often that one gets to track a pet from conception, but our acquisition of two Chinese dwarf hamsters was a premeditated thing. Phoebe found an Ohio breeder on Oobly.com and began a correspondence. As a result, Kacie introduced Sage, her female CDH,

to Lil’ Man and a romance blossomed. Lil’ Man was obviously well-equipped to become a father. I would call him Lil' Big Man. What IS it with those rodents and their wedding tackle?

The hamsters were quite compatible and began sleeping together and it wasn’t too much more than a month before we got an excited email from Kacie with a picture of Sage looking, as she put it, like a furry ping-pong ball. The next day she was blessed with five pink squirmers.

Here they are on Day 3.

On Day 4, they looked like tenrecs. (hamster is facing left, fyi.)

By Day 9, they were looking more like rodents.

That is some seriously fast development, from what was basically an embryo to this in nine days!

Day 19. Proper cute and furry.

All hamster photos courtesy Kacie.

Although Phoebe started out as the hot and heavy hamster lover, when Liam found out there were five in the litter, he asked if he could have one. Of course, since Phoebe would be getting a female, he wanted a boy. Nuh-uhhhn. I explained that if there were going to be two hamsters in the house, they’d both have to be the same sex. There followed a discussion of the dangers of inbreeding. Liam got it before I had to invoke McKenzie Phillips and her Papa John.

I met Kacie in East Liverpool, which wasn’t far from West Liberty, WV, where I was working for the week. She was so sweet--she tried just to give me the hamsters, and this after breeding them special for us, and putting daily work into civilizing them, acclimating them to handling. Amazing. She brought all four girls along and let me pick. I picked two who seemed friendliest and didn’t nip me right off the bat.

After waiting since Easter, Phoebe was over the moon to finally be cradling her own CDH. She has named hers Vetiver. Liam was completely charmed. He's cuddling Verbena, his choice of a name.

Any misgivings I had about having two more creatures to care for dissolved as I watched my babies welcome their babies. I am all about encouraging tenderness in children, and there is nothing better for that than giving them little pets to care for. Well, now, a baby brother or sister is real good for that, but this mare's out to pasture.

And there was someone else who turned out to be very into hamsters, too. He was so into them, he couldn’t get to nothing else.

As I write, Chet Baker is shuttling from sunspot to shade, sunspot to shade. He's like a little black soapstone carving, radiating heat. There. I snuzzled him for you. Never fear, more Bacon adorability is just ahead.

There's Bacon on Your Board Game

2009-10-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

It froze last night, one of the earliest frosts I can remember. It only hit 32, but it was a showy frost, with white rime on everything and thin crackly ice on the pond and birdbath. We're usually OK through Halloween, and we had one year in the mid 90's where it still hadn't frozen at Christmastime; the mandevillas were blooming weakly as I wrapped presents. Bill of the Birds has been most diligent in preparing my Garden Pod for the winter. He put his mind to finding some way to plug the circular vents around its base, and settled on cutting plugs from a big sheet of insulating construction foam. Fabulous! The Pod is packed with refugees from the frost. It is so cold out there that I thought I would warm you with a heat-radiating doggeh.

Chet Baker comes by his name, "Little CatDog," quite honestly. So many things he does: perching on the back of chairs and couches, leaping lightly up into your lap the second you sit down; taking your seat the second you stand up; and planting himself on whatever you're trying to read or do on the floor are cat traits.

So it was no surprise to enter the room on a sunny afternoon to find him firmly ensconced on the kids' ongoing Monopoly game.
Whut? I, Chet Baker, can play Monopoldy too. I am the boot. The Scottie dog is already taken.

However it is a little lonesome to play Monopoldy when the chirrun are at school. So I am here to hold Liam's place for him.

The autumnal sun feels good on my almost five-year-old bones. Mether, were you aware that the Boston terrier was first developed as a heat-retaining bedwarmer? This is why we are black. Red brindle Boston terriers radiate too much heat, and are not as good at warming beds. This is why the black ones have prevailed.

Chet Baker, you just made that up. That is a just-so story.

Well, it is true. My grandmother, Maeve, told me that when I was little. I am gathering heat in my solar panels for this evening, when I will fulfill my breed destiny by crawling under the kevers. You will see.

The Hotdog Brothers

2009-10-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

Oh, how I loved watching my boys, the Hotdog Brothers, working the river together. There was so much to see.
I love this shot.
And this one. Liam passed some of the time by drawing.

Liam proved a slightly intermittent paddler, but Bill was more than able to pilot the huge loaded canoe himself. It might have been nice to have a little more power in the bow, but he didn't complain. Phoebe and I needed to go full bore just to keep up with him. He's got guns under those sleeves.

Every once in awhile, a man needs to rest, however.

Liam was charged with making sure they didn't run aground. But the sun and trickling water worked their magic on him, too, and his head dropped lower and lower.

Soon he was sound asleep.

I cannot tell you how much he looks like my father here. How many times have I seen my dad in just this pose. Never in a canoe, mind you; he was an Iowa farm boy, wasn't much for water. But asleep, chin on chest, hands clasped? Oh yes.

Campsite Scenes

2009-10-14T12:08:00.000-07:00

There are many times when I use my 300 mm. telephoto lens to photograph my family. I'm not a fan of the typical travel snapshot, in which a person stands grinning in front of a sign, a precipice, a statue. Blaa. No information content, no artistry, no interest, no life.

So when I crawled out of the tent and saw this scene unfolding below I deployed the long lens for some paparazzo-style documentation of Liam self-actualizing.

Liam loves, loves, loves to cook. He is almost always between me and the saute pan or mixing bowl. Perhaps because my mother would only let me rinse bowls, never allowing me access to the messy stuff, I try to let Liam stir and mix and pour. It's hard, I'll grant Mom that, to stand by and let somebody do something wrong, or messily, but how else is he going to learn to do it right? And how hard is it to wipe up afterward, if he gains confidence and surety in the process?

Jim and Nick asked Liam to mind the sausages. And mind them he did.

I love how he's holding the tongs here. He doesn't quite get that tongs are long so you don't get burned. Had I been hovering, I'd have shown him how to hold them. But I stayed back.

Hmm. Is that done?

We all agreed that the sausages that morning tasted extra good, and wondered aloud who had cooked them so masterfully. It was me, Mommy!

Later, I looked up from packing the tent and sleeping bags to see this fine example of anthropoid ape grooming/bonding behavior. Out came the telephoto.

Yes, candid shots are ever the best.

Threading the Needle with Bill of the Birds

2009-10-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

Not only was the slot canyon spookily magical, but it offered some fabulous photo-ops.

There came a point where it narrowed down to a squeeze. Now the fun begins!

I often wish I were taller than I am. This was not one of those times.

The slot canyon narrowed down to a hole, blocked by a huge boulder. You had to crawl under the boulder to get through. It was tight. I was regretting the extra biscuits, but I made it.

Come on, Daddy! You can do it! I just did it!

Of course, Liam did it in seconds. Little snot. Then he climbed the wall just for fun.

Bill of the Birds examines his options. He don't much like that crawl-under thing.

Nick suggests climbing the wall a ways back and coming along the ledge instead. So Bill handed us his camera and binocs and went for it.

This was not an option I was wild about. The ledge kind of melted away in a Dali-esque drip as it neared the passage. Bill soon reaches a point where he can go neither up nor down, forward nor back. Oh, drat. You guys go on. I'll just stay and feed the burying beetles.

Back to Plan A. In order to squeeze through beneath the boulder, Bill has to wriggle on his back, like a sea otter. I went through on my hands and knees.

He's going to make it.
I think we should do this slot canyon hike every year. It will keep us honest when the Christmas cookies come around.

This post is dedicated to all the Little People out there. Sometimes we rule.

For those needing another Chet Baker fix, as well as a splendid photographic and video run-down of October 11's Big Sit from our tower, go visit Jim McCormac's excellent blog, Ohio Birds and Biodiversity. There is a picture of Chet there that will make you smooch your screen.

Slot Canyon Magic

2009-10-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I think about my favorite days ever. A few stand out in memory, like the day I took Phoebe, 17 mo. old and just walking, in a bike trailer along the coastal trail in Monterey, California. I remember every detail, every sparkle on the water from that day.

The Slot Canyon Adventure on our Missouri River canoe trip in Montana certainly ranks up with the Monterey day. We'd camped under some cottonwoods, and got up the next morning to go into the most magical of canyons. As its name suggests, a slot canyon narrows down until it's a squeeze to get through, making for a whole lot of fun. That's a whole 'nother post, seeing Bill of the Birds through that canyon.

The view across the river included some sheer cliffs and a prairie falcon nest!
Bill of the Birds had brought his spotting scope along, and we watched the falcons tend their young.

A bull snake greeted us at the campsite. Liam spotted it first!

Our guide Nick caught the placid snake and relocated it a short distance away. Bull snakes climb after birds' nests, as rat snakes do back home in Ohio.

What a gorgeous creature. He looked like someone tried to make him a T. Rex for Halloween.

This canyon had it all. Gorgeous wildflowers with extraneous minutiae (Nick and Liam).

There's a rock wren in this picture. Take my word for it.

Gumbo lilies, a kind of primrose, spread their huge white flowers along the cliffsides and tops. I scrambled up to this one and confirmed my suspicion that it would have a heavenly fragrance! Barely any leaves, any plant at all--just a huge flower that looked like someone had dropped a Kleenex on the scree.

Rock pigeons nested along the canyon walls, filling the space with their eerie moans. It was as if the rock walls were breathing, weeping.

We took turns shooting pictures of each other in the great arch atop the canyon.

Here's Bill of the Birds, posing.

I don't know why we feel we have to stand, face the camera and smile, but we do, again and again, even though it makes for some pretty prosaic shots.
To me, the rock looked like a big camel, or a wonderful turkey.
Al Batt, humorist, writer, exemplary human being, was along on our trip, by the grace of Mountain Bluebird Trails and the Great Falls Chamber of Commerce. Such a gift they gave us, letting us experience Montana's Russell Country in this way. Al barely fit in the arch.

Back at camp, Al and Bill muttered about needing some yaller mustard for these here hot dogs hmmmmmm
I don't think there was a pop culture, music or movie reference that Al didn't get and fire right back, and they flew thick and fast. Not to mention his wide-ranging knowledge of natural history, and the obvious mutual affection between Al and our kids. What a wonderful traveling companion!

Oh, thank you, Russell Country. I hope my readers are inspired by this post to book their own trip on the Missouri.

A Bald Eagle's Lunch

2009-10-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

Wildlife viewing opportunities along the Missouri can be spectacular. There are eagles, bald and golden, prairie falcons, mule deer, mergansers, nighthawks, coyotes, soft-shelled turtles, beaver, muskrat...we saw them all.

A pretty Brewer's blackbird poses for its portrait.

Here's a pair of golden eagles on a distant but most picturesque promontory. Oh how I wanted to get closer.

With Phoebe steering, we drew near a bald eagle who was having a fish dinner on a log.

It's a subadult bird, with a "dirty" head, not quite in full adult plumage. It could be anywhere from two to four years old.

Note that it's got the fish in its bill on takeoff.

I am loving this, trying hard to keep my camera steady as I fire shot after shot. Should have had it on motordrive, but ah well.

And then he did it--transferred the fish from bill to talons, in flight! Woweee!

As this publishes, they'll be finishing up the Big Sit in our tower at home. I'll be over in the Dayton area, having booked a presentation for the Bruckner Nature Center on the day of the Big Sit. D'oh! Never thought the Sit would fall on October 11! That's what happens when you book a year in advance...things slip your mind. But I'll have been there from dawn to noon, when I have to take off. And I'll have packed in as much fun as I could. Hope you've had a fun weekend, too, wherever you're Sitting.

The Lucky Day

2009-10-09T04:26:00.000-07:00

I know. It's been a long time since I posted Chet. Here's a fresh picture for you, of Chetty at the top of the tower stairs, hoping to get a lift down. You may be sure he got both a kiss and a lift, a hug and a squeeze. He saves me every day, my little carved ebony lovepuppy.

I woke up at 3:30 AM yesterday morning, and my nasty old brain revved right up and said GET GOING YOU HAVE WORK TO DO and my body said WAAAAH WHY WHY WHY and my brain answered JUST BE GLAD IT'S NOT 2:30 I COULD DO THAT, YOU KNOW! AND NEXT TIME I JUST MIGHT! HERE, HAVE SOME MORE HORMONES SOME ESPECIALLY CRAZY ONES!

Can you just stop with the hormones? I am a sane, productive person trapped in the body of a cackling madwoman. Trying to claw my way out of this pod.

So I stayed up for five more hours, to get Bill off to Boston and Phoebe on the bus at 6 AM and Liam on the bus at 7:45 and I fed everybody and made sure they had all their stuff and at 8:30 I crawled back into bed supposedly to edit my manuscript but we all know that lying in bed with a couple of pounds of paper on one's chest is the surest soporific there is. The sun was streaming in on my face and Chet was warm and satiny and snoring gently by my side and my arm was draped over him and two hours just flew away while the world waited and life got better. Bluebirds were chattering and singing outside the whole time.

When I woke up I went out into the greenhouse which I had filled up for the winter only the day before

and I gazed at my plants and breathed and was thankful for this wonder, this best gift ever, this little summer-crammed room, saving my soul even as things are dying outside

for those big shrubs on the top shelf are gardenia and poet's jasmine, the things I need to survive winter...and oh I must take some heliotrope cuttings today!! I always forget!

There are hibiscus and begonia

and many geranium cuttings, rooted and just waiting to burgeon. There is lobelia seeded into every pot, already abloom. So we will have plenty of whitefly this winter.

And I walked out into the backyard and saw a bird hopping on the ground and thought, that doesn't seem right, that it should hop like that with me nearby...
so I drew closer and darned if it wasn't a male bluebird who couldn't fly.

He scuttled into the grass and hid silently but I dug him out for his exam.

and he proved to be surely the fattest most beautiful bluebird on the planet. From the shrill of his voice when I picked him up I could tell he was born this year, perhaps on our place. His wings check out, no breaks or even bruises and he's fat as butter but he can't fly so I will give him food and time and love.
and later on when he's rested up and trying his wings, a screened flight tent and we will see what all that does for him.

His two companions keep circling the yard looking for him and calling and calling. They saw me catch him and take him inside and I swear they followed me around the yard all day, calling disconsolately. I told them I'd get him back to them as soon as I could.

It was a lucky day all around. Lucky for him, lucky for me.

The Horse Rustler's Cabin

2009-10-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

It seemed that every time we glided around a bend on our three-day trip down the Missouri River in Montana, there was something that just begged to be photographed. Alas, the names of many of these places, as carefully spelled out by our guides, have fled into memory's mists, but the images remain.

Devil's Stack? Devil's Tower? Devil's La-Z-Boy? I dunno. Just a big beautiful black rock sticking up out of the white cliffs.

My favorite times were when we'd get to our campsite early, and go on a hike. I loved hiking this country, walking through a Charlie Russell painting with my hub and babes.

We climbed a bank up to the ruins of a little horse rustler's cabin. Here, he'd hide out and watch for pursuers coming down the river.
Some beautiful pines were growing there, which proved to be limber pines, named for their rubbery branches. You can tie a knot in a branch, and it won't break. It must be full of resin to be so limber.
Here's the rustler's view. What a place to live. I could see a Russell painting, staged here, of his capture.

Beautiful stark-white cliffs, snowy clouds, blinding blue sky.

Bill and Liam in the vastness.

And my little girl in the stern.

If you have never canoed the Missouri River, please, please put it on your list of things to do before you paddle down into the Big Mystery.

check out our outfitter: Missouri River Canoe Company

They couldn't have been better: relaxed pace, great food, local lore and history. Book it!

Pelican Parade

2009-10-07T14:09:00.000-07:00

White pelicans occur along the Missouri in summer. I'm not sure where they're breeding nearby, but they sure are in high breeding plumage, in a state most of us don't get to see. In this state, the white pelican grows a comb on its bill, a horny plate that falls off when it's not sexy anymore. And they grow this lovely black peruke, a little pelican toupee.

With Phoebe in the stern, we snuck up on a pelican. When I was in college, I took an animation course. This was in the days of cels and paint, when you drew every stage and painted it on a transparent cel. I chose to animate the takeoff of a pelican from the water. Oh, if I could have had these photos to work from!

Here's what I learned in Animation. I learned that I didn't want to be an animator, at all. I guess learning what you don't want to do is half the battle. Maybe more than half the battle.

This pair of white pelicans was resting and talking quietly on a mudbar.
Suddenly another pelican approached.

Sploosh! he splashed down and skated in to break up the tete-a-tete.

Who invited him?

I TOLD you he'd crash our little date!

I am so excited. My right elbow is resting on an 1 1/4" high stack of paper, still warm from the printer. It is the text of my new book. I finished the final edit today. Well, with books, there is no such thing as a final edit. Heck, it hasn't even gone to my editor, Lisa White at Houghton Mifflin. But I finished my quasi-final edit. And now I get to pencil in the illustration ideas in the margins. Oh my goodness. Verklempt!

Sometimes it hits me that if I were a normal author, I'd be pretty much done now. Instead, my work is about half done, because I've got to create all the illustrations. And if this book is anything like Letters from Eden, it's going to be lavishly illustrated with sketches and paintings of Important Birds in My Life.

Let the wild illustration rumpus start!