Meanderings

Four year old buckwheat seed still a hearty sprouter in this year's garlic field. A fast-growing cover crop, it is now tilled in.

My neighbor's giant pumpkin patch: all those leaves to support one pumpkin.

My tray seeded royal catchfly, Silene regia, finally flowers, weakly, in its first year.

Eastern tiger swallowtail grabbing a drink from a rain filled cell tray.

A frog poking its head out of the same. 

The tomato patch, post tomato. One plant has retained a healthy posture, but continues to blight its fruit. The plants directly to the right are peppers, unaffected by the blight. The container near the hydrangea are potatoes that have somehow, to date, resisted succumbing. I pulled all the plants, anyway, leaving the tubers in the ground for my picking as needed. The tomato plants filled three 45 gallon trash bags.

The very green Eastern gray tree frog, notably Hyla versicolor, on its spiked throne.

Spring Chorus

You cannot see them, but they are there, near any body of water. They know when you are there, even though they are concealed under leaf litter, and will hush on your approach. If you wait, silently, they will begin playing their combs once again. They are the Chorus Frogs of March. See here for the group experience.

Autumn Creature Feature

This is the best view we could get of a Wood Duck that inhabited the back pond (I don't know what else to call it now, it's beginning to suggest permanent). About two months ago the ducks began congregating, yet I was so busy I didn't realize what was happening. A few weeks later, while felling trees, we noticed on the ridge a steady stream of walking ducks. It went on for minutes, there must have been one hundred! They are extremely skittish and do not let you get close, but I had been listening to their squeaky swing set sound for weeks. It wasn't until the parade that I understood we had a large congregation. One day, a week or so ago, they began flying over the house, rounding back to land on the lawn. Then they were gone.

Last year I did my best to save the frogs from what I thought was a frog trap. But now I'm beginning to think they want to be in this pit -the soil cut and retained around our basement, code required, egress window. I count at least thirteen in this portion of the pit, but there are more. You may also see the blue-spotted salamander to the left of the blue, roofer's trash. Next summer this pit will be excavated, probably retained with a galvanized steel, and a new, rot-proof, egress window installed. What will happen to this amphibian paradise?

Apparently, in autumn, the best house painting days are also the best days for lady bugs to seek out their death chamber. By the thousands on a warm, breezy day, a couple of weeks back, they swarmed the house. On their backs, stuck to the paint I eagerly applied, they became such a nuisance I had to quit. Several left defensive trails, "reflex bleeding" as it is known, on the paint that had dried. Once in the house they strive for light, which tends to be the light fixtures on at night. Look up at the plastic lens to see all the dark splotches of recently passed Coccinellidae. Don't bother cleaning it until winter sets in. They are stubborn too. When you try to coax them into your hand or onto a piece of paper they hunker down or, just as frequently, as they climb walls and windows, they simply drop to the floor, sometimes spreading wings to fly to another location. While gardeners love ladybugs, I have entered a new relationship to them that is, well, a little bit more complicated, and I well-learned not to paint the house after labor day.

Squirrels. This one had no idea I was standing there, silently waiting for Wood Ducks to come by. They didn't. Look at how auburn it is -for a gray squirrel. The posture resembles a man in a Godzilla suit, and by most people's reactions to them, squirrels may as well be Godzilla. Me? I still like them, they do not bother us or the house, we don't feed birds so I have no self-interested reason to despise them, and I'm pretty sure they're having more fun in the woods than any other animal. There is one thing I have learned. I always thought it was squirrels dropping all those acorns in the back yard. It's not. Bluejays. Autumn is the season of bluejays. They knock the acorns down and then do their level best to stuff them in their mouths, then fly away to stash them. Even though I grew up in an oak forested area where gray squirrels and bluejays were the most common animals, I never recognized this behavior until this autumn.

The Chorus

I would be lying if I said that I was perfectly at home in our new environment. It took nearly four months for me to use the word 'home' to describe where we return to. It's not that the land isn't beautiful, clearly it is, or that I am not grateful for the house inherited by us, because I am. I think that it's largely the overwhelming change: leaving our home of nearly fifteen years, all of our ritualized attractions, each place taken in to distract from problems or ourselves, to quiet the disquieting internal dialogue. We've left friends and family (although some family is here) and the reassuring comfort they bring. We've removed ourselves from the network of artist acquaintances that, at the very least, give us the sense we are part of an art "world." Finally, we left our university positions -my wife, adjunct professor at several universities, and myself, university adjunct professor and staff. Like nearly all artists we know, we also must work to pay life's expenses and do the things we want to do. About our move to Minnesota, work is the great, looming question.

At times it feels that it may be easier to land a position as CEO of a corporation than a university professorship. Despite the odds, my wife, with great fortitude, luck, and experience has made it to the final four in a local university faculty search. I acknowledge my bias, but it is well known across a spectrum of university administrators, students, faculty and artists that she is a great professor, artist and role model. She'll be interviewing with several people and giving demonstrations next week. There will be dinners with faculty, lunches with students, campus walk and talks. The whole process is an interview. Although one candidate of four, she may just have a fifty fifty shot at getting the call. If selected, we can move forward here with greater confidence.

If you pray, put in a word for her, us. If you cross fingers for luck, now's a good time to cross 'em. After next week, the months worth of work she has put into this application will be done and we wait. By May, possibly sooner, we'll know.

In the lull I offer the male Western Chorus Frog*, Pseudacris triseriata. singing their greatest hit, "Looking for love in all the wet places..." and the chuckling quack of the Wood Frog, Lithobates sylvaticus, who can hardly take it.

*The species may be the Boreal Chorus Frog, Pseudacris maculata. There are minor physical differences, like slightly shorter legs, that account for differences in species or subspecies nomenclature of North American Chorus Frogs. They are easy to hear and hard to find, and I'm perfectly okay with being mostly right on this one.