Wednesday, May 23, 2012

daily update


Up late, up early, cat in, cat out, the cool breeze of the late night comes into the room and stirs things up a bit and finally, there is the light of another beautiful morning.

Ed’s out on the roof taking down the last of the gutter hangers. The tail end of last year’s decision to try life without gutters.
They just collect leaves – he tells me. Well I know that. I used to clean the gutters in my past suburban home, often far too late in the season, when the slime and rot were already half frozen. Still, shouldn’t we be in the business of redirecting water?

But, a year has passed, gutterless, and so down come the hangers and it all gets posted on Craigslist where maybe they’ll sell but probably they will not. We have several items going on Craigslist -- things I would have said had no retail value at all, except every once in a while a call will come and someone will say -- that old screen door...?


I graded today. I know, I promised not to write “I graded today,” but I met my goal and that is quite unusual and so I make this exception. Seven more days and I should be done. Summer starts then.


In the meantime, Lee, our resident farmer, is working her quarter acre in the back.


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We have had several conversations with her about what’s happening to the fraction of the field that she has thus far ignored and sometimes we understand each other perfectly and sometimes we understand each other not at all and on this issue it is more the latter. Maybe there is a sister and maybe she is waiting for something, or maybe it is a fragment of land sacrificed to the gods who have decided that there shall be no vegetables grown on it this year.

Our own plantings (and this would include veggies or flowers) are both thriving and being lost to chipmunk lunch. Each morning I go out to see what’s chomped off. Today, it’s the penstemon. Yesterday, it was the phlox. Every day a surprise.


Behind Ed's back I can whisper that The Cat is not guilt free either. He loves to walk across the veggie patch and most recently, he moves nimbly through my most prominent flower bed, then finds a spot between the Daylilies and the Echinacea Purpurea and settles in. Tail sweetly wrapped around the Echinacea tag.


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Does he crush some of the plants? Maybe, but at least his mark is less pronounced, less in your face than the bitten off flower heads that are purely the chipmunk’s handicraft.

And still, I cannot complain. They -- the creatures, beasts and birds -- are who they are and if my plant is destroyed today, it will grow back tomorrow or the next year. That’s just the way it is.

5 comments:

  1. If you can't sell them and tire of them hanging around, you can always put them on madison's freecycle.

    also, happy you are embracing the reality of all the little creatures. here is one of my favorite quotes (shared in Megan Senatori's animal law class):

    "Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us. Animals are so easily overlooked, their interests so easily brushed aside. Whenever we humans enter their world, from our farms to the local animal shelter to the African savanna, we enter as lords of the earth bearing strange powers of terror and mercy alike. [A]nimal welfare is not just a moral problem to be solved in statutes, but a moral opportunity to fill our own lives with acts of compassion. How we treat our fellow creatures is only one more way in which each one of us, every day, writes our own epitaph- bearing into the world a message of light and life or just more darkness and death, adding to the world's joy or to its despair." --Matthew Scully, Dominion.

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  2. Beautiful quote, regan.

    In this household, I'm not even permitted to kill spiders or wasps. Sometimes, when their populations swell, we provide them an escort to another habitat. With, what we hope will be an upgrade in a living situation.

    The chipmunks are pushing it in the garden though. They've invited all next of kin for what appears to be this region's feast for fat rodents. And they dig around root systems. We're contemplating a transport to a finer living situation, but there may be just too many...

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  3. We have some chipmunks in our front lawn and they go down one hole, over a ways, and up another hole. I could watch them for hours. (I'm easily amused).

    Why not invest in a few plants of catnip? We have some growing outside but no cats around here are on the loose, they all live indoors. I like the plant anyway. This way your kitty-kat will have something to aim for each morning and it may just send him into a nice mild high so he won't care about treading on other plants so much!

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  4. Bex -- our resident chipmunks are amusing, I'll grant them that. But they just love the array of planting here. Sigh... So it goes: it is that way every year.

    As to Isis the cat -- oh, does he ever love catnip and we have it growing everywhere (it is quite invasive)! I swear, the cat is on a perpetual high from its sedating effects (it is a cousin to valerian). But Isis does love to snuggle in the flower beds. It's safe there and allows him to keep an eye on the chipmunks. He wont chase them -- they're too fast, but he likes to assert his superiority by just being in their way!

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  5. i know the critter count in our vegetable garden increased the more we gave them places to live and hide, which went up with each new human critter we added to our brood. as the weeds grew, so did the straw covering (to hide and kill the weeds we weren't pulling), which gave the voles a good place to nest, along with three square meals a day. but you're certainly not neglecting your garden like we were.

    if you ever tire of fastidiously tending to your garden, you should watch this video about ruth stout for inspiration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWz0-DznwSE

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