Getting Ready for Grenada

In just a few days, Fred and I are off for an overdue thirtieth wedding anniversary trip to the island of Grenada in the Caribbean. We'll spend a week sailing and a week at a cottage on the north end of the island. We've been reading up and taking extra long walks to get ready for hiking in the mountains there. The island got hit very hard by hurricanes a few years ago, so we are hoping the trails are open now. I'm looking into Project Stuff Your Rucksack to find out about some small items we could bring with us that might be needed by a school. Of course I'll be bringing some books. I'm really hoping to see a mona monkey and a Grenada dove--and lots of other birds. Santa brought me Birds of the West Indies for Christmas! And we plan to do lots of snorkeling! Here's a favorite shot of us resting after a hike at Carter Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We probably won't need the polar fleece for Grenada! 



Christmas Bird Count on Toad Hill

I wasn’t going to do it. Ronnie had asked me to go on a Christmas count with her and I’d declined. I’d neglected my work so badly over the holidays. It’s frightening how much time I spend on Christmas. It’s a sort of love/hate vortex that I just can’t stop myself from being sucked into. The New Year is fresh energy. Days lengthening. Creative juices flowing.

It was only to be a short walk for some exercise. Fred had twisted his back, so it was just little dog, George, and me. January second. Windy flurries and patches of sun. A thin snow cover. I headed out back along the trail that skirts the brow of the hill behind the house.

There was a twitter and flurry of two tiny birds doing acrobatics on the ends of some maple twigs. Not chickadees. I was suddenly alert. But I’d never see them with these fuzzy 58 year old eyes. Ah, but they came closer! Curious. Friendly. The eye stripes and bright yellow Mohawks were unmistakable. Golden Crowned Kinglets!



Okay. This must be a message. No husband to get impatient. My work can wait an hour or so longer. The Murphy’s law of binoculars is that if you don’t bring them along, you will wish you had. I raced back to the house for my brand new ones that Nikon so kindly sent to replace my old pair with the faulty eye rings.



The kinglets had moved on. But maybe I could scare up some grouse. I had read that their numbers are declining, but I think we still have a healthy population on Toad Hill. It would be good to report some. We walked behind the old Scotch pine plantation that the loggers ripped out last fall and fed to the chipper. They were planted for Christmas trees in the fifties, let go, and now are slowly dying off. These bare patches look like war zones right now, but the native trees will come back and create a healthier forest.



George scouted the edge of some brush piles, and pouff! A grouse zoomed out and veered into the woods like a low flying fighter plane. “Get ‘em George!” I called, but she is clearly not a bird dog. Tail waging, she snuffled her muzzle into a tuft of snowy grass. Mice are more her style. I stomped among the brush piles. Pouff! Pouff! Pouff! Out rocketed three more grouse.



We crossed the road onto the old Kane farm. With the Scotch pines gone, it’s easier to imagine a dairy farm and pastures here. Last fall a pair of blue birds hung around for some time. It will be interesting to see how the birds like all this clear cutting. The rough foundation of a tiny school house can be found on the Lyons Road. I can picture ten or so kids from these several hilltop farms gathering here for lessons. Before those families, this was wilderness. Such a short history of Caucasian influx.



I tramp up through the old orchard which Fred is reviving with six new trees and judicious pruning of the gnarled and lonely survivor—a tasty Snow apple. A red tailed hawk lifts out of the spruces. These also were planted, but they are healthier, so we are leaving them. The hawk is so huge that I am transfixed, waiting for the turn and flash of the bight rusty tail. I feel a surge of joy. Winter is far from dead and dull!



I have hardly lowered my glasses when there is a wild and rowdy barking overhead. A flock of Canada geese, perhaps ninety strong, are heading south. Now? Well, there’s been barely any snow, and winter is still very young.



At the edge of Jerry Smith’s field, I step out into the open beside a round bale to take in the view and gaze at the blustery sky. Patches of blue, but the Whitesville valley is socked in with steel gray. I duck back across the hedgerow. Maybe I can spot some turkeys behind Book’s cabin. I am cruising down the trail that borders our south boundary when I look off to my left. What the heck bird is that? It’s huge and long. Bluish gray. For an instant I think great blue heron, but it’s too late for one. The bird cruises closer over the hayfield, wheels, and suddenly the underside is exposed, starkly black and white. Gorgeous. A rough leg? It’s too early for them to have come down from the north isn’t it? I watch until it is out of sight.



No turkeys. Oh well. It’s been pretty satisfying. Back at the house I check with Sibley and decide that the gorgeous bird was a male harrier. The feeder is as busy and competitive as Black Friday at the mall. Everyone is stocking up for a drop in temperature and a bit of weather. I make sure the cats are in. I'm trying to only tlet them out at night these days. George happily sheds her polar fleece coat and heads for the couch. My cheeks are pink and tingling. Now it’s time to hit my desk.

Tree Trimming 2011 (It sounds like a college course.)

In the 1950’s a former owner of our property planted many acres to Scotch pine and spruces for Christmas trees. When we came to Irish Hill Road in 1980, the blocks of Scotch pines had become impenetrable jungles, perfect hideouts for deer. Gradually, porcupines and disease were killing them off. The spruces fared better, growing into handsome stands where crows and blue jays love to nest. All over the property seedlings from those plantings have sprung up.



Fred and I both come from traditions of wild Christmas trees. My family cut willowy hemlocks at our camp in New Hampshire. The Beckhorns cut bushy little white pines from Grampa Gach’s farm in Alfred. In our youth we both worked at Stutzman’s Christmas tree farm in Hornell and we well know how a nicely pruned Christmas tree should look, but we’ve always been happy with our “Dr. Seuss “ trees, as Fred sometimes calls the more unruly ones. Sometimes we have cut a big tree and lopped off the top. Most years we locate a suitable one growing on our property right alongside Irish Hill Road.



This year we found our tree right across from Fred’s shop. We’d passed it many times with a thought towards the holidays, but the little spruce’s double trunk always nixed it. How could we ever get it into the stand? The young evergreens that spring up in the ditch along the south side of the road shade it and ice remains here long after it has melted other places. They need to come out anyway. Well, let’s just take a look. . . Lo and behold, the double trunk had split from a single stem eight inches from the ground—just enough to fit into the stand. It was perfect. Once set up in the front room, there was no room to actually put a gift under the tree, but no matter.



With the kids grown, decorating is my business. Football is Fred’s. But this year I made a bargain—you put on the lights and I’ll handle the ornaments. It worked. He dutifully tackled the job—but of course I found myself helping to untangle strings, tightening bulbs, and replacing duds. It was fun doing it together. Now I was in the mood. Fred retired to the couch and the game and I, blind and mostly deaf to the NFL or whatever FL was running roaringly around on the screen—set to work.



My husband is an apple tree pruner, a fire wood cutter, a wood butcher, and furniture builder, but he is not a tree decorator. Well, what self respecting woman would trust a man to trim a tree anyway? I ask myself. There’s an art to it. You can’t hang six ornaments on one branch, fragile ones within cat reach, or the best ones at the back—as my man has been known to do—and he may be a wood artist, but you don’t want to set him loose with a box of tinsel.



Now if you’re going to decorate something, a tree is a damn good choice. There are all those branches! Every year I tell myself, you don’t have to put all the ornaments on, but every year, one by one, each with a memory, finds its place. There is the little black ceramic sheep with wool made by pressing clay through a sieve that Fern made at Gammy Lou’s house a quarter of a century ago. It sounds better than it looks. Usually I have hung it low, but this year my newly married older daughter is spending her first Christmas with her husband in Colorado. It is suddenly precious. I place it high in the front. There are all the hand made ornaments: chickadees, Santas, reindeer, rocking horses, a miniature basket full of tiny balls of wool with pins for knitting needles. My sister Cathy has given them to me over the years. She makes them for her church bazaar and always sends me the current year’s model. I could decorate the whole tree with them!



But I can’t leave out the scrollwork star that my high school friend Shiori made, or the stained glass star that Ken made, or the real starfish star. I hang all three stars in the top with the cheap K-Mart angel that Fern and I bought when she was three and still called it the “Ball Store.” I have to set the angel high enough above the top white light so that it doesn’t look as if her feet are burning up. There’s the crudely carved wooden squirrel that I bought from a boy with muscular dystrophy the summer I worked for the Frontier Nursing Association in Kentucky. His mother hated to part with it, but they needed money and I loved it so much that she relented. I feel badly about buying him from her now, so every year I make sure to honor this little squirrel. I hope he carved another. There’s the tiny paper and glitter crèche from Loudonville—at least as old as I am. There’s the porcelain Beatrix Potter mouse, Hunca Munca with her babies, that Aunt Shirley sent me when I was first married. There’s the little wooden sled that I painted with the words "hope" and "joy"  when, in 1982, I was miraculously pregnant with our first child. There’s the sea-blue, blown-glass orb that Spring bought as a little girl on a visit to Frankenmuth, Michigan which will go to her tree when she has a home of her own. Each ornament has a story. I revel in Christmas past as I create Christmas present.



A week later, it is Christmas Eve and Spring and her dad have both gone to bed. But I am still unwinding from the night’s festivities. I help Santa stuff Spring’s stocking, tuck a couple of things into Fred’s and mine, and find gift bags for the dog toys. Poor old Spike’s Christmas present is a bag of tasty pill pockets. The Jack Russells will be sure to gratify us by finding their gifts, snuffling their noses into the bags, and digging out their new toys.



Then I pour myself a little Grand Marnier in one of the surviving delicate pink liquor glasses from my parents’ house, recalling the Christmas Eve I was allowed to sip my first crème de menthe—perhaps from this very same glass. I turn out all the other lights and sit a moment to sip, and savor the magic of the tree. Everything is done now: the baking, the cards, the making, the shopping, the wrapping, the decorating. Christmas can come in now.



But wait! The white light at the top of the tree under the angel is out! I shuffle to the cellar, find a new bulb, and unmindful of the glass of champagne I had a t Jeri and Ken’s house earlier and the Grand Marnier just now, climb the kitchen stool and screw in a new one.



It doesn’t work.



Doggedly, I return to the cellar for another. Yes! We have white light at the top of the tree, and an angel and stars!



There is one more sip in my glass. Not a creature is stirring. The little wild, double- stemmed spruce glimmers and glitters. Mum used to wrap all her gifts in shiny paper to enhance the shimmer. This year’s tree is truly beautiful—as always, the best one yet. But are there too many red lights? Should I put in a green one there, mid-way to the left? That’s it Susan! Sternly I send myself to bed and into Christmas future.

Apple Daze

Bubble Bubble, Toil and Trouble

Aching joints and endless scrubble

Bubble bubble, toil and pleasure

Fill the hold with apple treasure

The apples are in. Yesterday I finished a last task, canning five gallons of cider. Now, aside from taking stock of the rosy fruit crowding our fridge and root cellar, watching for those rotters that might spoil a whole box, and perhaps making another batch of applesauce, we are done. It was a bumper year for our little Toad Hill Orchard after two barren seasons. At last we feel like apple farmers. When the sun shines you make hay and when the orchard bears, you put away fruit—who knows what we will get next year.



When we bought our original thirty acres in 1980, there was a pair of big old apple trees in the little sloping field next to the road, a Baldwin and a Snow. The former is a venerable New England favorite cooking apple, the latter a crisp, luscious “eater” with snow white flesh and cherry red skin. We knew them from our years working in orchards in New Hampshire and the Champlain Valley. I can imagine the first settlers in Whitesville traveling out toe western New York with these two precious and essential apple trees which would eventually fill their cellars—as ours is filled this year.



Our second spring, we planted about thirty trees of many varieties to keep the two elder trees company. Hopefully the original chart is somewhere in Fred’s desk—the untidiness of which is only surpassed by mine. Perhaps one winter day I’ll take on the project of digging it out. Several of the trees are planted too closely and they all need to be pruned to accommodate ladders. Every spring for the fleeting few days that the trees are in bloom, we savor the ethereal scent and beauty, and hold our breaths hoping that frost and rain will hold off enough for the bees to do their work. It’s an organic orchard. We could improve our management, but we have never sprayed. We’ve had some good crops in past years, but nothing like this year.



We two fifty-eight year olds felt like we were in our twenties again, climbing ladders and limbs with one ratty old picking bag and a canvas shopping bag—until evening when aching joints reminded us of our age. Twigs tugged at my hair and leaves slipped down my shirt. Geese winged southward across the sky. Ravens circled overhead. Perfect apples are rare without chemical assistance. I tuck especially lovely ones into my jacket pockets. Sometimes I find one so irresistible that I crunch right into it on the spot. Eve had it right. Apples are definitely meant to be eaten. And there is nothing like picking apples on a bright autumn day. One afternoon Mom and Dad Beckhorn, both eighty-one, helped pick the lower branches, Dad from a lawn chair using his metal grabber. Later the two of them make and can a big batch of sauce in my kitchen. We reserved a sweetly laden little tree for my six Girl Scouts to pick to make into apple crisp for one of their meetings. I’ve made apple pie, kuchen, sauce, cider, and one batch of deep red crab apple jelly. The deer have been busily cleaning up drops and I’ve been giving our three horses armfuls of apples every day.



Fred has become a fanatic hard cider maker, traveling to western Massachusetts to attend workshops, and collecting wild fruit and special varieties to add to his blends. He went to Lains’ Cider Mill in Canisteo to press large batches, three times, some of which we sold fresh. He rebuilt our antique press to do small specialty mixes. (Unfortunately the grinder is horribly inefficient and it’s a bear to turn the handle, especially when grinding hard, small apples. But the exercise is great!) Now the cellar audibly gurgles with many yeasty, fragrant brews, one mixed with black currants, another purely from wild varieties.



There is an amazing difference in apples. One of our favorite findings this year is the pale yellow, thin skinned Calville Blanc D’Hiver (white winter). Our daughter Spring, home for the holiday weekend, made apple tart with it, crumbly with butter and ground almonds. Wow. Everywhere Fred goes, he spots wild trees—potential taste discoveries. I roll my eyes. I’m ready to be done with the harvest. With Spring, we pick up yet more small, hard, wild apples for her to make chutney. “That’s it!” I say, walking back to the car. “I am finished picking apples this year!” We drive up the driveway. It’s satisfying to see the trees bare except for a few stray apples that the deer and grouse will enjoy. High in the branches of the tall old Baldwin tree, the sun catches a tantalizing cluster of bright red fruit, enough for a couple of pies . . .

 



Wolves in the Neighborhood

Ah-roooooooooh, ah-roooooooooh! Ooooooooooooo . . .



There is no translating the sound into human language or writing. We share the same vocal range, but only Canis lupus comprehends the message in the undulating vowels, the drawn out, sweeping, or staccato rhythms, the rising and falling tones. The sound is riveting, joyous, sad, mysterious. It is the voice of wildness. Ever since I read Little House on the Prairie, Julie of the Wolves, and The Call of the Wild, I have longed to hear a wolf howl. On occasion I have heard my own tail wagging creature, who shares 98% of her genetic material with wolves, croon her own eerie little song, but it’s not the same.



Yesterday I heard wolves.



One of the things that I like best about cities is that they are fun and exciting to visit, but you can leave them quickly behind. Head north less than an hour from the Big Apple and you will find The Wolf Conservation Center. www.wolfconservationcenter.org. Yes, you are still in the suburbs, but here in 27 acres of hilltop forest, you can meet wolves that are part of a program which is working to bring Mexican red and gray wolves back from the brink of extinction, and which is educating people about the true nature of wolves. They won’t eat your grandma, but they will eat the slow, the weak, and the sick ungulates and help bring ecosystems back into balance.



Here in western New York, I can’t plant so much as a white pine tree without putting a cage around it to protect it from the ravenous, swollen deer herd. I love deer—precious dappled fawns, big eyed does, and heart stopping bucks silhouetted against misty pines—I love deer in healthy numbers, and deer on my dinner plate. Maybe we need a few more wolves back in their rightful place in the world.



It was an unforgettable day. I met “ambassador” wolves who are socialized to humans. The two yearlings Alawa and Zephyr, played in their enclosure, leaping, delighted and begging for treats and attention. The autumn sunlight glistened on their fur. Each wolfed down, in a couple of minutes, a chicken carcass that I might have stuffed for Sunday dinner, tenderizing it first in their powerful jaws. The elder wolf, Atka, visited aimiably, then lay down and posed as if he were expecting Ernest Thompson Seton to set up an easel nearby and paint his portrait. I glimpsed two rare Mexican grays in their wooded enclosure. If you “hack’ a captive born wolf pup into a wild wolf mom’s nest of pups, she will adopt it 100 percent of the time.



I’m sorry my computer wan’t read my photos today, but you can log onto the WCC website. The Wolf Conservation Center needs our help to win a $25,000. grant from the Chase giving Program. You can help if you are on Facebook by going to www.nywolf.org and clicking on the link on the left.



Ah-roooooooooh!

http://www.nywolf.org/

Why I Write

A rare day of brilliant sun and blue sky! I have bulbs to tuck into the ground for the winter, and a little horse in the pasture who is itching for a good gallop. I've been working on a collection of poems about my four legged friends. I'd like to illustrate them. Just trying to find time and courage. . . Yesterday at the Rochester Children's Book Festival it was exciting to meet readers who loved my books. One little girl had worn out her paperback copy of Wind Rider and was buying a hardcover, plus two for friends. That's why I write--for that one reader who connects. Here's a fun photo of one of my first riding experiences at age three in 1956. My brothers took lessons at Stewart's stable near where we lived in Loudonville, NY. They would let Cathy and me tool around on Trigger, a Shetland of un-numbered years. He was a great babysitter. Cathy was the only one who could make him canter. We have that documented on home movies that my dad made.  

Throw-Away Dogs: The Skeletons in Our Gullies




"Mahoney" learning that not all humans are ugly.

 Mary’s voice was strained. “Someone dumped nine puppies up on Mahoney Gully Road. Two were hit in the road. Ray and I managed to catch five, and Heidi caught another, which she is keeping. We think there’s one more hiding in a culvert.”

My heart twisted. Two dead. How long had they been out there? What kind of person . . . I had a flashback of the carcasses two dead dogs I had found in Heseltine Gully when I was hunting up rocks for my garden pool. The ear of one of them had twitched—but the dog had been dead for weeks. It was seething with feasting maggots. The hauntingly beautiful gullies here in western New York, are with decked with cascades of white trillium and other woodland flowers, birdsong, and sadly—trash. People dump old refrigerators, household garbage, and sometimes fluffy, toddling puppies.

“I’ll help you look,” I said.

As we drove slowly up the winding, seasonal road, which reminded me of my summer with the Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky, we were dreading the sight of the dead pups. “We should move them,” I said. But thankfully, someone had done that—or perhaps coyotes had already dragged them off.

We rounded a bend and saw a black puppy scuttle into the ditch. I pulled over and parked on the narrow verge. The bank fell away steeply in a dense growth of hemlock, yellow birch, and maple. The puppy growled in terror as we approached. I crouched in the wet ditch—we’ve had a lot of rain—and opened a can of dog food. The little creature stared at me, still growling valiantly. Carefully I held out a handful of dog food. The pup backed further into the culvert. I dropped a few chunks and withdrew my hand. Instantly, the pup leaned forward and snapped up the food.

By this time, Mary had silently taken a place above the culvert. I dropped some more food a few inches ahead of the little muzzle. The pup wriggled after it. Another bit of food. Another wriggle forward. Slowly, I coaxed the pup toward the opening of the pipe, while Mary eased her hand down. At last, she was able to grab the puppy’s scruff and pin her well enough so that I could also get hold. The little dog braced its feet and resisted for all it was worth, but finally, I was able to drag it out—a little female with white freckled forepaws and soft eyes. She didn’t growl now or make the least offer to bite.

The puppy and I were equally wet and muddy, so Mary drove my car back to her house. Even though the pup smelled as if she’d been raised in a barn, I couldn’t help nuzzling her. She responded by wagging her tail. I knew I couldn’t adopt her—I’m already at my limit of pets—but Oh, I wanted to. Her ears perked when she saw her litter mates on Mary's deck, and she trotted happily to a greeting of licks and wags.

I gazed at the six baby dogs. They were shy—nothing a day or two of love and attention wouldn’t cure. They were beautiful, each with the potential for a decade or more of devotion to the right human. A challenge to place, but do-able. It would have been better to spay and neuter the parents. I’m pretty sure that the “human” who thinks they can’t afford to spay or neuter a dog or cat somehow manages to find the money for beer, cigarettes, lotto tickets, potato chips, and soft drinks.

Mary and Ray took the puppies to Jim Hoover for shots and worming. Then they will go to Joyful Rescue in Cuba, NY for placement. With luck, they will find deserving humans.

"Hidey" back with her litter mates