As The World Turns

September: A three o'clock drive down Main Street means stopping for the school bus--Lisa's driving a brand-new one this year! A mom and dog wait for a first grader, the dog wagging, bowing, and barking as she takes the big steps down to the sidewalk. Self-consciously pierced, dyed, and duded-up teens walk hand-in-hand.

Birds are on the move. I glance up from my desk mid-afternoon to see an event happening: thousands of starlings flicker through the woods like tattered black sprites. They keep coming for five minutes, but how long before I noticed them, and why are they moving through the trees like that?

The leaves are changing: no brilliant color yet, but the delicate filigree left by the caterpillar invasion of June is faded green and falling in torn fragments to the ground. Goldenrod glows with a seeming inner light and my favorites, the dark purple asters, are coming on. I think of my birthday coming on as well, October second. Fifty-seven rich and wonderful years. A share of difficulty and heartache, but that is what being human and alive is about, and my share has been blessedly small. The past few days have been rainy and cool, but, there are four more days of summer!

Where have I been? Good adventures, wanderings, and visits with loved ones! No internet service! New memories to store and savor in this old head! In July we went to Virginia where I was a presenter at the VA Highlands Festival. I tried out my new "Writer's Medicine Bag" with treatments for all the ailments, physical and mental that authors suffer, from rejectionitis to writer's block. Plus we got to visit with dear old friends and family. Fun!

Then time and space at my beloved Island Pond in southern New Hampshire. It was a mix of solitude and social whirl with family and friends. I wrote a new story, Camp Dog George, in which a puppy learns the ropes of being a good camp dog from the ghost of the late family dog, Old George. We celebrated daughter Fern's engagement to Scott with songs and laughter. I did a presentation for daughter Spring's Audubon Camp. We raced kayaks and canoes for the WBW Memorial Regatta. (The girls and I placed second in our three-woman-powered canoe!) We recreated Mum's terrible recipes for the MLW Memorial Cook-Off. What a walk down our gastronomically distressed memory lane! We climbed mountains. Fred sold two beautiful tables at the Adirondack Rustic Furniture Fair in Blue Mountain Lake and I signed copies of Moose Eggs and Moose Power at the gift shop. We celebrated Mom and Dad Beckhorn's eightieth birthdays with a wonderful Beckhorn gathering in Owego. One dear old friend, Ranger, was lost to cancer and another sweet one, Linda, was saved from it. Year-old puppy, George, learned to swim after a stick thrown in the lake and leap from the ground straight into our arms.

Home again to lonely cats and an overflowing garden. We've gotten some wood stacked in the cellar, more to do. I've cleaned out the freezer in preparation for filling it again and we've frozen twelve quarts of beans and as many of tomatoes, brocolli, and summer squash. The mornings are dark and chilly. But there will be mist burning off the hills and brilliant Indian summer days, pumkins and cider. Here's an old unpublished song lyric of mine that I made up when the girls were little:

Color Time Rhyme

October is the color time
I like to sing a little rhyme
Come along and walk with me
I'll tell you what we'll see

The leaves are yellow, brown, and red
White geese are flying overhead
I see an orange pumpkin too
The sky is very blue

The squirrel finding nuts is gray
And purple asters line the way
There's nothing blacker than a crow
Green pines stand in a row

Christmas in July

The red currants are ripe. We planted the bush perhaps twenty years ago on the edge of the steep bank in front of our house. It’s a little too close to the drop off. Now that the bush is big, that side is difficult to pick. You have to fight the slope, encroaching blackberry canes, and the frightful crown vetch which someone told us would be a good thing to plant on the bank, but which we deeply regret. It swallows up anything else we plant, and it has been a struggle to grow the lilacs, flowering quince, althea, and rose bushes we’ve been planting on the problematic bank over the years. We have to keep peeling back the smothering blanket of vetch. (The bank is the result of building a passive solar, partially underground, stone house into the side of a sunny knoll.)

Crown vetch has now crept across the lawn and into my flower garden. It joins the throng of persistent weeds which love the huge raised bed of soft loam, laid over the near bedrock left by the house excavation and contained by a stone wall, as much as the flowers do. Bind weed and (shudder) horseradish both appeared without help. The Bouncing Bet I found as a pretty little slip in the sand of the riding ring. I stupidly bought the wormwood (nurseries should mark potentially invasive plants) and my sister-in-law brought me an un-named, hollow-stemmed bog plant for my garden pool which has spread all over, but thankfully is easy to uproot. But now, like the crown vetch, my thoughts have wandered to the flower garden—a vast subject in itself—which is ripe for a much-needed weeding after last night’s rain.

Currants are on the agenda today. It is a love/hate relationship, I’m afraid. Every July, I watch with a mixed sense of anticipation and dread as zillions of tiny fruits turn to brilliant, ruby jewels. With exactly no nurturing, and with rabbit-like fecundity, this bush has pumped out bumper crops year after year. My gardening encyclopedia tells me that in some states it is illegal to plant currants as they harbor a rust disease which affects white pines. I dearly cherish my thirty or so white pines, all of which I have planted. They are a sweet reminder of my New England childhood. But I cherish this crazily generous red currant bush as well. So it remains and the pines seem to be growing well. My resource also tells me that currants like well rotted manure, potassium, mulching, and some late winter pruning. Do I dare encourage more productivity?

Red currants are so sour that the birds seem to have no interest in them. Without sugar, one might think them poisonous. They are tedious to pick. Processing them is a bit of a chore. But! They make the most beautiful, tart jelly! Oh my! A jar of sparkling, glowing, tasty, red currant jelly, tied up with a green satin bow, in my mind, makes a lovely Christmas gift. I try to stow away two or three batches of half-pints jars every July. It eases my love/hate relationship with The Holiday to know that I have inexpensive, useful, gifts—with my heart sealed into them—put away for that foolish, exhausting, joyful season that I really do love.

And my heart goes into those jars indeed. Red currants are a strange fruit to pick. They grow in gleaming, cascading, grape-like clusters, which I strip off the stems, by rolling them gently between my fingertips. I feel almost as if I were stripping milk from the teats of a cow, as if I were milking the bush, easing her of her heavy burden. I tuck a quart yogurt container into an elastic waistband so that both hands are free, and set to work. But it is frustrating. There are so danged many of them that only a truly obsessive compulsive person could clean a branch entirely. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to stop. I am lost in a seemingly infinite world dripping with glowing red fruit.

I have picked them in the broiling sun with puppies playing in the shadows under the bush. I have picked them with my sister and friends, chatting away as we worked. One summer, I had family visiting to attend their Alfred-Almond High School reunion and had to leave be on the faculty of the Highlights Foundation’s Chautauqua Conference the next day. My in-laws all pitched in. We got the currant harvest into the freezer, I made the jelly later—and they all got jelly for Christmas!

Two days ago, I started by picking a quart. Yesterday evening, my husband helped and we got three more quarts in the grey light of approaching night and rain. I am reminded, with my face deep into the intricacies of the red currant bush, observing at close hand its many insect residents, how little I know of them. What is that spider with the body like a tiny white marshmallow? Or the triangular, hard shelled beetle that so often drops in with the berries. Look! Here’s a tiny snail, four feet off the ground!

So now, it’s time to get out the canning funnel and tongs, the strainer bag, jars and lids, pectin, a fresh bag of sugar. Will I pick all the currants this year? Perhaps I’ll have enough left over currants to put away for Spring’s boyfriend, Chris, to brew a batch of red currant lambic beer. Now that’s an idea. Better stop blogging about currants and start slogging away at them!

Frog Blog

Deep summer, and the nights, even here on breezy Toad Hill, have been sweaty and twisted-sheet-sleepless. The green frogs in our pond love it. They twang away through the dark. I have finally figured out what they are singing. It is a slowed down version of The Camptown Racetrack played disjointedly: The Camptown . . . racetrack’s . . . five miles . . . long doo . . . dah . . . doo . . . dah . . . the Camp . . . town la . . . dies sing this . . . song . . . oh . . . the doo dah . . . day . . . Just like the Camptown ladies, those darned green frogs are gonna to sing all night! Every now and then, a bullfrog thrums, but most of them are so deeply into their jug-o-rum by this hour that they are nearly comatose.

Heat and humidity, thy name is frog. They seem to be moving around these days, perhaps freed up to travel a bit with the air so moist and no fear of their skin drying out. I found a young green frog in one of the horse sheds the other day and was surprised by a bull frog in the garden at the end of the lettuce row. Perhaps he was going a-courting one of the mice that live under the straw mulch? Last evening, the sparse grass under the maple trees in our back yard was alive with the tiniest possible toadlings, just out from the pond and jerkily faring forth. We had to watch our feet as we stepped.

Charlie the rooster crows twice and I turn to look at the clock. 4:38. "Shut the hell up!" he crows. Why does he say that? He’s the one making the noise? The rest of Toad Hill is pretty silent. I am in some sort of half-sleep now, mind rambling. I hear the light lapping of Goldie stealing a forbidden drink from my water glass and the guilty thump as she jumps down from the bed when I roll over. Usually I keep a coaster over my glass as I really don’t like to share my water with a cat. It doesn’t seem like I am sleeping now, but I must be, because when I try my strategy for falling back to sleep, reciting The Walrus and the Carpenter, I keep forgetting where I am and don’t get past “and then they rested on a rock convieniently low . . .” If I am seriously wakeful at night I go through The Ballad of Sam McGee, The Pines,The Road Song of the Bandar Log, and perhaps, Gunga Din—at which point it is probably better to just switch on my Itty Bitty Book Light and read. Maybe it’s time to learn a new poem? Maybe some Gerard Manley Hopkins? Hopkins? The frogs are getting to me!

Our there, a song sparrow now sings briefly, perhaps the one who likes to perch on a dead branch of the old white lilac to pipe up his bit of music. Charlie is quiet for a half hour before crowing again. At least the chickens are down in the new garden in their “chicken tractor,” a moveable, bottomless cage, where they have been feasting on clover all summer. His crowing is blessedly muted by the distance. An indigo bunting sings wheezy double notes and then at five o’clock precisely, an entire chorus of robins breaks forth. The earth has revolved and now we will have light. A crow caws. Going to my desk now, I open the door to gather in the morning song. An oven bird. Really? So close to the house? Thank you.

A Slow, Abbreviated Walk

I was recovered enough from a very nasty stomach bug to try my usual walk this morning. We went to my niece, Susy’s, graduation from Connecticut College on Sunday and had a splendid family time. But midway through the lovely luncheon in Mystic, my daughter Spring and her boyfriend were struck simultaneously, necessitating that I drive Spring back to Northampton in her car, while Fred did the honors for Chris in our car. It was long and miserable drive. My time came during the night, and luckily Fred was able to drive me back to Rexville (another long and miserable drive) before he too was felled by the relentless germ. Not fun. At last, I was able to keep down a few crackers and some chicken broth.

But after a long sleep, I awoke to a misty, green morning full of birdsong. A bath and a very easy yoga session on the deck eased the aches. It felt wonderful to be interested in life again. Still, leaning over to tie my sneakers made me dizzy. I sat out in the yard and slowly ate a little yogurt and granola which tasted so good it almost made me shiver. The avian voices around me were like the layered fragments of conversation at a cocktail party. I could hear a tanager in the treetops across the road, the yard residents: yellow warblers, yellow throats, song sparrows, and redwings. Of course the oriole couple flashed about like flying orange slices. The male seems to have composed a new melody since Friday. It sounds like the opening of a Mozart minuet. I wish I was savvy enough to identify it. Maybe I can hum it for my sister Cathy and, with her perfect pitch and memory for things like that, she’ll recognize it.

Entering the woods, strands of tent caterpillar webbing clogged with tatters of wasted new foliage made it impossible to walk without trying to wipe the sticky threads and the creepy crawlies away from face and hair and neck and arms. Ick. I vacillate between crushing every caterpillar I encounter in an effort to do my part, and just picking them off and tossing them. Unlike the cuckoos, who are thriving on this second year of infestation, I do not find them in the least bit appetizing. Did I hear that bears eat them? But nothing seems to be able to keep up with all these busy larvae. They love the sweet maple leaves and many are denuded even as they try to leaf out after the winter. It is a sad sight after months of looking forward to the green woods of summer. Now it’s the chewed and chomped woods. The forest floor is covered with an unnatural litter—not the richly colored litter of mature leaves that have ceased photosynthesizing as the planet travels on its yearly passage—but a layer of tissue-thin crumbs of faded spring green. I stand motionless and can hear the activity. Is it tiny larval jaws chomping, or merely the rustle of leaf debris falling?

Suddenly, a streak of blue. An indigo bunting dives into a rosebush, another unwelcome invasive. An elegant mistake. He/she knows just how to get through the thorny mass at blinding speed, but somehow didn’t notice me. I look for the nest and find it, an untidy platform of twigs when viewed from underneath and as close as I can get without threatening myself or the safety of its contents.

There is plenty of foliage on the poplars to hide the tanager. While I listen and search for a glimpse of scarlet, his raspy notes are intersected by the more melodious notes of a rose breasted grosbeak. He doesn’t seem to mind being seen, but at last I give up on the tanager.

I am slow, but George-Jack-Russell is her usual energetic self. In the hedgerow stone-rubble wall, she suddenly encounters Mr. Skunk. I see the scuffle out of the corner of my eye, the dancing black and white derriere just before the skunk disappears into its den, and then George is rolling and running, scrubbing her face into the grass. She’s too frightened and miserable to go on with the walk, so there’s nothing for it but to go home and mix up some skunk recipe: peroxide, baking soda, and a few drops of dish liquid. Now she’s really a dog . . . except that she hasn’t met Mr. Porcupine yet . . .

A Drizzly Green World

George, all fifteen pounds of her, is a real dog. Here's a picture of her last June at seven weeks old. Just now, after a wet walk to the mailbox and back through the overgrown thorn apple meadow (indigo bunting, ovenbird, chipping sparrow) instead of following me back into the house, she opted for a session in the yard gnawing on her latest prize: a deer leg dragged home from the old Kane farm orchard. We’ve been going there daily looking for morels, but no luck yet. Well, I look for warblers and Fred looks for mushrooms, while the dogs cover the midrange. They look for deer, which George is too small and Spike to slow to bother much—or the occasional dismembered limb leftover from hunting season. So, just now, she came in, thoroughly soaked, needing a good toweling, and smelling like a wet dog that just chewed a deer bone. Such is a dog’s morning.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately—and tamping in fence posts for our new quarter acre garden and turning over a stony, goldenrod overgrown section of the old one the last few days has given me a lot of time to think—about children asking questions. “What’s that?” and “Why?” and how often we adults say, “I don’t know.” I love knowing, and each year it’s a little more: “That’s a black billed cuckoo calling and skirmishing around the shrubs by the pond with his mate. They’re eating up those hairy caterpillars—tent and gypsy moths. There are a lot of cuckoos this year because it’s a high caterpillar year and was last year. When the eating is good the birds lay more eggs, sometimes in other bird’s nests.” The cuckoos have no doubt been calling around Toad Hill for all of the thirty years that I’ve been here, but this is the first year that I feel like I truly know them. And yet I have not seen their nest, or eggs, or young . . . There is so very much to see. Much we are blind to, much we must search for. The sad thing is that when we keep saying “I don’t know” children stop asking—and become blind to what they once noticed and asked about. Children, I think, in some ways notice much more than adults. Yes, there is much they cannot understand, but: “What’s that?” “An ant.” “Like Aunt April?” “How can it carry such a big crumb?” "I don't know."

We should say, “Let’s find out” more often.

It takes me a long time to learn some bird songs. This year I’ve learned hooded warblers and now that I know the song, suddenly the blackberry woods near the area I think of as “Sherwood Forest” seems full of them singing “Danger danger! I see you!” I like to make up my own transcriptions. The common yellow throat does indeed often sing: “Whitchitty, witchitty witchitty!” like the Birding by Ear CD says, but I also hear: “Wheat eater, wheat eater, wheat eater!” and sometimes “Interview, interview, interview!” I wonder if children, with their ability to absorb language, could learn bird songs more easily that adults. Watch out any grandchildren of my future! Gramma’s going to take you birding!

My great grandmother, Mina Vestal French, after whom I patterned Grandmother in The Kingfisher’s Gift, took my mother and my uncles birding. My mother told me she sometimes found it boring, yet Mum took the time to teach me to recognize the birds page by page in the Little Golden Book of Birds before I went to kindergarten. Later, in college when I was given my first pair of binoculars by Grammy (Nin’s daughter-in-law) I would look at a bird and it would come back to me from that little guide: purple finch! Uncle Bob remembers that Nin would point out a bird and then shoot it with her twenty-two in order to skin, stuff, and mount it! I find that hard to believe (but why would he make it up?) unless it was a large bird--a warbler might end up just as a puff of feathers. But she did indeed have stuffed and mounted birds all over her house in bell jars. I remember them vividly. After she died, Mum took Cathy and me to Wayland to help clean out the house. I opened a trunk in the attic to find a gorgeous, perfectly mounted pheasant lying inside, so lifelike it could almost have jumped up and walked away.

Fox Eyes

I think there is a children’s picture book by that name, and now I see why. (Ah yes, dear old Margaret Wise Brown, Knopf, 1977, illustrated by my favorite illustrator, Garth Williams and yes, he really captured the intensity!) On my morning ramble a few days ago, approaching the dike of our upper pond, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a fox curled up resting at the base of a young Scotch pine. I say resting, because from the constant motion of his ears, he was clearly not asleep. I say he because I believe this is the male of the pair that I have seen a number of times. I had suspected they might be denning in the old slash pile in the grove of young maples that our daughter Fern long ago named, The Woodland of the Twilight Elves. I’m thinking that his mate might have a litter already and be holed up with them.

In any case, it was overcast with a strong wind from the east, and even though I had just coughed and then called Georgie-year-old-heyena-Jack-Russell pup, the fox was unaware of my presence. I sat down less than fifty feet away and studied him through my binoculars, imagining painting the many shades of red, buff and gray fur ruffled by the moving air, and the many texures of his coat. The black ears swiveled, keeping watch. Presently, Georgie came close without discovering him. Instantly his head came up and he fastened a gaze so intense on her that it took my breath away. Fox eyes! Gleaming jewels. Penetrating, intense, measuring. At last, Georgie discovered fox, and there was a merry chase down through the pasture to the Woodland, but he was safely gone, brush and all. Perhaps the den is entirely elsewhere and this was a ruse to lead her away.
The website www.wonderclub.com says, “Foxes are nocturnal animals whose nighttime vision is especially acute. Behind the light-sensitive cells in a fox's eye lies another layer of cells called the tapetum lucidum, which reflects light back through the eye, increasing the sharpness of its vision and better allowing it to spot prey. The fox's sensitive hearing also enables it to locate prey easily. It can pick up low-frequency sounds, such as a mouse rustling in the grass or earthworms moving on the surface of the soil.” The website also said that their eyes reflect green at night and they have whiskers on their legs as well as their faces! And a careful observer can distinguish individual foxes by coloring, so I will have to try to observe more carefully. I’d like to know my shy, russet colored neighbors a little better.

Moose Power! Muskeg saves the Day

Hurrah! It's finally here! Moose Power! Muskeg Saves the Day is now available from Downeast Books, Amazon, Borders, and where ever children's books are sold. Who doesn't love a big goofey moose and a grandpa and grandson who don't know what to do about their horse, Katy, who is too old to work and their fast-growing, big antlered orphan from the woods? The beautiful artwork is by Vermont illustrator, Amy Huntington. I think she really captured the heart and soul of my story. Thanks, Amy!

You guessed it, Katy in the story is named for my little Morgan mare who would gladly pull logs and race all in the same day, like her famous ancestor. I really hope people like this one because I just sent my editor Moose Feathers, in which the little boy, Ti'Jean finds a goose egg which hatches and, you guessed it, the gosling imprints on Muskeg! I'd love to see Amy's illustrations for that!

A big thank you goes to my editor, Karin Womer. A while back, after Moose Eggs was published, I sent her one of those photos that goes around the internet of a moose in full harness with the message, "Our next book?" She said, "Sure!" and the rest, as they say, is history. Easiest query I ever sent! Turns out the photo was a hoax, but there are existing real photos of moose and elk in harness, so it's a tall tale with a germ of truth to it. My French Canadien connection, Francine Veilleux, helped me with finding suitable phrases for my character, Jean du Bois. We had a lot of fun, sitting on the dock at my camp in New Hampshire working on the manuscript. So a lot goes into a few words, you see! My computer animation students at Alfred State got to see the story in progress as well.

So now, weighing in at just a few ounces, but strong and healthy and looking for lots of love, is my new baby, Moose Power! I hope lots of kids and librarians find it. Let me know what you think!