Monthly Archives: May 2008

Flowering rhubarb

I’ll be taking a few days off from blogging.  The kid’s getting her tonsils out today! Poor baby.  We’re making lots of frozen juicy things and hoping for the best.

I hope you all have a great, productive, dirt-filled weekend.

“Mama! Come quick! I found some spiders that are your favorite color!”

So of course I came, quickly. The three of us were very intrigued. These babies (baby garden spiders, I swear that’s what they’re called) were slightly smaller than sesame seeds. They were congregating on the top of an old well cover. Hundreds of them, I would guess. When scared, they scatter; otherwise, they feel safer clustered together like this.

Gosh, I am so glad the kid has no fear of creepy-crawlies. Every once in a while she will come home from school and spout some girly-girl crap she picked up from her friends, like “Ants are bad, and they scare me,” and I have to, uh, defend the ants and reassure her. It’s pretty rare though. I’m just glad the girly-girlest friend isn’t coming back next year. (Isn’t that mean of me?)

I realize, though, this blog has been heavy on the creepy-crawlies lately. I apologize to the squeamish out there!

Boo!

I can’t help it: I still am a city girl. Or at least that’s what my brain tells me.

There are instances where I am caught off guard by something I see or hear when here at the farm and my immediate reaction is to Think a City Thought. It happened again to me early this morning when I blearily stepped outside in my bathrobe (yes, Not a City Habit) to feed the chicks and chickens. It was still somewhat dark outside. A big patch of white caught the corner of my eye and I thought, “Who parked a van in our side yard?”

It was a blooming crabapple tree, not a white van.

I remember walking our dog at night when we first moved here in late November of ’04. (He was a city dog, and therefore expected a walk. Our current country dog assumes no such courtesy.) As I waited for Alex to do his thing, I looked diagonally across the property and I saw a red light, then a green light. “Wow,” I thought. “I don’t remember there being a stop light over in that direction.”

Not a stoplight. A neighbor’s Christmas lights. The nearest stoplight? Five miles away, in town, one of two.

Sometimes I will wake up and hear voices, and I won’t assume it’s the tv downstairs (which it is, as Tom’s a night owl) but I will think “wow, those people are out late walking, aren’t they.”

I wonder if I will ever lose city-centered thoughts. Will I ever wake up in the city and wonder who planted a crabapple tree on the curbline?

Gymnosporangium: cedar rust gall. One in this tree was so large I thought it was our dog’s frisbee.

The juniper nearest the house is covered with these things. It rained yesterday, which was welcome: rain means lots of wild asparagus, as well as a bunch of other happy plant life. Rain makes these galls form their little gooey arms. This is a fungus that affects the rose family, of which apples and pears are a part. I’ve got an apple tree 40′ from this juniper. I’ve never noticed a lack of apples because of it…and even if I did, I would have to get rid of a good 30 trees on our property alone to avoid it.

Gall, in the sense I use it when I think about annoying things like this war or this president (irritating, rubbed raw) comes from the Greek word cholos, or wrath; it’s associated with bile and “something bitter to endure.” I kind of like that. But this gall, an abnormal plant growth, comes from the Latin word galla, meaning, of all things, a gall (!) on an oak tree: an oakapple. Words are funny, but I still think Nature has the best sense of humor.

I love these floozy parrot tulips

“…I want to use the time it takes. Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass slowly or quickly, but be only time, something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.” Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (translation by Anne Born)

As I read that last night a large bug kept hitting the screen of the open window of the room I was in. Junebugs, already? I asked myself. It was a warm night after our hottest day of the year (79*F), the leaves are all out, the late tulips are blooming. Why does all this come as such a surprise to me? It must be I haven’t been paying attention.

I got dive-bombed by the barn swallows this morning on my way to feed the chicks. They’re back! They are so very beautiful, even their angry twittering when they swoop my head is lovely. I am reconsidering my plan to have a wild bird-free potting shed; I have spent days keeping the */&# sparrows out of it, but now, well, now the barn swallows want back in. If bird flu comes to our shores, I might reconsider, as the shed is where the chicks spend their first few weeks. But: the barn swallows are back!

Sounds are a nice benefit to farm life: the sounds you hear are, in the main, not man-made, and so they’re fairly welcome to tired ears. People say it’s so quiet here and I end up thinking you must not be listening. There are sounds a plenty, but mainly they’re not as strident as city or suburban sounds. One of my favorites is the noise the pine trees’ cones make after a rain. They close up, you see, during the winter and when it rains; when spring comes or things dry out, the cones pop. It’s a small sound, something between a snap and a pop; on a windless, dry day, you can walk out there and it’s positively crackly. Mostly, though, it’s just a small little blip you hear.

Tick, pop, tick.