APRIL 14

A bright, sunny day. A bright, warm, sunny day. We’re eager to get out and make some Vitamin D. For me, it starts with my usual walk down the road. This  morning I’m trying an experiment.

In a book I’m reading by Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works, he makes the claim that humans don’t think in a verbal language. “You,” he tells me, “don’t think in English.” Instead, my mind uses deep symbols, knowledge, visual images, to form thoughts.

It’s a difficult book, and I can’t follow his mind, let alone my own, without using English. But I’m giving it a try this morning. I feel the sunshine. I hear the same bird I’ve heard the last few days singing “New . . York!  New . . York” Wait a minute. This bird sings in English? Okay, it just sounds like English. But I talk about this bird to myself. In English.  “Wow!” is an English word, isn’t it? 

Try it.  See if you can think without using real, actual words. In your case, probably English words, too.

But now I’m back at the house, and there are chores to be done. First is to manage the kettle of chicken broth that I made from the scraps of two Costco rotisserie chickens that friends Nancy and Vik brought to the pot luck dinner we shared at our Black Butte house on Saturday. Yes, I brought the bones and scraps home in the big kettle, simmered them in water all night with celery leaves, some chunks of leek I found in the refrig, with pepper corns and etcetera. Seven pint jars of broth. Into the freezer. Pretty proud of myself.

I should get outside. I set up the little garden stool out in the path to the orchard and pull weeds. That takes me . . . let’s say forty-five minutes before my back gets too sore hunkered over like that, and I move on. Next is to use the weed whacker around the orchard trees. 

Long ago when we started this project, it seemed a good idea to define a circle around the trees by laying weed cloth around them, and to cover it with small rocks. 

But the chickens now entertain themselves by looking for worms, by flinging those rocks out into the orchard grass. This prevents the lawn mower from achieving a nice ring, and the orchard looks more and more sloppy.

A note on chickens: when they see me approaching, they get dithered. “She brings scratch! Worms!” They cluster around the gate and Rhodie often flies up to see what I have in the little plastic cup I use.  But when they see me with the bright yellow weed whacker in my hands, they scatter off to the corners. “I hate that machine. Why does she have to bring it here.” I’m quoting them. I wonder which language their minds use to process thoughts. We know a chicken has a brain, but does she have a mind?Question for Pinker. 

Right. So what has Larry been doing this beautiful sunny day? Garden work. Planting sets. Mending a hose. But here’s the hard part. There are spent berry canes lying outside the fence which have to be gathered, taken to the garden burn pile. Unfortunately the fence is not only barbed wire, but electrified. And turned on. His arms become a map of blood-smeared puncture wounds, amplified by frequent contact with electricity.

You’d think he might be happy to retreat to his upstairs office in the afternoon attending to the taxes which are due tomorrow. Well, no. 

So when we’ve finally eaten dinner, he suggests that we just leave the kitchen as is and go over to Trysting Tree (golf course) to hit balls. The famous Black Butte Invitational Golf Tournament is approaching, and Larry has not spent the necessary hours on the course in preparation for this event. 

It’s a nice way to end the day. Watch the sun go down. Be grateful.