We’re back from a few days at Palm Beach with Peter and Allison, where they share a vacation house with Allison’s Grandma Margie. It’s so beautiful there — palm trees against the mountains. Sunshine. It did get up to 94 degrees, but you just go out for your walk in the mornings. Sit on the patio and watch the golfers in front of you in the hot afternoons. We had dinner one evening, with Uncle Bacchus (Margie’s brother) and his husband Luigi in Rancho Mirage, which is the next development over. Their house is filled with treasures, the garden amazing, just, you know, two gay guys? Luigi is a cook, and tells the best funny stories in his Italian-flavored English. They promise they’ll visit us “at the farm,” but not holding my breath.
End of March, now, and Mom Nature’s busy, all her creatures celebrating spring. At our house, one of her ideas has been to provide us with several flocks of wild turkeys. Like maybe 25 birds, total. They’re interesting to watch, their tails when they’re courting spread into two feet of gorgeous fan, they gobble as they go, and seem to find our dog-less property the best real estate around. But. They scratch and scrape at our newly planted “country garden,” probably eating the newly sewn seeds, and poop everywhere. We act like idiots, run at them, barking and growling, and they do scurry away.
I complained about this on Friday to Tim, my banjo guy, who, incidentally, apparently knows everything, and he suggested that I could Google for coyote shaped figures made of cardboard to place strategically to frighten them. Really? I looked it up and there they are. Wow. Would we do this?
Well, walking down the road this morning, I’ll be damned if a real coyote didn’t run across the road in front of me. (You know how life does this. Pretty soon I’ll be seeing coyotes everywhere.) Then, to make Mom Nature’s point, this afternoon Larry and I saw a bobcat cross in front of the fence north of the house.
Yep. Cows are back. The babies are maybe 2-3 weeks old. I might worry about them, see above, if I didn’t believe that those 7-800 pound mammas make sure no coyote or bobcat touches her calves. Ryan (cow guy) has run the fences and turned the power back on the lines. I can hear it buzzing when I walk up to the barn to check on the water tank. There’s a float attached to the side of the tank which closes the hose when the level of water is an inch from the top. It works, and I believe that someone from Ryan’s outfit checks the animals every day. So I’m able to leave town for a day or two, but when I’m here, I double check.
Larry has spent several days planting the willow slips he collected several weeks ago. Twenty-three of them! I’d been thinking of them as trees — willow trees — but am corrected when Larry says they’re actually more of a bush. Remember the lyrics to that lovely song? ” Bury me beneath the willow, Under the weeping willow tree . . .” Anyway, here they are: (You’ll have to squint.)
You can’t tell, but these are along the big ditch behind the barn. Trees or bushes, they’ll be a good start to the rehabilitation of the ditch, which now hosts mainly blackberry vines, thistle, and the occasional oil barrel left from former owners of the property. Now that the oak stand has been thinned, this is the last big project we have to address.
Having said that, we did engage Allen (remember him) to rebuild the path that leads through the oak stand down to the wetlands. It’s beautiful in the woods now, with the first fawn lilies in bloom and all the tangle of berry vines, fallen branches, swept away. But the path is treacherous now to walk down, climb over, etc., at least alone. This has led to some serious conversations about what we can or should not try to do ourselves. This applies mostly to Larry, by the way. We each have a distinct reaction to a problem. I think: who can I call? Larry thinks: I can fix this. After a period in which the ATV, tractor, and even pickup have been away for repairs, my personal Mr. Fix-it has been sidelined and eager to get back to work. Hence the conversations.
I had a bit of fun the other day. Friend Marjorie spends a couple of hours several days a week, riding dressage in an indoor arena down the way. I begged to be allowed to come and watch one day, and it was such an invocative atmosphere! Horses.”Arena” doesn’t seem like the correct word to project the barn-like quality, soft sound, smell of hay. Later Marjorie showed me a graphic on her phone of the pattern she achieves with the horse (named Gwen, but oh well). I don’t know enough to appreciate the skill she has, or the art form, but it’s a magic hour. Such a different life! When I think of my girlish love of horses, I see one of two: Babe, first, whom Martha and I rode bareback around the woods and pasture, and then Ginger. Whom we could not ride as he was not “broken.” My dad would break him, he promised, but never found time. It was in watching Ginger in the pasture with our cow, Suzannah, when I first observed how it was that cows and horses made babies. Normally, one supposes, not with one another. “They’re just playing,” my dad explained when questioned, and that was that.
Funny. What was your childhood like?
Okay, enough. Happy Easter, happy spring. No, I’m not dying any of our eggs for the holiday!
0 Comments