Category: Life on Blueberry Lane

I’ve been asked about the wheelbarrow in which we put the weeds in a previous post. It came with the house, is painted red, and appears to be of recent vintage. The weeds are what give it that rustic look. I had forgotten to remark then that the wheelbarrow reminded me of piece written by one of Enrico’s favorite poets, William Carlos Williams:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

As we speak, our wheelbarrow is now empty of weeds and glazed with rain water from the tropical remains of Hurricane Hanna. No white chickens on the grass, alas. The nearest white chicken is a block and a half down from our house, and if outside is itself most likely glazed with rain.

But I doubt that anywhere near so much depends upon it.

Thurber once wrote about an odd fellow with some annoying habits, who used to haunt the halls of his literary cocktail parties . One of his more annoying habits was to pick up some common-place object, such as a light bulb, and present it to the group with dramatic flourish, announcing that he had just invented this thing called a “light bulb”. He would pronounce those two words slowly, as if no one had ever heard of them before. After having the audience repeat the words “light bulb” in unison several times he would continue on to demonstrate — see? — how you could screw the thing into another device he invented called a “light socket”, and when you throw a switch, the room is filled with light. “Just a little something I’ve been playing around with,” the fellow would claim, “I think it might sell. What do you think?”.

I sometimes wonder if these online notes from my Connecticut Journal are cut from a similar cloth. “Look,” I will say, “I have discovered these things I call trees. And over here is a long-eared thing I call a rabbit.” Readers who hail from a less urban landscape than is seen in Southern California might roll their eyes at each other, amused at the stop-the-presses discoveries of this brave pioneer into the demi-wilds of semi-suburban New England. Whether or not this is the case, the fact remains that it is all new to me.

It is in that spirit that I report to you now about some things called weeds.

Apparently, if you surround a house in the woods with a flower bed, plant flowers in that flower bed, and then let a summer’s worth of rainstorms come and go, all sorts of other plants begin to appear that you had not planted, which they call weeds. The owners of the house were going to be coming by this weekend to pick up their mail, and so we took it upon ourselves to go out and try to clear out some of the weeds before they arrived. After three hours digging around on a warm and muggy afternoon we were able to make some progress. We were drenched in sweat and filled an entire wheel barrow with weeds We had to stop though when it got to the point that we could no longer tell what was a weed and what was a flower.

Gigi called a gardener who came out and weeded the place yesterday. By the end of the day the house was bordered by what looked like a garden, with identifiable plants each in their own spot, the rest of the ground nearby clean and bare. When he had finished, Paul the Gardener showed me around, describing what he had cleared away, and pointed to some little plants he uncovered which turned out to be strawberry. He said he had to stop because he got to the point where he couldn’t tell what was a weed and what wasn’t. Guess it happens to everybody.

“Don’t know if you want to mulch or not,” he said. “Not much time left before winter comes.” I nodded my head as if I had some clue what mulching was and how one did it, leaving aside for the moment the issue of how one would know whether one wanted to do it or not before the winter came.

It seems like I often find myself in the situation of nodding my head in response to someone speaking about some facet of life about which I am completely ignorant but which they assume as a matter of course that I am intimately familiar. At long last I have come to terms with this by concluding that, early in my grade school years, there was some absolutely essential class, possibly called “How The World Works,” in which the teacher sat all the kids down and explained everything they were going to need to know to get through life in an ordered, systematic way, find a purpose in life, avoid catastrophic relationships, and in the end how to be happy — but that I was out sick that week and missed the class.

Squirrels
I was not aware of the ferocity of the turf wars that went on between squirrels. Gigi had noted that there were a lot of squirrels running around lately, which reminded me that while she was out in Texas I was witness one day to a small event of high drama in our backyard. There were two squirrels chasing each other around with a bit more energy than I was used to associating with squirrels. It seemed to be some sort of land dispute, centered on the picnic table under one of the larger trees. One of the squirrels was sitting in the middle of the bench seat of the table, staring down another squirrel which was clinging to the tree. If the bench squirrel had been a lizard he would have been doing push-ups (the way lizards do), but as it was he was just staring at the other one. I assume that they were both males; it didn’t seem like a mating dance at any rate.

At some point the squirrel on the tree decided to throw down the gauntlet, and ran over to the picnic table to challenge his foe. But before he got up onto the bench the other squirrel had already leapt off of the bench and laid claim to the spot on the tree where the other one had just been. And so this dance went for a while, to the point that it was not clear who was chasing whom. At long last one of squirrels decided (by whatever mental capacity squirrel brains have to make choices) to hold their ground on the picnic table bench, so that when the other one ran over and hopped up onto the bench, the two squirrels were now face to face, waiting to see who would blink first. If you wanted to add some additional drama to the event, I seem to recall that this was around lunchtime, and so it could very well have been High Noon. Neither squirrel looked much like Ian Macdonald, but one of them had a bit of Gary Cooper’s squint (or was that Clint Eastwood?). They stared at each other for a long time.

In any case, it was a bit of an anti-climax, but I had to go back to work and never found out how the crisis was resolved. It has been a couple of weeks now and I have not seen a similar battle flare up since then. All I can assume is that the squirrels realized that they were not going to be able to settle this amicably, and so they sought out a third party for binding arbitration.

Noticed a mouse puttering about the kitchen the other evening. It was a little guy, definitely not a rat. At least it didn’t look ratty. If you can believe wikipedia, the word mouse comes from an old Sanskrit word meaning to steal, and that the word muscle derives from mouse in that muscle cells look a bit like mice. This mouse seemed to be unaware of any of these facts. It just puttered around the kitchen for a bit, did not steal anything and then was gone. There is a cat-door that leads down to the basement, but no cat — the only thing that I have had to feed in the house is a Jade plant (a gallon of water once a month). I assume that the cat, like its owners, is on sabbatical, leading one to recall the old couplet that goes:

when the cat’s away, on sabbatical,
the mouse will play, indefatigable.

I am relatively happy to report that while the ten o’clock rabbit still makes its occasional appearance, there is no eleven o’clock bear. This report is for the benefit of those who may have read the news in the local papers about bear sightings in and around Connecticut. I too have read the reports and so decided to conduct a little investigation of my own.

The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection maintains a webpage on Black Bear Sightings in the state, including a table of statistics, broken down by town. As a newcomer to the state I had of course no idea where Wafflebury or East Noodleham was, and so was hoping that they also had a map. No dice. The table was also unhelpful in being sorted by name rather than number of bears spotted, so I fired up my spreadsheet program, google maps, and an image editor and produced the much more visually informative map seen here. I sorted out the table by decreasing numbers of bears, and then plotted them out on the map, with bigger circles for the larger number of bear sightings.

There are a number of take-aways from this map. The first is, that life in and around Simsbury must be very exciting (235 bear sightings last year). The second thing to notice is, none of the sightings substantial enough to plot on the map occur east of the Connecticut River. Now bears can of course swim, but they seem to have a preference for rivers shallow enough for them to be able to stand around and swat out salmon with their paws, and are otherwise land dwelling creatures. This means that all those bears who are currently raiding the bird feeders in Simsbury have only two or three options if they decide that they’d like to check out the honey farms here in South Glastonbury.

1. One option is to get on Interstate 91 south through Hartford then cut across to the 84 East that crosses the river at the Bulkeley Bridge
2. The other option is amble their way down to Rocky Hill and take the little ferry boat.

Now black bears, though blessed with excellent navigation skills, are notoriously bad drivers, and very few have the three dollar fare to pay for the ferry ride at Rocky Hill. So, what I get from all this is that until the economy improves, we are relatively safe here in South Glastonbury from the North American Black bear.

If the rabbit decides to go carnivore on us, however, we are in deep trouble.

Heard from Gigi (out doing research in Texas) that my entry on Erik the Falconer got Rob and Jackson’s attention. They had read the “My Side of the Mountain” books about the boy who went off to live in the woods on his own, and who had a peregrine falcon named Frightful. I never read the book(s), but I did see the movie when I was eleven and it left a lasting impression on me. In the movie version at least, the boy was a big fan of Thoreau’s, had a racoon named Gus, and brought a microscope in his backpack so he could do experiments while living for a year in a forest, in the hollow of an old tree. Gigi tells me that the author of those books had worried about publishing them, in fear that boys would get the idea in their head to run away and try to live in the woods like the boy in the book. The thought certainly occurred to me, back then.

I never had a falcon, but back when we were living in the Warm Springs district of Fremont our family had a hawk. It wasn’t so much that we adopted a hawk, but that the hawk adopted us. We had just moved out to California and were renting a house near the General Motors plant where my step dad Jim had gotten a job. In those days the whole area around the GM plant was agricultural, and the house itself was a bit isolated, surrounded by fields of tall grass. The hawk, which we later named Henry, landed on our backyard fence one day, and seemed to trust us well enough to let us get near and feed it a piece of raw meat. At some point Henry moved on, but you never really forget your first raptor. They mean business.

On August 7, a hailstorm hit our neighborhood.

Here is a recording I made of the hailstorm. It needs a bit of narrative. The hissing sound you hear at the beginning is neither static nor rain, but the sound of wind, powering its way through the trees around our house. There are a few rounds of thunder, followed soon by the unmistakable pinging of the first hailstones on the ground. This was recorded from the cover of our front porch, and so you will hear the sound of hailstones hitting the concrete sidewalk, as well as the windows and metal rain gutter on the side of the house. A few more thunderclaps and the storm eventually fades out, leaving only the wind.

A few weeks into our stay, it has become clear that when the weather report indicates a “chance of thunderstorm,” the actual probability of a thunderstorm in this area hovers around 100%, and the storm usually includes a few close strikes — at any rate, they sound close. I would have thought that, out here, there would be little chance of an earthquake. This is true, but it ignores the possibility of the ground shaking from a nearby lightning strike and the bowling ball thunder that follows.

I mentioned the hailstorm while at the local wine shop and was told that (unlike the thunderstorms) hail is not very common around here. Worried about the local farms. After all the trouble they went through, hiring falconers to chase off the starlings from their blueberries, the blueberries are all out in the open, where one bad hailstorm could destroy in ten minutes what ten weeks of hungry birds could not.

I met a fellow yesterday during my morning walk through the Rose family farmlands, who works for the farm as a falconer. He said his name was Erik and was on a “starling control” mission at the moment. Erik had a whistle around his neck, that he used to signal trained falcons to chase after the starlings that peck at the blueberries. The starlings were now so conditioned to associating the whistle with a dive-bombing falcon that the whistle alone was enough to scatter them (for a while at least).

The starlings swarmed around in a wave so thick that it looked like a cloud of locusts. My friend Rob tells me that the collective noun for such a cloud of those birds is called a “murmering” of starlings.

Synchronity: just this morning I read in our local paper (The Courant) an article on Erik and his falcons. The story has some nice photos of the whole area around the back of our house.

Link To the Story in The Hartford Courant
Photo gallery

The branch of an oak tree was lying in our driveway on a recent morning. It was about fifteen feet long, and took some effort to lug out of the way. In Los Angeles the main reason for keeping your car in the garage is to avoid dust and thieves. Here, you also need to worry about having the roof of the car caved in and the windshield broken.

…at this point you are most likely thinking: how the hell did this urban denizen identify the tree as an oak ? It was really just a simple process of elimination: every Southern Californian knows that there are only five kinds of trees on the planet, which are

• Palm (ubiquitous in LA)
• Maple (identified by the leaves, which are said to look like the Canadian flag)
• Pine (which smell like air fresheners sold at car washes)
• Christmas (identified by their ability to support ornaments), and
• Oak (aka, none of the above)

I have heard rumors that there are other trees, and now have evidence to support it. Have made plans to identify the trees around the property, as some of them do not appear to be on the list. Expect to see updates on this front as they arise.

Life is beginning to settle down here in South Glastonbury. I spend much of my day in this one corner of the living room, where I have set up my office. There are two windows facing out towards the back yard, which is decorated in various shades of green and brown. Thunderstorms have punctuated just about every day this week, and we have learned to recognize the locals in the parking lots of stores, because they are the ones who make no effort (any more) to use an umbrella in between the car and store during a sudden outburst. The wisdom of this is becoming apparent, as the storms are so short that by the time you leave the store, the rain has past, and all that the umbrella does is to drip all over the store’s floor making things hazardous for everybody else.

Living things are everywhere. The only purpose of wire-mesh screens, it appears, is to filter out only the very largest of the insects of every stripe and leg-count which amble their way through our house. The ants, in particular, can be very large (right). Their saving grace is that they all appear to be “scouts” who travel alone. Quite honestly, these ants do not seem to be trying very hard. We found completely open boxes of sugar in the cupboard when we arrived here — which in Los Angeles would have been swarmed by a line of ants within hours — but not a single ant was near. It could be that there are simply so many things to eat outside (e.g. an entire farm’s worth of blueberries) that these ants are all spoiled, and have lost the teamwork spirit that drives their southwest cousins to march in lock step. Mostly poet-ants, then, who have all gone off to the woods to find themselves. They could also be rebellious protest-ants, but they don’t look very religious…

The ten-o-clock rabbit was a bit late this morning, passing under the picnic table around 10:15am by my watch (EDT). He does the rounds, chews on a few flowers, and then moves on. There are strawberries and blueberries right next door, so my guess is that it just comes through here for the roughage.

In the afternoon we went shopping for food, making a point to stop at the local farmstands which dot the countryside. Got some corn, tomatoes (as sweet as plums), and some squash, under the watchful eye of the proprietor’s black kitten, to whom everything seemed surprising.