So, I blinked and a whole week disappeared...

During the last week I have returned to my usual complement of meetings of the volunteer organizations I work in and, as well, I have been co-opted into a group of folk who are trying to provide tools for a civil debate in our upcoming municipal election.  Our township council has been split four to three for much of its last term and the result has been in-fighting, chaotic or no decision-making and a wild assortment of letters to the editor of our local paper.  This paper is published weekly and does not have a lot of space and so, in the interest of keeping a good thing going, I volunteered to run a 'forum' type blog for a while.

Although the group has decided not to endorse candidates openly, I am comfortable in giving advice to the people we think should win.  I have been editing letters and putting together election material, printing stickers and getting the publicity out for the blog.  Meanwhile, my camera has been sitting around, whining that no one is playing with (him, her, it?  Does anyone anthropomorphize a camera? And is is 'z' or 's'?).  Is that even a word?  By the time I finish putting a candidate's thoughts into succinct bullets, my brain is like jellied aspic.  The green kind, with marshmallows.  As we all know, marshmallows can't spell.

However, we did have another day of alternate rain and sun, and late in the afternoon the sun shone through the rain and I had a tiny rainbow in my front yard.  Alas that it did not photograph at all well.  However, the cold rain on the hot rock in the back produced lovely mist. 

041/365

I also got this.  Grasshopper floats in space.  Kind of neat, eh?

042/365

We have had a young pileated woodpecker squawking around the place for the last week or so.  It's at the stage where the parent is leading it to a food source, feeding it once and then leaving it to continue finding the food on its own. Over the weekend, the food source was the wild cherries ripening on the black cherry trees along our side yard. The youngster eats a bit, slips off the branch, yells for a bit, eats a bit more, moves to the tree trunk and tries to find a bug.    Having listened to the wretched bird yelp and squall and whine for mommy most of the day, I took my camera out onto the kitchen porch, cranked up the telephoto lens and got these results.

043/365, 044/365, 045/365, 046/365.

And if he isn't pretty, he sure is dramatic. 

Sing a Song of Summer

The sun is shining. The air is dry. I am putting laundry on the line as fast as I can wash it, lest the weather deteriorate. Environment Canada's weather forecast is for possible rain tomorrow and then two days of sun. Unfortunately we had 3/4" of rain yesterday afternoon in as many minutes and so the door and decks that need paint and stain are too wet to work on. The rain also whomped my geraniums and the blooms are now all drooping or hanging their heads; I should really have dragged all the planters under the eaves when the sky turned black. Oh, well. More buds are popping up daily.

We have all been noticing how beautiful the wild flowers are this summer. The Queen Anne's lace is thicker than I have seen it since I was a child in Essex County, there are cornflowers and black-eyed Susan and buttercups and Canterbury bells and purple loose strife in quantities all along the roadsides, plus others that I do not know the names of; little yellow ones and big yellow ones and a spiky purple one and ....! Lots. And I am told the wild raspberries are good -- I will go and investigate after I get the wash line filled. A day in the sunshine, indeed.

Tomorrow I guess I will spend ironing. Such are the vagaries of housework in the land of little summer. At least we don't have forest fires this year. The newspaper has a photo of a house that was totally burned following a lightning strike yesterday, but I doubt you could get the forest to burn if you worked at it. Poor old B.C. has the opposite problem. I wish we could sent them a few days' worth of this waterfall we are having. I may also get at the windows since they haven't been washed yet this year, between my bad back and the weather. And vacuum the earwigs off the floors.

I don't know if earwigs are as much of a plague elsewhere as they are in southern and eastern Ontario. They are nasty, black crawly critters, mostly completely harmless but loathsome. They get into and under and between things and squish horribly when stepped on. I have bait out and am spraying poison into the dark, damp patches under the porches where they breed, but nothing stays through the rain and they can get into the house, I am not sure how. They also eat plant leaves, which plays hob with the landscaping. And they like toothpaste, for one. You haven't lived until you have picked up a toothbrush to put in your mouth and found an earwig clinging to it.

We also, of course, have biting bugs outside in huge quantities - mosquitoes love the rain and subsequent puddles. And we have deer flies in the bush and horseflies everywhere else. When I was a kid my parents had a cottage on Lake Erie, close to Point Pelee. In August the horseflies would arrive and the thing I hated most was that they would land on you when you were swimming and bite. I learned to be a champion underwater swimmer because of those flies. We don't have many of them close by, but we do have the smaller, vee shaped deer flies and they bite just as hard.

Deer flies will go for your hair and ears and the backside of your arms and your ankles and if you don't notice them land they take a noticeable chunk of flesh out and leave you cursing and bleeding. I am pretty well immune to mosquito bites - there is a mark for a few minutes and then it disappears - but the deer fly bites fester and itch for days. We have a neighbour who goes for walks with a butterfly net, waves it around himself, catches the deer fly and squishes it. You can also buy sticky strips which attach to your hat and the flies land and stick to the strip, buzzing and struggling until they finally die. Neither of these methods is perfect protection, but they do give the sufferer some satisfaction.

The biting flies will be gone in six weeks or so, but the mosquitoes last until frost, around Canadian Thanksgiving, if the summer has been wet. I don't want to live in the city but dwellers in the bush do pay a price for the absence of traffic noise, pollution and people. It is a price I am prepared to pay. I have two hummingbird feeders up and there is a newly fledged family at each of them, buzzing and cheeping and being chased off by the alpha male. There are also lots of American goldfinch around, blitzing the nyger feeder (a big bag of nyger seed costs about $80.00 but it's worth it.) We had a juvenile blue heron on the roof, of all places, on Monday. It flapped clumsily away and I hope it gets better flying skills soon. I love the birds, and that is only one of the joys of living 'in the bush'.

My favourite spot this time of year is our screened porch. It sits a storey above ground and is surrounded by trees, making you feel as if you are in a tree house. Nuthatches run up and down the adjacent tree trunks, the wind makes a wonderful noise in the leaves and cools you as you sit in the shade. And all the wretched flies are outside, frustrated.

I had planned on adding a lot of pics to this post, but the laundry machines are buzzing and it is almost lunch time. I may get back to it, she said, laughing.

The Enemies of Trees

We took a tour around our bush lots last week to see how they had weathered the winter. This clump hadn't; a windstorm blew it over. Wind and weather are not kind to shallow rooted trees.



We leave dead stumps in place for wildlife habitat. Here is a stump that the pileated woodpeckers found.
This shot shows leftover damage from the huge ice storm we had in 1998. The curved tree was bent over by the ice and has never recovered properly; but it is struggling to survive as the branches growing from the curve show.

We heat with wood -- and we have lots and lots of candidates to become firewood this spring.

Sorry Exup, I should have put in the info about the bird. You can read and hear and see a pileated woodpecker here.

We also have hairy and downy woodpeckers and this evening we had three sapsuckers blow through, doing their spring thing. Very cool. Unfortunately, I can't find an easy reference to their mating display. However, we have a hunt camp on the next lot to us with a metal chimney and the birds have been drumming on the chimney for the last few days. They have to have horrible headaches.

In other news, half of my daffodils came out today. Tomorrow I am going to try for closeups with the new camera. Stay tuned.

Sproing!

Sunday, in my flower bed.

Monday.
Sunday, a brave little bunch of croci pop out their golden heads.
Just look what that got them.

Weather forecast: Snow still falling, mix of rain and snow predicted for tomorrow and Wednesday.

April fool? That's me.

Monday Mission - When the stream runs dry.

We had sun today - glorious, warm April sun that melted away the inch or so of snow that fell on Saturday evening, snow that fell while the ED and her family were here for the ED's birthday dinner, snowflakes big and wet whirling down while the family went for a walk in the woods behind our house, checking out the newly opened streams and playing with the ED's birthday camera, snow that did not stick on the tarmacked roads and make their drive home slippery and dangerous. I was glad. Dangerous situations for my family are like dams against which the stream of my thoughts piles up, halts and whirls in eddies of worry thick with sticks and reeds of nervous and often unrealistic fears.

I think, in fact, that my thoughts are like the little streams that run in our bush, swollen at times with ideas from books I have read or from newspapers or from reading here in Blog land. When that happens, as when the snow melts away in the spring and the ground thaws, my mind races merrily downhill, swirling the dead leaves of other years, covering the rocks of insecurity and self doubt, bubbling, circling, dancing, carving new chanels sometimes in the soft earth of my mind. And then the spate slows, energy spent, and the things I think are tame and ordinary and quiet within the stream's new carved banks. The tips of the rocks reappear and the stream slows still more until it lies in stagnant pools crawling with larvae and green with water weed, steaming in the burning summer sun.

When there are newly opened croci in my flower bed and the robins start to sing and a swift black cloud of redwing blackbirds races across the kitchen window, you would think that my energy would grow with the spring, from the spring, that new freshets of words and images would leap from the split rocks and flow merrily along. Sometimes it even happens that way but not always, not often enough, not nearly often enough to make me feel confident in this medium I have lately adopted. I feel dry as a desert canyon tonight, dusty and cold under a gibbering moon in a sky from which it seems impossible rain or snow would ever fall. A baked mud stream bed, rocks heaving through the clay like bones, dead reeds rattling in a thin cold wind.

Sitting, fingers slack on the keyboard, hoping that the rains will come again.

This has been a Monday Mission as managed by Painted Maypole. The assignment was to write a 'stream of consciousness' post. And, as usual, I cheated.

Maypole, you think up hard ones. Love you for it!

Monday Mision -- Wheeeee!

This week's Mission is to describe a theme park ride or attraction. Thanks to Painted Maypole for organizing this. You can find all the players on Mr Linky at her website.

Welcome to Eastern Ontario's Wonderland. Step right up to our main attraction. That's right, it's the Change in Temperature Roller coaster.

Let me strap you onto your block of ice seat. Safety regulations, you know. Don't worry if you feel a bit cold because now we start the ride. Ah, see that temperature climb. From 0ºC to 10º C in one thrilling swoop. See the snow and ice melt. Feel the rain come down. Duck! You are now passing under the blocked eave trough which is, of course, the source of the ice cold stream of water running down your neck.

Are you slipping around on your seat a bit? Never fear. In what will seem like seconds, the temperature is going to drop back to -10º C. You will freeze to your seat in a flash.

You want to get off the ride? Okay. Watch the path as you are leaving -- it's a bit slipp... Oh dear.

What do you mean, you are going to sue? You can't sue Mother Nature, my dear. She'll just slip away into the fog, or snow, or rain.

Wordless Wednesday

Ah, winter. This snowfall is supposed to continue until sometime tomorrow.

(The snow shows better if you click on the photo to enlarge it.)

Monday Mission - Screenporch Symphony

Today's assignment was to do CD liner notes. Pages 1 through 6 follow.

Wordless Wednesday Oh that this too, too solid snow could melt...

Spring, maybe.

If this were yesterday, I would say that March is going out like a lion. The wind is roaring and growling around the house, buffeting the walls and banging on the windows. It's a warm wind; it's still one degree above freezing at 11:00 pm. The snow has been melting all day, first in rain and now in the wind.

This morning, when I looked across the field, there were wreaths and spires and swirls of mist coming off the snow, eddying in a slow dance under the warm rain. Then, late this afternoon, the air cleared and the wind came up. We'll be back well below freezing by morning. But a lot of snow got away. Little Stuff's Sunday snowman is leaning far to one side; he may not last the night. And you can see running water everywhere the snow has been cleared.

In other, more favoured climes, the first snowdrop or crocus is the herald of spring. My croci are still fast asleep under their white blanket, alas. Here the herald is the warm wind, the melting wind. And the trickle and drip of water.