Hillbilly Joe

If you read Summer Dirt last week, you'll know that the Malcolm house is fully entrenched in summer. While Bill is buried in the World Cup games, Will and Liam are buried in dirt. A water hose & sprayer has thus far quickly curbed the "I'm bored" statements. It has been a beautiful thing -- until a necessary re-entry into civilization.

We needed to make a quick stop at a doctor's office last week. I interrupted this freshly-Liam-made lemonade moment with "grab a shirt, a book, and your shoes."

Movement ensued! A shirt went on. In the van, I could see Liam reading a book as I pulled out of the drive. Forty-five minutes later and after three other stationary drive-thru errands, I turned into the parking lot of the doctor's office. I glanced at Liam's feet and asked him where his shoes were. Glancing up from his book, "Do I need them?" Will said, "He didn't bring a book either," but he's reading a book. "That's mine."

There were no shoes or socks in the van. Not a single pair of soccer or baseball cleats. The only wardrobe pieces were two bras in the back that I'd yanked off the deck railing as I drove away from the house -- in case any one stopped by the house while we were away, I didn't want them to see my hand-washables drying.

Once parked, I saw a bench in the shade outside the office building. I shooed the boys to the bench. Liam skipped over the hot pavement with a book he had found under the seat. The V-neck of his shirt was in the back. "Hey, Hillbilly Joe, your shirt is on backwards, too!" He just giggled and said, "I guess I'm not very well prepared today!" Hillbilly Joe smiled at the mention of his new name.

I asked for a quick appointment explaining that I had a shoe-less hillbilly son waiting outside for me. The moms in the office laughed, and I received the fastest service ever. I found the boys on the bench where I had left them -- always a welcome sight in these situations.

I don't even want to know how many times this shirtless kid has pee-ed behind the barn since the snow melted.

(Do you remember Summer Dirt?)

Summer Dirt

Summer brings dirt. I love dirt. I love dirt more than summer. Next to the barn, I've knocked down a weedy mess so I could plant a red climbing rose bush next to the old stone wall and the peeling window frame. My shovel slid through that dirt as if the ground was a chocolate cake. That's what a decade of decaying leaves will do for a little piece of Massachusetts: make it feel like a little bit of Iowa.

Some of the boys' school friends spent the afternoon at our house yesterday. They came freshly laundered; they went home a mess. Some of the happiest little messes ever. Between the sprinkler and the fort, jumping on the trampoline and crawling under the trampoline, they were summer's best. Streaked with sweat and water, covered in dirt, and exhausted. The only thing missing was the trace of watermelon juice running down their inner arms, creating a dried river bed contrasting the day's dirt adhesion with slightly cleaner skin created by the juice river.

"Why do I need to take a shower?" Because now I'm the Mom who washes the sheets. And I remember the days when my mom with four kids didn't always push the showers, but at least made us wash the river beds from our arms and the Iowa dirt from our feet.

Thanks, Mom, for letting us get dirty. I'm sure it built-up our immunity system and all that. But really, it was just wicked fun.

(Different places, different dirt...It's hard to beat rich, soft Black Dirt.)

Squirrel Numbers

This is the one farmer in our house who is responsible for coordinating squirrel removal:

The one child's winter snow shovel serves as protection against an angry squirrel attacking said-farmer's face, which is what happened to Chevy Chase.  The two hired trappers do not have this fear.  One trapper enjoys his job a little too much.  ("I smell something dead.  I'll follow my nose and see if I can find it...  Found it!  Come take a look!!")  I would much rather not.  But I needed to know where "it" was, so I did.

This is one of six.  As in one of six squirrels and also as in one of six hundred dollars spent on removal.

Here are two men tearing up Squirrel Avenue with the help of a simple machine: a rope, flung over an upper branch, tied onto the branch being cut, in order to guide it away from our neighbor's fence.

One man in his machine tearing up Squirrel Avenue.

The base of this one machine was the best... it looked like a giant grasshopper!  Squirrels should be scared.  Very, very scared.

At the end of the day, one new discovery: poison ivy all over the ground where the grasshopper sat.  This family of four is either very lucky or poison ivy resistant.

The farmer will soon be shifting from squirrel removal to poison ivy removal.

(In England, slugs may be more abundant than squirrels... An English Slug.)

 

Banner photo by Yigithan Bal from Pexels

June Numbers

It has been a week of more numbers than words. On a rainy afternoon, two boys... saved one worm.

One little, untouched Christmas fruit cake from England --  red ribbon removed -- was converted to an Englishman's birthday cake.  The one green tree and one blue candle represented the golf course.

Only one person ate the fruit cake.

Here are the Squirrel Numbers -- also concise.

Squirrels in the Loft

So often my writing at 3 a.m. on Wednesday mornings is from the hub of juxtaposition. I perch criss-crossed atop the intersection of a funky fence that spikes out from under me in many directions. On a slowly spinning Lazy Susan, I see a myriad of uneven angles resembling those created by cow-path meandering streets of my neighborhood. They make no Midwest-grid sense but perfect early-New-England-get-your-cow-to-the-common-in-the-most-direct-route-from-your-barn sense. And this morning on my spin: squirrels. Down the fence lines, I'm juxtaposed by the sights. My barn. The farm in Iowa. The scope of a .22. The tree tunneled electric wire highway to the big chewed away corner of my barn. The sweet animals playing in the winter snow. The lack of squirrel nests in my maple trees. My barn in flames. (That didn't happen. That is from a futuristic vantage point.) The Chevy Chase movie scene with a squirrel adhered to his face. Opening my email using software titled "Squirrel Mail." The rodents that are anything but sweet. Merely rats with bushy tails.

All these have culminated with the necessary action of squirrel removal from a place that isn't rural to most, but with so many trees is rural to some. A place I call the city, but a place a friend who lives nearer to "the city" refers to as "not the city." A place where squirrel removal doesn't involve my brother's .22, but rather a live trap set by a 3rd party. A man who has a no-nonsense kind of tone to his work. "The radio in the loft won't do anything, unless you want to teach the squirrels to dance." From the state of the pulled down insulation in the barn loft, there were a few too many squirrel dance parties before I even set the radio up.

There are times one must throw money at a situation for it to go away. Tax time. Squirrel time. Forget who you are, where you grew up, or who you know near and far. Call the tree man and call the squirrel man. For we aren't in a timber where we can fell a tree with two people and a chainsaw nor do we have weapons in our home.

Perhaps after this when the dreams stop and the fear of the back corner of the loft subsides, we will take some well-deserved time off. It will be a stay-cation at our own squirrel-free property. The money for the vacation went out with the squirrels and down with the trees.

(Who is your farmer in the family?  One guess who mine is.)

The Farmer in the Family

I had a minor surgery last Hump Day. As it was late in the day, I stayed overnight in the hospital. Bill came to get me in the morning. With the general anesthesia still clouding my brain, this is the first story I recall from Bill that morning. Bill woke up at 5 a.m. to go to the bathroom, and he saw a tarantula. I don't have all the details etched in my smoky mind, but both times he saw it -- at 5 and a bit later when he woke up -- it was tucked into a tight corner and he couldn't get it with a fly swatter or a glass , so he pulled shut the bathroom door. It was a bee that had bumbled its way into our house. I told Bill I would take care of it when I got home. "No, I can do it."

This happens every year. The first year, after finding three or four bees upstairs, I had a pest control guy come out. He assured us that the bees we found were simply hitchhikers that hopped a ride on someone's clothing. I don't buy it for a minute. Here is the problem:

With the plunging cold temperatures gone, rhododendron droop has subsided, and this is the view from outside our dining room window.  The rhododendron is below a second floor spare bedroom window.  This giant beauty is nestled outside the portion of our house that was built in 1880.  Big bumble bees love these blossoms.  They roll in the blossoms like pigs in shit.

And I'm convinced that in a pollen-drunken state they meander into a little hole in the old wooden window frame upstairs, get dazed and confused in the thin walls, and of all that enter, perhaps four a season end up inside the house. Then, far away from that sweet nectar and after the treacherous journey to the inside, the biggest one will meet an Englishman in a bathroom at 5 a.m.

When I got home from the hospital, I walked upstairs right by the bumble bee -- he had made his way to the stairs. "Oh, there's your bee," I stated as I walked by him. "OK, I'll get it... How many times do you think I'll need to hit it?" "Well, I don't know, Bill. It's a pretty big bug. What do you think?" No answer. Bill reappeared with a fly swatter and gave the bee a big thud on the head. And the bee bounced toward Bill. "It came after me!" "It didn't -- it bounced off the stairs from the impact of the fly swatter." Basketball is not a popular sport in England, so I didn't bother to use the term "rebound."

At the top of the stairs, the bathroom door was still shut tight with no apparent crack from which the bee could have escaped. Bill approached the door armed with the fly swatter in ready position. As he touched the doorknob, I stung him in the back with my finger. Oh my goodness, the poor Englishman hit the ceiling! And I found the sore spots from a belly laugh so soon after surgery.

Yesterday morning, the story came full circle. In our barn loft, we are experiencing squirrel hell. I fully anticipate writing the Squirrel Saga, but often times I can't write until the trauma subsides a bit, and we've been at it for weeks now. In the here and now, we have live squirrel traps on the roof of the barn and upstairs in the barn loft. They need to be checked daily. We can see the one on the roof, but we need to go up to the loft -- into the corner farthest from the stairs --and check the other one.

So here's yesterday's deal from Bill: "One of my colleagues at work had a bat in her bedroom. As she put it, there are girl jobs and there are boy jobs. And the bat was a boy job. As I see it, going up to the loft to check that squirrel trap is neither a boy job or a girl job. It's a farmer's job."

As Grandma Murphy would've concisely put it, with a sharp sting in the words:

Damn it.