Earth Day Follies

Besides life, the Earth gives us great pleasure.  On Earth Day, and on random other days of the year, Ox and I try to clean things up a little, to pay part of our dues to Mother

At first we saw only two people fishing at the far end of Mint Springs' dam, while a goose couple pecked quietly at grasses near the cattails.  Ox carried his invention over his shoulder – an eight foot pole with a net at one end and a very sturdy hook at the other.  This device is useful for retrieving trash that has made its way beyond reach into the water.  We headed to the pond from the parking lot.

We saw what looked like a decomposing plastic bag by the cattails .  A closer look showed tiny black tadpoles swimming in a milky glob.  This was not trash.

We moved up to the dam.  Ox retrieved various pieces of floating trash with his device.  I held the big garbage bag.  Ox’s initial catch included the yellow handle of a child’s bucket, part of a Styrofoam bait box, plastic bags, and a beer can full of water.  I'd forgot my gloves, but picked up many cigarette butts, and lots of bits of plastic and paper from the dam.

The wind was cold and strong.  Ox wore one of his greasier hats and I, blue jeans with polka-dot gardening boots.  Our coats bellied in the wind.  Gray hair swirled madly around my head.  The wind picked up.  I spread my legs a yard apart and crouched.  Ox was blown down, luckily not into the water.

We traded bag for pole; I retrieved things from the water and he from the land.  Slowly we fought our way toward the young fishers at the end of the dam.  They looked puzzled when we wished them many fish, but they smiled back.  A couple of minutes after we turned the corner they moved down to the other end of the dam.

The path makes a right angle at the end of the dam; The cliff is steeper and well-treed.   A cluster of plastic things gather there in the shoals.  We took turns with the pole.  Ox retrieved a couple of plastic lids, a job that would have been easier if our hook had been a sharp one.  He got a bait box.  I tried for and lost a child’s blue plastic shovel, tangled in a cluster of twigs.  This was, as many of our targets were, a reach, and I held onto a medium-sized tree as I reached.  My hand felt a fuzzy woody thing - uh-oh, a poison ivy root.  I wiped my hand on my jeans and we continued.  I tried for and lost a red fisherman’s float.  Ox retrieved it.   

A couple of teen-aged  girls came down the path when we were half way around the south side.

“What’re you doing?”

“Cleaning up; it’s Earth Day.”

They tactfully waited until they were on the dam to giggle.

We passed the hole where, some years ago, the underground roof of a beaver’s lodge had collapsed.  Down a short path from there I got some pieces of Styrofoam cup.  We didn't see any trash walking up the knobby tree roots that make steps for the hill.  We walked over the bridges.  The second bridge had two foil circles under it; I got them.  On the path to the clearing we call Goose Beach we found broken glass, and a trove of garbage on the shore of the beach.  We gave up our clean-up around Shelter One, figuring that park employees must police that territory.

Just past Shelter One we came upon three little boys with fishing rods, refugees from Huckleberry Finn.  they grinned as they said "Hi" and hurried on towards the path around the pond.

As we walked back to the parking lot our backs hurt.  We felt useful, smug and happy.

News from the Garden

Dear Jackson,

I so much wanted to write you a letter, and I am overdue for my next blog post, so I am killing two birds with one stone.  I hope as a fellow blogger you will understand.

I spent this morning catching Fanny and the Comets (our own rock band) so that I could clean their pond.  I prepared a giant bucket that was part of a shop vac before the vac gave up the ghost, filling it with a couple of smaller buckets of their current pond water so that it was half full.  Fanny and the Comets are as fast as they always were when they had a lot of water to swim in, but as I emptied the pond they had nowhere to go but into the smaller bucket.  They are huge, even bigger than they were last spring.  I emptied each bucket carefully, not wanting to pour our fish on the ground, but I didn’t see Fanny in the murky water and poured her onto the mud.  Before she could flop twice I grabbed her carefully and gently with both hands; she was the first into the shop vac bucket.  I was timidly cautious catching the Comets; they went into the bucket without mishap.

Once the fish were in the big bucket and that bucket was in the shade, I started cleaning the pond.  The poor fish; what a disgusting way to live!.  And yuck, what a job!  The sides of the pond were thickly coated with algae – just imagine thick green slime.  First I took all the stones I could reach out of the pond, then removed the basket with the iris and the ceramic baking pan. After taking the pond liner out of the hole we had dug for it two years ago, I brushed the algae off with a very stiff brush, and kept rinsing with a powerful stream of water.  After an hour of brushing and rinsing, the pond looked clean and I looked filthy and smelled very fishy.  I put the cleaned ceramic pan back in; propped up, it still offered a hiding place.  I put the big slate stepping stone over the east side of the pond instead of the west, figuring that the stone would offer shade and cover from the big black cat that prowls my back yard.  I replaced the iris basket.  Fanny and the Comets swam around eagerly once they were back home.  I fed them and replaced the bird netting over the pond.  Fanny is lumpy again, but a diet of fresh peas should help with that.  I put a wooden chaise-lounge, from Aunty Polly’s last move, over the pond to shade it.  It offers dappled shade.  Eventually a small tree might provide better shade to the fish.

After we had installed the pond a couple of years ago, I moved the table Aunty Polly gave me over to the edge of it.  I hoped the table’s umbrella would shade the pond.  The umbrella gave a little shade in the winter, when we didn’t need it, and offered inadequate shade in the summer.  Wind blew the table and umbrella over onto the fish pond's rim a couple of times.  When the table was by the fish pond the table was an uncomfortable place to sit.  The chairs sank into the dirt if anyone sat on them, and the side of the table next to the fish pond could not be used.  It was past time to move the table and chairs.

A few years ago I had removed a brick patio from the front of the house to put a shady flower garden there; I piled the bricks neatly under the upstairs deck in the back.  I decided today to make a patio in the backyard between the stairs to the studio and the baby apple tree with those bricks. I worked on the patio for several hours.  The internet advises digging a hole, deeper than brick-deep, to make a patio, then leveling the hole, filling it with a shallow layer of sand, leveling that and then carefully placing the bricks.  My bricks are too old and twisted to warrant so much work.  I just mowed the back yard, put down mulch cloth where the patio is to go and started laying the bricks.  After a good start, I discovered that the ground wasn’t as level as I thought.  I’m going to pick up the bricks that are below level, fill the space with sand, level it, and put those bricks back.  I wonder if smoothing the bricks with sandpaper afterwards would help get a more useful surface for Aunty Polly's table and chairs.

The next big project, erecting a four-foot high dog-eared fence between my back yard and the neighbor’s, only awaits the neighbor’s permission. The fence would provide my tenant and the neighbor’s tenants a little privacy.  After that I hope to top the bare bottom of the garden with topsoil and plants.

Last week I spent a couple of afternoons digging holes so that the two-inch high stepping stones that came with the house are level with the ground.  I had tripped over these a number of times before last week.

The back garden is looking better.  It has a clean fish pond, a mowed lawn, a couple of new camellias, a rose bush and a small rhododendron.  I planted broccoli and cauliflower in the raised bed/compost heap by the fishpond, but I think the skunk that lives under my neighbor’s garden shed may have eaten them; the once flourishing plants are just stubs now.  Oh well, it’s a good bed for tomatoes anyway.

The front garden is beautiful now.  The blooming lilacs are generous this year and the dogwood tree is in bloom.  The bluebells and Brunnera bloom bluely in the shade garden, contrasting with the graceful pink arches of bleeding heart, and the peonies have put up their shiny leaves.

 I hope you can come see the fish, the garden, and me soon.

Love,

Grannie

Ant Los Angeles

When I was a child, Los Angeles burgeoned into a geographically large city.  Some wags thought it funny to post home-made signs, ever further out, that said “Los Angeles city limits.”  Eventually, according to the signs, Los Angeles extended from San Diego up to Santa Barbara, and west to San Bernardino.  Once I saw a “Welcome to Los Angeles” sign on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada.

Yesterday Ox and I walked up part of Bear Den Mountain.  On these sorties we pay attention to how we feel; when either feels we have gone halfway to our physical limit, we tell the other person that we are halfway to tired.  We stop then, and turn downhill.  Yesterday we made it all the way up to Ant Los Angeles.

We started walking up this mountain about 35 years ago.  If there were ant mounds then, we didn’t notice them.  Eventually an ant mound appeared, and the next year there were more.  Every year since Ant Los Angeles has grown.

Ant Los Angeles now covers a square acre, maybe acres.  During the warm seasons these are busy cities, with ants scurrying everywhere.  Bears find ant feasts in these mounds – an occasional flat-topped mound tells that story.  Weather pokes holes in the mounds.  The Allegheny mound ants just carry on.

In the winter, except for the occasional sentry, the ants hunker underground.  The ant mounds are roughly dome-shaped; they're the terracotta color of our good Virginia clay; they are one or two feet high and up to a yard in diameter. They are said to extend about four feet underground.

The mound dirt looks friable, and the mounds are always covered with young grasses around the base.  I read that ant mounds are connected with underground tunnels and that the mounds support many queens.  I read that the ants clear the surrounding vegetation by biting plants and injecting formic acid into them.  The clearing allows the sun to warm the mounds to help incubate the larvae.  I imagine that the ants plant the grasses on their mounds to provide some camouflage.

Spring has reached the mountain only in the greening of small, close to the ground, weeds and grasses.  I will know spring has fully come to Bear Den Mountain when Ant Los Angeles' surface becomes again a busy city.

Walking at Dusk

It had been a happy Sunday dinner at my niece’s house.  Her energetic children, Tommy and Abby, just three and five, and my grandson Jackson, nine, played quietly and happily with Tommy and Abby’s puppy and their birthday presents.

I was tired; I had stayed up way too late the night before roasting and carving a turkey breast, washing the turkey roaster, finishing my book.

At dusk Ox asked me to go to the park.  I was reluctant, but I knew that I’d miss it if I didn’t go.  We drove to the upper pond.  The park was sparsely populated; a few people strolled here and there.

We climbed out of Ox’s car into soft, balmy air.  Two high pitches of trills announced that the American toads were mating.  The trills were punctuated with the song of the spring peepers.  A lone black-bird called from the very top of a tall tree.  Frogs roiled the waters by the cattails.  The vigor of the frogs comforts me, it shows the vigor of the pond.

We walked around to the south side of the pond. The other people left the park.  Though the moon had risen, the sky was darker - scuds of cloud blew past the moon.  A few geese flew onto the pond from the west, with quiet low honks.  Ox thought he saw a wake.

“Oh,” I said, “it’s just a goose or a duck.”

“ No,” he said, “It’s a beaver.  I can see the tail.  He’s almost black, darker than beavers we’ve had here before."

I looked again.  It was a beaver, smaller than the last beaver, last seen10 years ago.  He dove.  Five minutes later or so he surfaced about 15 feet to the east.  His wake, a silver V, reminded of all the wakes of all the beavers that lived for a short while in the pond.

The night was darker.  We walked slowly back to the car.  A toad jumped away from my descending foot, visible only in his motion.