In my last post, I said that I was going to be participating in Nanowrimo and that I would post updates on my word count and maybe an excerpt or two.    Here are some stats : I am currently at 27,872 words and am averaging over 2,000 words a day.  If I continue in this manner, I will reach 50,000 words on Thanksgiving Day, and will really have something to be thankful for.  In honor of my having reached the halfway point on Friday the 13th, here’s an excerpt of a ghostly nature.

“The old lady sitting next to my bed that night wasn’t the only dead person that visited me; around this same time I was also visited by a man who was either very tall, or was standing on something, or was floating up near the ceiling of my bedroom.  All of these visitations were at the house where we lived from when I was about eight years old till I left at about twenty-two.  I had three bedrooms in that house; a very small one when we first moved in, then my dad added a family room, bedroom and a laundry room onto the house and my sister moved into the new bedroom so I moved into her old one.  Then when she moved out and got married, I moved into the one she left.  The second bedroom was the one where I saw the dead people- oh, and a couple of dogs too.  They were digging into the floor of the bedroom and I didn’t want to know what they were trying to dig up, so I screamed.  As with the other visits, they disappeared when my mom or dad would arrive in my room, wanting to know what I was screaming about now.  I never saw any dead people or dogs or anything in the other two rooms that were my bedrooms.  I did have other times, in other houses or places, when I saw or heard or felt presences when there shouldn’t have been anyone else there.  At least, not anyone in a material body form.  Once, when I was working on the ranch where I worked and spent many of my younger years, I was in the old house that we used then as a girls dormitory; it was during the day and everyone else was out working.  I had come back to the house to get something that I needed, that I had forgotten that morning to take with me to the barn where I worked.  My bunk was downstairs, and while I was trying to find whatever it was I’d come back for, I heard a girl’s voice singing upstairs.  I went up to see who it was but as soon as I got to the top of the stairs, it stopped.  I looked around in the rooms up there, there was no one in the house except me.  I thought, well, it must have been outside, so I went downstairs and outside and walked all the way around the house but there was no one in sight.  I shrugged it off, went back inside and resumed my search for the forgotten item.  The singing began again, definitely coming from upstairs, and I went back up.  The singing stopped again as I reached the top of the stairs.  I searched the rooms again.  This was a very old house, with just four small rooms upstairs, and no closets to hide in and no way for anyone to sneak around if they were trying to hide from- the floors squeaked too much. The beds were just old Army cots, you couldn’t hide under one, and as with the first time I went up, there was no one there.  Whoever was singing was not a “live” person, in the flesh, so to speak, and whatever form the person who was singing was in, they were not going to show themselves to me.  I left the building at a faster pace than I came in, and still didn’t have the item I’d come back for.  But I wasn’t going back again, not by myself.

 When I moved into the house where we live now, after I married my second husband, he would be gone in the evening on many nights, teaching photography at a community college.  I would be at home, and on about three occasions I heard someone come in our kitchen door and would feel a presence in the room.  Each time I thought it was my husband coming home early, maybe a class had been cancelled or something, and I would go to greet him in the kitchen.  But it wouldn’t be him, it would be a short man dressed in a dark suit of clothes that had very long tails on the coat and he would be wearing a top hat, like Abraham Lincoln.  But he was too short to be Lincoln.  When I would realize it wasn’t my husband, he would disappear, in sort of a slow-motion dissolve.  I would be startled but not scared, there was no malevolence in the air or anything frightening about the man.  He was just there, and then he wasn’t.  This house also is very old, over one hundred years at least, and has seen its share of births and deaths.  My husband’s son was born in this room where I am writing.  We know the names of some of these people, and know that one of the previous owners has made herself known to us in various ways, although I have never seen her.  Her name is Laurel and she doesn’t like for my husband to go away on trips and leave the house by itself, unprotected, I suppose.  So she breaks things right before we are to leave on a trip.  Like the stove, or the water pump, or the pipes.  She also slams doors, or rather I should say she makes noises like a door slamming but no door has slammed, and once when we were talking about Laurel and the things she does, my husband smelled a rose perfume.  I don’t wear perfume of any kind, so we believe it was her.  She just wanted us to know that she was there, and was listening.”

Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) begins at 12:01am on November 1st, and I am ready to go.  I told my husband that for the month of November, he’d have to do all the cleaning, shopping, cooking, etc.  He said, “I hope you stocked up on lots of macaroni and cheese.”

Actually, although I do most of the cooking, my husband is a very good cook and taught me how to cook many of the dishes we eat on a regular basis, most of them vegetable based meals.  He’s also the identifier of things that grow wild in our yard, which we then incorporate into our salads and suppers as much as possible.  We tried, this year, to do this even more than we have in the past. 

Last year, for instance, we discovered that our wild spinach can be blanched and then frozen.  Months later, you can pull it out of the freezer, unthaw it and cook it in a dish as you would fresh or any frozen spinach.  This year, with an abundance of purslane growing wild everywhere, I tried blanching and freezing it as well.  Works perfectly.

Wild Spinach and Pinto Bean Skillet Dinner

Saute chopped onions and garlic in a litle butter, some olive oil and a couple splashes of vegetable or other stock.  Add a couple cups of cooked pinto beans and maybe three cups of wild (or not) spinach, fresh or frozen.  Season with garlic powder, salt and pepper to taste.  When this is hot and seasoned to your liking, add a half cup of shredded cheese (any will do, I used a smoked French Fume cheese), mix well and serve with a sprinkle of bread crumbs on top.  I served this in green pepper cups that I had steamed till tender, but it’s also good on a whole wheat, nutty bread or stuffed into tomatoes.

Another wild plant that we have is cress, which has a peppery taste and is good in salads.  We also have wild lettuce, but I don’t have a picture of that.  Here’s a picture of the cress.

Cress

 The fall has been mild so far and we still have tomatoes ripening on their vines, although they may not have time to really ripen.  In which case we’ll be eating fried green tomatoes and green tomato rice.  We also still had okra till just a few weeks back, but it’s gone hard and woody now.  A domestic lettuce that we let go to seed in the garden this spring has reincarnated itself and we have quite a few small lettuces now, without lifting a finger.  We did, however, lift our fingers to plant fall greens, swiss chard, brussels sprouts, beets, and potatoes.

Fall Basket

In the photo above, you can see some okra peeking out from behind some domestic spinach and lettuce, a cherry tomato and the wispy stuff to the right is tarragon.  We had tarragon potatoes last week that were delicious, my husband made them using this fresh and some dried tarragon, lemon pepper seasoning, some butter and some stock.  He mashed it all together and as I said, it was delicious.

So, as you can see, I won’t starve while doing Nano.  I have been asked by a few people what I’m going to be writing in my novel, and I reply that I can’t tell them, because if you talk about it, you won’t write it.  So I’m not telling any of you either.  But I will, from time to time, post my word count here and possibly some extracts as I stare down that goal of 50,000 words in 30 days.  At least there’s some mac and cheese to look forward to…

Blog Action Day 2009

‘Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.’

Sunflower

This year’s topic for is climate change.  Whether you believe that these changes are occuring through a natural process, or that human beings with large carbon footprints are to blame, the fact is that there are changes happening worldwide.  Some places are getting colder, some hotter, some are experiencing drought, some floods and rising sea levels.  Mankind is fairly adaptable; we evolved and survived in and out of Africa, through ice ages and receding glacial periods, in all types of climates. We’ll probably manage to adapt ourselves during these changes as well.

Castor Bean

But other members of our global family are not so adaptable.  Animals are mobile and unless their environment is highly specialized (like polar bears in Alaska), they can move and adapt themselves to a new area.  Domestic animals can be moved by their caretakers to areas that are more conducive to their existence.  I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t worry about the animals if the climate keeps changing, they are not nearly so “moveable” and adaptable as humans, and many species will be lost.  Plants and trees and other flora can also move themselves, there is already evidence that some species are in the process of doing so.  But they are much slower movers, they require generations to move and to adapt themselves, therefore many are in a race against time.  So the real losers in the climate change game may be the flora, the plant life of the Earth.  And if they lose, then it won’t matter how mobile or how adaptable or even how smart we humans are, we’ll lose too.  Because as our food supply goes, so go the animals and the homo saps that depend on it.

Flying Fauna

Over our agricultural history, farmers have increasingly focused on a lesser and lesser number and variety of plants, resulting in mono-culture crops.  This means vast fields of soybeans, corn, etc., that are specifically bred to an area and genetically modified in ways that vitually insure that the plant cannot adapt itself to a changing climate.  Some can’t even reproduce themselves.  Many older plant species have already been lost, partly because of the focus on mono-crops, and so we don’t have access to seeds or cultivars that may have been more suitable for the world we will find ourselves living in, in the not too distant future. 

Poona Kheera cucumber

What can we do?  Reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce our carbon footprints.  Learn to live with less, to be happy with enough.  Plant gardens, grow food, stop using chemicals on the land, in our homes and on our bodies.  Honor our Mother Earth and all her children, human, flora and fauna.  You’ll find many ideas, suggestions and guidelines all over the web today, on Blog Action Day.

Basil

Our phone line was out.  I picked it up one morning to make a call and was met with silence in my ear.  Over at the house that we are the caretakers for, their phone line had been out for a couple of months.  So I put in work orders for both our lines and awaited the arrival of the phone repair guy.  Somehow, our phone miraculously heals itself just hours before he shows up, but we go over to the other house so he can so what’s up over there.  (What’s this got to do with pesto?  Be patient.)

Turns out he’s already replaced the outside box here, it got struck by lightning he says and all should be well now.  But the phone is still not working.  Trouble is, he says, these people have no service contract, but because I’m a nice guy I’ll go inside and take a look.  He does, and the lightning has fried the jack too.  So I have two options, he says.  One, put in another work order and in another eight days or so, I come back out and fix it and you pay me.  Two, I fix it now, no charge, and we say nothing about it.  I’ll take Door Number Two, I say.  (Seriously, there’s pesto involved.  Chill.)

I offer him some money anyway.  No, m’am, he says, couldn’t do that, that would really be wrong.  Okay, I say, how about some pesto?  (Told ya.)  He whirls to look at me.  Pesto? he says.  His eyes are lit up like Times Square.  Where’d you get pesto?  I made it, I said, with basil from our garden and garlic and pine nuts and Parmesan cheese.  Yes, m’am, he says, I’ll take pesto.  I haven’t had good, homemade pesto since my Italian grandmother died.    I give him a jar of it.  He replaces the jack and the phone now works.   Bella.

He gives me his name and personal phone number.  Anything goes wrong with these phones again, I’m to call him directly.  The next week, our phone dies again.  I call him early that morning, from work, and within two hours he’s called back to say it’s fixed.  No charge.  I tell him stop by sometime for more pesto.  Yes, m’am, he says. 

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

People used to recite this nursery rhyme to me ad nauseum and I never liked it, because I never considered myself contrary.  My family may beg to differ.  My maternal grandmother used to call me bull-headed, which I thought appropriate since I am a Taurus, actually a Taurus/Gemini cusp, which since Gemini means the twins, qualifies me for bull-headed times three. 

Wait a minute, where were we?  Oh yes, how does the garden grow.  First, there’s the seeds:

Seed packets

I started a lot of my seeds in those little peat pellets you can buy that expand in water, then you plant your seeds in them.  After the seeds began sprouting and the weather was warming up outside, I moved them from our kitchen to the outdoors, so that they could begin to “harden off”, or toughen up to being outside.  If you don’t do this, they’ll get “leggy”.  Or bull-headed.

Then, after much weeding of the garden-space and making our hills (go here to see what I’m talking about), and after “all danger of frost has passed” (as the seed packets say), we started transplanting the little seedlings to the garden, like this heirloom tomato called Old Virginia:

Old Virginia Tomato

In the background of the picture you can see our Swiss chard; this is it’s third year in the garden- it seems to come back every year all by itself, no help from us- except for some weeding around them.  We also planted, this year, some spring vegetables directly into the garden: here’s some peas:

Sugar Snap Peas

And some lettuce:

Summer Crisp Lettuce

Here’s one of the garden workers, busy keeping aphids off of the lettuce:

Lady bug

If you should happen to be in the neighborhood, please stop by for some lettuce.  We have more of it in one of our other garden beds.  In this warm weather it won’t last long, so get some while the getting is good.

 One of the new seeds we are trying out this year is called White Scallop squash.  I started 3 of these in the peat pellets back in March, here’s one of them happily blooming outside:

White Bush Scallop Squash

Ruby Queen Corn

If it were possible, for Vincent’s birthday: I would invite Vincent and his brother Theo van Gogh to a cafe in Paris. I would buy them both absinthes, and I would tell Vincent of the tremendous impact he’s had on art and artists (including myself), a lasting impact of the kind that he would never believe, not in his time or this time or the next. I would tell him that the fires he saw in the sky and the voices he heard in his ears and the force that drove him to paint and paint and paint as if there weren’t enough time to paint it all were the fires and voices not of mental insanity but of creative insanity. I would tell Theo that his devotion to his brother and his willingness to support him (despite their differences) allowed the receiver of one of the greatest gifts of divine artistic fire to create some of the world’s finest masterpieces before he burned out. And that Theo’s devotion gives us a model for giving and acceptance and selflessness that we can but stand in awe of and desire for.

 The lights are burning low in the cafe and Vincent and Theo must go.  But Vincent’s final words to us are the words he wrote in a letter to Theo in June of 1877:  “Not a day without a line*”;  by writing, reading, working and practicing daily, perseverance will lead me to a good end.” These are words that Vincent lived by, and believed in, and proved true in the course of time. While we may not all burn with the same fire, we can warm our hands and our hearts with those words of advice and our own daily manifestations of it. And one more glass of absinthe.

 (*The quote is by Gavarni, an illustrator and artist)

November 4th, 2008, we, the American people, choose our seeds for change.  January 20th, we planted our seeds.  As with all seeds and things that we plant, we have to give them time to sprout, to grow, to flower and fruit.  And also like with all the things we plant, we can’t just sit back and hope everything works the way we want.  We have our part to do as well: weed, water, tend. 

You thought this post was going to be about our garden, didn’t you?

It is.  We have been choosing the seeds for this year’s garden, mostly from Baker’s Creek Heirloom Seed catalog (www.rareseeds.com).  Here’s our list so far:

Red Marconi Sweet Peppers

Red Malabar Spinach

Scallop Squash

Thai Holy Basil

Russian Tarragon

Kenaf Hibiscus

Jet Black or Nigra Hollyhock

That’s 3 veggies, 2 herbs, and 2 flowers.  What will be interesting is seeing what comes up on it’s own this year; last year, the garden was nearly taken over by volunteer tomatoes, morning glories and gourds.  The basil we planted last year did really well and we allowed it to go to seed, so we may have the Invasion of the Basil Plants this year.

Here’s a picture of part of last year’s basil crop:

Basil in a Basket

Need a little inspiration for change?  Try this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM&feature=email

“On October 15th bloggers everywhere will publish posts that discuss poverty in some way. By all posting on the same day we aim to change the conversation that day, to raise awareness, start a global discussion and add momentum to an important cause.”  http://blogactionday.org/

 Last year I participated in the first Blog Action Day, when the theme was the environment.  What’s interesting to me about this year’s theme, poverty, is that it was chosen before the USA’s financial meltdown (followed by markets and economies all over the world).  Here in the States, we don’t see much of the kind of poverty experienced in other places around the world; most of us here are relatively (compared to a lot of the rest of the world) affluent.  Some of us, while others around the world and here at home are dirt-poor, are filthy rich.  And now some, after the US of A’s financial crisis, have gotten richer, and some of us may come to experience poverty as we’ve never seen it or known it before.  We live in interesting times.

When confronted with a problem as seemingly huge and possibly distant from ourselves as poverty, where do we start?  Participating in the discussion taking place on blogs all over the world today is one action you can take.  Clicking on the Blog Action Day link above will take you to hundreds of blogs where others will be sharing their experiences with being poor, or working to end poverty, or giving suggestions for what you can do to help, or be helped.

If you do make this journey around the Web, you’ll also see many easy ways to donate money to various causes and organizations.  My problem with this, besides the fact that a lot of your donation will go to supporting the organization (yes, I know they do alot of good work and so on) instead of directly to helping a poor person is that it is so easy, and thereby impersonal, quickly over and quickly forgotten.  To work on a problem this large, we need a more personal, more lasting experience and involvement.

For many of us, the only way we can experience real poverty is on a voluntary basis.  There can be many reasons why someone would choose to do this, as many reasons as there are people, probably.  I recently followed the month-long journey of one young couple who, for their own reasons, chose to eat only as much as one dollar a day could buy.  You can read about it here, if you choose to.  Or you could chose to do something similar yourself.

How does doing something like this help poor people? By increasing empathy, awareness and understanding- of what it feels like to be hungry, or to not be able to buy whatever we want, whenever we want.  By putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes- or going barefoot, if you can’t afford to buy shoes.  Doing something like this is a little more personal and potentially lasting, but how can one move this experience into the realm of long-term commitment and involvement?

Here are my suggestions and a challenge (I am making the assumption here that you are someone who is looking for ways to help, not someone who needs help).  First, the challenge.  How far from where you live to you have to go to find poverty?  I mean real poverty, not poverty of the kind that laments not being able buy that new SUV.  Can you walk to it?  Ride your bike?  Or do yo have to get in your car and drive till you find what looks to you like real poverty?  That’s the challenge: find out for yourself how far you have to go from where you live to find real poverty.

When you have found the place that looks to you like it and it’s people are living in real poverty, get out of your car, and just begin by walking the streets, if there are any.  See if there are any businesses, and what’s available in the grocery store, and what kind of resources the community may have.  Have a bite to eat somewhere, if there’s a place to do so.  Talk to the people you meet.   Try to see life as they see it, smell it, taste it.  Spend as much time here as you can.  Try to imagine living here.

Then go back home.  If the distance, physically and mentally, doesn’t seem that far, then maybe there’s not much you can do.  But if it seems like you just came back from a Third World country, and you want to work towards shortening that distance, commit yourself to it.  Sacrifice for it.  How?  Here in the USA we consume far more resources than most of the rest of the world, and we waste more.  I believe that committing ourselves to reducing consumption of all kinds (food, energy, products) and not wasting what we do have (particularly food) helps not only the poor (the less resources we use, the more there are for others) but the environment, and ourselves. 

So, ready to turn a desire to help into a lifelong commitment?  Find a notebook or an old binder with some sheets of paper in it and get something to write with (no, don’t go buy a notebook or binder; we’re reducing consumption, remember?  Use what you already have).  At the top of one page write “How can I reduce my consumption?”  At the top of the next page write “What am I wasting and what can I do to stop?”  On still another page write “Community resources”. 

Now, take a walk around your house. 

See that pile of magazines and catalogs by your easy chair?  On your reducing consumption page write “cancel all magazines and catalogs” and on your community resources page write “find out where to donate or recycle old magazines and catalogs”. 

See the food going bad in the fridge and the pantry?  On your what am I wasting page write “food” and jot down ideas for how to stop this waste.  And no, eating out for every meal does not qualify as stopping food waste nor does it help eliminate poverty.  Restaurants waste large amounts of food and use large amounts of energy, and the food is generally less healthful and more expensive than what you could make at home.  Better ideas for controlling waste would be to only buy within a set food budget, freezing leftovers, and composting scraps if you can. 

See all those clothes in your closet that you don’t wear or can’t fit into anymore?  Find a place that makes them available for free to the poor (many churches do this).  See those old cell phones, gadgets, whatevers?  Use the phonebook, walk your neighborhood (or the impoverished one you found), or use the Internet to find places to donate these unwanted items to that make them available to the poor, or homeless shelters, or community centers.  Continue throughout your house until you have finished each room, then the garage if you have one (do I really need 3 cars?), then your yard (if you have one, and if you do have one, plant a garden and give the extra produce to a food bank).

Now, why are you writing all these things down?  Because now you are going to make them goals by putting dates on each item and using the binder/notebook to keep track of each commitment and to remind yourself of them.  So, by “cancel all magazines and catalogs”, you’ll put a “due by” date (“I will have called or sent cancellation notices to each magazine and catalog by Nov 15th, 2008″).  Schedule a day to do your community resource search, and write down all the things you learn in your notebook.  Keep this notebook in a prominent place on your desk, near your easy chair, wherever so that you can refer to it frequently.  Zen Habits says that a person needs to do something every day for a month to make it become yours for life- so commit yourself to doing something in your notebook every day for a month.  By changing your life, you change and touch the lives of others as well, and reduce that distance between yourself and that Third World country across the street and around the world.

Whatever you choose to call it, now is the time to celebrate the shortest night of the year, and the longest days, and the burgeoning fields and gardens.  There are many, though, that at this time will not be celebrating, because of the destruction of their fields and gardens and homes through floods, drought, or some other catastrophe exacerbated by global warming, mono-culture agriculture, destruction of wetlands and flood plains, or Mother Nature just fighting back.  So we might also take this time of year to reflect on our lives in relation to the world around us and what we can do about the problems we see.

Treehugger has posted a few suggestions for observing this time of year; which you can read about here.   They also have suggestions on greening your life, as well as environmental news; I recommend them as well as Grist for great reads on being green.  Mother Earth News, the “original guide for living wisely”, has a post here on how to help the Midwestern flood victims.  At all of these and many other places online, not only can you learn about greening your life (and possibly life as we know it), you can also glean tips for saving money, becoming healthier, reducing waste and chemicals, and maybe score some great recipes into the bargain.

As I’ve talked about before, one of the major ways you can achieve all of the above-mentioned goodies is by cutting meat out of your diet, in particular red meat, or at least reducing it substantially.  We have also cut out chicken and have changed our fish-eating habits based on evidence that some types of fish have been drastically over-fished and that the “farm-raised” ones are as full of chemicals and hormones as feedlot cows (salmon is an example of both of these categories; natural populations are dwindling and the farm-raised ones, just like feedlot cows, are being fed corn which is not their natural diet and so they must be fed antibiotics and hormones to help them stay alive until they are big enough to kill). 

This brings us back to the celebration of the Summer Solstice, or Litha, the festival of enjoying the summer sun and warmth, and sharing the abundance of the fruits (and vegetables!) of our labors.  So for my part, I’ll share with you a few meatless ways to partake of your garden’s produce (or your local farmer’s market, or even your grocery stores’)…

For Father’s Day, we were going to my dad’s for a covered dish/ barbeque and I decided to bring something based on what was available in our garden on the day of the gathering.  The day before, I dug some red potatoes from the four hills we have of them, and cut a zucchini squash and a yellow squash.  We have bunches of lemon balm pretty much all over the yard, so with all this mind (and in hand), I made a garden potato salad:  first, I cut the potatoes into chunks and steamed them until just tender, then I cut the squash into chunks and steamed them till just tender along with some chopped onions.  All of these I rinsed in cold water to stop them from cooking after they were done steaming.  Then I combined them all together along with handfuls of chopped lemon balm, some lemon pepper seasoning, some chopped garlic and sour cream, and put it into the refirgerator to let the flavors “marry”.  Later my husband added dry mustard, garlic powder and paprika.  If we had been having this at home as a meal, I probably would have added some steamed greens as the “side” dish, and that would have been our entire meal.

Later in the week, I took more zucchini and yellow squash, steamed them and combined them with couscous, chopped roasted red peppers, some leftover alfredo sauce and parmesan cheese in a casserole, seasoned to taste with lemon pepper, garlic and coarse salt.  This morning, our burgeoning basil plants needed cutting, so I cut a large basket full and made three batches of pesto (pine nuts, garlic, basil leaves, parmesan cheese, lemon pepper season and garlic powder) and tied two handfuls together to hang and dry.  I don’t add olive oil to my pesto while I’m making it because it tends to “cook” in the food processor as you are whirring the ingredients around, and I think it keeps longer without it.  I put my pesto into tight-lidded jars, label and date them, and keep them in the freezer till I’m ready to use them, except for one jar I keep in the fridge for quick access.  I add the olive oil when I use the pesto; for example, when I put some on my salad, I pour a little olive oil over it and stir it around in my salad.  Same with pasta: cook your pasta, drizzle olive oil on it, then sprinkle on the pesto.  This is particularly good when making a primavera (spring) pasta: another chance to pick and choose whatever veggies you want in your dish, steam them separately or cook them right in with your pasta, drain, season with pesto and parmesan cheese and there’s a complete meal.

Now get out there and enjoy the Mid-Summer Litha and/or Solstice, whatever you choose to call it and however you choose to celebrate it.

    In previous posts I have mentioned our strawberry-eating pair of foxes; here’s one of them who stopped to pose for my husband to take a few shots of him.  This one has a beautiful long tale, tipped with black, that supposedly means he is a gray fox.  I don’t really know that he is a “he”, but the other one, who has no tail at all, looked earlier this year as if she were pregnant.  Why does she have no tail?  We don’t know, but last year she had half a tail, and this year, no tail.  There’s a tale there somewhere.

    Our human next-door neighbor, the one who tends a larger garden than ours, says he thinks the parent foxes are bringing their babies out at night or in the early mornings or late evenings to play in the loose dirt/sand in a back corner of his garden (where the wild fields and trees begin).  He hasn’t seen them, he says, but he sees the messed-up dirt with fox tracks all around.  This neighbor came over a few evenings ago to show me his hat.  Here’s a picture of it:

    Yes, that’s duct tape on his hat, and one of those rolls of sticky fly trap paper.  A couple of years ago, when the deerflies were biting us all, my husband gave this role of sticky fly paper to our neighbor and suggested he stick it on his hat to trap the flies.  So two years later, he’s finally done it- and it works. 

    Our neighbor says he’s going to get more rolls and put them all over his hat.

    I’m not sure if this next neighbor is really a neighbor or not, he might have been just passing through, searching for females.  One morning several weeks ago, it was drizzling slightly, and I  looked up from my computer to see this little guy crossing the yard:

    He’s an Eastern box turtle, and I do know for a fact that he is a “he”, because the males have orange eyes (females have brown eyes) and slightly concave shells underneath, so that when they are mating they fit neatly over the female’s convex upper shell.  Box turtles can completely close up their shells to protect themselves from predators; that’s what this turtle did when I walked up to him, not knowing that I was not considering using him for turtle soup.

“Is she gone yet?”

P.S. Yesterday evening, which was Father’s Day, my farmer/neighbor’s wife told me that they had seen the fox pups!  Two of them, playing hide and seek in the beans while mom watched from the sidelines.  So Happy Father’s Day to the male fox at the top of this post and congratulations to mom too.