Happy Thanksgiving, Dolly Madison!

In recent days, it has become apparent that Dolly Madison, the turkey, is actually male. She has some black feathers coming on her chest, and the weird red fleshy bits on her head and neck have multiplied. She even has a purple sweep over each eye, like a drag queen in bad early 80’s eyeshadow. The discovery of her true sex has not changed her name or the pronouns by which we all refer to her. We say ludicrous things like, “Look, Dolly’s strutting!” and “Listen, Dolly’s gobbling!” But no one feels obliged to switch to masculine verbiage, and Dolly does not care. Gender is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.

One more interesting thing about Dolly’s new look: the dingle on her nose, which she seems to be able to operate—at least making it stand up a bit when she’s interested in something, such as my head appearing in the barn door—can also be extended, or drooped I should say, during The Big Show, which involves poofing herself out all over like a Mummer, dropping her wings and revolving majestically so you can get a good view of all sides. When fully drooped, this dingle, barely an inch long at rest, hangs down past the end of her beak. It’s the damndest thing you ever saw. Nature goes to incredible lengths to ensure future generations of turkeys. (Broad-Breasted Whites like Dolly can’t actually mate naturally any more, because they’ve been bred to grow quickly into tasty, easy to pluck T-day entrees, but we’re going to avert our gaze from that fact and dwell instead on where Nature was at in the Turkey Promulgation Project when we intervened.)

Yesterday, Thanksgiving morning, while John was out in the dog garden grilling the tofu for Thanksgiving dinner, I found out that, in addition to his other well-known gifts, such as the ability to cause a woodstove full of miserable, wet firewood to burst into flames simply by putting his hands near it, John is also a turkey conjurer. In the middle of a stream of conversation with Dolly, John interjected, “Give a little whistle!” and Dolly gobbled loudly. He can do this at will, for my entertainment and the children’s. It’s certainly going to be a good party trick when the weather turns warm again.

Invaded by Beauty

Most the of invasive plant species around here were introduced to this country as ornamentals, then escaped and spread all over the place by means of their very successful reproductive strategies. We have purple loosestrife; Russian olive; that USDA darling of the 1930s, the multiflora rose; and my personal favorite, the bush honeysuckle, which is so shallow rooted that in a fit of pique you can tear one out of the ground with your bare hands, even if it’s 10 times your size. We also have a few pyracanthas, or firethorn, pictured here. They’re a nasty customer, and good luck getting rid of one without chemicals. Fortunately, their successful reproductive strategy involves these beautiful red berries, a real treat at this brown time of year.

Tastes Like Chicken

Tonight for dinner, we are having our annual Fall Fungus Risotto, starring a new special guest myco-entity, the Sulphur Shelf, aka Laetiporus sulphureus. The Fall Fungus Risotto tradition began early in this century when I found myself one October in Scotland, where I chanced to eat one of the best meals of my life (at the restaurant of a Holiday Inn Express, no less), which included a locally-foraged Autumn Mushroom Risotto.

This experience was too wonderful not to be attempted again, so each year I make my fall risotto with whatever I have on hand, usually some boughten crimini, a dried porcini stock and one or two fresh shrooms extracted from the woods.

We are running late this year, thanks to the wedding; the usual September-October mushroom flush is long gone. In fact, the whole autumn apparently occurred while I was not looking. My friend Pat’s photographs of beautiful local scenery record the foliage that completely escaped my attention while it was hanging right outside my window. This makes me think that in addition to its other bad qualities, excessive stress makes you blind.

However, Nature in her mercy has vouchsafed me a cure for Autumn Deficit Disorder: in spite of the late date, Pat discovered a big clump of a beautiful mushroom that at first we took to be Hen of the Woods. But when I, the ever-dutiful mushroom hunter, went to look it up, I found that it lacked the Hen’s gray color and ground-dwelling location. This beauty was orange, shelf-like and growing on a downed log. It was, in point of fact, not the Hen but the Chicken—Chicken Mushroom being another of its aliases. According to Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America, by David Fischer and Alan Bessette, we may have years of Sulphur Shelves at the Fall Fungus Festival, because they tend to re-grow on the same log for several seasons.

So my autumn has been redeemed with a mushroom new to me, which in its raw state smells dee-vine. It will share the stage with the humble criminis and porcinis we depend upon, as well as some onions from the farmers market, our home-grown garlic and some Arborio rice all the way from Italy. We will eat this glorious feast by the fireplace, accompanied by a nice Shiraz and not much else. I don’t believe in crowding the plate when there is something so extraordinary to concentrate on.

I’ll let you know how it all cooks up.

Autumn Chores

I got married a week and a half ago, and this past weekend John and I went out to Pennsylvania’s really rural north-central section, where we sought out the elk. We’ve both seen them in the Rockies, but seeing them here at home is better. For one thing, some of them are right by the road and easy to get a good look at, but the main pleasure is in knowing that these big old things live in the same state as you. It makes you feel more genuine somehow.

In the days between the wedding and now, the tent was taken down and the borrowed pans and lemonade dispenser and so forth are slowly being returned to their owners. I have been feeling positively nostalgic for the misty past when I used to occasionally think about dinner more than ten minutes before its scheduled serving time. Yesterday and today the weather has been delightful—warmish and sunny and playing off the yellow leaves that are still on the trees and vines, and I managed to take in the garden hoses and drain the spigots, move the water lily to the frog pond for the winter and put out the floating de-icer to keep the frogs’ ice open so they can respirate way down in the mud at the bottom. There’s one frog in there that is either already asleep or just dead. Can’t say for sure. But most of them are a little active in the warm part of the day and apparently senseless by dark, not unlike myself.

This morning I roasted a pan of squash and broccoli and rutabagas that had been standing around in the fridge for a couple days, and for supper tonight I will make them into a fall vegetable quiche. It makes me feel sane to know what is for dinner tonight when it’s barely past lunch yet, and to have my garden hoses in the garage, and my frogs safely plugged in for winter. I like celebrations, and I had a wildly wonderful time at the wedding, but normal life at its best is so sweet. Life is endlessly entertaining if you’re easily amused. And thank goodness I am.

Barnyard Lockdown

The barnyard was attacked Monday sometime in the late morning by an unknown assailant. I came home and let the dogs out, then went out to break up the ensuing fight, and found the corgis with the neighbor dog pinned to the stone wall in the barnyard. There were no chicken corpses in sight, so I took him back to his pen and let his family know he was out again. Then I went back to see where all the hens had gotten to, and found a series of disturbing things—a trail of white turkey feathers in the barnyard, just a handful of chickens and no turkey in the hen room of the barn, two terrified sheep with bloodied throats pressed against the back wall of their part of the barn, making no sound. The third sheep, Joshua, was gone.

I ran back to the neighbors', because he’s a dairy farmer and she’s a nurse, and asked them to check and see whether Harry, the sheep with the badly torn throat, needed a vet. They thought he would be all right, and they and their daughter spent an hour combing the orchard, helping me look for the missing sheep. We found downed electric fence, the rest of the hens way up in the rafters of the barn, and even the turkey hiding in the brush pile, but no sheep, no corpse and no kill site. Joshua had four horns, including two that stuck straight up from his head like daggers, so clearly whatever had attacked was fairly large and serious.

I did not think the neighbor dog was implicated because he had no blood on him. He had probably come down and broken up whatever was going on. I felt certain that Joshua had been carried off by a bear, a bobcat or a mountain lion, all of which are known to be working in the area, probably when he came to defend his twin brother whose throat was so badly ripped up. Harry, the hurt sheep, never says anything and depends completely on his brother to decide how to spend his days. What Joshua decides to do, they do. Where he decides to graze, they graze. Part of the sorrow of the attack was how Harry would ever recover from the loss of his twin.

I took in the electric fence for the season, piled an overturned picnic table against the original pasture gate that has a little gap under it, wired the second gate across the opening we’d cut but not yet finished into the most recent electric pasture, then called for my new husband to bring home a bale of hay from the barn at his mother’s dairy farm, since we haven’t laid in our hay yet for the winter. The two remaining sheep would not leave the barn. That night for the first time since winter, I locked them into their room for the night.

John and I had just gotten married Saturday in a tent not far from the barnyard, and I was kind of struck by how fast normal life comes back. Cold rain, rental return people, predators in the orchard. The works.

Then Tuesday morning before I was completely awake, John jumped out of bed yelling, “I hear him! I hear him!” He threw open the window and I could hear Joshua’s familiar voice calling from the opening where the second gate was now blocking his return. In the barn, roaring at the top of his lungs, Harry was calling in reply.

Joshua was not badly hurt. He’s back to chewing his cud in moments of repose, and even venturing out into the barn dooryard to eat dead leaves. Harry follows. And the electrician is out today, wiring outlets into the barn walls, into one of which I am going to plug the permanent fence charger that will electrify the barnyard fence. I considered heavily armed guard towers at the corners of the barnyard as well, but that may be excessive.

You don’t have to lose many sheep to start understanding the people who hunted all the large predators to extinction in eastern North America. I’m not saying it was a good idea, but I think the farther people get from the farm and the woods, the more sentimental they become about animals, and the less they see the even-handedness with which animals murder one another the first chance they get, humans included. Meanwhile, I am 100% on the same page with the biblical author who wrote about the joy of getting your lost sheep back.

Descendant of a Friend

This week I was mowing and startled a praying mantis that was hunting in the high grass around one of my infant raspberry bushes. He fell all over himself trying to get away, so I passed quickly by to keep the terror to a minimum. Here’s a picture of one I found on the highly amusing garden blog wisdom-of-the-trowel.

I wonder if this mantid is descended from the one who used to sit in the driveway on summer afternoons a few years ago. He and I became closely acquainted; he stars in this poem that appeared in the garden-themed tangle, a limited edition artist book I made with the photographer Michael Poster as part of our 2008 series Ready to Fold.


Mantis at Prayer

Reverently he says grace
before the meal to come,
yet takes the time
to cock his head
to the hundred copies of
my face that fill his eyes.

Is it love? Neither wants
to look away.

If You Fill It, They Will Come

I have a little frog pond garden right off my office porch, featuring a 50-gallon Rubbermaid stock tank sunk into the earth and filled with some big rocks, a bunch of leaves, some rain water and 23 frogs. There used to be a miniature pink water lily in there, too, but it’s too shaded for the lily to be happy, so I moved that into a galvanized bucket on the front steps, where it gets full sun and actually made a tiny little pink lily flower this summer. Two frogs have moved into that bucket too.

I got the idea for the frog pond several years ago when the children abandoned their blow-up castle swimming pool after a few short weeks of playing The Siege Of Harfleur In Bathing Suits. I didn’t dismantle it in a timely way, and it turned green, and then when I was going to dismantle it because it was green and gross and an eyesore, it turned out to have numerous small frogs in it. At the end of the summer, we collected them all in mason jars and took them to the closest pond, half a mile away. But the next summer, when we dug the hole and inserted the stock tank, it filled right back up with frogs, and not all the same kind, either. The largest one is now more than 3 inches long, which I assume means he or she is an old-timer.

We continued to take them out every fall and carry them down to the pond to sink into the mud for the winter, but then we got a stock tank de-icer, which is a floating heater coil that I run on an extension cord out the basement window. It costs a few bucks a year to keep a little circle of open water in the center of the pond (which you have to have or your frogs will suffocate) but it beats sticking your arms into icy water all afternoon one day in late October, and then never being sure if you got everybody, or if someone is under a rock, resisting salvation. Plus other animals come and drink at the pond on winter nights, which you can tell by the footprints in the snow the next day.

I do wonder how the frogs find new water that is so far from the old water, and whether at night in the springtime, the world is secretly covered with frogs, walking everywhere in search of their new world.