SDRAM, LED, CAT

Fall has sped by in a blaze of cider and art openings, and the house now has more wooden storm windows on it than it has had in probably 80 years. We are hoping this will make us toasty warm on less oil this winter. Now I am getting ready to settle in for a long, snug winter at my desk, getting lots of writing done in between cooking meals, walking dogs and cats, and feeding barnyard folk.

In the photo above, you will see all the modern conveniences required by a writer, ie a big monitor, a laptop and a cat basket to keep the cat off the laptop and out from in front of the monitor. Yes, the basket has cut down considerably on my work surface, but since the cat was overheating the computer and using his sharp little elbows (even through the closed lid) to delete important emails and highlight long passages of the New York Times while I was reading, thereby rendering it impossible to scroll down to read the rest of the article, the cat basket is an acceptable compromise.

The other black cat, btw, sleeps on the printer on the opposite side of the desk, for symmetry. This is not super convenient, because if you forget and start a print job, the printer ingests the nearest part of the cat, but it does promote thrift in the use of paper and toner.

You are probably wondering why I don’t just close the office door and lock the cats out. And the answer is Ha! Because cats (also dogs, sheep, hens, children, husbands, etc) are the great annoyances that, like Keats’ flowered chains, bind us to the Earth.

Dolly Madison R.I.P.

Poor old Dolly Madison: that elegant creature gobbles no more among us. Although she lived only 17 months, that was still about 500% of the life most broad breasted white turkeys get, and she brought us—well, me anyway—a lot of satisfaction. At the beginning of the summer she lost her ability to locomote, so she spent her last weeks sitting in the grass in the barnyard, taking in the action of chickens and sheep and wild birds and chipmunks and house cats. She was fond of her kibble to the end, as I hope to be myself. The barnyard is notably green now, with no big white orb in it.

I am going to bury her down by Dermott in the orchard. I don’t think she would have had a lot of use for that terrier gentleman, but he would have found her a source of endless fascination.

Sheep Out to Eat

Sometimes circumstances cram you into a really nice spot you never would have gone to otherwise.

It’s practically impossible to move the sheep fence after the middle of June without a brush hog. But the New Holland and the brush hog had gone to John’s mother’s farm to cultivate John’s cornfield, and they never came home. So when the sheep pasture got overgrazed, I couldn’t move the three lengths of fence. Then Joshua, my four-horned problem child, got tangled in one length. Like so tangled he had 50 loops around each of his four horns. We had to cut him out of the now completely useless section of fence, arrivederci sixty dollars, and the overgrazed pasture was even smaller than before. The hay for the winter had not yet arrived, so in a moment of sheep starvation panic, I turned the fence off, opened the end of it and walked out into the orchard with the three sheep following curiously along behind. For an hour they stuffed themselves as fast as they could on multiflora rose leaves, ash sapling leaves, orchard grass, poison ivy and windfall apples. Then I walked back inside the fence, they followed me, and I locked it all up for the night. This worked so well, I have continued doing it even though there is plenty of hay in the barn now. In fact, it has become one of my favorite things to do. I take a book and a step stool and I go sit there for an hour in the goldenrod while my friends chow down. When everyone is visibly larger in diameter and burping up clouds of cider breath, we go back in. We’ve done it so often now that the sheep are the ones who decide when they’re full and it’s time to go home.

I have no idea how long it takes to re-chew that much plant material, but it has to be awhile. It seems to take about 24 hours for me to need my refill of orchard time.

Hay, You!

Lot of water over the dam since the last time I wrote. We’ve frozen some pesto and some Granny Puzo Sauce, put up some jam and froze not enough blackberries, started taking the sheep out to eat early each evening (outside the electric fence, that would be), and my submission to the Fair won the third place ribbon in the class called Flower Arrangement Under Five Inches, In A Thimble. I have heat rash AND hay rash, so you can tell it’s still summer.

The hay arrived this morning, fifty bales of first cutting, which ought to see us through the winter. The neighbor brothers who raise it and deliver it have at least one gas well between them, which makes me wonder why they still bother to sell hay. I guess they like it. I am reminded of the old Midwestern joke about the farmer who wins the million dollar lottery and is asked what he’s going to do with all that money. “Well,” he says, “I guess I’ll just keep farming til it’s all gone.” If I had a million dollars, that’s what I’d do.

So the hay room is full, the jam shelf is populated and the heating oil has been paid for. That means all we have to do is lay in a few cords of firewood and we’ll be ready for winter.

Benji Met the Bear

The dogs and I were just out for our morning walk around the North Orchard trail, and naturally the corgis had run on ahead while Murphy, the Labrador, and I came lumping along behind. There was some rustling and crashing in the thick undergrowth where we never brush hog any more because we’re letting the forest come back up there between us and the road, and I started to worry the corgis were messing with another groundhog, so when I reached the hairpin bend in the trail, I yelled, “Corgis! Corgis!” And both dogs come back around the next bend, and about 20 feet from them in the deep brush behind the raspberries, up comes a big old black head and shoulders. The dogs were mighty surprised, and Medwards offered to advance, so I started hissing powerfully and the dogs came back to me, and then me and all three of them lit out for the other side of the hill as fast as we could get through the brush.

I have no illusion that that bear meant us harm—the subsequent crashing indicated that he was running for the road while we were running away from him, and I hope he did not run out in traffic without looking, but years of Scottish terriers makes me think it advisable to put the largest possible space between your dogs and your wildlife.

So. I think we can dispense with the second cup of coffee today.

Thanks to yosemitehikes.com for the image. Now just picture that fellow chest deep in berry bushes.

Surprise Visitor

John came home one day this week with a Great Horned Owl that had gotten hit by a car and was nursing a bum wing and leg. He was on his way to a client meeting when he spotted the poor little guy on the shoulder of the road, so the owl rode to the meeting in John’s lap, and then transferred to a cardboard box donated by the client. (Side note: you have to love a building designer who shows up to your kitchen renovation carrying a piece of saved wildlife.)

We called the Game Commission and they said an officer would call us, but time went by and none did, so I left a message at the raptor rehab about 25 minutes from here. Then the phone rang, and the Very Cranky Game Officer, who was sitting at the intersection about a mile south of here, demanded to know where the owl was, and then whether I had made clear to the dispatcher that the owl was in my possession, and then the gender of the dispatcher who had supplied him with the false impression that there was a Great Horned Owl lying in a state of distress along Route 29 in Dimock. Although the VCGO would not confirm, it appears that he drove an hour to get here from the regional office, and maybe that’s why he was pissed.

He was not a great deal nicer in person, but he did take the owl off to a rescue center, saving me the trouble.

It was a real treat to see such a beautiful animal up close, and in our subsequent research we found out that where a big, mean game officer has 60 pounds per square inch crushing power in his hands, a Great Horned Owl has 500 pounds per square inch, enabling them to catch and eat animals two-thirds their size. I just wish we had called the nice lady from the raptor rehab first (she called back right after the owl left). Because as it is, I feel like we narced out the little guy to the cops.

And, for the record, if I thought I could get Officer Sunshine out of the building for two hours by neglecting to mention that the owl was resting comfortably in a box on somebody’s porch, I would do it too.

Psalm 23

The shearer came yesterday to relieve the overburdened sheep of their four inches of very warm wool. It’s been pretty hot for weeks, so they should have been glad to be shorn, but since it involves being torn one by one from their safe place in the barn and wrestled out the door to God knows what, they were not. Roger was gone by 8 a.m., but the sheep bawled for the next hour until I left the property for a wedding, and when I returned at 5, they were still bawling. I went back out and came back home, and at 7:30 p.m., they were still out in the barnyard, yelling their heads off. Finally it occurred to me that they sounded hungry, so I went out and walked down the barnyard with them and stood still at the bottom and let them bunch up around me. After a few minutes of butting and jostling, they settled down and began to eat ravenously. It would appear that all day long, they had been too frightened and unsettled to risk lowering their heads to graze.

It got dark as I stood there, letting the sheep eat and singing that Sweet Honey in the Rock song about King David playing his harp for his sheep, and the fireflies and the lighting started to come up in and above the orchard. And I developed a new appreciation then for the twenty-third psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters;
He restoreth my soul.

I’m afraid a lot of the Bible is thrown away on folks nowadays, not because we’re all corrupt and going to hell, but because we mostly don’t have sheep. Until you have made it possible for someone to go to bed with a full stomach merely because your presence makes them feel safe enough to eat, it is hard to appreciate how nice it would be to feel that way about somebody else looking after you. But lately I’ve been thinking that getting all bent out of shape about life doesn’t seem to be making a lot of difference, just losing me sleep, so maybe my new attitude should be, “Screw it. The Lord is my shepherd.”