by jphilo | Jul 8, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
So far as birds go, this spring and summer have been strange. Baltimore orioles are everywhere and the bluejay population has spiked upward. The orioles get a hearty howdy from me, but I wish the bluejays would find a different neighborhood to terrorize.
The bluejays have built a beachfront condominium by the creek and from what I can tell, they’ve driven away my favorite neighbors, the elusive indigo buntings. They’re hard to spot in the best of years, but this spring and summer, I haven’t seen even one of the breathtakingly beautiful males. Their electric blue finery, which almost perfectly blends into the shady green woods, has been the highlight of my summer walks for several years. I’m saddened by their absence and by the lack of goldfinches, which are also scarce this year.
The good news is that a pair of bluebirds have moved to our gravel road. They built a new trophy home at the top of the hill. They’re almost elusive as the buntings, but not during the height of their construction project. For a couple weeks they were seen hauling grass clippings, string and other building materials not available at Lowe’s, Home Depot or Menards.
Hopefully, the blue birds will talk up the neighborhood and convince the buntings to return.
If that doesn’t work, I’ll invite them and the orioles over for coffee, grape jelly and cracked sunflower seeds. But please, don’t tell the blue jays. They aren’t invited until they shape up their act. Like that’s ever going to happen!
by jphilo | Jun 22, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
After a month and a half of comfortable days and and pleasant, sleeping weather nights, Iowa’s normal weather pattern arrived with a vengeance last week. The humidity is oppressive, the temperatures hot all day and only slightly cooler after sunset. Forecasters like to say “The weather pattern has become active” which is the euphemism they use because they don’t want to start a panic by saying “Darn tootin’ you better have path to the basement clear or a tornado could land you and your house somewhere over the rainbow.”
With hot, humid weather comes the arrival of my least favorite walking companions, the deer flies. The small, striped flies have a wicked bite. But usually, they get tangled in my hair which is not an easy feat to accomplish considering how little hair I have compared to my bare arms and legs on hot mornings. The flies are exceedingly stupid, unable to extricate themselves from my inch-long hair or make their way to my scalp in a timely fashion. So I spend a considerable amount of each morning walk picking the little critters out of my hair and squashing them. So far, my record is 23 on one walk, something I think our president, my partner in fly extermination, would be proud.
This morning, as I committed insecticide with impunity, a dark spot on the road sprang to life and hopped out of my way. At first I thought it was a beetle, but closer inspection revealed it to be a tiny toad. But every time I got in front of it and tried to take it’s picture, it did an about face and hopped in the opposite direction. Finally, I gave up on capturing it’s smile and put away my camera. Then worried that the next car to drive by would end the toad’s life with a splat, I snuck up behind it, scooped it into my palm and carried it to the side of the road. Before I could bend down, it sprang from my hand, landed on the grass and disappeared. I shrugged, picked a deer fly from my hair and squashed it.
Were the two responses to critters on my road at odds with one another? How could I treat the toad, who could become a deer fly predator, with great compassion and then murder a deer fly? I have no good answer to the question, just a pragmatic suggestion for the deer flies. When they leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone. Otherwise, we’ll be at loggerheads until the baby toad gets big enough to eat my enemies or weather changes, whichever comes first.
This could be a long summer.
by jphilo | Jun 17, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
You know, we really do have the best of both worlds on our little gravel road. Here on the outerest edge of city limits, we don’t have to check for chemicals in the old well, but we’re surrounded by farmland, barns and country critters.
Lately, one of those critters has been making his presence known during my morning walks. The neighbor’s rooster and I love to be up with the dawn on these early mornings, unwilling to miss one minute of June’s glorious green parade. Today thanks to the rooster’s owner, the two of us were formally introduced. Every morning, while I meander along the road, the rooster’s highly ambitious neighbor jogs past me on her daily run. Today she stopped and begged me to pick lettuce and spinach from their garden, which is more proof of her admirable ambition. She actually plants a garden while I just think about doing it.
I took Anne with me, figuring this might be her only opportunity to learn to pick spring greens. As we headed to the garden, Mr. Rooster stuck his head out the chicken coop door and blasted a howdy doody our way. Once my ears stopped ringing, I put the daughter to work cutting lettuce while I took pictures of my new bud. However, he looked more imposing than chummy, so I kept my distance.
He crowed until our bags were bulging with greens, and then he crowed us all the way home. But tonight when we have spinach and strawberry salad, and tomorrow when we make Grandma Fern’s wilted lettuce, we’ll be the ones doing all the crowing.
Mmm, mmm, mmm. Life is so good along our little gravel road.
by jphilo | Jun 15, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
The daughter’s college boyfriend spent the weekend at our house. Hiram and I were on our best behavior, trying not to embarrass our daughter in the presence of her guest by picking our noses or passing gas, which our daughter considers cute and even adorable behavior in infants and toddlers but not from parents. We did pretty well, though things got a bit dicey for those who ate beans at the Mexican restaurant Saturday night.
Anyway, after the boyfriend left Sunday evening, Hiram asked Anne if our house had been a big disappointment to the young chap. “He loved it, Dad,” Anne replied. “You tend to forget we live in paradise.”
Her comment opened my eyes again to the loveliness of our roomy farmhouse (circa 1845) that has aged remarkably well. With this being a June of abundant rainfall, the grounds are at their best, all green grass, shady trees, and late spring flowers.
We do live in paradise, I reminded myself this morning as I walked along our gravel road. Climbing the hill, I enjoyed the calm winds, the pleasant temperature, the low humidity, and the birds chirping with gusto. Well, I enjoyed it until something underfoot nearly tripped me and stopped me in my tracks. A warty, bumpy, frowning toad hopped along, where the gravel road surrenders to asphalt, before he paused and gave me the evil eye.
Whoa! I don’t know what the toad was pondering while I snapped his photo, but I was wondering whose idea it was to let a toad into my paradise? A second, more disturbing question came to mind later, after I cleaned up and got to work: Did some malevolent old woman, intent on destroying young love, waylay the daughter’s boyfriend on his way down the road and turn him into a toad?
For today, I’m keeping that disturbing question to myself. But tonight, after I wiretap the daughter’s evening phone call to the boyfriend, and hopefully hear him talk instead of croak, I’ll rest easier. Once I’m sure he’s not been transformed into an amphibian, I’m posting some new rules for protecting paradise: NO BEANS OR TOADS ALLOWED.
Just want to keep the riff raff out of paradise and protect the boyfriend. We kinda like him.
by jphilo | Jun 2, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
I’m really, really glad that the picture of the doe I took last week showed up. Turns out, I had moved it where I though I had. But I’d labeled it “doe” and not “deer” which was the word I entered in the search program.
But the reason I’m really, really glad I found it, other than the assurance that my brain is not full of more holes than Swiss cheese, is that this picture is my only consolation for missing the deer picture of the summer this morning. For the first time in weeks, I left my camera home because the weather was wet, sprinkling in fact, when I walked – not enough to need an umbrella, but enough to damage a camera.
A little voice told me I’d be sorry, but it stayed quiet during my first lap when, unlike me, the critters and birds had sense enough to stay out of the rain. But the second time I came down the hill toward the bridge, a small doe stood in the road, trembling and still. I stopped and we eyed one another for a small eternity. Eventually, the deer lifted a slender leg, the diameter of it’s ankle smaller than my wrist, and stepped toward me once, twice, then a third time. Quivering, head jerking up and down, tail flitting from side to side, it finally came to a halt, not ten feet away from me.
I reached for my camera, then remembered it was at home. I sighed, the deer watching me, me watching the deer, until I took a tentative step in its direction. Apparently, I came one step too close. The deer hightailed it for the trees. (Please note: “hightailed” is not a cliche here. It is what happened.)
“Should I pick up my camera at the end of this lap?” I asked myself. “Nah, It can’t happen twice.”
That’s when the little voice piped up again. “It can too.”
“Pish, posh,” I sniffed as the rain intensified. I left the camera home.
When I neared the bridge, the deer was there again, munching at the undergrowth. From what I could tell, the little animal, a yearling from the looks of her, considered me her trusted friend. I slowed and approached her. She watched me, then went back to eating while I walked past, about eight feet away. And me without my camera. Again.
I walked one more lap, with the camera in tow, daring the rain to to rain on my camera or my parade. It didn’t, but the doe was a no show. Maybe her mother found her, scolded her for trusting strangers, and grounded her for a month. But maybe not. Maybe tomorrow, my new girlfriend will meet me at the bridge.
If she’s there, I’ll be ready, rain or shine, my camera in a Ziplock bag if need be. It’s the only way to silence the little voice in my head which continues to chant, “I told you so, I told you so,” in rhythm with the raindrops and the sighing wind.
by jphilo | May 19, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
This morning, I nearly did it again. I almost talked myself out of walking early when the breeze is cool and the birds are busy. “I’ll walk into town this afternoon for my meeting instead,” I told myself. “The walk will be longer. That would be good for me.”
But on this second day back from Colorado, a still, small voice urged me to resume my morning routine. Two steps down the road, and I was glad I’d obeyed that voice. The perfume of lilacs wafted my way. The blue sky peeked from behind green leaves of trees whose limbs were almost bare when I left home last week. Pink blossoms clustered on every branch of the honeysuckles. Columbines bloomed, and my neighbor’s tulips were a riot of color.
A small bird flitted across the road in front of me and perched on a low limb of a fading redbud tree. The neighbors had seen the bluebirds weeks ago, but this was my first glimpse of them. I fumbled for my camera, but before I could focus, the bird flew away.
I shrugged. Ah, well. The photo I took in Colorado of the small, blue bird with the black mask would do instead. Maybe I could photograph an Iowa bluebird some other morning. Before I finished consoling myself, four orioles swooped into the cedar trees. Just who was chasing whom, I’m not sure, but their turf wars were highly entertaining and more than compensated for missing today’s picture.
I finished my walk, warm and sweating by the end of it, my eyes and ears full of this Iowa spring morning. The rest of the day will be busy, so busy that it may become frustrating, confusing, disappointing. But whatever the day brings, I have seen a bluebird, lovely in the shadows of the fading redbud tree. I have smelled the lilacs and laughed at the orioles.
This sweet spring morning, I am truly blessed.
