Just poking around

If you search online for uses of pokeweed, you might find yourself caught up in a web of conflicting characterizations: it's a worthless weed, a delicious green, a cure for arthritis, a "uterine stimulant" (whatever that means), a dangerous poison, and more. To my mind, any plant known primarily for causing vomiting and diarrhea is trying to tell us something, so I'm not interested in eating it. I just find it pretty.

Right now in the woods you can find pokeweed in many stages: green stems sprouting rows of delicate white flowers that produce fruits shaped like tiny green pumpkins, ripening into deep purple berries on bright pink stems. They grow at the edges of woods and meadows, mingling with wildflowers and merging into thick copses of poke.

This morning at the Luke Chute Conservation Area, I walked amid the pokeweed marveling over its many forms and colors but also watched a spider with bright orange legs building a web, scrambling around on invisible lines and laying down a continuous strand bit by bit to produce a structure so strong and lovely that it made me regret every spider web I've ever destroyed, but that didn't stop me from knocking down a few webs to avoid walking through them. I'll admire a spider web alongside the path, but I prefer not to encounter them face-first. 

Indigo bunting!

 

No thanks for angst

On a long midsummer walk, the baseball cap I wear serves a twofold purpose: eyeshade and horsefly swatter. When a horsefly the size of a Piper Cub starts circling persistently around my head and trying to land on the least accessible spot on my back, I swing the hat through the air, frantically swatting at the horsefly. You think a mosquito bite in your armpit is bad news? If a horsefly bit me in the armpit, I'd have no choice but to amputate. And so the hat swings jerkily through the air, making me look like a person suffering from severe standing seizures.

The walk itself serves a twofold purpose--exercise and head-clearing--and sometimes a third: giving the dog a chance to bark at the neighbor's donkeys. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it. Hopeful used to bound far ahead of me and then sit and look back with an expression that clearly said Hurry up! Exciting stuff just ahead! But these days she's more likely to sit by the roadside while I walk the last leg of the loop, happy to rest and cut out a little distance. I don't even do the six-mile loop anymore because I can't stop her from following me and I know she'd be limping by the time we got halfway around. These days she takes the uphills pretty slowly--but then again, so do I.

So we know the hat serves a purpose and the walk serves a purpose and the dog serves a purpose, but what about the horsefly? Today the horsefly serves a twofold purpose: give my arms a little exercise and rouse me from a bad case of midsummer blues. I'd set off on my walk reluctantly, stewing in a funk of existential angst, despair over how little I've accomplished, and panic over what I still need to do before school starts, and I was walking dutifully through the woods with my head down, determined that if I accomplished nothing else of any worth in my whole entire life, at least I'd get a little exercise. So I wasn't paying attention to the kingfisher by the creek, the butterflies sipping up minerals from the creekside mud, or the goldfinches chasing each other from one stalk of Queen Anne's Lace to another, sights that would normally fill me with glee.

It took a pesky horsefly to wake me up and break my wretched mood. Existential angst can't hold a candle to a persistent horsefly that wants nothing more than to land on your damp eyeball, and it's difficult to remain focused on your own petty grievances while you're flailing spasmodically against a horsefly's onslaught. Fighting off a persistent horsefly engages mind and body in a twitchy dance requiring total concentration, quick reflexes, and intense focus on the moment. Sulking would be counterproductive; your entire body aims at one tiny target and swats it as sharply as possible with the hat, even if you end up hitting your own back hard enough to leave marks. Such an all-consuming activity leaves no room for existential angst.

So the horsefly did me a service: by the time I'd won the battle, I felt fully alive, alert, and ready to take on whatever might come my way. Next time I'm in a foul humor, just lock me in a room full of horseflies and see how happy I am when I emerge! I'm sure I'll be showering you with thanks. 

 

Near the corner of Grace and Daisy

For weeks I've by trying to figure out how this sentence ought to end: In a neat yellow cottage on Daisy Avenue there once lived a---what?

A witch? An orphan? A kindly old woman who loved to bake sweets for small children? Or, ramping up the incongruity, a serial killer, an ogress, or a Great White Shark?

A little yellow house not far from the corner of Grace and Daisy is where I'm making my home on the weekends when I'm in Jackson, Ohio, and it's just as cute as it sounds, with a magnolia tree in the front yard and a spacious front porch where we can sit and watch the world go by, although not much of the world makes its way up Daisy. Jackson is a little town (population just over 6000) that resembles many others in this part of Appalachia: from its bustling downtown, you can drive five minutes in any direction and find yourself in the middle of a cornfield. 

Hints of the boom times are visible downtown, where historic markers describe the impact of salt-boiling, iron-smelting, and apple-growing on the town's economy. Next to the courthouse stands a statue of James Rhodes, a local boy who served four terms as Ohio's governor, and the vicissitudes of history are evident just down the street, where the county sheriff's office, a brutally modern concrete building, sits across the street from an empty wood frame building evoking the city's frontier days, its faded paint peeling except where a realtor has painted "$95,000" in bold red figures. A sign on the window reveals that this was once the home of Michael's Ice Cream, now located in a nicer building on Main Street. (Try the Bubble, a great excuse to scarf down ice cream and nuts toasted to perfection.)

Early Saturday morning the town is so quiet that I feel no qualms about jaywalking right in front of the police station. A few early risers are out and about: a man mowing, a woman weeding, a young woman pushing a toddler in a stroller and carrying a baby in a backpack, a tall man walking a tiny fox terrier, a petite woman being dragged behind an immense fluffy mutt. A church carillon plays "Morning Has Broken" as I walk the broad avenues, where peeling asphalt reveals the original brick streets and big friendly front porches hold Adirondack chairs or sturdy wooden rockers. 

Over here a tidy white fame house looks as if it had stepped out of the frame of Grant Wood's American Gothic, gussied itself up with red shutters on the arched windows and red pillars around the porch, and then squatted down on a busy Jackson avenue. Here's an imposing yellow brick house fronted by a wide oak door surrounded by stained glass, while across the street another yellow house sits neglected, with water-stained plywood where the door ought to be and weeds colonizing the yard.

Smaller houses squeeze together on side streets, and every once in a while I make a turn and suddenly catch a glimpse of the downtown water tower just where I don't expect it to be. It's painted to resemble a rosy red apple, another nod to the town's apple-growing industry, rumored to have started with a visit from Johnny Appleseed and now sadly in decline.

I'm trying to get to know the town in the best way I know how: by walking its streets, reading its historical signs, taking pictures of its points of interest. The next step is more difficult: talking to the people, finding out what makes the mowing man, the weeding woman, the dog-walkers, the stroller-pushers, and the carillon-players love a place that struggles with the same problems haunting all of southern Ohio: unemployment, opioids, lack of outlets for young people's ambitions. Not all of these issues are visible from the front porch of the little yellow house on Daisy Avenue, so I'll have to go where the people are and ask questions. 

For now, though, it's a lovely morning and I think I'll sit and enjoy the breeze, the lingering magnolia blossoms, and the banana trees and continue to ponder how my peculiar sentence will end.  

Where I live (on weekends)

Water tower planted by Johnny Appleseed?

Old train depot.

This historic building can be yours for $95,000.

Sheriff's department.

James Rhodes statue next to the county courthouse.

The smell of the funnel cakes, the roar of the hog

I'm sitting on a bench breathing in that familiar county-fair aroma and trying to distinguish its constituent parts: cotton candy, onion rings, and funnel-cake grease combined with diesel fumes, sweat, and a whiff of the livestock barn. Nearby some teens in tank tops and torn jeans flirt shamelessly while a mom orders lemon shake-ups for her thirsty crew, and in the background I hear music that I swear sounds like a mutant hybrid of rap and country. We're definitely not in Kansas anymore.

We're at the Jackson County Fair, located not in Jackson but in the nearby town of Wellston, Ohio. It's a small fair but plenty colorful, and we're just in time to see some 4-H members auction off their chickens, goats, and rabbits. Men in plaid shirts and cowboy hats cluster inside the auction enclosure to bid exhorbitant sums for the rabbit trembling nervously in the arms of a pig-tailed girl in a white shirt and spotless jeans. Meanwhile, outside the barn the grand champion hog balks and squawks, objecting to being moved to the arena.

I don't blame the hog: the place is crammed full of people, and the huge ceiling fan does little to dissipate the blistering heat. The auctioneer's voice pierces the air and hammers on and on through the afternoon while his bid-spotters out in the crowd holler out when they catch a bid. If I were a hog, I'd want to go wallow someplace quiet in some nice cool mud.

Instead, we wallow in fair food, although not too much. Is there anything they won't deep-fry? I've eaten a fried Oreo once and I think I've met my lifetime quota, but in this heat a peach sno-cone refreshes the tissues nicely. We nip inside the Junior Fair barn to enjoy the air conditioning and look at the 4-H displays: one poster illustrates parts of a goat while another demonstrates a child's first attempts at photography, and over there is a whole booth full of colorful hand-crafted jellyfish made of yarn. So much creativity! So many colors!

Outside the sky darkens and the lights come up all over the midway, a million bright colors competing for attention. Here's a new attraction called the Hampster Wheel--inflated plastic wheels floating on water that you can climb inside and spin--and I'm tempted to point out the spelling error, but anyone who goes to the fair to correct spelling is sort of missing the point.

The Tilt-A-Whirl spins into the sky where dark clouds loom, threatening rain. The first raindrops hit as we leave the parking lot and soon we're driving through a storm more exciting than any thrill ride--but that's a story for another day. 

Hamster wheels getting inflated.

Bid-spotter at the auction arena.

4-H members waiting to enter the arena.

Time to go home!

Rain, work, walk

I had intended to drop by my office for just a few minutes, long enough to water my plants and pick up a book or two, but the moment I stepped out the building to head back home, rain started pouring down. Of course I brought an umbrella with me! It's in my car. In fact I think there are two or three umbrellas in my car, which is where I need to be, but I don't care to run out there through the pouring rain with books and a computer in my arms, so I think I'll just sit here for a while and ramble on about what I've been doing.

Not enough is the answer. I haven't been doing enough writing, mowing, walking, cleaning, or anything else of substance for weeks on end. I've finished two and a half syllabi (out of four), and I've organized my dad's upcoming 85th birthday party, and I've mostly finished another annoying little project, but the big things are still looming: revising my journal article and laying some groundwork for my spring 2019 sabbatical. Can't do anything about all that while I'm sitting here waiting for the rain to stop, though, so I may as well think about happier things.

Like the pollinator habitat! This morning I went out to Luke Chute Conservation Area and walked around the pollinator habitat, where the trails wind through tall flowering plants stretching way overhead. I heard a bunch of common yellowthroats and a hawk, saw two hummingbird moths but couldn't get the camera to my face fast enough to take photos, and walked face-first through enough spider webs to make my hair feel shellacked with spider silk. But mostly I enjoyed watching the pollinator habitat do its valuable work: attracting pollinators of all types. I can't identify all the different types of bees I saw but there were bunches of 'em.

Now I hear wet squeaky shoes trekking through the hallways as a bunch of incoming students head for a meeting, and it looks like rain has stopped for now. Time to make a dash for it before it starts up again. I could gripe about having to wait, but at least it gave us a chance to have this little chat. Let's do it again soon. 

 

Make room for blackberries

A colleague told me about a time when she needed to chop down a thick stand of weeds at the edge of a ditch, so she took her machete and swung through the weeds, mentally giving each weed the name of person who had annoyed her: telemarketers, demanding students, annoying neighbors, and so on. This allowed her to kill two birds with one stone (or whack two weeds with one machete): she cleared the weeds while harmlessly working out her frustrations.

What names would I project on the weeds I pulled in the blackberry patch this week? Take that, telecommunications problems! Curses on you, neverending road construction project that makes me sit in traffic waiting for a flagman to let me through on two separate parts of my morning commute! I spit in your face, spring floods!

I hadn't intended to do any weeding in the blackberry patch this summer; in fact, I'd written the blackberries off as a lost cause for several good reasons: they never got properly pruned over the winter; grapevines have been colonizing the back end of the patch; and the flood that took away our driveway and garden shed dumped a pile of silt and debris on the blackberry patch. What happens to blackberry bushes that sit under five or six feet of water? I didn't particularly want to find out. Add to that a busier than normal spring and the need to move a bunch of stuff to Jackson and I pretty much pushed the blackberry patch right out of my mind.

But then the other day I was mowing and noticed the wild berries turning red on the edges of the woods--their tart, juicy goodness made me wonder whether our poor neglected blackberry patch would be producing any fruit this summer.

But I can't pick berries if I can't see 'em, so I decided to wade in and start pulling weeds, thick stands of jewelweed and joe pye weed stretching over my head. I can pull out jewelweed easily with one hand, but the bigger weeds require both hands and every ounce of strength, and then if they let loose suddenly I end up reeling backward. I saw spiders and beetles and heard buzzing bees, swatted grapevines out of the way and knocked down flood debris, and I saw plenty of dry, lifeless blackberry canes.

But I also found berries. I pulled a lot of weeds, cleared the healthiest portion of the patch, and picked two big fat blackberries, leaving many more to ripen. It may take a year or two to bring the patch back to full production, but this year we ought to have enough to make all that weeding worthwhile.

Take that, pesky weeds! Thanks for the great workout, but now it's time for you to make room for blackberries.
 

At home in nature or nature at home?

Sunlight filtering through leaves throws shadows on a moss-covered rock, making it look upholstered, like a comfy pouf I could put in my living room, but that would be a mistake: the fabric-like pattern depends upon a specific set of circumstances that would be impossible to recreate indoors. And so I appreciate the rock but leave it sitting where it belongs.

Lately I've been reminded of Gene Stratton Porter, the author of The Girl of the Limberlost and other best-selling novels in the early years of the twentieth century, who, in her fiction and many magazine essays, promoted an aesthetic diminishing the distance between people and nature. She loved to create outdoor "rooms" dissolving the walls that separate us from nature, and she loved to bring nature indoors by filling her homes with moth collections and woodwork intricately carved with leaves and owls and other woodland creatures. Every time I've walked through her houses, I've wondered how many trees she had to sacrifice to demonstrate her love for trees. And once her former gardener told about a time when Gene wanted to create a beautiful display of trilliums around a rotting log, so she set the gardener to work transplanting the delicate flowers, causing him to remark upon the massive number of man-hours required to make a spot in the woods look "natural."

My personal aesthetic is more aesthetic; all I require is that every room in the house have some spot of beauty on display: an interesting fabric, a photo of grandkids or birds, a pretty shell, a bit of needlework. That sun-dappled stone I saw in the woods makes me want to find a fabric that recreates the effect, but I'll leave the stone itself where it belongs, in a dynamic, fluid environment. Who knows what it will look like next time I visit? 

Shadows on a rock.

Lovely Lake Katharine

See the face?

Bigleaf mangolia trees stretch far overhead

I love the way the light dapples the water

 

Death by a thousand bites (or just one bite in a really bad place)

Summertime and the living is easy, as long as you follow one simple rule: whether you're working, shopping, picknicking, or mowing the lawn, try not to think about the mosquito bite in your armpit.

I know it's hot! I know the air's so thick with humidity that you could part it like a curtain, and every tiny movement causes sweat to pour out directly over that mosquito bite and make it feel as if your entire armpit is on fire, but whatever you do, don't think about it. In particular, don't think about scratching it. In public. Like, at the grocery store.

Say you're pushing your shopping cart around the store, enjoying the refreshing air conditioning before you have to plunge back into the outdoor sauna holding the entire midwest in its crushing grip right now, when suddenly that mosquito bite starts to itch and sting like an entire Fourth of July fireworks display under your arm. What should you do?  

Don't scratch. Don't even think about scratching, not just because scratching one's armpit in public Simply Isn't Done but because you'll eventually have to hand your money over to the cashier with a hand that smells like sweaty armpit, and if you happen to be walking up the seasonal items aisle and notice a set of grilling tools on sale, do not even think about grabbing that pointy meat fork and using it to scratch your armpit until it's raw and bloody, because then they'd make you buy the bloody meat fork and how will you ever show your face in that store again?

If you must think about the mosquito bite under your armpit, you might wonder how a mosquito managed to sting you in that relatively inaccessible spot. I mean, what were you doing, wandering through the woods waving your arms in the air? You couldn't have been signaling for a touchdown during baseball season, so maybe that pesky mosquito targeted your armpit at the precise moment when you were reaching up to refill the hummingbird feeder. Lucky little mosquito. Hope it enjoyed that blood meal because someone ought to get some pleasure out of this experience and that someone certainly isn't you.

Especially don't think about the mosquito bite in your armpit while you're lying in bed trying to get to sleep at night despite the feeling that millions of creepy-crawlies are continuously feeding on your armpit. You're alone in the dark; no one would ever know if you just reached over and started scratching until you found some relief, but let's face it: there will be no relief, not even if you scratch it bloody, and then every ounce of sweat you excrete will make it sting even more and it may even get badly infected, and who wants to deal with an infected armpit? You think a mosquito bite is bad! Imagine asking your beloved doctor to look at the massive oozing pulsing glob of pus colonizing your armpit. So don't scratch. No good can come of it. Sit on your hands if you have to.

Don't even think about it. Think of anything else besides the mosquito bite in your armpit, even though there's a mosquito bite in your armpit and it's never, ever going to stop itching until you break down and grab a sharp metal implement like a paring knife or a meat fork or your car keys or even a bouquet of long-stemmed roses at a booth at the Farmers' Market. Do not--repeat NOT--grab the bouquet by the blossoms and start tearing at your skin with the thorny stems until the blood pours down your arms and they find you laughing and bleeding on the sidewalk in the middle of town and call for reinforcements. "Put down your weapon," they'll say, but you'll be so engrossed in the sweet relief of scratching that you'll threaten anyone who comes near you with the thorny stems, and the next thing you know you'll be shot dead on the sidewalk and someone will have to peel those stems out of your cold, dead hands.

But look on the bright side: at least you won't have to think about the mosquito bite in your armpit.

Field notes from afar (but not too far)

We knew we were the first hikers on the Salt Creek Trail at Lake Katharine the other day because we kept walking face-first through spider webs stretching across the trail--now there's a good reason to take turns leading the way. Blistering heat and humidity make it hard to spend time outside these days, but at 7 a.m. the woods were still cool, shady, and fragrant with blossoms and rot. We saw some interesting fungi and creepy patches of white finger slime mold, but at Lake Katharine the main attractions are trees: towering sweet gum, groves of birch and beech, and bigleaf magnolias with leaves as long as my forearm. Next time I'm taking the camera.

This morning I took the camera out for an early trek up the hill behind our house, where the wild raspberries are redding up and wild grapevines are colonizing a dead tree. Hopeful bounded alongside, happy to have some company after my weekend away. We heard an indigo bunting and some tufted titmice, but otherwise the upper meadow was utterly still, with not so much as a butterfly stirring.

Down in the lower meadow we marvelled over the debris from our May flood still clinging to tree limbs three feet above my head. (Well, I marvelled. I don't know whether Hopeful marvels over anything or how to determine her level of wonder.) If the debris is three feet above my head, and I'm standing in a field ten feet above the level of the creek, then the water must have been...really high. Wish I'd seen it.

A patch of bee balm looked flattened but the chicory is blooming all along the driveway. I know chicory is as common as dirt in disturbed soil, but I love to see their cheery blue flowers brightening up the roadside in midsummer. 

In the high grass along the edge of the meadow I found a little group of Asiatic dayflowers blooming and I wondered why I'd never seen them in that spot before. Several obvious answers suggest themselves: 1. The flood washed them in. 2. I've never walked past that exact spot during the brief time when they're blooming. 3. Our wet spring made the meadow too mushy to mow, and the resident meadow-mower has been splitting his time between home and Jackson and therefore hasn't done as much mowing, which allowed the dayflowers to bloom in the tall grass that would normally have been cut down by now. 

Speaking of Jackson, I enjoyed my first full weekend at the parsonage but it will take some time to get accustomed to being surrounded by neighbors. I can stand at the kitchen sink and look into a half-dozen backyards, and I assume that they can look into mine--and see what? A garden shed, a charcoal grill, a horde of robins feeding in the grass. I've seen few other birds, and I hesitate to hang birdfeeders for fear that they'll provide a buffet for the local feral cat population. At least we'll be close to Lake Katharine and some other notable beauty spots. I expect to make friends with those bigleaf magnolias, and if the price of admission is a few spider webs in the face, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

My bottlebrush buckeye is blooming!

I love the tiny pink anthers at the end of the stamens.

Dead tree supporting wild grapevines.

Tufted titmouse.

Wonder? Marvel? Or something else entirely?

Asiatic dayflower.

Debris in tree.

Chicory

Wild berries--tiny but delicious