happy anniversary

to the new supernatural nephew's parents.

the magnificent exploding max

max fell out of bed. at 4:40 this morning, i awoke to a thump. it's the sort of thump that lets you know a medium sized dog has landed on his back from a few feet up. the thump wasn't on my side of the bed, so i woke the sweetie, who insisted max just jumped down to get a drink. now, max is gearing up for his sweet sixteen this fall and he's not the jumper he used to be. back in brooklyn, we have little steps so he and guthrie can get up and down from the bed without breaking those short little legs they insist on having. here, we lift the old guy up and down by hand, the way they did it in the olden days. max won't jump down himself. instead, he'll put himself very near my head and will cry a sad, horrible cry for as long as it takes to wake me and let me know he needs to get down. this does not work with the sweetie as he could sleep through an explosion, so max doesn't bother.

so it was no surprise to me when we turned on the light and max didn't look quite right. well, max has never really looked quite right, but this was different. we've noticed he's going deaf and we've also noticed sometimes he stares off into space for a while. none of this has really changed him all that much. if anything, he's been more wonderful in his ancientness. but when i reached down to pick him up he snapped at me. this made me think he broke something in his fall. all his bones are about the same age, so it could have been any of them, but he was standing when the snapping occurred, so i figured it wasn't a leg, back or head bone. probably a rib. scary. ribs are always snapping off, puncturing lungs and other horrible things. we saw this a few weeks back on deadliest catch, and if it can happen to a ship captain, it can happen to max. the sweetie insisted he was fine until the snapping turned his way. then, suddenly, he came to the conclusion, based on all he'd seen, that max fell out of bed.

which meant that in the still dark morning we all four (guthrie is a worrier and needed to be right up next to max) went downstairs (max had no trouble here, which really narrowed down the possible bones he'd broken) where the sweetie took max out for a walk because nobody could sleep. this meant guthrie stood inside with me worrying up a storm. he is, after all, my dog. when everyone was back inside we continued to look at max's grumpy side. this particular side harbors many of his old dog bumps. you will remember from a few posts ago we had to have a particularly hideous bump removed from one of max's back toes. and a few years back, while he was under for something else, we had one removed from his back, right in the prime pet zone. so this side, his grumpy side, was grumpy far before he fell out of bed.

and what we found when we examined the horrible side of max is that one of his awful old dog bumps had been torn out by the roots. we did not find the actual bump, which we suspect might be somewhere inside max. it's best not thinking about that sort of thing. what this means is that max had a gaping hole in his side the size of a pencil eraser that went right into him. we are, at this point, pretty well able to deal with any sort of external grotesqueness max can create. and now that we weren't worried one of his ribs had leapt off it's mooring and skewered a lung or two, everything was fine. max was still in a lot of pain and feeling pretty stupid for falling out of bed while gnawing off one of his bumps. we waited for daylight. then we waited for the drugstore to open. the sweetie went to get a bandage and other max repair items. we hoisted him into the kitchen sink (his least favorite place in the house) to bathe off what looked like a tunnel into max. then we wrapped him up like a fighter with taped ribs.

for the first fifteen minutes, he was so humiliated, he just sat, staring into space. i reminded him whose fault all this was and what time the sweetie and i got up to investigate all this drama. i let him know guthrie had stood by him, staring, clueless for hours. suddenly he recovered. he has five or six bumps left right now, but he can only reach two. i'm sure he'll be dramatic when the time comes.

freaks and monsters

disclaimer: don't get yourself all riled up about the word "freak". go to the coney island freak show and learn a little something about difference if you're snarling right now.

yesterday i spoke to the first supernatural nephew. i had called his mom to ask about shipping some mysterious chocolate and then there he was.

what's your favorite animal? he asked. now, i know my favorite animal is the bat. there's nothing better, nothing more fantastic, but i paused, scanning my brain, because i wanted him to be impressed. i wanted him to be proud of my choice. i went with bat. he seemed pleased. i asked about his favorite and it's a pterodactyl. he hesitated first, asking if it could be extinct. i said extinct would be fine because i know how he loves the dinosaurs. good. then his favorite is definitely pterodactyl. he likes the way they're able (in his way of seeing things) to fake out larger, land-bound predators by swooping away at the last minute. he laughed just thinking about it. he said pterodactyls would laugh, too, yelling down taunts to the carnivores snapping below them. secretly, i was thrilled because we'd chosen the same animal. okay, not really the same animal, but kindred creatures. freaks. irregulars. it is his ability to recognize and celebrate rarity and strangeness that i hear most in these calls. the nephew and i love the churkendooses.

for those of you who don't know, the churkendoose is the barnyard version of the "it takes a village to raise a child" story. it seems one day the ladyfowl at the farm notice an egg all by itself. it doesn't belong to any of them, but each takes a turn sitting on it. all that sitting somehow infuses the little birdlet with characteristics from all the mamas involved. the hatched bird is a freak. spectacular and gifted, a little bit like everyone but not entirely like anyone. misfit. but every one of those bird mamas saw her own kind in the little freak. that's the moral of the story, i suppose. that even the strangest among us has a little bit of us. but what i got from it as a kid is that everyone loves the strange kid.

there will be more phone calls. the nephew lives half a country away and we don't see each other much. he changes quickly and i can't keep up with what wildness swirls into his head but he reports on bits of it from time to time. i know there will be more questions and i'm ready. i have not forsaken my beloved bat, but there are more loves than one in the animal world. i have a whole list of animals he'll like to meet. platypus. wallaby. axolotl. but those are pedestrian. those are easy. i've gone to schreber's fantastic beasts for the serious stuff. malayan stink badger.klipspringer. fossa. crab-eating fox. african chevrotain. greater grison. babirusa.

gunpowder pinhole

warning: this is too long to be one entry. you know how little kids see something exciting and then tell you about it in meandering, stream of consciousness? proceed at your own risk. loads of photos toward the end.

disclaimer: polaroid pinhole photos were rephotographed on a digital camera and downloaded. editing was hasty.

those of you who have been visiting a while will remember the very first post, about "arkville holiday", a confusing little wonder involving firemen, bbq, fireworks and santa all on the 27th of december. well, i don't mean to alarm you, but that's not the only time of year we get a fireworks combo. that's right. the fourth of july, done up margaretville style, is not to be sneezed at. and, of course, there are firemen. and bbq, though santa was nowhere to be seen. in his place there's a no joke, bona fide carnival.

here's the deal. the carnival busts loose on the first. we went over to the field behind the a&p around dark. there were clusters of folks milling around brightly lit rides, none of which seemed to be going. that was not a problem. most everybody was deeply involved in some sort of carnival food- cotton candy, funnel cakes, fried vegetables, lemonade, sausage and peppers. a few were trying to win things at those games of skill. the prizes were impressive. almost nothing was a cartoon character. this sort of thing repeats itself until friday, when the entire town takes off from work in anticipation of the day's festivities. starting with the flea market. now, the flea market is a lot like most. it's outside on a field between arkville and margaretville, sort of across from the local hospital. it has plenty of folding tables full of stuff like twenty year old used hair mousse and lots of broken kitchen utensils. and farm implements. and wagon wheels. the local army navy place has a little booth, complete with a display of guns "not for sale". heh. but on the fourth of july, the flea market transforms. it takes on a level of seriousness and excitement that truly makes it worth taking a day off to see. so we did.

generally, folks park at a pull out on the side of route 28, with space for maybe ten cars. but on this special day, cars were lined up along both sides of the road, parked in the lot of a semi-defunct restaurant and even on the grass near the edge of the market. we walked over to the first "booth", which was mostly a bunch of junk lying on the grass. the folks at the flea market appear to have limited marketing and display skills. this doesn't matter when you're selling stuff for a buck, but when you slap a $300 sticker on a rusted saw, you better make it look pretty. and they don't. but back to the first booth. junk on the ground. and then the puzzles. 33 jigsaw puzzles, all assembled, lying on the ground. i'm not joking. mostly outdoor scenes. village scenes. at first i thought they were mounted on something and meant to be used as art. nope. just put together for folks to look at. that way you can see all the pieces are there and you can see what you get in the end. brilliant. disturbing.

there was a table near the middle with an old microscope. it sat on a wooden board next to some other lab looking equipment and had a $25 tag on it. i might have mentioned before my love of microscopes and my need to have old, busted up junk all scattered around. it was a raggedy, dusty mess. the sweetie wasn't too sure. he loves the old, busted up junk as well, but in this new house, he likes his busted up junk a little nicer than what we've had in the past. the thing about the sweetie is, no matter how raggedy an object is, if it has working mechanical parts and he can fix it up and get it going, he can be convinced that we need it. he was. so i forked over my $25 and it was at this moment i realized the microscope was mounted on a board and the strange little machine next to it was coming home, too. this, for me, is the equivalent of spying a dollar on the street and realizing it's a five while picking it up. i was worried someone would find out what we had before we escaped with it. we got it home where i freed both machines from the board and shined them up a bit. the sweetie got things working and in no time at all we'll be gazing at pond water and fly wings under the thing.

but i forgot about the firemen. the margaretville firemen do not have brooks bbq cater their field days. they make their own. on the lot across from the a&p there was a mile long grill with several firemen tending half chickens and there were some folks standing at little booths scattered randomly (and with no clear indication of what's going on) over this parking lot and on into the park behind the grocery. i think we counted five places to buy chicken, none of which said anything even resembling "hey, buy chicken here!". but it doesn't matter. if you want the chicken, you'll find it. and for $7.50, these folks will slap half a chicken in a styrofoam box and toss in a roll and two sides (i got beans for both mine). i have been known to be squeamish about food, but for some reason, seeing the guy grab a half chicken out of a large cardboard box covered with tin foil didn't stop me from digging in on the walk across the street.yes, before we sat down i was chewing on chicken in the street. and there will me more again today. they are not joking around with this whole field days thing. judging from the amount of folks i saw gnawing on half chickens, margaretville firemen will be able to buy a whole new set of trucks. perhaps they will sell the old ones at the flea market. i know someone who needs one.

but we still aren't to the main event. the fireworks. now, we live about a mile from margaretville, just down the road on route 28 and we hopped in the car around 9 for the 9:30 show. we knew to expect something pretty swanky from the arkville holiday experience and we wanted to get a good seat. we did not understand the event at all. we underestimated everything. we turned right off our own road onto 28 and within a few yards we saw cars parked along the side. some folks were walking along the dark road toward margaretville and the a&p while others were just sitting in lawn chairs in the backs of trucks or on the ground between cars. the flea market grounds were packed and the little rise where the hospital sits was covered with families on blankets. like times square on new year's eve. i'm not exaggerating. except without any of the nastiness. no yelling. no honking. and our car was going forward. confusing. we decided to go for it. we kept driving, taking a right into margaretville, crossing the river and going past the a&p. and we drove up into town. now, margaretville is like many small towns. it's small. once you get off the main street it's just houses and churches and sidewalks. so we drove toward the back end of town, which is pretty much four blocks from the front end, and we parked. we didnt' really know where things would be so we followed the stream of folks with lawn chairs and blankets. we had our own blanket and a couple of cameras with a tripod. this will be important later. the trail led us to an alley up behind the big trucks the carnival people live in. there were plastic lawn chairs scattered near the side doors of the trucks, but everything else was shut up tight against the mass of townfolks. we kept walking.

and then the road went right up to a roped off clearing with every human being for fifty miles packed in. this is where i mention i'm not so good with crowds. i know i've spent the last ten years in nyc. still, not good with crowds. but fireworks is a whole other kettle of fish, so we pressed on. there was a little open space on the ground right at the edge of the road and we plopped our stuff down. a woman and a young girl were selling glow sticks, which we clearly needed. they're still glowing this morning. we faced ourselves the direction everyone else was facing and the dark finally got serious. we were looking at a small rise where a tiny building with the sign "margaretville water dept." on it hunched down. when i say tiny, think shed. from behind margaretville water dept. it started. fireworks like you only read about. and, just like at arkville holiday, they echo off the mountains in crazy ways. you can feel them exploding in your insides. and we had managed to wander into front row center seating. the sweetie took photos with the digital camera, long exposures with brilliant color. i had the pinhole camera on a tripod, exposing the film for a minute or more. the whole explosion thing lasted at least 30 minutes, during which time if you craned your neck you could see a terrifying red cloud just behind the margaretville water dept. sinsiter. perfect.

after the fireworks we went strolling around the carnival, looking for places to set up the pinhole camera. we found plenty. and each time, some fortysomething guy, kid in tow, would look at us shyly for a minute, then ask, "is that a... a... pinhole camera or something?" in the manner of a ten year old boy with a crush. yes. it is. although i'm not prone to generalizations, especially those about men or women, i feel comfortable saying men of a certain age get all stupid over cameras they don't have, especially if they hearken back to something from their youth. i'd show the photos and they'd ask more questions. one guy had a child who is, i'm sure, in regular contact with the original supernatural nephew. he was keenly interested in cameras and had his own digital at home. he looked at the photos, gazed at the camera (at seven, he could already recognize the beauty in a simple, functional object- clearly a superpower) and cried, "that's exactly the camera i've been wanting!" of course it is. a wooden camera with no lens and a polaroid back. the very camera. so i agreed with him. his dad laughed and said they'd maybe try an oatmeal box pinhole. but i figure if you're buying a seven year old digital cameras, you've got the cash to buy him something really beautiful. something that will not be easy. something without a viewfinder, so he will have to find his own way. something that will require him to be very still and count, maybe as high as 300. that kid needs a camera like mine for real. the way he doesn't yet know he needs fireworks. and carnival rides. and chicken made by firemen.

front porch

the chairs are finished. i have managed several hours a day (it's okay. you can be impressed) in my rocking chair on the porch. before anyone gets all critical, i spend my remaining time hiking, gardening, picking up rocks scattered all over the yard, mowing and dealing with small but energetic dogs. i get my exercise. but at least one hour during the day and usually several every evening around dusk, i sit in my rocker, sip some sort of beverage (tea, bourbon, hot chocolate- it gets cool here at night), breathe air that smells like the summer when i was eleven and knit pants for the supernatural or peruse our library of geekdom.

when we bought the house, we immediately furnished it with a field guide to wildflowers (north american), catskill region waterfall guide (where we found that nice trail featured in an earlier post), peterson field guide to eastern trees, and the national audubon society field guide to birds- eastern region. this is because once you become a homeowner, a landowner, you have to know what's on your land. and around it. and i do. mostly i use the books in my secret feuds with the tree guy. he does not know about these feuds. he says the trees in our fence row are chinese elms and i know they're rock elms, mostly because of the drooping lower branches. he says the woodpeckers destroying said rock elms are downy woodpeckers when they're clearly yellow bellied sapsuckers. i win these arguments entirely in my mind. the field guides are vindication enough. the tree guy is so nice i don't have the heart to fight him for real. although i would clearly kick his butt. but this is what i do. i sit on the porch and look around and need to grab a book every few minutes to establish my surroundings. biblical folk say god let adam name everything. i want to know everything's name.

like the hummingbird i saw the other night. i thought that would be tough. they're tiny and it was nearly dark when the thing zipped over to the tiger lilies (who were in the process of closing up for the night) and pranced around. i was secretly hoping it would get stuck in a closing lily, but those things are pretty quick. by the way, the fireflies were all around the lilies, too, and i was begging them to fly into a lily and light up. they absolutely refused, although one did hover just above a lily and set the whole thing ablaze. but the hummingbird. the hummingbird, indeed. tiny. dusk. impossible to identify. except, according to national audubon society, the ruby throated hummingbird (archilochus colubris, of the family trochilidae) is the only one living its frantic little life around here. good. because i have no idea how many centimeters the thing was or the color of its undercarriage. generally, the folks at audubon are pretty straighforward with their descriptions of voice, habitat, nesting and range. but not with this little critter. check this out: "nesting: 2 white eggs in a woven nest of plant down held together with spider silk and covered with lichens. nest is saddled to the branch of a tree." holy cow. just put a few line breaks in there and you've got yourself something sassy enough for a high school poetry journal. the thing is, the language is pretty, but i'm thinking, "how do they get the spider silk?" i know they're small and i know they're fast, but come on. you're telling me a bird with that sort of amped up personality can abscond with a spider web and then manage to use it successfully to cobble together a hobbit nest?

they're so sleek and shiny and small, the hummingbirds. thank goodness for bats. fat, fuzzy, disheveled looking. it's the bats i really love. since i was a kid. they're such a brilliant package. mammal. nocturnal. flying. sleeping upside down in caves. and then the echolocation thing. seriously? one animal got all that? cows must be pretty annoyed. regular birds, too. not me. i couldn't take all that responsibility. i'm nearly overwhelmed just taking it all in from my rocking chair.

nice kitty

these were at a furniture store on route 28. free to a good home. they are very soft and quite cuddly.
_________________

the nephew called after the early part of this post. he was worried about me. so here’s what happened.

i grew up around plenty of wildish animals. my cousin carl lee showed up at a family reunion with a handful of baby raccoons and even before that my dad brought us tiny rabbits to raise. there were birds- all sorts of birds. dad once took us to see a friend who had a three legged deer. there was always some misfit creature busting out of the wild and becoming part of civilization. silly things.

so today when we stopped at an amish furniture store we weren’t all that surprised to see seven baby skunks curled up together under the front porch. now, i’ve seen plenty of skunks at a distance and once, up close. i was living in ann arbor and working a 6am shift at a bookstore. i didn’t drive and the buses didn’t run at 5am, so i walked the two or so miles into downtown most mornings in pitch darkness. it saw me first. it was in the foresty brambles next to my house and i was on the sidewalk, but this was enough for it to take action. i wasn't expecting a skunk to lift up on his front paws, butt in the air, to attack, but this one did. because what sort of idiot would do that, really? a skunk. i do not remember moving at all but found myself walking down the opposite side of the street a few moments later, so i must have moved fast.

but the human instinct to move toward baby mammals is overwhelming. my knowledge of skunkings and my own narrow escape could not stop the “oh, how precious!” that squealed from me as we walked up the low ramp to the porch of the store. precious. skunks. but they are. much cuter than kittens, with thicker fur and those magnificent fat tails. they are like some cute cute cute cute cute kitten crossed with the most adorable adorable adorable adorable dog. oh! precious! when we walked in the sweetie asked about the skunks and the owner, a gruff marine type, said, “i suppose i ought to do something about those,” and got up to go outside. i was imagining. he would put them in a sack and throw them in the river. he would shoot them. cook them. set his dogs on them for fun. i could tell by his tone those poor baby skunks were headed down an ugly road.

we looked up as he came back in, arms full of skunks. “how many were there?” again in that scary old marine guy voice. seven, i told him. his voice didn’t fool me anymore. i’ve seen plenty of grown folks with armfuls of baby wild animals. it turns them stupid to carry around little beasts. he tossed them into a wooden toy chest and went out for the other two. one bit him, which seemed to delight him. he’d had two skunks as pets long ago. while i sat by the box to pet the little babies (because all baby animals will be miserable if you don’t cuddle on them as soon as you see them) he disappeared and came back with a cold chicken leg. exactly what skunks eat in the wild. when i asked what made him decide on skunks as pets he said he didn’t know. he used the word “hell” a lot when he talked. probably the same thing that made him buy two hogs, then more, then a bunch of cows. craziness. but cows are different from skunks and the two sorts of crazy aren’t even neighbors.

he said he’d call animal control later, but you can tell by looking at them he’s going to end up keeping all seven. i would, if the dogs would let me.

spray paint

if you have a big, fat front porch with a view of a mountain, you have to have some good sitting chairs so you can be taken seriously. i don’t mean those canvas chairs you can buy at target with the drink holders (we take them camping) and i don’t mean the teak chaise lounge (although who wouldn’t slap one on a porch, if one just strolled by) you can get at those crazy stores online that show porches outfitted with real indoor furniture and curtains. i mean serious metal outdoor chairs. preferrably from the forties or fifties, just to drive home how serious you are about the whole sitting on the porch thing.

if you live in most places, you go to a yard sale and pick up a few old chairs, sand them down and repaint them. the whole process takes an afternoon and costs maybe fifty bucks. but if you live in brooklyn, that sort of furniture doesn’t even exist. so you look around upstate. what you find are the chairs you want, but they’re at “barn sales”, which is a gentle way of saying, “antique store”, which is, as you know, code for “i found this on the side of the road and scuffed it up and am going to charge you a thousand dollars for it”. but if you want the chairs (and we really, really wanted them), you fork over whatever the barn people ask because your only other option is to sit on the floor.

so we bought three. two regulars and a rocker. i might not have mentioned it but if you knit and are cultivating an old lady scene and you don’t have a rocker, you might as well give up now. so the rocker was a necessity. it is a disaster. when it came home the back was rust. not rusty or rusted. rust. like when you’re walking out in the middle of nowhere and you come upon some shard of civilization from a hundred years ago. there’s nothing there but rust. the steel fled maybe twenty years ago. but i can rock like a madwoman in it and i think the fact that it lists to the side like a torpedoed ship just adds to the charm.

one of the non-rockers was already painted a sassy flat red. not quite like the red primer most boys i went to high school with painted their cars, but close enough. the paint is relatively even and i think the color is funny, so that one stays. not so the others. the sweetie and i each grabbed a chair, some sand paper and a good supply of iced tea. i got out my stupid filter mask (you know, the white masks that fit over your nose that some construction workers wear when they’re doing things that cause tiny fibers to float around). i know who i am and i know how my lungs feel about me. mask. the sweetie spent about three minutes maskless and suddenly my idea seemed brilliant. the sanding took way less time than i expected. his turned into a spectacular combination of cherry red with a soothing pistachio green underneath. like a reverse olive with pimento. mine turned from orange rust to yellow rust. what if i sand right through to somewhere else? i asked him. what if i end up in another country? it’s not likely, he reassured, but he looked over at my chair and i could see he was ready to grab me if i started to disappear into some sort of rust wormhole. the yellow rust and orange rust together actually looked quite beautiful and if we’d paid less for the chairs, i might have left mine in its unruly state. but i need to be able to rock in that thing well into my actual old lady years, so forget it.

bring on the spray paint. now, last time i used spray paint, i think it was probably on some old metal chairs sitting in my parents’ yard right now. that would be at least twenty years, maybe more. i have poor spray control. the sweetie went over it with me several times. don’t try to cover everything in the first pass. it will drip. just spray evenly and we’ll do several coats. the fact that i needed help getting the cap off didn’t bode well for the rest of the experience. i shook the can, checked the nozzle and began to spray. i was surprised how similar the paint was to the yellow rust. then i was surprised how sticky my left hand felt. and how yellow, when i looked at it. any dreams i still harbored of being a graffiti queen died right then. evidently the spray paint folks and i have different ideas about how to signal where a spray nozzle is.

the pattern (yes, i said pattern. i know) of the chairs is, i think, called pie crust. look at the photos and you’ll see why. this particular pattern seems to encourage duotone painting. the main part of the chair one color and the details another. the sweetie suggested this but i have no idea how anyone could get spray paint to follow the sort of rules you’d need for that sort of detail work. besides, i chose my colors carefully and want them solid. we looked for the paint from a local hardware store and i was immediately drawn to a honey colored can cap. caterpillar yellow it said. funny, i thought, i don’t know any yellow caterpillars. still, what a color. and i wanted green for the other chair. in my mind i was searching for the color we eventually unearthed on both chairs as their original- a pistachio color that just screamed “old lady business going on here!” but the spray paint industry caters to a community more interested in putting four foot letters on abandoned buildings than the subtleties of greens for porch chairs, so i was about to give up. then i found it. not pistachio, but something better. international green. again with the funny names. but perfect. bold. a good companion to my caterpillar yellow. wait a minute. caterpillar yellow. international green. i hadn’t even looked at the photo on the can. it is some sassy green farm implement with yellow trim. ace hardware makes its own line of machine and implement spray paint. caterpillar. international harvester. i really am from the midwest.

photos of the finished product will be posted as soon as the spray paint dries.