Planked
Greenman
You can get so immersed in one project that the world begins to
disappear. Focus narrows, colors lose their intensity, you bump
into things. While I've been wrapped up in building this ark,
the landscape has wholly transformed itself, and I barely noticed.
If it wasn't for the sneezing, I might have missed the flowers.
The tender pastels have saturated and darkened as leaves spread,
and the woods gone dense. A sparse and threadbare world has turned
rich and rank. Long views disappear, replaced by intimate glimpses.
Instead of wandering in the puckerbrush, I'm poking in the garden.
Garden Gates
Salad Bowl
There the first planted peas are four foot tall and in blossom.
Spuds are bushing out, and corn is poking through the mulch hay.
It's Salad City in the shade of the Eagles, and the beans are
boasting. Mitch says he has 40,000 dry bean plants up and thriving.
And it's first cutting time. Eric has turned from sawing pine
to making hay, and he had forty acres down when I went over for
more bottom plank.
Got away with it, too. Max and Mitch didn't cut hay, refusing
to risk it with the wind southerly, but the threatened rain didn't,
and the barns begin to fill again. Fields are full of bales and
hayrolls. Even in these boonies rolled hay and machinery have
replaced the gang of youngsters pitching bales. You can't find
a young man who'll sweat in the fields, and those who are still
baling are old cranks, gimping around in grumbled anachronism.
Hay Rolls
Ray blew in from his winter habitat like a tufted songbird, and
was full of genial tales at Jeanine's. Told how he was on a traveling
ag crew in Kansas the summer of his junior year in high school,
back in the 50s, when he got abandoned in the middle of nowhere,
by a driver who took off with the spending money. Ray had enough
cash to eat for a few days at a diner down the road, and he stuck
with the harvesting rig, assuming the owner would eventually come
looking for it. He went to the county jail to see if the driver
was locked up there, and the judge said that all he had to do
was ask, if he needed help. But Ray stuck it out on his own.
Someone had left a pile of magazines under the truck seat, and
Ray said it changed his life. Until then he had only faked at
reading, getting by in school with the subtle strategies of the
illiterate. "I started puzzling through those magazines, word
at a time, and after three days I was reading pretty good. My
senior year in high school was very different. I have to thank
whoever left those magazines." Ray didn't say he was grateful
for being dumped in the middle of Kansas. The bossman finally
bailed him out.
There have been days when Brooklyn Neck feels like Kansas in August.
This square-toed frigate shines with a glaring intensity, and
I find myself half-blinded by noon, unable to see indoors until
my eyes stop buzzing. Guy and Darryl have been on the roof all
week, where the shingles are almost too hot to handle. There were
actually four layers of old roofing on this ancient pile, and
you could hear the building sigh as it was ripped off. Or was
that creaking just Guy thundering around? The gypsy trash man
hauled two dumpster loads of old roof out of here, and now we're
recapped for the millennium. The place stops feeling like a building
site. Just a boatyard and ornamentation factory.
Black
I did take a day off and finished the ornaments I'd promised Jimmy
Chard. Two big ravens like the ones guarding our corn patch, and
a pair of redwing blackbirds. Great idea for ornaments. The most
territorial of birds, who shout at you for trespassing: marking
your turf with redwings says it all. I made a pair for us, as
well, and posted them out front.
Birds
Then I finished planking the Millennium Toad. She's going to be
a beamy beast, and I'm already casting about for cargo to freight,
to rationalize this caper. So far the only offer I've had is to
load her with zucchini in August, to dump offshore. Or possibly
to create a new island in the Bay. Zucchini Island. This is what
happens when you spend all day in the hot sun.
All Planked
Yellow Scene
It's getting dry again, but the veg is still abounding. There
are seas of yellow buttercups out there, purple clover and violet
vetch, daisies and roses run rampant. Everything is covered in
sticky yellow pine pollen. And the kids are loose. Tammy and Nancy
have set up a pool nextdoor and turned the backyard into a daycare
haven. Young David came over to tell me how cool the pool was
while I was sweltering over the last planks. He meant well.
The weekend din of jetskiis running the upper Cathance, the snarl
of mowers, and the splashing laughter of kids, fills this backwater.
Seth has the volume up in the hall where he's doing the last trim
work, and the old gripe is bunging his barge. Peggy is grading
her final exams, and The Season is about to get serious.
Toad at Home
Snapper
It's snapper time, and the big turtles are waddling upcountry
looking for laying spots. Seth and I stopped for one on the road,
and chivvied him away from the traffic with a long stick. Man
but don't they have a quick snap, and a nasty bite. By the time
we were done with our mission, we were glad to leave him (her?)
to his own devices.
Snavely the woodpile snake has taken to cooling it in the bulkhead,
and it's a bit disconcerting to lift the cellar lid and find him
sprawled out where you just stuck your hand. Nice to think he's
averting the rodents, though. Much rather have a slither of summer
snakes than a skittering of winter mice.
Snavely
Looking Up
CC and I took a hike out to Wildes Point between dog trials, and
managed to flush a covey of young partridge in the woods. She
was thrilled. It's been right boring, hanging in the dooryard
while the man plays with planking. Good for me to open my eyes
again, too. If looking with full intent is the artist's business,
I've been out to lunch. Maybe now this hull is whole, I can spare
a moment to watch the world. Examine the sky.
Summer birds are lighting on the coast, and the swallows are nesting
under the eaves at the old shoe factory, just out of reach. When
you walk past the air fills with swirling swallows. Every hollow
tree seems to have someone in residence, and Route One is down
to a creep. Welcome to the way life should be.
Swallows
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