A long winter, a late spring. The shape of the land shows like the ribs of a hungry animal this early in the spring. Waiting for the arrival of spring, Mr. Linton and I blazed a couple of new trails. It's easier to make a way without having to part that modesty-drape of leaves and grass. Naming the trails is surprisingly difficult, for what we end up calling them.
Anyway, a few days and a few yellow blazes later, we now we have Dead Possum Trail (named for the skeleton we found, natch) and what I first thought would be Trillium Trail. Then we noticed this: So, Broken Wagon Trail it is.
Okay, yes, it's not technically a wagon. Neither is it precisely broken. But Abandoned Hay Rake Trail doesn't have the same ring, does it? Plus Mr. Linton named it, and what he says, goes. Sometimes. This time. Back to the narrative. Late spring this year: even the old oaks seemed to be having a hard time waking up.
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My Daddo was petrified of snakes. A traumatic childhood canoe mishap rendered him and his sister and his mother all terribly snake-averse. In later years, he referred to them as "serpents" in a mostly ineffectual effort to keep from getting the willies* when talking about them.
Mumsie was seriously afraid of spiders but pretty much loved any other living creature in the world. She said, "Oh, for pity's sake. Put them down before they warm up and start biting you." Lo these decades later, the vaccination still works. A little corn-snake lurking among some line doesn't bother me one bit.
I wonder if he imagined he was invisible. He didn't have much of a grip on how complementary colors work on the color wheel. It's a like scene from a Michael Bay film. *Ooh, yeah, that Flickr site: so there's someone who re-creates Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons using Legos. I may have reached the end of the interwebs. So there's a tumbledown house at the Would-Be Farm –– a modest wooden structure that's slowly collapsing into its foundation after being abandoned sometime in the 1980's. It sports an outhouse that has been, up until now, frankly, too horrifying for me to examine. Mr. Linton, however, is a made of sterner stuff. And thus his courage was rewarded: The photo begs a caption. Or something.
Each spring, one of the first pleasant chores at the Would-Be Farm is a nice mix of high tech and low mud: we retrieve the game cameras and make our observations of the winter action. Some old friends appear year after year. And a few surprises. Even with thousands of images captured on the tiny photo cards, some creatures are still camera shy. Others pose. While a couple are hiding in plain sight:
National Poetry Month. Poems are where word-caterpillars emerge from their cocoons. Maybe. P-p-pa-poetry? Here, this won'd hurt much: The Caterpillar by Ogden Nash I find among the poems of Schiller No mention of the caterpillar Nor can I find one anywhere In Petrarch or in Baudelaire So here I sit in extra session To give my personal impression. The caterpillar, as it's called, Is often hairy, seldom bald; It looks as if it never shaves; When it walks, it walks in waves. And from the cradle to the chrysalis It's utterly speechless, songless, whistless. Shakespearean butterflies? Sure. And where else but Lear? It's a butterfly-ish play**, the madness and the stomping around and all...and for the fastidious, his poetry is a blanker shade of verse than Mr. Nash's.
*That from "An April Day" by William Wadsworth Longfellow. WWL was a BIG fan of April. *Okay, maybe Lear is not SO much butterfly-ish, but Peter S. Beagle's fictional butterfly quotes Lear to great effect in another work; hence they are joined in my mind.
We'll camp in the Everglades National Park. It's not our first venture into this wilderness. It's a place less full of shady Spanish moss and swampy mud than one might expect. It's pretty darned pleasant, actually: we pitch a tent on the sandy beach, maybe catch a few fishes, play with driftwood. In general, the hazards that are most worrying on this venture off the map are, oh, I dunno –– mosquitoes, sunburn, getting stranded and having to be rescued. THIS is not what I expected: Mormon Key is our favored camping spot. George was almost 10 feet long last time they checked, and weighed in at 700 pounds. Good lawsey day.
More Everglades Challenge? Okay, here's a story about the adventure race by the late great Meade Goudgeon. We'll miss seeing him on the beach this year. The Challenge starts on March 3 off Fort DeSoto Beach. He probably needed to warm up before tortoising. Today's writing prompt comes all the way from the Galápagos. Pranayama
He tried to still his thoughts. Circular breathing. He counted in with the breath: one-belly, two-ribs, three-shoulders. He attempted to send his breath into the interstitial area, wherever that was––! And then out again: shoulders-one, ribs-two, three-belly. And pause. He was happy to pause. He could out-pause anyone. Not that it was a competition. The instructor went on, and he decided to keep pausing. He'd hold still, he figured, and then nip back in next time. Like Arlo Guthrie, he'd just wait for the chorus to come around again. Circular breathing was frustrating and difficult, but the practice was only forty minutes out of a day. Ah, there it was: Inhale. He did, trying to make the breath open first his belly, then ribs, and finally, shoulders. Or what would be shoulders, had he any. Ribs? His ribs were fused into carapace, and everyone knew a carapace didn't –– shouldn't!–– flex. And what chance did his belly have against the dusty plastron? He lived inside a shell corset, and he might just as soon ask his breath to give him wings. He recognized the monkey-brain resistance and focused on the air moving through his sinuses. He sipped the air in and ahhed the breath out. His eyes closed. In. Out. In. The class finished and the day turned into night before he opened his bleary eyes again. The night was absolute, fog blotting out the yellow streetlights and the stars alike. Damn, he thought. How long was I out? I wonder what year it is.
During the all-too-brief week we spent on the Would-Be Farm in early July, I decided to postpone the research by getting clear (clear-ish) photos of the latest crop of mystery plants. This is not rocket science, but I am only just skidding into the new century of digital memory. When I was a googly-eyed junior in high school, being all moony and swoony over my equally googly-eyed boyfriend, our biology teacher, Mr. V. would shake his head at the sight of us two and mutter under his breath, "Two smarts equal dummy." Oh, Mr. V., even just the one sometimes equals dummy! Here's a few of the unknowns: I figured I'd have tons to time to do the research during my months away from the farm. After all, some of these plants are bound to be edible. So far, not so much research, but the winter is still young...
We spent a month in Ecuador. We went to the lovely seaside town of Salinas, west of Guayaquil for the Lightning Masters World Championships and the Lightning World Championships. The Lightning we sailed is Steve Davis's boat. We jump onto a Lightning with Steve from time to time, and as a bonus, we've been able to travel with Steve and his wife Jan. Sometimes we get to hang out with additional Davises, which was an extra treat this time. Hi Stephanie! Hi John! Steve and Jeff share an unshakable and insatiable interest in hunting fish. Luckily, they have a Lightning friend in Ecuador, Paco Sola, with just the right big boat for such an interest. The boys took a day between races to search for fishes. Shall we say "bucket list"? After the racing was done (3rd and 12th respectively. Respectable!), we split tacks with Jan and Steve. They went home to Colorado, to work on the Bosler House, while we went swanning off to the Galápagos. We saw a whole bunch of blue-footed boobies. (Yes, the use of the word never gets old.) Also iguanas –– both land and marine versions. We swam a lot. We had some encounters. And hiked some trails. And had some other encounters. The time just flew by. But we never got our fill of sea-lions.
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