Every Day Is a First...for Something
Every day is a first for something in a new house and we watched fall settle over the landscape with interest. The groundhogs are all gone to earth, our resident mama having taken her powerful waddle to bed–to the shrubbery bed, in fact, where this spring, she had raised a litter of prosperous porkers which spread out over the neighborhood. The kits, like children of all sorts, experimented with independent living situations, elegant and modern-but-austere drainage culverts and basement window-wells, before settling, for the most part, into more traditional digs.
Gone with the groundhogs are the box turtles and garter snakes with which our yard was so richly blessed. A whelping of little garter snakes ornamented the front lawn this summer, causing the lawnmower to swerve dramatically, diving into two inches of turf as if it were a deep, green pool. I found one dead on the drive, where it had been run over while sunning, possibly by myself. My vision is not so good as it once was, relieving me of the sin of that vanity, and I supposed it was a small belt or pet collar, perhaps a child’s bracelet, in my passings with the riding mower. When I finally dismounted to see what it could actually be, I was dismayed to find a beautiful infant dead.
Our granddaughter had been checking all summer on the box turtle’s nest. We had been alerted by visitors, who noticed the female just off the edge of the driveway starting to dig with her hind legs into the grassy earth. Of course, we gathered in force, but not a bit of our racket seemed to penetrate the shell of preoccupation surrounding the earnest the turtle. Harmless and inadequate as the short back legs of a box turtle appear on first, or even on second glance, she managed to excavate quite neatly through the tough stems and roots, down about six inches. Moist and glistening egg after egg slowly dropped into the pit, and the loose dirt and grass-roots, which she scrapped back over them were so unremarkable in the general mix of the lawn, that we quickly lost track of the exact location. A wire tomato cage, rapidly filled with Michaelmas daisy, tall grass and goldenrod, protectively straddled the area of highest probability for the rest of the summer. Our granddaughter’s heart was won by the tender act of nesting and she asked if we could keep one or, better, all as pets. Off to the internet we jetted, like good modern citizens, and in nanoseconds we had located the Box Turtle Rescue site.
One dependable source of amazement is to observe the degree of commitment different people feel to unanticipated aspects of the world and of life. The late Roman empire was divided by a passion for nearly inexpressible distinctions–between adherents of the Niceane Creed, who held that Jesus and the Holy Spirit must be co-equal, co-eternal and of the same stature as God, the Father and Homoean believers, who felt that the Son had been created by the Father, though of the same substance, and although divine, had a subordinate stature to the Father, to whom he returned. Of course, they were just looking for an excuse to fight, but that can hardly explain the equally obscure motives behind the coming into being of a Box Turtle Rescue Association. Perhaps they simply like box turtles. That would be understandable.
We learned that a nest of turtle eggs should hatch in seventy days, and so we grew increasingly alert for sixty-nine days and gradually less concerned in the weeks after, as no visible activity took place. The web site did warn that a young female might lay a clutch of infertile eggs her first summer. We cast back to memories of her scaly limbs, wattled neck, horny lips and humped carapace for clues to her age. But at no time in its life is the average box turtle lissome or anything like willowy. We were not equipped to distinguish between bounding youth and spry old age. In turtles, dewy skin simply means that she has been out in the dew and who can tell by what means the bull turtle may be drawn to his love?
Actually a great deal of activity had taken place right around the site of the turtle’s nest. That spot is not far from the property line dividing our yard from that of the neighbors. The boundary is not marked and it is simpler for the neighbor’s lawn-mower guys to cut right up to the edge of our drive than to leave a foot-wide strip un-mown. But the turtle’s nest, protected by its weed-filled tomato cage stood in the traditional path of the mower. The first time the yard crew arrived after I had put up the defensive cage, I was fortunate to spot them from my loft window in the peak of the roof as the machinery roared up the hill from the curb. Tumbling down flight after flight and out through the basement and garage, I caught the weed-whacker man just as he wrenched the wire cage out of the earth.
“No, signor!” I cried.
So many Mexicans have moved into this area, seeking work in the mushroom houses, that the overflow fills all the crevices of seasonal employment and Mexicans have become the backbone of the landscaping business, pretty much at the blue collar end, not so much as management because of difficulty with spoken English. The young man I had called out to looked up with anxiety. Clearly he only wanted to please: to please me, to please the neighbors, whose lawn he was trimming, to please his boss–if only he could. Even as I spoke, rather loudly, as the weed-whacker and various lawn-mowers were racketing away, I was distantly surprised to find myself speaking rapid Spanish. Of course, I had studied the language, but I would have expected to have forgotten nearly everything in the intervening forty-three years. Clearly the mower guy was surprised, too. Too surprised to speak, I thought, for he never uttered a single syllable.
Not to be cutting the grass here, no. Not to be removing the...the...this, I brandished the tomato cage and put it back where I thought it belonged. Because why? Because of there being here in this place the nest of.... We had never learned the Spanish for box turtle in high-school, an oversight which should be corrected if no child is to be left behind in the complete sense. Well, there are eggs in the ground here, did he see? He looked. I am not certain he saw. However, he was a cooperative young man, who certainly understood that I did not want him to remove the tomato cage and cut down the weeds growing up inside it, so he smiled anxiously and nodded emphatically. And yet, he had a boss and the neighbors to please, so when I regained my attic window, I saw him working out the algebra of the situation. His solution was to use the weed-whacker to trim the grass all around the tomato cage right down to the bare earth, so that, on average, the square footage containing the turtle nest would be about the right height. It only occurred to me afterward that maybe he didn’t speak Spanish. That would explain his puzzled expression. Maybe the young man was Cambodian. I don’t speak any Cambodian at all, not that I know of.
If you go to the state college ag extension web site, you find quite a good bit of critical comment on the subject of groundhogs. They are singularly well equipped to get under, over, around or through most precautions against garden depredation. They are said to be the least responsive species of vertebrate pest to the Heckel n’ Jeckel motion detector-activated, hose end, water-jet, pest frightener that works so well with deer and birds. They fit so neatly into the definition of garden pest, that the benefits they bring to an area are seldom fairly considered.
When the leaves are all gone from the trees, when the bird bath begins to freeze regularly, and all the Halloween candy has been consumed, then the fat groundhog feels his blood slowing as he crawls down beneath the earth to the chamber he lined with summer grass and begins the long sleep. Probably the groundhog must climb over or pass other creatures already wintering in side passages of his excavation: toads, snakes and box turtles. Just as the beaver creates a marshy environment necessary for the survival of other creatures, from muskrats to wood ducks, from snapping-turtles to sunfish, so the groundhog provides for reptiles and amphibians in his neighborhood.
The Turtle Rescue web site was pretty sanguine about the prospects for survival of a baby box turtle. Not even such a mild, slow and inoffensive a creature as the box turtle is spared nature’s severe indifference. I had made up my mind that we were not going to create a heated terrarium in the family room, complete with hot-rocks and a bowl of fresh-minced Lizard Stick. After many years, my father-in-law would not agree to any more cats, saying that he couldn’t stand it when they died. For a generally very accommodating man, he showed a lot of backbone on that issue..., a surprising amount. I’m moving in the same direction, beginning with box turtles in the house and I’ll just see how things go from there. It seemed the issue would never come up, though, until one crisp September morning when I was showing my skeptical five year-old grandson the dirt and bug-free beauties of nature, in as far as they could be appreciated from our driveway, we came upon the littlest morsel of a turtle that Louis Tiffany could ever had contrived for buttons on a Czar. It sat, a perfect thumbnail, with sharply pointed scales in a ridge down its back, and around the edge of its shell, each toe equipped with an ebony needle, a tail shorter than any meadow mouse’s and its perfect eyes closed in death there on the edge of the pavement, not a dozen feet from where it had hatched. There was no sign of what it had died of– cold, hunger, disease, injury, parental neglect, loneliness....
So there is some hope that in the tunnels under our shrubs or buried in the layers of leaf mold there are the tiny acorn-sized nubs from which future mighty turtles and snakes and groundhogs may grow. The reason I hope so is that retirement is a lot more solitary than my salad days had been. I spend a lot of time in the garden, and though some of that time is spent fastening down the bottom edges of wire I have to put up to keep groundhogs out of my lettuces, it’s a pleasant thing to live in an inhabited landscape. Ireland has its leprechauns: ‘lepre,’ French for the ‘hare,’ ‘-chaun,’ a corruption of ‘one’, the rabbity ones who live under the hedges (I’m making this up). Probably there were the original Celts. Until the neighbors’ children get off the school bus, it’s pretty much me and the animals. Occasionally the neighbor-lady will pass between house door and car door and call out a friendly, “Oh, you’re at it aga-ain!” Well, of course, it’s what I do. It’s important. I’m growing lettuce, cabbage, broccoli. Asparagus will go over there in the spring. The neighbors are nice and my wife loves me, despite all, but every so often I glance up and catch the beady eye of the groundhog and feel reassured that there is at least someone who appreciates how hard this stony clay is to dig in, the pros and cons of its drainage qualities– someone who considers a well-grown bed of leafy greens to be a valuable prize worth plotting to gain for oneself. We appreciate each other’s place in the landscape. And it makes a body walk more lightly over the chilling earth, that there are so many others sleeping beneath it.
Gone with the groundhogs are the box turtles and garter snakes with which our yard was so richly blessed. A whelping of little garter snakes ornamented the front lawn this summer, causing the lawnmower to swerve dramatically, diving into two inches of turf as if it were a deep, green pool. I found one dead on the drive, where it had been run over while sunning, possibly by myself. My vision is not so good as it once was, relieving me of the sin of that vanity, and I supposed it was a small belt or pet collar, perhaps a child’s bracelet, in my passings with the riding mower. When I finally dismounted to see what it could actually be, I was dismayed to find a beautiful infant dead.
Our granddaughter had been checking all summer on the box turtle’s nest. We had been alerted by visitors, who noticed the female just off the edge of the driveway starting to dig with her hind legs into the grassy earth. Of course, we gathered in force, but not a bit of our racket seemed to penetrate the shell of preoccupation surrounding the earnest the turtle. Harmless and inadequate as the short back legs of a box turtle appear on first, or even on second glance, she managed to excavate quite neatly through the tough stems and roots, down about six inches. Moist and glistening egg after egg slowly dropped into the pit, and the loose dirt and grass-roots, which she scrapped back over them were so unremarkable in the general mix of the lawn, that we quickly lost track of the exact location. A wire tomato cage, rapidly filled with Michaelmas daisy, tall grass and goldenrod, protectively straddled the area of highest probability for the rest of the summer. Our granddaughter’s heart was won by the tender act of nesting and she asked if we could keep one or, better, all as pets. Off to the internet we jetted, like good modern citizens, and in nanoseconds we had located the Box Turtle Rescue site.
One dependable source of amazement is to observe the degree of commitment different people feel to unanticipated aspects of the world and of life. The late Roman empire was divided by a passion for nearly inexpressible distinctions–between adherents of the Niceane Creed, who held that Jesus and the Holy Spirit must be co-equal, co-eternal and of the same stature as God, the Father and Homoean believers, who felt that the Son had been created by the Father, though of the same substance, and although divine, had a subordinate stature to the Father, to whom he returned. Of course, they were just looking for an excuse to fight, but that can hardly explain the equally obscure motives behind the coming into being of a Box Turtle Rescue Association. Perhaps they simply like box turtles. That would be understandable.
We learned that a nest of turtle eggs should hatch in seventy days, and so we grew increasingly alert for sixty-nine days and gradually less concerned in the weeks after, as no visible activity took place. The web site did warn that a young female might lay a clutch of infertile eggs her first summer. We cast back to memories of her scaly limbs, wattled neck, horny lips and humped carapace for clues to her age. But at no time in its life is the average box turtle lissome or anything like willowy. We were not equipped to distinguish between bounding youth and spry old age. In turtles, dewy skin simply means that she has been out in the dew and who can tell by what means the bull turtle may be drawn to his love?
Actually a great deal of activity had taken place right around the site of the turtle’s nest. That spot is not far from the property line dividing our yard from that of the neighbors. The boundary is not marked and it is simpler for the neighbor’s lawn-mower guys to cut right up to the edge of our drive than to leave a foot-wide strip un-mown. But the turtle’s nest, protected by its weed-filled tomato cage stood in the traditional path of the mower. The first time the yard crew arrived after I had put up the defensive cage, I was fortunate to spot them from my loft window in the peak of the roof as the machinery roared up the hill from the curb. Tumbling down flight after flight and out through the basement and garage, I caught the weed-whacker man just as he wrenched the wire cage out of the earth.
“No, signor!” I cried.
So many Mexicans have moved into this area, seeking work in the mushroom houses, that the overflow fills all the crevices of seasonal employment and Mexicans have become the backbone of the landscaping business, pretty much at the blue collar end, not so much as management because of difficulty with spoken English. The young man I had called out to looked up with anxiety. Clearly he only wanted to please: to please me, to please the neighbors, whose lawn he was trimming, to please his boss–if only he could. Even as I spoke, rather loudly, as the weed-whacker and various lawn-mowers were racketing away, I was distantly surprised to find myself speaking rapid Spanish. Of course, I had studied the language, but I would have expected to have forgotten nearly everything in the intervening forty-three years. Clearly the mower guy was surprised, too. Too surprised to speak, I thought, for he never uttered a single syllable.
Not to be cutting the grass here, no. Not to be removing the...the...this, I brandished the tomato cage and put it back where I thought it belonged. Because why? Because of there being here in this place the nest of.... We had never learned the Spanish for box turtle in high-school, an oversight which should be corrected if no child is to be left behind in the complete sense. Well, there are eggs in the ground here, did he see? He looked. I am not certain he saw. However, he was a cooperative young man, who certainly understood that I did not want him to remove the tomato cage and cut down the weeds growing up inside it, so he smiled anxiously and nodded emphatically. And yet, he had a boss and the neighbors to please, so when I regained my attic window, I saw him working out the algebra of the situation. His solution was to use the weed-whacker to trim the grass all around the tomato cage right down to the bare earth, so that, on average, the square footage containing the turtle nest would be about the right height. It only occurred to me afterward that maybe he didn’t speak Spanish. That would explain his puzzled expression. Maybe the young man was Cambodian. I don’t speak any Cambodian at all, not that I know of.
If you go to the state college ag extension web site, you find quite a good bit of critical comment on the subject of groundhogs. They are singularly well equipped to get under, over, around or through most precautions against garden depredation. They are said to be the least responsive species of vertebrate pest to the Heckel n’ Jeckel motion detector-activated, hose end, water-jet, pest frightener that works so well with deer and birds. They fit so neatly into the definition of garden pest, that the benefits they bring to an area are seldom fairly considered.
When the leaves are all gone from the trees, when the bird bath begins to freeze regularly, and all the Halloween candy has been consumed, then the fat groundhog feels his blood slowing as he crawls down beneath the earth to the chamber he lined with summer grass and begins the long sleep. Probably the groundhog must climb over or pass other creatures already wintering in side passages of his excavation: toads, snakes and box turtles. Just as the beaver creates a marshy environment necessary for the survival of other creatures, from muskrats to wood ducks, from snapping-turtles to sunfish, so the groundhog provides for reptiles and amphibians in his neighborhood.
The Turtle Rescue web site was pretty sanguine about the prospects for survival of a baby box turtle. Not even such a mild, slow and inoffensive a creature as the box turtle is spared nature’s severe indifference. I had made up my mind that we were not going to create a heated terrarium in the family room, complete with hot-rocks and a bowl of fresh-minced Lizard Stick. After many years, my father-in-law would not agree to any more cats, saying that he couldn’t stand it when they died. For a generally very accommodating man, he showed a lot of backbone on that issue..., a surprising amount. I’m moving in the same direction, beginning with box turtles in the house and I’ll just see how things go from there. It seemed the issue would never come up, though, until one crisp September morning when I was showing my skeptical five year-old grandson the dirt and bug-free beauties of nature, in as far as they could be appreciated from our driveway, we came upon the littlest morsel of a turtle that Louis Tiffany could ever had contrived for buttons on a Czar. It sat, a perfect thumbnail, with sharply pointed scales in a ridge down its back, and around the edge of its shell, each toe equipped with an ebony needle, a tail shorter than any meadow mouse’s and its perfect eyes closed in death there on the edge of the pavement, not a dozen feet from where it had hatched. There was no sign of what it had died of– cold, hunger, disease, injury, parental neglect, loneliness....
So there is some hope that in the tunnels under our shrubs or buried in the layers of leaf mold there are the tiny acorn-sized nubs from which future mighty turtles and snakes and groundhogs may grow. The reason I hope so is that retirement is a lot more solitary than my salad days had been. I spend a lot of time in the garden, and though some of that time is spent fastening down the bottom edges of wire I have to put up to keep groundhogs out of my lettuces, it’s a pleasant thing to live in an inhabited landscape. Ireland has its leprechauns: ‘lepre,’ French for the ‘hare,’ ‘-chaun,’ a corruption of ‘one’, the rabbity ones who live under the hedges (I’m making this up). Probably there were the original Celts. Until the neighbors’ children get off the school bus, it’s pretty much me and the animals. Occasionally the neighbor-lady will pass between house door and car door and call out a friendly, “Oh, you’re at it aga-ain!” Well, of course, it’s what I do. It’s important. I’m growing lettuce, cabbage, broccoli. Asparagus will go over there in the spring. The neighbors are nice and my wife loves me, despite all, but every so often I glance up and catch the beady eye of the groundhog and feel reassured that there is at least someone who appreciates how hard this stony clay is to dig in, the pros and cons of its drainage qualities– someone who considers a well-grown bed of leafy greens to be a valuable prize worth plotting to gain for oneself. We appreciate each other’s place in the landscape. And it makes a body walk more lightly over the chilling earth, that there are so many others sleeping beneath it.