It's that sad-happy time of year when I take down my cottage garden - all in all, a little more complicated than folding up a beach umbrella, but the idea is the same. Summer is over, and Life is about to get Real again. I know there's a lot of that going around now and you, Gentle Reader, can relate.
I've always liked flowers. I grew up in the 'burbs, and my father grew roses, espaliered against the backyard fence. Most were the standard crimson, but the ones by the house were fancier - I recall one bush that yielded a bright, egg-yolk yellow bloom, and another, my favorite, was called "Tropicana" - deep orange, with the barest hint of cream staining the petals at their base. A magnificent wisteria grew up one entire side of the house - I could lean out my second-floor window and pick its flowers, if I so fancied.
The neighbors had an immense lilac that spilled over into our yard, and, feeling like a thief, I used to cut sprays of the pale purple flowers, dripping like grapes, and perfume my bedroom with my spoils. I would put them on the nightstand, next to whatever book I was currently reading under the covers by flashlight and by the side of the glass of ice water I never went to bed without, and I recall that I was as happy as a little girl with a good book and a bunch of heady, redolent blossoms to refresh her nose with from time to time could be - a latter-day edition of Francie Nolan on her fire escape in Chapter One of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.
When I was in college, I became one of the founding members of the Friends of Moningside Park, which, at the time (early 1980's) was in dire need of friends. It had been badly neglected for decades at that point, and I was told during Freshman Orientation to stay out of Morningside Park if I didn't want to be murdered. They weren't kidding. But since I never do what I'm told, and since I had a chainsaw and an ax to chop down the underbrush that had taken over the sinuous lines of this Olmsted gem, I wasn't too worried, and I went in anyway. Nowadays, like everyplace else in New York that was grungy and kind of dangerous when I was young, it's prime real estate and you can't get an affordable apartment within two dozen blocks of it.
But I had wonderful times grubbing away there, and as I worked, I would hum and sing to myself, and think of the words of Mary Lennox that I'd read under the covers on that glorious occasion when I first happened upon The Secret Garden (and I have to say, anybody who is reading that book for the first time has my envy):
"It's a secret garden, and I'm the only one in the world who wants it to be alive. . . It's the best fun I ever had in my life--shut in here and wakening up a garden."
Then I graduated, moved into an apartment, and didn't even have a window box for a very long time.
But about nine years ago, I began to spend my summers in a small Adirondack cottage that has a yard behind the house. That first year, John Wirenius and his wife Catherine came to visit. I had quite forgotten about gardening as a pastime or a pleasure by then, but my guests were living on the first floor of a house in Queens at the time - and they had a backyard. Catherine had caught the gardening bug, and she'd caught it bad. Before I knew it, there was a small patch of turned-up dirt edging the tiny patio that I'd never thought of using for anything but putting the grill and a couple of Adirondack chairs on. An unbelievably large pile of rocks and pebbles she'd dug out of the dirt was heaped on the patio itself, and Catherine, sitting on the back steps of the cottage, her hair tied back in a whale-spout, a smudge of dirt on her nose, pounding together a witch's brew of cow manure and rich black dirt that she'd bought in a bag, was explaining, "Your soil is very poor, and I've never seen so many rocks in one place, so we're going to have to put down some decent dirt or nothing's gonna grow here. By the way, I'm putting in a raised bed over there."
I was dubious, but interested.
Never one to do things by halves, Catherine spent much of the visit hollering for us to "Pull over - I see a plant nursery!" I quickly discovered that it's more fun to buy plants than jewels. Plants are bigger, the colors are brighter, and their sheer variety puts Tiffany's to shame. Pretty soon I, too, was squinting judiciously at the astilbes and muttering, "Well, yes - these will do for the shaded area next to the woods, but what about that sunny patch by the patio? Astilbes don't like too much sun . . . what about some black-eyed Susans?"
We drove our husbands crazy. Mine was waiting impatiently for us to get back in the car so we could go have some real shopping fun at the Organic Food Co-op, and hers was rolling his eyes and wondering whether there would be enough room in the car for all the books he was planning to sneak past Catherine as soon as we spotted a secondhand bookstore.
Over the years, the garden expanded, which is the way these things go. My husband has grown somewhat resigned to the fact that there is always dirt in the trunk of the car, and refers sardonically to our Saab as the Rolling Greenhouse. Pretty soon I discovered that the bright hues of the garden were attracting hummingbirds, so then of course we had to put up a hummingbird feeder. A romantic trip to the Gaspé Peninsula turned into a quest for the Perfect Birdbath, which I discovered in a shop in North Conway, NH on the way home. (It has a little mermaid perched on the edge, and the finches like to sit on her head.)
In short - I was obsessed.
Since the backyard is small-ish, I very soon found that, like Alexander the Great before me, I was grieving that there were no new worlds to conquer. Fortunately, there is a wooded area just past the lawn, impenetrably overgrown with scrub pine, maple saplings, and crappy-looking underbrush that I refer to collectively as the "Nobody-Invited-You's." Majestic pines and lissome birches are barely discernible through the thickets of junk that had sprung up over decades of neglect.
Do I have to tell you that I bought myself a present, and that it was a pair of loppers?
So I have been having a grand old time clearing out all the Nobody-Invited-You's, and every day I totter in happily after a morning of lopping, all covered in scratches and with twigs in my hair, but supremely joyful that I can now see blue sky and dappled sunlight when I look up the hill.
If there is any truth to the theory of reincarnation, then in a past life I was Pa Ingalls.
Showing posts with label Adirondacks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adirondacks. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Things to Do Here
I had fondly deluded myself that I was going to get back on my regular writing schedule, but I am still on vacation, with the additional welcome distraction of a very dear friend who is paying us a four day visit in our little Adirondack cottage. Before she arrived, I drew up a list entitled Things to Do Here and we've gotten to about a third of them. As we toddle about, spending money like drunken sailors at the tag sales, immersing ourselves in icy mountain streams, and eating far too many local delicacies (the cider donuts! the Maple Creemies! Daily Chocolate in Vergennes!) I console myself with the assurance that, after my friend leaves, John Wirenius' Phineas at Bay will show up on the dining porch (it's the country, you see - nobody steals your unattended mail, and parcels are simply dropped off wherever their owner is most likely to see them, and where they won't get soaked in case an unexpected mountain thunderstorm comes along) and I will have the pleasure of reading it for the fourth time and then writing a well-thought-out, profound, witty review, all the while stroking the pretty white pages and emitting little coos of delight about the fact that it's a really, truly, honest-to-goodness book, made out of really, truly, honest-to-goodness paper. (But don't let me stop you from ordering the e-book, if that's how you roll.)
So what are some of the things we have done up here?
Well, the first day was given over the the activity known in our family as Vermonting. In other words, we transported a female who is over the age of consent across state lines, forcing her to binge on the aforementioned cider donuts while still in New York State by emitting shrieks of, "Look, look, there's Gunnison Orchards, we have to stop!" careening into the parking lot, and tumbling out of the car like Eliot Ness in pursuit of Al Capone. I mean, the donuts are that kind of good. I go for the plain ones, although they have fancy, too. This year, they got a little silly and added maple-frosted donuts with crumbled bacon on top, thus getting on the "put a little bacon on everything that used to get cilantro/wasabi/black pepper on it and charge 30% more" bandwagon. But as far as I'm concerned, this is what is known in musician parlance as "gilding the turd." The plain cider donuts are so exquisitely perfect that to bedizen them with anything at all - even a dusting of cinnamon sugar - strikes me as being the sort of bad idea endorsed by those who waste their time embroidering brocade. The plain donuts are masterfully restrained as to their sweetness, tender to the tooth, and reveal a moist, yielding interior after crunching through a superb surface crispiness. They do not travel well, and must be consumed within an hour or two of purchase. On a good day, they last that long, but most of the time we just gobble them up while we're still standing in line to pay. There's always a line, because everybody knows about Gunnison Orchards and their cider donuts. The fruit pies are pretty damn good, too, but we didn't want to be piggy.
As we all know, eating sugar initiates the phenomenon of craving more sugar, until you are finally so bloated and sated that you crash hard and start behaving like a cranky toddler in need of a nap. Luckily for everybody's sunny disposition, the next stop was Daily Chocolate in Vergennes. For this, we had to cross the recently built bridge from Crown Point, NY to West Addison, VT. It's a beautiful bridge, and the second you're across it you realize that Vermont is different from New York. You're still in farm country, but it's somehow lusher, greener, and, in addition, prosperous-looking in that discreet way that Old Money is prosperous-looking. Which is not to say that all Vermont farmers are rich - far from it. It's the land itself that is rich, and it doesn't hurt that the earth is lovingly curated by those who farm it. New York Adirondack soil (as I can testify, having coaxed a pocket-handkerchief-sized Schroon Lake flower garden into existence) is chock-full of rocks and varies wildly in its quality - all the darkest, loamiest dirt seems to be lurking sullenly under thick copses of underbrush that dare you to chop them down and make anything of them. There's a wildness to the New York farmland that never seems to quite be tamed; there's always a sense that Nature is just waiting to leap on those hard-wrested cornfields and turn them back into pine land.
But Vermont land seems to purr under the plow like a sleek, well-fed kitten being stroked by a gentle hand. No mater where you go - the farmers have made it look easy. Like the land just naturally got that way.
Vergennes is one of those postcard-pretty New England towns that seems too good to be possible. Daily Chocolate is a tiny basement-level shop tucked into a tiny side street off Main Street. (The main street really IS Main Street, and once you've rolled through that, you're back in farmland.) When you walk into the shop, the aroma of high-quality hand-dipped chocolate grabs you by the nose and marches you to the counter, where you swiftly find yourself in a trance of greed, trying not to drool on the glass display case as you point at things and say, "I'll have the pistachio-chili bark...dark, I think...oooh, and some of the Delight bars, the ones with the coconut, please...one of the pine nut-caramel dark chocolates - no, make that two - umm, some of those ginger-orange ones... I forget, how many pieces of the English toffee did we get last time?" Then you pretend you're buying it as a present for your aged aunt in Brooklyn, but you aren't fooling anybody, because all the while you've been surreptitiously noshing on the little plate of broken-up chocolate samples that include white chocolate with lavender infusion, until, to your dismay, you find that you've eaten it all while you were pointing at things in the case, which embarrasses you so much that you order a few more things, just to make it up to the nice lady behind the counter who has been patiently waiting for you to finish your impulse-buying.
We each ate a little more chocolate, and were about to drive off, when the two females in the car (myself and our guest) set up a clamor for my husband to stop, stop, stop, there's a farmer's market on the Village Square! Being the soul of resigned indulgence, he managed to find a parking spot, and we happily bounced off to look at more food. This time there were actually a few healthy things, and, since we were already stuffed with goodies, we were able to salve our consciences by buying sungold tomatoes and local cukes. There was also a man who made intricate and detailed hand puppets out of plastic cups, construction paper, and a bit of string; since he was selling such creations as a unicorn, a pink cow, and a lion with puffy cotton cheeks at a dollar apiece, I picked up a few to bring back and give to the arts & crafts counselor at our summer community's children's day camp, figuring that they would be a treasure on rainy days and the kids could use them as prototypes to try and make their own puppets.
At last we continued to our stated (non-food) destination - the Shelburne Museum.
Now, I have been to the Shelburne half a dozen times, or maybe more, and have never yet managed to see all of it. Partly this is because it's the country estate of the immensely wealthy Electra Havemeyer Webb. If you've ever been to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, you may recall that there is an entire wing named after the Havemeyers, and that their name is carved into the marble across the top of the entrance. I'm talking ridiculously, ludicrously, insanely, top-one-percent-of-the-one-percent rich. As my friend Corinne once muttered, as we gazed upon the Lauder collection at the Neue Gallery - "Nobody should have this much money."
When my son was small and first learning to talk, he used to point at objects that caught his fancy and plead, "Have-a-dat! Have-a-dat!"
I think Electra Havemeyer should really have been called "Electra Have-a-Dat." If she saw it and she liked it - she bought it, simple as that. And since she had 45 acres to put it on, she never worried too much about storage space.
There you'll be, walking along the rolling green fields, cresting a hill, and suddenly you're looking at a lighthouse that seems to be warning the steamboat Ticonderoga not to crash into that grove of trees on its right. The steamboat is up on cinder blocks, in a bizarre twist on those trashy neighbors who used to have half a dozen rusted-out cars up on cinder blocks in their junk-strewn driveway. The steamboat is beautiful, with gleaming polished wood, with perfectly restored everything, and the floury-looking ersatz rolls and lustrous, shiny fake cherry pies arrayed on the table of the little below-deck kitchen were so real-looking that I poked a surreptitious finger into one to see whether I could pull out a plum. It's the Collyer Brothers, all right, but it's Collyer Brothers who are willing to throw around some money.
Another thing Electra (and you have to wonder - why would any mother want to name her daughter Electra?) couldn't bear to give up was her Park Avenue apartment, and the five Monet paintings in it. So, she didn't. She had the whole thing dismantled, shipped, and reassembled in a house that she ordered custom-built to put it all in. Did I mention that she was born with a full set of Louis Comfort Tiffany silverware in her mouth? And that each hand-turned piece has a different image - a beetle, a butterfly, a ladybug - on the handle? And that it's in the Breakfast Room, along with the Tiffany tables and the hand-painted Japanese wallpaper?
It's a great way to spend an afternoon, and you never run out of lovely things to look at. Far too soon, the helpful and courteous guard/docents are telling you that the museum is closing and they want to go home, so off you go, still having seen only a fraction of the Have-a-Dat Estate. We managed to see a magnificent temporary exhibition of French Impressionists, as well as some truly impressive quilts (don't laugh - they are hand-made and represent thousands of hours of painstaking stitchery.)
After all that walking, of course we were hungry again.
So we went to Burlington, because that's where A Single Pebble, arguably the best Chinese restaurant in the Northeast, is. We have been going to A Single Pebble at least once a year since we were first introduced to it, and it never disappoints. The mock eel! The dry-fried green beans! The Ants-Climbing-a-Tree! It's perfectly amazing cuisine, and it's always our destination when we have a guest with a discerning palate. Since this particular guest is an Upper West Sider from way back, she knows her food.
So we drove the long, long way home, and crashed out in food comas, and nobody got up until very late the next morning, and the dog was simply furious with the lot of us for staying out late and coming home smelling of food that she'd never gotten a chance to beg for, even though I'd hired a dog walker to take care of her and give her supper at six, just as she's used to. So she pooped in the house to punish us, but her aim was bad and it landed on the linoleum instead of on the braided rug I'd bought at a tag sale. And that's why my homework is so late.
So what are some of the things we have done up here?
Well, the first day was given over the the activity known in our family as Vermonting. In other words, we transported a female who is over the age of consent across state lines, forcing her to binge on the aforementioned cider donuts while still in New York State by emitting shrieks of, "Look, look, there's Gunnison Orchards, we have to stop!" careening into the parking lot, and tumbling out of the car like Eliot Ness in pursuit of Al Capone. I mean, the donuts are that kind of good. I go for the plain ones, although they have fancy, too. This year, they got a little silly and added maple-frosted donuts with crumbled bacon on top, thus getting on the "put a little bacon on everything that used to get cilantro/wasabi/black pepper on it and charge 30% more" bandwagon. But as far as I'm concerned, this is what is known in musician parlance as "gilding the turd." The plain cider donuts are so exquisitely perfect that to bedizen them with anything at all - even a dusting of cinnamon sugar - strikes me as being the sort of bad idea endorsed by those who waste their time embroidering brocade. The plain donuts are masterfully restrained as to their sweetness, tender to the tooth, and reveal a moist, yielding interior after crunching through a superb surface crispiness. They do not travel well, and must be consumed within an hour or two of purchase. On a good day, they last that long, but most of the time we just gobble them up while we're still standing in line to pay. There's always a line, because everybody knows about Gunnison Orchards and their cider donuts. The fruit pies are pretty damn good, too, but we didn't want to be piggy.
As we all know, eating sugar initiates the phenomenon of craving more sugar, until you are finally so bloated and sated that you crash hard and start behaving like a cranky toddler in need of a nap. Luckily for everybody's sunny disposition, the next stop was Daily Chocolate in Vergennes. For this, we had to cross the recently built bridge from Crown Point, NY to West Addison, VT. It's a beautiful bridge, and the second you're across it you realize that Vermont is different from New York. You're still in farm country, but it's somehow lusher, greener, and, in addition, prosperous-looking in that discreet way that Old Money is prosperous-looking. Which is not to say that all Vermont farmers are rich - far from it. It's the land itself that is rich, and it doesn't hurt that the earth is lovingly curated by those who farm it. New York Adirondack soil (as I can testify, having coaxed a pocket-handkerchief-sized Schroon Lake flower garden into existence) is chock-full of rocks and varies wildly in its quality - all the darkest, loamiest dirt seems to be lurking sullenly under thick copses of underbrush that dare you to chop them down and make anything of them. There's a wildness to the New York farmland that never seems to quite be tamed; there's always a sense that Nature is just waiting to leap on those hard-wrested cornfields and turn them back into pine land.
But Vermont land seems to purr under the plow like a sleek, well-fed kitten being stroked by a gentle hand. No mater where you go - the farmers have made it look easy. Like the land just naturally got that way.
Vergennes is one of those postcard-pretty New England towns that seems too good to be possible. Daily Chocolate is a tiny basement-level shop tucked into a tiny side street off Main Street. (The main street really IS Main Street, and once you've rolled through that, you're back in farmland.) When you walk into the shop, the aroma of high-quality hand-dipped chocolate grabs you by the nose and marches you to the counter, where you swiftly find yourself in a trance of greed, trying not to drool on the glass display case as you point at things and say, "I'll have the pistachio-chili bark...dark, I think...oooh, and some of the Delight bars, the ones with the coconut, please...one of the pine nut-caramel dark chocolates - no, make that two - umm, some of those ginger-orange ones... I forget, how many pieces of the English toffee did we get last time?" Then you pretend you're buying it as a present for your aged aunt in Brooklyn, but you aren't fooling anybody, because all the while you've been surreptitiously noshing on the little plate of broken-up chocolate samples that include white chocolate with lavender infusion, until, to your dismay, you find that you've eaten it all while you were pointing at things in the case, which embarrasses you so much that you order a few more things, just to make it up to the nice lady behind the counter who has been patiently waiting for you to finish your impulse-buying.
We each ate a little more chocolate, and were about to drive off, when the two females in the car (myself and our guest) set up a clamor for my husband to stop, stop, stop, there's a farmer's market on the Village Square! Being the soul of resigned indulgence, he managed to find a parking spot, and we happily bounced off to look at more food. This time there were actually a few healthy things, and, since we were already stuffed with goodies, we were able to salve our consciences by buying sungold tomatoes and local cukes. There was also a man who made intricate and detailed hand puppets out of plastic cups, construction paper, and a bit of string; since he was selling such creations as a unicorn, a pink cow, and a lion with puffy cotton cheeks at a dollar apiece, I picked up a few to bring back and give to the arts & crafts counselor at our summer community's children's day camp, figuring that they would be a treasure on rainy days and the kids could use them as prototypes to try and make their own puppets.
At last we continued to our stated (non-food) destination - the Shelburne Museum.
Now, I have been to the Shelburne half a dozen times, or maybe more, and have never yet managed to see all of it. Partly this is because it's the country estate of the immensely wealthy Electra Havemeyer Webb. If you've ever been to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, you may recall that there is an entire wing named after the Havemeyers, and that their name is carved into the marble across the top of the entrance. I'm talking ridiculously, ludicrously, insanely, top-one-percent-of-the-one-percent rich. As my friend Corinne once muttered, as we gazed upon the Lauder collection at the Neue Gallery - "Nobody should have this much money."
When my son was small and first learning to talk, he used to point at objects that caught his fancy and plead, "Have-a-dat! Have-a-dat!"
I think Electra Havemeyer should really have been called "Electra Have-a-Dat." If she saw it and she liked it - she bought it, simple as that. And since she had 45 acres to put it on, she never worried too much about storage space.
There you'll be, walking along the rolling green fields, cresting a hill, and suddenly you're looking at a lighthouse that seems to be warning the steamboat Ticonderoga not to crash into that grove of trees on its right. The steamboat is up on cinder blocks, in a bizarre twist on those trashy neighbors who used to have half a dozen rusted-out cars up on cinder blocks in their junk-strewn driveway. The steamboat is beautiful, with gleaming polished wood, with perfectly restored everything, and the floury-looking ersatz rolls and lustrous, shiny fake cherry pies arrayed on the table of the little below-deck kitchen were so real-looking that I poked a surreptitious finger into one to see whether I could pull out a plum. It's the Collyer Brothers, all right, but it's Collyer Brothers who are willing to throw around some money.
Another thing Electra (and you have to wonder - why would any mother want to name her daughter Electra?) couldn't bear to give up was her Park Avenue apartment, and the five Monet paintings in it. So, she didn't. She had the whole thing dismantled, shipped, and reassembled in a house that she ordered custom-built to put it all in. Did I mention that she was born with a full set of Louis Comfort Tiffany silverware in her mouth? And that each hand-turned piece has a different image - a beetle, a butterfly, a ladybug - on the handle? And that it's in the Breakfast Room, along with the Tiffany tables and the hand-painted Japanese wallpaper?
It's a great way to spend an afternoon, and you never run out of lovely things to look at. Far too soon, the helpful and courteous guard/docents are telling you that the museum is closing and they want to go home, so off you go, still having seen only a fraction of the Have-a-Dat Estate. We managed to see a magnificent temporary exhibition of French Impressionists, as well as some truly impressive quilts (don't laugh - they are hand-made and represent thousands of hours of painstaking stitchery.)
After all that walking, of course we were hungry again.
So we went to Burlington, because that's where A Single Pebble, arguably the best Chinese restaurant in the Northeast, is. We have been going to A Single Pebble at least once a year since we were first introduced to it, and it never disappoints. The mock eel! The dry-fried green beans! The Ants-Climbing-a-Tree! It's perfectly amazing cuisine, and it's always our destination when we have a guest with a discerning palate. Since this particular guest is an Upper West Sider from way back, she knows her food.
So we drove the long, long way home, and crashed out in food comas, and nobody got up until very late the next morning, and the dog was simply furious with the lot of us for staying out late and coming home smelling of food that she'd never gotten a chance to beg for, even though I'd hired a dog walker to take care of her and give her supper at six, just as she's used to. So she pooped in the house to punish us, but her aim was bad and it landed on the linoleum instead of on the braided rug I'd bought at a tag sale. And that's why my homework is so late.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Atoning to the Chipmunk
Gentle Readers, I am all to aware that the atonement ought rightly to be laid at your feet. I have been - let me be painfully honest here - lazy, slothful, and inattentive to my blogging duties. I have salved the chirps of my conscience with the excuse, "But I need to rest really hard after all the horrendously overwhelming work of moving the contents of a five room apartment into an eleven room house, one room of which was a kitchen so filthy that the Leatherface family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have collectively held its nose and stalked out, rather than cook anybody in it."
The truth is, I have been enthusiastically atoning to myself for all the many fancied wrongs and slights that leaving Manhattan has inflicted upon me, and that atonement has taken the form of a month in Paradise - Paradise, in this case, being a tiny Adirondack town about an hour and a half north of Albany. We have been renting the same summer cottage here every year for decades, and it's all so bucolic that it makes my new home, which has deer, foxes, and flocks of wild turkeys trotting about in the backyard at all hours of the day and night, look like Times Square at rush hour. While I've been AWOL, plenty has happened that I will talk about at greater length in other blogs, the chief event perhaps being the release of my friend John Wirenius's novel Phineas at Bay, which is now available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon. As you may recall, I was the midwife cum domineditrix to Phineas, and I will have plenty to say about the delights of seeing this splendid book at last take physical shape - a sort of literary Pinocchio, joyously shouting, "Look, Father! I'm a real book at last!"
However, for today, let me just stick to the topic at hand - namely, atoning to the chipmunk.
One of the things that gives me infinite satisfaction about life in the Adirondack cottage is that I have a flower garden behind the house. (Incidentally, if any of you Gentle Readers can talk me through posting a few cell phone pictures here, then you, too, can have the pleasure of looking at my day lilies, New Guinea impatiens, lavender, and astilbes.) Now, as every gardener knows, gardening consists of a certain number of surprises every year - "pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be," to quote dear Lady Bracknell, (or, as she is more fondly known to fans of Oscar Wilde, "Aunt Augusta.") This year's pleasant surprises included the fact that, despite reports that the region endured three solid weeks of 20-degree-below-0 temperatures over the course of an exceptionally brutal winter, many of my perennials made it through, including the azaleas, those un-killable day lilies (they grow wild in the ditches here, and for some occult reason the deer don't eat them), the hostas (nibbled to nubs by the deer - that was one of the nasty surprises, but they are rebounding), the astilbes, and a lovely little heather patch that always gets me to murmuring about Heathcliff and Cathy under my breath, as I weed out the wild strawberry fronds that will try to strangle it.
Just before I left last year, I found myself with too much time on my hands, as well as a pair of garden loppers that called out to me that the devil finds work for idle hands, so let's get to it. So, I went wild with the loppers and cleared out all the underbrush that had rendered the wooded glade beyond our yard completely impassable. The grounds-keeping crew was not best pleased at being expected to cart away mountains of chopped-down scrub pine and maple saplings just when all the other Summer People had gone home and they thought they could relax and drink a beer. However, we have great chiaroscuro light this year, and the lilies-of-the-valley have taken advantage of the newly-created space to hurry down the hill and stake their claim before the maples and the pines come back to shriek they were unfairly evicted and have been reinstated on an appeal. That was another of the good surprises. I've sown a wildflower seed shade mix from The Vermont Wildflower Farm in the shady area, and if those come up, it will be another nice surprise.
What I didn't reckon on was the disagreeable surprise that something other than lilies-of-the-valley might find the nice, clear, richly fertile ground that has been quietly slumbering under a thick layer of composting leaves for decades appealing, too. Something with four feet, a stubby tail, and fur. Something that likes to tunnel.
That's right, we've got moles.
Or maybe it's groundhogs. Or then again, it could be chipmunks. Whatever it is - and I've never caught it in the actual act of popping its begrimed little whiskery head out of the neatly-dug little hole that appears like magic under my suddenly-wilted annuals, whose roots have undergone an underground assault in the Tunnel Construction Project - it is pissing me off royally. Not only that - it's been winning. No matter how many times I go out and stomp down the tunnels, there they are again the next morning.
Now, in all fairness, the gopher, or mole, of chipmunk - the Offending Rodent, in short - is undoubtedly saying to itself, "Whatever this creature in the absurd outfit consisting of a long-sleeved man's Brooks Brothers shirt with frayed cuffs and ring around the collar, ancient dungarees filth-encrusted at the knees, leather-palmed gloves, battered old shoes that are too disreputable to be worn around town lest the charitably-inclined offer their wearer a quarter and a cup of coffee, and a perfectly ridiculous over-sized straw hat may be, it is pissing me off royally. No matter how many times I laboriously construct my beautifully-engineered tunnels, the bitch comes out and, like some sort of sartorially-challenged Godzilla, stomps them back down."
Naturally, I have the advantage, in that I have bigger feet. I also have the Internet, which the mole, chipmunk, or gopher does not. (I think.) After the second or third appalled morning of tunnel-stomping, I got online and started researching how to persuade the little bugger that it had better go try exercising this Eminent Domain crap elsewhere.
Some of the online mole-haters got quite vituperative, and advocated wholesale slaughter, arguing that the critters deserved death and destruction for the havoc they wreak in carefully-tended gardens. I feel their wrath. I feel their pain. But a certain degree of fair play deters me. The critters were here first, after all. Besides, I'm a vegetarian. True - I'm a vegetarian who eats lobster - but there aren't any lobsters digging up my garden, or we'd be having an entirely different - and far more interesting - discussion.
What I finally did was ask my Husband the Chef to mix up a vile concoction of vegetable oil, Frank's Hot Sauce, and dishwashing liquid in a discarded water bottle. I shook it up vigorously, and the resulting witch's broth looked just like a Creamsicle Smoothy, though it smelled far too nasty to be anything of the sort. This elixir was then poured into the tunnels, which I had deliberately left un-stomped so I could ratchet up the warfare by rendering the tunnels unusable.
So far, no new tunnels have emerged. My flowers and I are jumping for joy.
But I also have a weakness for chipmunks, mainly because they are so darned cute. And since I had some leftover birdseed from last year, I decided to extend the olive branch. Choosing a spot that was far enough away from the garden to prevent the chipmunk from claiming that I was sending Mixed Messages and inviting it to come gorge itself on the roots of my plants, I poured a pile of birdseed (grain, mixed with a generous proportion of sunflower seeds) on the ground in a spot I could see from my bedroom window and from the kitchen door, and waited.
It wasn't long till I glanced out to see an ecstatic chipmunk who seemed to be suffering from a dozen impacted wisdom teeth, so bulged-out were its cheek-pouches. It clearly couldn't believe its luck, and kept looking around from time to time to see whether anybody else in the rodent family was coming to despoil it of this inexplicable bonanza. It worked busily away for half an hour or so, hastening under the house to carry off the spoils to some little chipmunk-stash that will not, I hope, be raided by some larger animal. It was the happiest chipmunk I ever saw. I hope the little guy understands that this was my way of saying, "I'm sorry I had to stomp your tunnel, and I would like to co-exist in peace."
The truth is, I have been enthusiastically atoning to myself for all the many fancied wrongs and slights that leaving Manhattan has inflicted upon me, and that atonement has taken the form of a month in Paradise - Paradise, in this case, being a tiny Adirondack town about an hour and a half north of Albany. We have been renting the same summer cottage here every year for decades, and it's all so bucolic that it makes my new home, which has deer, foxes, and flocks of wild turkeys trotting about in the backyard at all hours of the day and night, look like Times Square at rush hour. While I've been AWOL, plenty has happened that I will talk about at greater length in other blogs, the chief event perhaps being the release of my friend John Wirenius's novel Phineas at Bay, which is now available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon. As you may recall, I was the midwife cum domineditrix to Phineas, and I will have plenty to say about the delights of seeing this splendid book at last take physical shape - a sort of literary Pinocchio, joyously shouting, "Look, Father! I'm a real book at last!"
However, for today, let me just stick to the topic at hand - namely, atoning to the chipmunk.
One of the things that gives me infinite satisfaction about life in the Adirondack cottage is that I have a flower garden behind the house. (Incidentally, if any of you Gentle Readers can talk me through posting a few cell phone pictures here, then you, too, can have the pleasure of looking at my day lilies, New Guinea impatiens, lavender, and astilbes.) Now, as every gardener knows, gardening consists of a certain number of surprises every year - "pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be," to quote dear Lady Bracknell, (or, as she is more fondly known to fans of Oscar Wilde, "Aunt Augusta.") This year's pleasant surprises included the fact that, despite reports that the region endured three solid weeks of 20-degree-below-0 temperatures over the course of an exceptionally brutal winter, many of my perennials made it through, including the azaleas, those un-killable day lilies (they grow wild in the ditches here, and for some occult reason the deer don't eat them), the hostas (nibbled to nubs by the deer - that was one of the nasty surprises, but they are rebounding), the astilbes, and a lovely little heather patch that always gets me to murmuring about Heathcliff and Cathy under my breath, as I weed out the wild strawberry fronds that will try to strangle it.
Just before I left last year, I found myself with too much time on my hands, as well as a pair of garden loppers that called out to me that the devil finds work for idle hands, so let's get to it. So, I went wild with the loppers and cleared out all the underbrush that had rendered the wooded glade beyond our yard completely impassable. The grounds-keeping crew was not best pleased at being expected to cart away mountains of chopped-down scrub pine and maple saplings just when all the other Summer People had gone home and they thought they could relax and drink a beer. However, we have great chiaroscuro light this year, and the lilies-of-the-valley have taken advantage of the newly-created space to hurry down the hill and stake their claim before the maples and the pines come back to shriek they were unfairly evicted and have been reinstated on an appeal. That was another of the good surprises. I've sown a wildflower seed shade mix from The Vermont Wildflower Farm in the shady area, and if those come up, it will be another nice surprise.
What I didn't reckon on was the disagreeable surprise that something other than lilies-of-the-valley might find the nice, clear, richly fertile ground that has been quietly slumbering under a thick layer of composting leaves for decades appealing, too. Something with four feet, a stubby tail, and fur. Something that likes to tunnel.
That's right, we've got moles.
Or maybe it's groundhogs. Or then again, it could be chipmunks. Whatever it is - and I've never caught it in the actual act of popping its begrimed little whiskery head out of the neatly-dug little hole that appears like magic under my suddenly-wilted annuals, whose roots have undergone an underground assault in the Tunnel Construction Project - it is pissing me off royally. Not only that - it's been winning. No matter how many times I go out and stomp down the tunnels, there they are again the next morning.
Now, in all fairness, the gopher, or mole, of chipmunk - the Offending Rodent, in short - is undoubtedly saying to itself, "Whatever this creature in the absurd outfit consisting of a long-sleeved man's Brooks Brothers shirt with frayed cuffs and ring around the collar, ancient dungarees filth-encrusted at the knees, leather-palmed gloves, battered old shoes that are too disreputable to be worn around town lest the charitably-inclined offer their wearer a quarter and a cup of coffee, and a perfectly ridiculous over-sized straw hat may be, it is pissing me off royally. No matter how many times I laboriously construct my beautifully-engineered tunnels, the bitch comes out and, like some sort of sartorially-challenged Godzilla, stomps them back down."
Naturally, I have the advantage, in that I have bigger feet. I also have the Internet, which the mole, chipmunk, or gopher does not. (I think.) After the second or third appalled morning of tunnel-stomping, I got online and started researching how to persuade the little bugger that it had better go try exercising this Eminent Domain crap elsewhere.
Some of the online mole-haters got quite vituperative, and advocated wholesale slaughter, arguing that the critters deserved death and destruction for the havoc they wreak in carefully-tended gardens. I feel their wrath. I feel their pain. But a certain degree of fair play deters me. The critters were here first, after all. Besides, I'm a vegetarian. True - I'm a vegetarian who eats lobster - but there aren't any lobsters digging up my garden, or we'd be having an entirely different - and far more interesting - discussion.
What I finally did was ask my Husband the Chef to mix up a vile concoction of vegetable oil, Frank's Hot Sauce, and dishwashing liquid in a discarded water bottle. I shook it up vigorously, and the resulting witch's broth looked just like a Creamsicle Smoothy, though it smelled far too nasty to be anything of the sort. This elixir was then poured into the tunnels, which I had deliberately left un-stomped so I could ratchet up the warfare by rendering the tunnels unusable.
So far, no new tunnels have emerged. My flowers and I are jumping for joy.
But I also have a weakness for chipmunks, mainly because they are so darned cute. And since I had some leftover birdseed from last year, I decided to extend the olive branch. Choosing a spot that was far enough away from the garden to prevent the chipmunk from claiming that I was sending Mixed Messages and inviting it to come gorge itself on the roots of my plants, I poured a pile of birdseed (grain, mixed with a generous proportion of sunflower seeds) on the ground in a spot I could see from my bedroom window and from the kitchen door, and waited.
It wasn't long till I glanced out to see an ecstatic chipmunk who seemed to be suffering from a dozen impacted wisdom teeth, so bulged-out were its cheek-pouches. It clearly couldn't believe its luck, and kept looking around from time to time to see whether anybody else in the rodent family was coming to despoil it of this inexplicable bonanza. It worked busily away for half an hour or so, hastening under the house to carry off the spoils to some little chipmunk-stash that will not, I hope, be raided by some larger animal. It was the happiest chipmunk I ever saw. I hope the little guy understands that this was my way of saying, "I'm sorry I had to stomp your tunnel, and I would like to co-exist in peace."
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