She Is Risen

Bear, Spring 2017, by Deb Marshall

I got home quite late Wednesday night, very close, in fact, to Thursday. On the way to put the car into the garage, I stopped first to put the bags of groceries that had been marinating in the car for hours onto the wart. Then, car garaged and after fiddling around with the odometer and mileage recordings to keep the tax man happy, and gathering up the remaining back-pack and bags of school stuff, I trudged to the wart loaded up like a pack animal to haul the grocery bags in, let the dogs out to pee, give all the critters their pills, and do a few must-be-done-before-bed chores.

The Husband hadn’t felt well and had gone to bed quite early, leaving behind a man-mess in the kitchen, so I slammed things around a bit and grumbled loudly about men who just assume someone else will take care of their messes as I put groceries away, wiped counters and stove top, cleaned the I-don’t-want-to-know-what out of the sink, and filled the bone-dry barkie boys’ water bowls. Just as I was getting started on the necessary computer chores, and I’d told one of the barkie boys he’d have to wait to go back out until I was finished, down the stairs Husband comes.

“There’s a giant bear on the kitchen wart,” he says, then stumbles back up to bed.

We have motion-detection lights that illuminate the wart, its stairs, and the path to the garage; the one over the kitchen door is always on low, and gets brighter when something’s moving about. I hurried into the kitchen to peer out the kitchen door window. Rats, forgot my glasses back by the computer; but, yup, there’s a fairly large, very black mass out there in the corner of the wart. 

Any progress I ever make towards the source of all good things – the kitchen – is inevitably made with at least one dog racing ahead of me. Fortunately, the louder, less sensible one was snoring away loudly at the far end of the house. “Abu,” I whispered to the underfoot barkie boy, “I don’t think you’re going to be able to go out again tonight. Let’s go get my glasses.”

Trek out of the kitchen to the computer; trek back to the kitchen with the glasses. Shut the kitchen lights off; shut the barkie boy up with a treat in the snoot. Peer out the window again. “Yup,” I tell the barkie boy, “you are definitely not going out again tonight. That’s either a wayward dementor out there, or a bear. And since it appears to be eating leftover bird seed, I’m guessing bear.” I flip the wart’s real light on. The black mass turns a not-quite as black face towards me, hesitates a moment, and goes back to her feast. I lock the kitchen door – just in case.

Trek back to the computer to turn it off. I’d not staying downstairs any longer than I need to, in case Bear – newly risen from her winter den and hungry enough to relish left-over bird seed – decides she’s going to test the kitchen door to see if she can get at the cat food on the counter. Nope. I’m not.

But I can’t stand it, and have to take one more look. Besides, I need snoot-treats to lure the barkie boys upstairs without a fight about a last, bedtime, pee, which is clearly not going to take place this night – they’re gonna have to hold it. Bear tolerates me watching her dine for a few minutes, then exits, not by the stairs, but through the bottom railing next to the stairs, taking out the rail and attached fairy lights, stomping all over a raised bed, and crushing its walls down in the process. 

Bears up close in the dark look like velvet shadows, very round, very silent, with pointy faces if they deign to look at you. Very, very large velvet shadows. Very, very strong velvet shadows.

Bear Feasting on Seeds from the Wart Railing, by Deb Marshall

By this time Catmandoo has arrived, and His Massiveness is way too interested in what’s happening on the other side of the door. I shoo him away from the kitchen, herd the dogs upstairs and lock them into the bedroom, then head back downstairs to hustle the Catman back to bed. I find him sitting in plain sight in the glass door in the Chapel, peering out into the full-moon yard and trying to pop the door open. Thank goodness doors have locks! I peered out, wondering if Bear has a cub or two with her, but saw nothing.

“You’d make an entirely too delicious fast-breaking feast,” I tell him, hefting him up to shoulder (20 pounds of heft) and climbing the stairs, shutting stair doors firmly behind me. “Get that critter out of your mind. You don’t need to investigate.” 

Then I take myself to bed, to wonder where Bear spends the winter, somewhere in the woods that run back of our house to out-back-naybah Eddie Bear’s house, or in his woods that run back to the road to Elkins. Is there a cave? A hollowed-out area beneath a big tree’s sheltering roots? A grubbed-out area in a hill amongst granite boulders? Inside a really big, rotten log?

How am I going to be able to put out the remaining bird seed without enticing Bear back to the wart? Will I get home some night and find I need to sleep in the car in the garage because Bear’s already on the wart? If I’d been just a bit later…or she’d been just a bit earlier…who’d be eating my groceries today?

In the morning, I discover that Bear managed to empty the one bird feeder I use without taking it down or breaking it – she left a fair amount of bear slobber all over it, however. She bent the metal pole that held the suet cage in half, removed the cage, pried it open, and made off with the remaining suet. The seeds were all gone. 

There was a red-breasted robin hopping along the newly snow-melted lawn, listening for worms. I can see the entire raised bed where the parsnips are over-wintering now, and I can actually get to it on bare ground; I’ll need to see if they can be pulled yet. I scattered more seed on the wart rails.

“Eat fast, birds,” I called. “There aren’t going to be too many more hand-outs this year. Bear has risen – the season has turned.”

The feeder’s coming in with me, tonight.

April 2017; for the blog alone.

 

Things I Covet

Turkey Gang, by Deb Marshall

I once rented an old farmhouse, back in the dark ages, simply because it had an entire room - with a window! - that was set up as a pantry. I could picture myself filling baskets with root vegetables, stacking pumpkins and winter squash under the table, keeping geraniums in pots on the window sill, while the cat curled up contentedly in a basket on a chair.  Fortunately, I came to my senses and got married, instead.

Still, sometimes other people have something I really, really want.

The Book Lady, for example, has three things I want:  an incredible front door that looks like it came out of a castle; a library room filled with actual, handsome stacks; and a herd of turkeys that visit every day at 4 pm looking for a hand-out. If she’s late hopping to it, the ballsy tom strides up to her French doors, glares in, and hammers on the door with his beak until they bring corn for him and his harem. I considered encouraging the local turkeys to see what they’d do at my house, but the few times they moseyed out of the woods to snack on winter sunflower seeds, Catmandoo, our generally benign, very large Lord of the Universe, was alarmed by their size, and the barkie boys had a great deal – a very great deal - to say about the invasion, repeatedly – so maybe not.

The Tall Dude also has rooms I want. He has a whole room filled with tables and counters and storage bins and shelves that he built to fit the exact needs of his many interests, and his chest freezer lives there, too. There’s custom storage for ski equipment, fencing equipment, canning gear, camping gear, and special counter space for his seed-starting set-up, ski waxing, and all manner of things – all perfectly designed. He also has a pantry room, with a sink in it – and off that, a root cellar. How often do you find a real root cellar, nowadays? I want it. And I want a few of the dozens of beautiful, elegant (and empty!) hornet’s nests that adorn his tall walls.

Hornet's Nest, by Deb Marshall

 There was a brass candlestick in my bedroom in the servant’s quarters, the college summer that I spent as the cook on an historic summer estate, that I really, really wanted. It was designed to adjust how much of the candle was lifted above the holder, and I was quite taken with the whole idea. Actually, I do have that candlestick…like I said, I was taken with it.

The Husband and I almost bought a house in Maine because it had a big room that surrounded its center chimney, with a clever, secret entrance. Artists had built the house, and it was a fair reproduction of an historic Cape, right down to not having a septic system. Well – technically it did: there was a buried VW Bug with the seats removed and the windows rolled slightly down that served the purpose, out back somewhere; the owners couldn’t quite remember where but we were sure to locate it sooner or later. The Husband wiped the fairy dust out of my eyes.

My best school friend’s house, built by her Grandpa, had a secret staircase that curled narrowly down from one of the bedrooms to the kitchen, where there was a door on the bottom stair making it look like a closet.  Her mom used the lowest stairs to store canned goods, and the kids used the whole stairway to spy on the adults. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Still do. 

In my Nana’s house, the window over the sink is split in the middle, and an old-fashioned latch holds the two sides together. In the summer, you can unlatch them and open the two sides out. I love that window; it reminds me of fairy princesses opening their windows to call out to people below, and of my Nana opening the window to call out to Brother and me as we passed beneath. There’s something much more elegant and lyrical about unlatching and pulling a window open, rather than shoving one up, or cranking one out. Mom (who now lives in Nan’s house) and I argue about whether she’s allowed to replace that window with a modern, energy-efficient one.

Eddie B., our out-back neighbor, had a whole house I wanted – and I could have had it, but he sold it recently. That house is like a magic box that opens into unexpected spaces, with multiple stairways and porches, little hidden rooms with unusual doorways, secret places for cat litter boxes, one stairway that looks like it’s taking you into a cave, big windows revealing lovely things outside, and a myriad of unusual details that only a builder with plenty of time and imagination could make for themselves. It is, absolutely, the most enchanting of houses.

But I have a house I love; and in the library live a banshee and a Chinese soldier that I’m quite attached to. So – sometimes, other people have something I really covet. But you don’t always get what you want…

Originally published in the Concord Monitor, April 15, 2017, as "Things I Covet."

Suspicious Comings and Goings

TimberDoodle in Snow: Cold Feet in April  by Deb Marshall

 It may be spring when you read this (Ha! Snowing again today!), and I may have had a parsimonious parsnip sighting (not yet!) and possibly even feasting, and the woodcock, or timberdoodle as we call it here, may be hopefully peeting for wives (he started last night – before the snow started), but as I’m writing the season has not yet turned, the weather gods just recently dumped a fresh two-foot-deep pile of snow on top of the dregs of the old, and I can only reflect on what a strange and disturbing winter it has been. The latest nor’easter was useful, in a way – it gave me a day off from work, time to finally get my seed orders sent out, so I now peer into the mail box daily, hoping for packages. 

I hadn’t seen a grey squirrel all winter, but very very early one morning – I was up because one of the barkie boys had had a restless night – I looked out and there was a great, fat, cocky one sitting on the wart railing, flicking its tail insolently and cramming in sunflower seeds as fast as he could. Catman was thrilled and dashed out after it, and it led him on a fair-thee-well chase over driveway and up snowbank, down bank and over pond, finally winning taunting rights after he’d dashed up a maple tree. Catmandoo never exerts His Massiveness to tree-climbing, having endured the humiliation of the erection of a ladder and ascent of a mere human to pry him off limb and carry him down ladder when he was still a pup: what goes up easily does not always come down easily or willingly (let’s all remember that truth of nature next time we vote). 

When I was a pup myself, my best friend, PowderPuff, figured out that if she climbed the ladder leaning against the house and sashayed along the narrow overhang that was 3 feet below the second story windows, she could sit just below my bedroom window and yowl to wake me up. ‘Twasn’t her problem to figure out how I was going to get her up the last 3 feet and through the window into my bedroom. It took three scary rescue excursions before the humans-in-charge thought that just maybe they should remove the ladder. What one puts up, does not always come down fast enough (ditto above).

Catmandoo Up a Tree: What Ascends On High Doesn't Like To Come Down  by Deb Marshall

We had several sightings of red squirrels through the winter, so the furries spent a number of very busy days patrolling the firewood stacks. It kept them occupied, not a bad thing when cabin fever and the news was taking its toll on man and beast, but the squirrels were always long gone before the furries  fully engaged. It takes awhile to rouse from a catnap in a basket near the woodstove, alert a human to let one out, then barrel out in hot pursuit; the object of the chase is usually high in a pine by the time one gets up to full speed, but hope springs eternal.

Last winter some critter chewed a small hole in the corner of the front screen door, which is just 9 feet from the railing where I set out winter bird seed. We wondered why the furries spent so much time lying in the cold hall, staring intently at the snowed-in front door. Come spring when we roused that door from its winter rest, we discovered why: a cascade of sunflower seeds poured into the hall when the inside door was opened, from the critter’s lovely between-doors nest and larder near the birdseed take-out joint. 

That door got fixed and the furries didn’t spend much time patrolling hall or cellar this winter - a nearly full-time job last winter. I had no sightings of any actual mice, though a lovely nest made up of dryer lint and grasses came in with one load of fire wood. I did find several mouse droppings atop the metal bins in which I store birdseed at the bottom of the cellar stairs, and lived in dread that one morning before I was fully awake I’d lift a lid to scoop seed, and scoop a malingering mouse as well.  I think the handsome red foxes we saw last spring and from time to time strolling up our long driveway all winter, and the funky critter who spent last summer in the compost bin, and the owls we hear hooting and occasionally see as a flash of white overhead in our headlights, have helped the furries reduce the Mouse Colony to a manageable, mostly external, population again. (Or, at least I did think so; this past week Beastreau and the Man have fetched four mice that I know of out of the cellar upstairs to the kitchen to chase and eventually eat – my personal illegal immigration controllers.)

 I have no malice towards mice in general, but one very late night Catman the Hunter decided it would be a good thing to bring me his latest – still very alive – catch, so I could play with it. At 3 am I proved unequal to the task, so he left it next to my bed and took off in a fluff of disgust. I spent most of the remains of the night wondering if I was going to be joined under the warm covers by a traumatized mouse. Two weeks later I found the dead mouse’s body entombed at the back of my sock drawer. As places to die go, it could have been worse, for the mouse and for me, but I’ve never been so pleased that we don’t heat the upstairs bedrooms.

Mouse with Seed, by Deb Marshall

We didn’t see trail or pawprint of the critter in the compost all winter, but it was such an odd winter of melting and blowing we might not have recognized any signs. Not knowing what the critter actually was, I don’t know if it moved on after the elections, was hibernating, or quite active but invisibly responsible for the reduced mouse and squirrel sightings. If it’s still around, we’ll probably know soon – the compost will soften, in spite of current weather indications, and spring cleaning of burrows is apt to happen anon.

Odd times lead to odd meetings. Last month a friend and I spent hours watching an opossum in a tree not far from her window, busily munching dried berries or rosy leaf buds. Possum stopped his meal briefly but didn’t retreat as some walkers and their dogs passed by, oblivious, and wasn’t bothered by windows flung open so humans could see better. 

Rarely seen and mostly active at night, this ‘possum turned its aversion to risk-taking upside down, inside out. Considering the whacky political climate, that might be a reasonable response. (I wonder if Possum is one of those many thousands of illegal voters NH supposedly hosts?)

Years ago, two raccoons made a barn roof in Elkins into their bedroom – another highly suspicious activity. Despite the numbers of folks who came by to peer at them – the roof was clear of all trees, so they were very unusually out in plain sight – the duo stayed curled up and conked out all day, and found the accommodations so fine, they repeated their public snooze next day. By the third day the raccoon pair was nowhere in sight – much like this winter’s Mouse Colony.

Maybe their visas were revoked.

For the blog alone: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com.     You’ll find me busy monitoring suspicious comings and goings.

Bird Brains

Corky; photo by Ralph Marshall

Dad lived in a small apartment set on the side of a hill. On the high hill side was a deck, much like a tree-house. A glass door opened onto it, and opposite the door - so she had a good view out - was a large cage in which resided Corky, the African Grey Parrot.

Corky was a one-man bird. She’d let my father put her upside-down on his lap for a claws and flight-feathers trim, and she’d climb his chair to sit beside him to watch tv.  She’d happily step onto Dad’s finger to get a ride to an outdoor cage - a delicious taste of the wild on fine days. Everyone else she bit - hard. It was possible to handle her if you pretended to be Dad when you did it, but she wasn’t fooled for long, once you forgot who youwere supposed to be. Dad used to say that children and dogs do what you expect them to do; apparently that’s true for birds, too, because we all expected to get bitten, and usually did - and he didn’t expect to get bitten, and rarely did. 

Like most African Greys, Corky was a great mimic of noises: the microwave beep, the dryer beep, the door bell, the alarm clock, the stove timer, the smoke alarm – whatever was most likely to get the humans hopping about. She knew many sentences and applied them appropriately: “Going shopping?” she’d ask as Dad got ready to go out; “Wanna go pee?” to the dog who visited from next door; “Want supper!” when it neared suppertime and “Want cake!” when it was time for dessert; “Here kitty, kitty, kitty!” to the wild birds she met beyond her outdoors cage, and “Time for bed!” when she was ready for her cage to be covered up at night. Once in the dusky privacy of her covered cage, she’d spend the next half hour practicing new words or phrases or snatches of songs, which she’d not use in public until she’d perfected them to her own standards. 

Dad’s relationship with Corky, and hers with him, was complex and nuanced. When he was dying, and no longer able to care for her, she was more co-operative with the rest of us, and would waddle down the hall to his bedroom, where she’d stand next to the bed, peering up at him. “Whacha doin’?” she’d ask. Just before he passed, she went to live with a lady who had other exotic birds; I heard through the perch-network that Corky is having a fine time.

Our human minds long to wrap themselves around bird’s alien perceptions. My Nana kept parakeets, which she’d let out of their cages to take joyous baths in a basin of water she’d place on the kitchen sink drainboard. She trained one to ride in a toy train that she’d pull about the house by a string, and that bird seemed to enjoy his rides tremendously, oddly choosing it over a free-flap about the house.  

Wild birds don’t pay much attention to we two-legged wingless critters, but there are curious exceptions. Buzzy Boy the hummingbird interacts with us daily during the season, is interested in what we’re doing, and has clear ideas about what we should be doing. Buzzy distinguishes between us and visitors – he dive-bombs us vigorously for attention, but never attacks strangers. After Buzzy said goodbye before migrating south last fall, I left the feeders out for stragglers migrating from further north who might need a fast food take-out joint on their long trek. After a few days, a small female arrived who hung about for several days. She, too, would hover near our faces when we came out to the deck, clearly interested in what we were doing. While she wasn’t as bold as Buzzy Boy, she reminded me of him so strongly that I have to wonder whether she’s his daughter, and whether we’ll see her again come fall.

Years ago I was in my driveway practicing t'ai chi while the First Hound lounged in the shade near the front stoop (keeping a careful eye out in case marauding dogs came to attack me). Concentrating on keeping my balance on uneven ground, I looked up from my feet directly into the face of a great blue heron that was watching me. I stared, amazed; in a moment, a look I can describe only as complete bewilderment passed over the bird's face. It gave itself a little shake, then took flight - thinking, I imagine, "What on earth were you doing with that human? Are you insane?" I turned to the First Hound, who was staring intently at the spot the bird had just left, thinking, "What on earth were you doing, why didn't you chase that bird? Dog, that was a big bird..."

Some birds – it can be hard to say why they find us fascinating. The chiropractor whose office is next to mine in White River was recently adopted by a beautiful, shining black pigeon. She stands on the windowsill outside his treatment room and spends a good part of the day watching him work. She seems especially interested when one of his patients calls out during an adjustment: she stretches her neck and hops a bit so she can get a better view. She’s tame enough to approach within inches from the other side of the window glass; she has beautiful purple and green hues mixed into her ebony feathers, and strawberries and cream feet. She never comes to my next-door acupuncture office window – watching me stab people with needles as they drift off into a nap is apparently too boring to be a spectator sport. 

Last summer Niece and the Chef adopted a small flock of hens. One beaked lady quickly became enamoured of my eldest grandniece. She follows the little girl around the yard, much like a puppy would, and tolerates being handled - a lot - by the 4-year-old. Grandniece sits on the back steps, the hen hops up onto her lap and lies there on her side - apparently relishing rubs and scratches and pats – and listens attentively as Grandniece talks and talks to her.

Do birds wonder about us as much as we wonder about them? Do they know we dream, sometimes, of flying? Do they suspect that their morning songs and their evening murmurs change our moods? Do they know we watch their aerial dances with fascination and wonder?

Do they know that, when they pass overhead on a perfect, still day, and we can hear each beat of their wings in the air above us, our breaths catch, and our hearts swell?

Originally published in the Concord Monitor, April 2, 2017, as “What Do the Birds Make of Us?”.