critters in the bed

We just got home yesterday evening only to discover an unfortunate scratching noise coming from our headboard. I heard the scratching earlier on, and Colin thought I was making it up. However, the noise was loud enough to wake us both up this morning around 3 a.m. I was determined that the bed was infested with worms or termites and that they were going to drill into our brains. I told Colin so and stuffed my head under his armpit for protection. The scratching ceased, we fell back into troubled sleep only to be woken yet again a half hour later.

This time Colin was convinced it was some critter behind the bed. So we pulled the whole massive furniture out far enough from the wall so the cats could pounce on whatever it was that was scratching, scratching, scratching. Secretly, I'll admit, at that point I wished the thing was a nasty cockroach or beetle rather than a mouse, since we were releasing hungry kitties on the poor unsuspecting thing.

However, that action proved fruitless, when, after twenty minutes, Au Lait was still scratching at the wall and getting quite violent with the electrical socket. But she was no closer to the intruder and was making noise ten times louder than the other one.

We decided that the noise must be coming from inside the wall. And I'm pretty sure now that it must be a mouse. And I'm okay with that. Au Lait's raucous behavior was enough to silence it for long enough so we could get a little bit more sleep. But I'm feeling a little thick right now. Wonder what'll happen tonight?

letter from maman

I got this email from my mum today (she never e-mails) and I enjoyed reading it so much, I decided to post it. She's from England, by-the-way...

* * * * *

Papa and I watched 'The Queen' last night. Papa cried. I thought it was very well produced, and they seem to have pinpointed the characters to form. What I found poignant was the relationship of Charles to his parents. As a child, he had very little, if any, cuddle-time. Nanny was the one constant, while his parents went about their business of state and commonwealth. As an adult, he still feels the distance, coldness and ridicule for his so many inaptitudes.

The other scene that left a mark was Her Majesty, stuck in the river, having a little moment of sorrow, and, turning, there he was, the most majestic stag on the entire 4,000+ acre estate. She shooed him away with her scarf. She turned briefly, and he was gone. On hearing of his ultimate demise, she drove over to the next door estate, which housed the weekend business man who had shot the stag. The gamekeeper showed her the stag, hanging unceremoniously from a hook in the game room, head laid aside to later adorn the great hall of some cold castle. She gently touched his head, noticing that he had been wounded, not a clean kill, as with Henry's Anne. The stag had to be tracked for miles before he was finally put out of his misery. Here was majesty, tracked down and felled.

What strong abodings... Our house is full of ladybugs. Papa has painted the front door a delicious umbric red, and has been chopping and stacking wood. I have been gradually putting the garden to bed: tying up the raspberries, mulching them heavily with peat moss and leaves. I made the most delicious soupe a l'oignon last night, with a slice of toasted Ezekiel bread atop laden with cheddar cheese and popped under the broiler til bubbly and golden brown...simply delicious. Papa went crazy over it!

I tried to take the DogAge Test the other day, which is quite involved, and was almost at the end, where I would get the results for Sadie Wall when it suddenly disappeared, and was gone forever. It took so long to get that far, that I just didn't have the energy to go back and do it all again. They can get stuffed! Sadie is great. She spends her outside time pretty much creeping up on the squirrels as they feed at the bird feeders, then tearing madly after them as they scramble for safety in the retaining wall, or up the pine tree, screaming bloody murder at her for her impossible rudeness!

Latin goes well, and is progressing nicely. I am quilting a lot these days. Wait till you see what I'm up to now... It's a beautiful Sabbathday, so I must needs get me back into the garden... the lavender is in full bloom again! Crazy! Who would think it that it's late October, and 74 degrees F. Love to Colin...I'm really excited about our trip to England. Al of us! What a hoot!

Love, Maman xxx

new spider friend

Found a spidy building her web just now. Such a windy spot too--on our porch. We'll leave her there for now, I guess. At least until she can get her supper...

two weekends in pictures, plus more kitty

I just uploaded a bunch of photos last night from our escapades over the last couple of weeks.

A weekend trip to my parents' house in the Northeast Kingdom included wild turkeys in the garden, fly fishing, and creatures.

A long weekend in Nantucket with friends offered just what we needed: relaxation, good food, good company, and some quality time with Colin. Oh, and the ocean, of course!

Suki was glad to have us home last night.

on clyde pond

I always love going home to my parents' house. Going home to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont is like going on retreat. No one will ever find you there. And once you arrive, you can finally breathe. This is not to say that Burlington is the rat-race. Not by any means. But in comparison to sitting in a canoe on quiet Clyde Pond, it might as well be.

Going home also means going to church. That's okay by me, especially since it's my dad who does the preaching and he's the best in the world. And not just because he's my dad. You'll always walk away from service with some kind of little nugget you can use to tackle the week ahead with joy and grace. And so I did this morning. But instead of walking, I decided to run--all the way to the house about 50 yards towards the woods--so invigorated was I from the good words and the gorgeous sun shining down my back. As I galloped down the path about a hundred tiny red butterflies seemed to burst from my feet and fly up beside me like dolphins, diving in and out of my sight. They followed me all the way. Good omen!

My dad and I took the canoe behind the house and put in at Clyde Pond, an old reservoir hidden among the woods behind Newport. Only the locals know about it, I think. For human visitors are few and far between. We paddled upstream to the Clyde River and my dad pointed to a stretch of shore where just last week he had seen a baby deer and its mother. In a strange way, I still felt the ghost of their presence there and couldn't help but recall a poem I once read by Mary Oliver in her stunning book House of Light. The poem called The Deer, depicts timeless, ever-present nature--like two deer walking in long grass as though time doesn't exist. The poem speaks to the strength and reliability of the wild earth. But it also voices a fear for its fleetingness. We need the make the most of every minute with earnest devotion.

Each of us is given/only so many mornings to do it--/to look around and love/the oily fur of our lives,/the hoof and grass-stained muzzle./Days I don't do this/I feel the terror of idleness,/like a red thirst./Death isn't just an idea./When we die the body breaks open/like a river;

As I was thinking about this--I could think for ever on this quiet, isolated river--I gazed among a patch of lily pads, looking grand like a hundred emerald sun dials, and saw a white flower peeking up from the water.

"Look!" I said to my dad, "the flowers on the lily pads are blooming!"

"Yup, waterlilies," he relied. "That's what we used to call the sailors."

"Really?" I asked. "Why?"

"Because of those hats they used to wear. You know, those white ones."

"Can we get close to it?" I asked. We paddled towards the lone bloom. In my thoughts, I imagined a handful of earnest sailors bobbing up and down on the water like buoys. Not the same effect really. I thought of Monet's large old paintings of waterlilies that I was fortunate to see up-close over the winter at L'Orangerie in Paris. If you are ever lucky enough, like I was, to see these massive round panels in person, you'll probably notice that they're surprisingly drab, albeit breathtaking. The flowers themselves are barely noticeable in among the grass and ripples and brush strokes. I guess that's why the painting are so famous--you have to squint your eyes a bit. They're gorgeous, but they do no justice to the waterlily flower that, in real life, stands out against the deep dark waters like a bright star in the midnight sky.

We were now close enough to the flower to touch it. I wanted to take a picture. But the lily seemed to be playing a game with me, ducking in and out of the shadows, in and out of the water, and only peeking out long enough to say, "Here I am, and here I go." Fleeting and exuberant, as only a real-life waterlily can be. Finally I got a snapshot. A quick snapshot of the yellow pollen mustache, the pointy white petals, the game of peek-a-boo to remind me of this fleeting moment and make it timeless.

Leaving my parents' is as thrilling as it is to arrive. There is no room for sadness, because your arms and your car are filled to the brim with fresh flowers and produce from the garden, clean laundry--line-dried and smelling like sunshine, new plants to add to my porch pot garden (this time I have two mint varieties and borage, whose flowers garnish any summer cocktail with a colorful flourish), and my parents' home-roasted coffee tickling our noses (oh, how Au Lait loves the scent of coffee!).

bug musings and art

I grew up learning to love bugs. This was never too difficult to do out in wild nature where the bugs roam free and happy. I’ll never forget the first time I heard a cicada chirping. I was living in Connecticut at the time. I thought I was hearing rambunctious crickets.

The little boy I took care of said all-knowingly, “Don’t you know what those are? They’re cicadas. Come here.”

He led me to a tree trunk where we found, clinging to the side of the bark, the delicate empty shell of a cicada nymph. It was over an inch long and looked like a giant translucent brown bumble-beetle (without wings). An exotic-looking creature, cicada nymphs will eventually moult and shed their skin before emerging as adults resplendently winged and ready to sing (well, the males anyways).

“I never knew we had these way up here,” I said in awe.

“Yeah, I know,” the boy replied. “And they get really loud too.” The novelty of those sacred creatures had certainly worn off on him long ago, but I was fascinated.

When I traveled to Provence several years later, I was again awakened to the cicada’s summer anthem. In that region of the world, cicada fields fill the air with sound all day under the hot sun, and louder still into the night under the high starry sky.

I have yet to see one in real life -- the closest I’ve been is in sound and the shorn remnants of a bodily outline those few summers ago.

Recently, I went to an art opening at Pursuit Gallery in downtown Burlington. The artist displaying her work was none other than my good friend Elisa Freeman. A grand theme of her work -- beautiful insects -- is interpreted very differently from my own nostalgic references.

Whereas my reference pertains almost entirely to bugs in their natural setting (and therefore content and somewhat sporadic), Elisa’s fabulous creatures are very much confined to physical interiors and patterned aesthetics such as boxes, lace, and printed wallpaper. In that kind of juxtaposition and structured setting, the bugs take on a very creepy undertone. It’s the difference between hearing a cicada sing his beautiful song from a field afar and finding the same cicada tickling across your wallpaper. The immediate sensation is one of invasion and fear.

But if you linger a little longer, and peer into the shadow box cases, the artwork begins to feel like a still-life display at the insectarium. You can find beauty in seeing those iridescent wings so up close and find comfort that its strange little legs are kept behind glass or pinned like a specimen to the wall. But then in that same comfort, there is also an underlying sadness that accompanies capture. You have to wonder how the little bugs feel landing in this unnatural space. How is their own comfort threatened? How does their fear manifest itself?

Like I said, I’ve learned to love bugs in their natural habitat. But seeing them in spaces other than their own (in my bed for instance) invokes a huge feeling of discomfort for me. It’s not just that I’m uncomfortable with the bug in my bed, but I also imagine that the bug itself is very uncomfortable too. And probably very frightened.

Perhaps that’s why the artwork sparks such emotion within me -- both good and bad. These are after all just paintings, not the real thing. I still haven’t seen a cicada up close in real life in nature or in captive, but Elisa’s intricate representations on printed wallpaper patterns make me feel as though I have. They conjure up memories and feelings. They cause me to reflect on my relationship with the microcosm right outside (and oftentimes inside) my doorstep and the larger pattern of life in this world. They also manage to fill in a small piece of my own nostalgia story.

Oh, and it's worth mentioning that Elisa's work depicts not only cicadas, but lots of other cool bugs and people creatures too. But for Col and me, it was the cicada piece. So we bought it.

Artwork shown by Elisa Freeman, www.elisafreemanart.com.

bees for life

There’s been much ado about bees lately. They’re not doing so well. Colonies in their entirety have been disappearing. An article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago (Bees Vanish; Scientists Race for Reasons) describes a scenario called "colony collapse disorder" in which bees become disoriented and are unable to find their way back home. Historically, this is not the first time we’ve seen this type of behavior, but it’s the first time it’s reached such a massive scale, and on a global level too.

I’m sad for the bees. Can you imagine getting lost on your way home from the grocery store and never finding your way back -- your family waiting for their dinner, but never getting it?

But it’s not just the bees that are affected. We all love their Zen-like presence in the summer months. And I can’t imagine living without my Vermont honey. But these are mild, aesthetic pleasures. No, the big problem with bees disappearing is that human life as we know it could not exist without them. That’s because the majority of our crops rely on bees for pollination. No bees, no food for us. They’re miracle life workers, those bees!

So why are they disappearing?

Sophie, my beekeeper friend in Provence, once told me that pesticides are the cause, that it’s the chemicals that are causing the bees to lose their orientation. The Times articles states many theories -- viruses, mites, disease, pesticides, stress, poor diet -- but scientists don’t know for sure and are hesitant to single out just one cause at this point. It could be a combination of many factors.

The Department of Agriculture has concluded that we rely too heavily on bees as a primary pollinator. I can just imagine that in the near future, we’ll have found new methods of pollination (robots?). Bees won’t be in the picture any more. But that doesn’t mean we can forget about them or lose sight of their value in our world.

The term “beekeeper” should not be taken lightly. Yet, a good number of the possible reasons for the bees’ current demise are directly related to human interference. Is there a way that we as consumers can make a difference this late in the game? I’m not so sure. Awareness is a start. Maybe we could try only buying local, organic food and avoid supporting large-scale farms and crops that require mass transportation of bee hives for pollination. Maybe we could all use a little less honey.

What’s apparent to me is that bees rely on humans just as much as we rely on them. We need to give back a little of what we take -- food, serenity, life.

For now, I’m sending out some good vibes. I hope our bee friends find their way home.