Buck Fever

Oh why do I do this ?

The self deprecation, the whining and worst of all, undisguised sarcasm. "So many snowbirds, so little freezer space," the bumper sticker on a car in Phoenix read. I reword it to, "So many blogs, so little room for trash."

A circuitous route from one cutesy blog with a catchy title to another. Minute investigation of the narrow roads of cyberspace that people travel leads to a dead end in upper New York, a picture of a person driving a car without a door and erotica. Following the next blog tag is a puzzling journey from Michigan and an invitation to a pot luck to the island of the stars. In the end it's not just the dog that moans on the carpet.

The fall photo of Kickapoo Center seems lack luster compared to the dozens of awards some garner. A Sunday afternoon spent reading about Aunt Emily and writing pithy comments would bolster my thin list of readers and expand my data profile to extend beyond the US. What for? I'm just waiting on a Kundalini Snap and the outline for the novel. In the meantime I'll enjoy the word play and clever writers who comment about gubernatorial sounding too much like the character in the Andy Griffith Show with the resultant comment from five ignorant readers that the character's correct name is Gomer. ...And the Brazilian Reverend writes the woman who jogs that he'll pray for her soul. Oh, please.

Score one more for the weatherman. Our dinner salad contains five different greens, fresh radishes and accumulated tidbits. "Do ya wanna cover the garden?" Dawn asks. "Check the weather," I tell her. The local weather forecast is for lows in the high 30's. The eighty foot row in garden number one has survived temperatures as low as 20 degrees with a white row cover draped over bent wire to resemble a miniature hothouse.

In the morning I check the thermometer in the breezeway. Forty four degrees. Wow, that's pretty warm. The thermometers next to the kitchen window report a different story. Twenty two degrees. I let the dog outside via the deck door and traipse out behind her in sweats. There's a fine accumulation of frost on my meticulously manicured front lawn. The combination of low temperatures and dryness allow me to fine comb the grass. The radishes are wilted. The buttercrunch lettuce falls over from shock.

Mandy stares at the highway. Something's has attracted her attention. On the hill leading up to the highway an eight or nine point buck wanders through the high weeds. She barks once in recognition and runs to the barb wire fence line. The buck stands still in an alert posture. Mandy barks again, deep throaty -I'm watching you-barks. The buck would have crossed the highway just before the bridge. Oncoming morning traffic is heavier than the quiet day yesterday. Deciding to avoid the barking menace between him and the highway, the buck trots back down the abutment, leaps over a depression in front of the ten foot high culvert and bounds off for protection of trees lining the river. Mandy has saved his life. In another three weeks he'll be hounded by orange clad hunters who'll cut off his head and display it on a wall in the hardware store.

The only thing that the Hunchback of Notre Dame and I don't have in common is a bell to ring. I get up with a groan and walk like an eighty year old. Wood gathering has extended two more days of bending, tossing, stacking and dumping down a chute to the basement. Avoiding the outside with the excuse of installing a french door, I use the extra hour afforded by the time change to perform one thousand minute tasks that thankfully I didn't enumerate here on a previous post. I would have, though, if time hadn't interceded. In my advanced state of dementia brought on by overwork, I thought my list humorous at best. Who wouldn't find dusting the blades of the ceiling fans and vacuuming Japanese beetles in Dawn's studio noteworthy.

In the afternoon with temperatures outside in the 60's, I load corn shocks and pumpkins in the back of the truck. The corn shocks go on a burn pile. The pumpkins I pretend to be part of an Olympic shot put competition. They are too fresh and don't splatter when they hit the cement debris previously dumped to make a barrier against spring floods in the north forty. To make matters worse, they bounce and roll back toward the truck.

Today we'll screw off royally. I've one garden plot to clear of stakes and weeds. Hopefully, the weather man will wait for another day before forgetting to forecast ground freezing fronts moving in from the west. We're gonna hit the big city for supplies. We'll buy a months worth of butter, wine, cat food from an employee owned grocery chain that beats Wal-Mart's high prices. I briefly imagine picketing the Wal-Mart in our town which takes advantage of the 65 miles to the larger metropolitan area to charge exorbitant prices but succumb to "why bother". The This Week news magazine I read every week reports that most grocery stores now stock garlic imported from China, supplanting California growers. Briefly, I imagine 10,000 square feet of organic garlic growing in our 11 garden plots. I should quit this mind theater.