Skydiving From Grace

note:

Usually I e-mail my friend Ella separately. She'll send me back an excerpt of her life with two daughters, one a freshman in college and the other still in high school . Her business consultant husband keeps me updated frequently with a newsletter about focus and business philosophy. He's in high demand as a speaker because of his unique point of view as a businessman and visually impaired person. He skis, drives a stock car and has my admiration for safely operating a chain saw despite his blindness. Both were dead set against the Iraq war from the beginning. Rather than sit on their cans complaining like most of us, they stood at busy intersections in the city with signage indicating their displeasure at Dubya's Folly. They put their beliefs in action frequently traveling to Central America in a church program assisting a sister church in Guatemala. The daughters take time from their lives earning money for school by working in Appalachia and various other US based initiatives for the poor. Today's rain will give way to sun. I'll not have time for more than this post.


Dear Ella,
Dawn brings home old magazines from the retirement home. I'll grab one and, out of habit, thumb through from back to front. Reading backward poses a few problems. The National Geographic I thumbed through this morning has an article about sunken treasure. I marvel at small pottery bowls , urns and elaborate figurines. It isn't until I reach the beginning that I learn the ship is Chinese, constructed entirely without nails and approximately 1200 years old. The point being that when I post excerpts from life in Kickapoo Center at the turn of the century, I'm thumbing through experiences that happened hours, days or weeks ago.


I set up my new Little Chief smoker in the open area between the house and garage. I shoot two digital pictures of it in action to e-mail the kids who gifted me the smoker. The larger format picture shows smoke billowing from the shiny aluminum body. The jpeg I send to my son-in-law has a few wisps escaping the box. I'm sure both are on high speed Internet, unlike me, but I'm eager to smoke ribs and a loin roast to share with my Amish friends. At the end of the summer Titus and I will build a large concrete block smokehouse to accommodate hams and bacon. My Little Chief is great for smaller cuts.

The smoker comes with alder chips. I've never heard of using alder for smoking meat. I decide to go to Viroqua for mesquite and hickory chips, some rosemary and to deliver the pork to the Amish. It costs $2.58 for less than an ounce of rosemary leaves in a tin can. In Arizona the house was surrounded by rosemary. Besides functioning as a barrier against witches( a Middle Ages concept) it furnished culinary herb and made the area around the house fragrant. The trip to the city takes two hours since I run into numerous friends and acquaintances while shopping.

I putter in the afternoon. Four, 80 foot rows of onions are filled with weeds in areas I can't rototill. Dawn hand weeds for hours on Saturday while I weed in segments to forestall an aching back. The ribs I smoked for dinner are in a slow cooker on the kitchen counter. Besides sprinkling them with rosemary I add a single onion across the top-really a scallion- that I'd mistakenly pulled while weeding. When Dawn gets home from work, it's time to take a break. She gets the mail and walks to the front field. "Pooch, mama is home," I yell out. He comes out of a hiding place to greet Dawn. The three of us discuss the day's events. The Pooch is quiet.

Suddenly, the Pooch streaks out of the grass between the spinach and herb gardens. We're startled by his quick flight. There's shrieking and squawking. An image comes to mind of the chicken at the organic apple orchard on Turkey Ridge that was attacked by a hawk as Dawn and I survey the rural countryside. Then, robins and, amazingly, blackbirds appear out of nowhere. It a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Squawking, shrieking birds dive bomb the Pooch as he scampers away with something in his mouth. For a cat that is skittish at the least sound, a pen dropping on the kitchen floor, the backfire of a truck, he ambles away as if there is nothing amiss. We are too surprised to do anything but stare at the unfolding drama.

Later, I deduce that the robins were taking a youngster out for a pre-flight check off. The mother has a nest in the pine tree near the garage. She spends her days clucking like a broody hen. The Pooch seizes an opportunity. He acts upon instinct and we are unable to thwart his behavior. Scolding him or worse, keeping him penned in during the day would be pointless. I don't have any sympathy for the field mice he catches, however, both Dawn and I are saddened by the robin's loss.

I go back to weeding onions while Dawn picks spinach for dinner.

Keep in touch.

R______________

Whishes

I wish I were tall.

I'm a cat. Some would say an ordinary cat. I beg to differ. I have muted gray stripes, a nicely camouflaged white face and an extraordinary raccoon striped tail. My name is Pucci. Actually that's the name my owners gave me. Most often I'm called The Pooch. Something to do with a latent desire to own a dog. My real name is Salvatore Anthony Travolta? My mother was fond of the actor. Own ? They think they own me, yet once I cross the highway into the pine woods on the other side, I could follow the Kickapoo River and be on another journey. But I don't want to start a journey. I'm happy and so are they.

I don't remember when I was born. I led a normal kitten life. Then, on a cold November evening I was tossed from a car on highway 131 by the Freymiller Farm. These folks have four dogs and three cats, therefore I wasn't allowed inside. Except at mealtimes, I could do without smelly dogs. I got used to sleeping under their porch and hunting mice in the barn. When I could, I sneak dog food left outside for the pooch kept in a fenced kennel in the front yard. February it turned cold. Ron forgot to feed me. I was really hungry. My stomach hurt. The neighbors down the lane left a pan of scraps for a black and white feral cat I'd see sneaking around the Freymiller farm. After dark the temperature dipped well below zero. I could smell the old bacon in the pan. In a moment that will be forever marked in the annals of synchronicity, I slipped down to the neighbors and tried to get a bite of the scraps in the pan. Dinner was frozen solid. I'm starving. The light over the back door comes on and I jump for cover. Then I see and smell a chicken breast. Fresh and warm. I forget my shyness and cautiously approach the chicken breast. It is not a delusion brought on by starvation. I eat the whole breast, bones and all. The door opens, another chicken part appears and I allow myself to be picked up and brought inside.

It's all history now. I'm slowly training these people. Their names are Bert and Bev Bubnick. They're caring people. The only animal they had before I came into the picture was a beautiful black Persian cat named Sueshe. She died at nineteen in a place far from Wisconsin. Her pictures line Bev's studio because she was Bev's cat. Rescued from starvation in a garage when the owner died. I'm particularly attached to Bert. I call him Pork Chop because he feeds me. I sleep on Bev's lap in the evening while they watch quirky movies. Bev's lap accommodates me well. When the gunfire or shouting on the television becomes too loud, I amble off to a comfortable Danish, ergonomically designed chair in Bev's studio.

I'm really intelligent and I know how to spell. Once, to watch Bert and Bev's eyes pop, I put my paw on Bert's arm. The two are sitting at the kitchen table. I'm half listening to their inane chatter. Bert says, "Hey Bev, watch this." Then he looks at me and goes "pssst". "Psst always gets my attention because it sounds like a hiss. "Psst. Pooch. Put your paw on my arm," Bert says. This will be fun I say to myself. I lift my left paw and place it over his forearm. It gets me lots of hugs, kisses, treats and scratches in places I can't reach. You're wondering about the spelling of wish.

I call them whishes because they go by so fast. If you don't concentrate, focus your whole attention on the wish, nothing will happen. Whish...Then it's gone.

Bert picks me up. He holds me in front of the kitchen window so I can see everything in the huge front yard all the way to the dense cover of wild day lilies and thorn bushes over at the east fence line. Then he moves to the north window. I see trucks whizzing by on the highway, a two acre garden and a sand pit. The Bubnicks filled in an old house foundation with sand with the intention of building a house over the sand. Right now there's the skeleton of a drying tent. In the hot months of summer, 300 pounds of onions cover drying tables under a white tent. The sand pit is my own personal litter box. I love to dig for moles and scatter sand. It's fun to roll in the sand too.

If I stand on my hind legs I can see better. Being eleven inches tall has its limitations. In winter it's the worst. I cannot see over snow drifts. Once I got into a fight with the black and white cat. I showed him a thing or two about fighting and he/she ran off in the snow. It was so deep the black and white cat looked like a porpoise leaping over waves in the ocean. I can use the privet hedge for cover if I'm stalking birds and it helps if I duck down low so they don't see me, but...

I wish I was tall.

Slide

On the downhill slide after my birthday, a busy day of phone calls, a trip to the Big City and the usual:laundry, varmints which includes a pesky mole determined to undermine prime cabbage and garden fine tuning, it's returned to subnormal here in Kickapoo Center.

The area is experiencing a Seattle Rain-slow and steady without the need of umbrella or protection. The golf course, as Titus once described this place, has turned to rough in two days of drizzle. The cabbage plant wilted from mole tunneling now stands straight and tall, eager to jump out of the soil. I've eaten spinach for breakfast lunch and dinner. The Pooch comes in from the rain. He announces his entry just like his morning greeting- a single, monosyllabic high pitched yow without the me attached to it. I can leave the back door open for him in rainy weather because the flies and mosquitoes don't fly in the rain. I dry him off with a white terry cloth towel from Sam's Club. He slept on the red shag area rug in the upstairs bathroom last night. Dawn says she thinks he likes the rug because it's cooler than our bed. He waits until 6:00 before jumping on the bed to nuzzle and lick me. He one smart cat. Once he gets me out of bed, the next task is to get me to fix breakfast for him. He sits under the arbor vitae tree at the corner of the deck. While my spinach omelet is fluffing in the cast iron skillet, I chop raw chicken gizzards for him. Then, I open the kitchen window,"Pooch, your breakfast is ready." I see him scamper from under the tree and onto the sidewalk between the house and the privet hedge. It takes him awhile to get back inside because there are mandatory stops along the way to sniff and prod bugs, rub against the open door marking it as Pooch territory and thinking again about knocking something over in the entrance way just for fun.

Without the distraction of cable TV, I read. You could say I'm a rabid reader. Wisconsin Public radio has a noontime segment called, A Chapter a Day." I catch a brief segment working in the garage. I was WPR deprived for weeks when the plug on the radio broke. The host is reading excerpts from Driftless by David Rhodes. As the name implies, the novel is set in this area called the Driftless Region since the southwest heel of Wisconsin is missed by glaciers during the ice age. Hence, no drift of gravel, sand, eskers or moraines. Just coulees and steep hills. The eighty-some year old head librarian in the small town six miles south is a pistol and a fount of energy. When I suggested ordering the book last week, she goes to her computer and looks up the title and author. In order to cut shipping costs, she also orders Alexander McCall Smith's latest book about Botswana, the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency and Precious Ramotswe called Tea Time For The Traditionally Built.

I wonder if the "after birthday let-down" causes me to well up when I read the jacket notes about Driftless. David Rhodes is an up and coming author with three published works. Then he is paralyzed in a motorcycle accident in 1977. Driftless takes ten years to write. I imagine the other twenty years an uphill struggle after the accident. I read the prologue. The setting for the novel is a small town called Words. It could be anyone one of the small towns in the tri-county area-Liberty, Esofea, Beaches Corners, Avalanche, Cataract, or Seneca. I'm jealous of his success . At the same time I know the dedication and determination it takes to publish.

I'm making a list for a trip to the bank, Wal-Mart and the hardware store. The only reason I shop Wal-Mart is that I'm cheap and poor. That's the reason most everyone in the area, old retired people, dirt poor farmers, young married couples working for $6.75 an hour- the bottom feeders in rural America. I dress up going to Wal-Mart. That means I wear clean blue jeans and a shirt without an offensive slogan. Only the Amish are better dressed than me in Wal-Mart. A secondary reason to look "decent" is that many of the employees are friends from the time I worked in the dairy department. A 15 minute shopping list takes an hour. Conversation to catch up rules. I also have a mental list of tasks I want to complete. I briefly consider blowing off another segment of Kickapoo Center Follies.

There are many things the readers of this blog are unaware and lacking in information. The structure of a blog inhibits details and descriptive elements. I censor everything. One flash I have eating breakfast is to go back to self publishing. It goes to the same place as the segment called, Allo, Allo Is Anyone There ?- a tribute to the foibles and inadequacies of Allopathic medicine. The time and expense of sending out paper copies is a big deterrent. Other segments I've stifled: Unlax- Bugs Bunny in the country. Rosie and Rainbow, a segment from the Hippie years living across the road from a 100 member commune. Penelope subtitled Penny-elope, the true story of marrying a Prima Donna high school cheerleader, I Wish My Sister Was My Mother a character substitution in which my mystic and crazy step mother is replaced by her daughter- a carbon copy in everything except the craziness. No, I am not psycho-neurotic. My step sister could have saved me amazing amounts of childhood terror. I should follow Navajo restriction and never mention my step mother now that's she's gone. Who could forget my hard working saint of a step-Dad standing in the kitchen telling her she's "full of !@#$." Matthew if you're reading this, you have no idea how your phone call on my birthday hit a deep note telling me, your step Dad, how much you loved me. My left eye twitches. I have to blink several times to see the monitor.

I've temporarily lost contact with the outside world. The Pooch has visited and disappeared out the back door, making sure his Pork Chop is still here. He needs dry food and I need to pick up a bag of compost for Dawn's upside down tomato planters for the retirement home. The picture you ask? The number in the center was my auction number for the recent Amish Quilt auction last weekend. I mention this as a way of nudging karmic balance. Let me explain, briefly.

Dawn is on-call for emergencies at the retirement home on a rotating basis. She was on-call last weekend. Two emergencies pop up in the middle of the auction. Then dark menacing clouds bring rain in the fore noon. I attempt to bid on a Titus quilt. I raise my hand to bid when the price seems to flatten out at $180. The auctioneer and his Amish helpers don't see my raised hand because the bobble head in front of me jumps up and down to allow a dip-stick in the same row to graze for coffee or doughnuts or pie, whatever? Yesterday, I drive to their farm for eggs. Titus tells me a woman from West Allis named Sandy walks off with $500 worth of merchandise without paying. The phone number she gives is phony. The Amish are too trusting and don't verify driver's licenses, addresses:basic information. So Sandy in West Allis watch out for the cosmic slap. You defrauded simple people raising money for their non-profit school in an intentional way. May the slap be hard and painful. I volunteer to check driver's licenses of those not familiar to the Amish. I quip, "I'll also do blood tests."

Thriller

The local library specializes in mystery, suspense and thrillers. Many are detective stories. I sort through the good, bad and terrible. They all have several things in common: A main plot, a side romance, a fallen hero, lots of investigative filler and, if they're a New York Times bestseller, they will have multiple side plots and a Deja Vu or a flashback.

This is the Kickapoo Center version with little or no descriptive element. I'm on top of farming for now, but I'm behind in other areas. Some of my days start at five in the morning and end at seven in the evening. I've left dinner prep to Dawn.

The local dairy farmer is busy planting corn in the fields around us. An endless stream of farm machinery runs down our dead end farm lane. He hires the co-op in Westby and other ne'er do wells to perform specialized tasks like spreading chemicals or spraying for weeds. He's a agri-businessman with little environmental concern. Short term money goals are prominent in his decision making. At 8:45 a few evenings ago Dawn and I head outside to confront a pickup with two men speeding down the lane. "What's your name," Dawn asks brusquely. I repeat the license plate number. After hearing a lame excuse about checking the fields that have been planted, I add, "bull!@#" and call the sheriff. Forty five minutes later the sheriff shows up. He fourteen going on fifteen. He takes down all our concern about safety, residential area, late night trips with two kids looking for anything not tied down and offers little help other than going to talk to the farmer who hires these yahoos. Both here and in Arizona our property taxes are thousands lower than our suburban Milwaukee home. Here we have few services and a sheriff that could star in Green Acres. I keep a baseball bat near the garage door for "self protection." If necessary I'll protect myself by smashing headlights of late night truck runners. At the next town meeting we'll petition for a warning sign and speed ordinance. Should be fun.

The Pooch disappears. He scoffs at the raw catfish breakfast and strolls outside. He sits on the woodpile collecting a new batch of wood ticks and watching for mice. I hope he is smart enough to avoid the snakes. When I start up the rototiller in the lawn shed, he runs for cover. He's gone for ten hours. I walk to the neighbors and ask if they've seen him. The short answer is no. One of their smaller two year old horses comes to the fence and looks at me with big, gooey eyes. I rub its nose. Maybe we need a horse. Dawn says, "I know zip about horses." The Pooch shows up as I walk to the garage to toss cans in the recycling containers. Thirty mile an hour winds blow the garbage cans across the lawn. The Pooch is cat-chalant. I pick him up and toss him inside. He avoids me the rest of the night. We're both ticked off.

I spend $75 for new garden hose and a fancy metal sprinkler. The old hoses are stretched across the road to the front field. I don't worry about leaving them as farm machinery repeatedly runs across the rubber hose. For dinner we have baby spinach in a mixed greens salad. In a restaurant this would be one of the $9.00 salads with the thousand dollar name. It takes the sting out of spending money on farm equipment. The next night we have cooked spinach and I find two perfect little radishes growing in the potatoes. A small gift from over the winter. The peas are climbing the trellis I made when I sowed two kinds of edible podded peas. I congratulate them for their smartness. The cukes are emerging. I hope they see the fancy climbing trellis I made for them. Even the peppers which took a hit from high winds and cold are sending up new leaves. I ask the cabbages to give them a high five.

The hummingbirds are fighting over control of the feeder. I add a second to disperse their anger. I may have to add a third. Robins are dooking it out on the lawn and blackbirds are mating in the trees. Unusual bird songs ring out in the backyard. An oriole is attracted to the nectar feeder. I buy oranges but don't have any grape jam. The geese pass noisily overhead in pairs or small V's. Sandhill cranes croak down at the river bottoms. Small sparrows chase each other in a whirly-twirly fashion. Yellow throats call "witchty-witchity- witichy" from bushes. Every time I mow, I find another hawk feather I choose to think of as a special gift.

Dawn's father has a heart attack( he's 87) and blocked arteries. She spends all day Tuesday with him in the hospital trying to keep him from pulling out his I.V.'s. At night the nurses wake the both of them up frequently. Shift changes and blood pressure readings are the reason. FOL (fear of lawsuit) is the other. She leaves right after he goes into surgery on Tuesday afternoon. He's discharged on Thursday. I'm happy because more people die in hospitals from infectious disease and in our area, raw, untrained personnel. Dawn tells me of some people that she comes in contact with. Medical and caring services use a 24 hour military clock to track time so there is no mistaking am or pm. Some of the staff cannot decode 1500 hours. Sad.

This weekend there's an Amish quilt auction. It starts at 7:00 am with a pancake breakfast. We're going there to learn. I wish I had more money. I've seen some of the quilts that Titus' family makes. Behind the old house Titus' wife is talking with a man standing by a charcoal grill-the big industrial kind made from a barrel. There are chairs stacked on the porch of the new house. A rusty wheelbarrow planted with flowers looks like an auction item delivered early. Titus has been scarce of late.

Side romance? Number one son's former girlfriend is stalking him. He plans a pub crawl for his birthday. Number two son is coming up for my birthday. Not wanting to crawl through farmers bars in town, I plan a dinner at Piggy's restaurant. Dawn says it's closed that day. We may have to settle for Buzzard Billy's " Flying Carp Inn".

A Note to sAM

Chompin' at the bit...

It's after nine. The sink is full of dishes from last night's walleye dinner and this morning's confetti waffles. In spite of the name, they were tasty and delicious. Walnuts, craisins, chocolate chunks, butter,eggs, milk and a dash of pure vanilla. Dawn leaves for a four hour drive across the state to visit her Dad. He's in the hospital after suffering a heart attack. Big black clouds loom in the east, south and west. There's no indication of rain in the forecast. Last night I collapse into my recliner after another Olympian event of small farming. I didn't finish cultivating. If it rains, the tender crops-squash, pumpkins and gourds will go into the ground. I'm getting their beds ready for planting. The Pooch helps by pooping in the soft soil I rototill. When it comes to weeds in the early part of the season, you have to "hit 'em hard, fast and low" to quote my high school football coach.

A woman in Michigan whose blog I follow, leaves me a nice comment. On Sunday afternoon, I leave a comment reply and e-mail her similar regards. Both the blog format and especially, the space allowed for comments, is difficult for a motor mouth like me. In one of her recent posts, she mentions "fuss" at work. She's a teacher. Fuss is my label. I have to tell her of my experiences as an inner city teacher for two tours of duty and a total of 15+ years, longer if you include my year and a half as a substitute teacher. The total time as a teacher would and could extend longer if you include working with adults in some of the classes I organized and taught with Dawn's help as part of the art and craft business I started when I left teaching. I'll be a teacher until I'm buried and after that too, if I need to come back and haunt some people ( that's a joke).

Teacher's love turmoil.

At least that's my inner city experience. Out here, I avoid substituting because they give me the tough assignments none of the regular substitutes will handle. The kids here are pussycats compared to city kids. Even the worst special needs and behaviorally challenged would have a hard time one-upping some of the children I taught over the years. Thus, local teachers are what I'd term conservative, staid and for the most part low key. The substitute dispatcher gives me an assignment for one-on-one teaching of kid sent out here from the city to a group home who got expelled. She uses the term naughty to explain his behavior. I stifle a guffaw.

At the beginning of the school year there's an orientation for teachers and substitutes. The principal of the middle school tells the audience of a disturbing problem with her daughter. They take away her cell phone because she sent over 1,000 text messages in one month's time . They're aghast. I'm concerned because it's part of a trend with young people to communicate via abbreviations, short sentences, blurbs and so on. Language skills are diminishing.

One of the schools I did a ten year stint in has a serious problem with theft, vandalism and muggings. In one year 36 teachers had their cars broken into. Two cars were stolen. One substitute ran so fast to avoid being mugged, her shoes flew off as she ran back to the safety of the school building. As an aside, if you lived in the inner city, were poor and saw shiny new cars parked around a brick school building wouldn't you think of it as a candy shop? Yes, it's a serious problem. A bigger problem was the churning of energy that started with the school secretaries and worked it's way up to the staff. A friend and professor who happens to be Native American once described in a class on Native American Dreams and Visions how a person can attrack negativity to themselves by their thoughts and actions. I saw it happen first hand. Sam, you were right to stay out of the fray.

Oh, I forgot to add laundry to the above list of tasks. Which also reminds me of one of Sam's posts about splurging and buying Tide instead of a lower price detergent. I know it's a small matter, but it really impressed me. Every time I add a cup of that fluffy off-brand detergent to my whites, I wonder if they'd be cleaner if I broke down and used Tide. Then, perhaps I wouldn't have to add 20 Mule Team Borax.

So, if I don't leave a comment it doesn't mean your words don't leave an impression. They do. I'm glad to be part of a larger community of people who like to share events in their lives.

Twelve Hour Shifts

"That's it," I yell to Dawn who's covering baby beet plants at the far end of the field. At dusk I ask her to escort the Pooch inside. "I'll be inside in a moment." I shrug off making 26 small cardboard box covers for transplants. Instead, I cover them with plastic Dixie cups. The Pooch was absent all afternoon. I expected him to find cover from gusty winds that threw the empty garbage cans across the yard. By 7:15 the sun is lower in the west and I'm getting worried. Unusual behavior for a cat that likes to come in and grab a bite to eat, take a nap and follow me around while I work in the garden. "Is that the cat near the steps?" Dawn asks. At 8 pm he makes his appearance to help with the preparations for the upcoming frost advisory. He sticks his paw down a hole left from a garden stake I'd pulled. Then he walks over bedsheets covering herb transplants. He finds one especially comfortable and watches us work.

This morning I see him ambling along peony plants in the back forty heading for the neighbors. As he gets to the property line I call out. "Where are You going?" He stops. Oh, oh, caught in the act of disappearing. He trots toward me and I walk to him. Maybe he'll show me his hiding place. As I stand by the horse corral waiting for him to make his move, I wonder if it wouldn't be easier raising horses. All one has to do is throw them a bale of hay, make sure there's enough water and, perhaps, ride around the flats down by the river. Pipe dream.

Saturday is dump day. We're set to dive the dumpster for milk jugs and water jugs. I bring twine to tie them together. After a brief conversation with the dump master sharing weather information and other important facts, such as how to anchor a milk jug in high winds, we leave with 30+ plastic jugs, a few black plastic plant pots and three white plastic pails. I tie them to a fence post in the garden. Later, while mowing the back forty I see Dawn running after milk jugs escaping toward the river. I count plants and containers. I'm a big fan of insurance. Not the kind you have when there an auto accident and then they cancel you. The kind where you do one thing and the opposite happens. I know the cabbages are frost tolerant. If I don't cover the recent transplants. they'll wilt and die.

I make 40 cardboard orange boxes I'd saved from Wal-Mart. The boxes that say, made from real oranges, not from fake oranges. We've got 88 plastic Dixie cups, 2 rolls of landscape fabric, old bedsheets, a 50 foot roll of black plastic covering a half finished patio, clear plastic paint drop cloths used in the kitchen remodel, assorted odd plastic covering art work in the barn, rags, old drapes, and an assortment of wood fence post ends, boards, pails of sand, rocks, landscape timbers to weigh down the crop covers- all of which lies wet and frost covered in the grassy strips next to the 10X80 garden plots.

The Pooch grunts and moans occasionally on the foot of the bed. I stick my nose next to his and he licks it. Big yawn. From his 5:00 am greeting meow to soft sighs at 6:30, I cover my head and try not to think about the garden. At 7 I'm dressed and checking the thermometer under cover between the house and garage. It says -thirty degrees. The radio called for temperatures in the high twenties. For an hour I uncover what we covered 12 hours earlier, inspecting for possible frost damage. Only the basil looks wilted. One cabbage plant got crushed by it's plastic cup cover. The sun has warmed the ground covers. Everything is dripping wet. Water runs off the roof of the bird feeder. Hummingbirds that stoked up on nectar while robins grabbed that last worm in the twilight are back to the feeder, luxuriating in the warm sun. By the end of the uncovering process, the temperature is in the forties.

On the weather map, the two large H' s have moved toward the east. Most of the country is looking at clear, sunny weather. There's another low coming from California. Predicted low temperatures start with the mid forties and rise to the fifties by midweek. Warm and dry. Time to get out the watering cans .

Oh, Deer.

The varmint alert is over and earlier warnings have gone from fire engine red down to mossy green. I wake up early at 5:45. Whenever I'd get up to use the bathroom, I'd frequently peer out the upstairs windows at the area in front of the barn illuminated by two floodlights. Nothing appeared to be moving. I shelve the idea of getting a dog. The live trap, baited with bacon and cat food is empty. The Pooch hears me moving about downstairs and follows me into the entryway. I slip on an old sweater and my muck boots.

Yesterday something dug up a corner of the corn garden. I laid landscape fabric as a test along the south side of this patch and planted leftover cabbages in slits cut in the fabric. My experience with the black fabric is that weeds like to grow on top of the fabric. The varmint dug up a corner to get at bugs and worms under the fabric. It also pawed a three foot area along the chives plot. I'm convinced this is a possum. The behavior is a bit odd. Digging at the stake at the end of the wax bean row, the possum ignored more beans in the row. The Pooch is following my trail in the garden plots. I check the cabbage transplants. Disheartened because so many were drooping in yesterday's sun, I wrote off 50% of the harvest. Now at six am in the cool, dewy morning all transplants are perky. Their leaves are poised up toward the morning sun. Along the garden plot where new buttercruch lettuce is beginning to appear are tracks. Deep tracks. In one track near the end of the row, I see a bunch of fur. Guard hair from a deer. I look around at all the crows and weird birds and Heckle & Jeckles with cigars drooping from their maws. "Nice job of scaring off the deer." I mutter.

On the highway a little bit to the west of the barn, crows are jostling on the gravel apron. A doe lies on her side. I surmise the doe was probably the one grazing in the garden the past few days. No possum or raccoon would pass up the teat in the live trap. "That'll learn ya," I sneer. I walk back to the house.

Anatomy of decision making: I stand at the rear entrance, musing. Fresh deer road kill? Am I that poor, I need to eat road kill? Dawn doesn't care for venison. What about all that venison jerky and sausage? Do I need to call the sheriff? By the time I call the sheriff and what not, the deer will be rotting and bloated. Can I drag it off without anybody seeing me? What if they catch me? I've got a morning of processing chicken broth and meat scraps from the backs and necks. I don't have the time to butcher a doe. What to do? What to do?

I drag the doe to the barn. There's no traffic. Inside the barn, I examine it. Poking the ribs I can find no broken bones. The neck is intact. No limbs are broken. On the highway there was a small amount of blood coming from the muzzle and a little green bile. I poke some more. The stomach is curiously distended. It appears to be bloated. I imagine gutting it and a huge blast of gas escaping. Eeyew. The Pooch is curious and tries to sneak in the barn. I walk to the house and he follows. When I attempt to pick him up, he hisses at me. Whoa, that's weird behavior for a normally lovable tabby. He jumps down, I pick him up. He hisses and crawls under the woodpile. Strange. I lure him out from under the woodpile, pat him on the head. He appears to be a little sheepish for getting angry with me. Of course, he follows me back to the barn. I chase him back to the house and drag the doe back up to the highway. This critter died from eating something poisonous or possibly died from CWD ( chronic wasting disease). No one drives down the highway, but Dawn stands at the upstairs windows watching my antics. I quickly wash my hands and go back the making coffee. I tell the Pooch to stay away from the highway. If he can read my mind when I pick him up to put him in the house then he read my thoughts about the highway.

Before I go to the blog, I check the weather. The low temperatures on Saturday have been revised down from 35 to frost and freezing temperatures. After my morning of processing chicken broth ( ten chickens cut into legs, thighs, breasts and wings fill a basket in the bottom of the upright freezer) I'll need to make preparations for covering all the peppers and tender plants. This is no small feat.