Kittens!

Remiss of me to not report the most important event in our household this year—kittens!

My excuse: This is a yard-and-garden blog, and the kits have nothing to do with our outdoor life. Nevertheless, they will eventually become indoor/outdoor cats and play their own parts in our landscape. So here they are, and here’s their story.

Friends of ours from autosports collect, buy, sell, and race BMWs. One day they had to remove a rare European version of a BMW sedan from a ratty old barn where it had been stored for a decade. So they wrestled their way in, dug out the car, tossed loose parts and stuff inside it, dragged it onto a trailer, and towed it home.

It sat in the driveway for four days before they had a chance to clean it out in preparation for sale. At that point they found, beneath the junk in the backseat, three very hungry kittens.

Not being pet people, owing to their crazy work and racing schedules, they weren’t equipped to suddenly become cat-parents. But they dashed out anyway to get supplies and commenced kitten caretaking until homes could be found. Keeping with the BMW theme, they named them Boris, Manfred, and Werner.

Meanwhile, spouse and I had emerged from the grief of losing three of our four cats in 18 months, and were ready to get a kitten or two in replacement. The surviving three-year-old was getting bored and lonely, and we missed the love and companionship that comes with a full-size furry family.

So we visited the local farm where two of the cats had come from 13 years before, only to learn that there was no litter this spring. Disappointed yet relieved (were we really ready?), we returned home . . .

. . . and found an e-mail containing the above story and photo.

A week later, our friends drove six hours on a stormy night to bring us all three kittens. By then they were approximately a month old and weighed about a pound apiece. It had also been determined that one was female, so Manfred had been re-dubbed Minnie.

Now they are almost three months old and a second one has been identified as female. Both girls have been renamed: Spirit and Cricket. The male, Werner, has not yet shown what his permanent name should be, so we're temporarily calling him Blondie.

Spirit

Cricket

Werner/Blondie

All are happy, healthy, vigorous, and have tripled their size and weight. They are at the crazy-kitten stage where they get into everything and make constant mess around the house.

Our young-adult cat took a mere five days to get over the surprise before adopting them. We are counting on him to teach them how to be cats, since they had no chance to learn from their mama. For now our challenge is to keep him from playing too hard with them. The games started when he was literally ten times their size and weight; they grow so fast, that differential has now been halved, yet he still has the power to hurt them by accident. It’s a good thing we work at home full-time!

Pond repair, ctnd.

I went away for three days and came back to find the empty pond essentially refilled. Amazing spouse did the whole repair himself in two day! Here's his summary of the situation.

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At this time the pond is ½ full depth wise, just a bit over a foot below the lowest point of last year.
I have two leaks on the very lower sides where I had tried to bed in the rubber sheet but then removed it and by the time of removal was far enough below water I was not willing the reach down to reflow the tar. If I had a scuba mask I could have fixed it. Carolyn just got back from RI and guided me as I used a tool to reach 5' below water and plug the leaks with plastic bags.
I would like to get the scuba gear and go down and do it right.

I would say the pond is ready for fish and at the current rate of filling should be all the way up on Tuesday.

So, yesterday at 11AM Friday there are 13 boards on the lower section at a touch under 6" wide each.

And again at 4pm Friday, water was well over my waist at this time.

And at noon on Saturday

The pond when I started on Friday,

And midday Saturday. The sticks in the canoe are what I cut off the submerged tree.
I am tired.

Down the drain

Followers of this blog may remember an entry last summer about fixing the leak in our pond ("Our Pond," 8/12/12).

Today I must report an unhappy follow-up to that episode. Around midday, I stepped out on the deck to look across our little world as the weather cleared after three days of rain -- and saw that the pond had disappeared.

OMG!

Apparently our hard-won repair to the outflow gave way against water pressure and split sometime overnight, emptying the entire half-acre basin in one big swoosh.


We knew this was a possibility but had fingers crossed all winter and spring, hoping the patch would hold and we could effect a proper repair under controlled conditions at our convenience this summer.

Alas, not to be.

Now it's an emergency repair, for there's just a small pool left in the deepest part where a few fishes managed to survive. The rest, presumably, went down the drain with the water and, hopefully, made it all the way through the runoff channel through the woods to the river (which itself had been stripped of aquatic life two years ago during the flooding from Hurricane Irene).

Hubby rigged a rope to hang on to as he slid down the mucky slope to inspect the damages. Along the way, he found a dozen or so freshwater clams still alive, stuck on the exposed bank, and tossed them into the pool. So maybe there will be enough creatures left over to repopulate when all is done and the pond refills. Too soon to tell.

Not only is this a distressing hit to a micro ecosystem, but also an unwelcome disruption to our already too-long list of delayed and complicated projects. *sigh* The joys of homeownership and land stewardship.

Here's how it looks. I hope, in the not too distant future, to post a photo of the normal water level back up against the bottom of the dock.

Before the leaves

Of all the things I love about spring, the best is the way the land comes alive before the leaves break out.

In November/December—a.k.a. “Stick Season”—you get to see the contours of the landscape through the trees, but everything is brown and gray and shriveling. In April/May, you get the same long views and revealed features while the land turns progressively more colored.

During one season, the living world is contracting; during the other, it’s expanding back into life. So although the scenery is technically the same, one season brings dismay and the other inspires joy.

Then there’s the light. In spring it gets stronger by leaps and bounds, and a sunny day is bedazzling. Whereas in fall, each day gets dimmer, faster, triggering the urge to dig in.

As the grasses slowly turn from beige-gold-mustard to lime and emerald, the flowers begin to stand up and shout. Yellows predominate: first coltsfoot, then daffodil and forsythia; with ground-hugging purples—crocuses, violets, myrtle—providing a near backdrop, while afar the hillsides acquire a mauvish tint signaling no more maple sugar.

Then come the secretive plants, which lurk under shrubs and in the forest’s humus, only blooming during the brief window between frost and leaf-out. These are the lovely wine-colored trilliums, and purple-speckled yellow trout lilies, and white-star bloodroots, along with uncurling ferns.

Each week, a new wave of songbirds returns, and wood or pond frogs emerge, to add musical accompaniment. One day you turn around to find that the grass needs mowing, insects have become bothersome, perennials are growing inches each day, and tender beauties like azalea opened up their bright hues overnight. Trees are so lushly budded that you expect to hear popping noises when they all unfold.

Everything happens within a few short weeks, regardless of weather. Suddenly lilacs and fruit trees are blooming and it’s time to put in the vegetable garden. Poof! Spring is over, and a green canopy covers the land.

The big blow, redux

Six months ago (October 26, 2012) I reported on the microburst that sliced through our neighbors’ parcels at the end of the road. Last night it was our turn, only instead of a straight-line chop, we had our own private tornado!

It had been windy all day—unusually and unnervingly so—but lessened as usual toward dusk. We checked the radar map before retiring, noting a bright green line running straight north-south, with yellow and red boxes well below us. This suggested that we would have a short, intense hammering of rain pass through overnight from the west but would not feel the main action.

Fine. Nighty-night!

But then, around ten o’clock . . . a dull, steady roar arose, which got louder and louder, closer and closer, inspiring neck hair to lift in instinctive alarm. Hubby was still up, trying to reboot our computerized weather station that was beeping after a split-second power drop a few moments before.

Since the juice had come right back on, I attended to the blinking bedside clock, trying to ignore the oncoming crescendo—until it broke against the house with a thunderous whoosh! that rocked the whole building! Then got louder, and stronger, and things outside started to crash and bang and rend in the dark.

We thought it might be a derecho, having heard a few of those roll in over the landscape in our lives. But this wind had an encompassing pressure that made me throw back the covers and start scrambling to get away from the windows.

Don’t know how long it lasted: long seconds or short minutes, followed by a pause, then lightning and thunder, then just rain, to which we fell asleep. In the morning we went outside at first light to inspect the aftermath. And found a strange combination of things.

Heavy items—like four metal extension ladders stacked horizontally atop each other across beams, which have never so much as rattled in a blow—had been lifted as a unit then dropped to the ground. Light things, like empty five-gallon fuel cans, drain basins, and pail lids, which had been left outside the shop door, were strung in a perfect diagonal line across the backyard to the treeline.

Yet very light items, such as the plastic-dome squirrel guard suspended from an S-hook in an apple tree, were still there (I bring in feeders at night and leave out this dome because it’s too hard to reach); and plastic sheeting enclosing an addition in process, already split and frayed and flapping from winter and UV damage, didn’t tear another inch. But a framed-in vinyl window in the same addition had been blown out of its track.

On the opposite side of the house, the trash can and loose things nearby were strewn across a diagonal line like the fuel cans but along an opposite axis. On both sides of the house, shingles on a particular roof face that had been shedding in onesies and twosies for years had been peeled en masse and, on one side, dropped to the deck, and on the other side, hurled up and over the house to scatter on the lawn. A metal panel on the same roof face, underneath our solar hot-water array, was folded upward, and glass bits from one of the solar tubes (also previously damaged) landed in the side yard with the shingles.

Yet only one resin deck chair went over. The others stood in place next to the glass-topped table, undisturbed.

All around the property, various types of firewood cover—plastic sheets, tarpaulins, short metal panels, all held down by hefty rocks and concrete blocks—took off, along with a metal rain barrel, which we had tipped upside-down for the winter behind the house. That launched about ten feet and clipped an outdoor faucet handle, giving us a well-pump-cycling mystery that took until midmorning to figure out.

Oddly, no broken limbs or fallen trees, not even shattered small branches. Nevertheless, we are VERY GLAD the big pine trees next to the house are gone! It’s hard to imagine that something wouldn’t have split and fallen during the cyclone. This sort of event is precisely why we went through the big fandango to take them down.

The debris patterns clearly indicate rotary wind direction. And unlike the straight-line microburst that hit our neighbors, this wind lifted things up instead of blowing them down. I checked the local newspaper and all our neighbors, only to learn that nothing happened anywhere else. Except with our closest neighbor, who heard the same huge noise and had a tree fall across his driveway. It broke halfway up, in the middle of the pine stand along our shared border.

Wow. Twenty-four hours later, I’m still rattled . . . and better understand what flatlanders experience when they hear that telltale “locomotive” sound that sets off sirens and makes people duck and cover!

Breaking through

I live for March!

Okay, maybe because it’s my birth month. Fifty-seven years ago today, I was born between two blizzards, so March is in my blood.

But “they” say that, in the arts, what makes a successful work is tension between opposing forces. That’s a perfect description of this crazy, mixed-up month.

Winter keeps trying to hang on; spring keeps trying to break through. Every day, in myriad ways, the conflict continues. Water breaking through ice. Plants breaking through frozen ground. Sun breaking through clouds.

Recent days have been classic: Sunny and in the forties with bluebird skies, then, rain, snow, ice, mud. Today we had squalls that made the world look like one of those snowglobes you shake at Christmas, followed by bright stabs of sun and biting winds, through which it kept snowing. Temps inched up to nip the bottom of the freezing mark but didn’t quite make it, though if you stood in a sheltered spot, you could take off your hat and coat.

One of my favorite sounds is the roar of meltwater cascading off the hills and filling the rivers, which then bludgeon the ice apart and flood their banks in a brown-green roiling torrent.

One of my favorite sights is the first redwing blackbird atop the apple tree, scouting for open water and ground, preceded or followed by flocks of other birds returning from the tropics or vacating their winter grounds. Yesterday we had at least a hundred redpolls swarm through, moving like a school of herring in waves and ripples. A few nights ago, I heard Canada geese honking their way back north out of sight above the clouds.

My favorite of all: the first daffodil poking through the mealy snow and rotted leaf litter. It was early this year, a special birthday gift.

But what makes the month really special is the equinox. It has its equivalent in the fall, but September lacks the conflict-tension of March. With rare exceptions, such as an early blizzard or a hurricane, the summer-to-autumn transition is slower, less dramatic, than the winter-to-spring transition. You can rely on the vernal equinox to be a busy time of contrasts and constant change. Gaining back light is more heartening than losing it, so coming out of winter is just plain more exciting than sinking into quietude. March is the birth of the new year, and birth is always messy and painful.

The date one is born is luck of the draw. I am so happy to have been born in March, which gives me a Happy New Year in so many ways.