Spring, Almost Summer

 It's Memorial Day weekend, so I suppose it's strange to still think of this as spring, but it's an absolutely beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, no humidity, and a healthy breeze. I'm typing this on the back porch, listening to the sounds of the birds, occasionally punctuated by the roar of a motorcycle or a truck from the road. 

Usually the rustling in the undergrowth beneath the pine trees that separates us from our neighbors to the side is a bird foraging for snacks, but right now I'm also looking at the fluffy little butt of a rabbit, one of two who earlier today inexplicably chased each other up from the pond, around the yard, and under the deck - kind of a bold move in full sunlight with hawks about. These both appear to be full-size rabbits, but last year our yard was occupied by one adult and one small rabbit I called Baby Bun, whose demise I sadly witnessed later in the summer. The one I'm watching now just seems to be hanging out in there - napping, possibly. 

Without a real garden to defend (we have just three pots on the deck this year, two basil varieties and an oregano, classic Italian), the rabbits and other local fauna, like the under-shed groundhog, are mostly welcome. The chipmunks are still assholes. I picked up a downspout extender to empty it of any sitting water this morning and - to my surprise - ejected an equally surprised member of Rodentia! Even though I closed their "subway stop" in the middle of the driveway when we had it resealed, I still periodically consider annihilating them. 

But nay, there is only one creature for whom I reserve my truly murderous rage, and that is the Canada goose. In February of this year, when we had a weirdly warm period and the ground had softened, I built The Fence: more than 650 feet of 3-foot poultry fencing, supported by posts hammered into the ground by yours truly. I even sucked it up and made first contact with our neighbors behind, who we call Todd and Margo, to get permission for the tiny sliver of the pond they own on the far side. In March, the first "scouts" began arriving periodically. I chased them off with my laser, but it seemed like some of them had "noticed" the fencing, and I hoped they'd be deterred. 

Now, fences mean nothing to an adult goose, but to a flightless gosling they're an impenetrable barrier. Without the ability to jump into the water for safety, they'd be easy prey come nightfall. In early May, I saw a family of geese with four goslings over at the lake on Snake Hill Road, less than a mile from us as the crow flies. There's not a huge amount of grass there, and I had a suspicion that these were "our" geese, who had always shown up with goslings. I was right. At the beginning of May, I came home one day to find them hanging out by the shallow end as if they owned the joint. I might have lost it a little - I chased them into the street with a rake, and held them at bay while a line of cars formed in both directions. Someone in a car asked me "oh, why don't you like them?" which is basically a line designed to raise my blood pressure. One pound of shit per day, per bird is the answer! Last year we had 11, in two families! Gahhh. 

Chasing them into the road, as satisfying as it was in the short term, was ultimately not going to accomplish anything. They came over the ridge behind Todd and Margo's house, and that was the direction I ultimately was able to harass them into going later that day. Just from a few hours of their presence, though, there was poop everywhere. Now, I could have done nothing, and waited to see if the fence did its trick overnight, but I just really can't deal with their presence here, full stop. The amount of psychic damage the sight of a Canada goose does to me is just unreal. So when they came back - because of course they did - I called Geese Relief, a company that uses border collies for geese control in parks and golf courses. Someone from the company lives in our neighborhood. I met Kate, and her dog Flyer, and learned that his services came at the rate of $50 per visit. Steep, but can you put a price on your sanity?

Kate has only been here a half-dozen times, but it's always been...an experience. Canada geese are loud, which means the entire fucking neighborhood - including all the do-gooder looky-loos who just wuv the widdle baby gooses - is aware that something is going down at our pond. Twice, one of the adults (I choose to believe it's the male) has abandoned his family at the threat of Flyer and sailed himself to safety in the pond, only to spend the next hour like the metronome from hell: "HONK...HONK...HONK..." Eventually he leaves, once he figures out the others are gone and not coming back, but the first time this happened, I saw a car drive slowly down the hill in front of our property...turn into Joe's driveway and turn around...and drive slowly back up the hill. I knew exactly what this was, so I move up to the road, and sure enough, this middle-aged woman has parked her car and is peering through the brush at the pond. "Is everything alright? Is she taking the babies?" I was not as diplomatic as I could have been, but I was very clear that this is a professional (whose branded vehicle was in my driveway), and that the geese are merely being made to feel unsafe. Ughhhh.

The downside of the "exit" back toward their original lake being on Todd and Margo's property was that I needed to get their permission for Flyer and Kate to cross onto it. So I did that, armed with a bottle of wine as an apology, and got permission from Todd. Except, a few days later, when Kate (who drives by our property regularly since she lives nearby) let me know they were back, she was promptly informed by Margo that she can't go on their property. Really annoying, and I'd like my damned bottle of wine back, Todd. 

Anyway, our most recent encounter revealed that their goslings now numbered only two (huzzah). Kate and Flyer drove off one adult and gosling and the male took to the pond again. This left one gosling outside the fencing and unable to get in, running at it headlong and falling over. The male wouldn't come out of the safety of the pond, but sat there honking at us, as Flyer menaced the gosling, trying to get it to run away. Now, thank God this happened on a Wednesday around lunchtime, with fewer neighborhood busybodies, because this was right by the road, and Flyer - who is still in training - was a little rough with the gosling. At one point Kate said she thought it might be dead, so I ran for the garage, returning with a contractor bag and gloves, fully ready to conceal the evidence of what is - technically - a federal crime in my front yard. 

But it wasn't dead. In fact, in a shocking turn of events, the gosling began to attack the dog. We're talking about a two-pound ball of gray fluff, wings spread and hissing, squaring up on a border collie. It bit the dog on the nose and Kate screamed - because guess what? Goslings are never aggressive. She had no idea what was going on. It kept going for Flyer - all while its parent is honking up a storm! - and I got to the point where I suggested to Kate that if she could herd it down the "alley," which is shielded from street view, maybe we could just let Flyer finish it off, since he had already taken a small nip out of its breast at some point in the tussle. Not super proud of this, but I honestly didn't know how this was going to end! Kate was mad about her dog, and madder still when it attacked again in the alley- she tripped over the poultry fence in protecting Flyer. I had a rock from the edge of the pond, and if I had better aim...well. I thought about it but didn't do it, and Kate wasn't going to have Flyer contradict his training. Ultimately, Kate and Flyer chased the gosling around the pond, and it headed over the ridge on its own. The male stuck around honking for 45 minutes and then left. 

This story has two codas. The first was around 5:30 that evening. I was relating this story to Joe, when we heard the awful honking and saw two geese circling overhead. I hoped - I prayed! But no, they landed in the pond. We suspect these were two of the six geese that our neighborhood hippie Justine is feeding down the road. Back I go to call Kate, she's there in five minutes, and 15 minutes later the geese decide they do not like it here and leave. Before she arrived I was yelling at them "you assholes are costing me $50!!"

This "$100-dollar-day" was on Wednesday of this week. We haven't seen any geese since, but I passed the lake yesterday and confirmed that they're there...and down to just one gosling. The vicious one that toddled off on its own got its just rewards. Now, these geese are around for another 6 weeks or so, so every victory is a "battle-and-not-the-war" situation. And it's not cheap, either. But every time I walk around my property without needing to stare at the ground to avoid shit, it's worth it. So fucking worth it. (But oh, if we just lived somewhere without so many adoring eyes on the geese...I would kill those fuckers and save myself the money).

And now for some happier content! Sara said to me last year, when I musing about not having any rue "hobbies," that it seemed like taking care of our property is a hobby and honestly it kind of is. This property requires so much work, lots of it of a kind of work I was definitely not anticipating when I thought vaguely about "owning a home," but the payoff is also awesome.

Even though the necessary consequence of having a pond is battling the geese, I love that fucking pond. I love watching the goldfish in the pond (there are dozens and dozens), I love seeing the turtles (who are very shy, and plop into the water if you get anywhere close), I love the seeing the herons show up for a meal (blue heron in the early morning, the little green heron in the afternoon). Like an idiot, I kind of love getting into my hip waders and removing unwelcome muck and aqueous plants from the shallow end. 

I love sitting the chairs facing toward the pond in the afternoon, watching the reeds swaying, with the red-winged blackbirds bouncing around on them.

 

I love the "wild" back end of the pond. The first year we lived here, I didn't have a push mower and this area was too steep for the tractor, so I had to let it go wild. Last year I uncovered it, and discovered yellow daffodils and, blooming now, yellow irises, which must have been planted by Don and Betty, the original owners. There are more yellow flowers on the opposite back edge, at the end of the "alley," but that's been completely taken over by various invasive species.

Last year I decided to to make the area around the remains of a tree stump sort of a little mini-garden, letting whatever was growing there go wild, including the bull thistles that I painstakingly dug out of the lawn elsewhere. They wind up growing to four feet in height, with lovely purple flowers, and the bees adored them! Unfortunately I didn't know that letting them go to see was the worst thing I could have possibly done, haha. All of the downward slope and the flat area between the "island" and the pond? All thistle, all the time. Going down there to take these photos while wearing flip-flops was likely playing "the floor is lava," except instead of lava, it's spikes. The only move now is to keep it under control by mowing it - and this year, prevent the ones on the "island" from going to seed.

This slope along the side of the pond has milkweeds coming up again! Last year I only got a single monarch, but I still hold out hope. Plus, not mowing this saves me the hassle of the push mower on the grade.

I also love watching things grow, especially after the effort of spreading new mulch, plucking out weeds and grubs, etc. Our bearded irises popped yesterday, and I harvested the first peonies from our "peony corner today." Our grow in a variety of white-to-pink colors, but I think the white ones with the pink inside are the ones that smell the absolute best.

Generally my policy has been to steward what's already here, rather than adding new stuff, but in the case of our rock wall, last summer I dug out the hostas that had been buried along the long side, where they were not only getting full sun, which they hate, but were literally getting "cooked" by the warmth of the rocks. Even the ones you can still see here will be miserable-looking by midsummer, while the ones on the shadier side of the house will still be full and pretty. I transplanted three of them under the laurel tree in the front, and they're doing well, but the roots of these bastards are deep. I replaced them with these purple salvias. Originally I was going for lavender, but a guy at Van Wilgen's advised us that these are a bit easier to grow. Frankly, I doubt my abilities for new plants, and the salvia was half the price - sold!

Of course part of ye olde land management means keeping an eye on what I need to control (mugwort, Tree of Heaven) or eradicate (poison ivy). I realized that the alley was being overrun with poison ivy, which Sean is really allergic to, and it was also on the opposite side of the property underneath the pines in the front year. So, yesterday morning, I put on a disposable Tyvek suit and gloves and ripped out an entire contractor's bag full! Cleaning my boots and tools with mineral spirits, rubbing alcohol, and soapy water has - I think - done the trick, and I haven't had any reactions so far, but I'm going to use nitrile gloves to drag the bag to the curb for trash this week just in case. 

 

So yes: the house and the land and the pond are my hobby, and this is the season when that hobby is the most rewarding. When I was visiting Sara and Zach last weekend, they shared a party-game question they'd asked other friends: if you had fuck-you money and could only own two houses anywhere in the world, where would they be? My immediate answer was that I would keep our house (adding one in Italy of course), and use the fuck-you money to do all the things. I'd buy out Todd and Margo and put an impenetrable goose fence up on that ridge. I'd hire the most eco-friendly landscapers and landscape designers to remove all of the invasives and non-natives and replace them with natives (and keep up on the management, naturally). I'd trench the electrical to the pond and put in a bomb-ass fountain. Or maybe do the solar panels. Or maybe both? I'd have fuck-you money! Obviously there's things we would do to the actual house, too, like expand the kitchen so Sean could have an actual island...but mostly I dream of what I'd do to the property, haha. 

I love it here. 

Two Years and a Boat

Yesterday marked two years since we officially moved into our house! The occasion was also heralded by the achievement of my long-standing dream to successfully get our rowboat into the pond. 

During our first spring season in the house, in 2021, I rather optimistically moved the boat from the shed down to the shallow end of the pond. And there it stayed, like a picturesque overgrown lawn ornament, all through the summer and fall, until we brought it back up to the shed for winter storage. I thought about not being bringing it down there this spring; after all, it didn't seem to do much besides being picturesque except accumulate weeds and lots of spiders. But I've increasingly felt like that pond owes me for all I do to take care of it -- clearing the overflow drain of sticks, dead reeds, clumps of duckweed; weeding the shallow end during this summer's drought; wading back in in my ridiculous green plastic overalls after the water returned to rip out the weeds that stubbornly refused to drown. The pond owed me some joy, and joy I would have! Oh, and I also wanted to see if I could cut some of the dead and dying reeds that were falling into the water (and which would soon become more blockage for me to remove from the drain). So, pleasure and practicality combined, which I think is fairly on brand for me. 

Sean has never been particularly interested in this, but he agreed to "supervise" on a reasonably warm October morning. We had to haul the boat out of its weedy nest first, then do a little weed-whacking and use a pole saw to cut some of the invasive reeds that had spread into the "launch" part of the water. It still wasn't quite enough space, but I waded in and Sean used a little force to shove the boat through the weeds, et voila! What I was surprised by was how easy it was to get into the rowboat and maneuver around. I think that was a lot of what was holding me back from trying; I thought it would either be unstable and I'd go ass over teakettle, or there wouldn't be enough water for it to have clearance. In case of the first, I had acquired the very sexy life jacket seen in the photo (covering the equally sexy hip waders), and for the second, I was very mistaken how little water the boat needed. I was even able to "come alongside" the shallow end, where the water's probably only 18-24" deep.

There were two oars in the shed, but I quickly realized that without oarlocks, there was too much risk of dropping an oar in the drink, so I stowed one and just alternate sides to move around. I went into the center of the pond (and saw the little turtles at the far end fleeing my presence by jumping into the water!), where the water did indeed seem quite deep. I'll have to borrow Joe's 10-foot pole on my next trip. It brought me so much joy to be out there paddling about, after two years idly thinking "we should try out that boat!" I didn't even mind the number of neighbors who very clearly slowed down their cars or lingered at the cross street to stare at me, haha. 

After that, I spent a bit of time cutting the reeds and hauling as much of them into the boat as I could. Getting splashed in the face by dripping roots, not super awesome, but I achieved my purpose! The reed also proved helpful for maneuvering, since they're pretty strong and well-rooted - I could grab on to them and pull the boat closer until I could cut it near the waterline. I even used some reeds to line the boat up for "landing" - then I tossed Sean the rope, climbed out, and he pulled it ashore. (He had been sitting on a rock pondside playing cards on his phone while I was doing this - beyond taking the photo, his role was merely to watch out in case he heard a shriek and a "plop"!)

It's also beautiful this time down year down the little allée on the far side of the pond. (Pretentious much? Yes, but when you have to haul brush and try not to roll your ankle on the slope while avoiding the poison ivy, it helps to cast things in an elegant light, haha). Sometimes I get discouraged, not just by the amount of work that has to be done just to keep the property in reasonable shape, but by how many of the plants are invasive non-natives that I'll probably never have the money, time, or energy, to fully eradicate and replace with natives. Or I'll get discouraged by how less-than-manicured everything looks, even though the rational part of me is fully on board with the program of no watering, no chemicals, encouraging clover, etc. etc. But then I look at our semi-feral borders and see all the wildflowers blooming (goldenrod, blue aster, and little white daisy fleabane), and I realize that most of the houses I go running by in our neighborhood don't have those, because they keep things neat. By the long side of the pond, even though the milkweed didn't bring many monarchs this year, the wild patch of weeds beside it is humming with bee activity, even in October, because it's fully of the little white daisies. That makes me so happy.

And here, after our single successful "sail" of the season, is the boat after having been washed and being prepared for winter storage. Next year we might have to get Sean a pair of waders if we want to recreate the "Kiss the Girl" scene from Little Mermaid, haha. 

 

STITAH 2022

In mid-July, I participated in Yale's Summer Teachers Institute in Technical Art History, a weeklong seminar designed to give professors (not just art historians, but a couple of chemists and one painting teacher) first-hand understanding of art conservation and conservation science, with the theme "A Brush with the Artist." There were no assignments, unlike the NEH summer program I did in 2019; just daily on-sites in the galleries and labs, interspersed with hands-on workshops designed to give us a better sense of a few painting techniques. I counted myself lucky that I've always been interested in "technical art history," because if this was all otherwise new to me, I think I might have been bowled over by the amount of information coming at me at once. As it was, I found it immensely interesting and stimulating, if a bit maddening to recognize the vast gulf in resources between what YUAG and YCBA can do with the objects in their care vs. what we can do. 

One of the first class sessions in Dr. Hall's Renaissance grad seminar was entitled "The Hermeneutics of Facture." It was my first month of grad school, and I remember seeing that on the syllabus and thinking "oh shit, I am not cut out for this!" I actually don't know whether that was intended to be a joke (she does have a sly sense of humor) or it was just her being fancy. Anyway, I remember that we were assigned in groups to read technical articles, and mine was Joyce Plesters on the cleaning of one of the Titians in the NG London, possibly the Bacchus and Ariadne. I didn't expect to write my dissertation on Titian at the time, just happy accident, but I enjoyed it! Fast forward to 2012: in preparing for my exams, technical art history was one of the themes I was writing draft essays on. Here's my introductory paragraph:

Over the course of the 20th century, conservation and technical analysis became an integral part of the art historical apparatus.  As techniques (including X-rays, infrared, and chemical analysis) advanced, they have told us more about the materials, techniques, and working practice of individual artists.  Technical analysis has also responded to changes in the questions scholars are asking, for example as the field shifted from an early connoisseurial interest in separating original from copy to the growing interest in methods of reproduction in the workshop.  These developments have not come without controversy, particularly in terms of cleaning and restoration.  Particular problems also remain in terms of integrating technical data into art historical monographs and catalogs, although there have been recent promising advances.

Look at the baby art historian! Still putting two spaces between her sentences. Actually, STITAH corrected one misapprehension that I've evidently held since the beginning: elsewhere in the essay I made reference to chemical analysis of materials being possibly through the use of "core samples," which I envisioned as being extracted with a syringe, kind of like a geological core, but I learned that it's done with a scalpel, like slicing a piece of a mole for a biopsy.

Anyway, since I've been teaching the Technology and Art intro course, I've been able to apply some of my interests in the classroom, which has been really fun. It's kind of unusual to feel like something we're doing is "cutting edge" (it's Fairfield, c'mon), but Yale is only now redesigning its intro courses to follow a similar "deep dive" idea. And although it's always humbling to be reminded of the scale and scope of Yale's art collection, some of my fellow STITAH-ers were coming from institutions that had no collections of any kind to teach from. I'm lucky not only to have a museum, but to work in the museum, which makes it the easiest for me to use.

People were pretty interested by the Teaching Collection, too, which, I can boast here, was my idea: putting together not only art objects that don't rise to the level of accession-worthy, but also artists' materials and tools, into a collection that that students can actually handle and get a feel for. The Teaching Collection has our Wave That's Doing It's Best, for example, but also samples of Prussian blue, produced by the Chemistry and Art students. We have a lithographic stone and a Japanese lacquer box, both bought off Ebay in order to support education around specific exhibitions. I just acquired two samples of Carrara marble, including one chunk of the purest white that Michelangelo would have used, for my fall Renaissance class. It's pretty cool, and I'm proud of it, and it was really affirming to have such interest from professional colleagues, several of whom wanted advice on how to go about starting collections of their own. In our case, it's mostly happenstance: stuff Jim donated that was in bad shape, or the copy of the Guido Reni Madonna and Child that had been kicking around the library, and which a local art restorer test-cleaned pro bono, to show the difference after varnish and stain removal.

In addition to the varnish demo, the only real tool of conservation science that I can feasibly/cheaply/safely deploy is a UV flashlight I bought from Amazon, which can show discolored varnish as well as later overpainting. Megan was a little nervous about me flashing that on non-Teaching Collection objects, so imagine my delight to learn from the conservators at Yale that not only is it not an issue, they also bought their flashlights from Amazon! (Theirs was nicer than mine, so I immediately traded up). Of course, they typically employ a room-sized UV set-up, like the one in the photograph.

Other methods of investigation are just frustratingly out of reach. Watching them use the IRR camera on a painting was incredible, but they also had this nifty handout showing that different cameras that could perceive different wavelengths of IRR showed quite different results. It's been my burning desire to have some form of near-infrared imaging to use on our own objects. You often hear about modifying cheap digital cameras to remove the IR filter, which I attempted last year with a $50 Amazon camera, with no luck. I found a Heritage Science article on modifying a specific type of older Smartphone with the addition of a fairly expensive small lens, which I shared with a Physics professor who brings his Optics classes to the gallery. He expressed interest, but I need to follow up on that this year. Irma Passeri, the YUAG conservator, noted you can also buy DSLR cameras and have them factory-modded, but that's a thousand dollars or so (another reminder of Yale resources). Post-STITAH I discovered you can buy cameras on Ebay that have been "ghost-modded" - enabling infrared for ghost-hunters! Sadly, I doubt that those kinds of mods would achieve the wavelength necessary to reveal underdrawing on a painting, as opposed to "cold spots" in a house.

Anyway, among my other discoveries: mixing ground pigment with oil is harder than it looks (as pictured). I was a little bummed we didn't to attempt to grind any pigments, though obviously for reasons of time, a lot was pre-prepared for us. That included these panels, which had been gessoed, applied with bole (the dull red at right), gilded, and polished in preparation for us to try our hands at various forms of tooling and pouncing! The rabbit, at left, is an example of sgraffito, paint scratched away to reveal a design. We used carbon paper to trace the rabbit onto thin paper, laid the paper on the red area (painted with highly toxic cadmium red, for quickness of drying), "pounced" it with a sharp tool around the contours, and buffed in some charcoal to transfer the design. Then we did our scratching, and then we were free to decorate it by stippling dots into the gold with the same stylus. Next to it, we used sets of punching tools to add the decorative elements (a lot harder to press in than I expected), and used a compass and straightedge to add arcs and lines.

What I am not immortalizing here is the tempera painting exercise that we completed on the lower half of the panel, because damn, I sucked that that! They only gave us 3 tints, and our goal was to imitated a detail of some drapery off a 14th-century panel, and mine was...not good. If I use the upper part of this panel for teaching (if I ever do Early Ren, that is), I'll be taping an index card over my shame at the bottom. The same went for the oil exercise, which I didn't even bother to bring home. We also did a sumi-e workshop with a Japanese painter, and after he helpfully added in the bamboo leaves that I, after 30 minutes of practicing, could not manage to wrist-flick properly, I declared my work done, brought it home, and gave it to my sister. She gives me the boys' art all the time, and since mine was of about the same level, I figured why not repay the favor.

I came out of the week having learned a lot and energized to see how I might put even a tiny bit of this into practice. We have a painting in the TC that we're pretty sure is a modern imitation of an early Renaissance panel painting in oil, but Irma told me that Raman microscopy would be the only "proof" of the binder. I asked around - no Raman microscope at Fairfield. Ditto XRF (one of the scientists, Anniko, passed around their XRF "gun" and cheerfully told us it costs about $50k), which could help identify pigments. UV can only show some overpainting, as well as fluorescence of the white highlights (which matches lead white, as opposed to titanium or zinc white, but so what? A modern forger could well have used more traditional materials...). If I had an IRR device I could check for underdrawing. Even with just raking light I can see incised lines for some of the background and the halos. But alas, Fairfield's on-campus resources just aren't quite there. We've asked Yale to look at some objects for us before (our mystery Chinese plaques, which in their elemental composition matched ancient Chinese gold objects), but never a TC-level object that we're pretty sure is a "tourist art" piece, just based on stylistic analysis; Carey and I agreed that the angels' hair just "looks" wrong, for example, plus there's an inscription on the frame, Ave Maria Mater Pia, that does not seem to have been used in the 15th/16th century, based on my rudimentary research. It's a little frustrating to know we could have so many more answers about this object in a couple of hours, if we had Yale's material and intellectual resources! Arghhh.

Anyway, I contented myself with taking our pigment collection - much of it verrrrry toxic, like all our bright cadmium reds, yellow, and orange - to my colleague Dorothy in the chem lab, who rehoused them into small glass containers. Here are a few that I arranged into a little rainbow after labelling them!

Friends and Nemeses

 Sean was recently joking about the increasing length of my "Nemeses" list, and how much of the animal kingdom would wind up inscribed there as opposed to the shorter "Tolerated" and "Allies" lists. The top (non-human) slot on the list goes to the Canada geese, of course. This year we played unwilling hosts to no fewer than nine geese in two families! Originally there were ten, but one got eaten early on by a coyote; we cheered his success, but were disappointed that he never managed it again (though his casual appearance in the middle of the street would send the flock into a panicked waddle to safety, highly amusing to us spectating goose-haters). There was even a late attempt by a third family to establish residence, but they evidently got bullied away by families 1 and 2. Cue Sean, joking about my mom watching from the afterlife as we make fun of something she used to do: "Oh yeah? Think that's funny? More geese!" 

I can be sanguine about this now only because the geese are gone, and I can once again roam the property without having to be careful of where I'm stepping. There was a full and complete "stages of grief" process of dealing with those assholes this year. First, denial: I was so convinced that we'd be able to prevent them from hatching eggs at all. We drove off one pair in early spring just by harassing them, but realized afterward that that's the same infertile goose couple that showed up first last year (and got driven away by a breeding pair). They wound up at the home of a well-intentioned neighborhood hippy named Justine, who has feeding stations for animals all around her yard, including squirrels, who she supplies with peanuts in full summer when there is food everywhere. Like, ma'am, did no one ever tell you that feeding wild animals is not actually helping them? Justine caught me a few times when I was running, and in those protracted conversations I quickly learned that her philosophy on the geese (pure love) was significantly different than my own (pure hatred). 

Once the breeding pair turned up, I was ready for battle. Originally the plan was that we'd just find their nest and (humanely!) "addle" their eggs, preventing them from hatching but also not clueing the parents so they'd lay more. The first snag in this plan: we figured out that they must be nesting on one of the little islands in the pond. I did not really feel prepared to undertake a naval battle. The second snag: I learned that our pond is a lot deeper than I'd thought. It's pretty shallow at the end by the spillover drain, but our neighbor Joe brought over a 10-foot pole and we tested sinking it in around the sides - it was immediately more than 5 feet deep, right at the edge. OK, new plan: we hire a professional! I had Jay the "Critter Cop" all lined up - he told me to let him know once they were incubating the eggs, and $275 would see the deed done. 

But here's where Mother Nature was much more clever than me: everything I'd read about geese said they need to incubate the eggs by sitting on them for at least a month. We kept seeing both geese, so we didn't think they'd actually gotten around to the egg-laying at all yet. Imagine my surprise one day in May when these little bastards stroll out of the reeds with four goslings behind them! And not even newborn yellow ones, these were like a week or so old. They stealth-hatched their children! And that wasn't even the worst surprise. Geese are also supposed to be territorial, but three weeks or so later, I came home from work, saw the goose family, and then looked further into the backyard and saw another, also with four offspring. These were clearly larger and older goslings, meaning this new family had walked to our pond from somewhere (since the babies can't fly). At that point I knew addling would never word - what's the point of destroying a local clutch if these bastards can just commute?

Various stages of bargaining followed - we tried hazing them with a laser as suggested by DEEP, to keep them further away from the house. We put up an official "do not feed waterfowl" sign that they provided, to keep the old men of the neighborhood from giving them bagels (actually, that part worked we think). We tried using the "Bird-B-Gone" spray that contains a highly concentrated version of grape Koolaid, which Joe claimed he could smell all the way in his backyard when it was applied. Nothing really worked or kept them at bay for long. Poop everywhere! We were settling into miserable apathy until the day that I was drinking coffee in the living room, looked out the window, and saw a woman standing in the road photographing the geese enjoying the pond's shallow end like she was shooting for NatGeo. She was far from the first person who had done these (walkers, joggers, drivers - people looooove their little slice of Mother Nature, as long as its not their shoes they have to clean off), but this particular instance flung me into such a rage. I wanted to yell at her, and I wanted to kill them, and since I could do neither I went to Home Depot and bought green poultry fencing and fenced off the shallow end of the pond! The geese didn't like this, since their primary enjoyment (beyond eating grass and leaving giant piles of shit everywhere) was getting in and out of the water a dozen times an hour, particularly when they felt there was danger. I liked how much the geese did not appreciate this, so I bought more poultry fencing...and more....and more. Ultimately I installed maybe 300 or 400 feet, covering 2/3 of the pond's perimeter. They always had ways in and out, since I couldn't fence the part of the pond we don't own, but it was mightily inconvenient for them, especially when the goslings were small and slow. I enjoyed their confusion greatly, especially when the coyote was nearby and they would do adrenaline-fueled barrel rolls right over the fencing, haha. Long-term, our only solution is to get permission from our neighbors to fence the entire pond circumference in springtime. If they have no access into the water, they'll move their kids someplace else. Maybe Justine would like more company next year? 

My other chief nemesis this spring was in the Mammalia family: the chipmunk. For some reason, their numbers exploded this year, and I swear we had a dozen just around the house at one point (despite more published claims that they're territorial and will drive others off - ha!). My annoyance with them was twofold: first, they dug up all the early-spring flower bulbs in the front beds and just left them. I'd understand if they needed them for food, but nope! Just malice. I tried to replant them, but it didn't work that well. Second, I realized that they were digging under our driveway, making a little chipmunk subway system to come up in the giant garden bed in the center of the driveway. It's one thing to have a crack in your driveway...it's another to see a chipmunk actually using it as an emergency exit. Like with the geese, I tried many things, with little success, including cayenne pepper, mothballs, and one a few particularly malicious occasions, some goose poop that I would nudge into a hole. If you filled one hole with sand or gravel, the chipmunk would merely re-excavate; if you blocked it with larger rocks, it would dig a side-access tunnel or an entirely new one. 

Once again, rage. I bought snap-traps (rat-sized, not mouse) and baited them with Sean's peanut butter, even using gloves to avoid leaving human scent on them, and put them near the subway "exit" in the garden bed (to minimize the chance of another creature, like a bird, running into it). Nothing! I realized that his homemade peanut butter doesn't have added sugar, so it might not have smelled good enough. I bought some Jiffy, and heard you could add an additional piece of fruit as an enticement. Then, somehow, I didn't go through with it. Part of me felt kind of bad for wanting to kill an animal just because it was inconveniencing me (though let's be clear: excavation under the driveway is legitimately an issue, because it could weaken it until part of it sinks!). Part of me thought my mother, watching from the beyond, would follow through with the threat: more geese. I also suspected that a couple of traps wouldn't even be enough: I'd have to be willing to go full Apocalypse Now on those little bastards. Sean's friend McTague had done the "bucket method," which everyone agrees tends to be very successful, but it involves both a) drowning animals and b) disposing of a bucket of dead drowned animals. I don't have it in me (yet). Instead, we'll be having our driveway re-sealed next week, part of which involves injecting sealant into all those cracks. It's not going to close the Chipmunk Line, but at least the mid-driveway stop is getting shut down. After that, in the fall...we'll see. I still have the traps, the gloves, the Jiffy.

Now, on the subject of creatures I do like:

• Bees! I tried overseeding a few patches of grass with clover this year, but it turned out to be mini-clover, which looks so different from what's there already that it just looked odd. However, the existing white clover in the lawn was doing well, along with the invasive-but-pretty creeping Charlie, and the bees have been loving it. It gives me so much pleasure to sit in a chair in the grass to read, and be able to look around and see all these little industrious fellows of different species doing their thing in the weed-flowers. 
• Birds! (of the non-goose variety) The gray catbird might be my favorite, but we've got so many cool ones - I really love seeing a goldfinch winging it across the yard at top speed, just a little shooting star of yellow! Red-winged blackbirds, blue jays, and grackles are all lovely to look at, but rather less charming to the ear. 
• Bunnies! I became particularly enamored of a young rabbit I called Little Bun, who could usually be found nibbling right around our house (I liked the way he would do a big stretch, to eat more without actually having to get up and move - I felt that). Sadly, he was killed by a hawk last week - bad enough, but then I accidentally disturbed the hawk, so it flew away and left Little Bun's body! I felt bad, even though I knew that something would eat it. I'm not as fond of the other, older buns. They just don't have Little Bun's spirit. 
• Butterflies! Sadly, my monarch-friendly milkweed patch, which has boomed from the few plants last year, attracted just one single mature monarch, and no caterpillars, but I've seen a few other butterflies of black/blue and black/yellow varieties, which might both be kinds of swallowtails.
• Pond dwellers! Turtles, frogs, fish, dragonflies. Last night was cool, so we slept with the windows open. Most of the frog noise has quieted by this point in the season, but in the early morning hours the bullfrog will periodically do this staccato -- --- --- --- sound, like just four vocalizations together, which confused me (through my earplugs) until I remembered what it was. The turtles I feel badly for, both because most of their egg deposits wind up getting plundered by skunks or whatever else comes out of the woods, and because we don't have any good basking rocks or logs for them in the water. They usually cling to the base of the reeds along the side of the pond in the morning, but I wish we could have something a little more comfortable. I'm thinking of adding a log from the pile beyond the shed, though with my luck it will just immediately sink. As for the fish, we've just seen an entire school of little goldfish toward the shallow end, so apparently they're successfully breeding in there. 

What about the plant kingdom? There, too, I have both friends and foes, haha. I'm still a little sad about how practically everything growing around the edges of our property is non-native and/or invasive, but Sean rightly pointed out that our property is just too big to envision attempting to rip out and replace everything, so my strategy is mostly just control. Down by the back of the pond, I "excavated" part of what I'd let go complete wild last year, and discovered some beautiful irises planted against the stone wall that the original owners created for that far end. Unfortunately, both wisteria and the Chinese tree of heaven have footholds down there, so even in this dry season, when I've gone several weeks without cutting the grass, I've had to go mow down the seedlings/saplings in that corner, just to keep them under control. On the opposite side, I periodically have to cut the wisteria that tries to climb the giant fir trees and strangle the lilac bush, and which oh-so-conveniently shades the poison ivy beneath.

I love our flowers and trees, though! The pear tree at the back seems to have delivered up its last fruits last year and be ready for death. I got to try a total of three cherries from the sweet cherry tree, which were mostly enjoyed by a frenzied parade of squirrels and birds in the tree, and geese and rabbits on the ground. Our flower beds are in full bloom, particularly the one in the center of the driveway. Orange and yellow liles, blue and purple hydrangeas, and hot pink roses - I love it! I don't even mind the cicada killer bees that nest around the edge of the rocks (even though one actually bonked my hat when I was out there this morning), now that I know they're basically just putting on a show and won't mess with humans. 

Even if it's a lot of work, I love this place. Even if we have to deal with the geese every year, it'd still be worth it! I'm actually typing this on the patio, because it got cloudy, and it's cool/not-humid even though it's late July. What a gift! 

Anniversary Post

 Sean asked me yesterday if I'd remembered to make a 20th-anniversary post here, and of course I hadn't. I just checked the "archives," and my first post was March 8, 2002. Missed that by nearly a month, but hey, I'm here!

I knew I hadn't written anything in a while (though I didn't realize I last posted in August, damn), but I was planning to write a post about "Michelle and Sara's Italian adventure." Except it didn't really wind up being the trip that we'd spent two years waiting for - she tested positive for Covid literally the night before our flight to Rome. Obviously, this was much worse for her than for me, but it still sucked. Add to that that I managed to injure my foot literally on day 1 by lacing my sneakers too tightly, and yeah, it was not the trip I'd hoped for. Nonetheless, it was great to be able to spend time with Carla, and to revisit the city I lived in for two years, plus Florence. Also I guess I can say that I got to experience what's it's like to try to get around in a non-ADA-having country while temporarily disabled? Hint: it sucks balls.

Among the highlights were a visit to Palazzo Massimo alle Terme to see my favorite sculpture, the Boxer, who has been moved onto a slightly different pedestal (but still with the ridiculously sensitive motion-sensors)

I love him so much. I started my first class once I was back at Fairfield with this sculpture, tangentially linking it to our discussion of the Benin bronzes before spring break, but honestly just to nerd out over how cool it is. 

I visited the Academy twice. The first time was with Carla. We hauled ourselves up the Gianicolo by San Pietro in Montorio (I have not missed that climb, even without being injured), and stopped by the Fontanone and looked out over the city as we waited for 3:30 in the hopes I could see Gabri on his way out and Alessandro as his shift started. Success on both counts! Gabri was literally talking to the guard in the gatehouse when we walked up. Honestly, I had been a little worried about whether he'd recognize me, especially with the mask, but he he did, and he asked me to come back when he was actually working. We went in and had a coffee with Tina, with Alessandro behind the bar, and walked around in the garden for a bit before leaving. It was mid-afternoon, so the place was empty anyway, but not being able to have coffee in the bar felt strange.

The second time was the day before I left; I went around 2pm, as lunch was ending. I'd brought some chocolates for Claudia, because Gabri had said she'd been ill, and then did my best to have an all-Italian conversation with her, while accounting for masks and the (relative) din of lunch going on in the cortile. I had also arranged with Sean to Face Time him so he could at least say hi to them, and while the connection wasn't great, Gabri still managed to tease him about his beard going white, haha (honestly, Gabri looks the same). After that, I had suppli at Da Simone, and wandered around our old neighborhood for a couple of hours to kill time before the wine shop on Fratelli Bonnet re-opened, so I could buy a bottle of the Tunnella refosco. Carla and I drank it right before we watched the 2005 Pride and Prejudice that night, and you know what? It was just as good as I remembered!

Another highlight was visiting Domenico's restaurant Marigold in Testaccio for Sunday brunch. We walked up and who do I see but fellow AAR alum Karl sitting outside! The food was delicious (very Brooklyn-y vibe, which is downright exotic for Rome), and it was a pleasure to say hello to Domenico in the kitchen. Then we went to the Protestant Cemetery, where Carla amused herself by befriending the locals:

I met a bunch of Carla's friends at her apartment, and it was a lot of fun - we also drank a lot of wine and are no longer spring chickens, so the next day was spent lazing about and watching Outlander, and then going to see Batman in Trastevere (it was a delight). 

Florence was definitely the loneliest part of the trip, but I'm glad I went. For one thing, I don't know when the next time will be that my hotel room includes a Seicento fresco on the ceiling:

The Uffizi: incredible. David: a stunner, as always. Piazza Signoria, especially at night? Fave. I spent some time planning my Renaissance course for Fall 2022. And yet while it was delightful to immerse myself in Florence's charm (despite my inability to correctly predict exactly where many streets went), spending three days there was definitely enough to remind me of how tiny and provincial it seems. Those streets are fucking tiny! I did not enjoy feeling so up close and personal, even though people were generally still wearing masks in the street. I hadn't been doing that everywhere in Rome, but I did in Florence, simply because I felt like I was in such close quarters all the time. Getting back to Rome, even with its diesel fumes and roaring bikes, felt like such a relief. Sean laughed when I told him that, because everyone jokes about how Rome is just a provincial city (for a capital), but at least there's space in the palimpsest. And yes, I couldn't keep that word out of my mind as I wandered around, haha. 

I managed to hit most of my food goals: Milka, 1936 San Carlo chips, Tunnella, da Simone suppli...I did miss out on gelato from the goat milk place, because they were closed; ditto Alfredo e Ada the one night Carla and I tried to go. We had excellent pizza at La Gatta Mangiona. In Florence, I had lunch at Casalinga, and many coffees at Rivoire. Our last dinner out in Rome was at La Matricianella, where I shied away from getting Sean's rigatoni alla pajata at the last minute in favor of carbonara. Carla, like Sean, is a huge fan of the only-in-season puntarelle, and just like Sean she managed to get some!

And then it was time to depart! Not, of course without a little last-minute drama in getting my pre-flight Covid results, as I had completely forgotten that since I have a codice fiscale I am thus in Italy's health system forever and ever. The lady at the pharmacy underneath Carla's apartment was very nice, but really could not get it into her head that I have this number even though I was not a) born here, b) live here, or c) work here (she asked me each of those more than once!)

Sean says that Rome will always feel like home, and it's true. There's a chance that ND might offer the Italy trip next spring, in which case I'd tag along as a co-chaperone, but either way, the next time I go back, it'll be with him!

My notes app contents:

• Roman pines and hooded crows
• Doria Pamphilij walk, so beautiful! (editor's note: this is where she laced her sneakers too tight and strained her tendons)
• Have not missed smell of diesel fuel, or walking right next to cars
• Have missed the church bells ringing the hours
• Taking the bus down is a nice progression from Carla's neighborhood (Bravetta) into Trastevere, and then into crowded downtown
• Pantheon: standing in line at least gives you time to admire the facade
• Lunch, Desiderio preso per la coda, with friendly yellow lab Ben
• AAR with Carla
• Marigold - Karla, Domenico and Sophia
• Protestant Cemetery! So lovely
• Meeting Carla's friends
• Hangover day and Outlander, Batman
• Florence: no Martini sign lit up at night? Bummer
• Definitely mixed up streets
• The huge overhanging cornices! The sgraffito facades
• Fiesole: a pleasure to hear some country quiet, sitting in the Roman theater
• Lunch: angolotti with sausage in a lemon cream sauce, good if scarce! Wine from Bolgheri
• ATAF: gone as of 2022! Google not caught up yet
• Mercato centrale food hall, paccheri with pesto genovese, more Bolgheri
• Bargello: Donatello's David butt (NB: I missed the once-in-a-lifetime Donatello show by days, so the gallery with David was closed)
• Returning to Rome, so much more room to breathe! Florence too crowded/tiny
• Figures: the best coffee was at the Kimbo cafe in the airport

Surveying the Land

We're coming up on a year of owning this house! We came for the inspection exactly one year ago today, and I'm glad I took so many photos as I went around with the inspector, because I definitely look at the often for reference (and also to recall how different the previous owners' taste in paint and furniture was from our own - lovely as it was). 

One of the things on my summer to-do list was to draw up some kind of diagram of plants and trees. The plants, especially, after we spent the spring playing the "weed or plant?" game, and then discovering that even things we thought were one type of plant, like ornamental grasses, turned out to be something else, like lilies that don't bloom until July.

I would love to have an artistic rendering of the house and all its plants -- my uncle Dana often posts his on Instagram, and his clients often frame them -- but alas, I lack the artistic talent to make that happen. I tried downloading a landscape-planner app, but that was way too annoying to make work on just a phone. So back to basics! I pulled out the property survey and started by tracing our property onto a sheet of printer paper. The scale of the house was so small that it wouldn't be useful for labeling any of the garden beds, so I decided to use it as a tree survey instead. I used my plant identifier app to ID the trees I didn't already know (yesterday afternoon, during a heatwave, because I'm very smart). A few of them I don't think it got quite right; several of the big trees out front came up as black walnut, but one of the arborists told me it was hickory, and I tend to assume that a specialist on the ground could eyeball it better. Walnut and hickory are related, who knew?

My next step was making a larger diagram of just the house and garden beds. Honestly, I'm kind of proud of my "enlarging" efforts. Everything done with a ruler looks so nice...the freehand stuff obviously less so. By this point I was also kind of regretting that all I had to work with were pencils, sharpie, and a pack of colored pencils, because it would have looked so much sharper if I had colored pens (like the pack of rainbow-colored Sharpie pens sitting in a drawer at work...). I also enjoy my additions of the cherry and pear fruit, haha. This morning I saw our resident deer chomping down on the pear I accidentally ran over with the tractor yesterday; very "circle of life."

Last but not least, my wobbly rendition of the center island in the driveway! The problem I ran into here is that there were actually way more plants in there that flowered and withered early in the spring, and if I looked them up on the plant identifier, I didn't actually save their names. So some of this is a bit "tbd."

                                          

One thing I didn't bother labelling was the various kinds of wildflowers and flowering weeds that are blooming by the pond. Plants I know are there: rose campion, wild carrot, thistle, milkweed, daisy fleabane, evening primrose, and orange jewelweed. We've had some goldfinches hanging out over there, and they're so lovely! Meanwhile, the rock pile at the end of the wall is covered in Oriental lady's thumb, larkspur, and Asiatic dayflower, which are very cute names for what are - sigh - mostly non-native and fairly aggressive plants. The lady's thumb is all over in the "no man's land" under the Norwegian spruces along the property line, along with some poison ivy and other unpleasant things like pokeweed that I have it on my list to "deal with." Oh, and some young Norway maples, which the arborist advised killing off if we can, since they outcompete everything native once they get established. That's for next week, post-heatwave!

ETA: So it turns out even more things are invasive, or just aggressive, than I'd thought, though thankfully it's only around the perimeter of the property. Saturday I spent the morning weeding, and was annoyed to discover that a plant I'd thought was a milkweed, growing right next to our hydrangea, was actually one of those impossible-to-destroy pokeweeds. I did manage to rip out a smaller one, and it literally had the longest taproot I have ever pulled, 5-6 feet. The big one I could only cut it down to the thick-ass stems. Then, under the mountain laurel, I spotted a small amount of poison ivy. I also knew there was poison ivy in "no-man's land," and Sean is insanely sensitive to it, so I suited up in jeans, my rubber boots, and rubber gloves. Cue me absolutely sweating balls for the next hour or so. I wasn't even trying to remove the poison ivy in no-man's land; it's been so overshadowed by the weeds growing above it, though, that just moving around in there meant I, or my tools, were likely brushing it. I hauled a couple of massive loads of pokeweed, arrowleaf ragwort (native, but aggressive), and Norway maples over by the pond, where a narrow wooded strip is basically our only yard-waste dumping area. 

What I call no-man's land really has two parts. The part in front of our house, bordering the Vietnamese family, is the area with the pokeweed and poison ivy (along with its weedy friends Virginia creeper and three-seeded Mercury). This section revealed the presence of the dreaded Asian jumping worm, which everyone in gardening groups gets really freaked out about. They destroy all the nutrients and leave behind earth that looks like dry ground beef or coffee grounds. And guess what plants can readily adapt to the new soil conditions? Yup, the trifecta noted above! I also noticed that it was really easy to pull the ragwort weeds out in this area. But once you follow no-man's land to the backyard, which borders Susan (formerly known as Our Lady of the Cigarette), the earth under the trees looked normal, it was harder to yank up the few ragworts that were there, and the dominant undergrowth is Chinese wisteria. Still bad in its own right (it was trying to climb up my lilac tree again, and it's reached the top of one of the massive spruce trees), but at least not rash-inducing.

Once I was done with yard maintenance, I took my phone over by the pond to ID some of the plants and trees over there. Autumn olivetrees? On the CT Invasive plant list. Ooh, what's this bush growing berries? Multiflora rose? On the list. What about this vine-y thing with berries? Oriental bittersweet? On the list. Also on the list, Norway maples from no-man's land as well as "tree of heaven," which I removed some of near the far end of the pond. Basically, between this, the purple loosestrife, and the phragmites reeds, our pond is like 100% surrounded by shit that ideally should not be there! If we wanted to address it, we'd probably need a landscaper to come in and take down the bittersweet and multiflora rose and haul it out, but since it's literally growing in the area I dump weeds in - including the non-native undesirable weeds from elsewhere on the property- I can't imagine what would replace it would be any better. Argh. Now I understand why people burn stuff!

 

Late Summer

 The geese left in mid-July, just a day after I had finally broken down and attached a "Please Don't Feed the Geese - Your Neighbor" sign to the tree closest to the road. Being able to walk around my own property these past couple of weeks without needing to keep an eye out either for the geese themselves or their droppings has been incredibly liberating. I'm not doing this again next year, that's for damn sure. The only question is how much it's going to cost. 

While I haven't gotten a full quote from Geese Relief (which has an employee living in my neighborhood), they said they would need to bring their border collies 2x daily for up to three months next spring to keep the geese scared of taking up residence. The guy also blithely told me that while the goal is to prevent nesting, they'll also straight up destroy the eggs for us if they do lay any (which is a crime, technically, so I was surprised he just dropped that into the conversation). I'd already done some research into "addling" the eggs, which is considered a humane (and legal) means of population control, but it requires getting up close and personal with the parents, which I'm not really keen on. We can also apply "goose repellent" to the grass around the pond, which will make the grass gross-tasting for them I guess -- pretty sure our neighbors behind us with the fancy chemically-treated lawn had that on theirs, because I watched the geese and they never seemed to want eat their grass. 

                                                        

So that's one fun unexpected homeowner expense we need to budget for next spring! The other is also pond-related. I had a consultation with a pond and lake company to see what they would recommend and to get a sense of how much it will cost to eventually install a fountain. They suggested an environmentally-friendly herbicide for the floating green plants (duckweed and something else), but they also suggested making an effort to control or remove the phragmites australis, also known as the common reed, which - surprise! - is an aggressive and invasive plant that will crowd out all others and take over wetlands, plus contributing too much biomass to the water when it dies each year. The herbicide happens spring into summer and reed treatment happens in the autumn, but the state agency that authorizes the permits for doing this in wetlands is so backed up that they said there's really no point in trying this year; I can reach out in January and get the permit process started for next summer. A 1/2 HP or 3/4 HP foundation will run us about $1500, but the real expense will be the $3k to get the electrical line trenched from the house, which is more than 100 feet away. Long-term planning.

The good news is that our pond is pretty healthy even in its current state! I was worried the green surface of the duckweed was a real problem, but the guy told me that even the Branford Supply Ponds, which are much larger and stream-fed, have the same issue in the summer. Our pond actually connects to the Supply Ponds, as I learned after Elsa. It rained like 5" in a day or two, and the pond had massively overflowed into the lawn. Sean insisted it would go down on its own, but I (correctly) guessed that the grate covering the overflow pipe was completely clogged by dead reeds and aquatic weeds. I had to unclog it manually - not the first time I've done it, but definitely the first time that it was so flooded I was having a hard time figuring out where the grate even was, since the rock border of the pond was like four inches underwater! It was not a neat business, but once I managed to clear a bit of the grate, the strength of the suction of the amount of water wanting to move through was incredible! It would make a fierce tiny whirlpool or a minute or two before more debris would arrive to clog it up, meaning I needed to immediately clear it again. It took me an hour or so, but I felt very accomplished - especially once Joe beckoned me across the street to look at the stream separating his property from Paula's. It was rushing with all the water from our pond! Finally I understood that our overflow pipe doesn't go to the storm sewer in the street...it goes under the street and empties into that stream, which runs down to the Supply Ponds. 

Ultimately I'm less worried about aesthetics than about keeping the pond functioning as a viable ecosystem. We have tons of frogs and dragonflies (which I have only recently learned are mosquito-eaters, which explains why we don't have a problem with them), a turtle population that keeps growing thanks to my neighbors' "donations" (one came just this morning!), plus the goldfish Tony tossed in, and lots and lots of birds, including my favorite, the elusive green heron. The pond guy complimented me on our "wildflower area," which to my surprise contains milkweed, the favored plant of monarch butterflies. I did own up that it wasn't exactly an intentional wildflower paradise; rather, the slope of the land over there was a little too steep for me to comfortably cut on the riding mower, and since we lack a push mower I just decided to "let the pond have it." 

My other recent nature discovery (besides finding out how many of the lovely pop-up flowering plants and weeds around the property are non-native, and thus should be in theory be ripped out...sigh) is that we have cicada-killer wasps! They're freakishly large (while gardening in the early morning, these bad boys cast a shadow as they buzzed over me), but completely harmless to humans. They've made their nests in the sandy soil underneath the circle, using gaps in the boulders as entry points, and yesterday I saw a female cicada killer doing her thing, wrestling a paralyzed cicada almost twice her size into one of the entrances! Nature is metal. Honestly I hate the drone of cicadas, so kill 'em all, ladies! 

Summer

Yesterday we had an arborist come to give an estimate for removing the dead ash tree from the front of our property:

 While I do love its Gothic-horror look, it's going to come down sooner or later, and I'd rather it not do so on me or a passing car. I took the opportunity to ask him some questions about some of the other trees, and learned that what we'd thought of as a very large bush, at the right in the photo, is actually CT's state tree, the mountain laurel. Its less-than-stellar appearance right now is apparently due to last year's drought, since that can take a year to show its effects. And it just occurred to me now that we have a mountain laurel...on Laurel Hill Road! :-)

Spring already seems to be over, and summer is here! At the pond, we've welcomed back the turtles (natives + adopted), the frogs (which are insanely loud at night), the herons, and discovered that the goldfish the previous owner chucked in on a whim are still in there, in the deeper water. Yesterday I pulled the rowboat (christened the S.S. Fat Man, in honor of JTD's unfulfilled desire for a boat) out of the shed and took it back down to the pond to fulfill the picturesque image that we saw when we first looked at the house. I don't know when we'll actually try going in the pond in it, though; when spring arrived, so did the Canada geese, and the pond is now home to at least one breeding pair and the four goslings they brought out for the first time yesterday. Geese: we don't like them. They poop, a lot (and if I thought two was bad, six is sooooo much worse), and they're really unpleasant sounding. Honestly I would hate them less, despite the poop, if they didn't have such a terrible honk! We get to hear it on take-off, landing, and when they're feuding with other geese (ie, frequently). Sigh. Damned wildlife. 

Said wildlife have put the kibosh on our plans to have a raised bed garden here like we did at Concord Street, at least this year. Sean's been too exhausted by the end of the school year to think about it, and we would have to do a lot of strategizing, and building, to create a garden fortress that can withstand the "locals." Sean thought maybe we could just use simple netting, but we've got everything from groundhogs to deer to rabbits - we'd need Fort Knox. We think the previous owner was planning a garden, because he arranged a bunch of cinderblocks into a U-shape in the backyard, so my plan is to use the cinder blocks as the base for posts and create an enclosure around the entire thing, then we can build at least two raised beds, maybe even three, inside it! 

But that's not a "first season of homeownership" type of plan. Mostly I'm just trying to keep up - keeping the garden beds with their frankly spectacular plantings weeded and watered, setting up the dozen or so peony plants with cages and struts to keep them from slumping over, mastering the beast that is our John Deere...the list goes on. Admittedly, working from home 3 days per week has meant that I've had a lot of flexibility to get things done! We've had the expected string of contractors, too. We just had an electrical outlet added to the back patio to run the Traeger smoker Linda gave us for Christmas, and Damon, the electrician, quoted about $3k if we ever wanted to run electrical down to the pond to power the (still-missing) pump and fountain. We had additional insulation added to the attic and above the garage, free courtesy of a program subsidized by Eversource. We're having the gutters replaced in a couple of weeks. One of Linda's friends, a landscaper, is going to look at our small grading project on the side of the house. We've been extremely fortunate in only have a few hiccups so far in home ownership, but the projects certainly do present themselves! So yeah, no Fort Knox of tomatoes this year, just a few pots on the patio: basil, mint, parsley, and oregano. 

Also, I bought a hammock and I fucking love it. 

The world feels so much more hopeful as we move into summer, thanks to the vaccines. Obviously it's not over yet, and more terrible shit happens in our country, and around the world, literally every day...but to be able to have Jen and Vinny over with the boys, no masks, and to not be a little bit nervous to pick up baby Leo and give him a hug? It's incredible. I'm headed up to their house tomorrow to babysit, while Sean attends ND's graduation in full "wizard robes." And then Sunday will mark twelve years since we got married! Damn! Time flies when you're...becoming an adult?