Be Glad You're Not a Whitetail!

Baker, posing with my venerable Hinoki cypress, and my oldest Japanese maple, which has perfectly lovely leaves the size of a quarter. Amazing tree. Amazing doggeh, too. 

In an ideal world, I'd have had this post up by Mother's Day afternoon. I have noble intentions, but May is its own thing, and when it's overlain with the kind of barely contained chaos that is 2017, I'm lucky to squoze out one post a week.  I get up every morning and strain my eyes to see if there are any deer in the meadow. If there are, I throw on whatever clothes are nearby, coming up with some truly fetching ensembles, jam my bare feet into muck boots, and I steal from deck to shrub to tree  to ambush them with my long lens.

It's an entirely different thing from just taking pictures of pretty deer. It's more like an espionage mission. I'm gathering information. I want no I NEED to know who they are. Not just what they are.

This is challenging, but I have a wealth of clues to go on. I see two adult does. Both are heavily pregnant. They're the two animals on the right. The far animal has much of her summer coat (red) in, while the closer doe still has a lot of winter hair (blue).

There are two yearling fawns from spring 2016 to the left side of the photo. First, I need to determine the sex of the fawns. That may tell me who the moms are. So while I'm shooting, I'm blowing up my photos and peering at the backscreen. Bingo. I've got a doe (left) and a buck (right). See the little button on his forehead?

Now I take a closer look at the does. Man, they're about to drop their fawns. Heavy bodied and moving slowly. The doe in the foreground is in better condition than the red doe. Better filled out, better topline, no sway in her back like the red doe. The close doe has a beautiful topline.

I'm smiling now.  The red doe is older than the blue doe. Her back is swayed and she's thin around that big old fawn in her belly. But there's a distinct resemblance.  I'm pretty sure I have my beautiful Jolene and her mother here, and they're both pregnant. That doesn't happen much with people. Which sends me into a reverie about just how happy I am that I'm not a whitetail doe. I try to imagine being pregnant every May without fail, and cannot. Nope. We humans have a lot of follow-up with our babies. The pregnancy and that crucial first year is only the beginning for us.

Jolene in front, Grandma behind.

Jolene is still being trailed by last May's buck fawn, and she's fixin' to drop him a little sister or brother. You don't see a doe hang this low very often. I wonder if she's carrying twins again?

 Once I figured out the structure of this little group, I could divine who they all were. Seeing the buck and doe twins was the key to knowing who I had. They're the Blackbriskets! Grandma, Jolene, and Boy/Girl. I haven't named the twins as yet because I haven't gotten to know them yet, the way I know Pinky and Flag, Ellen's orphans.  And their black briskets aren't in evidence now. That's sort of a winter thing. It's tricky to identify individual deer, especially when they change coats with the seasons.

How do I know the twins are Jolene's, and not Grandma's? 

Well, they associate closely with Jolene, nuzzling and grooming her, and not with Grandma. 

Maybe Grandma's cranky when she's about to give birth. Weird sentence, I know. But we're talking whitetails, not people. Phew! 

 I study the photos to confirm my hunches. I'm still and always looking for confirmation for my hunches. I know from past explorations that Jolene has light brown scent gland tufts on her hocks, rather than black.  She's got a long face and prominent white eye rings.

Jolene also has a little notch in the outer edge of her right ear. I scrutinize several photos and can make it out in three of them. (Jolene to the left, her buck fawn to the right). Light tan scent tufts on her hocks, big white eye ring, square throat patch, notch in right ear border. Check, check, check, check. 

Here she is in February 2017, with the slight notch in her right ear. Marks like that tend to be permanent. 

It's hard to describe the joy that settles over me when I am able to reconnect with my friends.  Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jo-leeeeeene!

They all turn around to stare at me, giving me a last wonderful family portrait op. I love how Jolene and her ma are both looking over their shoulders!

 Buckfawn, Jolene, Doefawn, and red Grandma with her sway back. If I had to guess I'd say Grandma's gonna drop her fawn first. 

Or maybe she's got twins this time, too!

Stranger things have happened. I'm thinking of tiny stunted Ellen, who had her last twins when she was at least nine. You know I'll be watching for Pinky and Flag this summer.

And I'm thankful again that I don't have to drop a chile every May. I've got way too much to do.

My Mother's Day completely precluded blogging. I started the day with a slow birdwalk, netting 61 species, including 15 warblers--all within a mile radius of the house. Such is mid May in Appalachian Ohio.  I then did three loads of laundry and hung them out.  Charged the tractor battery and mowed the lawn. Continued emptying the greenhouse of its beauty to make these baskets and planters and lug them into place. Soo much more satisfying than having a pre-fab hanging basket presented! Then, because it was such a beautiful day and I was cruising on sunshine, I cleaned the pond, saving the lives of about 271 individual toad tadpoles as I went. Scoop out muck, pour into bucket, wait for taddies to surface gasping; net them out, return to pond. The muckstank was disgusting, as it always is in May. Now I've got it all out it, the water's clearing up and it's so nice to hear the fountain going!

 Here, I've just stepped out of the shower and asked to have my picture taken with some fruits of this glorious sunny workday. Not that I needed a shower.

I'd spent all day Saturday at Liam's last regatta. Somehow volunteered to tidy up the portolets, all 60 of 'em. Whew! But I did get to drive a golf cart around to haul the trash and spare bogrolls.

 Boyfaun is growing up, up, up. Lookit those gams! That shock of cornsilk on top! But no button antlers as yet.  I bought him a shirt with all the college oar insigniae on it. Very cool! Maybe his future college is on his shirt. It's a nice thought, innit?

  Miss Fifi sent me a strange Mother's Day snap using her trademarked dead-eye camera smile.  She makes me larf!!

 It was pretty much a perfect Mother's Day. Working my butt off is always my activity of choice when nobody's around to suggest I do otherwise. I wound up feeling like weary little Tilda Sixbuttons, who's still trucking around the front porch and doing impossibly cute things 24-7 while raising babehs she's got tucked in a hole somewhere.

Today, my knees, feet and ankles are hollering at me because I never get off 'em. And when I can't run around any more, I sit meself down and write a blogpost. Happy Mother's Day to all you hard-working women. Be glad you're not a whitetail!

Morel Madness

I left West Virginia, reluctant to leave my friends in Fayetteville, but eager to get home to my gardens and kids and the birds I knew would be flooding into the woods at Indigo Hill.

A shy showy orchis waved goodbye as I left Opossum Creek Resort.

The ONE thing I did not have time to do the day I left for the New River Birding and Nature Festival was look for morels in the orchard. It had rained for a couple days straight and I KNEW they'd be popping up. I didn't even have a chance to ask Phoebe to do it. 

I needn't have worried. That evening this popped up on my cellphone. OMG!!!!

You can't buy a kid like that. You have to make them. She knew. She just knew.

Surely the finest picking we've ever had. They were JUST HUGE. There were about 30 of them!! Phoebe put them in the fridge, unwashed, in Ziploc bags, to await our return. They were fresh as daisies when we came home three days later.

Every time I cook morels, I absolutely hate cutting them up. I love them as they are. Maybe I should sautee and eat them whole. 

That first night, though I was absolutely spent from guiding and speaking and singing at the festival, then driving almost four hours home, I had to honor these mushrooms and the girl who picked them. So I picked the first (and likely, thanks to the horrible winter, the last) asparagus from our bed, sauteed chunks of chicken breast, made brown Basmati rice, sauteed the mushrooms separately in butter, reserved the liquid, took the morels off the heat and reduced the mushroom juice/butter with half and half and sour cream until it was a little thick. Then I threw the morels and chicken back in it and served it Zickhot, which is to say that everyone was puffing like locomotives as they tried to eat it. Just like I want it. I take after Ida in that way. If I don't burn somebody I haven't done my job.

The next night, Phoebe wanted morels again, and since Bill was taking off for yet another week, I wanted to make another special meal. This one was morels prepared the same way, but paired with pulled herbed pork shoulder, acorn squash, and stir-fried vegetables. The morels are at 6:00 on the plate, with delicious morel sauce for the pork.  I was a bit concerned the pork would overpower the morels. Nah. YUM. 

I'm counting my blessings these days. I get to look out at spring rolling over the meadow, where a whip-poor-will is singing as I write. (I wrote this after dark).

I get to sneak up on deer. This morning, this pair had NO IDEA I was peeking from behind the little bluestem, and they walked right past me. This, like all the others in this post, was taken with my iPhone. i.e. no telephoto. I could hear them stepping through the grass.

I get to look up at the spring clouds (these are mammatus, one of my favorite formations, which indicates high roily winds aloft).

I get to watch the sweet polled Hereford calves come into the world and learn all about it.

Dogiepalooza.

And I have this fine sweet little feller to waller on.That's three beds, stacked in a throne. Enough, perhaps. Maybe not.

It's been drizzling and sprinkling and showering for the last day, though total rainfall amounts are not much more than a trace. Still, it gives me hope that the morels, quiescent since Phoebe's find, will awaken for one last May blast. I'm headed out, with visions of success in my head. It doesn't hurt to think that we might luck into a picking like this again.

Oh yes. It's Mother's Day. Though I consider it a card holiday, because it was dreamed up and promoted by Hallmark, after all, I do embrace the little jog it gives me to think about these kids and what they mean to me. I have been thinking a great deal of late about Phoebe, about the end of August, when we will have to do without her.  I called my parents once a week when I was in college, on the rotary phone that sat in the dorm hallway. Usually on Sunday nights, when the longing to be nestled between them on the couch got too intense. You may be sure that texts, Snapchats and phone calls will fly all day long. Still...

I wound up having to replant our 21-year-old asparagus bed yesterday. Through some combination of the bitter winter and overharvesting (prime suspects), ours petered out. Only got three shoots we could eat this year, and they are pictured above. So I dug deep into the bed and put eight new sets of roots into compost-filled holes. Man, I'm digging a lot of holes this spring, and the compost pit and I have become intimate. Who knew we ate so many avocados? So much corn, so many grapefruit? Happy to say that the grapefruit rinds do eventually return to earth.

I looked up from this smelly and mucky job to see this. Phoebe had brought me a bouquet from Caroline Waller's Marietta, Ohio floral studio, Passiflora. Caroline sent it to me out of the clear blue, just for Mother's Day. White lilacs, white peonies, stock that is knocking me over with its spicy fragrance. Yellow roses. Peach iris from her own garden. I sat there on my piles of dirt and compost and bawled.

Liam and I will be spending a whole lot more time together soon, since Phoebe has taken him absolutely everywhere he's needed to go for the last two years. He's excellent company, literally a laugh a minute. When he goes to get his hair cut, his teeth cleaned or his eyes checked, he leaves a trail of charmed women, who come to me later to compliment me on my personable, hilarious son. Liam loves to engage people and make them laugh. He makes his mark. He's never been one to be reticent or too cool for school. No, he looks you in the eye and unleashes a unique and surprising vocabulary, laced with occasional Casey Stengelisms, that bring you up short with startled barks of laughter.

I believe in child slavery. What else are they for? When I've come in from a hard day's gardening, I will sometimes demand a neck rub. Liam, having no choice, reluctantly complies, whimpering softly, "Whyy? Whyy?" 

Happy Mother's Day. Use it as an excuse to enslave your children, if only for the day. You're worth it.