Now I am Eating my Cat!

 I remember many, many years ago, when I was a baby illustrator, reading a piece about the New Yorker cartoonist and beloved children's book author (creator of Shrek!) William Steig, reminiscing about his first paying job. He had sold a drawing of a cat, and took himself forthwith to a café for a cup of tea and a bite to eat. Maybe it was in Paris. Maybe New York. I don't remember the details. But I remember this:  He savored the moment, smiling, saying, "Now I am eating my cat!"

Steig's words were an epiphany for me; the scene I saw in my head made real the direct relationship between sold drawing to money in the pocket. Such a heady concept for someone just embarking on freelance art!  That someone would pay for art he'd created was a delicious concept for a young Steig, as it still is for me so many years later. I love getting paid for my art, writing, lectures, inventions...it's the ultimate validation for living a creative life. I think about it a lot, as the WarblerFall continues to sell briskly, 15 months after its official launch. (Now I am eating my bird fountain!) Gratitude fuels me, keeps me going.

I want to share a little story about a recent commission, a peculiar one to be sure, and the Steig moment I have every time I look at the gift I bought myself with the money I earned.

While Liam was working at a gift shop in town, he was approached by the former owner of a restaurant and wine shop where he had once worked. She knew he was an artist. Could Liam, or his mom, perhaps--wasn't she the bird artist? draw some ducks for a wine label?  The message took a little while to filter to me, but when Liam told me about the exchange, I replied, "Sure. I've done wine labels. Bring it on." 

A few days later, a mysterious email arrived with two photos of a wine label, and no message attached.

I responded, asking what this was about, and was given a number to call. Pamela's daughter had emailed the photos for her mom. I was intrigued, but I still didn't know what the job entailed. When I reached Pamela, she explained the unusual nature of this request. What she wanted was not art to be reproduced on a wine label. She wanted me to draw ducks directly ON this wine bottle. Oh. Oh! I was intrigued!

You see, Pamela's son and daughter in law had this wine, Paraduxx, served at their wedding. It's a very nice wine. And now their anniversary was coming up, and in the interim they'd had two children. Pamela wanted to mark the occasion by having someone (me) add two more ducks to the label of a bottle of Paraduxx, to make a family of four, and she wanted to present it to the couple this Friday (it was Monday).

Once I understood the nature of the job, my wheels started turning. How to make it happen? Could I draw that small?  "How many zeroes are we talking about?" Pamela asked. I burst out laughing. "Not many. Maybe two, if that. I won't really know what I'm getting into until I start the job, but I promise it won't be too expensive for you."

Truth be told, I loved the challenge of this commission. The ducks on the label are small. Tiny! Maybe no more than an inch and a half long. I'd have to draw super small. I wasn't sure my eyes and fingers would be able to do it. How could I even place the eyes? Draw the bills that small? Eek!

I went to the wine shop to pick up the bottle. The pintails were not only tiny, they were embossed. Still, I thought I could make something believable out of it.

It was September 11, and it would have been Bill's and my 30th anniversary. I hadn't done the math; I didn't mark it in any way, didn't announce it. But as I left the wine shop with the bottle to be painted, I passed Greenleaf Nursery. There was a hand-lettered sign propped out front. 

ALL TREES 25% OFF 

TODAY ONLY

I took that as a sign. Oh, it was a sign, all right. I knew just what I was looking for. I executed a hairpin turn, parked at the left side of the lot. I was looking directly out my windshield at some red dogwood trees.

The tree I'd wanted for...forever. The first three I looked at weren't so hot. Withered leaves, no buds. No wonder they were 25% off. Maybe this wasn't going to work. An employee came out to help me and led me to another section where there was one tree that looked like just what I had in mind. The variety was "Cherokee Brave." It is supposed to be cold-hardy and have dark red flowers, fading to pink, then white. Yes. That's what I want. This tree.

                                            A Cherokee Brave dogwood in full flower. Swoon! 

It was covered in buds. BUDS! and it was tall and well-branched and strong. With 25% off, the tree came to $120, a very fair price for a tree maybe 9' tall and covered in BUDS! Sold, to the artist in olive drab! I couldn't believe the perfection of this moment. Kismet! Did somebody set this up? Kinda seemed like it. Bill?

But how would I get it home?

We turned it on its side and slid it into my Subaru. 

It fit perfectly. Like it was grown to fit in my Forester, grown to live on our sanctuary.

All the way home I talked to it and told it I loved it and that it had just won the dogwood lottery. It would grow up surrounded by friends and conspecifics, planted in dogwood-friendly soil and watered and fed. It rattled its curled leaves in response. This was the Curtis Loew of trees. Rescued from another winter in a too-small plastic pot, to be set free in the wild.

When I got home, I put my new tree on the patio and set right to researching flying pintails.  The anniversary was Friday, and it was Monday. I drew a couple of tiny ducks and used my ca. 1991 reducing Xerox machine to bring them down to label size.  The next day I transferred the drawings by coating the back with soft graphite, taping it onto the label, and re-drawing the birds.

As I'd anticipated, I was unable to draw that small, but I could take a very fine brush and paint that small. 

A valuable lesson! I suddenly understood how people paint cameos and the like. Tiny brushes. One has ever so much more control with a brush than with a pencil or pen.

I added some splash tracks to the subtle water lines printed on the bottle, to place my juvenile bird in the foreground.

Then I painted a second juvenile pintail taking off, and layered its wings over the printed drake's tail. 

The finished label, impossible to adequately photograph. It looked pretty cool! 

I wrapped the bottle in kraft paper and wrote an invoice on the wrapper.  It was easy to decide what to charge for my work. $120.00, a fair price, I thought, for maybe three hours' total work, plus two drives into town and back (72 miles). It was the price of the red dogwood.

I drove the bottle to town and left it for Pamela at the wine shop counter.

It took me about a week to decide where to plant the dogwood, but I knew I wanted it somewhere I could watch it grow, flower, leaf out, turn gold and red...I wanted it outside the new lean-to greenhouse, and I wanted it backed by wild white dogwoods. Oh, I can just see them now.

To my surprise, the nursery wouldn't give me a warranty on it--they said they don't guarantee dogwoods to live. Huh. Eep. OK. I still want this tree. I kind of held my breath until I unpotted it and saw the gorgeous healthy white roots! I scored them with a knife in four places as instructed on the tag, to stimulate side growth. 

Planting it was a rather bigger deal than I'd figured on--digging the hole 2x the diameter of the pot; hauling manure and sand, filling it in, watering it down, then staking it with wooden stakes and a bunch of old landline phone cord, wrapped in vinyl, which wouldn't cut the tender bark. Yep, I'm one of those people who has a hard time throwing potentially useful things away. Knew right where I'd coiled that phone cord and hung it in the garage.

 It took several hours to plant the tree and I was tired afterward!

I have so enjoyed watching its leaves plump out, uncurl and turn a gorgeous golden maroon since I planted it September 16. It works well in the landscape, I think.

I added a couple of big tomato cages to the stakes, to keep bucks from rubbing on it this fall.

Did I say it was full of BUDS? Yes, I believe I did. Pamela and her son and daughter-in-law were thrilled with the embellished Paraduxx label. She sent me a check with a nice tip, too! Everybody was happy in this interaction! It was a win-win all around.

I can't tell you how long I've wanted a red dogwood tree. Maybe all my life. They were always so expensive, and later in life I found out they are extremely fussy. Well, I'm ready for that. I feel good about our budding relationship. If a red dogwood can succeed anywhere, Indigo Hill is the place. 

Every time I look at this beautiful tree, I say to myself, "Now I am eating my cat!" It's a tree of gratitude.

I thought you would enjoy this epic story of rendered wine labels and fat little ducks and dogwoods and kismet. You need tiny ducks on a label, you know who to call now. 

Dogwood Victory Garden

 

Even as I write, the dogwoods are greening, the leaves are growing each day, covering the aging white bracts that so enchanted me for weeks. I am hurrying, hurrying this spring. It's all so rich and there's so much to be seen and listened to and learned. In April and May, life itself is a race, sometimes thoroughly exhausting, just trying to take in all the wonder. Add house and grounds maintenance to that, and I feel I am in constant motion. Someone said I'm like a shark, have to keep swimming to stay alive. Yes. Like a shark. 

I have to share these photos before the dogwoods drop all their bracts. I went out the evening of April 20 to shoot--the sky had just cleared and the cumulus clouds mimicked the floating clouds of dogwood blossoms. 

Curtis Loew loves taking these several times daily peregrinations out the orchard. He moseys along, usually in front of me, taking in the third dimension of smells as well as the sights and sounds I am able to enjoy. 

It was a most perfect evening--in the 70's, with a soft, gentle breeze. We meandered through the best dogwood passages slowly, spinning around to take them in from every angle. The cloud shapes echoed the puffs and platters of dogwood blossoms. It was like walking into a Maxfield Parrish painting.

This is what I've worked for, this is what I continue to work for--free dogwoods, floating. Dogwood waves breaking in the air, with nothing to stop their curling fall.

As much as I anticipated dogwood bloom this spring, it was so much more wonderful than I'd ever hoped. It was a visual spectacle, all the sweeter because I had freed almost every tree from piles of strangling honeysuckle and rose canes. I'd personally twisted those vines off their scarred trunks and limbs, gritting my teeth and smiling as I did it, thinking of what it would feel like to take in these sights. But still, they were so much lovelier than I had imagined.

In the morning, a sherbert like mix with blooming redbud and I am swooning with delight.

The peek of redbud at the end of the path...

Free open passages to walk without ducking or struggling; free trees with the breeze blowing in between them. My summer office, almost ready for occupancy. 

Phoebe and Liam got to be here for the start of the bloom, and for that I'll always be grateful. We resolved that they should try to be home each spring for this. Dogwood Bloom, our sacred family holiday.

For this, I cut the olive and rose; for this, I make the giant brushpiles; for this, I burn them. 

For this, I learned to wield a chainsaw, and that feels like a big thing to me. I feel powerful, indomitable, strong. I don't need to wait for anyone to help me now. For a woman alone in the world, that's big.

There is so much more to do. I will always be doing this, for as long as always may be for me. I know it isn't nearly long enough.

I so wish I'd started earlier, so I could have been living out here all this time.

But we start when we are ready, and not before.

If Bill were still here, I'd doubtless still be hoping that he'd come over and do a little chainsawing now and then. I'd never have hired the Amish crew to clear out the deadfalls and open the paths so I could get through to attack the work myself, never would have bought my own saw. I'd have been hoping, and none of this would have or could have happened. Life and death are strange that way. Sometimes it takes the death of someone you love to force you to realize you are capable. 

April is strange, too. This was my wakeup on April 21, the morning after I wandered the orchard in a T-shirt, smiling ear to ear. 

I realized that snow on white dogwoods just looks like more snow.

I knew the dogwoods would shrug it off. And they did, with not a mark or a wilt.

Everything came back just fine. I enjoyed the snow overlay on green for as long as it lasted, which was about six hours. Well, "enjoyed" isn't exactly the right word, but I took it in, even as I was dealing with the consequences of a late April snow event in other bluebirdy realms of my life.

Ain't it wonderful? Here:

 and gone:

The poison ivy has finally leafed out, which means I must stop for the season my mano-a-mano fight with invasive vegetation. I'm spot-spraying it in the interest of free access, as I continue to spot-spray the stumps of Russian olive and carpets of honeysuckle, and the small but countless tufts of multiflora rose re-growth. If I don't, all this hateful crap will simply come back, and after a year and a half of intensive clearing work, that would be a crying shame. Much as I hate to use any chemicals, I'm thrilled to say it looks for the moment like I'm winning this war, at least in one old ridgetop orchard somewhere in Ohio.

 Rather, the dogwoods are winning, and all native plants are winning. I keep finding amazing things coming up that I've never seen out there before. Onward we go, beating a path, ever beating a path, making strikes for the good and native against the horrid and invasive. 

 

A Dream of Dogwoods

I have a dream, and it is all about dogwoods. It's a dream of building a gallery of dogwoods, a place you can walk and meanwhile drown in their white blossoms. 

I always gave Bill all the credit for having the vision and chasing it down to make it real, but I have vision, too. This vision, this dream, has crept up on me in the last few years. As many dreams do, it started with what I didn't want. And what I didn't want was a mess, a horrible overgrown orchard barricaded by dozens of fallen trees, nothing anyone could stroll through or take joy in. That's what I had in 2018, when a derecho wrecked the place (which wasn't very nice to start with). 

The orchard had fallen into great neglect. It had fallen in on itself and exotics had taken over, as they will when you turn your back for a couple decades. Everything took precedence over cleaning it up, and we didn't really notice the inroads the rose and honeysuckle had made until it was too late to do anything about it. It was overwhelming. And once the trees came down, the overgrowth went wild, and you couldn't get a tractor through to even cut the paths. That wasn't my dream. That was my nightmare. 

I set about rectifying that in the winter of 2019. I hired a small team of Amish chainsaw artisans, who rented a Bobcat, and they made it possible to get through the paths, to see where my vision could lead me.

In this panorama, you can see a brushpile, backed by blooming dogwoods. This is my backyard. This is the second such pile I have built since fall of 2020. I burned one, and it went up with a roar that lasted all day and into the night. And then I made another that's even bigger. The first pile I made with hand pruners. It was very hard won. This second pile I made with a chainsaw. It was hard-won, too, but my hands and arms feel a lot better this time. There is another massive pile twice its size up on the east hill. Some of that one was made with a bulldozer. Both will be burned soon. 

I owe what you're about to see to these piles of brush, to the grit and utterly driven fervor that have possessed me to clean this place up. I had to uncover the dogwoods.

I had to dig these floating white butterflies out of walls and mountains of horrible multiflora, to take the jabs and hooks to my arms and legs, neck and torso. I got a thorn in my scalp today. That was cool. Truly, you couldn't even see the form of these two dogwoods for thorns and vines. I was sick of it, sick of staring  at drowning trees, wondering what they might look like under all that overgrowth. 

This is what they look like. Having been buried, they were forced to make incredible outward growth, as they strove to reach past the tangle and toward the sun. And stripping all that junk away leaves these impossibly graceful cantilevered limbs. I love them desperately, all the more because they tell a story of having been imprisoned, and now living free. Every dogwood in this place has deep spiral scars on its trunk and limbs, from the honeysuckle that strangled it. These dogwoods have wabi-sabi. They're grateful survivors, and they are past worrying about cosmetics. They're just glad to be alive.

Their blossoms look like cabbage white butterflies, floating on the breeze. No visible means of support. Just flying. 

The first tree I freed was the one I call The Dogwood God. It deserved to have the vines and thorny canes cut off it first. The Dogwood God is so huge and old it is impossible to photograph well. You have to be in its presence to appreciate it. 

It's so tall that its flowers float high above, and you can't really appreciate them from the ground! 

But I do, I do. 

Curtis is slipping through a patch of spring sun here, and you can see how big the tree is relative to him.

It's down at the far end of the old orchard, where the paths are wide and the maples are dominant. I love that part. 

I keep on photographing this tree, trying to capture its majesty. It really helps to have a dog for scale. It really helps to have a dog at all.

It's the tree's spread that makes it so special. I remember noticing it when we bought the place back in 1992, and remarking on how long its branches were. But somehow I didn't revere it the way I do now. Things like old trees get more precious the older one gets.

There's that reach, that spread I was telling you about. 

Before it rotted and fell off, it had a low branch that was even longer than this one. It was ridiculous.

Dogwoods aren't normally very large trees. Most of the trees I love are on the small, gracile side. I thought birches were my favorite tree until I became obsessed with freeing dogwoods. 

Now, when I walk through the orchard, I assess it all in relation to the dogwoods. What compliments them, and what detracts? I remove that which detracts, and it is always something invasive. I removed a huge Russian olive here, and the sinuous dance of the happy dogwoods thus revealed was a sight to behold. I've made several such openings, little dogwood groves, in the orchard rows. 

And so I've come to know this place, by carving it out tree by tree. There are still messes, but they are fewer and farther between now, and they are shrinking. The native beauty that has been buried for years upon years is emerging. Beauty is winning. 

I'm writing this hanging in my Air Chair by the greenhouse. The purple Moonstruck petunia is pumping out its evening fragrance, trolling for moths. I note with some amusement that it smells just like the Russian olives, which I sniff out and saw down as fast as I find them. I spray their cut stumps and order them to stay dead, but it rarely works. 

Last night, I got up in the wee hours and went to the back patio slider to look out at the almost full moon as it sank toward the west. The moonlight on the bank of white dogwoods almost brought me to my knees. I think that was the first time I'd really seen dogwoods in strong moonlight. God, it was like drinking a glass of brandy all in one gulp. And if that weren't enough, there was a big doe nibbling at the fresh-cut stuff on the brushpile, and she leapt sideways when she saw me at the window, disappearing under one of those banks of white moon blossoms. Honestly, it was all enough without a large mammal levitating sideways. 

Tonight I'm going to try to stay up late enough to take a moonlit walk through the orchard, with no flashlight. The glowing dogwoods will show me the paths. A barred owl is hooting down in Orchid Holler, as if cheering me on. Oh, now the whip-poor-will has started singing! It's flown so close I can hear the hollow cluck it makes right after the "will!" Spring is just too sweet and beautiful! Still, even with a singing whip and moonlight on dogwood flowers, it's hard to stay awake very long when you've been cutting and hauling brush all day. 

I have more photos of the dogwoods in full bloom, but I figure you're overloaded by now. Next post. And the coyotes begin to wail. It's a good spring night on Indigo Hill.