Phoebe is 24!

She's like one of my birds, my ephemeral clients, come to settle in the nest for a summer. It's been a  seemingly endless stream of days that are very much the same. Confined, becalmed, cast out of our former lives into this odd replay of high school summers, we are frozen in time, bewildered but also knowing we are blessed to be together. We are reduced to our elemental selves, back in our old roles. And yet we know it will end; we will all find ways to move back into our old lives. And so it seems to be happening. 

I hear her talking to her laptop, to the people appearing in little squares on its screen, who've hired her to counsel high school students in the mountains of North Carolina. She's found a job--no small feat-- during the pandemic, all those hours of searching finally culminating in this. She's forming bonds, training for her work, expecting to fly the nest next month. We'll have to get her a wardrobe and a car and all the million things it takes to set up a life eight hours from home. It's as sudden as the months since March have been slow, and a bit overwhelming for her mama. In the long view, she is doing what she must as a young adult. She must start her own life, earn her own way, and she's fiercely determined to do it. She was literally kicked off La Gomera in the Canary Islands by her sponsoring organization, Fulbright, when the pandemic hit in mid March. Phoebe had to leave her elementary school students, her fellow teachers, her home, their dog Arafo, and her love, Oscar, with no assurance of when they'd see each other again. But they talk and laugh in the afternoons, so grateful to be connected by the miracle of video calling. Somehow they will be together again, but it's not going to be easy or soon. He waits patiently for that day in the bright Gomeran sun. 

She has handled it all with grace and grit, longing and love. Oscar has responded with incredible strength and positivity. He's back at work and saving money, studying English on DuoLingo and practicing conversation with Phoebe and us every day. I've been awed and humbled by their ability to adjust to their separation. What's their choice? She wants to be happy and independent, to find her own way. So she puts one foot in front of the other, and dreams of somehow getting Oscar over here to start fresh together.  America as we know it now will have to change a lot for that to happen. But it is changing, every day. We are well past ready for that change, for relief, for love and tolerance to conquer chaos, hatred and fear. I don't think we're alone.

Curtis helps. We all fall on him, inhale his woodsy scent, hug him as if our lives depended on it. He has lots of work to do here. He loves being wallered on all day long. He loves his long walks in the orchard and meadow.

Flowers have helped. It's been ages since she's been home for lilac bloom! Oh, to get to experience spring oh so slowly arriving, what a gift that was. Now we pray for the rain that seemed in May as if it would never stop. Prayers were answered today with a torrent! 

The woods have helped. Going into the woods is one of Phoebe's very favorite things to do. As if they knew we needed them, perhaps 50 showy orchis plants threw a party in a little gully in the farthest reaches of our 80 acres back in April.  We hadn't even known they were there, and suddenly they were everywhere.

They came up, among many other places, right in a circle of stones that Bill made back when the kids were little, and we packed up everything it took to cook hamburgers in the snowy woods on the coldest day of the year. He built a fire right there, and cooked our dinner. Oh, what a moment when we found that ring of rocks and realized what it represented: when we'd last been there together.

We turned over the stones, now gone mossy, and remembered. We've been talking about him every single day, keeping him alive in our minds and hearts. Part of being home, of course, is remembering what it was like when he was with us. Phoebe and Liam don't want to forget anything, and neither do I. We miss him, his expert guidance ("Here's what you need to do...") and the rich Thompson family history he could tell. We are a bit adrift without him. But we're finding our way.

She's been tending two new Moultrie game cameras, seeing what walks our paths when we're asleep or otherwise occupied. She looks for the perfect place to situate them, her trusty cur by her side (or ranging far, as he pleases). I love to see her suit up and go off by herself into the woods. She's a Maxi-Me, at 5'9".

There have been many memorable meals, three a day last I counted. We've all done some cooking.

Spinach/feta salmon burgers with asparagus and watermelon on a pretzel bun-- ole!

And on May 9, she brought home a tiny naked song sparrow nestling, found on the side of an asphalt road on a drizzly 37 degree afternoon. It had been discarded by its parents, we think, who couldn't keep it warm or fed, so they took it from the nest and dumped it on the roadside.

Together we raised it up, fed it hundreds of times, saw it grow strong and wild, and then let it go.

  Dustin deserves her own story. What a bird!

From this

to this!! in 45 days!

Phoebe was happy to move her job search outside to better accomodate our recent fledgling's need for food and companionship. Believe it or not, the new WiFi she researched and obtained for us reaches out to the chaise, in the shade of the Japanese maple! (Curtis gets his own chair, though he prefers the chaise and steals it the second Phoebe leaves to get something).

Yes, along with Liam, she's also in-house tech support and advisor. She helped us break free of HughesNet satellite "service," which was a lotta money for practically nothing. I'd been shackled by it for twenty years.  Now, getting Internet through our LTE signal, (Cyberonic Rural Internet Providers) we can do most of the things that normal folks can. Like watch videos, blog,  Facetime and Zoom. Phoebe swooped in just in the nick of time to save us from the Dark Ages. That first couple of months were really tough, when we were all living under one roof just as everything went online. We were still hamstringed by HughesNet and its paltry 15 gig/month "allotment," which invariably ran out within four days. It would take me hours just to upload the photos for a blogpost like this.  Now, it still takes me hours, but not because of a snail-slow connection. :/ Thanks for the rescue, SuperGirl! You've made our lives ever so much easier, faster and better!

Liam says Yay Phoebe! I can stream things now!

We have had some nice walks down Dean's Fork to visit the beavers and hear the wood thrush concerto at dusk. 

One of the unexpected gifts of the summer was all that rain in the spring. It filled up the puddles on the road that leads to our Personal Oil Well. (It's an Appalachian Ohio thing). Phoebe began monitoring them for frog eggs and tadpoles in late May and by the first week of June she was fully engaged, with American toad, mountain chorus frog, spring peeper, and gray tree frogs all going wild out there. When the rains stopped and the broiling heat started, she began toting jugs of rainwater to two puddles. She wasn't going to let a tadpole die on her watch. She enlisted Liam to carry some, and carried lots herself. A pint's a pound the world around; each jug is 5 gallons, so that's a 40-pound load on those shoulders.

By last week, it was getting so dry we were filling one of the puddles twice a day! I drove the tractor and wagon out with four jugs. All told we've probably toted more than 50 gallons of rainwater out to help the tadpoles. We moved those taddies to a more reliable puddle.

It's work, like everything else, to keep puddles full in a bad Ohio drought, but oh, the rewards are so rich. First to grow up and go were the mountain chorus frogs and spring peepers. I'm not pretending to know which one this is. We're just glad it's alive!

 

Rana, the Frog Princess, keeps everything documented, just like her mama.

 

 There were other cool things in that puddle. Here's a predaceous diving beetle, Acilius mediatus, next to a maturing gray treefrog taddy. See its little hinders folded up?  We have found this beetle to be no threat to the tadpoles, though perhaps small ones might be at risk.

 Phoebs has discovered that the gray treefrog taddies get pallid and thin right before they frog out.

As well they should; their mouths are changing from a sucker/scraper/radula thing to one more like ours! Probably hard to eat while your mouth is metamorphosing. Liam wondered aloud if it hurts. Dang good question, Science Chimp Jr.

And then, TaDAAA! you're a treefrog! Green for camo to start. Still with the little buttnub of your tail. Oh man. You are CUTE. 

But for Phoebe they wouldn't be on this earth.

All 250 of them would be a sad handful of dried mud. This was taken just a few days ago, when the smaller puddle finally dried up, despite our efforts. We think the deer and turkeys were drinking it down. We panicked, then quickly moved them to a nearby, deeper puddle that's reliable, and now we're augmenting that one. We have two puddles going; one with 170 tadpoles; the other with maybe 80.

And every day we go out at least twice and see who's popped out of the water. Oh, it's sweet. 

 

 Sweet, like a girl who's turning 24 today.

Who loves her brother, her dog, and her mama

who wears her grandpa Thompson's naughty hat with style

and is growing up just like the child of our red oak grows, straight and tall, strong, slender and true.

Happy birthday, dear Phoebe. Happy birthday to you! This is a little blog to remember your summer by. It has been the greatest gift to have you and Liam here together for the spring and most of the summer. I will never forget it. You are the best, the boldest, the brightest stars in my sky.

If you are thinking of taking Curtis to North Carolina with you, think again. 

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.