Bug Crazy

I've always loved bugs. Everyone claims they were a lonely, nerdy child who spent hours alone. But not many people can claim they spent hours as a child nudging an assortment of small insects down the sloping sides of ant lion pits to see what would happen; digging them up to find the crazy little ice-tong faced critter that could only crawl backward in circles; playing with tiger beetle larvae deep in their burrows, figuring out how to get them to clamp onto a grass stem so she could pull them out to have a look. Nope, most people don't say that in their memoirs. 

This is an unadulterated look at the right side of my "drawing board." I put that in quotes because I'm spending all my time there writing lately. That's OK. I write in big spurts and chunks, and then I draw the same way. It feels sooo good to be writing again, unblocked. Getting up in the morning looking forward to writing. It's a thing.

The Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America by David Beadle and my pal! Seabrooke Leckie is what you'll find me reading a lot lately. What a treat it is to page through and find the moths I've photographed without knowing what they were. 

The Beautiful Wood Nymph is technically a bird dropping mimic, but it's oh so much more when you have a close look. Yep, it's supposed to look like feces to fool predatory birds (who'd wanna eat that?), but gaaah what a beautiful dropping. That bronzy edge to the chestnut border; the olive spots of corruption, and the furry forelegs which are designed to look like squiggly softserve drips...ahhhhh.

When something like this blunders through the dog door and into the kitchen, I get all ate up.

I AM THE NIGHT! RELEASE ME IMMEDIATELY!

All right. Out the door you go.

So on August 1 when I saw a spectacularly colorful beetle clinging by one good leg to the bird-proof netting on the outside of my studio window, it was the most natural thing in the world to haul a kitchen chair out to the hummingbird garden so I could climb up and get it down. 

 I knew it was a metallic wood borer, but didn't know which one. It was a beautiful one.  Holy smokes  what a living jewel.

The Kaufman field guides are the ones I grab first. Small, compact, illustrated with immaculate photos (many retouched for accuracy), these guides are the bomb. My sentimental favorite is the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America. I love it because it's given me so many thrills. Ounce for ounce, the insect guide is the one that thrills the most. That's just because there is so darn much to know about bugs, and no naturalist can know everything. I started to write "amateur naturalist" then stopped. Ehh. I think I safely qualify as a pro at this point. 

 I turned the unfortunate beetle over in my hand, noting that it had somehow lost all but one of its feet. Perhaps through aging? An accident? It was hanging in there. I was so grateful to see it, to hold it in my hand.

I looked it up, posted photos on Instagram and Facebook, and was quickly and cheerfully corrected by a career entomologist named Ted MacRae. It wasn't Cypriacis fasciata, but Buprestes rufipes. Thus we discovered that there'd been a caption switch in the Kaufman guide. These things happen. They've happened to me. Imagine putting together a book like this with hundreds upon hundreds of photos to match to their names. This small error does not diminish my love for Eric Eaton's book in the slightest. It is incredible and I'm grateful to have it. You should have it too. 

The underside was particularly ridiculous. 

Buprestes rufipes is a wood borer, with a grublike larva that chews through already dead maple, oak and elm trees. Do not hate it. It doesn't kill your favorite trees. Just hope that you get to see one some- day, too. It is a spectacular insect.

Another thrilling ID from the Eaton/Kaufman guide: the Mydas fly! I knew I'd never seen anything like this gigantic fly. At first I thought it was a tarantula hawk, and that's what the Mydas fly wants you to think it is. But the head and antennae were all fly. The abdomen had a blunt end, no stinger. Good ruse!

The closer I got the more fly-like it became. The sweet thing was placidly sponging up nectar from the milkweed blossoms with a tongue that was standard-issue housefly--tipped with a spiny sponge. 

Will ya look at the honeybees on this milkweed?? This photo begins to capture the riot of activity in my favorite Monarch Meadow. 

It also begins to capture my joy at its conservation. This is the single best stand of common milkweed I've ever seen. Acres of it. And it was getting mown twice a summer, once just before bloom peak, and once again just before the cut plants struggled back with another attempt at blossoms. I will never forget the day I came back from the bus stop to find it being mowed. Late instar monarch caterpillars were being thrown through the air. We got out of the car and flagged my neighbor down.

All I did, back when the kids were still riding a big yellow school bus and Liam was about half as tall as Phoebe, was to speak with my neighbor, show him the displaced caterpillars, and suggest that he not do that second mow. That we leave the milkweed for the butterflies and bees. 

We took all the caterpillars, some 70 of them, home to our meadow to grow up. Sweet SuperLiam just happened to be wearing his cape when he was pressed into service to pick monarchs and transfer them to uncut plants in our yard.

please forgive your mother Liam, for posting this photo. You were and are the sweetest boy.

The meadow has never been mowed in late summer again.

This is the result.

The magic here is that the milkweed, having been mown in June, is bursting into bloom at precisely the time that bees, butterflies, and monarchs especially need it most. Ovipositing female monarchs are presumably ecstatic to find young, tender shoots to lay their eggs on, and a big drink of sticky nectar to boot. 

This, by the little black scent glands on his hindwings, is a male, but you get the picture.

There will be more posts from Monarch Meadow. I cannot stay away. Perfection is a real draw for me.

The Ancestral Home

Lots of people ask me what my name means. Zickefoose is a corruption of the German name Ziegenfuss, which means goat foot. It's not derogatory, not based on our looks. It refers to a nimble way of walking. Much better! I have had only two bad falls in my life, and both were when I was hugely pregnant. Amniotic fluid is a great cushion. Just ask my kids. As for the falls, I'm sure I can arrange more as I get old and doddery. But for now, I'm getting around pretty good. That was always what my grandparents said when asked how they were. It was all about mobility. I never understood why they emphasized how they were "getting around" then, when I was a little kid, and I moved as easily as I breathed. I get it now. Oh boy do I get it. 

Zickefoose is quirky enough that, when I got married and the pressure was on to change my name, I didn't. Wouldn't. Couldn't. I am a Zickefoose and will always be. Actually the decision had been made when I was very young. I loved my name, even though I was last in every line. I loved being my father's daughter, of being identified in some tangible way as his. He was a very cool man. My mom knew we'd have a special bond, with me being the last of six kids. She wanted my middle name to be Dale, to honor him. My dad voted it down. So my middle name defaulted to Sue. Which honors no one. A placeholder. Damn, and oh well. Why DOD, why?? Well, you know now that it would have been the right thing to do.

 Once I started doing freelance art as a freshman in college, I figured if I was going to hang out my shingle, I might as well have a memorable last name, one that, once learned, isn't forgotten.

What follows here is a small and shallow exploration of Zickefoose roots in America. I'm doing it mostly so my kids and family and I have a record of the things I've been told about our line. I don't expect it to be particularly interesting to anyone who isn't a Zickefoose, but I'm glad to know these things. Some people, like my brother Bob and especially our first cousin Brad Braga, have an aptitude for genealogy. Brad has an entire climate-controlled room in his Marshalltown, Iowa basement devoted to family photos and original records. He can answer any question we throw at him about who's related to whom and how.  He is a meet keeper of the Zickefoose flame and records. I am thankful for Brad. We all are.  He can explain what a third cousin, once removed, actually is. I can have something like that explained to me a hundred times and still not get it. Genealogy is like math to me. Genealogy lore goes through me like a dose of salts. So I'm determined to record it so I have it.

In 1751, Johan Jacob Ziegenfuss came to America from Germany. It's thought he had a son named Peter, who settled near the little town of Blue Grass, Virginia, in Highland County. At that time, Blue Grass was called Crab Apple Bottom. I guess I can see why they changed the name to Blue Grass.

  Peter had a son named George. George settled near Pipe Stem, West Virginia, with a land grant. At that time, Greenbriar County, WV, encompassed Pipe Stem. Larry Zickefoose, historian and genealogist for the West Virginia clan, says that during the time George was living there, you could be born, live and die in the same spot, but the county lines were changing such that you'd have lived in three different counties.

 So whether the Ziegenfuss/Zickefooses come from Virginia or West Virginia is a bit muddled. George's son, Benjamin, married his first cousin, Susannah Buzzard. DOD had told us this, and West Virginia genealogist Larry Zickefoose, who's written a book called From Zigenfuss to Zickefoose, confirms this. Marrying one's first cousin is forbidden in the Old Testament. 

This photo of Benjamin and Susannah entrances me. As I look at the pair, the set of their wide mouths and the shape of their heads, with prominent cheekbones and high foreheads, is very familiar to me. Susanna in particular looks like my dad's sisters, in a big way. 

The cheekbones alone belie their bloodlines. 

My father always said that he thought Ben and Susannah went west to escape the disapproval of their family. I'm glad they did.   They lived for a short while in Ohio (!) and Indiana, then settled in Henry County, Iowa, near Olds, around 1837. They had eight children. The first three were born in Virginia, the fourth in Ohio on the way to Iowa.  Their sixth was Western Summers Zickefoose, born near Olds, Iowa in 1842. That would make him just the right age to get caught up in the Civil War. He fought for the Union, with the 25th Iowa Regiment.

Western Summers was my great grandfather. 

He was at Vicksburg and other battles along the Mississippi, and was with Sherman around Atlanta and on his famous march. As they marched through the Carolinas Wes got malaria, and was sent north on a boat. He regretted missing the grand mustering in Washington D.C. Western's older brother, Clark, was killed at Arkansas Post and died in Wes's arms. He had been hit in the temple by a spent Minie ball. I remember DOD saying, "It never even broke the skin."  

Western was in Buell's Army of the Ohio, reinforcing Grant after the first day of fighting, when troops were being boated across the Tennessee River all night long. But Wes never got off the boat to join the fight at Shiloh. Good thing. 

My sister Micky has a tin plate and cup that had belonged to Western Summers, part of his mess kit. He lived through that terrible war and went on to live a full life. Missing Shiloh might have been the key there. Attaining the age of 83 is remarkable for a man, for those days. 

Western Summers' grave, Asbury Cemetery, Henry Co., Iowa

Western Summers Zickefoose, my great grandfather.

Martha Jane Yancey, my great grandmother.

Wes went on to marry Martha Yancey and have a son named Charles Summers Zickefoose. He was born in 1878, and remained unnamed for two years. Not sure what that's about. What do you call him until you decide what to name him? Hey You??  I remember Grampa Charlie Zickefoose being pretty crochety, but then he wasn't feeling well by the time I came along. My grandmother Elnora Zickefoose was the sweetest person you could imagine, so she more than made up for that. Whenever Nora would hear us Zickefoose kids singing in harmony, she would say, "They got that from the Yancey's." That's still a catch phrase in our family. It came from the Yancey's. Thank you, Martha, for giving us our musicality. It somehow escaped my dad. He loved music and could sing just fine, but had little sense of rhythm. Singing (or dancing, Ida said) with him was an adventure in compensation.

My DOD, Charles Dale Zickefoose

He may not have had much rhythm, but there was a lot he could do. Like, everything.

 I love the fact that my immediate family originated in Iowa, my grandparents and both my parents being born there, thanks to Ben and Susanna's moving west. When we moved from the Midwest to Richmond, Virginia in 1962, we were coming back to the homeland, though that fact was lost on me then. I remember missing terribly the big skies of the Great Plains. I was born in South Dakota and lived my early years in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. We were used to seeing the weather coming. In Richmond, we had to look straight up through the trees to see the sky, and storms always took us by surprise.

So you might imagine the feelings that coursed through me when my brother Bob gave me and Liam a route home from his place in Mt. Solon, Virginia, back to Ohio, that went right through the ancestral Zickefoose home along the Virginia/West Virginia line. (We were heading home from the wedding of Bob and Bonnie's daughter, Holly).

There are not many places in this world that I look at and say, "Yes. I could live here." But this was one of them. Rt. 250 went up, down and around through gorgeous healthy national forest with scattered agriculture and mountain vistas. 

Speeding car out the window photo. Near Blue Grass, Virginia. Ohhh yeah. It's sooo beautiful here.

Liam loved the ride so much he rolled down the window and hung his head out like a dog. He couldn't get over the views and the beauty of this place.

Before long the highway, which was all but deserted, rolled down into a valley where beavers had made a beautiful series of ponds, like beads on a big watery chain.

The clouds and reflections were perfect.

I've never seen Liam respond to a landscape the way he did to this one. We pulled over and got out to revel in it. 

I loved to think that our ancestors may have ridden or driven wagons along this route and loved this valley, too. I wondered if the beavers were there then.

I don't know if a landscape or a place can be so deep in your genes that you somehow know your ancestral place when you see it, but Liam and I knew something special was going on here.

I am grateful to have children with a sense of place, genetic or not. Who know beauty when they see it, and stop to wallow around in it.

Here's a little movie of Route 250 near the Virginia/ West Virginia line. I hope you've enjoyed this exploration of Zickefoose roots as much as I've enjoyed ferreting out the information and photos. Many thanks to Bob Zickefoose and Brad Braga for keeping the genealogical flame for know-nothings like me.

And because it was the song in my head the entire drive, here's Jonathan Edwards and the Seldom Scene with "Blue Ridge."

Hey 21! Phoebe's All Grown Up!

 I was thinking last evening about how very, very different the weather was on the evening of July 10, 1996. It was cool, cool enough to slow the crickets down and make me stretch one of Bill's great big fleece pullovers over my head and heaving abdomen. I sat heavily in a cedar Adirondack chair, long since rotted away, and submitted to a video interview by Bill, holding a camcorder on his shoulder (remember those?) It was bigger than his head. He was asking me questions about how I thought our baby would be: what she'd look like, whether she'd have long legs like his or short ones like mine.

July 10, 2017. Now THAT is ugly. In the most beautiful way. I was frantically picking wax beans in the garden, trying to get a meal before it hit. I failed. My favorite weather: the leadup to a thunderstorm. I HAVE to be out in it.

At the time I was a bit annoyed, as only a full-term pregnant woman can be, that he would subject me to this interview, and I told him he had to avert the camera while I puffed through the contractions, dammit! I didn't know it then but I was in active labor, and technically probably should have been at the hospital. When I did get to the hospital they checked me and started rushing around like their gowns were on fire, but it was to be another 12 hours of fabulous back labor before Phoebe made the scene. I pretty much knew there was no big rush. There was an herbed chicken with sweet potatoes roasting in the oven, and a pint of ice cream in the freezer that I intended to eat, because my midwife had told me they wouldn't let me eat once I got to the hospital. Well then! I had the hardest 24 hours of work in my life ahead of me, and you have to eat to work like that. We didn't go into town until midnight. Phoebe arrived at 11:41 AM July 11, 1996.

I watch that prenatal interview now and I'm so glad we have it, because so much more than what I hoped for that mystery baby has come true. I couldn't have dreamt a baby like that one has turned out to be.

"Good" doesn't quite capture this light, does it?

We all went out on the deck last night to bask in the after-storm light. I was so overcome I was unable to speak. This is a new thing with me...I stutter when the light is good. I stutter when I see deer doing good things that need to be photographed. When a worm-eating warbler shows up at the studio window, as one just did. I literally cannot form any words. I see Bill and Liam looking at each other and then at me, the way the Jetsons looked at Rosie the Robot when she'd get a short and go on the fritz and throw her metal claws up in the air and spin around in circles like a big clanky phalarope.

I know my brain is changing as I age, and this sudden incapacitation in the face of great beauty is one of the early heads-up I suspect. Or I could call it rapture. Yes. Let's call it rapture. 

All this beauty gave me to contemplate about what can happen in 21 years. One moment, you have a squirmy little girl with a tuft of copper on her head who can't even sit up

so you fake her taking a great balletic leap as she lies on a blanket

 and the next you have a lissome woman at your side, who is not only standing up but walking alone.

Phoebe is both an object of contemplation and a muse.  She is also my friend. As is her brother. At this point, they are giving me far more than I give them (well, if you don't count Bowdoin's spring semester bill gaaaaaackkkk). Together, they plug me in each night, help keep me going.

Playing the Jungle Gym game with a very young Jemima Jay, the kids cracked up when Chet Baker inserted himself into the scene. You have your hands out. Pet me then. Pay no attention to the little bird on the basket. Do not even look at her.

This sustaining love they both receive and give has only grown through the years. 

When she could still outrun him... (October 2014)

and when she no longer could. (June 2017)

When she got back from Panama, the longest time she'd ever been away from Liam, from us, from home. 

That love between them is my favorite thing about these kids. 

On this, Phoebe's 21st birthday, I wanted to celebrate her, and I could easily spend all day posting photos and writing captions. But I thought I'd pick out just two things to celebrate. And those are the love between her and Liam and her maximum bird magic. 

It started early, with Charlie Macaw.  This bird, whose vise-like bill could crack a Brazil nut, decided Phoebe was her baby. And all babies need attention and preening.

Phoebe knows that better than anyone. She is who made Jemima the character she is. As my DOD always said, "Attention makes the pup." It's been borne out again and again. Ask Chet Baker. Ask Jemima. As fate would have it, Phoebe was home during the critical socialization weeks of this jay, giving her the undivided attention that gave her confidence and strength of character.

Did this love and affection cause Jemima to be hopelessly imprinted on humans? Nope. Not by current indications. More on that later. Data is still coming in in great batches.

Can you love a wee little jay and still set her free? Yep. You can. 

Can rehab be fun? Yep. It is (except when it's not.)

 I present Phoebe and the Amazing Inflatable Blue Jay.

On your birthday, Phoebe, I wish you all the happiness in the world. I wish you best friends and delicious food and beautiful days. I wish you the sustaining love of your family and bird magic, every day.

I wish you joy enough to leap for.

Keep those snaps and texts coming, baby. I'm on my way.