Jurassic Garden

Once the renovation was complete, my focus turned back to the outdoors. There was the matter of the vegetable garden, protected by Jurassic era fencing of four different kinds and heights.  It dated to the early 1990's.  Every time Bill and I had another type of critter get in--a baby rabbit or a woodchuck, for example, we'd slap another layer of fencing on it. Stock fencing, two layers, chicken wire,  and black nylon deer netting, which made up the original enclosure until we realized everything small could get through that. It was horrible, and impossible to weed, too, with the grass and weeds all coming up between those layers of fence. Frankly, it was in shambles. The wood had long since rotted and fallen apart.  Somehow, it still kept the rabbits out, but barely.

The view from inside, late in the fall of 2024:

and the ramshackle fencing and warped door and rotted planks dating to 1994 or so. Ugggh. 

 Because there was so very much to do in the next three months (by now it was April, for a July wedding), I kept telling myself nobody would mind that I had a shabby vegetable garden, but I knew it wasn’t true. I minded, very much. It was time to demolish this monstrosity and make something better. It's funny what you can overlook and get used to until you know you're going to throw a wedding on your place. Yes, you can take that as a warning, if you're considering doing something crazy like throwing a wedding on your place.

And so in April 2025, I asked my friend Donnie Schott to design something beautiful for me. First we talked about raised beds within an enclosure, but I was loath to give up even a square inch of growing space to mulched paths between high, isolated raised beds. I laugh now to think of trying to grow my German Pink tomato plants (about 7' tall) and sprawling grape tomatoes in those neat galvanized containers I was looking at. 

Nope. It wouldn't work for my style of gardening. I wanted complete freedom to plant huge plants, and to plant my peas and string beans in the long rows I'm used to. 

So Donnie came up with a critter-proof enclosure that is quite ingenious.

                                

I never dreamt that the thing would go up in only one day! I thought I'd have time to get the soil delivered before it was finished. Nope! As I watched them moving at warp speed, I had to call Greenleaf Landscaping and scramble the mushroom compost I wanted to dump in there the very morning they started work, because we had to get it dumped and spread out before the last side went on. Three inches of mushroom compost--that ought to do it! 

They spread it out nicely with the backhoe!

Before the rebar reinforcers went up on top, and before the netting went up, this is how it looked at the end of Day 1.

We re-used the deer netting from the old garden. Pretty impressive that it's held up since the early 1990's! It keeps the deer out, but has enough softness and give so that it doesn’t kill any bird that happens to fly into it. You definitely can't say that about wire mesh fencing. Winning! 

No mammal has gotten into this garden--not even a chipmunk. Well, the cardinals fly down into it to macerate my snap peas, but that doesn't really count. I expect that every year. :) Donnie built me a citadel to vegetables! 

I asked him to stand next to it for a photo, as he is rightly proud of his elegant design.

I was absolutely racing to get the garden finished and the peas planted before I left for an April bird festival in Arizona. When I got back they were well up, and I had to do a thing backward. I had always intended to line the sides of the garden wall with foam, to protect them from moisture and to keep any wood preservatives from leaching into the garden soil. Well, thanks to the same-morning delivery of the soil, I didn't have time to do that before I had to leave for the festival, so I settled for getting the peas planted and figured I'd deal with it when I got back. Oh my, what a tedious job it was to do it after the peas were up.

I had to dig deep but careful trenches next to the already growing peas, apologizing as I went. It was a two day job. 

Then I cut the foam to fit, cutting around Curtis, who found the big foam sheets to be a wonderful place to sleep and collect kisses.

Next, I slid the foam down into the trenches and filled around it. My poacher's spade, with its straight rectangular blade, was a great help in all this.

When it was done, you could see the green foam edge all around. It makes me feel better about using preserved wood for the enclosure. It should make the wood last longer since it won't be in direct contact with damp soil, too. 

  Donnie built a citadel for tomatoes, tuberoses and beans, a glorious enclosure that would keep the deer and chipmunks and rabbits out of my food, replacing a monstrosity with an elegant, additive structure. 

Being me, I let the volunteer Grandpa Ott morning glories, who thought all that soil disturbance was their call to arms, clamber all up the netting. Oh, they were so beautiful. But they were a bit too enthusiastic, and they set seed with a vengeance. And they cut a lot of sun from the tomatoes and beans! 

Obviously, they loved the manure in the mushroom compost! Ut-oh. 

So when they were done blooming and quickly going to seed I spent a huge day ripping all the vines out of the netting by hand. In the process the dried up vines dropped approximately 1.6 million seeds into the garden, and around it too. (There were still 8.2 million seeds in the vines, so I had to dry them out in trash cans set in the sun, and then burn them.) The precautions I took in June, mulching with newspaper and soil all around the outside of the citadel, will likely not keep them from coming up next year. And they're going to come up like gangbusters in the garden proper. Well, you live and learn. I will be weeding nonstop come spring. But at least I won't be weeding grass coming in from the sides!

Speaking of living and learning...the day after I ripped the vines down there were a zillion morning glory seeds all over the bare ground around the outside perimeter of the structure. I was thinking I would vacuum them up to save weeding next spring. I came out to take another look at the situation and found a chipmunk, stretched out dead with not a mark on her, right on the bare soil. I looked at her tracks, and could see the circular tracks and bare soil where she had snarfed up a bunch of seeds. They were missing from all around where she lay. Gathering those seeds would be her last act. Morning glory seeds are both hallucinogenic and deadly poisonous. I hope she saw some wild visions before she checked out. Another reason not to let morning glories take over my vegetable garden! No fair to the naive animals (and maybe birds) that might eat the seeds.

Here's the enclosure as it looks now, in September, with tuberoses blooming their heads off, and beans telling me they need to be picked, and tomatoes telling me it's time to can, and gobs of basil telling me it's time to make the pesto! There is no rest for the weary.

Suffice it to say I was proud for our wedding guests to see it, and very, very glad I'd pulled the trigger on getting it built! Many thanks to Donnie Schott, D & L Backhoe and Construction and the wonderful crew for this modern-day barn-raising! You have made me so happy.

D & L Backhoe and Construction's next target: the rotting raised wooden deck behind the house. The spiffier the house became, the worse that old deck was looking...

Hoopla, Coming Up! But First, We Must Renovate!

Yep, I'm blogging again, having taken a "break" since April (What is it now, September 6?) As you'll see, it was hardly a break. I'm blogging not because I think the world ought to care what paint colors I chose for a renovation, but because I think that when you've worked hard, you should reflect on it and celebrate it. And when you and your beloveds have gone through an enormous life passage, writing about it and documenting it is a good thing to do all around. So much happens that we forget, and I love having a written and pictorial record of so many life passages here on this blog. If you enjoy reading it, that's great! If it inspires you to make some changes for yourself, so much the better!

This July, Indigo Hill was host to a wedding celebration for Phoebe and Óscar, who had a bare-bones, unwitnessed courthouse wedding in Indiana in January 2024, just a few weeks after he came to America for good. It was a requirement of the "fiancé visa" that they be wed within 90 days of his arrival from Spain. I didn't even have time to get out there to witness it; they just marched themselves right in and did the deed. Afterward, they went out for doughnuts. Delicious doughnuts, but still. 

We all thought there should be a little more hoopla than that...

We planned it around the flowers. Phoebe and I walked the meadows and watched, and it became clear to us over the last few years that the very end of July was peak for the wild bergamot, the woodland sunflowers, the purple coneflower. These would be the stalwarts, the backbone of our celebration. 

In so many ways, it was always about the flowers. It was about the outdoors and what the skies were doing; about living on this land. So we tried to ascertain when the moment of peak beauty might be. June as a wedding month has been done. So has May. We wanted it to be in our time, in July, the month when we both were born, when the insect music swells, and all the late flowers are having a riotous party in the wildflower meadow. When the butterflies are dancing, and all nature is celebrating anyway. We knew we’d be at the mercy of the weather; one always is when planning an outdoor event. But we couldn’t imagine anything for the ceremony but being outdoors, where we're happiest.

And so in April 2024, I began mowing what we came to call the wedding grounds. And I began weeding and mulching all the gardens around the house with a bit more than my usual tenacity. I figured if I kept up with it, I wouldn’t have a horrendous push of clearing and weeding at the end. And that proved to be the case. Just a topoff weed and water, some fresh mulch and a couple of final mows and I was good to go. If I’m good at anything, it’s maintenance. Faithful to the task, no matter how long it takes, and how many times it has to be repeated. I just keep going, and I enjoy keeping going.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and that's bad when you are a linear thinker like me. Because preparations for this wedding had started in December 2023, when I started purging my belongings for the renovation. Not that the house needed it, much. Oh Lord, did it need it.

The preparation all started in earnest on February 14,  2024, when I had all the floors redone and the walls painted. I was a full part of the two-man crew (Walt and Hero), here putting my fan together,

who swept through my house, making it beautiful. 

My bigass new fan-that-looks-like-a-windmill is one of my favorite things in the whole house. It takes me to the prairie and makes a wonderful breeze! 

These two West Virginians sure know what they're doing, and I'd hire them again in a heartbeat. It was a surprise to me how hard I had to work to clear the decks for them to do their work. Like, I popped out of bed when I heard their trucks pull in before daylight, and when they finally left in the afternoon, I was a limp, wet rag, done in. I was also the gopher for anything they needed from town, and many days I'd have to run in with a list and go into Lowe's Hell to try to find things I had never even heard of. That was hard. 

Redoing the paint and all the flooring was like having to pack up and move, without going anywhere. Because we were replacing all the floors, we had to clear all the furniture out of each room, and find places to put it while the flooring went down. 

 Kitchen hell, full of foyer stuff while the yellow

foyer's being painted. A torn-up kitchen is always the worst, right? Because even though everything is torn to pieces, you still have to eat. When you're a half-hour from town, you don't just pop out to dinner. You deal with it. Thank goodness we weren't doing a full kitchen renovation, just paint and floors. The hard maple cabinets dating to 1999 aren't going anywhere, though I could sure use new countertops and sink. But I'll think about that later.

 In the living room, my giant built-in wall of natural history books had to be weeded through so I could empty the shelves so they could be painted Northwoods Brown. UGH!! Awwwful job. I did that in the six weeks before the renovation began. This is just half of them.

The ones I wanted went in boxes in the basement for later, and the ones I didn’t also went in boxes, to be donated to Gorman Nature Center in Mansfield, Ohio, for distribution to biologists and field naturalists around the state, via free tables at conventions. That was deeply satisfying to me, and I thank Dave McShaffrey of Marietta College, biology prof and fine human, and Gorman Nature Center director Jason Larson for making my dream a reality, 567 volumes over. How did I have 567 books to give away? Well, every time a book came in for review at Bird Watcher’s Digest, Bill, who never got rid of anything, brought it home. It was my job to find a place for it, and I had long since run out of space upstairs and started putting them in the basement. Please, make it stop! But he never stopped bringing books home. He just couldn’t say no to them. It took me a long time to go through all those books, and it was painful both emotionally and physically, but they were heavy and the great groaning shelves of them were unsightly and there was no reason to keep them all. 

And that's why we don't do regular book reviews in BWD Magazine. Because we all work remotely, with a tiny staff, and there is no depository (namely, my house!) for all the books that would flood in if we did. Logistics rule, always. 

Here's the after effect. Thoroughly weeded, space opened up (that has since been filled again). 

My bookshelves are still full, never fear, but they look ever so much better, painted and orderly with a few nice knickknacks scattered through them.

When the living room lighting was out and the carpet was torn up...man. That was rough.  And we started on Valentine's Day, so it wasn't very nice outdoors. But it had to be done. If not now, when? 

Here's the before of the living room. It was green, and the walls and ceiling were thoroughly smoked from weeks of power outages when all we had was the fireplace to keep warm. Real tired carpet on the floor, that had been through two kids and a dog (though the Bacon never, ever peed on rugs!) and huge creamy coffee mugs being spilled on it again and again. 

And here's the After. I went with all luxury vinyl plank flooring. I chose a Benjamin Moore color called Elkhorn for the walls, and Northwoods Brown for the beams. I wanted to work with the colors of the fireplace and make it feel cozy and denlike. I'm really happy with how it turned out. 

Before the renovation, I never sat in the living room. I was either in the studio working, cooking in the kitchen, or I was in bed. The living room belonged to the kids and the TV. But after? Yeah. I actually sit in that leather recliner from time to time, and sometimes I nap on that nice leather couch!

See that giant white chair under the bird plates? I bought it for Curtis. And he refused to get up on it, using the couch instead. So I covered his end of the couch with a furry slipcover and he loved it. And, Lordy be! I sat in the giant white chair instead, and I loved that. I had a reading nook for the first time since I left Virginia! I had SO much fun hanging all my bird paintings on the walls. Finally, they had a place to rest, and I think they look awesome. The whole place is a gallery. Better on the walls than in boxes in the basement! 

And then about a month ago Curtis decided he'd take over that chair that I bought for him. And it being white, it needed a cover, and he is in it ALL THE TIME and that, my friends, is that. I can't complain. I got it for $74 at Valu City Furniture, and it was meant to be his all along. It's the most deluxe dog bed any dog ever had.

The living room brings me joy every time I walk into it. Still.

The old kitchen accent color was Cantaloupe. I was sooo sick of Cantaloupe. I don't even like cantaloupe.

For the renovation, I chose an accent color called Lush, which is a gorgeous deep green that just seems to make the poplar wood trim sing. 

And of course the plants look great against it. 

The front door got a new coat of vibrant blue paint as well. Color is the thing. After decades in a tentatively-painted, mostly whitish interior, I'm a bit Iris Apfel about color. Not apologizing! The barn-red siding with the blue roof works for me, and I'm just moving some color indoors now.

Using Lush on all the accent walls really pulled the house together.

I used it in the studio, too, and it didn't cut the light all that much, which had been my rationale for keeping the studio white for 25 years. Dang it!

I needed some color in there, too! and I absolutely love it. It brings out the warm oranges and browns of my favorite wood colors.

Antique oaken flat file from Cranston Real Estate in Marietta. Purchased for $350, and priceless to me.

Crammed with original art. (I sorted and purged that, too, during the renovation. What a JOB.

I'd had this (photo) slide cabinet for 40 years. Slides. Remember those?  During the renovation, I finally boxed up the slides in labeled boxes, tore out the dividers, and spray- painted that sucker with baby-chick yellow enamel. I can't tell you  how much fun it was to figure out where all my pens and mechanical pencils and envelopes and drafting tools and paintbrushes would go; my boxcutters and external hard drives and bluebird field notebooks; my flash drives. paper clips. binder clips, and pencil leads...get you one of these old slide cabinets and go to town! As long as the drawers are labeled you're going to be able to lay hands on anything you desire. Talk about a clutter-killer and mood-booster!

I wanted a studio that would make me want to write and create wonderful things. And I wanted flooring that matched Curtis' brindle. Got both those things. Next it'll be time to create wonderful things. But first, there was the wedding to prepare for.

Well, this is an elephantine post, but I had to start somewhere. I'm going in a line with this, because it's a mighty big thing to try to throw a lasso around.

I got the sweetest email from a reader the other day, trying not to be obtrusive but just checking in to see if I was still alive, I guess, and to tell me she missed the blog. I thanked her and replied that I was working on a new series of posts and the reason(S) for my protracted absence would soon be revealed. 

 I hope you enjoy it. It's nice to be back.

Going Political

 On March 17, 2025, Phoebe and I were taking the scenic route to Ohio from her home in Indiana. We wanted the smallest backroads, the nicest little towns, and Wabash, Indiana, was exactly the ticket. I love to look at the original courthouses in small towns, built on such a grand scale and with such lofty intentions.

 Here resides our government. Here, you can come get your marriage license, your dog license; here we store the plat maps for your property, the births and deaths in your family. Here is the judge and the court. It all happens here. Welcome, they seem to say. I was humbled and thrilled to see a beautiful bronze monument to Abraham Lincoln in front of the Wabash courthouse. Phoebe and I parked and jumped out to photograph it.

I first stepped up to the sign and learned that Wabash, Indiana, was the first U.S. city to have electricity! 

Next, I noticed a male American kestrel performing a display flight right over the courthouse, which happens to possess innumerable nooks and crannies where a pair of kestrels could lay eggs and raise little falcons. I was beside myself to be in on this moment of unbidden grace on such a searingly beautiful day, and to be able to share it with Phoebe!

And then I moved over to pay my respects to President Lincoln. He's depicted in contemplation, his angular form a little slumped in repose and apparent deep thought. I was struck by how much better this old bronze is than most newer portraiture one sees. It was created by New York born Charles Keck (1875-1951). It was installed in 1932, and its original all-dark patina has weathered beautifully to copper-red with a few verdigris highlights.  An identical casting of this beautiful sculpture stands in Hingham, Massachusetts. I hope to see it someday.

What does Abraham Lincoln have to do with Indiana? The Indiana Museum explains at this link. The story mentions slavery, unlike government websites which are being wiped "clean" of any mention of this vital part of our history. They've totally rewritten the story of the Underground Railroad on the National Park Service website, taking down a photo of Harriet Tubman, widely acknowledged "Conductor of the Underground Railroad," and replacing the actual history with lines of  AI-generated pap. Here's a 

gift link to a Washington Post article about the stripping of Black history from the National Park Service website, if you're interested in seeing what they've removed and what they replaced it with: meaningless, "authoritative-sounding" AI whitewash. Now that is governmental efficiency. 

Here's part of the Indiana Museum's writeup about the Lincolns in Indiana:

"In 1816, Indiana was a new state, forged out of the Western frontier of the United States. The land, abundant with animal and plant life, attracted men and families daring enough to make the journey and create a home in the dense forests. The Lincoln family of Knob Creek, Kentucky, was one family willing to take that risk. Unable to deal with disputes over land boundaries and disagreeing with Kentucky’s pro-slavery stance, Thomas Lincoln decided to leave in the early fall of 1816 and seek a new home for his family in southern Indiana. Like many new settlers, Thomas faced this challenge by first searching for land he liked, building a temporary home (which gave Thomas first claim to the land), and then returning to prepare his family for the journey. In November 1816, the Lincolns packed their few belongings and traveled north to Indiana. Thomas traveled with his wife, Nancy, their daughter, Sarah (age 9), and son, Abraham (age 7)."

The story goes on to tell how Abe, only 7, and his two siblings helped their dad build a cabin to shelter his family, and how his mother, Nancy Hanks, tragically died from "milk sickness" only two years later, when Abe was only 9 years old. When a milk cow eats white snakeroot, it poisons the cow and her milk, and can kill the cow and anyone who drinks the milk. White snakeroot grows all over my open woods. 

I stood before the monument, my eyes running over the statue, landing on the inscription, reading it over and over. The Zickefoose family has a special connection to Abraham Lincoln. All my life, I've been told he's my eighth cousin. The link seems to come via a relative named Susannah Buzzard, who was one of Nancy Hanks' forebears. After that, it gets hazy, and I know better than to even dip a toe into genealogy. Interestingly, that also means I'm distantly related to Tom Hanks, who is a second cousin five times removed of Nancy Hanks. George Clooney is also related to Nancy Hanks through his mom, Rosemary Clooney's, bloodline. Oddlly enough, neither Tom Hanks nor George Clooney have ever reached out to me, their long-lost cousin, but I'm not mad about that. I've always been proud to have some connection to this learned and deeply humble man.

I read the inscription, and something started rising up in me. It was sorrow. Sorrow at how very, very far America has fallen, how broken it is right now. Lincoln also knew a broken nation. The 1860's weren't the good old days. We were at actual war with ourselves, killing each other by the hundreds of thousands. But we had a wise, kind and strong leader in Lincoln, from 1860 to1865, when he was taken from us by a bullet. He was too good for this world.

My eyes traveled over Lincoln's stately form, and over the monument's inscription, taken from

his Second Inaugural address.

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation[']s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations[.]"   

And it hit me hard that everything in this eight-word outtake, and in the extended quote, has been turned inside out, upside down. Bind up the  nation's wounds? No, they're making more wounds, abruptly firing thousands upon thousands of federal workers without cause. Deporting people without one single thought to due process; deporting and holding them in deplorable conditions, and all for show. To get that body count up. Eliminating foreign aid. Even now, people--little children and babies--in Africa are starving to death, waiting for food that will not come, because Trump and Musk have smashed foreign aid to smithereens. Caring for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan? No, they're gutting the Veteran's Administration (no mortgage rescue for veterans any more!), and throwing the Social Security Administration into a death spiral, firing thousands of workers in the name of "efficiency," without the ghost of a concept of a plan for how to run the place without them. The money all of us have set aside through our entire working lives is now in question. People can't get through to the SSA any more. Everything is in uproar and chaos. Who, I ask, thinks that's necessary or beneficial? How does gutting the Federal workforce make things more efficient? How does destroying the government help anyone? Project 2025, in full force. Oh, but Trump doesn't know anything about that. Liars, liars, liars all.

Doing all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations? No, we're actively antagonizing every other country except, possibly, our old enemy, Russia, now our BFF, with tariffs designed to hurt trade, which constitute a new and onerous tax on the consumer. Canada hates us now, with good reason. Mexico, too. They're doing end runs around us to trade with anyone but the U.S. And don't get me started on the president's "review" of university grants and demands that they scrub DEI initiatives, lest they lose them. Or on the mass firings of national park employees, leaving nobody even to clean toilets, and turning national parks over to states for management. Oh, and FEMA. Who could possibly need our government's help when every single week, some massive flood or fire or hurricane or tornado rages through some part of this country, leaving scores of people dead or homeless? No, let's turn disaster relief over to the states. The federal government doesn't need to help. That would be expensive. They're saving money here. They're neglecting, even killing people in the name of efficiency. I refuse to use "we." This is not my government, and I did not vote for this. I'd wager that a number of people who believed Trump's endless spew of lies didn't vote for Project 2025, either, but now, thanks to those voters, we have it, and we are stewing in dystopia the likes of which I've not seen since the Viet Nam war days.

Standing there, with those thoughts and many others banging around in my brain, I teared up with the horror and injustice of it all. I felt ashamed to stand at Lincoln's feet and tell him about the disaster raging in our government--its utter dismantling by cruel and ruthless oligarchs and their fervent youth disciples who know and care nothing about anyone but themselves. Who are erasing anything that doesn't forward the interests of rich white men. Suddenly, diversity and equity are dirty words. And I realized that there was a painting in all this. 

From this:

to this.

  Our hero.