I have company on my porch these days. Knitting is happening,
Continue reading “Unknitting”
Scythes revisited
These scythes are just a few of the old farm tools we found in the barn and shed when we moved to Plummer’s Hollow in 1971. Other gems included a butter churn, a foot-operated grindstone and a chest-high, hand-cranked winnowing machine.
If the photo looks familiar, that’s because Phoenicia Publishing used it for the cover of Odes to Tools. In “Ode to Scythes,” I had written:
The scythes are emissaries
from a country
that no longer exists.
In fact, as I learned this past Saturday, that “country” is not completely vanished yet. The gentleman above, Martin Hardy, actually wielded those sythes (and also operated the butter churn, the grindstone and winnowing machine) as a boy back in the 1930s. His family lived in the old tenant house, the same house I live in now, for roughly the first four decades of the 20th century, living here year-round and looking after the farm while the absentee owners were in Chicago. To make ends meet, they grew oats, wheat, and other crops, kept a few dairy cows and sold the milk and cheese once a week in Tyrone. They stored the milk in the springhouse to keep it cool the rest of the week.
Though we’ve met many Plummer family descendents over the years, their attachment to the mountain is mainly a sentimental one. What memories they have are based on the few weeks they spent up here each summer. It was wonderful to meet a former year-round resident who actually grew up on the mountain the same as I did. Mr. Hardy was born in 1922, but he seems as if he could easily be 15 years younger. He recalled taking walks south along the mountain toward Altoona for fun, just as my brothers and I did, and like us, they kept chickens in the shed (the building behind him in the photo, which also houses the old tools). And while I have vivid memories of the Flood of ’72 (Hurricane Agnes), when we stood at a safe distance and watched floating trees slam into the decking of our access bridge over the Little Juniata, he remembered walking home from school during the Flood of ’36 and discovering that the bridge was completely gone. It was his grandfather, a skilled mason, who built the stone pediment that supports the present bridge, he said. It’s held up very well indeed.
I don’t think I ever shared this video for “Ode to Scythes,” the work of the British blogger and Buddhist priest Kaspalita. It was an unexpected gift, and very well executed, I thought — especially considering it was his first videopoem!
Mr. Hardy said they used a team of horses (one blind, the other sighted) to pull a mowing machine, and got out the scythes to mow the edges and the corners. I’ll bet our Amish neighbors in Sinking Valley still do much the same. I kind of question the poem’s premise now, in fact. A few decades from now, scythes may very well be common tools once again, and if any of us manage to live to 90, the tools people inquire about may not be hand tools, but things like iPads and the internet.
Leaf wings
These are the leaves we are hearing now: a kind of dry crepitation. Shall we believe the old folk wisdom, that this means it’s only six weeks now until the first frost? The real leaves are already yellowing, some of them, but from drought rather than from any intimation of an early fall. The katydids stay green as April right up until they die sometime in November.
This “testy little dogmatist,” rendered familiar by the verses of Holmes, is one of the loudest and most persevering of our native musicians; silent and concealed among the leaves during the day, at night it mounts to the highest branches of the trees, where the male commences his sonorous call to the noiseless females. The sound is produced by the friction of the taborets in the triangular overlapping portion of each wing cover against each other, and is strengthened by the escape of air from the sacs of the body, reverberating so loudly as to be heard a quarter of a mile in a still night.
Thus the venerable American Cyclopedia from 1879. The referenced poem is Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “To an Insect,” which is fairly dreadful, managing to be sexist and factually incorrect at the same time:
Thou art a female, Katydid!
I know it by the trill
That quivers through thy piercing notes,
So petulant and shrill;
I think there is a knot of you
Beneath the hollow tree,—
A knot of spinster Katydids,—
Do Katydids drink tea?
Meanwhile, something with enormous, filmy wings has somehow made it through the screen and launches periodic assaults on my reading light, flopping awkwardly about and startling me each time. I think it might be a species of lacewing. It rests now on the yellow wall, and I notice that its wings, too, somewhat resemble leaves — the kind that have been eaten away by leaf miners until only the veins remain.
Butterfly Loop 4
As I near the southwestern end of Butterfly Loop, a monarch catches my eye. He circles a few times and heads straight for a small clump of common milkweed I hadn’t noticed, half-hidden behind a locust tree. He stays only for a couple of seconds before moving on, however — perhaps because the flowers are covered with various species of beetles, busy feeding and mating and clambering over each other in their excitement. It’s interesting the extent to which one can find quite distinct gatherings of insects in neighboring milkweed patches. I imagine it’s a combination of which stage the flowers are in and what other sorts of plants they adjoin, but who knows, really? Continue reading “Butterfly Loop 4”
Butterfly Loop 3
Just past the second bend on the trail, another small clump of butterfly milkweed comes into view. This one delivers on the promise of the name, with two great-spangled fritillaries and a pearl crescent (Phyciodes tharos) nectaring in close proximity. Continue reading “Butterfly Loop 3”
Butterfly Loop 2
See Part 1.
Here’s what the meadow looks like from the first loop of Butterfly Loop Trail. I want to jump ahead and start with this photo today to make the simple point that, while scenic views are nice, and have a lot to do with why people like visiting or even living in the country, they don’t tell you all that much. Stand back and squint and this could be almost any field. A farmer would recognize that this hastn’t been planted or used for pasture recently, and would probably recognize the dominant “weed” as goldenrod, interspersed with non-native perennial grasses (mostly brome). But even a farmer would have to get quite close to see that it hasn’t been cultivated in a very long time, as indicated by the presence of things such as moss, polypody fern and ground pine (lycopodium). Continue reading “Butterfly Loop 2”
Butterfly Loop 1
Meet Indian hemp, A.K.A. hemp dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum), the more common — and less showy — of the two species of dogbane on the mountain. Why “dogbane”? The Latin name gives a clue: Apocynum means “toxic to dogs”… though people aren’t exactly immune, either. Why “Indian hemp”? “Apocynum cannabinum was used as a source of fiber by Native Americans, to make hunting nets, fishing lines, clothing, and twine,” the Wikipedia article informs us.
We’re standing right above the barn, at the beginning of Butterfly Loop. I aim to give y’all a guided tour of some of the commoner plants blooming in the meadow right now, if you’re up for it. This could take a while. Continue reading “Butterfly Loop 1”
Photos from the morning porch
It began innocently enough: I wanted to capture the leaf I wrote about for today’s Morning Porch update:
From what nearby October has it come, this already-red red maple leaf plastered face-down on the red porch floor and beaded with rain?
— Dave Bonta (@morningporch) June 29, 2012
But once I had the camera out, as so often happens, everything else got set aside.
Continue reading “Photos from the morning porch”
Spicebush silkmoths
It never fails to amaze me how little we know about our neighbors here. I’ve been noticing these curled-leaf cocoons on spicebushes for years, but never realized that they were most likely the work of the promethea moth, A.K.A. spicebush silkmoth. In fact, I’m embarrassed to admit that we initially mis-identified this mating pair on a spicebush next to the barn as cecropia moths — one of the three or four other species of giant silkmoths that occur on the mountain.
Continue reading “Spicebush silkmoths”
Speech alone
One of my favorite Jean Follain poems, with the W.S. Merwin translation in the subtitles. The reading is by Nic S., from her audiopoetry site pizzicati of hosanna.
I captured the footage of a half-grown bunny this evening, right outside my house. The eastern cottontail rabbits seem to be at a peak of population these days, which, somewhat counter-intuitively, may be due to the proliferation of predators such as coyotes, fishers and owls, which we think is the reason why there are no more feral housecats around. The cats predate heavily on baby bunnies. If true, this would be an example of what ecologists call a trophic cascade. Anyway, some of these bunnies are so accustomed to me now, I can walk right by them. It’s a cuteness overload almost every time I step outside the door.