Berry Greedy Pickers

 I can tell you that $41 worth of blueberries will just about break your arm. So we bring auxiliary containers  (plastic buckets) to dump the booty into so we can keep picking with our light little Easter baskets.

I wanted a shot of Liam walking his berries up to the garage to be counted.  But I had to stop in the middle of shooting. "Don't swing a full basket, Liam!"

"Okay!"

 

  And here goes Phoebe with hers.

 Not until I got this shot on the screen did I notice I'd captured a priceless moment in Liam's sweet life. Craack! Whump! Dump!


Classic! Look at his mouth, wide open. Ohhh! Dang!

Phoebe, of course, stopped to help him recover his fruit.

There was a little fellow at the cash register who was only too happy to ring us up. His mom had a terrible time keeping those fingers at bay. He wanted to punch all the keys at once, and he came at that little adding machine like a baby octopus. "I try! I try!" And she let him punch in our sale.

 Needless to say the Thomas the Tank Engine PJ's, worn all day long, endeared him to me forever. Not to mention his passionate desire to help his mom. I remembered Liam always punching keys on the credit card machine at the grocery store. He'd get so frustrated when nothing happened. His momma's a cash type.

 

 Too soon, it was time to turn for home. We could have picked until nightfall, but I was out of money. And truth to tell, I made a cobbler with the last of the frozen berries from June 2010 to make room for 2011 fruit in the freezer!  That's what happens when you have helpful kids (one of whom once wore his Thomas pajamas all day long, too)

and beautiful blueberries, with the greenywhite promise of more to come. Ahh, Summer. Could you just linger awhile longer, spread out your gifts through the long dull winter?

21st Century Hunter-Gatherers

 I believe I was a crazy good hunter-gatherer in another life. I love to pick things and I'm fast at it. My kids have inherited the gene, although they tend to look for the premium fruit rather than mass volumes of it. They pride themselves not on having the most berries, but the biggest and fattest.  I pick three times faster than they do, but their berries are Super Premium.

The blueberries at Rolling Ridge Berry Farm are more the size of grapes this year. 

 

And they are sooo beautiful. I love the ones with the heavy bloom, like these:

 

They remind me of the powdery sheen on a pigeon's feather. 

All around us the songs of Baltimore orioles, scarlet tanagers, robins, cedar waxwings and yellow-breasted chats rang out from the woods and blueberry rows. You won't see crop netting here, or hear cannons or nasty recordings of starling distress calls. The Winders grow enough for the birds and us.

 

View from the backmost berry row, where I like to pick and bird at the same time. It's alive with yellowthroats, white-eyed vireos, chats, robins and the like.

The habitat all around is rich and birdy to start with and then this farm sets a smorgasbird. You can imagine. Lots of parent birds bring their fledglings to the farm to fatten them up and get a break from the babies' incessant demands for food.

Phoebe and Liam noticed that the sweetest berries were most likely to have a couple pierced by the triangular pecks of birds. They know where the best ones are.

So seduced were we by the abundance and ease of picking that before we knew it we had FORTY-ONE BUCKS WORTH OF BLUEBERRIES. Yiiikes. Which would have been well over $100 worth in the grocery store, only not even a tenth as fresh and delicious. To those of you who are wondering what you do with that many blueberries, we gorge on them fresh and freeze what we can't eat. We give them to friends and family, make cobblers and throw blueberries into smoothies and yogurt and over cereal. We have a blueberry ball. I'm thankful for Rolling Ridge Berry Farm. A visit there is the perfect way to spend a summer afternoon with the kids.

On Quiet Waters

One good outing in a boat can be absolute magic for the soul. Forget chicken soup. I need the sound of trickling water under a canoe hull, the gentle rock of a boat on calm water.

A couple weeks ago, we mounted an expotition to North Bend State Park, not far over the West Virginia International Boundary with Ohio. About nine years ago, a dam went in, making a long, meandering flooded lake with lots of fascinating elbows and appendices to explore.

David and Mary Jane, Chet Baker's West Virginia parents, alerted us to this place, and all the birds they'd found nesting there made us anxious to explore it. So they brought their huge aluminum canoe, and graciously took our kids in it, while Bill and I zooped around in our one-man canoes.

Get a load of these reflections.

It was immediately clear to us as birdwatchers that we were entering a gallery of cavity-nesting birds the likes of which we'd never experienced.

For the flooded trees all died at the same time, and this made for easy excavation by flickers, red-bellied, hairy and downy woodpeckers.

Flickers, in fact, were going nuts all around us, courting and fighting. These two males engaged in some terrific stunts and dances, vying for a single female. See their black malar marks, or "moustaches?" Those small black dashes on the side of their faces (not the breast crescent; both sexes sport that) mean they're boys.

The males kept engaging each other, approaching, posturing with bills erect. There was a whole lot of woika woika woika-ing going on.

The female flicker's the top bird in this photo. 

Very noisy and amusing, they were.  What a treat to see flickers breeding--outnumbering the starlings, which compete for the cavities the woodpeckers dig. This is one of North America's most ornate birds. All the spots and dashes of jet black on warm brown plumage--they wouldn't really need the golden underwings and tail, or the white rump, or the gray toupee, or the little vee of scarlet on the nape...but flickers have it all.

Sometimes when I see a flicker on the ground I'm reminded of Africa's beautiful hoopoe, which is why I sometimes call flickers the American hoopoe. But usually only to myself or to Bill, because most people have no idea why I'm calling a flicker a hoopoe.

Good grief, they were spectacular. I love this photo--it captures the crazy antics we witnessed as the three birds chased and swirled above the mirrored water. Yes, that's gold in the spread wing of the lower bird. Oh, for a bigger lens, better light, closer approach. But you get the idea.

But flickers weren't the only woodpeckers nesting in the flooded forest of North Bend State Park. There were red-bellied, hairy and downy, pileated too. And then there was the most beautiful woodpecker of all...Bill's totem bird. 

The place is absolutely lousy with red-headed woodpeckers. I hope you're swooning, because we sure were. Red-headed woodpeckers are durn rare any more. Why the loveliest woodpecker must be our rarest...sigh.

More of these red, white and jet beauties anon.

The Driveway Oak

From the most basic to the most deeply spiritual level, it defined our home, the big red oak tree at the end of the driveway. Anyone coming here for the first time knew that it marked the right turn into our drive, wrote “big oak tree” on their directions. But it was so much more than a landmark. It was our friend.

In preparing these posts, I scanned the past two years’ worth of photos. There are many, many more, I’m sure, buried on those external hard drives I should be using. These are enough, I think, to tell the story of what one tree meant to us.

Winter, it was a stark giant, spreading heavy branches against a bleak landscape, casting its shadow across fresh snow. Always, it dwarfed us, but in a friendly giant way, a sheltering way.

 We loved the rhythm of its branches, the way they hung down like a skirt, and we loved seeing its bones revealed when the last brown leaf finally blew off it in November. It marked the sunrise for us, because this is where we wait for the bus every morning, August through early June.

.

We know how lucky we are to have a bus pick our kids up right at the end of our driveway. The first day of kindergarten for Liam; Phoebe heading back, a seasoned but very excited pro.

 The oak, a great wooden granny, watching for the big yellow bus, leaning with anticipation, it seemed. And off they’d go, and the oak would stroke the bus roof with its leaves, waving farewell.

 The oak sheltered us in rain and warmed us in the cold. If we backed right up against the east side of its trunk on a sunny cold winter morning, it blocked the wind and held the sun for us.

When the mornings got warm, we’d stay in its shade, and Liam would lose himself in Harry Potter or Wimpy Kid, only looking up when the bus rumbled up, a rooster tail of dust rising behind it. The oak gave us a place to be, a pool of cool, an umbrella over us as we waited.

There is more to the story, the difficulty being winnowing it all down, distilling 19 years of true love for a tree into just a few lines, a few of hundreds of images. The difficulty being having to do it.

Liam's First Alligator

I will not lie. Liam's first and main reason for wanting to go to Florida was not together time with his mom and sister, although he loves that. No, he wanted to see a ten-foot-long lizard. He really, really wanted to see an alligator. So from the moment we came in over the runway at Orlando airport, we were straining our orbs for eyebumps in every ditch and puddle. But it would be a couple of days before we got lucky.

Driving along Black Point Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island NWR, I finally spotted the prehistoric pile of scalage that said "gator" to my unaccustomed eye. It would have been hard to miss this one, hauled out as he was on a warm winter's day. Holy smokes!

It was all I could do to get Liam to take his eyes off it long enough to snap the photo of a boy with longing, for now, fulfilled.

We got out the spotting scope to get a better look at this dozing beauty.

I don't know why, but every time I see a dozing 'gator, my first thought is that it has hauled out of the water to die. They just look dead. When they close their eyes, the eye seems to sink back into the head, and they really, really look dead. You can't discern any respiration. A sleeping gator defines "inert."

Until the Science Chimp bleats like a little lost fawn separated from its mama and maybe about to try to cross the creek...oh, hello there. Sorry to bother you, but we didn't want our first gator viewing to turn into a wake.

Thus satisfied that the 'gator was quite alive and thinking about venison, we moved the scope so the kids and I could appreciate that armored tail. Dinosaurs live!

It was to be a wonderful evening for 'gators. We proceeded from Black Point to the alluringly named Biolab Road, where a molten sunset pointed up the scalation on three more beautiful gators.

It was really too beautiful and primeval to be believed. And these weren't babies, either. Liam's first  gator was the biggest--gettin' on 12 feet, we guessed. 

This one, maybe 9 feet...about the length of my canoe...eek! I wondered what it would be like to canoe around a beast like that. Maybe FloridaCracker can tell us. Does your heart race when one swirls under you? Heck, a big carp can scare the granola out of me, rocking my boat...what about a gator longer than your own conveyance??

I couldn't resist a shot of Firehair admiring this gorgeous animal.

Another...maybe 7 feet.

Another conservation success story. It's hard to believe we almost hunted the American alligator into extinction, just for the bumpy "leather" it lent to fancy purses and cowboy boots. It seems so archaic, so ridiculous to exterminate such a magnificent beast for things like that. It seems so...human of us. I grew up thinking I'd never see an alligator, or a bald eagle, or a wood stork...they were all but gone in the mid-1960's.

Endangered species legislation works. Alligators, bald eagles, and wood storks are back. Brown pelicans, too--they were once on the brink of extinction, as amazing as that seems. It's just too bad that so many truly endangered species are languishing in the Endangered Species Waiting Lounge, left unprotected because it's economically inconvenient to list them.

 How could we keep taking the tops off Appalachian mountains if the cerulean warbler that lives on them were finally listed as an endangered species, and we were legally bound to protect its habitat? Better not list that one. See, that's how it works. Once we saw what a powerful conservation tool the ESA could be, it was imperative to remove its teeth.

What if we had to legally acknowledge that polar bears and Pacific walruses are endangered because their pack ice habitat is melting out from under them? Legally they're listed as threatened, so we're not bound to do anything to reverse this deeply alarming phenomenon. They're in the waiting room, too. And what about the seals, mainstay of polar bears, that need the pack ice for pupping? Do we expect them and the walruses to simply switch overnight to hauling out on land? Who needs a bunch of pack ice? We don't. So what if they do? 

Having gotten a bit off track, I am thankful for alligators and the legislation that allowed their populations to recover. Well over a million alligators now populate the ditches and swamps of the Southeast.  And I'm deeply thankful that there are still places where you can take your kids to see the oversized scaly wonders of the natural world. 

See it while it's here, folks. 

Waves of Grace

 We were the only people in sight on the Canaveral beach in late January. Just like we like our beaches. Not that we see many, being Ohioans.

The kids had to get their feet wet. I knew they'd get their jeans wet, too, but there was no fighting it. We'd deal with the sand and the dampness later.

It wasn't really beach weather, as evidenced by the windbreakers and sweatshirts, but when would we have another chance to be in the ocean?

 I left them to play with about a dozen parental warnings about riptides and rogue waves, trusting their hydrophobic anthropoid instincts to carry them through. They're careful kids. I walked and felt the foam with my toes, walked and felt the sand with my tired feet, studied my prints and made some more.

We made two visits to the beach at Cape Canaveral. The second time, they wore bathing suits under their shorts.

What is it about the ocean that can soothe us and make us delight in just being there, being alive, walking and thinking about nothing and everything at once?

Is it the rush of the ocean mother's heartbeat in our chests and ears? Is it the half-remembered origin of life coming to the fore? I watched my children walk and talk, knowing that before long the leggy blonde boy would tower over his statuesque sister.

Neither of them believes me when I say that.

For now, Phoebe is content to let her brother crack her up as he meets the ocean in a power-slide.

She turns to laugh with me as, caught clowning and off guard, he tumbles down...

and then, being Phoebe, helps him back up.

 He adores her, shadows her every move for five days and nights, and she is almost always kind to him.
She was 3 1/2 when he came into the world, and it was clear she was ready to care for someone else. I'll always be grateful that they get along so well.

I watch them as the brown pelicans glide by.  I am never without something beautiful to watch.

I want to paint the perfection of this young pelican in watercolors; I know just which colors I'd choose.
I mix them in the mind's palette.

Thank you for your perfect wing, your unfathomable ghastly grace; your flat doll's eye and impossible bill.

You surf the waves with a few dynamic flaps and endless sails, riding on a pillow of air just over the water's surface.

 When I was a child moving into my teens I felt awkward and ungainly, and I wondered why I had been born in the body of such a homely primate. I wanted to be a deer, an antelope, an eagle. I despaired at the clumsiness of my species. I was blind to my own lithe grace.

 Having children disabused me of that notion; it opened me to the loveliness of my own kind. My own grace has faded, but I've caught lightning here in these slender vessels, and I gaze at it, newly fascinated.

 The sun catches their hair and strokes their lean forms and I catch my breath and hold it.

I thank the sea for giving us a taste of the carefree ease of summer, and wish the sun would hang low in the sky for a few more hours. I don't want to go back to the hotel; I don't want to go back to gray flannel Ohio. I want to stay with my beautiful ones in this timewarp, the turquoise sea rushing around us, cancelling noise, soothing us into reflection and meditation.