Rolling On One

Just to get it on record, before the show airs, just in case this happens,

Watch out for the kid they packed off to Idaho. Is his name Little Vito? I think he’s going to bust out of that camp, get a gun, and come back and wreak havoc in New Jersey. Look — Phil and Tony were both telling him, “act like a man.” All his role models of men are men who believe in solving problems with violence. He’s only going to get more of that at that camp. He’s going to say to himself, “this is what they want me to do, they deserve to get it.” The series is not going to go out with something predictable — the feds finally catching up, not even a war between the two families, not even the hispanic guys coming up from Florida because the NJ gang isn’t meeting their end of the truck hijacking deal. Mark my words.

But of course if it doesn’t happen, it was just a thought 🙂

We had a new guy at klezmer last night, a percussionist named Eddie. He had brought two drumsticks and two boxes of pasta that he was using as his instrument. “Sounds a lot like a snare drum,” he said. Jeffery, our flautist, told the director that at the next concert, when he’s introducing the band members to the audience he’ll have to say, “…and Eddie on the ziti.”

What with planting pear trees and all the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, we were outdoors a lot. On one short jaunt up what we call “the logging road”, a swath of brambles and other scrub that has grown up where the trucks went when the former owners had the property logged over (there aren’t any big trees left on the property. Darn.) (now how do I punctuate that? It needs a comma, but where?), I heard a rustle in the leaves off to the left. That always means some kind of wildlife to look for. Usually it’s a squirrel or chipmunk, but you never know. This time I saw a grouse walking along, foraging. That’s the first time I’ve seen one in the woods here!

The place looked really nice on Memorial Day weekend. The lilacs were still blooming, and the crabapple tree was about at its peak. The other apples were a little past full bloom. There were plenty of bulbs still blooming, though you can’t see in the picture.

The seeds I had planted two weeks before were up in the raised bed. Just the radishes really show, but with a little imagination you can see three more rows of little plants. Arlene put in some more cucumber, basil, pirella, and marigold plants after this picture was taken.

We’ve been hearing a lot of great crested flycatchers squawking from the treetops. There were dragonflies in the air all over, so I was hoping to see one of the flycatchers swoop out and pick off a dragonfly; but it didn’t happen while I was looking. Arlene did spot something bright red high in a tree, though. On a closer look, it turned out to be a scarlet tanager. Need I tell you, that’s one of the most spectacular birds we have around New England, and one we only see a couple of times a year and only if we’re lucky.

I like eating apples in the fall, especially now that we have five apple trees in Casco, but even more than apples I like seckel pears. So naturally I’d like to have a seckel pear tree on the place. The nursery catalog says that seckel pears need two other varieties in the vicinity for proper pollination, and that Bartlett can’t be one of them. The same nursery catalog sells three pear trees, of which one is Bartlett, in a package deal. Well, Bartlett is my second favorite pear, so I ordered one seckel and the set of three.

They came UPS in a long paper bag, only 6 and a quarter pounds shipping weight for four trees!

There wasn’t much dirt on the roots, just bare roots in some shredded bark to hold water around them.

I put them in Memorial Day weekend.

Voila! One tree planted —

And to sum up, coming up the driveway and then past the house,

Seckel,

red Anjou,

Bosc,

and Bartlett.

That’s special tree wrap around the bottom of the trunks (if you can call them trunks rather than twigs at this stage), to keep the tree protected from sun and gnawing animals. We went to the Aubuchon hardware in Naples first and asked if they had the stuff to wrap around newly planted trees, and they didn’t have any idea what I was talking about even when I said, “it sort of looks like very coarse masking tape.” Then we drove up the road to Mark’s garden center. Nobody was in the store when I walked in, but after several minutes a woman showed up. When I asked her, she said, “Oh, tree wrap, it should be … right about …. here!” and it was. It comes in a roll about the size of two tuna fish cans on top of each other and sure enough, looks a lot like very big masking tape or an oversize crepe paper streamer.
This weekend, by golly, they’re starting to leaf out. All four seem still to be alive. So I’m not a pear tree murderer. Maybe in three or four years I’ll be picking a few pears.

On our way to Maine before Memorial Day we saw three porcupines along the side of the roads, two on route 121 south of the blinking light near the Casco firehouse and one on Mayberry Hill Road going up the hill. The first two are positive IDs. The third I just got a glimpse of farther off the road. I don’t know if there are more of them around this year than last year or if I’m getting better at spotting wildlife.

Might have been a year ago I hit something with the lawnmower and broke the mower. I know exactly what I hit. It’s a big honkin’ hunk of cast iron, the thing the gas company could turn to cut off the gas supply to the house from the street. It’s been there all along, and I try to remember it so as not to damage the mower or the valve, but every once in a while I forget. Once years ago I hit it and broke the lawnmower blade. Last summer when I hit it the lawnmower came to a sudden stop and started smelling of burning insulation (it’s an electric lawnmower, not a gasoline one.) The motor wouldn’t move at all. When I was convinced it wasn’t going to change its mind, I rolled it back to the garage and thought I’d see if I could take it apart and figure out what was wrong before buying a new one.

Well, around the middle of May, one night when Arlene had book club and I didn’t have klezmer, I finally did start taking it apart. When I got to the point where the motor was exposed, I found that I could turn the motor around, but it seemed to stick sometimes.

When I was a kid I had a little kit to build a toy electric motor. It was surprisingly simple. The idea is to arrange little coils of wire in such a way that electricity gets switched on and off to turn the coils into electromagnets that pull themselves a little way, then get switched off while the next coil gets turned on and pulls itself a little way. The lawnmower motor was equally simple. There was a big cylinder, or really a thin metal can holding two halves of a big cylinder split in half lengthwise, with a rotor in the middle which was the set of electromagnets. I tried to pull the rotor out, but it felt as if there was a heavy spring holding it in place. I looked at both ends of the rotor but couldn’t see any spring on either end. It was a puzzle.
Two days later Arlene asked if there would be anything helpful on line. I found an appliance parts site that had an exploded drawing of the whole lawnmower (so people can figure out what spare part to order) that was indeed helpful. It didn’t show any spring, so I tried again to take the rotor out. It still didn’t come all the way out, but it did move far enough that I was able to spot a big chunk of something broken in between the two halves of the split cylinder. That was obviously enough to keep the rotor from moving, and obviously shouldn’t have been there, so I took it out. It turned out to be magnetic stuff. The half-cylinders were big permanent magnets that the motor’s temporary electromagnets pull themselves to, and this chunk had apparently broken off when the impact knocked the rotor against the cylinder.

I put the motor back together without the blade, plugged it in and turned the switch, and the motor hummed. I unplugged it, put the blade on and put the rest of the mower back together, and tried to cut the grass. It ran like a champ.

I didn’t figure out until the next morning that there was no spring holding the rotor in. It was all that big magnetic cylinder doing the work. I was pulling against a big magnet.

I hit the brakes in time to come to a graceful stop ten feet from a porcupine on North Raymond Road this evening. We only saw two porcupines last year, but this year they’re all over. Maybe I’m more tuned in to looking for them, but this one was in the middle of the road and hard to miss. When I first saw it at the limits of the headlights I thought it was a raccoon. Closer,  there were black-and-white stripes so I thought skunk. That definitely made me want to brake hard! I hit a skunk once when I was in college, and you didn’t want to be in that car for the next week.

This past weekend we were in Newton being part of Newton Open Studios.

This is the second year we’ve done it. Last year Arlene sold three of her prints. This time it was seven! She enjoys talking to the people who come in and explaining how she does the monotypes, and that they’re all different (as opposed to some other printmaking processes like silkscreen or etching). She had set up the living room with her prints and Charley’s photos. I was running the rubber stamp department the new room, the room that was a screened porch twenty years ago. We also had another artist selling her stuff, felted knit handbags and knit and crocheted scarves, in the dining room.

It was a miserable chilly rainy weekend. After the past two Mays, that shouldn’t be a surprise. We wondered if the weather was keeping customers away on Saturday. By midday Sunday there seemed to be plenty of people. Maybe everyone had said to themselves, “Screw it, it’s the weekend, I’m going to get out of the house even if it IS raining.”

The Newton Open Studios organization had provided (as part of a substantial fee for being part of the event) signs printed on corrugated plastic which fit on wire H-frames. The H-frames look sort of like an upper-case H, but with two crossbars. They’re made of textured wire about 1/8 inch in diameter. The tops of the upright wires fit snugly into the corrugations of the plastic, and the bottoms are easy to poke in the ground. Arlene tracked down a sign company that would sell her more H-frames, found some corrugated plastic in the markdown corner at Charrette, and made more signs. They held up perfectly in the rain. I greatly prefer them to stapling cardboard signs to telephone poles.

We had some interesting visitors. One woman bought a print. I figured the tax, $8.75, in my head, and she gave me the total before I added it on to the print price. Want to guess? She was Indian. I’m convinced that there’s a cultural respect for mathematics in India that goes back to when they invented what we call the Hindu-Arabic numeration system. She says that kids in India have to learn to do math in their heads in school, but that the skill is being lost. I still think that India is going to be the world’s number one power in fifty years and it’s going to be because they’ll be the only people left who can do math.

Another Indian woman, the first person who came to the house on Sunday, runs a store called Karma in Newton Centre. She was talking to us about how she has trouble getting people to work there because people don’t have the attitude she wants for the store, some kind of mixture of taking the store seriously but feeling that respect for the people who made the merchandise is as important as making money.

Lots of people asked how we make stamps, so I got to go over the whole process several times. Black & white artwork -> photo engraving on magnesium plate -> bakelite mold -> press semi-liquid rubber into the bakelite mold and heat (in a machine called a vulcanizer — by the way, the bakelite mold is also made in the vulcanizer) -> trim rubber, put on cushion, trim cushion, stamp image on mount with another stamp of the same design, assemble.

The last time we were in Maine, that would be the weekend of May 12, I put in a raised bed of vegetable garden.

I had bought the wood, three eight foot 2x6s, a couple of weekends before and nailed it all together. The next weekend I dug out enough ground (and rocks!) for the frame to sit down flat. I phoned Mark, who does our plowing and mows the lawn, and asked him if he could deliver some soil to fill the frame. He recommended a mixture of compost and screened loam, and we decided that three cubic yards would fill that frame (half a yard would just about do that), leave lots more for other gardening, and be enough to be worth the delivery charge. I mean, dirt is dirt cheap, so I might as well get enough to do some good while I’m at it.

Meanwhile, Matt had found a wheelbarrow left out on the curb for trash somewhere in Cambridge. The wheel had fallen off a bushing, but I was able to hammer it back on enough to roll smoothly.
Arlene got some landscape fabric, heavy black plastic perforated to let water out, in the meantime. We stapled it to the inside of the frame to form a weed barrier on the bottom, and set out to fill it.

So, here I am doing some manual labor. Arlene didn’t get out her camera until the frame was half filled:

The wheelbarrow could hold lots more than this, but could I push it uphill on that bumpy ground? I’d rather make twice as many trips with smaller loads.

I thought I had more hair than that. Looking at it in the mirror, from the front, I don’t get the whole story.

Into the frame — hmm, I could have rotated the picture a little so the trees would be appropriately vertical.

— and with a little raking (and another wheelbarrow load after this picture was taken) the raised bed is ready for seeding.

I put in, I think, lettuce, beets, radishes, and pumpkins. What will it take to keep the rabbits and deer away? People have recommended basil for that; gotta get some seeds.

It’s spring even in Maine.

There was a big rainstorm about three weeks ago that caused major damage to roads. Gravel under the road, rocks up to the size of baseballs, was washed out from under the pavement of the road that ends at the other side of the gate near our driveway. Our dirt road had lots of erosion, too, but the damage was less spectacular than the broken pavement:

If you drove off the side of that, your right wheel would drop two feet and you’d be looking for a new axle.

Wildflowers are out. Arlene was particularly looking for trilliums. We haven’t found any on our property, but there are lots along both roads up to the top of the ridge.

They turn out to be hard to photograph because the blossoms are very close to the ground and bend down. That deep rich red-violet is the right color.

I think I’ll just copy the names of the pictures into the post, and edit them into links later.

Our woods are mostly beech forest, where they’re not bramble and sweetfern thicket. Many of the beech leaves stay on the trees, at least the smaller ones, all winter. Some of the new leaves come out with a copper color like these:

A wildflower that you can overlook is the bluet. It’s tiny, not more than half an inch across, and grows low in the grass. But it’s pretty:

The reason you’re likely to notice bluets is that they grow in patches, so you don’t have to look for just one.

Sometimes they grow in such big patches that you think there’s still snow on the ground.

We planted some camas bulbs along the rocks at the beginning of the trail around the place. They haven’t bloomed yet, but there’s lots of foliage.

This patch of daffodils and dogtooth violets (trout lilies) is on the side of the house, outside out bedroom window.

A closeup of the dogtooth violets. These are in our garden, but the flower grows wild as a spring ephemeral — that is, it’s only in bloom for a few days, not more than a week, so you have to be looking at the right time.

The daffodil bulbs we planted were in an assortment that included many of these peach-colored double daffs. I don’t think I ever took a close look at double daffodils before to see that the petals really do look like two daffodil blooms right on top of each other.

We have lots of white violets growing wild in the lawn. There are lots of species of wild violets, and I have no idea what these are in particular.

One bird that’s not rare but we don’t see as often as we’d like is the rose-breasted grosbeak. This electric pink is the real color! In this picture t’s sitting in the apple tree right outside the kitchen window, debating whether or not to come back to the window feeder.

This is a progress report on the new house that’s going up on the other association’s road up the hill. It’s huge!

For contrast, here’s an old Maine farm house, the first on the right off North Pine Hill Road. It’s the place where we bought blackberries last summer.

The old farmhouses can have lots of floor area, what shows up in real estate listings as GLAAG, gross living area above grade, but it wasn’t built all at once. One of the groups at the concert in Lewiston last weekend sang a song about “big house, middle house, back house, barn”, the way families would add on to the farm buildings. The old New Englanders built the barn first, because you had to have some place for the animals, and the people could sleep in the barn, too, after all; then the main house for living; then the summer kitchen; then tied it all together.