If a black bear attacks, do not play dead

Who pooped in my raised bed? Who keeps digging in there, amongst the volunteer strawberry plants?*

"People are advised to play dead and lock their hands behind their neck...in the event of a grizzly bear attack. If a black bear attacks, do not play dead." —Amanda Holpuch in the New York Times

I replaced all the good bird seed with unshelled black sunflower seeds to send the soft-beaked starlings a subtle message: Fuck off, friends. They descend to peck vindictively at the remains of the suet. The crows visit to caw at me periodically throughout the day; they've trained me to toss peanuts into the yard on command.

A few days ago, I pulled into the Back Cove lot to get a look at a giant wire art installation — two huge egret heads against the blue sky. In the Subaru parked beside me, a man was calmly eating food with a fork as a woman in the passenger seat leaned out the open car door and vomited on the asphalt. When she was done, she closed the door and they both swigged from a bottle of mouthwash, swished for a long time, and then simultaneously opened their doors and spit on the ground.

The song my brain sings whilst I sit on my parents' fancy heated toilet seat in late June: hot seat in the summertime, to the tune of this.

“To kill an eel, seize it with a cloth and bang its head violently against a hard surface.” — Larousse Gastronomique, 1938

*I devised a torture-chamber-looking method of diverting the pooper that involves take-out chopsticks and skewers. Watch this space for DIY slug murder and powdery mildew abatement.

Rabbit rabbit

 

All things go

I've got to be honest, I have had recurring thoughts lately of shutting down this blorg. I'm not sure why, aside from a general feeling that the internets have become something I want to use only in a very methodical, efficient way and then turn my attention away from entirely. And if I come here and post a rabbit each month, methodically? Well, that's pretty boring, number one. I was going to say number two, I'm running out of locations for my monthly rabbit photo shoot, but that's ridiculous. THE WORLD IS MY RABBIT RABBIT OYSTER.

Maybe I'll start a newsletter? is a thought I've had on and off for three or four years. I have actually signed up for and then deleted several different newslettering platforms over the years. 

Maybe Google will eliminate Blogger is a thought I've had on and off for at least 15 years. Also, Why on earth hasn't Google eliminated Blogger, no one but me uses it anymore.

I realized today that I started this thing almost 19 years ago, and so I decided I should keep going at least until my big 20th anniversary, assuming Google doesn't pull the plug in the next 16 months. To wit:

This month in animals:

CROWS. Holly and I made a pledge to become old ladies who are friends with crows, and to that end I am continuing to foster my relationship with the crows in my yard and on my regular dog walking routes. Yesterday in the grocery store parking lot I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out peanuts, a penny (lucky: found on the ground), and a couple of rocks. I am a 12-year-old pretending to have a bank account and a driver's license and two grown children.

BEARS.

BEARS. Langlais Sculpture Preserve. 

CLOVER. Clover in boots, Clover in a jacket. Clover in Mark's arms, because we didn't put her boots on and her paws hurt from the salted sidewalks.

I'm Virginia, adoring and worrying over you (you're Pinka, her beloved spaniel).

You're the pupil in god's one good eye

My work queue has recently included so many antiquated, obscure, and fancy words that I feel like I'm writing a Decemberists song. Banderole. Cumbrous. Breviloquent. Ailurophile. Kemp. Maybe I'll call it Here I Dreamt I was a Vexillologist.

Weather report: fairly summerish. Summer-adjacent. The sun is shining at the moment, Mark and I were last-minute invitees to a wedding this afternoon, there are farmer's market strawberries in the fridge, and the only thing I'm concerned about right now is where my crow friend is this morning. It's the first time in several days that he hasn't come by to eat one single, solitary peanut in my back yard. 

THANK YOU

Isn’t every season, no matter what we call it, shadow season?

Reporting live from inside a month-long rain cloud:

FULL SET ACRYLIC TOES (seen in the window of a nail salon).

Looking at my gory finger (I accidentally poured boiling water upon it last week), thinking about Yellowjackets.*

An entire family of starlings has moved into my yard, including a dozen juveniles who scream at each other as they compete to hog the bird feeder. Each day I watch them shove each other out of the way, gobbling the birdseed and plunging their beaks into the suet cake. Today there's nothing left to eat but still they stay, squatters in my back garden. (Very Werner Herzog voice) Their hunger is almost incandescent. Again and again the birds continue their instinctive struggle for survival, pushing aside their own kin.

A thought, several days after I wrote the above, days and days later, as I watch these same starlings continuing to assault my bird feeder: it's only a murmuration of starlings if they're forming mesmerizing, shifting cloud shapes in the sky. If they're noisy back yard interlopers, you can instead call them a vulgarity of starlings. Or a scourge of starlings. Or, most accurately and benignly, a clutter of starlings. 

Speaking of Werner Herzog, I happened to read this in an interview with him and it made me laugh out loud. Interviewer: "Is anything cute to you? Have you ever seen a dog and thought, 'That’s a cute dog?'" WH: "No. I would assign a dog a different word."

My entire search history

*If you know, you definitely know

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree

Saturday is my traditional sleep-in day, but I woke at 6:00 with my head full of dreams, and got up to write them down. For weeks I haven't really remembered them, just the fuzziest outline and sometimes one detail (the night before I wrote in my dream journal "A flimsy tray, a shoddy paint job when viewed up close."). Last night's was one of those satisfying dreams that went on and on, involved flooding and long conversations and an Eastern European city and twins and adventures.

Gray November beach with Clover, early — one of my favorite kinds of beach. She played with many dogs, even big, bouncy puppies, and was only ready to leave when she heard a distant scary sound (blasting? Morning fireworks?).

I wish you could see how sleepy the sky is already now, at 4:15 pm, how tired the branches of the trees are in my neighborhood, still shedding gold and brown leaves. The only thing that's missing is crows! Where did they go?

 

You're the turmeric in my oatmeal, you're the goat milk in my tea

 Wonderful:

A murder of crows at the city golf course, and rediscovering that "city golf course" is a misleading descriptor for acres of public city land, rolling hills and evergreen stands beside a lazy river. It helped that we had it all to ourselves, before cross country skiers and walkers and skaters arrived. The crows have been spurning my back yard for months (or years), and I've missed that low, strange sound of a hundred of them gathered to discuss the weather.

Mark described the groaning sound Clover makes when we arrive at one of her favorite places or pull up in our driveway as sounding like Marge Simpson, and YES.

This peanut sauce on anything.

This year

I have zero cause for complaint. I'm extremely superstitious about mentioning this, but my loved ones are safe and healthy.

But here I go: this is the year in which a predicted snowstorm is likely to cancel Isaac and Edna's scheduled COVID-19 test tomorrow. They also have a test today, but they will have to wait longer for its results, and they're waiting in a generously donated—but very cold—space. This is the year that is keeping most of my beloveds, including my sweetest girl, far away.

Lucky: to have a kid who could drive here, to have a friend who would offer his empty house for isolating. To have enough money to feed ourselves and also buy out the frozen section of Trader Joe's for said kid's quarantine. To have a warm puppy and a warm catfriend and lights on a perfect little tree and batteries for window candles and a tube of almond paste for macaroons in the meantime. To have a car WITH HEATED SEATS and a beach ten minutes away, to walk in the cold wrapped in a warm coat. 

Things I observed recently:

• Crows congregating in a circle, something happening in the middle, but what? 
• A man wearing bright yellow trousers smoking a pipe over his lowered mask. 
• A sweet pit bull in a sweater gazing up earnestly at me, a loving, begging face. 
• Clover at a loss, looking like she forgot something, searching for Mark across the beach, on a day we'd gone without him.
• A police car running a red light, no lights or sirens on, just coasting slowly, brazenly through it.
• One lone bird trapped inside Trader Joe's (I keep thinking and worrying about this bird, days later).

Vernal

Some green, in honor of spring (although we're about two months behind the official beginning of spring here in Maine, of course). I'm spending this equinox drinking tea, sitting close to the stove, with my hot rabbit-shaped bag of corn on my lap, while I work. Outside, all is cold and gray, tinged with brown.

We have plenty of pellets for the stove, plenty of black tea bags and coffee beans, plenty of dogs and hot water and crows in the sky, plenty of ice left to crack, shows to watch, pies to make and buy and eat with and without slightly sweetened whipped cream, plenty of college kids whose company to savor, all to get us by this short season of not-spring.

Eighteen

The sun came out today, which makes all the difference, and right now I can see my favorite murder of crows swooping through the sky together, hundreds of them. Napping goes on around here every day, even if the human inhabitants resist. I am drinking coffee with cream and eating a piece of toast with sea-salted butter.

Some nights I sleep so lightly, worrying about Zoë and Isaac, worries with some substantiated basis vying with worries that appear ridiculous in the morning light--last night was like that, thoughts racing through my head and nudging me awake hourly. It's as if they're both lost, and twelve years old, or traveling solo through India with no Internet access. It's the opposite of that feeling when they (rarely) are both home and in their respective childhood bedrooms, and my brain is utterly satisfied and content with that knowledge.

I got a coat of primer on the kitchen walls first thing this morning, everything smooth and patched and sanded, even places that used to have enormous holes in the plaster--you would never know. Tomorrow, we'll get the first coat of actual paint (ultra white) on, and when it looks perfect, we'll start putting up the long wooden boards we stained medium-dark brown.

Watching Olive Kitteridge
Reading Afterparty
Drinking hot drinks
Eating warm foods, as many orange-colored ones as I can
Listening to Serial, along with the whole rest of the known world
Cuddling with this cat, pictured above, who makes me stop several times a day to pet him and scratch his ears and kiss his head

Black flowers on the snow

“It is January, and there are the crows
like black flowers on the snow.”

from "Crows" by Mary Oliver

Rabbit rabbit!

Ca-caw! It's December!

the way life tosses you around

it was a long week, but a sweet one. i had lunch with two of my very favorites.

























my copilot took pictures of this murder of crows for me one afternoon.
 
























i discovered a new (to me) meat substitute, jackfruit! i used it to make tacos one night and then vegan "pulled pork" sandwiches the next.

























(unless you are the person's child and possibly his or her spouse) you can forgive a person for being tempted to refer to this guy as "mister fuzzers." right?

 


















biography by amy dryansky

parking lot crow

gray sky, perfect silhouette of a crow. it's stupid how happy it makes me to see one, even in a parking lot.

crow(e)s

i spent the afternoon with my favorite crowe getting my feet soaked in almond-scented foam and my neck massaged at soakology (what a luxurious treat that was), and then later i had the pleasure of seeing my favorite murder of crows roosting in the trees all around my house. add to that a morning coffee and chat with my favorite dancer lady, and i can almost relax about the fact that i achieved basically nothing today (except pleasure! and relaxation!). i can, in fact, because this is fuel for the next several days of getting things accomplished.

uitwaaien

from a list of ten words that can't be accurately translated into english, uitwaaien is a dutch word that means "to walk in the wind," and simultaneously, "to take a brief break in the countryside to clear one's head." i love untranslateable words, and this one perfectly captures my weekend, which i spent walking in the wind on mount desert island with mark to celebrate our twentieth anniversary.

thanks to sweet jen, we stayed in this dreamy little cottage.

we also got great advice from her about how to spend our first day in acadia, and we followed her suggestions to the letter. first, we drove to the top of cadillac mountain, where amidst dozens of german tourists, i took numerous photographs of the orange tips of my gloved fingers (it was so windy, i was afraid my camera/phone was going to be swept out of my slippery hands). i did manage this picture of the village of bar harbor and my favorite nearby islands, the porcupines (bald porcupine is my very favorite).

after that we headed around the park toward gorham mountain, taking some extra time to clamber around the otter cliffs (mark's question: summit or cliffs? i like them both, but have a slight preference for the summit. he is a cliff man himself).

i see crows all the time at home, but the crows here were glossy and gorgeous. country crows, i guess. as we were hiking up gorham mountain, this one let me get pretty close so i could take dozens of identical photos of him.

we wanted to fit in as much acadia as we could, so we skipped lunch and walked around jordan pond instead. the sun started to dip down behind the mountains, and the light altered dramatically the whole time we were hiking - it was breathtaking.

as we drove out of the park, we realized we'd spent more than seven hours there! the next morning we got up early and explored a bit of northeast harbor, where we were staying. we checked out the asticou azalea garden, thuya garden, and the asticou terraces, which provide lovely views of the harbor below.

on our way home, we took a detour down the blue hill peninsula, another part of the state i've longed to visit for years. we stopped at the blue hill co-op for a delicious red curried tofu sandwich, vegan raspberry almond muffin, and coffee.

my favorite form of procrastination lately is browsing seaside real estate online, and a couple of weeks ago i found this sweet little antique house in deer isle. mark and i actually drove past it, down a long, ocean-side country road, and it was just as dreamy in real life (look at that apple tree in front of it!). except the roof looked like it was about two hundred years old. but beautiful! acres of woods, water access! sigh.

and just a little further down the road (at the end of the road, in fact, at the very bottom of the island) is the sweet harbor town of stonington.

meanwhile, we left zoë and isaac to their own devices for the first time ever. i found that i was a little anxious at night until i'd heard from them and was reassured that they were both home and safe and had locked the door and turned off the stove. but the truth is, they did absolutely fine without us. of course. i'm happy to be home with them, and portland is always nice to come home to, but i do sort of feel like we spent the weekend in a magical, beautiful fairy land. i can't imagine a better way to celebrate two decades with my sweetie.

work

some days, work for me means t-shirts piled all over my dining room table and several trips to the post office. i am completely in love with this new crow print, but i'm also pretty fond of the "state of maine" print, which is from an antique map.

rabenmutter

my new favorite german word, which i discovered in this article about working moms in germany. it means "raven mother," as in "big mean bird that pushes her babies out of the nest." isn't that great?!

saying crow things, doing as they please

every day is a little bit longer, but this is still what you see when you walk through deering oaks in the middle of the afternoon and look up.

it gets dark around here early because of all the crows

you should listen to this song while you imagine my back yard. also, i took some pictures, but they don't convey the masses of crows (at least one murder of them) roosting in our trees.



















i love them.