Reflections on the Sixth Week of Summer – Fluffy Cluck 

    On Tuesday, I joined my friend Marion as her guest for the Free Spirit Quilt Guild picnic at guild leader Kim's country place. The forty-two acres with trees, ponds, gardens, and lawns tempted me to explore, but I stood beside Marion under the pavilion roof to watch Kim.

   She arranged contrasting fabric diamonds into an eight pointed LaMoyne star. Picking up two diamonds, she put right sides together and said, “Sew from the bottom of the diamonds and to the mark in the corner. Don't go even one stitch past.” Stopping exactly at the mark was tricky, but making the contrasting fabrics alternate challenged my three-dimensional geometric skills. I pinned fabrics, peaked at the result, pulled out the pin, and tried a different side for the desired effect.

    Our second project had similar challenges–aligning pieces. I made a pincushion in the shape of a chicken out of blue fabric printed with white chickens sporting pink combs and beaks. First I caught the comb, variegated pinkish maroon yarn, in the seam with the beak. I ripped out the stitches and resewed. On the second try, the prairie point triangles for the beak shifted out of place. The chicken looked like it'd been punched in the face. I ripped and sewed again. With beak, comb, and tail in proper alignment, I attached round black buttons for eyes. Those shifted when I filled the body with ground walnuts making the chicken cross-eyed. Not guessing that the chicken would bring yet another difficulty, I set it with the other pincushions on the chalkboard “roost” at the front of the pavilion and wrote my chicken's name in chalk.

    The third project, dyeing a square of white fabric with ink, presented a different challenge. I dug through a pile of plastic stencils for a set butterflies. In the process of inking blue, red, and purple butterflies around the edges of the fabric, a drop of red ink fell in the middle. Camouflaging the “oops” with an array of polka dots would spoil the calming effect of the butterfly arcs. Instead I used another stencil and turned the mistake into the center of a flower. I hustled to fill the butterfly outlines with dots and lines while the group set food on tables.

    Satisfied I'd overcome the sewing challenges, I filled my plate with servings from five of the pot luck offerings. The pavilion buzzed with chatter of fifty friendly quilters. Conversations switched from “The seams do swirl in a clockwise direction” and “That fabric is beautiful” to “The Jello is super sweet because I made it with Orange Crush” and “She made the cake with apples and zucchini.” Stomachs filled, but most of the food remained uneaten–too much sampling from the snack table while we sewed.

    After supper, I took a walk through the grounds with Marion. We stood on the bridge across the largest of four ponds. A fountain splashed, a breeze tossed our hair, and a flock of geese flew west. I could've stayed on the bridge till sunset, but we went back to the pavilion for the guild meeting.

    Mid agenda, Kim lifted each chicken, gave its name . . . Chicken Chicken, Tie-dye, Chick fil A, Polka Dot . . . and made a comment. When she came to mine, the group chuckled because she said, “Fluffy Cluck. Don't repeat that name fast.”

Reflections on the Fifth Week of Summer – Zucchini Samaritan

    After Spence made zucchini cakes, zucchini burritos, zucchini sauté, and stir fried zucchini, he called Kathy. “Would you and Tom like some zucchini?”

    She groaned. “I just bought some at the store.”

    “Don't buy any more. We'll give you all you need, and, if you have extras, you can pass them on to friends.”

    “Oh, we'll use them,” Kathy said, “and I was going to call you anyway. Tom can't log into the computer. Can you fix that?”

    Spence packed his new Chromebook for fetching Internet instructions, collected zucchini, and waited while I grabbed my camera. In the truck we bounced two miles down disintegrating Creek Road.

    Kathy and I left Spence squinting at the butterfly foot sized password on the back of the router and moseyed through her Hosta garden and bunny barn. Seventeen noses wiggled in wire cages. Kathy reached inside the cage with a momma and five babies to pull out the gray baby, the smallest of the litter. It (“too small to tell which sex yet”) squealed, squirmed, and thrashed all four limbs. Kathy petted its head to calm the frightened bunny then placed it back in the cage.

   Two hours later we checked on Spence.

    “I broke it worse. Now Kathy can't log in either. I'll come back after dinner with the disk to reinstall the operating system.”

    Reinstalling the operating system got the computer working. Summer heat kept zucchini growing.

    Wednesday Spence said, “I'm going to take zucchini to Mary Ann, but don't come. I don't want to stay long.”

    I washed dishes, swept the floor, and still Spence hadn't returned. Was he fixing Mary Ann's computer too? I visualized eighty-something Mary Ann, with hands on her slim hips and stringy gray hair dangling around her shoulders, leaning over Spence while he squinted at her computer screen.

    I was wrong.

    “Mary Ann wanted to walk up the hill because her contractor told her a bald eagle had built a nest up there,” Spence said. “I knew she wouldn't be able to see it . . . ” Mary Ann lost her driver's license last year because of macular degeneration. “ . . . so I drove her up there.”

    “Did you find the nest?”

    “No. But when I took her back home, she showed me her blueberry bush. It's four times the size of your biggest one.”

    Thursday, Spence dumped an armful of garden zucchini onto the kitchen table and reached for a plastic grocery bag. He stuffed half a dozen zucchini into the bag then hung it from the red mailbox flag.

    No computer fixing. No drives to the top of the hill. Our mail carrier got Spence's message and left a note: “Thank you, Pauline.”

    Saturday, the replacement heating element for the stove arrived. Spence opened the oven door, eased down to his knees, and pulled out the broken element.

    I sat in my Adirondack chair, watched a chipmunk scamper through the pansies, and deliberated baking zucchini cake or zucchini bread–a useless exercise.

    “The clips attaching the heating element need replaced too,” Spence said.

    That night Spence dumped yet another armload of zucchini onto the kitchen table and said, “I could take some zucchini down to Barb.”

    I nodded. Barb didn't have a computer, and she could drive herself to the top of the hill to search for an eagle's nest. The question was, would she try to give Spence a stray cat or dog which had wandered to her house in search of food?

 

Reflections on the Fourth Week of Summer – Bunny Quiet

   Friday morning started country quiet. The cats' water fountain burbled, a robin sang “cheery-up, cheerily,” and a baby bunny scampered across the deck past the sliding glass door.

    I tiptoed through the great room, grabbed my camera, and slowly opened the deck door.

   The bunny hid behind a planter. When it stuck its head around the corner, I focused the camera, but the bunny pulled back and crouched among the hop leaves.

    I inched forward. The hider peeked over the edge of the deck.

    Was it considering a fifteen foot drop to avoid me?

    I backed away, and the bunny ran onto the porch. As if skating on the cement, it slid past the ash bucket and around the wicker chairs.

    I clicked three photos then retreated though the side door to let the bunny's heart calm down.

    Our cat George moseyed to the front door, looked at me, then looked at the door.

    Alone on the porch, the bunny hopped toward the thatched welcome mat.

    George merowed.

    The bunny took two more hops toward the mat.

    George gave me the you-know-what-I-want-so-open-the-damn-door look.

    The bunny leaped closer.

    I knocked on the door.

    George blinked and twitched his ears.

    The bunny dashed to the deck.

    I let George out and followed him. No bunny in sight. George sprawled on the deck and yawned. I left him in the cool breeze.

    Since Spence attended a meeting with Senator Sherrod Brown's staff in DC that morning, I climbed the circular stairs to do yoga without the accompanying sound of his computer keys clicking. No pans clattered in the kitchen. No one said “gobble, gobble” when the yoga DVD led me through cobbler's pose. The cats, bunny, and kitchen stayed country quiet.

Reflections on the Third Week of Summer - Raccoon Removal 

    “Raccoons are the new groundhogs,” Spence says.

Groundhogs devour baby plants in daylight. To discourage their garden grazing, Spence yells or shatters the country calm with a blast from his air horn. He watches groundhogs scamper back to their burrows then fills the openings with cat litter droppings–encouragement for groundhogs to move.

    Raccoons wreck havoc at night.

    The porch incident was my fault. I forgot to tell Spence I'd set a bag of garbage by the gate for him to take to the garage. Though he sat at his porch desk with feet up reading computer news for a couple of hours that evening, he didn't see or smell the bag.

    The raccoon did.

    The next morning shredded garbage decorated the porch floor and wads of paper towels, which I had used to wipe steak grease off the grill, stuck to porch rails and wicker chairs. The varmint even left a double handful mound of soft excrement. On hands and knees, I removed the mess with a rag and Soft Scrub bathroom cleaner.

    Disturbed earth attracts raccoons too. They dug up tomato plants, tossed them aside, and ate the crushed egg shells Spence had put in the holes to prevent blossom end rot. Raccoons dug up other seedlings they tossed aside. Those didn't have egg shells in their holes. Were the raccoons looking for grubs or slugs? Now Spence protects all new plants with chicken wire.

    Worse, raccoons rip the cover cloth protecting blueberries from birds. One got into the north garden tent, broke off a branch, and ate every berry on all three bushes that wasn't solid green.

    How can the varmint see colors in the dark?

    Spence added another course of chicken wire above the bottom row to make a wobbly four foot fence around the blueberry tent. That discouraged climbing, but the raccoons moved to the south garden and ripped open the individual tents.

    I closed tears with bull clips.

    Spence baited the Havahart trap with almond buttered bread and set the trap among the blueberry tents.

    He caught two varmints.

    Tuesday morning a twenty-or-so pound raccoon waited in the trap. Because Spence had heard a trapped raccoon turned on a man when he let it loose, Spence fetched his broken hoe. The blade had fallen off leaving a hook at the end. Spence lifted the cage into the tractor bucket and drove down the woods path to the creek. He set the cage on the ground, stood behind the trap, and reached over to open the door with the hook. The raccoon dashed away.

    Thursday, under ominous clouds, Spence hustled to load a trapped baby raccoon and release it before they both got wet. He wasn't fast enough. Rain hammered them on the drive downhill. Spence let the raccoon loose with the hook, and the baby splashed through the creek to an island.

    Friday morning the almond buttered bread had been eaten, but the trap was tipped on its side and empty.

    Spence secured the trap with tent stakes.

    Last night, a raccoon stole the bait without tipping or snapping the trap.

    Are raccoons the new groundhogs?

    They both are bothersome. But unlike groundhogs, we don't want raccoons to move. They devour snakes, squirrels, and yellow jackets. Raccoons are helpful nuisances.

Reflection on the Second Week of Summer – Life Guarding Skills

    While teaching children for decades, I resisted agreeing with colleagues that younger generations were less intelligent than ours when we were their age. Young folks were just modern, smart phone wielding beings.

    Take letter writing, for example. I remember licking three cent stamps and affixing them to the corners of envelopes addressed without zip codes. Who addresses or creates original cards now? Younger generations tweet or text–more efficient and tech savvy.

    Like them, I can use a cell phone.

    Feeling modern, I whipped out my phone to take pictures of a deer walking through Cain Park in Cleveland Heights. The deer crossed the paved path and munched leaves on a wooded hill.

    But modern was the millennial couple who turned their backs and took a selfie with the deer behind them. No doubt they immediately sent the photo to social media.

    No instant send off for me. I preferred the old style of downloading pictures onto my computer, sorting the collection for the best photo, and cropping it before sharing with others.

    A casual remark at this week's Deep Water Fitness class with other retired folks, however, had me questioning whether the difference in generations was just a matter of style.

Our instructor, a retired teacher, handed out kidney shaped Styrofoam boards designed to strengthen seniors' arm muscles. While we pushed the boards back and forth under the water, teenage life guard students gathered by the benches at the other end of the pool.

    Tricia, the svelte, thirty-something life guard instructor, leaned over the edge of the pool at our end and, in a stage whisper to Jim, said “I had to flunk four of them.”

    Jim stopped pushing his board. “Why?” he asked and glanced over his shoulder at the teens.

    Tricia smirked. “They said they didn't know they had to know how to swim.”

    Were the teens going to extend a selfie stick to a drowning victim?

    Call 911 for help?

    Anyone in my generation, at least all in our circle of opened-mouth exercisers, would have the common sense, as teens and as seniors, to know a life guard must be able to swim.