Reflections on the Sixth Week of Winter – For the Birds

Spence Hanging Double Decker Suet Feeder

    The Friday before Christmas, I ripped off a handful of paper towels and grabbed a spatula. Because Spence loved bacon, but didn’t want grease clogging his arteries, he baked bacon on a rack over a cookie sheet. And because he didn’t want grease clogging drains or the septic tank either, I scraped hardened drippings off the cookie sheet. Talking to my kitchen window reflection, I said, “There’s got to be a better way than bagging grease and tossing it into the garbage.” The image of cat shapes on my apron sparked a memory of Great Aunt Edith.

    Wearing her gingham apron in the 1950s, Aunt Edith washed her hands at her kitchen sink with soap she’d made from lard. An empty coffee can for collecting cooking grease sat on the counter under shelves of African violets.

    Did I want to wash my hands in soap that smelled like bacon?

    No.

    I rubbed the paper towels over the scraped baking sheet, yuck, and listened to a ScienceFriday podcast. Ira Flatow’s nasal voice announced, “The temperatures are dropping. The days are short, which means it’s time for the winter bird migration and . . . bird nerds around the country will be participating in the Audubon’s Annual Christmas Bird Count . . . .”

    Birds.

    Woodpeckers.

    Maybe I could make suet with bacon grease.

    I left the bag of grease, icky towels, and baking sheet on the kitchen table. After washing my hands, I plopped into the Adirondack chair and tapped laptop keys.

    Four websites confirmed making suet from bacon grease worked well if the birds had a fresh water source–not a problem at Wells Wood. I fetched a quart-size mason jar, emptied the bag of congealed grease into the jar, and stuck it in the refrigerator.

    Nearly five weeks later, on Wednesday, I pulled two quart jars of congealed bacon grease out of the refrigerator and set them on trivets over the wood stove to liquefy. Then I unpacked the squirrel proof feeders my sister had given me.

    Spence had misgivings about this gift. “Don’t hang them near my garden. The seed will attract voles and mice.” Our only seed feeder hangs on the sliding glass door well away from his garden. That feeder did attract voles, mice, and even a bear, but the animals didn’t harm the garden.

    I assembled a clear plastic feeder and held it up to show Spence. “Look. Isn’t the feeder cute?” But I didn’t wait for him to praise my engineering skills. “Darn. The opening between the top and bottom is too small for woodpeckers.”

    Spence reached for the feeder. “Turn the dome upside down.” He unscrewed the connecting rod, flipped the dome, and reassembled the feeder. “Now you have two bowls for suet.”

    I didn’t say, if the birds find it before the squirrels.

    Following Melissa Mayntz’s Internet recipe that read, “Once the suet is rendered, it can be fed to the birds as-is or you can choose to add simple ingredients to make it more appetizing . . . ,” I mixed together five ingredients without bothering to measure like other recipes directed.

• dust from the bottom of a walnut bag
• dregs from one almond butter and two peanut butter jars
• cornmeal
• oatmeal
• liquefied bacon grease that I’d poured through cheese cloth three times

   Aroma of bacon and peanut butter made my mouth water for a peanut butter bacon sandwich. Luckily, the tubes sticking out of the middle of the feeder domes distracted me.

    What if the suet clogged the tubes so I couldn’t insert the connector rod?

    Sheesh.

    I opened the silverware drawer and dug through the back for drinking straws. After I fitted the straws in the holes, I poured the suet in the bowls and carried the tray of bowls to the porch desk. Snowflakes drifted over the setting suet.

    Four hours later, I interrupted Spence from his computer work. “Do you have time to help me hang the suet?” I wouldn’t hang the feeders by myself because of his reactions to a hairy woodpecker in the summer.

    Spence had shaken his fist and shouted at the bird. “You ungrateful wretch. I kept you alive last winter, and now you’re pecking holes in my house.”

    Spence pulled his feet off the coffee table, set his computer on the empty space, and said, “I’m following you.”

Junco in Flight

    Bundled in winter gear, we stepped onto the porch. I pulled the straws out of two bowls, stuck the connector rod through the tube in the top bowl, and fitted a spring around the bottom of the rod. Spence screwed the rod into the bottom bowl and lifted the double decker feeder off the desk. The top smashed onto the bottom.

    Spence chuckled.

    I didn’t. “The suet’s too heavy for the spring.”

    Spence set the bowls down. “Take the spring out and use the straws to space the bowls.”

    That worked.

   We walked across the road, stepped over a frozen drainage ditch, and climbed a snowy bank. Briars grabbed our hats and scratched our faces. Spence paused. “Where do you want the cage?”

    “Across from the bedroom and loft windows.”

    He pulled wild grape vines off a young cherry tree and threw a chain–a quarter inch thick–over a branch. “This is closer to the house than I’ve been hanging suet,” Spence said stretching his arms overhead to pinch the chain closed with needle nose pliers.

    Next he took the suet cage off the hook at the bottom of the girasole patch to hang the second set of bowls. “Birds don’t eat from this cage as much as they do from the one at the end of the south garden.”

    So he reached above his head a third time to hang the last set of bowls near the suet cage on the ash tree.

Shivering, I hustled to the log house and gazed through the windows.

    No woodpeckers.

   No nuthatches.

    I needed to wait.

   At the beginning of every winter, a chickadee always finds the sunflower seeds in the feeder within hours of us first hanging it on the sliding glass door. Then the chickadee calls the rest of the birds in its feeding group to share the bounty. Would a chickadee find the new feeders? The enticing peanut butter bacon fragrance wouldn’t attract chickadees, woodpeckers, or nuthatches. Their sense of smell is weak to nonexistent.

    Maybe I’d have to wait a day.

    Thursday morning, I clumped through the snow, stood on tiptoes, and peered into all six suet bowls. No beak marks. No wing or three-toed foot prints on the ground under the bowls either. I’d have to wait longer.

   Thursday afternoon with the camera hanging over my shoulder, I clumped across the street, up the snowy bank, and through the snagging briars. Smooth suet surfaces. Figuring birds would find the suet faster where they’d eaten suet before, I traipsed to the girasole patch. No pecks.

    Discouraged, I crunched through the snow to the end of the south garden. A lyrical trill coming from high above distracted me. I tossed my head back and peered into the sky. Half a dozen juncos and one chickadee flitted in the tree tops. Through the zoom lens, I spied a slate-colored, dark-eyed junco puffing its chest three times normal size and singing louder than a scolding chickadee.

    Had the juncos and chickadee found the suet? Six steps took me to the ash tree with the old suet cage and the new suet feeder. No pecks.

    Friday, discouraged by countless window checks of hanging suet feeders with no birds attached, I lugged laundry baskets asked Spence, “Will you check the suet feeders for me?”

    He gave me a salute and marched out the door.

    “Either they don’t know it’s food,” he reported when he returned, “or they can’t figure how to get it.”

    Sunday, after the sun burnt through the thick morning fog, I pulled on boots, grabbed my camera, and slipped across the gravel driveway. Ducking around briars and tripping over branches, I reached the first suet feeder. A thin layer of ice covered the top bowl. I brushed the ice off with my fingers. A quarter inch of ice covered the bottom bowl. I broke the ice with a stick and dumped it out with some water. No peck marks.

    Maybe at the second feeder?

    Breathing in mixed aromas of mud and snow, I trudged to the girasole patch, cleared ice, and dumped water. No peck marks.

    Without hope, I baby-stepped along icy tractor ruts to the end of the south garden and peeked into the top bowl.

    “Yes!”

    Scratches marred the suet. Two bird foot prints. Had a bird stood in the feeder rather than perched on the side?

    So, I tweaked the suet project. With a serving spoon, I pried suet out of the bottom bowl of the feeder across from the bedroom window then mashed the gooey mess into the suet cage. Spence hung the suet cage in the ash tree next to the bowl with the bird tracks. Maybe the cage would tempt the birds.

    In the meantime, I lifted the baking sheet off the top of the wood burning stove and poured this morning’s bacon grease into a mason jar. A few dribbles oiled my hand, but I didn’t mind. I can wait awhile longer for birds to eat the homemade suet. No need to stuff bags of congealed bacon grease into the garbage–yet.

Marks in Top Suet Bowl

Reflections on the Fifth Week of Winter – Finding the Balance

Calculator on Quilt

    In an 1850s farm house on our snowy Tuesday afternoon, I settled at the kitchen table between two women I’d briefly met to start a job I’d never done. To succeed as a French Creek Township auditor, I needed to build the trust of the women and learn the job. At least we had a friend in common–Peggie, the quilter who’d talked me into to taking her auditing position. “Did you hear Peggie broke her ribs?”

    Nancy, owner of the farm house, retired substitute teacher, and auditor for twenty three years, gasped. “Ouch!”

    Eyes widening, Joan, retired school bus driver and auditor for five years, asked, “How’d Peggie break them?”

    “She reached for a package of meat at the bottom of her garage freezer, fell, and cracked her ribs on the freezer’s side.”

    Joan grabbed her ribs. “That’s so painful. I broke mine years back.”

    “Tell Peggie we’re thinking of her.” Nancy said.

    After Nancy asked if we were comfortable with the room temperature, she stood and tapped her pencil on a stack of folders. “We’re here to make sure all expenditures have a reasonable price and purpose. No secret trips to Hawaii. We also need to make everything balance.” She selected two folders from the stack. “You girls can start with the general revenue fund.” Nancy handed me a thin folder. “These records organize revenues by month.” She reached across the table to give Joan a thicker folder. “These are the same revenues organized by account.” She waved her pencil between Joan and me. “The accounts should add up to the same amount. Try adding the subtotals from each page to see if the two accounts balance. It could save some time.” She sat down and opened two folders. “I’ll work on the state revenue.”

    Taking a deep breath, I tapped numbers into my calculator.

    Beside me, Joan wrote numbers in her notebook and added them. Ten minutes later we compared grand totals–two thousand eight hundred dollars apart.

    “Okay. That didn’t save time.” Nancy stepped behind me. Running her finger down a column she said, “You’ll have to add this column on each page to see if the subtotals are correct.” She stepped behind Joan. “Add the amounts for each entry to check subtotals.”

    The blower on the furnace hummed, and we hunched over folders.

    At the bottom of the first page, I said, “This is off by ten cents. What should I do?”

    Following Nancy’s instructions, I selected a blue pencil, noted the correct amount on the side, and wrote minus ten cents at the bottom of the page. I turned the page and kept adding.

    Nancy’s cat padded behind us on his way to the kitty litter in the laundry room.

    “These numbers don’t match,” Nancy mumbled to herself. “Where did she get them?”

    I assumed “she” referred to Sherian, the township supervisor who kept the books.

    “Shit.” Joan said.

    Nancy and I laughed.

    “Oh, sorry.” Joan’s face reddened. “I don’t really talk like that, but something’s wrong.”

    Two hours later, The totals for Joan’s account revenue and my monthly revenue differed by a little more than a thousand dollars.

    “Okay. You’ll have to verify that the numbers match for each transaction.” Nancy pointed her pencil from Joan’s folder to mine. “One of you read to the other. Check the account numbers, dates, and amounts.”

   Joan raised her eyebrows at me. “Do you want to read to me?”

    “No. Your stack of papers is much thicker.” I held up my set. “I only have twelve pages to flip through.”

    Joan nodded. “March third, account three hundred one point one, four hundred thirty-seven dollars and twenty-six cents.”

    “Right.”

    But they weren’t all right. Sherian recorded seven for nine several times.

    Halfway through the revenues, I read to Joan. “One five three zero point two seven.” Numbers blurred. I looked up at the calendar on the wall and blinked to clear my vision. “Two six seven point zero two.”

    After three and a half hours sitting on the hard wooden chairs, Joan and I only differed by seven hundred eighty-seven dollars.

    I looked at Nancy. “What happens if we can’t get it to balance?”

    “We work until they do balance.” She looked at her watch. “My state revenues aren’t balancing either. Go home now. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

    Sunny Wednesday afternoon, Joan smoothed her Cochranton High School sweatshirt over her abdomen and said, “I woke thinking about the number ‘one thousand five hundred and four.’ That’s got to be it.”

    I hung my sweater on the back of the chair. “I woke thinking we just had to match the numbers against each other again.” I sat and pulled the chair in so that Nancy and Joan could walk behind me to get to the files on the counter. “One of them has to be off.”

    With bags under her eyes and a pale complexion, Nancy stood at the head of the table with the revenue folders in her hands. “I pulled an all-nighter and found the error. You had checked off one amount that didn’t match.” She set the folders on the table, flipped the top one open, and selected a page. “You matched a number in the thousands to one in the hundreds.”

    Oops. I remembered the blurry numbers and reading digits instead of number names. But we’d have caught the mistake on a second attempt.

    “And I got the state revenues to balance.” Nancy tucked the files into an empty carton on top of the counter next to the bowl of apples then put her hand on a full carton of files. “Today you can work on expenditures. Pick a month of bills from here. Match the bills to the expenditure accounts.” She handed us a file with monthly expenditure pages. “Make sure the amounts are reasonable and watch for a secret trip to Hawaii.”

    I grabbed the January file and handed February to Joan. With check stubs between us, we studied bills.

    Anti-skid, gasoline, truck repairs, mileage, vehicle parts, and a diamond. “Diamond?” Had I found an unreasonable expenditure?

    Nancy dropped her pencil.

   Joan dropped the stubs.

    “Oh, a diamond bit drill.”

    We laughed, and bent over our work.

    Later, in the April folder, the post office bill read $98.00 for two rolls of stamps, but Sherian had recorded $94.00. “I found a discrepancy, Nancy.”

    She got up to look over my shoulder.

    I pointed to the bill then the entry.

    “Look at the checkbook to see what she actually paid.”

    I flipped through the stubs. “The bill is right.”

    “Okay. Correct the amount in the space to the side, put plus four at the bottom of the page, and write in the new total below hers.”

    Thankful for experience editing and balancing my own accounts, I followed Nancy’s directions and flipped to the next bill.

    Later, Joan and I compared totals.

    A perfect match.

    Empowered, I balanced the general checking account making blue dots and printing corrections. Feeling like an auditor, I dictated the balance to Nancy then looked up at the clock. Twenty after five. “Yikes.” We’d been working four hours and twenty minutes. “I have to go. I need to eat dinner and leave by six for the quilt meeting.”

    “Don’t worry about the papers. I’ll clean up.” Nancy waved me away from the table. “Just go.”

    Friday, when Joan and I settled into our chairs, Nancy held a report and stood at the head of the table. “Yesterday, I took all your numbers and put them into the twenty page auditor report.” She flipped through the report showing form after form with a few numbers on each page. “Whichever one of you found that four dollar difference made the best catch. That would have been hard for me to reconcile.” Nancy put the report in a folder and pulled out a single piece of paper. “Now look over this summary sheet. Everything balances.” She handed me the paper.

    I glanced at the page. If Nancy said the numbers balanced, that was good enough for me. I handed the page to Joan.

    After studying the sheet, Joan set it on the table and tapped one line. “You forgot to change the date. It should read two thousand seventeen not two thousand fifteen.”

    “Darn.” Nancy scrunched her forehead. “I’ll have to print it over again. But that was the last sheet of clean paper I had.”

    I shrugged. Just change a five to a seven? “Use white out.”

    Nancy pulled back her shoulders. “No. That’s not neat enough for me. It’s got to be perfect. Maybe I can find another sheet somewhere.” She turned to the door then turned back to pointed to a carton on the counter. “There are twelve more folders to look through. Work on them while I fix this.”

    We read through files, added columns of numbers, and verified totals. No mention of a secret trip to Hawaii.

    Nancy came back. “I found a clean sheet of paper. Are you done with the files?”

    Joan shut the book of township meeting notes. “Might as well be. I was at all the meetings. There’s nothing new here.”

    “Sign this paper. I’m requesting fifteen hours for each of us at ten dollars an hour.” Fifteen hours? If I added the time spent filling out and notarizing forms in December, the hour organizing meeting on January 3, and the twelve plus hours working this week, that totaled about fifteen. But Nancy had put in hours and hours between work sessions with Joan and me. “Can’t you give us ten hours and you twenty? You worked way longer than we did.”

    Nancy shook her head. “It’s got to be fifteen for each of us.”

    I signed and handed the paper to Joan.

    She pursed her lips and folded her arms against her chest.

   “Sign it, Joan.” Nancy put her hands on the table and leaned toward Joan. “We’re saving the township lots of money. They’d have to pay a professional auditor thousands.”

    “I’d rather just volunteer the time–do my part for the community,” Joan said.

    Nancy put her hands on her hips. “Don’t make me do a lot of paperwork just because you don’t want to sign.”

    I looked from one woman to the other. “Sign it to support Nancy, Joan.”

    Joan signed.

    Nancy whisked the paper into a folder. “Okay. We’ll go to Sherian’s to finish this. Let’s go in your truck, Joan. Sherian’s driveway isn’t plowed.”

    At Sherian’s, Joan and I sat in cushioned roller chairs at a kitchen island in Sherian’s open space living area. Nancy and Sherian disappeared into the den so Nancy could type the report into the state’s auditor program.

    While I gazed through the window at snowy trees in the woods and Nancy gazed at Sherian’s family photos, we chatted. She and her husband Tim were a lot like Spence and me.

• They started as weekenders.
• They lived in a log house.
• They didn’t have grandchildren but enjoyed great nieces and nephews.
• They wouldn't go back to living in a city.

    “The suburbs are so crowded.” Joan tucked her arms and legs in as if preparing to squeeze through a tight spot.

    “I hate all the traffic lights when I drive in town,” I said.

    Joan leaned toward me. “I know what you mean. Here I can get to Walmart with only one red light. There . . .” She shook her arms as if facing an evil specter.

    Nancy’s voice floated in from the den. “Yeah!”

    Joan and I giggled.

    “The report must have gone through,” Joan said. “We’re almost done.”

    Nancy returned with a sprightly step, a peachy glow on her face, and a smile that sparkled in her eyes. “The report was accepted. We just have two more forms to sign.”

    Back home, I wondered about the fifteen hour division of time. Did the law really say we had to work equal time together?

    I called Nancy Saturday morning.

   “No,” she said over the phone. “I could have taken four hundred forty-eight dollars and left two for you and Joan. But, when I first started the job, the pay was kept equal. I want to keep it that way.”

    “You put in more hours than we did. It would be fine if you got more money.”

    “No. I couldn’t do the work without you girls,” and she changed the subject to her husband going to a gun show and asking me about my Philadelphia flower show trip. A half hour later we said goodbye. Her last words? “Be comfortable with your money.”

    I hung up the phone and exhaled. What a week.

• Match sums and reconcile differences.
• Develop skills and nurture friendships.
• Take initiative and follow directions.

    I eased off the teeter-totter week of balancing and looked forward to working with Nancy and Joan next January.