We had some visitors yesterday.
Gratuitous Dog Photo
Cooks’ advice
The cioppino I made last night has now reached 55 degrees. My philosophy is that I will pay a great deal of money NOT to get food poisoning. Must be thrown away, right?
Please advise. 😎
Gratuitous Winter Photo
Band of Squirrels
We live in the woods, and partly because our property is contiguous with other large wooded areas, we have diverse wildlife. It is endlessly fascinating. I spend more time looking out at the activities beyond our windows than I do watching television.
But I’ve never really paid much attention to squirrels. We have approximately eleven million gray squirrels, and a rapidly increasing population of red squirrels, whose aggressive habits chase other mammals from the territory, and cause destruction to human property. You can hear them scold if you dare to walk beneath any of their trees. They are smaller than gray squirrels, but they box above their weight. All together, squirrels are the most common animals on our property, and I take them for granted. They are not mysterious and fascinating like raccoons or possums; or innocently beautiful, like deer; or showy and cantankerous like turkeys. They’re just squirrels. Always there. Always busy. Almost always solitary except during mating season. Not particularly interesting.
And yet, I recently learned that squirrel intelligence is superior to that of dogs, and this has given me a lot to think about. It certainly explains how in the dog vs. squirrel chase category, squirrels are definitely winning.
Anyway, this is not meant to be a treatise about squirrel species. It is the observation of—if not friendship—camaraderie—and, perhaps, of something more important.
I first saw a pair of gray squirrels running together in the summer months. At the time—and without paying close attention—I marveled over How. Many. Squirrels we had this year. It was like a squirrel invasion. (A circumstance due, probably, to the sudden diminution of the coyote population.) Every morning, they were running together, one after the other: racing across the lawn, spiraling up trees, and looking, to my wandering and inattentive gaze, as if they were either rivals or a mating pair. I didn’t think about them, or pay particular attention. But they were always there.
Only recently did it suddenly occur to me that they were still always there, and it wasn’t just a pair. It was a group of four. And it had always been—I realized—a group of four. There were lots of other squirrels around, but here was this…clan…running together in the clearing down the hill, foraging together, and racing across the grass to a particular tree, where they would run up the trunk and disappear.
Their relationship is as constant as that of the turkeys, and as I look back I realize how much their antics have been a fixture of my mornings, if only in the background of my awareness. The other squirrels nearby did not interact with them, unless it was to run off a competitor. But I think it was the other squirrels who must have been run off most often in the face of this four-squirrel brigade.
I can only guess that they are siblings, but who knows. They seem to have broken the usual squirrel pattern of solitary nut-gathering, but maybe these behaviors have been happening all along and I wasn’t paying attention. Or maybe it is an adaptation, a move to provide a common defense against the aggression of the red squirrels. Not being an authority on squirrels means I have the fun of speculation. Do they feel affection for one another? Do they feel a blood connection? Or is this merely a business/military relationship?
I have one clue—based on pure observation without anthropomorphizing. Last year, I passed a newly-dead squirrel by the side of the road, and beside it, I could see a living squirrel, frantically patting the dead body as if attempting to revive it. I wanted to stop, but there was nothing to be done. Was I going to comfort the living squirrel? Help it bury its dead? I watched for a second or two in the rearview mirror and went on in a somber mood.
It is pouring rain in the precursor to a winter storm, and the rain is just now—finally—changing to heavy, wet flakes. As I sit in my cozy library, fire crackling, coffee nearby, I see the four friends, utterly indifferent to the weather, running together up the tree, down the tree, to another tree, and jumping from branch to branch, tree to tree overhead. They don’t seem to be working, but playing. Maybe to keep warm, or maybe because the hard work of food gathering is seasonal. Or maybe because it’s good squirrel fun. I’d certainly do it if I could. Although maybe not in this weather.
I wish them safety in the coming storm.
***
Gratuitous Dog Photo
Christmas Eve morning checklist
My daughter and I got up at 5:30 to finish wrapping presents. Despite my best efforts, we reached gift bag DEFCON and had to resort to old fashioned wrapping, which is prettier, but much slower. I’m pretty sure I have never finished wrapping gifts in advance of Christmas Eve. But we drank coffee and chatted, so that made it fun.
Our neighbors will arrive at 10 am for our traditional Thanksgiving morning mimosas, which were postponed by our travels in November. This may be a new tradition.
There’s still lots to do, but I will now reheat my coffee for the third time and take a bath perfumed by some French huile de bain.
First things first.
Joyeux Noël!
***
And now for your gratuitous dog photo.
Your gratuitous dog photos on a foggy morning
A doll’s…house
I have an heirloom dollhouse that I have been saving for my two great nieces. I sent it with my niece and her husband when they stopped to visit us on their cross-country move from Seattle to Philadelphia. At the time, one of her daughters was about three, and she was newly pregnant with the second, so we agreed that they would save the dollhouse for a time when the girls were old enough to appreciate it.
This is the year.
It’s a big dollhouse, made of wood, with wallpapered rooms and big muntined windows. I think it dates to the early 1950s. I was not the first little girl to play with it. It had belonged to my father’s cousin, and then to her daughter.
I thought it would be nice to include a set of the right sized dolls. I had no idea how difficult this would turn out to be.
I tried the hand-made website; and the auction website; I visited the very few actual toy stores. Nothing quite right. They had dolls, but they were either hideously plastic or one step up from corn husks. Nothing that simply had a nice face and reasonably-shaped body.
So, reluctantly, I turned to the Seattle guys. They do have dollhouse dolls. But you know how the algorithms are. Even if you reject something it keeps showing up in your feed. There is no Boolean method of saying “But not that”. And there is a series of dolls that, at first glance, seemed nice. The dolls come in different ethnicities and ages. But the longer you look at them, the weirder they become.
Do you see what I mean?
I showed them to my friend at lunch to see if she noticed. Maybe it was just me. But, no. She started laughing. “What is with their crotches?”
Exactly. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And it doesn’t really make any sense, either. I mean…never mind.
My friend texted me later with a suggestion of some animal family dolls she came across. One great niece will get a kangaroo family, and one will get a giraffe family. They will have to co-inhabit.
Close enough.
Accidental Christmas Tree
I have mentioned my friend from sixth grade before. We met at age eleven, and our friendship was cemented soon after. Our math teacher commented on our report cards that we giggled too much in class. We have a deep mutual commitment which has lasted these many years, and although we are very different personalities, we seem to share a general tendency toward lunacy.
We don’t live in the same town, but close enough, and I was on my way to her house yesterday to see her Christmas decorations, have some lunch, and, because she really is a good friend, drop off some papers pertaining to a small dilemma (See: accounting; loathe.) I was a tiny bit late, so I was tooling along the country roads at a nice clip. 1
However, as I turned down her familiar rural road, I noticed that the rickety farm market and petting zoo that has been there for decades was selling Christmas trees. I slowed, and saw there were some good-sized trees. For the next mile I debated whether I should buy the tree myself rather than going on a family outing. It was too far to come on a school night, and the place wouldn’t be open after dark anyway. And honestly, after a basketball game all an eighth-grader can think about is eating.
So after a pleasant few hours of lunch, conversation, and admiration of decorations (my friend has, among other things, a magnificent hand-carved Italian creche with bespoke lighting), we turned to the subject of trees. “Want to come?”
She did.
It was a balmy December day, almost 50 degrees, which in Wisconsin means mud. We pulled into the dirt drive of the place. There were no other customers, but an eclectic collection of barnyard animals in pens all around: turkeys, various sorts of chickens, a donkey, a sheep, several types of goats, emus, and at least one vociferous pig.
A guy with a shovel looked up from where he was standing.
“Are you open? We’ve come to look at Christmas trees.”
“Nah,” the guy answered cheerfully. “I’d rather shovel pig s*&t.”
He set down his shovel and came to speak with us. “I have to tell ya: Did you see that trailer driving off?”
We confessed that we had not.
“That was the boss. He’s gone down to the other field with a load of manure. His wife has cancer, and it’s her treatment day, no one else is here, and I’m not allowed to touch the electronic stuff. So, you’d have to pay cash. That’s all I’m allowed to do.”
I did not have cash.
“But,” he continued, “you can go up to the quickie mart on the corner where they have an ATM.”
I agreed that we could do this, but suggested we look first so we knew how much we would need. So we tromped down the drive through the mud, I in my new black suede boots, to look at the trees.
Balsams have been hard to come by, lately. I like frasiers; they’re very pretty trees, but there’s nothing like the scent of a balsam. There was a blight a few years back, and it takes years to replenish. But here was a lot full of them.
We picked our way through various forms of manure. “Watch out for the poop!” became the mantra.
We found a tree. Just eight feet. It had a sparse side that could be turned toward the window, but it was the right combination of fullness and height. Just as we were calculating the purchase price with tax in preparation for our trip to the cash machine, the farmer returned with an empty trailer, and we were spared a trip to the quickie mart. Total cost: $66.
The checkout was a strange little place, with a greenhouse/gift shop that had a slightly creepy Miss Havisham vibe, but we soon escaped outside, where the tree was netted, and ready to go.
“I can’t put the tree on the car,” the farmhand informed us. “Liability.”
An emu lurked preternaturally in the distant trees.
My friend and I looked at each other. “We only have to go a mile,” she said. “Tom is home, and he’ll have something.”
“I got twine,” said our man, helpfully.
This is probably the moment to point out that we’d had champagne with lunch.
The tree was very light and I settled it on the roof of the car and opened the windows. Our friend handed us twine and without touching anything, explained how to weave the twine among the branches for extra security. Having never done this before, I was happy to have expert advice. We bumbled along for fifteen minutes or so, because I really didn’t want to have to ask Tom for another in a lifetime of favors.
It wasn’t until we were finished and ready to go that the farmer reappeared, and started to laugh. “I think you’ve forgotten something.”
We looked at each other, then at the car, and light dawned. We’d tied the car doors shut.
The farmer chortled. “I’ll get the scissors.”
“No,” Julie said. “We can just crawl in from the back.”
Now, I have a small car, as anyone who has seen photos of my German Shepherds’ sweetly bent ears can attest. But I am reasonably agile, and the whole thing seemed simple enough. I climbed in the back, and as I contemplated my move, I realized that the space was more limited than I had anticipated. Fully aware of my audience, and possibly somewhat compromised in my judgment, I crawled into the front, only to find myself stuck with my feet in the air, my head on the front seat.
I started to laugh, and could not stop. I lay helplessly, unable to move and barely able to breathe. Tears ran backwards down my face.
My friend was in the back seat doing the same. I could hear male snorts outside.
“Move the seat back,” called the farmer. But that meant getting myself in a position where I could reach the button on the outside of the seat. Finally able to move, I wriggled my way to find the button, and then found it impossible to get my legs under the steering wheel. My knee landed on the horn. There was another lengthy bout of deranged laughter.
When we drove away, securely entwined, we all wished one another a Merry Christmas.
Julie, unwilling to copy my methods, sat in the back. “Well,” she said, “we just killed thousands of cancer cells.”
A mile down the road, Tom waited on the driveway with scissors to cut us out, and a ball of twine to re-tie the tree.
Our plans for a post-basketball family event would have to be something else.
We went out for sushi instead.
- Sidebar: I tend to amble when the dogs are in the car because I don’t want to toss them around, but when I’m alone, I like a good corner. This has softened my views on round-abouts of which Wisconsin has far too many for no particular reason. But they can be fun. ↩︎
It’s completely unclear where the people are supposed to sleep.
Christmas Dilemma
The adults on my side of the family are in a quandary about Christmas gifts. We don’t see each other very often since I am the only one not on the east coast. Some of us love the spirit of the thing, and love the connection of everyone giving something to everyone. Some are concerned about the cost. Some of us live carefully edited lives, either by choice or by circumstance (i.e., a tiny NY apartment). Some of us don’t edit, and therefore have too much stuff.
What to do? If any of you have come upon a nice solution beyond simply exchanging names, please offer your advice. Lest you think we are keeping this to the last minute, we are.
But we’ve been debating since last year.
***
Today’s gratuitous dog photo:
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J.F. Riordan 