Fragments From Floyd

The Way We Were

I'm still muddling through the archives of Fragments, revising and reordering the parts of the four seasons of life here that may become a little tome at some point. It is a love-hate experience to go back over pieces written on a morning long ago, then promptly forgotten. The advantages and disadvantages of writing for daily publication lies in the spontaneity of the writing... the Moving Finger writes...and the mind quickly forgets. And so going back through the archives is to open old trunks and boxes filled with precious and terrible mementos rediscovered. Some are comic. Some, tragic.

"If there are no tears in the writing, there will be no tears in the reading" someone has said.

This week, I'm working on Winter. Buster, our black lab, turned FOUR last winter. He was such a fine specimen and faithful companion during the turmoil of the past few years. Here is his birthday card. He died five months later.

And, mistakenly in with winter posts, was this account I called the Joys of Home Moanership. Now that brought back some traumatic, hilarious memories.

Time Wounds All Heels

Oy! What could I have done to make my left elbow sore this morning? And dang, my calf must have cramped in the night--I don't remember. And why, after using the same pillows now for years, do I have a "crick" in my neck today? I think it's time to consult the Third Age Disease and Conditions Finder to identify the Aches and Malaise du Jour. But I have to ask, just what is the Third Age, anyway? And if I'm there, I don't think I was quite finished with the first two and would like to complete those assignments before I do Number Three, please.

My name is Fred First and I am an age addict. I guess I'm just getting what I deserve here. I admit it. I have an aging problem. Every birthday, every ten year marker, I have craved ever more of it--an age fix--even knowing the consequences: the sore neck, the aching elbow, the lapsing memory. I've only recently learned that there is a scientific, diagnostic name for this condition (and this not from the Disease Finder above). I am hopelessly "methusalated": a birthday junkie. Hooked on decades. You can read about it here from a confessing addict who tells it like it is.

Sleeping in the Forest

From the poem by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

Three Fingers

This week our only grandchild turned three. She's become phone shy, and this is a problem because she lives 1500 miles away, and wouldn't come to the phone for us to sing happy birthday to her last night. Abby, I want you to see a picture of your momma when she was three years old.

I hope you grow up to be just like her. Mostly. And send me and GrannyAnny a picture of you holding up THREE fingers. Okay?

Love, Dumpa

Un-named

I visualized this image in its final state when I happened across it yesterday, and I ran and got my camera. A few minutes can make all the difference. It says something to me about organic interconnectedness and complexity. I'd be happy if you'd help me with a name from the list above (my 4:30 a.m. coffee-induced word-ramble) or some combination of your own.

Or, if you're feeling creative this morning (I'm not yet), could you write a verse or mind-wandering free association paragraph using the image as a catalyst? Willing to share it?

Readers Radio Theatre

First of all, let me just confess that the neatest part of this message is the little banner up there, created by the online Acme Label Maker. Thank you folks, that was fun. But here's the lesser news: The Fragments staff is pleased to announce our tenth "essay" to air tomorrow on WVTF if anybody's got three minutes to spare during the busiest part of your Friday morning.

And I must tell you that there was considerable controversy about this one before the decision was reached where all parties (in particular the one with the two X chromosomes) agreed to make this subject matter public. Also, I will warn you that there is a bedroom scene. And there is conflict. But in the end, sensual moans of satisfaction presage a happy ending.

You can listen via Real Audio: HERE (Live, real-time only)

Or if you're local: Regional radio broadcast: 89.1 - Roanoke; 89.5 - Lynchburg; 88.5 - Charlottesville 89.3 & 89.7 - Charlottesville, Waynesboro & Staunton; 91.9 - Marion, Wytheville, Galax & Abingdon

Date: Friday January 30, 2004

Time: Immediately after the regular short Civil War series that airs at 6:50 and again at 8:50 a.m., EST... so ~ 6:55 and 8:55-ish

The Road Less Travelable

Our road. It's not exactly a super-hiway. Actually, it's not exactly a road. It's more of a two-lane pig path with grass growing in the middle, even though it bears a state road number and is "maintained" all the way between the hardtop roads it connects. Our place lies right in the middle of this four miles of jeep trail. The eastern half is almost level (after the first tenth of a mile) and follows the creek, never rising more than a few feet above it. Piece of cake.

But to the west of us, the road ascends almost four hundred feet in elevation before it gets to the hardtop, and there are eleven very blind curves along the way. In winter, it is treacherous and we usually take the eastern route, even though it adds some miles and minutes to wherever we are going.

This morning, the Clarke Gas Company delivery truck showed up close on the heels of our weekend snow storm. I heard the sound of a heavy machine approaching and assumed it was the hi-way folks come back to scrape the snow again. But no, there was the big white tanker trying to pull the grade up our snow-covered driveway in reverse; and after several attempts, he gave up and moved on up the road -- as if he would try to get his largeness up the canyon west of here to service the next customer. I could have told him he was courting disaster.

Twenty minutes and a quarter mile of reverse gear later, he comes rear-end first through the woods around the bend, back toward the house. I know he would have loved nothing better than to pull up into our drive and turn the heck around. But alas: too much weight, too little traction. And so, bless his cervical mobility, the poor guy had to back all the way to Griffith Creek Road, a mile of gravel trail east of us, before he could turn that rig around.

And the heck of it is, we've burned so much wood since the last tank fill that we'd not used enough propane to warrant a fill-up anyway. Give us a call next time, Gas-guy. We'll let you know if we're getting low. And give you the pig path road report.

Shine a Little Light

The very little town of Floyd gets some momentary attention from the DC area music lovers once again. This one is particularly interesting to me because, by way of Fragments, I met Julian Smith, the young writer who visited our town not long ago. He was kind enough to mention our piece of pie and cup of coffee, and now I know why I'm getting quite a few google searches for Fragments this morning. Much appreciated.

Here's the article (that also includes the rest of his trip to the Carter Fold). You'll have to quickly register for the Washington Post if you haven't already. Painless. Really.

What's So Funny?

Well that does it. I've managed to meter them out over the past two years, and as of lunch today, I've seen them all… the three VCR tapes that contain the first year's episodes of M.A.S.H. Of course I can watch them again, and had seen all of them countless times before. Even when I perked up during the first scenes thinking "AHA! This is one I had never seen before!" half way through I'd find myself saying to no one "this is where Hawkeye shows up wearing only his hat and a pair of cowboy boots" and it would surprise me that I knew that.

But then, these stories and these characters have incredible staying power for me. I've followed other sitcoms before, in decades past… All in the Family, and later, Seinfeld. But I watched those characters as caricatures with faults larger than life and was often disgusted, shocked and mildly aghast even as I laughed at Archie's bigotry and Cramer's total lack of social inhibitions or restraint.

But I always admired Hawkeye.

Honestly, I confess that I have wanted to be somehow like him, I will confess. I had never thought about why, exactly. But watching the easy exchange between Pierce and McIntrye, I realize this is part of it: I envy the close and easy bonds between Benjamin Franklin Pierce and his partner in crime--first Trapper John, and then BJ. He was never alone against the "enemies" in camp. He always had a friend.

His sidekick understood his point of view and took his side in every battle with the "enemy" in camp. How few people can stand united with any one other person against all obstacles and laugh? And more than that, his partner always shares Hawkeye's sense of timing, his ironic twists. There is always at least one other person who 'gets the joke' and cooperates oftentimes in setting it up. Next to sex, the bond of shared laughter has got to be one of the most intimate of human experiences.

If I had life to do over again, there would be more music and there would be more laughter in my life. The music I could make alone. The laughter-- that is a more elusive fish. One can laugh alone, but the most satisfying humor is shared, and just as one finds only one or a few with whom he or she could spend a lifetime, it seems that finding another who shares the same way of coping with humor, of crisis management with laughter, of word play and wit-- is just as rare.

Two people who laugh at the same thing are more likely, perhaps, to stay married than two who balance their checking account the same way. Humor involves the intellect (wit), the emotions (mirth) and the physiology (laughter) and so when two people laugh at the same thing, there is a deep connection that is beyond words and a bonding occurs, or the bond that was always there is uncovered.

I am decidedly not funny as in joke-telling. If pressed, I couldn't come up with a half dozen jokes (half of them knock-knock) and I'd flub them sure as the world. But I do see (and too often voice) the ridiculous with some clarity in the news and my own bumbling life, and absurdity abounds on every hand. I see myself as a mirthful person; my family may not agree because I've learned to keep many of my witty quips to myself over the years. Language is packed with humor, and puns are not off limits, no sir. While I am definitely not into cruel humor at another's expense (which seems so popular on TV comedy these days) sarcasm and irony are fair and oft-used tactics, but I have to be very careful where I use them and have been misunderstood by my more concrete and somber colleagues in the past. There's nothing more lonely than to be the only one to get the joke.

The most laughter-filled time in my life was, paradoxically, while working in a Chronic Pain Program as a physical therapist. I would come home on Mondays, after our medical rounds, with permanent laugh lines etched in the corners of my mouth. While I'll confess, some of our pitiful patients were easy targets, the more usual victims were the clinical psychologist, the nurse, the sociologist-director (who gave presentations on humor in medicine), the exercise physiologist, the PT or the DO medical director. We were all such exaggerated characters in our own right, working in a stressful situation where terrible things had happened to the people in our charge-- not unlike Hawkeye and Hotlips and Radar in the heat of battle and bloody operating rooms. Lordy, it felt good to laugh.

If you and I spent time together, would we share a sense of humor? For some whom I've come to know via Fragments, I think "most definitely over a pitcher of some bubbly beverage, he and I or she and I would quickly find common ground and each other's humor-frequency… they are the BJ's and Trappers of this little blogging world". And there are others for whom I think "we'd get along intellectually, but he or she is too (serious, concrete, up-tight, academic…) for me to be wide-open with my authentic quirky way of seeing and expressing things… these are the Frank Burns and Hotlips of the blogosphere; we'd smile, but we wouldn't laugh often."

Sorry. I've gone and gotten ruminative about humor. I'm a mess. But then I've been alone with the dog for two days since Ann's snowed in at work. I'm starting to get a little cabin crazy and everything seems absurdly tragic or funny to me. Better laugh than cry. Eh?

TeleTubbies On LSD

I heard the TeleTubbies "creator" (using the term loosely) on NPR the other day describing with obvious pride her new mind-abortion called BooBah. Now fortunately I got my child-rearing years over soon enough that I was only grazed a glancing blow by Barney and SPongeBob and TeleTubbies. But this one, folks, will indeed require the wearing of little preschool foil hats. It is too "out there" for words, except the Greeblie One has done a pretty good job capturing the, er, unfortunate resemblence of BooBahs to, well, yes, male boobahs... with a pointer to the BooBah Zone so you can see for yourself.

If this doesn't make parents of small children throw a brick through their TV screens, there is no hope for us as a species! They're coming to take us away, hahahohoheehee....

Beautiful Mind

Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer thinks we increase the net pool of happiness by letting defective babies die:

"Suppose a woman planning to have two children has one normal child, then gives birth to a hemophiliac child. The burden of caring for that child may make it impossible for her to cope with a third child; but if the disabled child were to die, she would have another. ... When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him."

Seventy pound wheelchair-bound Harriet McBryde Johnson has taken on Dr. Singer's shallow disability bigotry and gained the attention and admiration of many... and a cover on the New York Times Magazine. This, folks, is worth a read. From New Mobility Magazine

What's At Hand

There is an old country bromide that deals with this question thusly: What's the best kind of wood to burn? Answer: whatever you have plenty of. Maybe in the same way, the best place to write about is where you sit and the best images to gather to show the forms that light takes are the ones it falls on within your vision.

I have an inordinate number of pictures of our barn. When I look up from my work I see it from my window every day-- weathered and gray, some rot in the timbers, but full of character. I love the way its hard edges cut the light reflected from the morning snow. I am entranced by the way moonlight bathes the roof in blue light when cloud shadows surge across the valley and up over the ridge. And I appreciate the old barn for the very fact of its existence. Like the house, the realtors figured whoever would buy this land would come in right away and tear down the old structures and put up new. They placed no value on house or barn while we saw the riches both would offer. And we were right.

I had first seen the barn as utilitarian storage. But it has come to represent so much more. It is the same barn every day and yet each hour's new light makes it different, shows another of its faces to me. It is a testimony of craftsmanship, to still stand after more than a hundred years of ice and heat, wind and storm. It is a emblem of aging gracefully.

I had said for years before we finally found our place here that I wanted to put down roots somewhere and know the same trees and hilltops through the seasons year after year. I suppose I can include the old barn as a fixture in my sense of belonging. It is not permanent any more than I am immortal. But it is a relative constant in this quiet life, an icon of green pastures by still waters. And so you will see more of it from time to time because it is the barn I have plenty of.

To Confuse the Muse

The muse is both the deity and the messenger... for it is surely not only for our own sakes that the gods are willing to appear to us and breathe their holy fire into our work. The muse, when she appears, takes us out of our little life and thrusts us into the world. -- Deena Metzger, Writing for Your Life

Yeah. I need to be thrust out into the world. Come on, muse. Thrust me. It might take two of ya. I dare ya. I've had enough of basting in my own juices in my little life. One can marinade in nostalgia and simmer in solipsistic solitude only so long before the dish gets a gamy off-flavor. Let's vary the menu a little, shall we? I have a nice barn, a fine dog, two beautiful creeks and I have served them over and over. But they are not the world. My memories are not the whole of consciousness. I've given it away freely (and worth every penny of it)-- my gardening tales, and stories from the trail, and philosophies about heating with wood and some of the yarn of how we got to Goose Creek and whatever comes to mind from my back yard. I've written every day for eighteen months so that "the morning pages" seem safely set apart for the act of writing. They no longer dawn each day like a punishment but more like an opportunity to relieve myself of pent up language, like being "milked" as blind John Milton has described the urgency to get down the words.

I have the intimation that perhaps soon, writing for the sake of writing will not be the only point and reason for writing. I have a sense of impending purpose. Perhaps this is only the coming of spring talking, for this is a fact: under the snow, blossoms grow in buds and energy stirs in roots and rhizomes in frozen ground. It is the dead of winter, but I feel currents moving underneath me that I cannot explain. I am ready to flow and leaf and flower, a perennial incarnated each year into some new thing bearing new fruit.

And the Muses looked at each other this morning and said "maybe we need to postpone the thrusting for another year or two. Ya think?"

Goose Creek Traffic Report

This update is for all you * who anticipate traveling the Goose Creek bypass between Terry's Fork (Former) Grocery and the YoYoVitro Glass Shoppe on Shawsville Pike this morning. The VDOT road scraper came through at half til daybreak and cut it back to about 3 inches of packed powder. However, it only opened one lane. No, wait a minute. The road is only one lane. The scenery is phenomenal so drive carefully. Just stop your trucks in the middle of the road and get out and gawk. You'll not see another soul to worry about. We haven't. For days now. Other road info here.

Also, we have this report: Fred First, a local resident, says "My feet have never been happier" and he beams as he points proudly to his new Muck Boots that took their maiden voyage in the snow this morning. "They feel just like my bedroom slippers.... even when I'm standing in the creek". His wife was overheard mumbling that she had been telling him for a year he needed new waterproof boots and is tired of listening to him gloat, like it was his idea.

The neighborhood dog Tsuga has been dubbed "Tsuga the Tsubaru" after this morning's outting in the snow. Yes, traction-lovers, he is indeed the AWD Dog (Model **YL... with custom package: webbed feet, lowslung chassis, extra power in the front end, but a bit greedy in the fuel department). * Up to a half dozen vehicles are anticipated in the next 24 hours! ** Yellow Lab

Humans...

... are some of the neatest people I know.

The creative play of this fellow resulted in a mockup of M C Escher's mind-boggling image, "Relativity" ... done completely in Legos. I can imagine this man's dreams while he was puzzling through the X, Y and Z planes he would encounter during his daytime play-periods. Which way is UP?

And let's hope that ugly is a universal quality and that American cities and hiways may someday have a bit less of it. Let's follow the lead of the British, who are disguising their cell phone antennae in most creative ways. (I did see one faux "tree" tower when visiting Birmingham during the summer.) If this is to become the rule rather than the exception, there needs to be more voting with our feet (or mobile phone contracts). Can you hear me now?

Via the Ecotone and Google, I've had the opportunity to meet Tom Montag this weekend. Tom is in the midst of a most fascinating undertaking. I'll let him explain (in the first paragraph of his mission statement, read all of it, okay?)

On October 2, 2002, I left a career in the printing industry to devote myself full-time over five years to "Vagabond in the Middle: An Expedition Into the Heart of the Middle West," an attempt to elucidate what it is that makes us middle western. The project is an exploration of place on a wide scale, across the tall grass prairie from western Ohio to the eastern half of the Plains states. I want to identify the "middle western" characteristics; but, more importantly, I want to find the stories in our lives that illustrate those characteristics. This will be literature, not sociology; it will be creative nonfiction, not scientific report.

Notice, too, that he is looking for occasional lodging in his target areas. I can imagine that after an evening of conversation with Tom and his wife about their work, I'd have a hard time dozing off to sleep. The wheels would be spinning. They already are!

Moving right along... my future Floyd County neighbor Doug Thompson has snazzied up his blog, American Newsreel, and adds this to a long list of things that keep him busy. For instance, check out Capitol Hill Blue and his writerly persona at DC Darkside.

And lastly, speaking of humans, let's talk about dogs. (Neat segue, eh?) Yesterday, I wondered outloud about the dog's long days at home should I get the Parkway job. Pascale suggested I just take Tsuga to work with me! First response: NEAT IDEA! Second reflection: NAH. Even if the dog was the epitome of good behavior and docility (I think regular readers know better than that) I would not take a dog with me into quiet places where people have come to the solitude and sounds of nature. I've had my own reveries too often shattered by Irish Setters (with jaunty bright yellow bandanas tied around their necks) and experienced other doggie presence in the waffles of my Vibram soles. I understand the freedom of letting your city dog run free in the woods, but too often, this infringes on the experience of other hikers or campers, in my opinion, even while more and more dogs are showing up in National Parks and on the Appalachian Trail. What are your thoughts about dogs in campgrounds and on trails?

Sunday Ruminations

~ Tsuga-- our little boy-pup-- is finally growing up. Today, twice out of five times on our walk, he lifted his leg in the male-dog way to pee. When Nate was home, he tried and tried to train the pup, demonstrating in mime fashion how it should be done, but Tsuga squatted in a most embarrassingly gentrified way.

~ It has just started snowing. And unlike most snows we get, this one waited until daylight to start. I love the depth that a light snow gives to the view out the window: the bridge over the branch is sharp, hard-edged, the color of wood; the barn across the road is muted, soft cornered, going to weathered gray; the far ridge is a flat silhouette of faint pink-gray against gray-white sky sifted with snow and could just as well be a painted backdrop for a winter play.

~ One of us tends to catastrophize when a storm (meteorological or otherwise) is upon us or possible. And so the Army of One has been instructed to bring copious supplies of milk jugs full of emergency water up from the basement. We're rounding up our Y2K supply of candles, making ready, hoping we don't need all of this preparation, but just being the good Girl Scout and Marine. We'll know this time tomorrow if the all-clear has been issued. In which case, we'll have lots of free flushes and empty containers for Tsuga to play with.

~ This Park Service application thing sort of throws the coming months into potential confusion. Will the dog be okay five days a week for ten or more hours inside the house alone if both of us are gone all day? Should we plan the trip to visit the daughter in South Dakota in May and then cancel if we can't both get away? On the one hand, traveling hopefully, it would be nice to sink my teeth into a new experience that requires the putting on of an old and familiar hat (the field biologist hat, that is). In other ways, if a miracle happens I get the job (winning over the vet-applicants who have a ten-point bonus added to whatever their applications rate) that will subvert everything I had thought I was going to do this coming spring and summer. For everything you do, you make choices to not do myriad other things. This mortal deal of being stuck in merely one instance of time and place sure gets to be an impediment sometimes, and I'll be darned if I can think of any way around it.

~ I borrowed a book (as if I needed to fill a book-void) from a friend. This book is by and about the writing life of Nancy Slonim Aronie (Writing from the Heart). The author got her foot in the door by sending a tape with a few of her essays (previously only locally consumed) to NPR. And the rest was history. My friend thought I might be interested in this book since my little writings have been locally consumed via our NPR affiliate in Roanoke. I'll air my tenth this week.
These radio essays are about the only products I have to show for my time away from a regular paycheck. Hearing one's voice broadcast regionally has been fun (and terrifying) but I have no illusions or hopes of the larger stage. So many successful writers with whom I've spoken (including email) seem to say the notoriety of a few hard-won publications may not be worth what it took to get them in print. They hold up the weblog as the no-middleman way to make your words available to readers around the world, instantly and permanently on record. I think there's merit in that. And still, I feel compelled to have a more tangible consequence to my writing than my Sitemeter statistics and three thousand brief comments. I confess, I don't completely understand what drives me or where the journey is headed. And I sometimes feel guilty that I'm having so much fun going there.

To Boldly Go

This blows me away. By all means, load a full size image (here). Scan across the image slowly, as if you were flying over it yourself, which, in a sense, you are. From your computer chair, a tiny speck on the face of Earth, you are seeing something no eyes in history have seen... the water-carved surface of Mars. There seems to be no other explanation for the mesas and plateaus, arroyos and canyons and alluvial fans, pocked here and there by round meteor craters. I am awed by our technologies, our drive to push back the edges of our ignorance, to extend the reach of our hands.

As animals go, we are rather pitiful and puny, clawless, weak-toothed creatures. We can't run particularly fast or for very long. We have the five senses, each of which are easily outstripped by "lower" animals-- the vision of an eagle, the hearing of a fox, the touch sensitivity of a mole's pink nose. But look what we have done with our minds to extend the force of our hands, the sight of our eyes, the edge of the known and knowable universe. Man has reason to be proud. As Shakespeare said--

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!

And for a moment this morning, imagining myself flying near the very surface of another world comprehended now by human sight, I basked in pride at our accomplishments as a species. Then, I clicked on a couple of news sites, and now I am ashamed and humbled by our smallness and violence to each other and the Earth. And so, it is also true:

What a piece of work is a man! How brutish in reason! How myopic in faculty! In form and moving how violent and deplorable! In action, how like a lunatic! In apprehension, how like a beast! The destroyer of worlds! The most destructive of animals!

We still have far, far to go.

Spring of Genius

The unnamed creek springs to light from darkness underground, from a dozen springs a mile south. Since its infancy before time, it has flailed north and south, forth and back between the ridges, swollen and angry, to carve our valley home from Appalachian stone. Today the little stream falls along peacefully enough, cold and clear as liquid glass, down mountains, carrying the smell of snow to a sandy beach on the coast.

Tonight the creek will freeze along the edges. In a month, we will hear a river embryo calling faintly from under ice. And we will walk on water. -- FBF

"Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius." ~Pietro Aretino

With Friends Like These…

I have this friend. First, he recommends my services to a patient who needs physical therapy. This patient just happens to be a former patient of his and he has offered the man and his wife the use of his guest house below the big house for a few months until their home is built. So yesterday, I go there for my first visit to see the patient, and beforehand friend Joe fixes us a big lunch (and then all I wanted to do then was go somewhere and take a nap!) After my patient visit, he had offered me the chance to cut a truckload of wood from his nice, level, mature hardwood forest; so I brought my overalls and the chain saw; and Joe goes with me and loads it onto the truck as I cut it. I am overwhelmed.

I left Joe's and on my way back toward town, lo and behold the infrequently-open-for-business bookstore is actually open! This is an old store on the highway where a newly relocated bibliophile has deposited her life collection (three truckloads of books, she told me) and is now selling them, mostly for $2 a piece. I brought home six (Hal Borland, Michael Frome, and others) and they will be temporarily shelved on the floor where they sit in their shopping bags until I build more bookshelves. Can a person ever have enough book shelves? I'm thinking of putting a shelf up near the ceiling in the "kid's room" upstairs and maybe in Ann's study.

And when I got home, I found an email saying one of my little doodahs has been accepted for publication. This man is editor of the southern arts magazine where my stuff will show up in a future issue... what a neat bookstore this is, back in my hometown! So, now I will be a professional writer. I get paid-- two copies of the magazine. Hey. Gotta start somewhere!

Now, it's Saturday morning and I have work to do... thanks to some recent help from my friends. Two days ago, just as I was walking in the door from recording another essay (broadcast announcement forthcoming) the phone rang. A neighbor up the road heard I needed a couple of downed trees relocated with tractor power (one was a 16" birch that spanned the creek; the other-- a 15" walnut dropped by the power company--was lying up on a bank too steep for safely using a chain saw). My neighbor (new to the road, I've talked with him two or three times) called (on his day off) and told me he could be here in 45 minutes to help. He wouldn't let me refuse. So, a short while later in the cold wind, we wrapped a chain around each of these massive trees, and with the amazing horsepower of his trusty Ford 4WD tractor, they now lie out in the open on level ground, waiting for the old reliable Stihl and a little spit and sweat equity.

Then, this morning I got a nice treat wrapped in an email from a good blogging buddy. You've caught me in an intense moment of warm fuzzies induced by the kindness of friends I've never met, strangers I've just met, neighbors I can never repay, and friends who feed me and keep me warm. Faith, hope and charity. I feel the charity and hope to pass it on.

We have another "winter event" heading our way tonight, so, after one more cup of coffee, I'd better get out and make sawdust.

Trinkets

"I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book–-let him [or her] relate the events of his [or her] own Life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them." Samuel Taylor Cooleridge (From, "A Writer's Almanac" 10/21/03, quoted by Garrison Keillor)

Beauty in the Woodlot: Jewel Beetles... link via Mark at WoodsLot

Well I'm outta the loop. Who are these people that are nominated for Weblog Awards? I never heard of most of them (except R Blood for Lifetime Achievement... waydago, Rebecca!)

BigWig is presenting at the "Weblog in Journalism" conference that starts on Jan 26.

Gospel or Gibson?

I've been reading the hype about Mel Gibson's Passion movie for so long I thought it had been out for a year. I think I'll pass when it comes to a theatre more-or-less near me. But a Toronto-based company is getting the jump on Mel with the release of the "Gospel of John" and I would be tempted (get thee behind me) to go see this one.

This three-hour movie has gotten surprisingly good reviews, even from non-Christian reviewers. While it attempts to remain true to the Biblical Gospel of John (apparently the narration, read by Christopher Plummer, is drawn from the contemporary Good News Bible), it of course will not give a complete picture of the life of Christ that benefits from the perspective of all gospel accounts. More here and here.

Morning Pages from the Province

Journal, January 03, 2003

Seven months ago, my wardrobe changed abruptly from casual business to casual farmer. I left my job as a physical therapist, and perhaps I have left my profession. We'll see.

On this side of the divide, the cerebral chemistry of stress and competition have given way to a sedate satisfaction with being in the present, cloistered in a rural safe haven with myself. It is a different way to live, an altered state of being, with a different center. It is more like being than doing. Words that passed fleeting and dismissed as I hurried to work -- the images, alliteration and allusion of internal dialogue -- are finally sifting down onto paper, or its phosphor equivalent, finding a voice beyond the stifled thought world of one man alone carried by the currents of a busy life.

Writing has become a daily celebration, and I have begun to learn who I have been under the costume all these years. Fortunately, I am mostly happy with what I see, and read, of this man, myself, and to know through the kindness of readers and correspondents there are others who know this struggle and this joy as well.

And yet I am not at fully at rest in this in-between state. I do not yet know fully what I should do with my life.

Journal, January 23, 2004

I set out this morning thinking I wanted to write a personal "state of the union" epistle, but that seems way too ambitious given the lack of vision and clumsiness with the keyboard that afflicts me as I first sit down to write this morning. The muse is not with me. It is Friday, after all, and I notice a cycle in my inspiration with this day at the nadir of the curve.

I am thinking about everything that has happened, for good or ill, in the past year (yes, I am a few weeks late for this kind of annual reflection). So much of the good centers on the writing, the friends made, phone calls and visits and kindness shown by those who have "met me" through this medium. I think about the radio essays and other chances I have had to touch lives through my writing, even sequestered as I am in this out-of-the-way place. I marvel that the words and images from such an ordinary life in a tiny valley have been viewed so many thousand times by visitors from places I have to look up on the world map.

I think of the peaks and troughs of professional identity and self-esteem, the weeks of loneliness during the never-ending winter of last year, the cycles of too much and too little rain, two gardening seasons, ice, wind, wood smoke and morning mist. I remember the dog's slow dying, the new puppy, the various wars and rumors of war, the silliness and attempts at serious expression that so often failed their mark. Last year the Ecotone was born; my computer crashed and so did the first Dell replacement; Nathan did his "V" thing (came home from Vermont to Virginia and left for Vancouver); we traded cars, carpeted the floor, and had all sorts of encounters with the wildlife: phoebes, king snakes, moles, and wrens. When you review your life set out in such ordered detail, even the backwaters of the rural provinces don't seem so dull as one might think.

Looking back, I can see how important the class at Tech and the Radford writers workshop and the Campbell School have been through the people I met who have influenced my enthusiasm and confidence and ambition; I think of all the things I've learned from writers and editors and geekly friends who have gone out of their way to help me with the technology of blogging. I look ahead with excitement to the next year with an unexplainable confidence that I will know, if not fully, at least in part, what I should do with my words and my life. Good things lie ahead. I cannot help but think so.

Simultaneous Submissions

I said yesterday that I had another question about writing. But since there is not likely to be decisive answer--any more than there is for the first question-- let's just call it a concern, an ethical dilemma. And this will only interest those of you who have, or will publish.

Is it okay to submit the same work simultaneously to two (or more) recipients?
From what I've gleaned reading on the issue and talking to folks, I have come to this incisive conclusion: it depends.

Fewer publishers these days are insisting on "payment on publication" and "no simultaneous submissions". Wait times for responses have increased to six months or more with many book publishers, and if a writer only eats if they publish, this is a long time to play a fish that will spit out the hook two seasons later.

Again, the bottom line is: be honest. If you want to be able to submit to more than one place, chose those who say it is okay. If you've got something out there, tell the publisher. It may be that, even if they say "no" to simultaneous submissions, if the other place where you've shopped your piece is not a direct competitor or is in a different genre of publication, your primary recipient may give the go-ahead anyway.

These are just conclusions I've culled. Here is one good (if dated) discussion on the matter.

If any of you have thoughts, or experiences or horror stories on this topic, I'd love to hear them.

Or Would You Like to Swing on a Star

I am pretty sure my granddaughter is going to be a risk-taker and a high-flyer just like her momma. She will have lofty aspirations and not be afraid of heights. And she will know how and when to bail out and how to use her parachute.

Happy Third Birthday, Abby. Wish you were swinging from the walnut tree over Goose Creek.

Is a Blog a Publication?

I have two issues and questions related to writing, blogging and publishing. I'll post them separately, maybe the first one today and the second tomorrow. First question...

If a piece becomes a blog post published on a weblog, has that piece been "previously published" when it comes to print publication? Is anyone aware of a magazine or book publisher who has refused to accept something because it had appeared on a weblog?

Update 22 January: Thanks to all who've weighed in with opinions and thots. I think the answer boils down to "it depends". Weblog posts are, as Chris suggests, more like emails shown to a relative few. Emails are not "publications" but can count as such if you sell the rights to broadcast them in any way. It is up to the party that potentially might purchase your essay or book or magazine article to decide if they consider a weblog post as "previously published" and what, if anything, they want done with the web version should they publish it in print (or online elsewhere).

This is not a dead issue, so please continue to pass along thots, precedents, even facts on the matter as you run across them. I'm not the only one asking this question.

Deleting Movable Type Comments

Thanks to Julie of Seedlings and Sprouts for passing along this tip-- it works wonderfully-- to remove blog spam. Share this with every Moveable Typer you know so the slugs who leave their waste on your blog will be wasting their time. Sweet revenge, it is!

This is the URL you need to delete comment #XX from blog# 1 on your movable type implementation:

http://...put.approprate.stuff.here.../mt.cgi?blog_id=1&_type=comment&__mode=delete&id=XX

Took me a minute to figure out that I clip my MT script from my edits page up to the cgi? then substitute the "blog id..etcetc =" above and the XX is the comment number for the one you want to remove. You can find that at the end of the address (in the address window) while viewing the soon-to-disappear comment, e.g., 4195&blog_id=1 was my last comment, so I would append 4195 to the url, click it, and it's gone.

Cold Crossings

Dang it's cold. The thermometer I keep on my desk says it is 60 degrees in here this morning, only six or seven feet from the woodstove where only a few pitiful coals remain from last night's eight o'clock feeding. The keyboard and genuine simulated wood surface of my desk, the arms of my chair-- feel like they just came in from a night in the barn.

We've had a string of below freezing days and single digit nights; the west winds have found their way in eddies even into our sheltered valley. The mass of the house doesn't retain much heat on mornings this cold. So I'm sitting here wrapped in an afghan (or as we called them as kids, an african) over my legs and I'm wearing clothes suitable for a winter outting.

I'm not complaining, mind you. (Well, maybe a little.) It was colder last year before we put the carpet down over the worst of our wood floors. When we lived in our very first house, it was often in the low fifties in some "heated" parts of the house, and we kept our outdoor coats on when we came inside. I learned a lot about heat tapes and plumbers that first year.

And going back farther in the history of cold, can you imagine what it must be to sleep on the frozen ground on a night like the ones we're having now, with nothing but a wool blanket? Or wake up in a stone castle with twenty foot ceilings and a meager fire from a heat-sucking fireplace?

It's plain that the human body can tolerate a lot more discomfort than we're accustomed to in our soft lifestyles and 70 degree thermostats, give or take one or two degrees only, please. I'm thankful that this old place is as snug as it is, and it's a comfort to look out at ample firewood that will easily get us through another couple of months of cold. But it's time to start thinking about next winter's cold mornings, and getting more wood stacked and drying under cover.

Seems all I do these cold days is feed wood and clean ashes. The woodpile disappears by the cartload every day, and I am not able to add back to it with temps this cold. I have a good bit I could bring over to the house from across the creek-- except, as you see looking at my creek crossing (that stays in shadow all winter)-- getting over the creek and back might make for more adventure than I'm up for.

Okay. I've suffered enough. Time to kick on the 30,000 BTU radiant gas fired wall heater in the other room, stand back-end to it with a cup of hot coffee, and think warm thoughts while this danged keyboard defrosts. I'll be back directly.

Continental Drift

Update 22 Jan: Okay. You've had long enough to wonder. This is a picture of the Ross Ice shelf breaking away from the Antarctic mainland that I took out the window of my reconnaisance suborbital aircraft one day last week. Or a picture of the ice in the creek with hue shift to produce the infrared look. I forget which.

Fit for Work

Well. Since my current little project (deadline tomorrow!) is offering me an opportunity to write but mostly to the exclusion of blogging about more interesting things, I will write about me in a self-promoting way, and blog that! Hey. I got no scruples. So, if you really want to see the bureaucratic side of your old uncle Fred on paper, here's one of four areas to be addressed by the job candidate. This response describes my "Knowledge of natural and cultural resources of the Southern Appalachians":

While my major field of study for my first masters degree was Vertebrate Zoology, it dawned on me midway into my degree how important and absolutely necessary the plant community is for food, shelter and all the other needs that animals required from their habitat. In the end, those years of study gave me a good balance between zoological and botanical interests and knowledge base. After graduating, I taught for twelve years with special personal and pedagogical emphasis on field-related study, feeling that looking at prepared slides or films in lab was a distant second to actually seeing living specimens in the wild whenever possible. I developed two courses never before offered at my community college (though course descriptions existed in the system wide course catalog): Regional Flora (a more technically challenging course using Radford, Ahles, and Bell's Vascular Flora of the Carolinas), and a hobbyists level class called Plant Life of Virginia (that used the very accessible Newcomb's Wildflower Guide.)

I spent two five-week tenures at Mountain Lake Biological Station (University of Virginia) for courses in pteridology and ornithology during summers when I was teaching at the community college. I won second prize in a one hundred station field quiz created by the faculty to test knowledge of all aspects of natural history.

I have lived in Sylva and Morganton in North Carolina and Wythe and Floyd counties in Virginia. In all these locations, the Parkway has been a destination for botany forays or photography shoots, and so I am familiar with the flora and fauna over a good bit of the southern three-fourths of the Parkway.

Southern Appalachian culture has been an interest of mine since reading Horace Kephardt's Southern Highlanders after moving to Virginia from my home state of Alabama. In the mid seventies, I was exposed for the first time to claw-hammer banjo music and the rich history of mountain folkways in my frequent visits and coming to know students from the Grayson Highlands area. While living in Sylva, I learned a great deal about the Trail of Tears and the flooding of mountain communities to create Fontana Lake. Living in Morganton, I was able to explore the mountains around the Grandfather and the Globe area with their rich history. As a therapist, I have provided home health for elderly patients living near Floyd County's Buffalo Mountain who were around during the years in Floyd County when Rev. Bob Childress "moved a mountain".

The cultural past and future of the town of Floyd and Floyd County are of particular interest to me now. In January of 2003 while a student in "Appalachian Identities" at Virginia Tech, I wrote a project paper entitled "Floyd County: Culture, Tourism and Identity" that is still referred to by staff at our local cultural incubator facility, the Jacksonville Center. In June of 2003, I attended the Highlands Workshop on Writers and Writing at Radford University to increase my exposure to the written culture of the southern mountains and to gain abilities to write on this subject in my own explorations. I am a charter member of the Partnership for Floyd that seeks to find the best match between our rich heritage here and positive visitor experience.

The Branch

Ten years ago, if we had found a piece of property that had as much running water even as our little branch meandering down beside the house, we would have been overjoyed. Ann and I both grow up far south, and water has been a big part of our lives... ponds, bays, bogs and puddles full of frogs. Finding land with water seemed a vanishingly slender hope. You can see it here beside our shed, weaving its way down to Goose Creek, passing under the culvert we put in when we made our driveway. Then beyond that, where the shaded pasture is still blue with morning, it flows under the little footbridge, then under the gravel road. Where it joins the creek, it has left a wide delta of black topsoil carried from the bowl of rugged hillsides that it drains.

The branch has its source underground. Exactly where its waters emerge and flow on the surface, we will never see because the source is on the steep logging-ravaged land behind us. The little stream at the very bottom of the steep "V" is too filled with logging waste and brambles to wade it very far. How serene this little trickle of cold water it must have been in the deep shade of forest before the first axes felled the tall white pine and hemlock and tulip poplars that grew there when this place was first settled and farmed just after the Civil War.

When we first moved here and I was hoping to have my garden over in the pasture by the barn, I had the notion to build a little reservoir at the foreground of this picture, and gravity-irrigate the garden with a couple hundred feet of PVC that I could have easily buried in the bottom of the branch and threaded through the culverts and bridged the cleft of Goose Creek to the garden. Then we realized two things: the branch can go completely dry, as it did in the drought of 2002; and the pasture hides an infinite number of rounded rocks washed into the valley in ancient floods and will foil any attempts at digging.

In the process of clearing out the sedges and burdock and other wildings that had invaded the neglected branch, we have discovered many bits and pieces of this house's history -- old white glass canning lids, pieces of unknown metal tools and bits of crockery. The dog is especially good at finding them. Last summer, Ann spent hours in the branch in her tall rubber boots wielding an old maddock, determined to rejuvenate the little stream. She was engrossed in her project, lost in childlike fascination, mesmerized by the perpetual flow and incessant babble of water that appears from underground. One warm day in July, pulling out tall grasses from the edge of the muddy bottom, she found two very old yellow rubber ducks buried in the silt. We kept them as our mascots, reminders of other lives that have inhabited this house, and splashed in our little branch.

Bloggers Can Be Beggars

Beggars may not be choosers but bloggers can be beggars.

I've had it. This is the last day I'm going to spend half my keystrokes individually banning blog spam from my comments. I tried installing Jay Allen's Blacklist script a few weeks back and couldn't make it work. I'm ready to tackle it again. It requires Moveable Type 2.6 or better. Cheeesh. I don't even know how to find out what version I'm running. This has got to be embarrasingly simple but I'm needing a little pointer. Anybody?

And I've run across other folk who had problems installing the blacklist. If somebody can share their AHA! moments when they got things to actually work, I would be most appreciative. Dang, I am such a parasite on the rump of the Blogosphere.

Jots and Tittles

Do by all means go over and say hello to new blogger nTexas at Mind Crayons and read ALL of the Fish Tale. Gotta love the ending. Don' let your kids read this.

And how about seeing NPR's Susan Stamberg in a bra? A Face Bra, that is. Or you can listen to her interview with the inventor. Actually, as I listened to this on Saturday, it sounded oh so familiar. Alley McBeal's Elaine wore one. Then, it was a joke.

And for those of us who are tubeless, you can catch some of John Stewart's antics via video clips here at Comedy Central.

A Brighter Shade of Obfuscation

So. Do you think that Scots poet Bobby Burns inspired the Procul Harem (what's a Procul anyway?) to write the most obscure of songs (just after McAuthurs Park) in Whiter Shade of Pale? This fellow sees parallels but there are all sorts of other ideas about it. This looks like a question for The Wizard of Wax, Mr. Dustbury. Chaz? (link via Boynton).

The Dog and Pony Show

Blogging detours continue to pop up at Fragments lately. The latest is this federal application (the real thing finally located with a little help from my friends) for which there is a mailing deadline of Wednesday, this week. I am in the midst of compiling my KSA's... of course you know that that is fed-speak for "KNOWLEDGES, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES". Yes, that's plural on all of them; and when written, my KSA's will be reviewed by a "personnelist". Our Bureaucracy... gotta love it. So, I am digging deep to elaborate on my...

1. Ability to deal effectively with people.
2. Ability to operate and staff a Visitor Center.
3. Ability to provide a variety of interpretive programs in a park setting.
4. Knowledge of natural and cultural resources of the Southern Appalachians.

And I read the fine print last night: veterans get a ten-point preferential. Doh! So I can score 99 on this application, a veteran 90 plus his 10 extra points, and he wins. This sort of severs the nerve of fervor in this long shot, but what da hey. Nothing ventured...

Wind, Revisited

January is here again, and I'll admit, I am not happy about it. Even snows that come this month are not likely to be very pretty, flying past on unrelenting wind that blows snow sideways, abrasive and angry. On the brighter side, it is possible we will hear Spring Peepers on a rare warm day later this month, and their hopeful piping always lifts my sagging spirits in the bleakness of mid-winter. But realize that this cheery frog chorus is just a tease, and February turn around and rub it in our faces, February being a month even farther removed from the memory of green things growing, of insect noises, summer lightning and warm breezes.

Winter wind is perhaps the only element of weather I have come to terms with. Cold, you can dress for. But January wind will find a way to poke a stick at you, freeze-dry your eyeballs, and toss your toboggan in the creek. It’s like an annoying little brother waiting for you outside every time you suit up and venture out of doors in January. I ‘d like to have a better attitude about winter wind, to not take personally its bluster and brashness, to accept it without passing judgement. But this is a lesson that will take me a lifetime of winters to learn.

Read the rest, see the image...

Local Color

Floyd doesn't just come in Pink any more. Our little town and county of the same name are also becoming colorful in their own right, and people are coming to see what the music (and arts and crafts, and scenic country roads) are all about.

I got an email last week from a young man who would be returning to our town over the weekend. He had two objectives with his visit that would also include the Carter Fold in Hiltons, Va.: 1) bring his Lovely Companion to Floyd for the Friday Night Jamboree (mentioned here recently with a video link) and write an article for the Washington Post about Floyd and the music scene here; and 2) do a bit of update for his next printing of his travel book on Virginia-- one of several he's written, and probably one day, one of many that he will author. He found me via Fragments when surfing for facts and features in our area, and we set up a time to meet and chat.

You can imagine that I liked Julian Smith from my first impression-- biologist by education, ecologist and editor, writer, traveler and photographer, and half my age! And so we met for a while over a piece of pie at Tuggles Gap Restaurant on the Parkway and talked about all sorts of things. And I apologize. I had promised to try to keep on track with Julian's purposes for the meeting, but I'm afraid I sort of diverted from my digressions at times. When on a typical day you only talk to a pup-dog, a stimulating conversation with energetic young folks with actual lives is almost more than a silverback bumpkin can stand!

As we were picking up to go, he asked "What do you like best about living in Floyd?" By then my mind was racing ahead to all sorts of projects and possibilities that had taken shape as we talked, and my trite answer came from the muddle of this distraction: "I like it because there's one traffic light and no Walmart" I think I said. That is so not the whole answer.

I like the fact that the county remains relatively unexploited, free of congested streets, billboards and flashing neon signs, and is treated kindly by those who come here to share the area with those who have been here all along. I like the fact that these two groups of people live here with very little strife and a lot of cross-pollination, even though there is room for further gains in this area. I appreciate the pristine beauty of land settled but not ravaged, where even modest homes are tended with pride. There is enough open space and horizon to satisfy my need for sky and enough mountain to wrap around me to feel the familiar comfort of the Appalachians.

I love the fact that here, one can live what I call a "slow, progressive" life. There are six people per square mile in my end of the county, but I have DSL to the internet. Half my neighbors are farmers and loggers, the other half artists and craftspeople. Floyd is a WYSIWYG community, about as authentic as they come, and by and large, folks want it to stay that way. One restaurant in town has its logo painted on the window depicting one farmer, one businessman, and one "hippie" standing happily side by side. That pretty well says it in a nutshell.

Current Events

This time last year I was beginning to think of the consequences of unplanned growth on our little town of Floyd and Floyd County. I took a class at Virinia Tech last January and wrote a term paper on "Floyd County: Culture, Tourism and Identity" partly because it seemed the issue of tourism was slipping onto the front burner and needed some attention. My class toured the Jacksonville Center -- at the time, nothing more than a vision... a rough shell of an old dairy barn that was to become the "cultural enterprise incubator" for our county. The old barn at the top of town would be the center of culturally-related business development, a clearinghouse of information for crafts and music enterprise and tours, and a place for county residents -- those who were new to the area and those from lineages going back two hundred years-- to mingle, share interests, become better neighbors and partners in the process of making our town and county a better place for our visitors, but especially for those of us who live here. But were there enough motivated people in the county willing to think proactively to guide future tourism and related growth in the county?

This week I went to a meeting at the fully and tastefully completed Center for a meeting of the "Partnership for Floyd" where folks from all kinds of background are sharing their visions for appropriate growth in Floyd County, and already have some great and do-able ideas related to preserving historic landmarks and cemeteries, restoring our legacy (of music and history), connecting citizens (including such things as walking tours and trails) and building community. It truly felt like the miraculously refurbished old barn was reincarnated into a fine second life and serving the purpose envisioned by its founders. They must be very gratified to see it working.

The Center provides studios and offices for new culturally related enterprises and already some artists and craftsfolks are moving in. The Center provides low cost utilities, communications and space until budding studios can be birthed into autonomous businesses out in the county. One newly occupied space will become headquarters for the Thompsons who are setting up their headquarters in the Jacksonville Center. They bring a wonderful combination of photojournalistic experience and expertise to the area. I thought some of you might like to view the video they produced recently of the Friday Night Jamboree in "downtown" Floyd. Come on. It's the weekend. You can afford to kick back for a few minutes and watch people having a good ol' time on the dance floor!

Take a Hike

A friend called yesterday-- an old Fish and Wildlife buddy from years back-- to tell me about a federal job opening on the parkway for a "Park Guide" in our general area. Wouldn't be much money involved, just about enough for gas and lunch, but it could be interesting for someone who wanted to meet people, wander in the woods with a camera and a field guide, and come home every day with "new material" for the writing endeavors. Sure, I'll take a look at it.

Ah, here it is. But wait. What's this? Here I get the first 100 words of a job description, and the fact that the job is in "southwest Virginia" (which covers quite a few thousand square miles. Where in SWVa is the position headquartered?) and then they tell me...

When you find an interesting position, you may choose to subscribe to gain access to all the information you will need to apply for the opening.

• complete job descriptions
• contact name & phone number
• application instructions
• experience and academic requirements
• eligibility requirements

... the page "suggests" I might consider purchasing a Premium Subscription to the Insiders Guide to Federal Application Process for $10 a month or $40 a year.

I'd have been more inclined to pursue this if they'd just been honest up front and called it a mandatory application fee. But offering me an "option" that is an absolute prerequisite to even begin the tedious process of government application paperwork makes me envision the bureaucratic nightmare I might be walking into. Methinks I will smell the roses where I live and wear my own clothes. I've never worn a uniform and don't reckon I'll start now.

WILL GIVE TO A GOOD HOME

Heck. There have been times in the last week I'd have given Tsuga away to any kind of home. But in my less exasperated moments, I know I have to cut the dog more slack than our misbehaving children. The pup's odd and frustrating behaviors come much more from the hardwiring of instinct while the kid's came from pure willfulness, mischief and the rewarding joy of parental torment.

I can only think that Beagle Perfume was wafting in the air, invisible Siren Calls such that a few mere molecules inhaled could turn a guy dog's head and heart to thoughts of a conjugal visit. Two young ladies unknown to me were walking down our road (very unusual!) with a small beagley dog running along behind. For the next two days, Tsuga would be behaving normally, chasing a tossed tennis ball, for instance, when he would stop dead in his tracks, nose sniffing the air, and turn 180 and head for road. And he would not come. And he could not be enticed by "TREAT!" that has always gotten his attention before.

We literally had to drag his sorry self back to the house. But the pheromonic tyranny has passed now, and yesterday, other than one obstinate episode in which he discovered frozen horse tracks and a large snowy-frozen mass of yummy road apples, he was back to his old semi-obedient quasi-tractable self. Even so, we must get those jewels of male motivation taken care of real soon because when his southern brain takes over his northern brain, he morphs into the Incredible Hulk of Canine Muscle and Sheer Will and I don't do mud wrestling.

And then there is his indoor vice. We've laughed at Tsuga's "hallucinations" before, only to learn that well, there was something there after all. So I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I'm not willing for him to dig his way through our hardwood floors to whatever it is he thinks is under them. We see him act in the same way outside when he has found a mole tunnel (and last week in the snow, he found the actual mole that I rescued from him the day after the wren got inside). So, in our "great room" he presses his nose against the floor intently sniffing, ears waggling, head straight down as if his magnetic snout had been pulled suddenly toward a large anvil beneath the floor. Then he rears back lifting his front end up on his hind legs and spikes the floor with his forepaws and commences to digging until we come at him with a rolled up newspaper or the can of rocks to make him stop. He stops in the front room and carries his digging equipment into the kitchen and starts over again.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt today and throw a couple of packs of DeCon under the house, just in case. There could be mice or rats down there; there could even be a ground hog; or it may be flying squirrels he told us where out on the porch last night. We didn't believe him. I turned on the porch light and there sat a big-eyed nocturnal gray colored prowler, sitting up on top of my hiking stick. Okay Tsuga, some times you are right and we are wrong. But we pay the mo