Conservancy Project at Bear's Retreat

Ah, the Retreat in springtime! Pretty bucolic, for a suburban lot. And lovely, in the spring. Very lovely.

Now that it's spring, things are getting green. The trees have leaves, and some of them -- the apple, the dogwood, the lilac -- are even blooming. It's great.

Amongst all this bucolic greenery, there's a LOT of a plant we didn't recognize. It's pretty, and it has nice little white flowers,


but there's really a lot of it, no kidding, not just in our garden and on our lawns, but taking up entire clearings up on the hillside:


So we wondered what it was. Sam went online to the wildflower identification site, and it wasn't there, so he went to our Vast Library of Stuff and discovered it in our Wildflower Identification book. It's in the mustard family, which sounds good -- it's "garlic mustard," in fact.

Great! I figured I could cook with it.

Well, yes indeed I could, BUT it turns out we have a problem. A big problem: the garlic mustard is an alien species, brought in from Europe in the 1860's. And. Not only is it an alien species, but it's an Alien Species From Hell -- it's invasive, it's ubiquitous, it crowds out the native plants, it takes over everything, and it upsets the balance of nature. I had idly wondered, looking over the vast amount of it we've got, whether the deer liked it. Nope. I figure that's why they ate my tulips.

Glad to have an object of hate other than the deer, of whom I was fond before they scarfed up all the tulips. Now I can with whole heart go after the garlic mustard.

So that's our project; for our sake, for the sake of the balance of nature at Bear's Retreat; for the sake of the little woodland deer, for the sake of the cookie cutter houses in the surrounding development, we now have a Conservancy Project, which is that we pull the garlic mustard in the yard, and put it in the TRASH rather than the COMPOST, which is where it was going earlier, and also, up in the woods on the hill we whack the garlic mustard down -- this won't kill it, but it'll at least keep it from seeding this year. (We don't want to poison it, on account of if other plants would like to come in, we'd like to welcome them and make them feel at home.)

There's an upside to this, as there always is; the child has been allowed to wield a dangerous weed buffeting tool. He feels very mighty.


I wonder if we're eligible for a government grant.....

Yorkie: It's Not For Girls.

One year when the child was young -- about 3, I think -- we were living in England when Easter came, and so the Easter Bunny brought the child an English Chocolate Easter Egg instead of the usual American Chocolate Easter Bunny. (Also, the Easter bunny, who was purchasing her supplies at the Sainsbury's in Cambridge, had to use brown eggs for the egg hunt, which came out in pretty, but unusual, colors. It was fun.)

And so every year since then, the Easter Bunny, even now that the child understands it's Mama, orders an English Chocolate Easter Egg from a British import store online, as a special treat for the child's Easter Basket.

Well, this year Mama was online, and she found a new Easter Egg; she didn't recognize the candy name -- which was "Yorkie" -- but she liked that, being fond of Yorkshire, and so she ordered it, though she could not, given the size of the picture of the Easter Egg, see it very well.

When it arrived, it turned out to say, in very big letters that Mama couldn't possibly have missed, so she doesn't know how that happened, "Yorkie: It's Not For Girls," and also to sport an outline of a human in a dress carrying a purse, in a red circle with a red slash through it.

"Oh, my God!" is what I said. "I gave these people MONEY!"

Turns out that Nestle is trying to capture the male side of the chocolate-eating English market (which is, I gather, believed to be mostly dominated by women having hormonal difficulties) by making a manly hunky candy bar. Women, in TV ads, try to purchase the candy bars but get scared off by fake spiders. Only men can handle this candy. On account of their manliness. And also it's important that men have a manly candy bar, since, as Nestle puts it, "in today’s society, there aren’t many things that a man can look at and say that’s for him." Well, they can be proud of the Yorkie candy bar, I'll tell you. Also the Easter Egg packaging, which is even more spectacular.

I put the thing in the child's Easter basket anyway, since there it was, and I figured it could be a Teaching Opportunity. Oh, was I right.

The child was appalled, I take it, since, although he laughed and laughed about it, as we all were laughing at it all Easter, he took a pen and tried to cross out the "not for girls" part. Good kid. He gave one of the included candy bars, AND the box, to the beloved friend, who had come for Easter dinner, and who dragged the whole thing off to her Literary Theory classes. The Literary Theory classes mostly wanted to know why Dr. Brannen had bought misogynist candy.

Why, indeed.

I think the beloved friend told them it's cause I'm a snob -- that's a fair cop, really; I don't think I can deny it.

(I now recall that there was another Easter, when the child was about 5, when the Bunny had to visit him in Albuquerque, and since the Bunny had flown in just before Easter, the Bunny had to go down to the Walgreens and purchase the last remaining Easter Basket, which contained, besides some chocolate, a plastic well-armed police squad, complete with bomb-sniffing dog, a set which I then referred to for the rest of the weekend as "the holy SWAT team of the resurrection." The basket did NOT say "it's not for girls." It didn't have to. I see a pattern here. Next year, I'm telling you, the Bunny's buying THE girliest Easter Egg it can find.)

The whole incident's made us a bit touchy around here, though, as you can imagine.

So it's disturbing to realize that the favorite toy of the female kitten is a string of shiny beads, since she's addicted to bling, whereas the male kitten prefers objects bigger than himself,which he likes to drag up the stairs. Yoga blocks. They're not for girls.

Keeping the Kittens Amused

Now that it's warming up, the kittens have discovered that there is An Outside, which can be observed through the screen doors.

One can look out the kitchen door, for instance; there are birds out on the lawn, happy grasses grokking , and new smells wafting in:



And besides that, the wildlife is reproducing itself and getting all busy and spring-like, which means not only more movement outside the door, but more movement inside it. Last night I was lying in bed, wondering why the kittens were so intent on stalking my gym bag, when I realized that the rustling sound I was hearing was coming not from the kittens, who were outside the gym bag, but from something IN it.

Sam came up to look, on account of being a fearless knight of true courage, and took the whole gym bag outside and liberated its visitor, which was not, as we had assumed, a mouse, but a mole instead.

What the hell.

Sam wanted to know if I'd brought the mole in with the gym bag, but no, I didn't. I thought maybe Dara, who's taken to dragging anything he can manage all around the house (bags of yarn, yoga blocks, packaging materials -- especially bubble wrap -- oddments rescued from the trash) had found the mole in the basement (where the mice and the snakes hang out), and brought it upstairs. Sam thought maybe the mole had crawled up the heating vent and got into the bedroom that way.

It's exciting, living in a handmade house. There's lots of little doors for the wildlife to come in. Later on, for instance, the chimney swifts will fly down the chimney and thrash around in the house. The kittens will have LOTS of fun then.

This ought to make up for our having stolen their mole before they were finished stalking it.

Quick, on a Monday

There's a lovely short animated movie made from those easily understood international graphics, depicting a traveler at the airport, on the plane, coming home, which is silent and work-safe and sort of cute. You can tell from the landing that the pilot's Navy trained, by the way. (Here's my thought on this: sure the Air Force pilots land long and slow and easy. But hey. Pilots trained to land on REAL short spaces in the middle of the ocean, so they don't DIE? I'm for them. Glad to know the Navy fliers, even if they bump the plane when they come on in.)

And after that you can go see Some Really Awful Scary Knitting. (However. The gauge on this looks to be pretty small -- so at least the set will knit up pretty quickly, if you decide to inflict it on somebody for Mother's Day.) (If you do, I think, really, you'll need to keep it in this exact shade of pink.) (For maximum effect.)

Another Update from Chaucer

I can NOT even begin to tell you how relieved I am to discover, from Geoff's latest post, that he never wrote that gawdawful "Prioress's Tale," but intended instead to write "sum edifynge storie of frendship and cooperacioun bitwene Jewes and Christian folk." That terrible tale is Gower's! This is going to make teaching the Chaucer class so much easier, since we won't have to discuss the extent to which Chaucer was or was not aware of his anti-Semitism. Nope, it's Gower's work -- he slipped in his tale of Hugh of Lincoln, "whiche ys aboute as tolerante and charmynge as a badger on methamphetamynes."

In general, I'm grateful that Chaucer's seen fit to post his first fragmentary notes on the Canterbury Tales -- I'm just so sorry that we've apparently lost so much of what he originally planned: the Knight's Yeoman's Tale of the swyved blancmange; several workers' tales (the haberdasher, the carpenter, the weaver, the dyer, the tapestry-maker) -- all of which concern the workers saving the world from an asteroid; the Dog-Master's Tale, all about John Gower annoying the wool-quay, by pretending to be a ghost.*

And of course, many notes that clear up the stuff we DO have -- apparently Chaucer intended to keep the Tale of Melibee from being excessively boring -- to0 bad he didn't make it -- and there is indeed a section wherein the Host changes the rules, cause the original plan calls for way too many tales -- and then there's the news, happy news for all of us, that there WAS a winner of the game. It was the Miller.

Well. We could have guesssed. But instead we argued. Glad this has been cleared up.
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*I'm especially interested in this new fragment; I've written elsewhere (in my official writing life rather than my blog writing life) about some drunken guys in Cambridgeshire, early 17th century, who went over to the house of one of the local churchwardens, whose wife had just died that day, and pretended to be ghosts. It's bothered me for years that the entry in the church court documents give us not enough details. HOW does one pretend to be a ghost, in the early 17th century? Does it involve sheets? Whoo-hooing? Well, Chaucer tells us here that medieval faux-ghosts looked EXACTLY like the ghosts in Scooby-Doo. Sheets. Whoo-hooing. Thank God. Now I know.

She Didn't Bounce

There's been WAY too much culture around here this week. There was the Patty Griffin concert; the child managed to make it all the way through, though he dozed a bit. That was Thursday. Then, on Friday, we took non-Catholic Manhattan friends to the fish fry at St. Thomas a Becket's, cause it was a sort of anthropological expedition for them, besides dinner. If you count paper plates as dinner. They dutifully tried the haluski, which was smart on their parts. I had my doubts about it when I first moved here and was told about it (cabbage and noodles? really?), but it's excellent. And then today we had Tosca, which, like Madame Butterfly, comes along regularly. (Why can't we have The Pearl Fishers? Why?)

I've seen Tosca about 5 times now, and to my grief, everytime I see it, it works. Granted, it's satisfyingly silly -- I like that part. (That blond chick upon whom the Mary Magdalene painting is based: why does she disappear from conversation after the first act? Hasn't she helped her brother escape? Why isn't she arrested? Or at least harassed by the villain? Also. I understand narrative structure, so on that count, it's clear why Tosca would natter on and on about her encounter with the villain -- he demanded my body! I was upset! I told him no! He said yes, I had to or you'd die! I cried! -- on and on, whilst her True Love is all upset. Really. You love the guy so much, let him know -- I got away! My honor's intact! Here's what happened! Instead of letting him imagine The Payment Scene. And! Notice that Tosca's all -- Be careful when you fall! I know all about stage falls! I'm an actress! -- but she never actually demonstrates. How the hell is the True Love supposed to know how to fall naturally? Good thing there were real bullets, after all. He'd never have been convincing otherwise, I bet.)

Yes, it's silly as all get-out. But what I'm REALLY waiting for, every time I see Tosca, is for the actress to bounce back up after she throws herself off the battlements.

It happened once. Not a legend, I hear. Honest-to-God excellent operatic moment. Or, we're told, several moments, cause when the annoying diva hit the trampoline the stage hands had stuck under her jump-off site, she bounced back up again and again and again...

That was New York, 1960.

And I'm still waiting for it to happen again. Not this time, though. She didn't bounce.

Sam said she did pretty well at throwing herself off the battlements, too. I said she did, but the effect was sort of spoiled by the gigantic train of her dress, which remained on the battlements LONG after Tosca herself bit the dust.

So that was cheering. Still. NO bouncing.

Now I'm looking ahead to more culture; I've heard about some Goddess Weekend over at the airport Sheraton, which has -- and I'm reading this off the flyer -- Massage Therapists, Workshops, a Henna Artist, Yoga, an African Drum Circle, Relaxing Meditation, Belly Dancing, a Relaxing Spa, a Shopping Bazaar, and Goddess Tara Dancing.

I am SO there. I have no idea what Goddess Tara Dancing is, but the Zafira dance troupe will be performing, and I'm fond of them. Also. I have decided I need Relaxing Massage and some Henna Art.

This will ease my sorrow over the lack of bouncing in Tosca.

Then, later, at the end of September, I can go down to North Carolina for a weekend tribal dance culture camp. More workshops. More food. I'm betting there's more henna art, too, though I'm not sure about the Goddess Tara Dancing.

More on all this later.

Aprille with his shoures soote

In celebration of the first of April, Geoff would like you to go around reciting his poetry to all and sundry, even "humorlesse rogues who studien engineerynge." To help with this, he's given you the first few lines of his excellent poem concerning a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Say the lines however you like; who's going to make fun of you?

Not me, I'm over at Bear's Retreat, which is undergoing springtime garden intensification.

Here is the herb garden, for instance (in honor of Mr. Chaucer's poem and his excellent blogge, the hidden captions -- roll your cursor over the photos -- will be in Faux Middle English):

Ok, well, not much actually growing yet, at least not visibly. Sam says that the oregano and thyme and chives have survived the trip over from the other house and the winter; also the medieval roses look like they'll come through. As far as I can tell, all the lavender is dead as doornails, but Sam says no, it's ok. And Sam, Steward of Bear's Retreat, knows his stuff.

So he spent the day gardening, until the sweet showers of April came and pierced the March droughts unto the root, which was sort of exciting, and also very wet.

Sam would like you to know that his coldframes, dragged on over from the old house (with the help of the child, who has now officially entered the Manly State of his humanhood, on account of Helping to Drag Heavy Things Around), are in good shape, and will soon be producing salad:


And also that Bear's Retreat has produced flowers already:


Finally, let's see the kittens. How big are they?


They're pretty much as big as Lila.

(Here's what they looked like when we met them, as a reminder, if you like.)