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barbecue weather
Monday, May 26 2008
In the smallish hours of this morning, at around 4am, I heard Eleanor outside barking like a maniac. Her barking gradually receded into the distance as she followed whatever it was that had raised her concern (and hackles). This made me uneasy; perhaps a group of cunning coyotes were luring her out into the forest so they could kill her. So I got up, grabbed a flashlight, and went walking down the Farm Road. Sally joined me. I didn't call for Eleanor; I just walked and shined the light. There was nothing going on, so I turned around and headed home. As I got to the part of the Farm Road where you can look down and see the Stick Trail, I shined the light down and saw two familiar bright blue eyes shining back at me. "Eleanor!" I said. With some difficulty, she scaled the steep escarpment between us and gave me a tail-wagging dance of surprised delight. She was clearly exhausted by whatever it was she'd been doing.
Gretchen returned from the forest this morning with a pained expression on her face. "What?" I asked. She'd come upon a dead fawn on the Stick Trail not far from the house; something had eaten its muzzle off. Later when she passed the fawn again on the way home, Gretchen saw that it no longer had a head. Evidently Sally had eaten that delicious part during one of her extended absences. That's how dogs roll. One critter's tragedy is another's snack, and in this case it was also a third critter's inspiration; Gretchen immediately went to her computer to compose a poem.
I mowed the lawn for a second day in a row, this time using the closer-cutting of our two human-powered spool mowers. Yesterday I'd begun mowing the grass for the third time this season after seeing a robin looking forlorn in the long grass. Robins, like suburbanites and Sally the Dog, prefer their grass short. I have considerable admiration for our lawn's pair(s) of robins, who boldly forage for worms despite the cats. It often seems that the male robins hop around near the cats as a means of demonstrating their fearlessness to their mates.
It was a glorious sunny day, ideal for a Memorial Day barbecue, and that's just what Penny and David hosted at their place this afternoon. Lots of people turned up, though Gretchen was the only vegan in attendance. Despite the existence of veggie burgers and Portobello mushrooms, there's not a whole lot of overlap between the vegan scene and the barbecue scene, and this event had a soul made entirely of meat. This didn't make everyone in our contingent unhappy, of course. Eleanor and Sally are huge fans of the traditional barbecue.
By the time Gretchen and I returned home later this afternoon, she was in a foul mood just from want of alone time. So I gathered up the dogs and drove off to get a few supplies. I went at the ShopRite near the Home Depot to get some unsweetened soy milk and, after parking the car in the one shady spot, I saw the guy whose job there is to retrieve shopping carts from the parking lot. I always see that guy whenever I go to this ShopRite. He's tall, has close-cropped hair, and there's always a crazy expression on his face, one that is mildly-threatening, anxious, melancholy, but also a wee-bit friendly. He said hello to me, so I asked him how his Memorial Day was going. "Alright I guess," he said. "You going to any barbecues?" I asked. "Are you?" he asked, adding something of an self-invitation at the end." "No, sorry man," I said, "I've already been to one." Had I been going to one later, though, I would have endorsed his self-invitation and given him directions.
At the end of my outing, I extended it a bit with a walk in the forest at the bottom of Dug Hill Road. I followed a mountain bike path up the hill, past the ancient stone foundation of a house (N 41.923738, W 74.09441). Since this foundation was on state land, it had to have been abandoned before the 20th Century. The only relics not made of stone were an old rusted box spring (probably of relatively recent, post-abandonment origin) and a massive iron rail that had probably supported the stones over a doorway. Further on, I walked with the dogs up a narrow gorge cut by a stream that was now barely flowing. Here and there it couldn't keep up with the steep grade of the land and broke into series of waterfalls. I'd been up this gorge before, yet I hadn't noticed how gorgeous it was. But others had. Above the gorge to the north were a series of beech trees. In urban and accessible areas, beech trees usually carry the permanent (and slowly inflating) messages of those who happened by with a knife and a yearning for immortality. I never see such carvings on the beech trees in this forest, but above this gorge the beeches bore messages. Among the messages with dates was one from the 1990s and another from the 1940s.
Returning back to the car, I lost track of Sally for a moment, and then I heard her barking in the distance. It being porcupine season, I ran after her to see what critter she was confronting. As I drew close, I could tell that whatever it was was still on the ground; Sally was using her mouth to tear sticks out of a pile of brush. Then I saw it. It was a smallish porcupine, entirely black except for a few white quills pointing backwards over his tail. He looked as though he'd shed the vast majority of his quills, perhaps after multiple altercations with ignorant dogs. I grabbed Sally and yelled "No!" and "Porcupine!" though I knew such advice was a waste of time since she was never going to learn. This gave the porcupine a chance to begin scaling a tree, which he did with a world-weary attitude of "What'd I do?" and "Don't tase me bro!" The fact that Sally actually had held back with this porcupine and not been quilled at all suggested that perhaps she had learned something from her quilling the other day.
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