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hornets in the windfall
Wednesday, September 7 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I got up early this morning and drove the Subaru down to Ray & Nancy's place. Awhile ago Ray had told me about a big limb of silver maple that had broken off and fallen across his yard, and this morning was the first time I really had time to carry through on my promise to come harvest it. It was bigger than expected, and I just barely cut it into human-moveable pieces before the battery on my 80 volt Kobalt battery-powered chainsaw was exhausted. At some point I noticed a fat globular white-faced hornets' nest right there where I'd been cutting. Had that been an active nest, I surely would've been attacked and stung, but it had apparently been mostly abandoned after it had fallen with the branch to the ground (I did see an occasional hornet, so it still represented some risk). But Ray had been less lucky; he'd apparently gotten too close in the aftermath of the limbfall and been stung, never having been aware there was a hornets' nest somewhere in the fallen limb.
Ray tried to help me moved pieces of the tree to my car using a little trailer on the back of his lawnmower. But it was made of thin sheetmetal and wasn't quite up to the task. After moving a single piece, he gave up, and I moved the rest of the tree to my car using a small handtruck. One of the pieces was so big I had to roll it, and Ray cut it into two using a 120 volt electric chainsaw he'd recently bought.
Meanwhile Jack was very interested in what I was doing, watching especially keenly as I filled my car to capacity. Bruce was there as well, though he's still recovering from surgery to remove four or five fatty tumors from his shoulders, face, and neck. As for Nancy, she got me a cup of coffee, which is always welcome, even when carrying a cup interferes with the ability to pull an overloaded handtruck. Ray reminded me that today was their fourteenth anniversary.
It hadn't been evident before Gretchen and I left for Silver Spring, but now it is: we're in a drought. The garden mostly looks terrible, and that's mostly because the plants we're trying to grow look bad, not that there are too many weeds. A blight is now attacking the kale in the cabbage patch, a part of the garden I explicitly started because of kale blight in the main garden patch. At least the tomatoes and the habañero peppers appear to be doing well.
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