Yes, spring is still my favorite season of the year, hands down.
I’ve been trying to rework some things in my life so as to be less busy, and while I can tell that I definitely am making gradual progress, this spring the combination of a fairly full schedule and some physical discomforts has limited my ability to enjoy being outside as much as I’d like. That said, spring has still sprung, and here are some events that I’m still excited about.
Some six or eight weeks ago, I began hearing a reprise of the wonderfully melodic bird songs we’ve heard during the past two springs, the source of which I have identified as purple finches. I truly LOVE to hear these guys sing! Well, they’ve been singing away several times a day for weeks now, and I’m pretty sure they and their relatives have built two nests, one above the back office window (which Mr. SS examined and found wanting) and one on top of the left stone porch post.
Meanwhile, for about the same stretch of time, a barred owl has been regularly reminding me that I’m on my own as far as meal prep is concerned. I’ve never been able to see him, but I always smile when I hear him as he asks his “Who cooks for YOU? Who cooks for you all?” questions. I think he hangs out in the trees by the ditch, and for a couple weeks he called pretty consistently around 7:15 PM. Then he expanded to also calling off and on in the morning and afternoon. = ) It’s just such a cheerful sound!
In visual news, on the morning of May 1, the Missouri primroses up at the 65/160 interchange suddenly burst into bloom in all their brilliant yellow glory, and now, three weeks later, they’re still hard at it every morning. I get to experience their striking beauty on my way to and from the gym every morning, and they make me very happy.
The very next morning, one of our white – actually very, very pale pink – peonies opened. It was the one on the right end, closest to the smokehouse. I am a big fan of Lazy Genius Principle #1, “Decide once.” It means figuring out the best way to do a repetitive task and then always doing the thing that way… until it doesn’t work. Deciding once eliminates all the unnecessary brain cycles some of us go through each time we do certain things.
I think God was in a decide once frame of mind when he created perennials. Without any deep analysis or specific effort on their part, perennial flowers simply do the same thing (BLOOM!) over and over and over, year after year after year. When we bought our house nearly 28 years ago, there was a long flower bed of peonies by a little stone wall in what we call the near back (yard). We have never watered or weeded or fertilized or trimmed or in any way tended those peonies, and although the bed is now quite overgrown and even has a couple of young trees sprouted in it, and although a number of the original probably eight bushes have died, the four or so remaining peonies still erupt from the ground every spring as purple sprouts and proceed to crank out huge blossoms for a couple weeks.
Each year I think, “I really should get out there and clean up that bed and maybe even plant a few more peonies in those empty spaces,” but every year I am too (fill in the blank: tired, busy, sore, pre-occupied, LAZY?!?) to go out there and do the work. But even in spite of my complete lack of involvement, those peony blossoms still pop out to please me.
Then there’s April 25th, which also comes around every year. As evidenced above, I do like birds, both seeing them and hearing them. Here in southwest Missouri, the proper time to set out hummingbird feeders is April 25th, and I am very consistent in doing so, given a day one way or the other. This year, I found myself dealing with a number of other issues in life, and while doing some stuff in the playroom on May 6th, I realized I had missed my self-imposed hang-the-hummingbird-feeders deadline. Horrors! And I may have really messed up this time, because it always takes the hummers a few days to find the feeders. If they had already come looking in the past week or so and found nothing, they may have given up on our porch for the rest of this season. Sigh. But I dutifully prepared the nectar, filled the feeders, and hung them up, hoping against hope.
FIVE MINUTES LATER, I walked past the front door and something out on the porch caught my eye. There was a hummer at the front feeder(!!!), and a second one was slurping from the side feeder.
We almost never have a dull day in downtown Walnut Shade, so the fact that today has not been boring surprises no one.
Scott was away today, and I decided that this was the day to plant tomatoes. The weather has been quite warm, and they should have been planted two or three weeks ago, but I was late in realizing that my 18 little seedlings that had sprouted up quickly but only grew to a height of 1″ in six weeks were in serious trouble. The problem turned out to be the seed starting mix they’d been sown in. Either it was deficient in nitrogen and/or phosphorus or it was contaminated, or both.
I had to very delicately transplant them into new soil in new peat pots, shaking off as much of the bad soil as possible. In so doing I saw one really weird thing; they had almost no roots! Anyway, over the past two weeks they have taken off and done GREAT. They’ve had a short hardening off period, and with a few expected dry sunny days before the next round of storms, I decided to take the plunge. This involved a number of steps.
1. Propping the pots better to sit level. This revealed some serious slug, pill bug, and earwig problems; I’ve ordered some product to kill those guys.
2. Grating 8 bars of Irish Spring soap. This hour investment is made more pleasant by listening to a great audiobook.
3. Carrying everything – the plants, the jug of powdered egg shells, the trowel, the soap stockings – outside (with one hand while using a cane).
4. Working eggshells into the soil of all 12 pots.
5. Determining which variety should go into each pot. Nine of the cute baby plants are Bush Early Girls which don’t climb, and three are Oaxacan Jewels which do vine and climb; they need to be closer to the porch rail for support.
6. Planting the plants. In so doing, I found that during just those two weeks in good soil they had grown massive, full sets of roots where they’d each had only a single one-inch root before. Velly intellesting (Matthew 13:3-8).
7. Dragging mulch from the smokehouse to the front yard.
8. Mulching the plants.
9. Watering the plants. They were gasping!
10. Dragging the excess mulch back to the smokehouse. In retrospect, this was not a smart move. I will need LOTS more mulch out front whenever I tackle the flower beds, so I could’ve just left it on the porch.
11. Extricating nine small tomato cages from the smokehouse. No matter how neatly they’ve been stacked, it is simply not possible to extricate the correct number of the appropriate size.
12. Caging the Bush Early Girls.
13. Extricating three large tomato cages from the smokehouse; comment on #11 still being true.
14. Caging the Oaxacan Jewels.
15. Hanging the soap stockings.
Although the whole process was somewhat challenging, took a fair amount of time, and generated a moderate amount of sweat, it was HIGHLY satisfying! The problem developed between Steps #13 and #14. As you can tell, I was up and down and in and out of the smokehouse numerous times. NOTE: Family members can testify to the fact that whenever one exits the smokehouse, it is impossible not to see the back of the house with its associated large blue Raintree Disposal trash can. Both are right in front of one’s face.
Having (with effort) completed the Step #11 extrication, I simply tossed the cages down into the yard, walked down the steps while facing the house and its aforementioned trash can, picked up the cages, carried them out front, and proceeded with Step #12, Caging the Bush Early Girls. That took maybe seven minutes, at which point I returned to the smokehouse for the Step #13 extrication, which took maybe two minutes. So, for the sake of margin, let’s say ten minutes elapsed between when I stood in the smokehouse doorway to descend the steps the first time and when I again stood in the doorway of the smokehouse to descend the steps the second time.
The first time there was nothing of significance to be seen.
The second time – a mere ten minutes later – I saw this.
Now, although my friend Janell may well dispute this, the sight of a black rat snake outside does not normally freak me out. I keep my distance from snakes, but I am not terrified of them. I find them interesting, the important exception being copperheads in the yard and/or cottonmouths in the water. I also know that black rat snakes do us a service, especially since we live in the country and don’t have a cat.
We don’t see them often, but over the past 27 years, we have seen them occasionally – in the yard, along the back of the house, on the porch (where the kids sometimes found shed snakeskins), and once high up in a plum tree. I know they do like to climb. While floating the Buffalo once in my single days, one fell out of a treeinto the canoe I was sitting in! Not fun AT ALL! But basically, we leave black rat snakes alone, and they eventually mosey along and probably enjoy a meal somewhere along the way.
Oh! How could I forget? There was one truly terrifying instance when a maybe 10-year-old kid came back up out of the cellar without the requested gallon of milk because there’d been a black rat snake less than two feet away at eye level on the foundation ledge down there. But that is that person’s story to tell, not mine. I can only imagine how scared I’d have been if I had been the one to meet such a snake at such close range. Again, snakes are okay on the property, but NOT inside any part of the house.
So I stood there at the bottom of the smokehouse steps and watched for a couple minutes. The pace at which the guy climbed was truly impressive, but the higher he went, the more concerned I got. When he was even with the first floor ceiling, I decided I had to do something, but what?!?
Where the heck was he going, and why? Reminds me of the end of Go, Dog! Go! (“To the tree, to the tree! Up the tree, up the tree! What is up there at the top of that tree?”) It took him less than ten minutes to slither and haul himself up to the very top, and then he went horizontally to the left, above the window in front of Scott’s desk, all the way to the corner of the house. Then he turned around and went back the other way, pausing numerous times and going up against the eaves, as if trying to find a way onto the roof!
By that time I was too shook up to take good pictures, so this next one was taken a few hours later, when I went back outside to try to get some shots of the different parts of the house the snake toured. They also are not great pictures, but in this one you can see Scott’s window and the corner of the house where he (the snake) turned around.
I know you can’t tell from that picture, but earlier in the day and with better lighting you could’ve see the seam where the top of the siding meets the underside of the eave, and he was closely investigating that seam, going mainly across the top of the window from left to right, but taking numerous detours up and in between those three beams that stick out to hold up the roof.
Our house is 112 years old, and neither “tight” nor “level” are words that accurately describe any part of it. I feared that there might be a crack in that seam, and if anything could pull itself through a tiny space, it would be a snake. Ugh.
In the above picture, we’re looking at the office window above Scott’s desk. My desk is ten feet away across the room from his. We have a third floor above the office, but because of the pitch of the roof, the walls of the third floor rooms aren’t out flush with the exterior wall of the house. There’s maybe six feet of unfinished attic between the third floor room wall(s) and the outside of the house.
If Mr. SS (Speedy Snake) found a crack at the top of the eave through which to slip into the house, he’d be in that unfinished attic space where no one ever wants to go and where he’d be nigh impossible to find and relocate… or, as hunters say, dispatch. And then I’d have to try to sleep wondering if there was a long black rat snake somewhere above me. Or even closer to me? Unthinkable!
And that’s where I started to lose it.
What to do?!? Well, what does anyone do in a difficult situation that needs a practical solution?
Call J.R.! He can fix anything. So I did, but he told me that he doesn’t do snakes. Hmm… Did he know anyone else at church who might? Yes. I could try Janell. I called Janell and in a shaky voice explained my situation. She does do reptiles and was not freaked out. She was confident she could get him, but she was at work, and it would be well over an hour till she could get there. She talked me through my panic, which was a blessing. I told her I’d just sit there on the smokehouse step and keep an eye on him. I thought if I left and came back and he was gone, I’d really lose it.
Then I called Michael. Michael is a lovely lady who lives in the neighborhood and is not easily intimidated. She was in Hollister at the time, and I asked about her husband, who is also exceedingly handy and never met a challenge he’d ignore. He was in Highlandville, but she’d try to hurry him along and have him come by as soon as he could. I was grateful.
Mr. SS had now gone back toward the right. Here is another after-the-fact picture which he is not in, but try to picture him stretched out horizontally, with his tail at the far left end of in the space between the two windows and his head moving toward the top right corner of the vertical office window on the right. There’s a birds’ nest (my beloved purple finches) there. Later, folks discussed the likelihood that the snake was curious about whether the birds’ nest contained any eggs.
I’d been sitting out there for close to 30 minutes at this point, and I was trying to think who else might be nearby and willing to climb a ladder and knock down a snake. I called Jared and asked him how he felt about snakes. He said they didn’t bother him, so I explained my situation, and he said he was at a nearby car dealership and could swing by on his way home soon.
Meanwhile Zach (graduating high school senior neighbor) had arrived to mow our yard, along with his grandpa, Reggie, who had come in his golf cart to pick up sticks for Zach. Reggie said if I had a long stick, he’d knock it down for me. We “just happened” to have an extension ladder lying on the ground against the back of the house, because we’d recently dealt with a broken second floor window on a different part of the house. But Reggie said he’d broken his foot a while back and no longer did ladders. He and Zach discussed but discarded various options: shooting the snake with a pellet gun (too close to the window), Reggie standing on his golf cart and knocking it down with a long stick (no 20-foot sticks in evidence), or throwing a smaller stick up at it to scare it so it would “jump” (again, too close to the window). They went back to yard work and I went back to sitting and watching Mr. SS and praying.
Steve drove by on his way home. Steve has a big shop/barn kind of building, and maybe he’d have some kind of tool or something that would be long enough. So I called him. He turned around and came back. He set up the ladder and asked if I had a rake. I thought so and walked slowly back to the lawn building to find one. As I came back down the driveway with the rake, Wade, Michael’s husband who’d been in Highlandville, met me and asked where the snake was. I pointed to Steve, who’d found something long and was climbing the ladder, which Reggie was holding.
Steve did not hesitate. He climbed straight up and poked the snake, which writhed impressively and fell 20 feet to the ground. We (Reggie, Zach?, Wade, and I) were all standing there, and Mr. SS looked like he wanted to head toward the driveway, but we were all in his way. He was not pleased. I stepped out of his way.
Wade said, “What are you going to do with him now?” and I had no idea! I stammered something and Wade promptly stepped on the snake about 18″ back from his head, reached down, and with his bare hand grabbed Mr. SS right at what I’d call the base of his neck. Mr. SS jerked back and I think gave Wade a mild bite, but he did not let go. He just held him with Mr. SS’s belly facing out (I’d never seen a black rat snake’s underside before), and I got this proof of the capture.
Wade and the snake, both very much alive!
Either right before or right after I took that picture, Jared arrived. We had quite the little backyard gathering, all these fine men stopping whatever they were doing to help a damsel in distress.
Then, while Steve was bringing down the ladder,
Wade asked me where I wanted the snake. “Far enough away that he doesn’t come back to my house!” I figured he’d throw just him in the woods by the ditch, but no, he put him in his truck and said he’d take him to the creek and release him there. I was grateful!
Here’s the text I sent to all of them once they all left and I was back inside:
“I am SO thankful for all of you who played a part in successfully ending my snake incident today.
J.R.
Janell
Michael & Wade
Reggie & Zach
Steve
Jared
Scott and I are blessed with great friends who do whatever they can to help us, and especially me when he’s not available. We thank God for each of you! 😊”
Thus ends the story of Speedy Snake, but while I was writing this post it occurred to me that my decision to plant our tomatoes on Friday must’ve been a God idea. If I had waited to plant them on Saturday as I’d originally planned, I would have had no reason to go into the smokehouse on Friday afternoon. I wouldn’t have stood in the smokehouse doorway, so I wouldn’t have seen the snake, and there’s no telling where he might be by now! Clearly, God was looking out for me, and Wow! I am so very thankful. = )
the time when it seems to me that I’m not getting anything done, so I make a list of the “extra” things I’ve been doing lately (those non-daily, non-weekly, occasional, or unusual tasks) so as to remind myself that I really am making progress. Here’s my list, in no particular order, from the past couple weeks.
~ Did a library run to turn in about 35 picture books and select a roughly equivalent number of new ones.
~ Looked extensively at home for A Squash and a Squeeze, one of the books I was pretty sure I had taken back to the library, but which the library insisted had not been returned and was now overdue.
~ Did all my usual online work in slow motion due to our internet being down for five ever-lovin’ days. At 9:00 AM on April 25th, it worked fine. An hour later it did not. My hotspot’s internet service was spotty. I was almost but not quite maximally frustrated.
~ Invested quite a number of brain cycles and phone calls – plus eventually a few miles – in trying to obtain an elusive prescription medication.
~ Attended an outstanding workshop, “Perennials in the Garden,” at the Library Center of the Ozarks (LCO, formerly known as Taneyhills Library) and brought home two free plants!
~ Made two pans of Cheese Spaghetti Casserole in an effort to build up some freezer meals.
~ Wrote a number of ministry-related emails. Without functional internet. = {
~ Took Thomas to the car wash (thank you, Andrew!), vacuumed him, and let him take a sudsy shower.
~ Did not find A Squash and a Squeeze at home. (I had known I wouldn’t.)
~ Colored for 30 minutes on the porch.
~ Went out to lunch with friends after church. [NOTE TO SELF: The chicken chimichanga at El Lago is better with fajita chicken no peppers than with the shredded chicken it normally comes with. There may have been an upcharge for that…?]
~ Realized our tomato seedlings weren’t growing and was very sad, but didn’t know what to do about it and didn’t have time to figure out what to do about it.
~ Had a very helpful counseling session.
~ Learned a tiny bit about how vinyl letter signs are made while “helping” transfer sheets of letters to signs for our church’s Drive-Thru Prayer outreach.
~ Did the monthly treatments on our dishwasher, washing machine, and tub drain.
~ Cried in frustration and embarrassment during a physical therapy session in which I was not able to lift my left foot over a three-foot-long, three-inch-high foam “obstacle” lying on the floor in front of me. It looked like an oversized pool noodle that had been sliced in half down the middle and then put in a panini press. This should NOT have been such a difficult challenge!
~ Made a pan of Neiman-Marcus Brownies to take to a luncheon after church. They were well-received. = )
~ Shopped for and purchased replacement porch lights. I have a friend I’m hoping we can hire to install them when he returns from a mission trip.
~ Called the library to get some closure on A Squash and a Squeeze. I hate having outstanding debts, and even though I thought I had returned it, I couldn’t prove it, and I wanted to just pay for it and be done with it so that my card wouldn’t be frozen. I was hoping to talk with Corrinne or Sarah who both know me well, but I got a super-nice young lady I’ve never met and who used a cheerfully emphatic “absoLUTEly!” for every positive response. She double-checked that the book had not been turned in and could not be renewed, so until I came in and paid for it, my card would be frozen. I have six cards, my own being the main one to which all the others are connected. She did not know if freezing my card would freeze all the cards; if so that would be a major problem for our grands. When I asked how much I needed to pay for the book, she said she’d need to check with her boss and would I please hold. Sure. Or, I guess I could have said, “absoLUTEly!” She was gone a L-O-N-G time, more than ten minutes, but when she returned she had good news: A Squash and Squeeze had been found, my card was unfrozen, and all was well! I did not say, “I told you so.” I said, “That’s great! Thank you very much.”
~ Bought new peat pots and name brand potting soil to replant all 18 tomato seedlings that were one inch high and a sickly purple-to-yellow color, with only two tiny seed leaves each, a full five weeks after sprouting. At that point, they should have been six inches high, green, leafy, and bushy. The re-potting was tedious, messy, and sad, but it was our only chance at homegrown tomatoes this year. [UPDATE: A week after being re-potted, here are the happy babies. This is how they should have looked a month ago.]
They may end up being late bloomers, but they’re still alive and (finally!) thriving
~ Made two meals’ worth of Calico Beans to feed the freezer.
~ Reviewed the “Sngs to Missouri 2024” spreadsheet and inquired about the use of a high chair.
~ Spent several hours helping with the Drive-Thru Prayer outreach. It went well, we prayed with a number of folks, it was really encouraging and energizing, and picking up the signs was an adventure!
~ Roasted three sheet pans of veggies to eat throughout the week.
~ Had phone conversations with several family members I hadn’t talked with in a while.
~ Went to the library to browse books for ME to read and picked out several that were not shelved in the children’s section.
~ Learned more than I ever wanted to know about DSL modem cables, including why they can’t be bought locally, AND was reminded that there still are people in this world who are willing to spend their time explaining things in simple ways and helping us when there’s nothing in it for them (I wanna be like that!), AND finally learned the real reason we had no internet for five days.
~ Got an oil change for Thomas.
~ Had an especially meaningful conversation with our pastor.
~ Bought two books for myself that our library doesn’t have. Even if they had been available at the library, I plan to read them in bed, and since I usually cover only a few pages before falling asleep, I’d never be able to finish them in the six total weeks I could keep them checked out.
~ Decluttered my sock drawer.
~ Took Batchelators (for Bill) and visited with LaShell and his mom. His dad passed away two days ago. He was already back at work, but I left instructions that he is to share at least one small piece with his mom. Batchelators are the only thing I’ve ever known Bill to be selfish about. He likes to cut the pan down the middle and say everything on one side is his.
~ Dumped the dehumidifier three times.
~ Attended worship practice, one of my most favorite recreational activities.
~ Actually planted the shade-loving plant I got at the “Perennials in the Garden” workshop. It’s a Begonia grandis, and the note on the pot said, “hardy begonia, pink, shade, 18-20″, emerges late” (which means it blooms late in the season). Today it looked like this,
Begonia grandis
but I’m hoping that someday it will look like this. = )
Begonia grandis, photo credit: iNaturalist
All that was in addition to my usual stretches, exercises, workouts, shopping, banking, cleaning, laundry, physical therapy, and church responsibilities and activities. Ah! Looking back over this list is encouraging. I really have been doing some stuff! = )
Walnuts on My Windshield 