Tales from Toad Hill

Walking to School in Grenada

2012-02-14T14:25:00.000-08:00

Everywhere we went in Grenada, we saw children walking to and from school. They were usually in laughing, high spirited groups. Most wore uniforms. Perhaps some walk to bus stops, but it seemed to me that many of them have quite long walks up and down the very hilly terrain along the narrow, winding roads. We saw moms, dads, and big brothers and sisters leading beautifully dressed toddlers to and from pre-school. What a big time commitment! Education is obviously important.

After a day or two, when we realized how friendly people were, we began offering rides to folks. Many people carry the universal tool-of-all-trades, the machete, commonly called a “cutlass.” Our American sensibilities kept us from inviting people wielding potential weapons to ride with us. We also didn’t feel right offering rides to children, but adults seemed happy to get a lift. It was fun chatting. One young man, living in a remote part of the island, told me he is studying mechanical engineering at a community college. Another wants to be a teacher and asked for my address. I hope I hear from him.

Kids in the states don’t walk much any more, but I was reminded of my own walks to Lincoln and Mystic Schools in Winchester, MA, in the 1960’s. We walked 9/10th of a mile four times a day, in good weather coming home for lunch, totaling about 3 1/5 miles. In winter we brought our lunch, but walked despite the snow and ice. It was also hilly terrain. Luckily it was downhill on the way to school or we would have often been tardy. My sister, Cathy, and I sometimes ran all the way, pretending we were horses. The uphill slog home, lugging books, our clarinets, school projects, etc. could be tiresome. Nobody used backpacks then, so our arms got pretty tired. But on the whole, it was often the best part of the day. Bookworm that I was, I even mastered the art of reading as I walked along the sidewalk, stopping when my peripheral vision noted curbs and intersections. Monday mornings, I brought home bouquets salvaged from the bin behind St. Mary’s Church. In the fall there were fists full of bright leaves. How we loved to kick our feet crisply through them. In the spring I picked masses of lily–of-the-valley, lilacs, and apple blossoms by the old quarry behind the Harwood’s house. When I changed to Mystic School in sixth grade, it was magical walking the brick path next to the Freeman’s greenhouse and pond, exactly like Mr. McGregor’s garden.

I imagine the school children in Grenada, picking fruit and flowers, seeing birds and iguanas, perhaps a mongoose scuttling into the underbrush, passing tethered goats, flocks of foraging hens with puffball chicks, stray dogs, and chatting with neighbors as they pass. There are fishing boats out on the water to watch, perhaps an ancient cannon to visit, careening buses and jeeps to stay clear of. The ubiquitous American school bus has robbed kids in the USA of such good things.

Island Dogs of Grenada

2012-02-06T14:29:00.000-08:00

We’ve seen them at other islands in the Caribbean—the ubiquitous island dogs. They’re as colorful and friendly as the people, living their lives alongside humans but mostly in a world apart. There is a different attitude toward dogs in a world where there is no extra money for dog food or veterinary care--where you might think twice before patting a dog. Life is easy for vegetarians in Grenada. Everywhere we saw chickens, goats, donkeys, even cows, feeding happily on the abundant vegetation. But there’s not a lot of food available for carnivores. Many of the dogs we saw were hungry, but otherwise healthy and sassy. They pranced up the middle of the narrow roads as if they owned them. But a few were clearly starving. Many had mange or infections of some sort. It was very hard to see. I kept telling myself, at least I am not seeing starving people.

There is a veterinary college in the town of St. George's. Ten leashed dogs wearing service dog vests boarded the plane for the island of Grenada with us at Kennedy. They curled politely under the seats with no noise or fuss. One did piddle on the floor in the airport, but a three year old child might have done the same. Many of these dogs had been rescued in Grenada and, now healthy and the proud owners of loving and attentive veterinary students, were returning from their first vacation in the United States.

I’m trying to get in touch with someone at the college to learn what is being done for the dogs. We saw few strays in St. George's. At the Grand Etang Park, a prime tourist attraction, I saw three dogs in crates in the back of a pickup who were being taken from the vicinity. I don’t know what was to be done with them. I felt that the hungry strays were being removed from the eyes of tourists. But in the rural areas, we saw many of them.

I began saving leftovers from our meals for the dogs. It was my little canine UNICEF program. When we spied a hungry dog, Fred would slow the jeep, I’d whistle to get its attention, and toss a tidbit.

We saw this one at Windward on Carriacou when looking at a wooden boat under construction. The rope indicates that he belongs to someone and is valued.

These guys trotting up the hill by the Catholic church in Mayreau seemed to epitomize the independent, cheerful personality of most of the island dogs we met. They accompanied us on our walk over the hill to Salt Whistle Bay. Wish I'd been quicker with the camera to catch this image of self-sufficient comraderie.

This one seemed to be near the close of her days, sleeping on the beach at Salt Whistle Bay, Mayreau. Although clearly emaciated, she wasn’t particularly interested in the bread and cheese that I offered her. She did take a small drink from a plastic bag.

This is a very typical island dog look, medium sized, upright ears, short fur, more often than not yellow or light brown. We met him outside a cabin on a hike to the Sulphur Spring near Grenville. I asked the owner his name and was told, “He has no name. I just call him ‘dog.’”

Most of the island dogs were hungry, but otherwise healthy, and quite friendly, though some weren’t. Our newly-met friend, Christina from Germany, was bitten when hiking to a nearby beach. The owner claimed the dog had been vaccinated, but it’s hard to believe that many are. I was a bit anxious snapping this photo as the dog did not seem friendly.

These two fairly healthy characters adorn the steps of a bar outside Grenville.

This is one lucky dog. He is sleek, friendly, wears a collar, and seems to belong to La Sagasse resort. We met him while hiking to a hidden beach described in our guide book. He’d been following a family of British tourists but abandoned them to go back to the secret beach with us. When re returned to La Sagasse, He came along. I think he owns the beach.

This one was a heartbreaker. She was clearly ill and starving. We encountered her while watching some fishermen clean their catch. She seemed invisible to them as she licked the raw guts of the fish from the sand.

If there was one dog that I could have taken home, it would have been this nursing mom. She shyly approached our car at Bathway Beach and wagged her tail when I spoke to her. We had a nice chunk of cheese and some bread to offer. A bigger, male dog, in much better weight, came up and started snatching the bits I tossed to her. I threw small bits to him and then gave her the whole piece of cheese when he was distracted. Can or should her pups live? Should she live? I knew I wasn’t solving anything except a hungry belly for one day.

I’ve started work on a picture book called Island Dog. If I get it published, I intend for it to be on sale at every cruise boat port in the Caribbean. Any proceeds I make will go straight to the dogs—so to speak. Meanwhile, every time I hug my own, well fed, George and Spike, I pretend I am sending a little love to an Island Dog.

Getting Ready for Grenada

2012-01-08T12:37:00.000-08:00

In just a few days, Fred and I are off for an overdue thirtieth wedding anniversary trip to the island of Grenada in the Caribbean. We'll spend a week sailing and a week at a cottage on the north end of the island. We've been reading up and taking extra long walks to get ready for hiking in the mountains there. The island got hit very hard by hurricanes a few years ago, so we are hoping the trails are open now. I'm looking into Project Stuff Your Rucksack to find out about some small items we could bring with us that might be needed by a school. Of course I'll be bringing some books. I'm really hoping to see a mona monkey and a Grenada dove--and lots of other birds. Santa brought me Birds of the West Indies for Christmas! And we plan to do lots of snorkeling! Here's a favorite shot of us resting after a hike at Carter Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We probably won't need the polar fleece for Grenada!

Christmas Bird Count on Toad Hill

2012-01-05T10:31:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t going to do it. Ronnie had asked me to go on a Christmas count with her and I’d declined. I’d neglected my work so badly over the holidays. It’s frightening how much time I spend on Christmas. It’s a sort of love/hate vortex that I just can’t stop myself from being sucked into. The New Year is fresh energy. Days lengthening. Creative juices flowing.

It was only to be a short walk for some exercise. Fred had twisted his back, so it was just little dog, George, and me. January second. Windy flurries and patches of sun. A thin snow cover. I headed out back along the trail that skirts the brow of the hill behind the house.

There was a twitter and flurry of two tiny birds doing acrobatics on the ends of some maple twigs. Not chickadees. I was suddenly alert. But I’d never see them with these fuzzy 58 year old eyes. Ah, but they came closer! Curious. Friendly. The eye stripes and bright yellow Mohawks were unmistakable. Golden Crowned Kinglets!

Okay. This must be a message. No husband to get impatient. My work can wait an hour or so longer. The Murphy’s law of binoculars is that if you don’t bring them along, you will wish you had. I raced back to the house for my brand new ones that Nikon so kindly sent to replace my old pair with the faulty eye rings.

The kinglets had moved on. But maybe I could scare up some grouse. I had read that their numbers are declining, but I think we still have a healthy population on Toad Hill. It would be good to report some. We walked behind the old Scotch pine plantation that the loggers ripped out last fall and fed to the chipper. They were planted for Christmas trees in the fifties, let go, and now are slowly dying off. These bare patches look like war zones right now, but the native trees will come back and create a healthier forest.

George scouted the edge of some brush piles, and pouff! A grouse zoomed out and veered into the woods like a low flying fighter plane. “Get ‘em George!” I called, but she is clearly not a bird dog. Tail waging, she snuffled her muzzle into a tuft of snowy grass. Mice are more her style. I stomped among the brush piles. Pouff! Pouff! Pouff! Out rocketed three more grouse.

We crossed the road onto the old Kane farm. With the Scotch pines gone, it’s easier to imagine a dairy farm and pastures here. Last fall a pair of blue birds hung around for some time. It will be interesting to see how the birds like all this clear cutting. The rough foundation of a tiny school house can be found on the Lyons Road. I can picture ten or so kids from these several hilltop farms gathering here for lessons. Before those families, this was wilderness. Such a short history of Caucasian influx.

I tramp up through the old orchard which Fred is reviving with six new trees and judicious pruning of the gnarled and lonely survivor—a tasty Snow apple. A red tailed hawk lifts out of the spruces. These also were planted, but they are healthier, so we are leaving them. The hawk is so huge that I am transfixed, waiting for the turn and flash of the bight rusty tail. I feel a surge of joy. Winter is far from dead and dull!

I have hardly lowered my glasses when there is a wild and rowdy barking overhead. A flock of Canada geese, perhaps ninety strong, are heading south. Now? Well, there’s been barely any snow, and winter is still very young.

At the edge of Jerry Smith’s field, I step out into the open beside a round bale to take in the view and gaze at the blustery sky. Patches of blue, but the Whitesville valley is socked in with steel gray. I duck back across the hedgerow. Maybe I can spot some turkeys behind Book’s cabin. I am cruising down the trail that borders our south boundary when I look off to my left. What the heck bird is that? It’s huge and long. Bluish gray. For an instant I think great blue heron, but it’s too late for one. The bird cruises closer over the hayfield, wheels, and suddenly the underside is exposed, starkly black and white. Gorgeous. A rough leg? It’s too early for them to have come down from the north isn’t it? I watch until it is out of sight.

No turkeys. Oh well. It’s been pretty satisfying. Back at the house I check with Sibley and decide that the gorgeous bird was a male harrier. The feeder is as busy and competitive as Black Friday at the mall. Everyone is stocking up for a drop in temperature and a bit of weather. I make sure the cats are in. I'm trying to only tlet them out at night these days. George happily sheds her polar fleece coat and heads for the couch. My cheeks are pink and tingling. Now it’s time to hit my desk.

Tree Trimming 2011 (It sounds like a college course.)

2011-12-27T06:26:00.000-08:00

In the 1950’s a former owner of our property planted many acres to Scotch pine and spruces for Christmas trees. When we came to Irish Hill Road in 1980, the blocks of Scotch pines had become impenetrable jungles, perfect hideouts for deer. Gradually, porcupines and disease were killing them off. The spruces fared better, growing into handsome stands where crows and blue jays love to nest. All over the property seedlings from those plantings have sprung up.

Fred and I both come from traditions of wild Christmas trees. My family cut willowy hemlocks at our camp in New Hampshire. The Beckhorns cut bushy little white pines from Grampa Gach’s farm in Alfred. In our youth we both worked at Stutzman’s Christmas tree farm in Hornell and we well know how a nicely pruned Christmas tree should look, but we’ve always been happy with our “Dr. Seuss “ trees, as Fred sometimes calls the more unruly ones. Sometimes we have cut a big tree and lopped off the top. Most years we locate a suitable one growing on our property right alongside Irish Hill Road.

This year we found our tree right across from Fred’s shop. We’d passed it many times with a thought towards the holidays, but the little spruce’s double trunk always nixed it. How could we ever get it into the stand? The young evergreens that spring up in the ditch along the south side of the road shade it and ice remains here long after it has melted other places. They need to come out anyway. Well, let’s just take a look. . . Lo and behold, the double trunk had split from a single stem eight inches from the ground—just enough to fit into the stand. It was perfect. Once set up in the front room, there was no room to actually put a gift under the tree, but no matter.

With the kids grown, decorating is my business. Football is Fred’s. But this year I made a bargain—you put on the lights and I’ll handle the ornaments. It worked. He dutifully tackled the job—but of course I found myself helping to untangle strings, tightening bulbs, and replacing duds. It was fun doing it together. Now I was in the mood. Fred retired to the couch and the game and I, blind and mostly deaf to the NFL or whatever FL was running roaringly around on the screen—set to work.

My husband is an apple tree pruner, a fire wood cutter, a wood butcher, and furniture builder, but he is not a tree decorator. Well, what self respecting woman would trust a man to trim a tree anyway? I ask myself. There’s an art to it. You can’t hang six ornaments on one branch, fragile ones within cat reach, or the best ones at the back—as my man has been known to do—and he may be a wood artist, but you don’t want to set him loose with a box of tinsel.

Now if you’re going to decorate something, a tree is a damn good choice. There are all those branches! Every year I tell myself, you don’t have to put all the ornaments on, but every year, one by one, each with a memory, finds its place. There is the little black ceramic sheep with wool made by pressing clay through a sieve that Fern made at Gammy Lou’s house a quarter of a century ago. It sounds better than it looks. Usually I have hung it low, but this year my newly married older daughter is spending her first Christmas with her husband in Colorado. It is suddenly precious. I place it high in the front. There are all the hand made ornaments: chickadees, Santas, reindeer, rocking horses, a miniature basket full of tiny balls of wool with pins for knitting needles. My sister Cathy has given them to me over the years. She makes them for her church bazaar and always sends me the current year’s model. I could decorate the whole tree with them!

But I can’t leave out the scrollwork star that my high school friend Shiori made, or the stained glass star that Ken made, or the real starfish star. I hang all three stars in the top with the cheap K-Mart angel that Fern and I bought when she was three and still called it the “Ball Store.” I have to set the angel high enough above the top white light so that it doesn’t look as if her feet are burning up. There’s the crudely carved wooden squirrel that I bought from a boy with muscular dystrophy the summer I worked for the Frontier Nursing Association in Kentucky. His mother hated to part with it, but they needed money and I loved it so much that she relented. I feel badly about buying him from her now, so every year I make sure to honor this little squirrel. I hope he carved another. There’s the tiny paper and glitter crèche from Loudonville—at least as old as I am. There’s the porcelain Beatrix Potter mouse, Hunca Munca with her babies, that Aunt Shirley sent me when I was first married. There’s the little wooden sled that I painted with the words "hope" and "joy" when, in 1982, I was miraculously pregnant with our first child. There’s the sea-blue, blown-glass orb that Spring bought as a little girl on a visit to Frankenmuth, Michigan which will go to her tree when she has a home of her own. Each ornament has a story. I revel in Christmas past as I create Christmas present.

A week later, it is Christmas Eve and Spring and her dad have both gone to bed. But I am still unwinding from the night’s festivities. I help Santa stuff Spring’s stocking, tuck a couple of things into Fred’s and mine, and find gift bags for the dog toys. Poor old Spike’s Christmas present is a bag of tasty pill pockets. The Jack Russells will be sure to gratify us by finding their gifts, snuffling their noses into the bags, and digging out their new toys.

Then I pour myself a little Grand Marnier in one of the surviving delicate pink liquor glasses from my parents’ house, recalling the Christmas Eve I was allowed to sip my first crème de menthe—perhaps from this very same glass. I turn out all the other lights and sit a moment to sip, and savor the magic of the tree. Everything is done now: the baking, the cards, the making, the shopping, the wrapping, the decorating. Christmas can come in now.

But wait! The white light at the top of the tree under the angel is out! I shuffle to the cellar, find a new bulb, and unmindful of the glass of champagne I had a t Jeri and Ken’s house earlier and the Grand Marnier just now, climb the kitchen stool and screw in a new one.

It doesn’t work.

Doggedly, I return to the cellar for another. Yes! We have white light at the top of the tree, and an angel and stars!

There is one more sip in my glass. Not a creature is stirring. The little wild, double- stemmed spruce glimmers and glitters. Mum used to wrap all her gifts in shiny paper to enhance the shimmer. This year’s tree is truly beautiful—as always, the best one yet. But are there too many red lights? Should I put in a green one there, mid-way to the left? That’s it Susan! Sternly I send myself to bed and into Christmas future.

Apple Daze

2011-11-28T09:15:00.000-08:00

Bubble Bubble, Toil and Trouble

Aching joints and endless scrubble

Bubble bubble, toil and pleasure

Fill the hold with apple treasure

The apples are in. Yesterday I finished a last task, canning five gallons of cider. Now, aside from taking stock of the rosy fruit crowding our fridge and root cellar, watching for those rotters that might spoil a whole box, and perhaps making another batch of applesauce, we are done. It was a bumper year for our little Toad Hill Orchard after two barren seasons. At last we feel like apple farmers. When the sun shines you make hay and when the orchard bears, you put away fruit—who knows what we will get next year.

When we bought our original thirty acres in 1980, there was a pair of big old apple trees in the little sloping field next to the road, a Baldwin and a Snow. The former is a venerable New England favorite cooking apple, the latter a crisp, luscious “eater” with snow white flesh and cherry red skin. We knew them from our years working in orchards in New Hampshire and the Champlain Valley. I can imagine the first settlers in Whitesville traveling out toe western New York with these two precious and essential apple trees which would eventually fill their cellars—as ours is filled this year.

Our second spring, we planted about thirty trees of many varieties to keep the two elder trees company. Hopefully the original chart is somewhere in Fred’s desk—the untidiness of which is only surpassed by mine. Perhaps one winter day I’ll take on the project of digging it out. Several of the trees are planted too closely and they all need to be pruned to accommodate ladders. Every spring for the fleeting few days that the trees are in bloom, we savor the ethereal scent and beauty, and hold our breaths hoping that frost and rain will hold off enough for the bees to do their work. It’s an organic orchard. We could improve our management, but we have never sprayed. We’ve had some good crops in past years, but nothing like this year.

We two fifty-eight year olds felt like we were in our twenties again, climbing ladders and limbs with one ratty old picking bag and a canvas shopping bag—until evening when aching joints reminded us of our age. Twigs tugged at my hair and leaves slipped down my shirt. Geese winged southward across the sky. Ravens circled overhead. Perfect apples are rare without chemical assistance. I tuck especially lovely ones into my jacket pockets. Sometimes I find one so irresistible that I crunch right into it on the spot. Eve had it right. Apples are definitely meant to be eaten. And there is nothing like picking apples on a bright autumn day. One afternoon Mom and Dad Beckhorn, both eighty-one, helped pick the lower branches, Dad from a lawn chair using his metal grabber. Later the two of them make and can a big batch of sauce in my kitchen. We reserved a sweetly laden little tree for my six Girl Scouts to pick to make into apple crisp for one of their meetings. I’ve made apple pie, kuchen, sauce, cider, and one batch of deep red crab apple jelly. The deer have been busily cleaning up drops and I’ve been giving our three horses armfuls of apples every day.

Fred has become a fanatic hard cider maker, traveling to western Massachusetts to attend workshops, and collecting wild fruit and special varieties to add to his blends. He went to Lains’ Cider Mill in Canisteo to press large batches, three times, some of which we sold fresh. He rebuilt our antique press to do small specialty mixes. (Unfortunately the grinder is horribly inefficient and it’s a bear to turn the handle, especially when grinding hard, small apples. But the exercise is great!) Now the cellar audibly gurgles with many yeasty, fragrant brews, one mixed with black currants, another purely from wild varieties.

There is an amazing difference in apples. One of our favorite findings this year is the pale yellow, thin skinned Calville Blanc D’Hiver (white winter). Our daughter Spring, home for the holiday weekend, made apple tart with it, crumbly with butter and ground almonds. Wow. Everywhere Fred goes, he spots wild trees—potential taste discoveries. I roll my eyes. I’m ready to be done with the harvest. With Spring, we pick up yet more small, hard, wild apples for her to make chutney. “That’s it!” I say, walking back to the car. “I am finished picking apples this year!” We drive up the driveway. It’s satisfying to see the trees bare except for a few stray apples that the deer and grouse will enjoy. High in the branches of the tall old Baldwin tree, the sun catches a tantalizing cluster of bright red fruit, enough for a couple of pies . . .

Wolves in the Neighborhood

2011-11-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

Ah-roooooooooh, ah-roooooooooh! Ooooooooooooo . . .

There is no translating the sound into human language or writing. We share the same vocal range, but only Canis lupus comprehends the message in the undulating vowels, the drawn out, sweeping, or staccato rhythms, the rising and falling tones. The sound is riveting, joyous, sad, mysterious. It is the voice of wildness. Ever since I read Little House on the Prairie, Julie of the Wolves, and The Call of the Wild, I have longed to hear a wolf howl. On occasion I have heard my own tail wagging creature, who shares 98% of her genetic material with wolves, croon her own eerie little song, but it’s not the same.

Yesterday I heard wolves.

One of the things that I like best about cities is that they are fun and exciting to visit, but you can leave them quickly behind. Head north less than an hour from the Big Apple and you will find The Wolf Conservation Center. www.wolfconservationcenter.org. Yes, you are still in the suburbs, but here in 27 acres of hilltop forest, you can meet wolves that are part of a program which is working to bring Mexican red and gray wolves back from the brink of extinction, and which is educating people about the true nature of wolves. They won’t eat your grandma, but they will eat the slow, the weak, and the sick ungulates and help bring ecosystems back into balance.

Here in western New York, I can’t plant so much as a white pine tree without putting a cage around it to protect it from the ravenous, swollen deer herd. I love deer—precious dappled fawns, big eyed does, and heart stopping bucks silhouetted against misty pines—I love deer in healthy numbers, and deer on my dinner plate. Maybe we need a few more wolves back in their rightful place in the world.

It was an unforgettable day. I met “ambassador” wolves who are socialized to humans. The two yearlings Alawa and Zephyr, played in their enclosure, leaping, delighted and begging for treats and attention. The autumn sunlight glistened on their fur. Each wolfed down, in a couple of minutes, a chicken carcass that I might have stuffed for Sunday dinner, tenderizing it first in their powerful jaws. The elder wolf, Atka, visited aimiably, then lay down and posed as if he were expecting Ernest Thompson Seton to set up an easel nearby and paint his portrait. I glimpsed two rare Mexican grays in their wooded enclosure. If you “hack’ a captive born wolf pup into a wild wolf mom’s nest of pups, she will adopt it 100 percent of the time.

I’m sorry my computer wan’t read my photos today, but you can log onto the WCC website. The Wolf Conservation Center needs our help to win a $25,000. grant from the Chase giving Program. You can help if you are on Facebook by going to www.nywolf.org and clicking on the link on the left.

Ah-roooooooooh!

http://www.nywolf.org/

Why I Write

2011-11-06T09:37:00.000-08:00

A rare day of brilliant sun and blue sky! I have bulbs to tuck into the ground for the winter, and a little horse in the pasture who is itching for a good gallop. I've been working on a collection of poems about my four legged friends. I'd like to illustrate them. Just trying to find time and courage. . . Yesterday at the Rochester Children's Book Festival it was exciting to meet readers who loved my books. One little girl had worn out her paperback copy of Wind Rider and was buying a hardcover, plus two for friends. That's why I write--for that one reader who connects. Here's a fun photo of one of my first riding experiences at age three in 1956. My brothers took lessons at Stewart's stable near where we lived in Loudonville, NY. They would let Cathy and me tool around on Trigger, a Shetland of un-numbered years. He was a great babysitter. Cathy was the only one who could make him canter. We have that documented on home movies that my dad made.

Throw-Away Dogs: The Skeletons in Our Gullies

2011-05-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

"Mahoney" learning that not all humans are ugly.

Mary’s voice was strained. “Someone dumped nine puppies up on Mahoney Gully Road. Two were hit in the road. Ray and I managed to catch five, and Heidi caught another, which she is keeping. We think there’s one more hiding in a culvert.”

My heart twisted. Two dead. How long had they been out there? What kind of person . . . I had a flashback of the carcasses two dead dogs I had found in Heseltine Gully when I was hunting up rocks for my garden pool. The ear of one of them had twitched—but the dog had been dead for weeks. It was seething with feasting maggots. The hauntingly beautiful gullies here in western New York, are with decked with cascades of white trillium and other woodland flowers, birdsong, and sadly—trash. People dump old refrigerators, household garbage, and sometimes fluffy, toddling puppies.

“I’ll help you look,” I said.

As we drove slowly up the winding, seasonal road, which reminded me of my summer with the Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky, we were dreading the sight of the dead pups. “We should move them,” I said. But thankfully, someone had done that—or perhaps coyotes had already dragged them off.

We rounded a bend and saw a black puppy scuttle into the ditch. I pulled over and parked on the narrow verge. The bank fell away steeply in a dense growth of hemlock, yellow birch, and maple. The puppy growled in terror as we approached. I crouched in the wet ditch—we’ve had a lot of rain—and opened a can of dog food. The little creature stared at me, still growling valiantly. Carefully I held out a handful of dog food. The pup backed further into the culvert. I dropped a few chunks and withdrew my hand. Instantly, the pup leaned forward and snapped up the food.

By this time, Mary had silently taken a place above the culvert. I dropped some more food a few inches ahead of the little muzzle. The pup wriggled after it. Another bit of food. Another wriggle forward. Slowly, I coaxed the pup toward the opening of the pipe, while Mary eased her hand down. At last, she was able to grab the puppy’s scruff and pin her well enough so that I could also get hold. The little dog braced its feet and resisted for all it was worth, but finally, I was able to drag it out—a little female with white freckled forepaws and soft eyes. She didn’t growl now or make the least offer to bite.

The puppy and I were equally wet and muddy, so Mary drove my car back to her house. Even though the pup smelled as if she’d been raised in a barn, I couldn’t help nuzzling her. She responded by wagging her tail. I knew I couldn’t adopt her—I’m already at my limit of pets—but Oh, I wanted to. Her ears perked when she saw her litter mates on Mary's deck, and she trotted happily to a greeting of licks and wags.

I gazed at the six baby dogs. They were shy—nothing a day or two of love and attention wouldn’t cure. They were beautiful, each with the potential for a decade or more of devotion to the right human. A challenge to place, but do-able. It would have been better to spay and neuter the parents. I’m pretty sure that the “human” who thinks they can’t afford to spay or neuter a dog or cat somehow manages to find the money for beer, cigarettes, lotto tickets, potato chips, and soft drinks.

Mary and Ray took the puppies to Jim Hoover for shots and worming. Then they will go to Joyful Rescue in Cuba, NY for placement. With luck, they will find deserving humans.

"Hidey" back with her litter mates

A Thousand Cranes for Japan

2011-04-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

Whitesville New York, Girl Scout Troop 76 Origami Crane Challenge

When the five scouts in Troop 76 heard about the March 11th earthquake and tsunami in Japan, they were especially concerned as they had recently represented Japan at their International Thinking Day celebration. As part of their study of traditional Japanese culture, they learned to fold paper cranes. The day of the quake in fact, they hosted a tea party where they taught girls from another troop how to fold cranes.

The policy that prohibits Girls Scouts from raising money for other organizations has temporarily been suspended in order that Girl Scouts can support the relief efforts. Our girls learned that Japanese Girl Scouts folded and sent thousands of paper cranes to New York to show their goodwill and sympathy after the 9/11 attacks. In Japan, strings of a thousand paper cranes senbazuru are often given as wedding or baby gifts. The crane, said to live for a thousand years, is symbolic of good luck, hope and world peace.

After discussing the logistics of mailing 1000 paper cranes to Japan, the girls decided that they will fold a thousand cranes, but rather than sending them, will sell the cranes for one dollar each and send a check, along with a picture of themselves, with the cranes they have folded. Others wishing to donate can make checks payable to Girl Scouts of the USA-Fund Development, PO Box 5046, NY, NY (Memo: Girl Scouts of Japan relief efforts). Those wishing to send cranes can send them to: USAGSO-West Pacific, HQ USARJ/9th TSC, Unit 45005, APO, AP 96343-5005. Directions for folding origami paper cranes can be found on YouTubeVideos. Anyone who would like to help Troop 76 meet their goal, either by folding or purchasing cranes, can contact Sue Beckhorn at 607-356-3154, susb@zoominternet.net or Marsha Van Vlack at 607-356-3414.

How Real Life Affects My Writing

2011-04-06T08:52:00.000-07:00

My daughters, Spring and Fern,

sitting under the Weeping Mulberry tree, about 2001.

Recently I was asked to participate in a panel discussion of fantasy writing at the Empire State Book Festival with three other writers, Julie Berry, Janine De Tillio Cammarata, and Vivian Vande Velde. Each of us was to speak for seven minutes on how our real lives affect our writing. Then we took turns answering questions from the floor. To prepare, I wrote the following essay, but in the end, just spoke off the cuff:

When I first saw my middle grade novel, The Kingfisher’s Gift, listed as fantasy, I was astonished. To me, fantasy was sorcerers and vampires, dragons and spells, something, well, fantastic! My story, built out of my memory and life experiences, but set in 1912 and based on an idea I had in seventh grade, seemed pretty real to me. My heroine, Franny Morrow, is shy, awkward, introverted, and imaginative. She is, in many ways, me at eleven years old.

The story is firmly rooted in historical fact. I did lots of research on life in New England in the period. I thumbed through pictures of automobiles to find one that fit my mental picture of Grandmother’s car—it turned out to be a Cadillac Touring Car. The setting is based on memories of my great grandmother, Mina Vestal French, and her estate in Wayland, Massachusetts. I was even able to go back and visit, where I discovered that the weeping mulberry tree that I remembered from half a century ago, is alive and well, and in use by the new owners’ grandchildren—and their fairies.

Oh.

Fairies.

In The Kingfisher’s Gift, there is Meadowsweet, the changeling water sprite who yearns to fly, and her parents, King Tamarack and Queen Iris. They are real to Franny, real to many of my readers, and I, the author, cannot say for certain that fairies do not exist. I am grateful to editors Patty Gauch and Michael Green for helping me to develop and preserve their realness in my story. I never say in the story that the Franny’s fairies are not real. It’s up to the reader to decide. I think that is perhaps the strongest part of The Kingfisher’s Gift.

So I had to ask myself, what is fantasy? I looked at the definition from my old World Book double volume dictionary: “Fantasy: 1. a play of the mind (I love that!); a product of the imagination; fancy. Many stories, such as Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland, are fantasies.” I wondered: what sort of fantasy is The Kingfisher’s Gift? Are any of my other books fantasy? Is all fiction really fantasy since it is “a play of the mind”—or must fantasy have something in it which most of us believe to be untrue?

But what is truth? When I asked my then eight year-old daughter, Spring, where the porcupine got his quills and she answered, “from the thorn apple tree,” I instantly recognized a truth in her words—and asked her permission to use her idea in a story! (In the Morning of the World, Down East Books 2000, How Porcupine came to Have Quills).

But the thing about fantasy is we need to believe it or it doesn’t work. Believability is built from a foundation of detail based on reality. Writers are often asked if their work is autobiographical. What a silly question! If we didn’t have lives, we’d have nothing to write about. We could rehash the writings of others infinitely—and dully. But to speak with a fresh and an individual voice, to create the illusion of reality—that lovely “play of the mind”—we must refer to our lives. Everything that happens to us is material for the crazy quilt of story we piece together. I heard one writer liken her work to dumping an armful of her experiences into a washing machine, hitting agitate and spin, and seeing what comes out.

Memory is a bottomless well that can be dipped into for all of one’s days. When I’m composing fresh material, I stare into space, letting my inner eye and senses take charge. I ask myself, How might that have happened? What if? How might that smell? Taste? Feel? Sound? Then I begin dredging up diamonds of my life. As they say, there’s nothing more amazing and fascinating than real life.

Often things pop into my stories without any conscious intention on my part. One day, long after The Kingfisher’s Gift had gone to press, when visiting my parents, I ran down to the basement for something. I looked up on a high shelf and stopped and stared. There sat a small, rectangular, covered basket—a basket that I thought I had not thought about since I carried my sock puppets in it as a little girl. It was also the very same basket that Franny uses for her fairies to travel in.

Other borrowings from real life come about through serendipitous discoveries—like the vintage advertisement that I found in the Mather Homestead Museum in Wellsville, NY. It shows a little girl with wings, sitting on a bar of floating Fairy Soap, with the slogan: “Is there a little fairy in your home?” Of course, Fanny had to find a bar of Fairy Soap at Grandmother’s house!

To help make Meadowsweet come to life, I gave her a pet, a wooly bear caterpillar which she smuggles with her to Grandmother’s house—just as my daughter Spring once smuggled a gerbil to camp in New Hampshire. What would its name be? What might a little girl name a striped pet? I thought of my other daughter Fern and her kitten—well it had to be Stripesy!

I could go on and on . . . the bearskin rug that I played on as a child, the miniature fishing poles that my brothers rigged and set on toy boats to catch real fish—which towed their boats crazily, the baby squirrel that I raised on a bottle, the golden winged warbler’s nest with a canopy of feathers woven delicately into its rim—exactly like a fairies cradle—that my friend Jill found, the Luna moth that once came to the screen porch late at night—too lovely to describe, every detail of Nin’s house: the mounted birds in bell jars, the portrait of Robert E. Lee . . . All that and more is tucked into The Kingfisher’s Gift.

What about my other books? In a way, writing prehistory is like writing fantasy too. We know just so much from scientific study, and the rest we have to guess, based on what we know of human nature, similar cultures, climate, geography, flora, and fauna, etc. When I wrote Wind Rider, a YA novel in which a young girl tames a wild horse and becomes the first human on earth to ride horseback, I wondered how it might have happened. Where and when was easy. I had only to look at the archaeology: 6000 years ago in what is now Kazakhstan. But how? Well, there was the time the mare I was riding got mired up to her belly. . . She was entirely helpless. I’m not sure she could have gotten out on her own. What if a wild horse got mired, a young one, and what a girl with an affinity for animals, who doesn’t want to see her people eat the horse, finds her? That became the germ for Wind Rider.

How might Moose get flat antlers? I’m pretty intimate with big rocks after building a stone house, and I know the foolishness of the ruffed grouse from the silly birds that strut at the side of Irish Hill Road and sometimes attack the side view mirror of my car. When Fern was tiny, she was afraid of the water heater and called it the Blue Moose, so I told my children many long forgotten stories about two baby moose named Sphagnum and Hemlock. When Moose finally gets his longed for children—not out of eggs I might add—I couldn’t resist naming them.

Shortly after the publication of Moose Eggs, a friend sent me a fake photo of a moose in harness. I come from a family of lumber men. I have harnessed and driven draft horses to gather maple sap. I have a cranky little Morgan mare named Kate who doesn’t tolerate flies on her belly, but who will work all day for you if you understand her. A story evolved called Moose Power.

I may never need to write a memoir or autobiography. It’s all there, woven into my stories in bits and pieces like the golden warbler’s nest. Reality becomes mind play—a fantasy—a reflection of my life.

Winter on Toad Hill

2011-01-25T08:59:00.000-08:00

I am awakened in the dark to a cup of coffee being set gently down on my nightstand. Fred goes to his bath. Old dog Spike asks to go out and in a few minutes, gravity carries him around the house and down to the kitchen door, where he barks. I make a reluctant dash downstairs to let him in, trying to ignore the three cats who try their feline best to waylay me the moment I rise in hopes of being fed. Then, because reading is part of my work as a writer, I go directly back to my counterpane office where young dog George is still snoozing under the covers, and set to work on both coffee and book.

As of December first, our daily walk has become our daily ski tour at the top of the hill. We love the old Keeton Homestead. It must have been a beautiful farm once, a self-sufficient world of its own. The well is so close to the cellar hole that we think it might have been incorporated into the dwelling. Cuckoos and blue winged warblers sing among the thorn apple trees in summer. Now George races through the snow hunting field mice and playing stick. She tried biting a small porcupine in a brush pile the other morning. We were able to get the 20 or so quills out on the spot. The next day she barked at the same porky, but refrained from making her muzzle a pincushion a second time. Spike lags far behind, but he still wants to go, so we wait for him back at the car. Yestderday it was seventeen below when we got up. Just for kicks, at 8:00, when the thermometer had zoomed up to negative five, we decided to ski anyway. I wore my usual two salvation army sweaters, an ancient turquoise chashmere and a thick alpaca, over a tutrle neck and topped by a windbreaker parka. Goggles helped keep my face warm and my eyes from tearing. With a neck muffler and warm gloves, I was toasty, eeven sweating by the time we finished.

These days I have been working on a story about a puppy learning to be a good camp dog, playing with some rhymes about my childhood, submitting to agents, and promoting Moose Power! Fred has worked up some new table designs, shelves, picture frames, and lamps. He goes to shows and I go to book festivals, signings, and presentations. Come five o’clock now, it’s nearly dark. I give Shady, the old pony, her senior feed. She lets herself from the run-in shed into the tacking-up area, eats, and then lets herself back out. The two horses, Katy and Star, have yet to figure out how to nose open the gate with its hydraulic hinge, so I can be sure Shady gets her chow without having to stand guard. Then I walk down to the garden where we keep our two hens and one rooster in their tiny coop. They are already perching quietly, and as I shut them safely in for the night I like to stoke their glossy feathers and thank them for their gifts. We’re getting an egg every other day now—always a precious, warm miracle in my hand as I return to the house. Every few days, Fred and I each breakfast on an egg with a yolk the color of an orange nasturtium. We dine on veggies and venison—bounty from Irish Hill.

Fern is in Pine, Colorado with Scott, and their dogs Sylvie and Addie. The big news is that we will welcome Scott as a son on their wedding day next July! He manages the restaurant at the Golden Hotel. Fern works as a massage therapist, runs many races, and is applying to the CU Boulder MFA program for next fall.

Spring, friend Christopher, and their dog Chloe are in Northampton, MA. Spring works mornings in a school infant care room and loves her babies, but sometimes seven diapers in a row are a bit daunting! Afternoons, she teaches at a YMCA after-school program. Chris is now the brewer of fabulous beers for the People’s Pint in Greenfield.

We are well. We are happy. We wish such blessings to each of you in 2011. Cheers!

Sue/Sus and Fred/Wiz

The Rowboat

2011-01-20T12:57:00.000-08:00

Mum, her dad and brothers (each kid with a turtle) in the rowboat about 1930.

I think it’s no mistake that cathedral arches and the prows of boats take the same shape. Both are structures of beautiful form following function, created to lift us through the stormy waves of life and keep body and soul afloat. I am not sure my father thought our old row boat was beautiful on the days he spent in the hot sun with it inverted on a pair of saw horses, laboring to patch it up for another season. Like Burt Dow’s colorful Tidely Idely, our vessel had a few “tender places” between her planks. She was a classic New England dory of some sort, happily retired to the tame, silky-warm waters of our southern New Hampshire Lake. Our boat was always referred to simply as the rowboat.
My father was an ocean boy, who grew up summering in Duxbury, Massachusetts. He had been in the Navy on a destroyer during World War II and was one of the few sailors on his ship who liked to swim off her side if the water was warm enough. Once he swam clear under the ship from one side to the other. After the Battle of Santa Cruz, he defied rules and jumped overboard to save a drowning seaman—probably not the best idea, as he was the ship’s chief engineer. The captain “balled him out,” then presented him with the ship’s flag, flown during the battle. He never told us the story until he was well up in his eighties, waking at night thinking he was still aboard the Mansfield.
Like Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, Daddy adored messing around with boats. He taught me to splice rope and let me help him make outhauls for our boats. He built us a raft complete with a narrow, canvas-covered, plank for a diving board which was conducive to games of pirates and Billy Goats Gruff. He made a ramp for our dogs to scramble aboard by, and maintained the raft with copious amounts of creosote every season. Still the rowboat was a challenge.
I have no idea how old she was. My mother, born in 1920, had grown up with her and I scarcely believe that my grandfather bought her new. By my era, the fifties, she may well have been half a century old. In any case, I have a vivid picture in my mind of Daddy blistering the paint off the bottom of the boat with some sort of electric paint-stripping tool. I can still smell the fumes, mixed with sun on pine needles, lake water, and sand. Then there were hours of hand scraping, sanding, and carefully packing the seams with oakum. At last, he would give her a new coat of white paint over the thick strata of many summers past, with perhaps a fresh layer of dark green for the inside as well. My brother, environmental journalist, Ted Williams, once wrote in Gray’s Sporting Journal that in her latter years our boat was probably more of a paint rowboat than a wooden one.
She was heavy. It must have been a job to wrestle her onto the sawhorses. Then she was dragged down to the water and launched for another summer. What a vessel for four kids! She had three plank seats that fitted into place, as well as a triangular built-in bow seat which was much fought over. She had floorboards which also fitted neatly into their appointed sections and which kept our bare feet out of the bilge. A few inches of water in the bottom was inevitable, no matter how carefully Daddy caulked her seams. This bilge was ripe with dead worms, soggy sandwich crusts, potato chips, rusty hooks, and the occasional bloated sunfish. After a rain, there was no choice but baling. Atlas himself could not have lifted the rowboat to dump her out once she was filled with water.
But the crowning glory of our boat was a spacious, built-in stern seat which curved along each side and boasted a dark, sloshy, and odoriferous well, perfect for storing bait, turtles, empty cans, or any flotsam and jetsam picked up on the lake. This stern seat easily accommodated an aunt or grandmother’s ample bottom as well as the smaller butts of several children, usually myself, my sister and a cousin or so.
Mummy liked to tell of the time her father (Baba to us) caught a snapping turtle by getting it to bite onto an oar. With thoughts of dinner, he argued the beast into the well and delegated his six year old daughter to sit on the cover. It was a scary ride home for little Mary Lou, seated atop an angry, thrashing turtle. It was fruitless to boot, as she always described the soup, boiled up after the turtle was given the coup de grace with a brush hook, as “vile.”
Our destination was usually “the swamp” which lay directly across the lake from our camp. Drew Brook winds under three small bridges before opening into a lovely little marsh as it flows into the pond. In the fifties when fewer camps had been built in wetland areas and weeds were not a problem, the water level was kept lower. It was low enough for us to enjoy a sandy beach at home and for the rowboat to bump and scrape—passengers crouching, eyes squeezed shut against falling flakes of rust and rotten wood—under the first two bridges.
We loaded the boat with fishing rods, shiner nets and pails, picnic lunch, butterfly nets, and most important for my sister and me—nets for catching turtles. Then we donned the cumbersome, many strapped, life jackets of the era which were about as comfortable as wearing an empty cider keg around one’s chest, and set off across the lake. I spent much of the voyage staring over the transom into the water. From the first dimly waving pondweed as we approached the sandbar, to the murky depths beyond the second bridge—which offered up hornpout, perch and the occasional trout—there was much to fascinate a kid.
We caught snappers and musk turtles, but the sought-after jewels were painted turtles. Maneuvering the rowboat through the weeds was heavy work. Mum had a bad back, but that didn’t stop her. She was as keen a turtler as we were. It was a matter of pride to be able to spot a yellow and black striped head among the myriad broken weed stubs glittering in the sun. There’s one . . . about ten feet away on the right . . . it just went under . . . I think it was a baby . . . wait . . . everyone be quiet . . . scoop under it . . . There! It might be a miss, or the net might be held triumphantly aloft containing a tangle of weeds and a frantically clawing turtle. One extracted, the turtle was passed around for all to admire its bright yellow plastron and gorgeous black carapace edged with red.
We kept our turtles as summer pets in a cage on our beach, to be released the morning we once again donned shoes and returned to school. It was a small comfort, as we faced another year confined to the classroom, to set something free. When my girls and their cousins were small, my sister and I took them up the inlet in kayaks and canoes, portaging over instead of under the bridges. We caught many turtles, but always let them go before paddling home.
The rowboat didn’t last forever, except in my memory. One year, Daddy gave up and purchased a noisy, nearly indestructible, maintenance-free aluminum canoe. On the Fourth of July he piled the rowboat with driftwood and brush, anchored her a hundred feet out from our dock, paddled out in the new canoe, and set her alight. She burned to the water-line on a summer night filled with fireflies, fireworks, and shooting stars. It was as fitting an end for her as a Viking funeral pyre. I remember a sense of honorable celebration more than sadness. The next day, my brothers towed the blackened ribs, which arched eerily up from her bottom, to the swamp--there to dissolve, like so much other organic matter, into the muck of the wet wilderness she had so often prowled.

Camp Dog, George

2010-12-13T13:46:00.000-08:00

Here's a shot of my little dog, George, on the dock in the Adirondacks, learning "the ropes" of being a good camp dog. She's not really tied up with that big rope--it just looks that way! My August-October project was a chapter book called, Camp Dog George.

The Children's Pony

2010-12-10T07:49:00.000-08:00

The Children’s Pony

When I was three, and we were living in Loudonville, New York, our parents bought us a pony. She was a palomino Welsh pony, with a luxurious silver mane and tail. She had a triangular white patch on her near hindquarter. That marking made its way onto Thunder, the primitive horse in my novel, Wind Rider, as a sign that she was somehow genetically different, with a kind streak which allowed her to be tamed. To this day, Przewalsky horses are nearly impossible to train.

Our pony’s name was Primrose when she came to us, and she was quite naughty at first. I remember that my brother David thought up the name Maple Sugar and gradually she came to trust us and grow into her new name. She settled down to following my mother around like a big golden puppy and allowing all sorts of shenanigans like London Bridge under her belly and multiple children on her back. I truly thought I could ride her and embarrassed myself horribly when I told my teacher at Farm School (a magical nursery school) that I didn’t need to be led. You guessed it! The venerable old pony, Mickey Mouse, ran back to the barn with me at a trot! We did have one scare with Maple Sugar when she ran away down Border Road with my sister, Cathy, on her back. Like Mickey Mouse, she was probably thinking about her hay. Daddy was able to flag down a passing car, head her off, and catch her, and Cathy stayed in the saddle.

That summer, and for the next few years that we had her, we brought Maple to our camp on an island in New Hampshire, where my older brother, Ted, then ten or twelve, rode her on the old logging trails. When I later discovered the Billy and Blaze books by C.W. Anderson, I thought of Ted’s adventures riding his pony alone on the island. She learned to roll under the single strand of electric fence wire and visit Mrs. Fenn next door, who would open the kitchen window and hand her a few chocolate Hydrox cookies.

When we moved to Winchester, MA, in 1957, the fall of my fourth birthday, Daddy built a tiny stable for Maple in the back yard under the oak trees. Our grandparents came over to help and it was a big family project. Maple’s stable was a beautiful little building that stood until my parents passed away and the house was sold fifty years later. It had plank siding, a shingled roof, two windows, an overhang which allowed storage of a few bales of hay, and an electric light which worked from a big round, red battery on a little shelf by the door. I recall sitting in her manger on a winter’s day, methodically setting off a roll of caps from my brothers’ cap guns, one by one, by scratching each with a nail. Maple never minded. She just kept on placidly munching her hay and blowing steamy breaths into the cold air. We have a lovely home movie clip of Maple frisking in new snow on Christmas morning in the back yard.

I don’t really know what happened, but as many ponies do, Maple foundered. I remember the vet coming and big white horse pills which were probably the horseman’s common anti-inflammatory known as “bute.” (Butezaldone—hope my spelling is close I can’t seem to find it in Google.) Founder is a painful condition of the laminae of the hooves which causes lameness. Ponies can recover and be ridden again, but I think my mother was frazzled from raising four kids and felt she just couldn’t cope with a pony any more. In any case, Maple was given to Doris Spollett in Hampstead, NH. Doris was a NH representative in the days when few women were in politics. She loved horse and actually had her childhood pony and family carriage horse stuffed in the barn. She was going to breed Maple. We went to visit our pony once, and when all four children cried, Mummy said, never again. I was six.

Every Christmas after that, I asked for a pony. When my own children began begging for one, a fuzzy, round Shetland pony appeared in the goat pen one Christmas morning. His original name was Peanut. It was magical when the girls, then four and seven, chose Chestnut as his new name. Chestnut lived with us for about fifteen years before going to pony heaven. I am still working on a middle grade novel about him. He was always naughty, but we all loved him dearly. Sometimes he would rest his chin on my shoulder. He went to Pony Club Nationals for games twice and when Fern wanted to “be a cave girl for the summer,” was the inspiration behind Wind Rider. Like my golden childhood pony, Maple Sugar, he too was a Children’s Pony.

The Children’s Pony

We have a golden pony
With silver mane and tail
And Daddy built a house for her
With hammer saw and nail

Davy named her Maple Sugar
Teddy fed her hay
He’s big enough to ride alone
They saw a deer one day

Cathy’s toe got stepped on
It bled and made her cry
And Maple nudged her with her nose
As if to ask her why

I like to go and visit
In my snowsuit, boots, and hat
And sit up in her manger
For a cozy winter chat

We play London Bridges
Underneath her tummy
And she thinks chocolate cookies
At the house next door are yummy

We dressed her up as Pegasus
With cardboard wings and ties
And we were mad that day
Because she didn’t win first prize

She follows Mummy like a dog
And I’m not scared at all
With both fists buried in her mane
I know I couldn’t fall

Our cousins and the neighbors
And the dogs all run beside
And each child gets a turn
When we take Maple for a ride

An Ordinary Childhood

2010-12-03T07:57:00.000-08:00

I'm still working on that title, but am simmering up a collection of rhymes about my childhood, 1953 through about 1965. We spent summers on a lake in southern New Hampshire. Maybe that's not so ordinary. We were damned lucky. We still are. My kids only had two weeks there each summer, but they are lake kids in their hearts. Our camp had well water piped to the kitchen sink, but my grandparents' camp had only lake water. My two brothers, Dave and Ted, my sister Cathy, and I were expected to fetch well water every few days for Grammy and Baba in gallon glass jugs.

The easiest way to fill them was from the faucet on the side of the pumphouse behind our camp. This was a little squat building of weathered boards nestled among ancient pines and hemlocks, on a path beside a Colonial-era stone wall. In May, pink ladyslippers sprang out of the pine needles like earthbound fairies. Until August, we battled swarms of mosquitos which thrived in the cool, moist air around the pumphouse.

The jugs were heavy. The good ones had a sort of glass tab which allowed one to use several fingers to carry them. The hard ones had only a ring for the index finger. As the littlest child, I was assigned a half-gallon jug with a tab. I remember being quite fond of my jug. As I grew, I could handle a full gallon like my big sister and finally a gallon in each hand like our bigger brothers. Our grandfather wanted us to develop a little muscle, I think, and didn't like to put the jugs in the cupboard or fridge with pine needls or sand on the bottom, so the challenge was not to set a jug down to rest on the five minute walk.

There was a greater challenge though. When a few gallons had been drawn from the tap, the pump would start up with a loud banging which sounded like: a-huntel! a-huntel! a-huntel! My brothers were masters of terror and invented a little old man who lived in the pumphouse. They told Cathy and me that he resented us taking his water and hammered with his hammer to warn us away. If we took too much, he would burst out the door and come after us. I have a pretty clear image in my mind to this day of a wizened little man running after me with a hammer in his upraised had!

The twist to this horrible possibilty was that the boys were bigger and filled their jugs first. Just about the time their jugs were full, the pump would start up. they would run down the path, laughing, chanting: a-huntel! a-huntel! a-huntel! along with the banging pump. Cathy and I were left quaking, sometimes even crying, yet more fearful of our our grandfather's rath if we didn't fetch our share of water. Even seeing our father go into the pumphouse to work on the pump, peering into that damp, cobwebby, half-underground, concrete chamber and seeing for ourselves that there was nobody at home, didn't entirely erase our fear. Until my grandparents finally had a well drilled at their own camp, my heart always thudded harder when the pump started up and The Little old Man in the Pumphouse started banging away with his hammer.

The Little Old Man in the Pumphouse

There’s a little old man in the pumphouse
My brothers both say that it’s true
But sometimes it’s fun to pretend to be scared
That he’ll jump out and run after you
The little old man in the pumphouse
Has skin that’s all mossy and green
And snaggley teeth and little mad eyes
He’s horrid and hairy and mean

A-huntel! a-huntel! a-huntel!
He hammers with might and with main
A-huntel! a-huntel! a-huntel!
Again and again and again
Who would be stealing my water—my icy-cold bubbling brew?
Children who dare
You’d better beware
Or I’ll hunt with my hammer for you!

There’s a little old man in the pumphouse
He pounds and he pounds with his hammer
We have to fetch water for Grammy and Baba
In spite of the clash and the clamor
Teddy and David are bigger
They make us girls fill our jugs last
And the hammer is pounding as loud as our hearts
As laughing they run away fast

Cathy can carry a big gallon jug
Switching hands without stopping to rest
Our brothers are strong, they can each carry two
But I like my half-gallon best
I can’t set it down because Baba will know
If there’s pine needles stuck to the wet
That drips down the glass on the side of my jug
Like icy-cold hot summer sweat

There’s a damp little room in the pumphouse
One time Daddy opened the door
And pulled on the string that turned on the light
I saw steps and the pump—nothing more
But the little old man in the pumphouse
Still hammers with all of his might
And tho’ I’m quite sure that he’s only pretend
He still makes me shiver with fright

A-huntel! a-huntel! a-huntel!
He hammers with might and with main
A-huntel! a-huntel! a-huntel!
Again and again and again
Who would be stealing my water—my icy-cold bubbling brew?
Children who dare
You’d better beware
Or I’ll hunt with my hammer for you!

Morning pages, Take Two

2010-11-13T04:29:00.000-08:00

11-13-10

Morning Pages as Blog

Well, I didn’t get too far with that. Last entry, May 8th. But the good thing about life is that until we close our eyes for the last time, we can always open them again, and try something once more. Do all writers worry that what they write might be ho-hum drivel? The trouble with morning pages as blog is that they tend to be—and it’s okay—messy, vague, wandering, unedited, or in other words pretty embarrassing if published to the web without spending some time slapping them into shape. But at least it’s a start, and at least it’s writing. It seems like far too many days, I don’t actually write.

There are so many other things to do . . . Sorta like the little boy at Whitesville school who when I was talking to his class about writing, stuck his hand up and asked, “Did you ever think of all the things you could have been doing when you were writing?” So what kept me from it yesterday? Girls Scouts, dear friend Marsha who got me involved . . . and horseback riding, which is not a bad thing to do at all on a glorious, warm sunny day in November when I know there will be months ahead with no riding. Well, at least thanks to Sandy, I have discovered the joy of riding bareback in winter. The insane gallops which Katy and I love so much should be reserved for a saddle and good footing.

I did get an odd and an end done yesterday. Finished Jan de Hartog’s The Little Ark about two children who survive a great flood in Holland in 1953. When I picked it up at Kasey and Kevin Cox’s (From My Shelf Books, Wellsboro, PA) Book Festival used book table a few weeks ago I was thinking he was Meindert DeJong who won the Newbery for The Wheel on the School in 1954 (lovely story about children trying to get storks to roost on the roof of their school). De Hertog’s story is written from the perspective of two children, but the details about the horrific flood with bloated bodies of people and animals are so graphic that I kept wondering if it was at all meant to be a children’s book. I think the only other books I’ve read about Holland are Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates (which I now want to read again after reading about it in the essay on classics at the end of Red Badge of Courage which I recently reread as research for my long-simmering Civil War story) and those lovely artbooks about Trolls that came out about 25 years ago. One of my first serious creative writing attempts must have come soon after reading Mary Mapes Dodge. It was a play that took place in Holland. I was in about fourth grade and I’m pretty sure it was about a flood! Oh look, yummy! I have in my hoard of treasured books a 1932 Garden City Publishing edition of Hans Brinker illustrated by N. C. Wyeth and Peter Hurd. Hmmm, who the heck is Peter Hurd? Any relation to Goonight Moon’s Clement Hurd? (Same generation 1904-1984, western artist, b. Carlsbad, NM territory, student on N.C.)

Quick glance at Jan de Hartog (1914-2002) son of a minister, ran away to sea twice, playwrite, novelist, Dutch national treasure, came to America. He clearly needs more investigation! Anyway, the book was exquisite and despite the tough stuff, very funny.

So yesterday, I read, walked, applied to the Empire State Book Festival, prepped for Scout meeting, rode with Carol, put today’s book signing for Moose Power! at the Canacadea Country Store in Alfred up on Facebook, counted $$ from &#@@!* cookie sales, talked to my girls about courage and strength, taught them how to giftwrap a box of cookies (our sales gimmick for our cookie sale at the Independence Grocery Store Sunday 1-3, do come and buy some cookies!), let them groom and ride little old Shady for horse lovers badge, for dinner made crab cakes to go with our garden carrots and Wiz’s fabulous salad and fried green tomatoes, watched John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, relaxed in the hot tub with Wiz and saw four shooting stars--one stunning--and started a new book, Woof, loaned by Ronnie, dog stories, so far delicious. And all the time, a potential rhyme about “The Little Old Man in the Pumphouse” is running through my head. I tried to write it once. Think I can do better, but the troll on my shoulder keeps saying I’m a lousey poet.

So now, with two quick edits, it's 7:40 and there's lots to do today, so I’m going to post this drivel.

Shameless Self Promotion

2010-10-28T04:08:00.000-07:00

Moose Power!
Muskeg Saves the Day
a sweet Christmas Story

2010 Events: Meet the Author and buy a signed copy for someone you love:

Rochester Children's Book Festival, Monroe Community College, Rochester, NY
Saturday, November 6, 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
www.rochesterchildrensbookfestival.org

Canacadea Country Store, Main Street, Alfred Station, NY
Saturday, November 13, 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Holiday Extravaganza, Main Frame Picture Framing, 112 N. Main Street Hornell, NY
Beckhorn Books and Fire Cat Glass Jewelry
Saturday, December 4th, 1:00 - 4:00 PM

Holiday Booksigning, Independence Grocery Store, 458 Main Street, Whitesville, NY
Sunday, December 5th, Noon - 3:00 PM

Reading and signing Moose Power!, Open Mic Night, Wellsville Creative Arts Center, Main Street, Wellsville, NY, Wednesday, December 8, 7:00 - 9:oo PM

Holiday Booksigning @ Barnes and Noble, Pittsford, NY
Saturday, December 11, 1-3 PM

Santa and Storybooks, Fisher's Pharmacy, 138 N. Main Street, Wellsville, NY 14895
Saturday, December 18th Noon - 2:00 PM

Lift Bridge Bookshop, Brockport, NY
Saturday, December 11, 3:30 - 5:30 PM

As The World Turns

2010-09-18T03:06:00.000-07:00

September: A three o'clock drive down Main Street means stopping for the school bus--Lisa's driving a brand-new one this year! A mom and dog wait for a first grader, the dog wagging, bowing, and barking as she takes the big steps down to the sidewalk. Self-consciously pierced, dyed, and duded-up teens walk hand-in-hand.

Birds are on the move. I glance up from my desk mid-afternoon to see an event happening: thousands of starlings flicker through the woods like tattered black sprites. They keep coming for five minutes, but how long before I noticed them, and why are they moving through the trees like that?

The leaves are changing: no brilliant color yet, but the delicate filigree left by the caterpillar invasion of June is faded green and falling in torn fragments to the ground. Goldenrod glows with a seeming inner light and my favorites, the dark purple asters, are coming on. I think of my birthday coming on as well, October second. Fifty-seven rich and wonderful years. A share of difficulty and heartache, but that is what being human and alive is about, and my share has been blessedly small. The past few days have been rainy and cool, but, there are four more days of summer!

Where have I been? Good adventures, wanderings, and visits with loved ones! No internet service! New memories to store and savor in this old head! In July we went to Virginia where I was a presenter at the VA Highlands Festival. I tried out my new "Writer's Medicine Bag" with treatments for all the ailments, physical and mental that authors suffer, from rejectionitis to writer's block. Plus we got to visit with dear old friends and family. Fun!

Then time and space at my beloved Island Pond in southern New Hampshire. It was a mix of solitude and social whirl with family and friends. I wrote a new story, Camp Dog George, in which a puppy learns the ropes of being a good camp dog from the ghost of the late family dog, Old George. We celebrated daughter Fern's engagement to Scott with songs and laughter. I did a presentation for daughter Spring's Audubon Camp. We raced kayaks and canoes for the WBW Memorial Regatta. (The girls and I placed second in our three-woman-powered canoe!) We recreated Mum's terrible recipes for the MLW Memorial Cook-Off. What a walk down our gastronomically distressed memory lane! We climbed mountains. Fred sold two beautiful tables at the Adirondack Rustic Furniture Fair in Blue Mountain Lake and I signed copies of Moose Eggs and Moose Power at the gift shop. We celebrated Mom and Dad Beckhorn's eightieth birthdays with a wonderful Beckhorn gathering in Owego. One dear old friend, Ranger, was lost to cancer and another sweet one, Linda, was saved from it. Year-old puppy, George, learned to swim after a stick thrown in the lake and leap from the ground straight into our arms.

Home again to lonely cats and an overflowing garden. We've gotten some wood stacked in the cellar, more to do. I've cleaned out the freezer in preparation for filling it again and we've frozen twelve quarts of beans and as many of tomatoes, brocolli, and summer squash. The mornings are dark and chilly. But there will be mist burning off the hills and brilliant Indian summer days, pumkins and cider. Here's an old unpublished song lyric of mine that I made up when the girls were little:

Color Time Rhyme

October is the color time
I like to sing a little rhyme
Come along and walk with me
I'll tell you what we'll see

The leaves are yellow, brown, and red
White geese are flying overhead
I see an orange pumpkin too
The sky is very blue

The squirrel finding nuts is gray
And purple asters line the way
There's nothing blacker than a crow
Green pines stand in a row

Christmas in July

2010-07-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

The red currants are ripe. We planted the bush perhaps twenty years ago on the edge of the steep bank in front of our house. It’s a little too close to the drop off. Now that the bush is big, that side is difficult to pick. You have to fight the slope, encroaching blackberry canes, and the frightful crown vetch which someone told us would be a good thing to plant on the bank, but which we deeply regret. It swallows up anything else we plant, and it has been a struggle to grow the lilacs, flowering quince, althea, and rose bushes we’ve been planting on the problematic bank over the years. We have to keep peeling back the smothering blanket of vetch. (The bank is the result of building a passive solar, partially underground, stone house into the side of a sunny knoll.)

Crown vetch has now crept across the lawn and into my flower garden. It joins the throng of persistent weeds which love the huge raised bed of soft loam, laid over the near bedrock left by the house excavation and contained by a stone wall, as much as the flowers do. Bind weed and (shudder) horseradish both appeared without help. The Bouncing Bet I found as a pretty little slip in the sand of the riding ring. I stupidly bought the wormwood (nurseries should mark potentially invasive plants) and my sister-in-law brought me an un-named, hollow-stemmed bog plant for my garden pool which has spread all over, but thankfully is easy to uproot. But now, like the crown vetch, my thoughts have wandered to the flower garden—a vast subject in itself—which is ripe for a much-needed weeding after last night’s rain.

Currants are on the agenda today. It is a love/hate relationship, I’m afraid. Every July, I watch with a mixed sense of anticipation and dread as zillions of tiny fruits turn to brilliant, ruby jewels. With exactly no nurturing, and with rabbit-like fecundity, this bush has pumped out bumper crops year after year. My gardening encyclopedia tells me that in some states it is illegal to plant currants as they harbor a rust disease which affects white pines. I dearly cherish my thirty or so white pines, all of which I have planted. They are a sweet reminder of my New England childhood. But I cherish this crazily generous red currant bush as well. So it remains and the pines seem to be growing well. My resource also tells me that currants like well rotted manure, potassium, mulching, and some late winter pruning. Do I dare encourage more productivity?

Red currants are so sour that the birds seem to have no interest in them. Without sugar, one might think them poisonous. They are tedious to pick. Processing them is a bit of a chore. But! They make the most beautiful, tart jelly! Oh my! A jar of sparkling, glowing, tasty, red currant jelly, tied up with a green satin bow, in my mind, makes a lovely Christmas gift. I try to stow away two or three batches of half-pints jars every July. It eases my love/hate relationship with The Holiday to know that I have inexpensive, useful, gifts—with my heart sealed into them—put away for that foolish, exhausting, joyful season that I really do love.

And my heart goes into those jars indeed. Red currants are a strange fruit to pick. They grow in gleaming, cascading, grape-like clusters, which I strip off the stems, by rolling them gently between my fingertips. I feel almost as if I were stripping milk from the teats of a cow, as if I were milking the bush, easing her of her heavy burden. I tuck a quart yogurt container into an elastic waistband so that both hands are free, and set to work. But it is frustrating. There are so danged many of them that only a truly obsessive compulsive person could clean a branch entirely. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to stop. I am lost in a seemingly infinite world dripping with glowing red fruit.

I have picked them in the broiling sun with puppies playing in the shadows under the bush. I have picked them with my sister and friends, chatting away as we worked. One summer, I had family visiting to attend their Alfred-Almond High School reunion and had to leave be on the faculty of the Highlights Foundation’s Chautauqua Conference the next day. My in-laws all pitched in. We got the currant harvest into the freezer, I made the jelly later—and they all got jelly for Christmas!

Two days ago, I started by picking a quart. Yesterday evening, my husband helped and we got three more quarts in the grey light of approaching night and rain. I am reminded, with my face deep into the intricacies of the red currant bush, observing at close hand its many insect residents, how little I know of them. What is that spider with the body like a tiny white marshmallow? Or the triangular, hard shelled beetle that so often drops in with the berries. Look! Here’s a tiny snail, four feet off the ground!

So now, it’s time to get out the canning funnel and tongs, the strainer bag, jars and lids, pectin, a fresh bag of sugar. Will I pick all the currants this year? Perhaps I’ll have enough left over currants to put away for Spring’s boyfriend, Chris, to brew a batch of red currant lambic beer. Now that’s an idea. Better stop blogging about currants and start slogging away at them!

Frog Blog

2010-07-13T03:52:00.000-07:00

Deep summer, and the nights, even here on breezy Toad Hill, have been sweaty and twisted-sheet-sleepless. The green frogs in our pond love it. They twang away through the dark. I have finally figured out what they are singing. It is a slowed down version of The Camptown Racetrack played disjointedly: The Camptown . . . racetrack’s . . . five miles . . . long doo . . . dah . . . doo . . . dah . . . the Camp . . . town la . . . dies sing this . . . song . . . oh . . . the doo dah . . . day . . . Just like the Camptown ladies, those darned green frogs are gonna to sing all night! Every now and then, a bullfrog thrums, but most of them are so deeply into their jug-o-rum by this hour that they are nearly comatose.

Heat and humidity, thy name is frog. They seem to be moving around these days, perhaps freed up to travel a bit with the air so moist and no fear of their skin drying out. I found a young green frog in one of the horse sheds the other day and was surprised by a bull frog in the garden at the end of the lettuce row. Perhaps he was going a-courting one of the mice that live under the straw mulch? Last evening, the sparse grass under the maple trees in our back yard was alive with the tiniest possible toadlings, just out from the pond and jerkily faring forth. We had to watch our feet as we stepped.

Charlie the rooster crows twice and I turn to look at the clock. 4:38. "Shut the hell up!" he crows. Why does he say that? He’s the one making the noise? The rest of Toad Hill is pretty silent. I am in some sort of half-sleep now, mind rambling. I hear the light lapping of Goldie stealing a forbidden drink from my water glass and the guilty thump as she jumps down from the bed when I roll over. Usually I keep a coaster over my glass as I really don’t like to share my water with a cat. It doesn’t seem like I am sleeping now, but I must be, because when I try my strategy for falling back to sleep, reciting The Walrus and the Carpenter, I keep forgetting where I am and don’t get past “and then they rested on a rock convieniently low . . .” If I am seriously wakeful at night I go through The Ballad of Sam McGee, The Pines,The Road Song of the Bandar Log, and perhaps, Gunga Din—at which point it is probably better to just switch on my Itty Bitty Book Light and read. Maybe it’s time to learn a new poem? Maybe some Gerard Manley Hopkins? Hopkins? The frogs are getting to me!

Our there, a song sparrow now sings briefly, perhaps the one who likes to perch on a dead branch of the old white lilac to pipe up his bit of music. Charlie is quiet for a half hour before crowing again. At least the chickens are down in the new garden in their “chicken tractor,” a moveable, bottomless cage, where they have been feasting on clover all summer. His crowing is blessedly muted by the distance. An indigo bunting sings wheezy double notes and then at five o’clock precisely, an entire chorus of robins breaks forth. The earth has revolved and now we will have light. A crow caws. Going to my desk now, I open the door to gather in the morning song. An oven bird. Really? So close to the house? Thank you.

A Slow, Abbreviated Walk

2010-05-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

I was recovered enough from a very nasty stomach bug to try my usual walk this morning. We went to my niece, Susy’s, graduation from Connecticut College on Sunday and had a splendid family time. But midway through the lovely luncheon in Mystic, my daughter Spring and her boyfriend were struck simultaneously, necessitating that I drive Spring back to Northampton in her car, while Fred did the honors for Chris in our car. It was long and miserable drive. My time came during the night, and luckily Fred was able to drive me back to Rexville (another long and miserable drive) before he too was felled by the relentless germ. Not fun. At last, I was able to keep down a few crackers and some chicken broth.

But after a long sleep, I awoke to a misty, green morning full of birdsong. A bath and a very easy yoga session on the deck eased the aches. It felt wonderful to be interested in life again. Still, leaning over to tie my sneakers made me dizzy. I sat out in the yard and slowly ate a little yogurt and granola which tasted so good it almost made me shiver. The avian voices around me were like the layered fragments of conversation at a cocktail party. I could hear a tanager in the treetops across the road, the yard residents: yellow warblers, yellow throats, song sparrows, and redwings. Of course the oriole couple flashed about like flying orange slices. The male seems to have composed a new melody since Friday. It sounds like the opening of a Mozart minuet. I wish I was savvy enough to identify it. Maybe I can hum it for my sister Cathy and, with her perfect pitch and memory for things like that, she’ll recognize it.

Entering the woods, strands of tent caterpillar webbing clogged with tatters of wasted new foliage made it impossible to walk without trying to wipe the sticky threads and the creepy crawlies away from face and hair and neck and arms. Ick. I vacillate between crushing every caterpillar I encounter in an effort to do my part, and just picking them off and tossing them. Unlike the cuckoos, who are thriving on this second year of infestation, I do not find them in the least bit appetizing. Did I hear that bears eat them? But nothing seems to be able to keep up with all these busy larvae. They love the sweet maple leaves and many are denuded even as they try to leaf out after the winter. It is a sad sight after months of looking forward to the green woods of summer. Now it’s the chewed and chomped woods. The forest floor is covered with an unnatural litter—not the richly colored litter of mature leaves that have ceased photosynthesizing as the planet travels on its yearly passage—but a layer of tissue-thin crumbs of faded spring green. I stand motionless and can hear the activity. Is it tiny larval jaws chomping, or merely the rustle of leaf debris falling?

Suddenly, a streak of blue. An indigo bunting dives into a rosebush, another unwelcome invasive. An elegant mistake. He/she knows just how to get through the thorny mass at blinding speed, but somehow didn’t notice me. I look for the nest and find it, an untidy platform of twigs when viewed from underneath and as close as I can get without threatening myself or the safety of its contents.

There is plenty of foliage on the poplars to hide the tanager. While I listen and search for a glimpse of scarlet, his raspy notes are intersected by the more melodious notes of a rose breasted grosbeak. He doesn’t seem to mind being seen, but at last I give up on the tanager.

I am slow, but George-Jack-Russell is her usual energetic self. In the hedgerow stone-rubble wall, she suddenly encounters Mr. Skunk. I see the scuffle out of the corner of my eye, the dancing black and white derriere just before the skunk disappears into its den, and then George is rolling and running, scrubbing her face into the grass. She’s too frightened and miserable to go on with the walk, so there’s nothing for it but to go home and mix up some skunk recipe: peroxide, baking soda, and a few drops of dish liquid. Now she’s really a dog . . . except that she hasn’t met Mr. Porcupine yet . . .

A Drizzly Green World

2010-05-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

George, all fifteen pounds of her, is a real dog. Here's a picture of her last June at seven weeks old. Just now, after a wet walk to the mailbox and back through the overgrown thorn apple meadow (indigo bunting, ovenbird, chipping sparrow) instead of following me back into the house, she opted for a session in the yard gnawing on her latest prize: a deer leg dragged home from the old Kane farm orchard. We’ve been going there daily looking for morels, but no luck yet. Well, I look for warblers and Fred looks for mushrooms, while the dogs cover the midrange. They look for deer, which George is too small and Spike to slow to bother much—or the occasional dismembered limb leftover from hunting season. So, just now, she came in, thoroughly soaked, needing a good toweling, and smelling like a wet dog that just chewed a deer bone. Such is a dog’s morning.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately—and tamping in fence posts for our new quarter acre garden and turning over a stony, goldenrod overgrown section of the old one the last few days has given me a lot of time to think—about children asking questions. “What’s that?” and “Why?” and how often we adults say, “I don’t know.” I love knowing, and each year it’s a little more: “That’s a black billed cuckoo calling and skirmishing around the shrubs by the pond with his mate. They’re eating up those hairy caterpillars—tent and gypsy moths. There are a lot of cuckoos this year because it’s a high caterpillar year and was last year. When the eating is good the birds lay more eggs, sometimes in other bird’s nests.” The cuckoos have no doubt been calling around Toad Hill for all of the thirty years that I’ve been here, but this is the first year that I feel like I truly know them. And yet I have not seen their nest, or eggs, or young . . . There is so very much to see. Much we are blind to, much we must search for. The sad thing is that when we keep saying “I don’t know” children stop asking—and become blind to what they once noticed and asked about. Children, I think, in some ways notice much more than adults. Yes, there is much they cannot understand, but: “What’s that?” “An ant.” “Like Aunt April?” “How can it carry such a big crumb?” "I don't know."

We should say, “Let’s find out” more often.

It takes me a long time to learn some bird songs. This year I’ve learned hooded warblers and now that I know the song, suddenly the blackberry woods near the area I think of as “Sherwood Forest” seems full of them singing “Danger danger! I see you!” I like to make up my own transcriptions. The common yellow throat does indeed often sing: “Whitchitty, witchitty witchitty!” like the Birding by Ear CD says, but I also hear: “Wheat eater, wheat eater, wheat eater!” and sometimes “Interview, interview, interview!” I wonder if children, with their ability to absorb language, could learn bird songs more easily that adults. Watch out any grandchildren of my future! Gramma’s going to take you birding!

My great grandmother, Mina Vestal French, after whom I patterned Grandmother in The Kingfisher’s Gift, took my mother and my uncles birding. My mother told me she sometimes found it boring, yet Mum took the time to teach me to recognize the birds page by page in the Little Golden Book of Birds before I went to kindergarten. Later, in college when I was given my first pair of binoculars by Grammy (Nin’s daughter-in-law) I would look at a bird and it would come back to me from that little guide: purple finch! Uncle Bob remembers that Nin would point out a bird and then shoot it with her twenty-two in order to skin, stuff, and mount it! I find that hard to believe (but why would he make it up?) unless it was a large bird--a warbler might end up just as a puff of feathers. But she did indeed have stuffed and mounted birds all over her house in bell jars. I remember them vividly. After she died, Mum took Cathy and me to Wayland to help clean out the house. I opened a trunk in the attic to find a gorgeous, perfectly mounted pheasant lying inside, so lifelike it could almost have jumped up and walked away.

Fox Eyes

2010-05-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

I think there is a children’s picture book by that name, and now I see why. (Ah yes, dear old Margaret Wise Brown, Knopf, 1977, illustrated by my favorite illustrator, Garth Williams and yes, he really captured the intensity!) On my morning ramble a few days ago, approaching the dike of our upper pond, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a fox curled up resting at the base of a young Scotch pine. I say resting, because from the constant motion of his ears, he was clearly not asleep. I say he because I believe this is the male of the pair that I have seen a number of times. I had suspected they might be denning in the old slash pile in the grove of young maples that our daughter Fern long ago named, The Woodland of the Twilight Elves. I’m thinking that his mate might have a litter already and be holed up with them.

In any case, it was overcast with a strong wind from the east, and even though I had just coughed and then called Georgie-year-old-heyena-Jack-Russell pup, the fox was unaware of my presence. I sat down less than fifty feet away and studied him through my binoculars, imagining painting the many shades of red, buff and gray fur ruffled by the moving air, and the many texures of his coat. The black ears swiveled, keeping watch. Presently, Georgie came close without discovering him. Instantly his head came up and he fastened a gaze so intense on her that it took my breath away. Fox eyes! Gleaming jewels. Penetrating, intense, measuring. At last, Georgie discovered fox, and there was a merry chase down through the pasture to the Woodland, but he was safely gone, brush and all. Perhaps the den is entirely elsewhere and this was a ruse to lead her away.
The website www.wonderclub.com says, “Foxes are nocturnal animals whose nighttime vision is especially acute. Behind the light-sensitive cells in a fox's eye lies another layer of cells called the tapetum lucidum, which reflects light back through the eye, increasing the sharpness of its vision and better allowing it to spot prey. The fox's sensitive hearing also enables it to locate prey easily. It can pick up low-frequency sounds, such as a mouse rustling in the grass or earthworms moving on the surface of the soil.” The website also said that their eyes reflect green at night and they have whiskers on their legs as well as their faces! And a careful observer can distinguish individual foxes by coloring, so I will have to try to observe more carefully. I’d like to know my shy, russet colored neighbors a little better.

Moose Power! Muskeg saves the Day

2010-05-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

Hurrah! It's finally here! Moose Power! Muskeg Saves the Day is now available from Downeast Books, Amazon, Borders, and where ever children's books are sold. Who doesn't love a big goofey moose and a grandpa and grandson who don't know what to do about their horse, Katy, who is too old to work and their fast-growing, big antlered orphan from the woods? The beautiful artwork is by Vermont illustrator, Amy Huntington. I think she really captured the heart and soul of my story. Thanks, Amy!

You guessed it, Katy in the story is named for my little Morgan mare who would gladly pull logs and race all in the same day, like her famous ancestor. I really hope people like this one because I just sent my editor Moose Feathers, in which the little boy, Ti'Jean finds a goose egg which hatches and, you guessed it, the gosling imprints on Muskeg! I'd love to see Amy's illustrations for that!

A big thank you goes to my editor, Karin Womer. A while back, after Moose Eggs was published, I sent her one of those photos that goes around the internet of a moose in full harness with the message, "Our next book?" She said, "Sure!" and the rest, as they say, is history. Easiest query I ever sent! Turns out the photo was a hoax, but there are existing real photos of moose and elk in harness, so it's a tall tale with a germ of truth to it. My French Canadien connection, Francine Veilleux, helped me with finding suitable phrases for my character, Jean du Bois. We had a lot of fun, sitting on the dock at my camp in New Hampshire working on the manuscript. So a lot goes into a few words, you see! My computer animation students at Alfred State got to see the story in progress as well.

So now, weighing in at just a few ounces, but strong and healthy and looking for lots of love, is my new baby, Moose Power! I hope lots of kids and librarians find it. Let me know what you think!

Bird Day

2010-05-10T04:24:00.000-07:00

Bird Day
May 9, 2010

Mother’s Day and nearly the whole day spent doing the spring bird count. I started in my own back yard here just over the Steuben County line. It was thirty-two degrees, with a dusting of snow on the shingles of the sunroom, and no sun to be seen. I was afraid no birds were to be seen either, but those migrants are tough! Starting out below the pond, in the wet, old meadow, overgrown with thorn apple trees, I found yellow rump, magnolia, a black and white, and a Nashville busily stoking their tiny furnaces with whatever nearly invisible bits of nourishment they were finding amidst the fearsome three inch needles. They weren’t doing much singing, just industriously eating! On the way to the spring, a robin flew out of a cavity in a red maple and I could see a cluster of brand new, bobbing, gaping beaks in the nest. Up in the horse pasture, the bluebird couple was perched on box and fence wire, mama not brooding yet, I guess. The bobolinks were back in Jerry Smith’s field, swinging on grass stems and singing their phoenix phoenix phoenix song. By the time I came in at 9:15, my fingers were hurting with cold and I needed to warm up.

At ten, Fred and I met up with Ronnie, Lauren, and the two Eds for a Potter County, PA count. Because of the chilly day, we did a lot of drive-by, listen-out-the-window birding and were counting many commoners (a flock of 70+ crows, 158 robins), but feeling a trifle disappointed. Still the back roads of northern PA were enchanting. Then we stopped at an old homestead, its cellar hole surrounded by a carpet of budding lily-of-the-valley, a sentinel white lilac bush nearby, and many of those hardy little white jonquils with the orange centers that the old farmers’ wives planted. The gully across the road was filled with willow thickets and old apple trees—and busy with birds: oriole, rose breasted grosbeak, magnolia warbler, ovenbird, redstart, and posing, peering curiously at us, and singing lustily: a northern parula! It was a first for all but one of us. I thought Fred might be hooked when he said, “It’s much better than the photo.” (in Stokes)

Came home thoroughly chilled despite the fact that I was wearing my cold weather cross country skiing garb. Standing around trying to spot birds is not the same as moving! Fred made up a fire and cooked steak and potatoes and fed me one of his fabulous salads. Unfortunately my cold had really taken hold and I couldn’t taste much of anything. Had good chats with both girls on the telephone. Fern sent me some super organic lotion which I am sure will magically transform my face back into the bloom of youth. Together, the girls and Fred gave me an azalea to plant by the drive way. I wonder if the one they gave me at the lake last Mother’s Day is blooming?

Daily Detours

2010-05-09T03:12:00.000-07:00

Does a day ever go as planned? I did get the day lillies in front of the dining room weeded. They are doing well in that sunny, but dry spot by the stone wall. So good to pull those long roots of quack grass out. It will come back, but I beat it down for a while! Ed was true to his word and came by with his lens cleaning stuff to work on the telescope--brought from Paris by my great great grandfather, James J. Walworth in 1858. The mirror needs to be recoated and sadly there is no literature existing with it to expalin all the different lenses. We couldn't get it to focus, but after Ed left, I kept tinkering with it, found etches lines on the barrel, and by lining them up and messing around, was able to get a nice clear view of the hog farm down on Cryder Creek ["The Cyder" (no R) if you are local]. I'll give Dr. Stull a call in Alfred and see if he can help me some more.

By lunch time the weather had turned very windy, with the sky to the west clay colored. Soldiering on, I went up to the shop and filled buckets with wood sawdust for mulch, but Wiz thought it would be too acid, so we'll use it on the blueberry bushes. I moved on to weeding the day lillies beside the tree lilac by the gully, which is doing quite nicely. It felt good to be able to rip garlic mustard up by the roots. We'll use old hay to mulch there. Didn't finish because the rain was coming horizontally then--my family's official description of "sea hag weather."

I retreated to the house and did what I've been threatening to do "some rainy day" for quite a while. I cleaned our funky little walk-in bedroom closet! I filled a leaf bag with discarded clothing. Found Mum's (and my) wedding gown just fine in it's box, and Dad's old fedora hat (should I give it to Dave?), relieved myself of formal tennis attire (stained) from the days when we used to go to the Hillsboro Club in Florida with Mum and Dad, did keep the brand new and very expensive tennis sneakers, snooped a tiny bit through a box of my husband's memorabilia. He is SO sentimental. Anything, no matter how pathetically poorly constructed, that was ever given to him by one of his children is kept unused as a religious relic: such as a pair of socks embroidered with "I heart you." Well, I have to admit, I couldn't part with the shiny paper medal Fern made me for cleaning up an extra large dog poop one time whne she was about ten. I hung my Pony Club Games hat with DC and coach's pins (and my pin from 1955) in the guest room closet. It was just too sentimental. Dust and mouse turds. And an indescribable feeling of calm and control to have two closets of my life clean and tidy. (I did the linen closet, with some mouse proofing foam around the stone chimney, last week.) What a housekeeper I am!

And I did go to bed, pleasantly sore, to sleep well.

Gardening Day

2010-05-08T07:34:00.000-07:00

May 8, 2010

Okay, morning pages can be my blog or my blog can be morning pages and it can all be a spilling of my thoughts onto the record, hopefully some worthwhile. May eighth, 2010. It sounds like science fiction to me. Sometimes I’m sure I’m still living in the last century. A splendid blustery, sun and fast moving cloud morning after a thunderous and wet night. We needed the rain. The birds are loving it. Tomorrow I do a spring count with friends. The migrants have flooded in over the past few days. Yesterday I saw or heard nine different warblers up at the old Keaton farm, where there had only been a handful two days before. I stalked what sounded like a northern parula for forty-five minutes with no success. Darn. It would have been a life bird. Has anyone noticed that the leaves came out before the birds did this year? The treat was running into a flock of yellow rumps and a good look at a yellow billed cuckoo who was busily eating caterpillars. It was a very welcome sight at it looks to be another bumper caterpillar year, tents and black clusters of writhing worms everywhere in the woods.

I am finished with my year teaching drawing at Alfred State College. I’m feeling wistful about students I may never see again, but reveling in the thought of more time. I am a one track person. I seem to need clear slates to work on. Yes, I’m spoiled. A person can do much in spare, disjointed moments. Having more time is also a bit scary. Now I have no excuse—except for all the gardening, traveling, horseback riding, birding, fishing, kayaking, etc. that I want to do! In the end, we make time for what we want most to accomplish. Argh! I've been watching too much Grey's Anatomy--I'm beginning to sound like Meridith!

This Saturday is a gardening day: weeds to pull from the damp, softened ground, fence posts to set for the new plot, mulch to spread, seeds to put into the earth. Yesterday I watched my tray of morning glory, cosmos, and sunflower seedlings sprouting, new ones popping up each hour. It was miraculous. Age old and brand-new. So good for the soul. Twelve hours from now I will lie down to sleep with aching muscles, dirt under my nails, ears full of birdsong, nostrils full of lilac and new cut grass, and my inner eye brimming with the spectacle of green and growth and flower and rich, open ground.

Moose Feathers

2010-03-06T13:14:00.000-08:00

So it's Saturday afternoon, brilliant blue sky, and I've given myself a few more minutes at the desk before going for a ride in Katy. I love throwing a bridle on in the winter, hopping on her back, and just taking a walk through the woods. Snow is deep and melting fast. We skiied with Mike and Marcia this morning with the three young dogs beside themselves with energy and poor old Spike plodding in our wake. Yesterday, thinking about our puppy, Georgie, as I skiied:

She's got way too much tail for a Russell
And her ears don't stand up as they ought
Her legs are too long
And her teeth are all wrong
But this is the puppy we got . . .

Brilliant poetry! I think like a five year old sometimes, but that's good. Maybe more too come? I do love how ideas flow when we are doing things other than art, like how my swimming/flying idea for my new picture book text, Moose Feathers, came during shavasana (sp?) at yoga class the other night. I've been working my way through chapter one of The Artist's Way. What a great book. Doing my morning pages does seem to center me for the day, but now I'm not getting as much reading done, and the transcribing of my great great-grandfather's journals isn't getting done either. And ever since I went to Kindling Words in January, I've been frustrated with teaching, or the time it takes away from my writing. I truly love my students, even the difficult ones, who are few. It's been very exciting watching their drawing develop this year and thinking that I might have something to do with it. I feel deeply that this odd year of a different path was the right detour for now. I will use what I have learned in unexpected ways. Maybe I will be a little better at drawing myself. Maybe I will try some illustration again.

The Horse Boy and a boy named Horse.

2009-12-03T07:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was my long day of the week, starting with a cup of coffee and a couple of chapters of The Horse Boy (now a film) by Ruphert Isaacson at six o'clock. I was pretty excited to find this book, as coincidentally my new young adult novel, In the Shelter of the Sky (currently unsold and just finished for submission in early November) features a little boy with autism named, Horse, who speaks for the first time when my male protagonist, Catch, brings a riding horse to the Night People, who worship Great Horse as the creator of the world and believe riding is an abomination. Catch and Spring (my female protagonist) travel to a mountian shaman to seek healing for her injured leg and his black thoughts--what we would today call post traumatic stress disorder. My story is set 6000 years ago in central Asia and is fiction. The Horse Boy is a true, contemporary account of a father and mother who bring their autisitic son to shamans and horses in Mongolia to seek healing for him.

My story thread came from lunch last March with my ancient horse guru, Sandra Olsen, of the Carnegie Musem of Natural History, when I was invited to do a presentation and book signing for the opening of The Horse exhibit. Sandi told me a story of a little boy with autism who spoke for the first time when he was intrudced to a policewoman's horse in his school parking lot. Funny that with all my delving into the ancient history of humans and horses, that artifact of modern life should be among of the treasures that I was able to bring to my story. I should add that Sandi is not ancient--only the horses that she studies!

Ever since the first version of Wind Rider appeared as a short story called A Gift from the Spirit in Horsepower Magazine, there has seemed to be some sort of channeling going on. I wrote about people who only had domesticated dogs and horses long before I discovered the Botai culture of ancient Kazakhstan. Then while researching Shelter, I reconnected with Steve Bodio, author of Eagle Dreams and A Rage for Falcons, who was my mentor at the Wildbranch Writers Conference about fifteen years ago. Darned if he's not researching the domestication of the dog in Kazakhstan while I'm researching the domestication of horses! (I think I'm being led to Asia and to writing about hunting with horses, eagles, and dogs next!) And now the mystical connection between autists and animals . . .

So anyway, to make a long blog (and day) short, I taught two three hour classes with my foundation drawing students (who mostly seemed still exhausted and thoroughly blocked about the concept of actually working despite their Thanksgiving break) with grocery shopping in between. Then off to the Wellsville Creative Arts Center for my tile making class with Ashley Gray. I have now carved one-and-one-half tiles in clay, so my new bathroom should be done in about ten years. Home in wind and rain at nine.

Big Turkey Tracks

2009-12-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

Fred (Wiz) and I got back from Thanksgiving in New England yesterday afternoon. The Allegany plateau was the predicted ten degrees colder than the rest of the world and yes, indeed, we did awaken to a dusting of snow this morning. Charlie the rooster and Buttercup, the hen are safely in their new coop inside the garden where they can roam during the daytime. I'll call my friend Bob (www.thunderbirdatlatls.com) tonight and see if he's willing to sell me a couple more hens. I really love hearing Charlie crow through the dim world of my early morning sleep hours. I don't find it annoying, just sort of a peacefull country sound. Also it reminds me of Sally Birmingham, our dear neighbor who passed away a few years ago. She loved to hear a rooster crow.

We had a lovely, mini-Thanksgiving with our daughter, Spring, at our hundred year old, barnswallow's nest of a camp in southern new Hampshire. The overcast weather held the temperature at a pretty comfortable 46-48 degrees. It's a hard building to heat, but we were pretty snug. We feasted on an eleven pound, organically grown, heirloom variety, Burbon Red turkey purchased in Northampton, MA, but sadly grown in California and shipped cross country, which gave that little bird a much bigger footprint than it already had. Ah well. All the veggies were from our garden, butternut squash, leeks, brussells sprouts, and potatos. Yum. It was fun cooking together, and very tempting to pull up chairs for the three dogs to join us at the table.

As we washed up our three plates in the kitchen, I thought, uh oh, now it's the Christmas season!

To Blog or Not to Blog . . .

2009-11-16T17:25:00.000-08:00

Blogspot, Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo . . . What's a person who grew up in the last of the typewriter era to do? I'm not sure if I'm really a blogger. . . and my followers are probably convinced that I certainly ain't. What I'd like to do, since I don't really journal any more, is use it as a sort of open journal. Think in words a bit and if anyone wants to snoop in case I say something amazing, or amazingly stupid, well okay, have at. That way, whether I'm actually writing great fiction or not, at least, I'm keeping the writing muscle excercised.

Writing for me is easier once I've got a story roughed out. I could whittle, paste, and polish almost indefinately. It's the early days that are the hardest when every line seems barely worth putting down, the story is worthless, and my personal troll is huge on my shoulder yelling all this unhelpful derision in a cracked voice, spittle flying all over the keyboard, breath scented with rotten mackerel, into my ear. It's fairly painful.

July sorta got away on me. August as well. I got offered a job teaching a drawing class at Alfred State College and spent much of that month studying up and freaking out. Then the class actually started and I've been trying to stay one jump ahead of my students, feeling like a twenty-one year old newbie teacher when I'm actually three and a half decades older than that. Well isn't it nice to feel young and foolish again!

The truth is that I have met and gotten to know forty-eight eighteeen-year-olds who delight, disarm, and amaze me every time we meet. They walk all over me and then come through with gestures of integrity, thought, and lord have mercy--drawings! I think some of them may have actually learned a bit about how to apply pencil or charcoal to paper. I hope I've helped some get over fears that they are not the next DaVinci, and I hope my DaVincis--and there are several of them--have found it worthwhile. There have been a few days of frustration, but many more days of exhileration, challenge, and fun. Next semester, it's figure drawing, and yes, some of them will be naked (the figures, not the students) and maybe some will be male, and maybe some will be less than perfect physical specimens of the human race.

Meanwhile, somehow in the past year, I actually (let's see, what are some good synonyms for "wrote"? Coughed out? Spewed? Vomited? Bled? Birthed? Ripped out of my Viscera?) . . . Well, where once there was nothing, blank paper, empty disc space, for three long years since Wind Rider, there is now In the Shelter of the Sky, a second generation companion novel. Maybe it is not the season's next best seller. It's not even sold. Not even read by anyone but me yet. The market has gone upside down. But it's part of me, and it's here. And actually--I love it.

On the homefront, the sweet little puppy of six months ago, Georgie, killed or drove off to the foxes her first chicken the other day and mauled Charlie, the rooster. He seems to be recovering and hopefully the chicken master is wiser. Now we know that Georgie may not look all that much like a Jack Russell, but she definately has the soul of one. And we need a new hen.

Hammers and Nails and Puppy Dog's Tails

2009-06-22T10:14:00.001-07:00

This is our new puppy, a little girl Jack Russell, born April 16th. We've had her since June 5th. She is now almost ten weeks old and has Fred and me wound about her little tail. Did I say tail? Yes! She has a beautiful little tail! We took a chance and committed to her when she was only a day old so that we could save her tail. We sure lucked out. Georgie is smart, healthy, and crazily speckled to boot. She may not be showring material, but she's won our hearts. Already she knows come, sit, and speak, and is learning stay. I've been putting a soft pillow at the bottom of the stairs incase she loses her brakes going down. She hops to the second stair and takes a flying leap onto the pillow! She and Cole Porter, our six month old cat wrestle wildly. It gets a bit rough, but they both keep coming back for more. Spike, the ten-year-old Aussie tolerates the puppy amazingly. She hangs by her teeth from his ruff and helps herself to his chow. He just looks worried, with an occaisonal bark of reproof when she oversteps the limit of his endurance.

I want to start a revolution in this country and The American Kennel Club. The old nursery rhyme isn't so funny. Why would anyone want to cut off a puppy's tail? The American Veterinary Association has just come out against tail and ear docking. It's illegal in Europe and Australia. Dog need their tails for communication and balance (and snipping off ears is just plain dangerous and barbaric). The tail is the happy spirit of a dog. So let's see those stupid breed standards vanish!

Wednesday, May 5th, 2009

2009-05-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

(Here's a photo of me riding in Alaska last June! I'll try to get a good shot of Katy-Morgan some time. I can't remember this horse's name but he was a nice character. The ground we rode over was very spongey, but he handled it just fine.)

This time of year just blows me away. Yesterday morning, walking back from digging leeks with my husband to send to his parents in Florida, I saw my first Nashville warbler! I missed the roufous crown spot, so will have to try for another look. It was up by the Lyons Road, a wonderful, steep little seasonal connector between Irish Hill and Shamrock Roads. The girls used to call it the Lions and Tigers Road, and loved to run screaming down the hill after walking up to it. I also saw a Blackburnian in the treetops out behind the old chicken house. I was grateful to find our hunter neighbors had taken down their deerstand that was over the border on one of our trees and from which one could see our house and conceivably fire into our back yard. This morning I scouted down an elusive woodthrush to add to my 2009 list. It was impossible to mimic the ethereal, twining double notes.

The Junior Girl Scouts came up to ride Star and Shady yesterday afternoon. It's pretty hard to talk seven fourth grade girls into surpressing their urge to shriek and leap about wildly! "Horses are prey animals, they spook easily . . ." Ah well. They weren't too bad and I think they all had fun. Star was a good old girl and Shady was great considering she hasn't been ridden in over a year. We didn't take Katy out as she's a bit of a fireball. Here's her rhyme:

Katy’s Made for Galloping

Katy’s made for galloping and Katy loves to run
Katy thinks that walking really isn’t very fun

Her walk is locomotive and her trot’s a little bumpy
She’s got not use for cantering, it only makes her jumpy

Oh, she’ll slow down if you sit right back and really tell her whoa
But Katy’s got two settings; one is stop, and one is go

Katy’s built for bushwhacking, as broad as she is tall
You wouldn’t think that Morgan mare had any speed at all

But out across the meadow track, underneath the sky
I gather up the reins and then I let my Katy fly

You may call my horse a fireball, even call her crazy
But one thing that you couldn’t call my little mare is lazy

May Day Evening

2009-04-30T16:36:00.000-07:00

The sixteen or so hours that I am awake each day seem so short.

Yesterday was: write (reviewing early chapts. of WIP), go to dump and Dr.'s checkup (while listening to Twilight Book Two on tape--very funny, imagine going to a birthday party at a vampire's house getting a paper cut, then slashing your arm open on broken glass, I mean what a situation!) yoga class, Colbert Report, bed.

Today: write (adding patches to early parts of WIP--it's like piecing a crazy quilt), prep for presentation to eleven 1st graders at ICS School, do presentation (fun group-a set of triplets in the class!), sit in on author Joanne Hurwitz's presentation to 4th and 5th graders at Wellsville middle school (boy soes she know how to manage a crowd!), dig up and transplant some of the creeping phlox that doesn't do so well where it is, cook chili and cornbread, eat with Fern and Fred, catch up on computer stuff (like blog).

Oh! Check our my friend, Linda Underhill's new book: The Way of the Woods

I was fortunate enough to hear readings from it in progress at the Pond House Writers Group in Alfred. It's what all my woodsey relations (and there are lots of them!) are getting for Christmas!

Synopsis
In The Way of the Woods, Linda Underhill explores some of our nation’s most important forests, from the magnificent old-growth groves of Cook Forest in Western Pennsylvania to the endangered hemlock forests of the Great Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee, from the giant sequoias of the Sierra Mountains in California to the rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Along the way, she also walks in ordinary woodlands, state parks, private nature preserves, and the woods surrounding her family cabin in western New York. Part memoir, part travelogue, and part meditation, The Way of the Woods examines the ways in which forests and woodlands contribute to the life and health of the planet. Each of the forests Underhill visits has a story to tell, and each of the lyrical narratives she relates about her journeys reveals an insight about forest conservation, including the importance of preserving old growth and wildlife habitat, the significance of urban forests, the role of fire in the regeneration of forests, and the ways that forests and woodlands inspire us with a sense of the sacred. Together, these stories provide the reader with many reasons to be concerned about the fate of our forests. Anyone intrigued by the beauty and mystery of the American landscape will find something to enjoy in The Way of the Woods.
Biography
Linda Underhill is the author of The Unequal Hours: Moments of Being in the Natural World. Her essays have appeared in such journals as Fourth Genre, Under the Sun, ISLE, and the Pennsylvania Review. She is former Chairperson of the Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and is currently a Visiting Professor of English at Gettysburg College. She lives in Wellsville, New York.

Chloe is a Russell

2009-04-21T18:18:00.000-07:00

This is Chloe! She's seven years old and belongs to our daughter, Spring. When Spri was in high school she had a little trouble with the NY State Regents Exam in Math. After two shall we say "not passes" we asked her what it would take, and she said, "A Jack Russell puppy!" Which worked perfectly. Spring just graduated from college and moved into her own apartment, so Chloe just moved out. We couldn't stand the nest being quite that empty, so we are getting a new puppy, a little Russell girl named "George" after our old beagle. Georgie was born last Thursday night. We had to pick her out then because we wanted the whole dog this time and tails get docked by day three. I wish the breed standards would get over amputating doggie parts. It just ain't right or necessary. Fern made up a poem about Spike's missing tail one time:

"Over hill and over dale
Spike's been looking for his tail
It's been missing from his bum
Since the day that he was born . . .

There's more to it than that, but I can't recall it right now.
Here's Chloe's Rhyme:

Chloe is a Russell

Chloe is a Russell and a Russell is a pup
Who has to see what’s happening and needs to know what’s up!

She bosses all the other dogs, attitude is all
And no one dares to tell her that she’s really very small!

She’s as savage as a lion; she’s as growly as a bear
All the toys belong to her; she doesn’t like to share!

She really likes her Squeaky fish, she really likes her ball
You must throw them down the stair well; you must fling them down the hall!

She drops Squeaky in the in the tub because she knows that he should swim
Then she’ll stare at him and tremble till you finally rescue him!

She’s busy in the orchard, and she’s busy in the yard
And she’s busy in the woodlot; little dogs work very hard!

She rushes after rabbits and she scurries after squirrels
And she chases all the chipmunks; she’s a very busy girl!

She terrorizes chickens and she exercises deer
And she just despises garter snakes, a Russell knows no fear!

She can’t be caught for cuddling, she’s got no time for mush
There’s a woodchuck in the pasture and a Russell’s in a rush!

And when the day is over, and she’s finished with her fun
And her Russell heart is happy, and her doggie work is done

A tired little Chloe hops up on the bed
And crawls beneath the covers, and let’s me stroke her head.

Four Footed Rhymes

2009-04-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

Do you love you critters as much as I love mine? Here's our dog, Spike, in the center, surrounded clockwise from left to right, by daughters, Fern, Spring, husband, Fred (Wiz), and Jack Russell, Chloe. Lately, to rest my mind from the novel-in-progress, I've been playing with rhymes for my pets. I'm working on a collection of them. I adopted Spike, a handsome black and white Aussie with a Hollywood face, when he was less than a year old, after his owner's house burned down. He was tied outside in the early morning and saved three lives by barking. He's ten years old now and slowing down a bit, but he still has a thing or two to say about the salad spinner, young men jumping off docks, children fighting, my neice, Mindy, River Dancing . . . He loves excitement!

Speaking of salad, lucky me, my husband grows fresh greens all year round in his cold frame and we have salad almost every day. I can't remember when I last bought lettuce. Better yet, he likes to make the salad and his own special, incredibly delicious dressing, which he calls "Black Beauty" because the balsamic vinegar and powdered kelp he uses in it makes it quite dark. (If you'd like the recipe, I might be able to talk him into giving it out. We've talked about marketing it but I'm fairly sure he'll never get around to it.)

Lately we've been eating salads made of raw, tender young dandelion greens. which are absolutely delicious. He also digs and boils the whole plants--a good spring tonic and yummy with a tad of butter and vinegar. The best salad is arugula with toasted pine nuts and grated aged parmesan cheese. Indescribable! The only trouble is I am spoiled for salads at restaurants. I have yet to order one that beats those made by Wiz. And every one starts with a rousing one-dog-alarm when the salad spinner goes into action! Things would be pretty quiet here on Toad Hill without Spike.

I have to explain that the refrain for the following was stolen from something our friend Jim Lucey once told me that his daughter Alison used to say as a tiny girl: "Nevah evah evah evah evah evah evah!" It has a lovely cadence to it and I constantly find myself telling Spike that there was nevah evah evah a better dog then him. Oh, and I forgot to say that he is Spike-number-two, named after the Border Collie I grew up with.

Spikey

When the flames were licking red and the people were in bed
He sounded the alarm and nobody came to harm!

If the little girls are fighting and there’s scratching and there’s biting
Spikey nips it in the bud before someone spills some blood!

Did you evah know a dog quite as noble and as clevah?
Why, nevah evah evah evah evah evah evah!

When Mindy came in prancing, doing kicks from Riverdancing
Spiky, bolting from his nap, stopped that rumpus in a snap!

It was Chris’s sad mistake, when he leapt into the lake
That he didn’t watch his back and Spikey launched a rear attack!

Did you evah know a dog quite as canny and as clevah?
Why, nevah evah evah evah evah evah evah!

When the dreaded salad spinner whirls and wobbles before dinner
There’s a loyal Aussie waiting to arrest that wild rotating!

And if you have a notion to create a wild commotion
He’s a self-appointed cop who will bark until you stop!

Did you evah know a dog quite as handsome and as clevah?
Why, nevah evah evah evah evah evah evah!

The Case of the Triplicate Sus/zanne Williamses!

2009-03-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

Prepare to be confused! It turns out there are three childrens' writers out there with very similar names:
Suzanne Williams (http:/www.suzanne-williams.com)
Suzanne Morgan Williams (http:/www.suzannemorganwilliams.com)
and me (http:/ww.susanwilliamsbeckhorn.com or http:/www.susanwilliamsbooks.com)

Have fun sorting us out! We are all fabulous writers (of course!) and very different personalities. Unfortunately we live in far flung parts of the country, but I have a feeling that the fates will bring us together some day! You can tell us apart by calling us Suzanne, Suzy, and Susan respectively! Does that help?

I hated my name when I was a kid because I couldn't say it! I had a wicked lisp. It was embarassing to introduce myself as Thuthy Williamth. I wish I knew how to find my speech therapist to thank her!

I've been finding that if I roll out of bed in the morning and stagger to my desk (where my angel of a husband brings me a cup of coffee) I can get an hour or so in on my WIP (work in progress)before breakfast. I am not so tempted to check email and I think my brain is still partly in a creative, dream-state mode. Then whatever happens the rest of the day, at least I have that much to feel good about.

Spring Fever!

2009-03-16T12:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of Shadow Dancer, "Shady" being a naughty girl one morning a few weeks ago. She had snuck out under my very poorly maintained electric fence. (It's not even plugged in at the moment!) She is snacking on sunflower seed from my stone birdfeeder made by artisit and friend, Toni Moon. The kitten, Cole Porter, is watching her, maybe thinking a big, black condor has landed!

Now all the snow is gone, except for a few patches in the woods. I took Katy out for a long ride on Saturday. Even though I made her walk most of the way, with only a couple of short gallops, she jigged with excitemnet and came back soaked. Spring Fever! I had to spend a long time rubbing her dry in the sun. Didn't dare hose her in case it got cold again.

Yesterday, we worked clearing brush and dead trees in the yard, and making a fire so that we can grow morel mushrooms on the sterilized spot. Don't ask me how to grow them, I'm leaving that up to Fred. I have enough to do trying to grow novels! I also raked up a bunch of old leaves from the barbeque area for safety and for garden mulch. Went to bed with a backache, but it felt great to be able to work outside again.

Friday Afternoon

2009-03-06T13:39:00.000-08:00

And it's been a busy week: Last Saturday I did a talk about writing and researching Wind Rider, followed by a booksigning as part of the opening of The Horse exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. I got to meet one of my idols, researcher and curator Sandra Olsen, who was kind enough to introduce me and bring some way cool artifacts: replicas of a Botai culture pot and woman's woven hemp dress, a pair of Kazak boots, a riding whip made from a saiga antelope foot, and a horse hair rope. We sold lots of books and the exhibit, on loan from NYC was fabulous.

Missy Spring, my younger daughter (23 and just graduated from college), moved out to begin life as an adult on Tuesday. A little tearful watching the purple Honda go down the driveway, but so proud of the young woman she has become.

Wednesday, I did a talk for a teen writer's group at the Naples Library--just wish we'd had more time! What a beautiful library, nice group of talented kids, and great teacher they have in writer, Angela Cannon-Crothers.

Yesterday, met with my critique group in the morning and went to RACWI (Rochester Area Children's Writers and Illustrators) in the p.m. Much sinful burning of petroleum en route, but I listened to Three Cups of Tea and saw seven swans in a cornfield north of Dansville. They had black legs and beaks and the juveniles were quite gray. I'm thinking either tundra of trumpeter swans, either of which is pretty exciting, especially for this amature.

Today revised a couple of chapters, read brand new articles in NY Times and Science on Sandra's research on early horse domestication. The dogs have been driven wild by a woodchuck in the yard. Lot's of barking. Spring Fever!

This evening is a celebration of twenty years since the nuke-dump fight here in the souther tier. I'll bring my guitar, maybe sing my new "The Earth Child's Song."

Bird Count, Sweaty Horse, and Agents

2009-02-15T16:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a challenge: try counting gold finches and pine siskins at your feeder for Cornell's backyard bird count! They move in and away in waves at my feeder, tiny, mouse-sized birds: the goldfinches buffy golden and the siskins stripey golden--fluttering in, then pouf! the whole flock spooks. I think I had 25-30 siskins and 20-25 goldfinches today, and I know I had one redpoll, his red poll gleaming like a ruby in the late winter sunlight. Sometimes I look out and they are swarming on the ground like feathered maggots! Not a nice image I know, but what busy little creatures! A number of other visitors were ransacking suet and sunflower seed, jays, nuthatches, juncos, woodpeckers, etc.
When Fred and I skied this morning, we only saw a couple of chickadees in the woods. I wonder how big an area of woodlnd is represented at my feeder? After lunch I talked a willful and rebellious Katy into allowing herself to be captured for a ride, but but first she grabbed a mouthful of horse treats, turned tail and made me tromp up to the upper pasture after her. I think she has spring fever. We headed accross the road because Fred had seen the coyote hunters go up the hill. All winter Katy has been content to walk fairly sedately through the snow, but today she wanted to gallop! And I let her! This winter I've been riding bareback, surprised at how safe I feel, even at 55 and not exactly Olymic fitness level. It's warmer too, and a treat to grab a helmet, bridle, snag Katy or Star and go. Of course I have to take my noble steed to the picnic table for this shorty to get on without stirrups to help. I learned that when your horse stops, and she is not lifting her tail, she has a reason. Sure enough, there a the edge of the woodlot behind Jerry Smith's tunble down barn, were two deer. Then I spotted a pair of redtail hawks, but try to convince ole Fireball to stand still long enough for me to get my mini-binoculars on them. Ha! She did finally consent to go into her lovely, smooth jog. It's only taken her sixteen years to learn it. It was a treat to watch her roll in the snow afterwards.
I managed to write a synopsis (I hate and despise writint them) of my middle grade novel, Chestnut, compose a letter to go with it, and YIKES attach the manuscript. So there it will be on Michael's desk tomorrow morning. For better or worse. Well, I know it's been worse. Hopefully it is better now. So I guess it's also ready to send to Jill as well. Here goes.

Monday Morning

2009-02-09T09:23:00.001-08:00

Trying to jot a few thoughts before lunch. Each day sorta goes in a whirl. I just screwed up my courage and called an agent that I sent my shipwreck story to back in December to let him know I would be submitting (how I hate that word) simultaneously to some other agents. Just a courtesy call, I didn't even need to talk with him, just leave the message. I hate that at 55 I am still fearful of calling people that I don't know. I used to get my older sister to call my best friend, Martha, because I was afraid somebody else in her family might answer. And why didn't I tell that lady in the grocery store exactly what I thought when she stated that the heap of white flour, sugar, and trans-fat she was buying was for her grandkids, then asked for three packs of cigarettes and gave the "cool" advertising gimmick card on the back to the young cashier?

What else did I accomplish this a.m.? Oh yeah, an email to my researcher in Pittsburgh who has invited me to have lunch when I go there to hear her talk and see The Horse exhibit at the Carnegie Museum at the end of the month. Yoga and a walk in the woods. And maybe a tiny breakthrough in a plot idea, although nothing on paper.

Library Sale to set up this afternoon. Well, it's a good cause, especially in this part of the state with its appalling illiteracy rate.

Oh, and I finished Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why this morning. It's an important and compelling read. I'll donate it to Whitesville Central School in memory of my cousin Peter. I don't believe we've had any suicides here (ever?) but that doesn't mean we should not be watching our kids (and friends and selves) and ready to act and reach out when people need emotional help.

Monday Morning

2009-02-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

Writing exercises and soap

2009-02-06T09:01:00.003-08:00

I woke up a bit groggy this morning after getting home at midnight from my RACWI meeting (Rochester Area Children's Writers and Illustrator's). Sibby Falk did a great job leading us through some writing exercises. I'll bet her students really like her! We started with five things we are grateful for. Mine:

1. An idea that wakes me at five in the morning--complete with melody.
2. Crowds of winter birds at my feeder.
3. Phone calls from my kids.
4. Back rubs from my husband.
5. Two dogs and three cats surrounding me on the bed as I read and sip my a.m. coffee (brought to me by same wonderful husband).

A lot of us found writing the same line of dialog from four different points of view enlightening. (Kid, teen, adult, senior)

As I reached for the bar of soap this morning I thought about eccentricities. One of mine is that I love to use up a bar of soap. I can't throw away the sliver! I have to use it until it's gone like the moon! Then it's like a present to unwrap a beautiful new bar of soap. I especially love glycerin soap in natural fragrances. My great grandmother used to save all the slivers, soak them into a glob in a pan, let it harden and then cut into bars again. How thrifty! Of course she made her own soap. I remember the chunky yellow bars which we used at the camp in New Hampshire especially for washing after getting into poison ivy.

February 3, 2009

2009-02-03T10:16:00.001-08:00

Whoahhh!

I'm blogging, or is it slogging, clogging, logging, flogging, hogging, snogging . . . ? How much difference a couple of letters make in meaning. Just back from SCBWI Mid-winter- Manhattan (exciting and fun as always) and trying to get back into the groove with a list of to-dos for the day that fills up both sides of an entire index card. So far I've written one TQ note, filed my trove of new used books from Uncle Gordon's magic shop (D'Aulaire's Don't Count Your Chickens, Ernest Thompson Seton's The Arctic Prairies, and a few other gems), checked on what the heck it was that I said to the last agent I submitted material to, and now am actually working on "having more of an online presence" as advised by the bright, young Claudia Gabel (newly laid-off from Random House). She cheerfully told us that the good news is she has a cute boyfriend. She is pretty cute herself in all senses, new and old, of the word, so hopefully will soon be back in the publishing world, gainfully employed. Ah, so much to read and so little time . . . Richard Peck says, "We write by the light of every book we ever read . . ." Also, so much to write and so little time. Hello to all my writer/reader friends! I feel a bit intimidated with free-styling my thoughts into words pasted up for all the world to see, without a whole hell of a lot of revising. I hope there is a way to erase asinine statements! Guess this ignorant old-timer will find out all in good time. I need to go check off a few things at least on my day's list! Cheers!