Month: July 2018

I need to revisit my last post about the spider.  I watched an orb weaver last night build her web in the corner of one of my lakefront windows.  She started at 8pm, when the sun had just slipped below the trees.  She worked must faster than I could have imagined.  She first set her longitudinal threads, dropping down from the top sill, on a diagonal, and swinging herself to the vertical sill.  That first thread was a loose loop.  She quickly climbed to the corner and dropped herself down to swing and catch that loose thread.  After a few more structural threads, she was off to the races, weaving the most intricate spiral web.  The spirals are sticky, the structural threads are not.

She was done in about an hour.  She then settled in the middle of the web.  But not for long.  Once the sun goes down, the mosquitoes arrive in droves, looking for any way into the cottage to cause me misery.  When one got stuck, the spider quickly crawled down to wrap her prisoner in several ribbons of thread.  She did not eat the mosquito but crawled back to center.  I soon realized why as more mosquitoes landed all over her web.  She needed to immobilize them before their twists and wriggles to escape tore up her web.

Perhaps she had a very good night because I was shining my flashlight on her web drawing light-loving bloodsuckers to my window.  By the time I went to bed, she had more than a dozen neatly wrapped food parcels.  Her web was not in shreds, but there were some holes where some larger insects had bombed through.

In the middle of the night, I took another look.  Her parcels were fairly neatly consumed and she had retreated to the corner of the window.  She has been sleeping there all day.  Her web was gone by the morning as the daytime breezes probably swept it away.  I’m waiting to see if she is back at it again tonight.

It occurs to me that what distinguishes us from wildlife is that we don’t have to work quite as hard for our food.  Yes, in a larger sense I work for food and shelter but when I wake up, I pour myself a cup of coffee and make some toast.  The spider doesn’t wake up to a larder of food.  If she wants to eat, she must build her web, trap the mosquitoes, and hope that her web stands up to the nightly assault in time for her to eat.  And when she wakes up, it’s ground zero.  A Sisyphean task.

Before we feel too sorry for the spider, a recent study in the Science of Nature Journal, as reported in the Washington Post, estimated that spiders eat somewhere between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey a year.  “That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tons of meat and fish each year.” As the Post captioned its article, “Spiders could theoretically eat every human on earth in one year” (March 28, 2017).

A spider’s web is twenty times the size of the spider.  That’s some work.  She deserves a few mosquitoes.

So I finished my jam today but it wasn’t without its pitfalls, mostly of my own creation.  First, let me vent about flavored spirits.  “Flavors” are mostly a chemical bench “oil” and lend such an artificial taste that it’s best to avoid them at all costs.  Infused oils taste good if they are from natural sources.  The trick is discerning which are okay and which are not.  Add that hostility with my view that anything that makes an alcohol (or coffee) taste like dessert is a recipe from Hell.

So, flavored vodka.  Blueberry infused vodka is great.  Smoked salmon vodka, weird but also good.  This vodka?  Very bad.

I must have been half-asleep when I bought this thinking it was plain vodka.  Because no one in their right mind would ever buy this shit.

Fast forward to this afternoon when I poured my raspberry/blackberry syrup into my cherry jam, lovingly reduced it into the most vibrant colored jelly (without seeds, which is an enterprise unto itself), and turned the burner off to fill my jam jars.  At this stage of jam-making, I add a quarter cup of alcohol and let the hot jam burn off some of the alcohol fumes to leave a fully rounded out flavor behind.

Yah, well, as soon as I poured a quarter cup of this baby, I knew something was VERY WRONG!  Holy crap.  I added a “whipped cream” flavored vodka and almost puked when I tasted the jam.  I thought briefly about pouring the whole mess into my sink.  But such a drastic reaction deserved a more considered counter point.

Heat burns off alcohol so I brought the jam back to a boil for 5 minutes and let that toxic fog steam off into the atmosphere.  I’ll be honest.  It’s not what I would have chosen to do.  And I won’t ever do it again.  But the jam is fascinating.  Cherries are often paired with vanilla (think vanilla ice cream and cherry topping).  I think I like it.  At least I don’t hate it.  And I now have 10 little jars of it.

So that’s the bad.  The good is that I started working on my silversmithing again.  It’s time consuming and best done while binge watching an entire series of a 6-episode crime series from Wales.  This little project (and I usually work in miniature) took me six hours.

It is one-inch across and is made of 30-gauge silver wire (no bigger than a hair’s breadth).  My eyes are not quite as elastic as they were and much of this is done by touch and stabbing the wire repeatedly until it hits the right opening. I now have two of these and don’t yet know what they will become.

And now for the beautiful.  Today my carpenter came over and set his table saw on the deck to finish the trim inside my cottage.  It blew lots of sawdust and when he was done, he asked for a broom.  I brought it to him outside and we noticed that a fine film of sawdust had landed to illuminate spider webs under the cottage.  A spider web is 20 times as big as the spider and these were at least a foot across.  I don’t like spiders in the home (having suffered more than a few night-time bites), but in the right place, they belong.  This is the web of the orb spider, which weaves during the day and rests at night.  It probably took that spider six hours to spin the web, about as much time as I spun mine.

Out of respect for its work, we took care to sweep the sawdust away from the web.

A rainy day on the lake is heavenly.  You wake up slowly to the sound of a peaceful drumming on the roof.  The cottage cools overnight, a blessing given how hot the sun beats in at the end of the day.  Truth is, I don’t like cool and damp and there is one quick way to better enjoy my coffee: start the canner on its boil.

Next, it’s time to set out all of the fruit I collected yesterday.  Local raspberries and the most beautiful petite blackberries I have ever seen.  Next come the plumcots and cherries.  And then the peaches (which seem to be collecting more than a few fruit flies, indicating it’s do or die for them).

I have made so much jam over the past two years, I don’t bother with recipes now except to understand possibilities.  Who needs rules?  I make whatever suits me at the time using whatever fruit looked good to me when I bought it.  While I started out making one-fruit jams, I prefer to have a little fun blending my fruits.

My kitchen has become my art room of old.  At my all-girls English boarding school, the art room was open on weekends.  Dorm rooms slept up to 10 girls at a time.  We were “reminded” when to get up and when to sleep by ringing bells and thoroughly nasty matrons and senior girls.  In school corridors (called “passages”) you had to walk single file to the right and no talking.  At meal times, you were told where to sit.  The younger girls had to sit in the middle to clear the plates.  The older girls made up the seating charts.  If you didn’t know where you stood in the pecking order, the seating chart was a very good clue.

I spent my weekends in the art room.  Often, I was the only person there.  All materials were available.  No one was there to tell me, for example, what happens when you mix oil paint with acrylic (hint: nothing good), or that the glaze you put on your pot will look very different after firing.  In a school that had so many rules, somehow I was allowed to be loose in the art room where I learned by experience.

There are no shortcuts to learning a skill.  Yours hands have their own memory, and it is said that hands have to perform a task more than 500 times to start getting it right.  The conscious competence theory is one way to express the learning progression.  There are four stages, although there is some argument for a fifth.

1. Unconscious Incompetence
2. Conscious Incompetence
3. Conscious Competence
4. Unconscious Competence

Think of how you learned to drive.  Moving from stage 1 to 2 is the moment you are aware that you don’t take left hand turns very well, and you constantly misjudge how to fit your car in the parking lines.  Having become aware of your weaknesses, you progress to stage 3 through practice.  Getting to stage 4, you drive without thinking of all of the coordinated steps necessary to driving.  Stage 4, however, might lead to complacency which is the moment you get in a car tired or angry and narrowly miss a collision when someone hits your blind spot.  I’ll let you decide whether there is a stage 5, an enlightened competence.  Some people think it is when you can teach your skill thoughtfully to others.  Others argue it is that stage where a truly great practitioner take skill to new levels in a creative burst.

Anyway, I needed many weekends in the art room to experience my own mistakes, and the lack of outside disapproval gave me license to learn from them in my own fashion.  While there is a place for teachers, I am happy to find my own path.

Today I made peach plumcot jam, and threw in some local strawberries because their time had come.

I threw the raspberries and blackberries into a pot with lemon juice and sugar, simmered, and they are now dripping through a strainer.

Separately I simmered the cherries, adding a little crème de cassis to the mix.

Tomorrow I will decide whether to throw the whole lot of fruit together in a single jam.  They are probably fine each to their own jam.  But it is possible that the whole is greater than the sum of their parts.  And if the jam doesn’t gel, it will make a fine topping for a pint of vanilla from Round Top.

The lake is pretty quiet but human noise sneaks in. You can still hear the sound of trucks rolling on Route 1, two miles away.  Then there is the hammering of shingles, chain saws, and boat traffic during the day.  You have to filter out human noise to hear the wildlife.  It takes concerted effort.

Silence — true silence — is hard to find.  Growing up, I remember hearing nothing but birds and the farm rooster in the morning.  (In Switzerland, you were prohibited from mowing your lawn on a Sunday.)  These days, there is always human noise in the background.  We keep the lights on to stay up later, people are always getting up earlier to get to where they need to be, and there is no day of rest.  In search of silence, I sometimes get up at 3am, to live on the edge of sleep and life.  It is a strange silence, coffin-like and there are no bird songs.

While 3am has its magic, there are other times to hear nature’s cycle.  My time of choice this week is that hour while the sun is almost done casting its afternoon shadows, but hot and warm enough for the very best of photos.

To bring you into temporal perspective, these fields are covered with lupine in the late spring, a gorgeous wildflower growing on the coast of Maine that really only thrives in neglect.  You can’t grow lupine deliberately, it grows where it wants.  See wild lupine on Round Pond (a few miles from me) as taken by Keith Webber here:

This time of year, the lupine are dried out husks sticking up through meadow grasses and other wildflowers and thistle, attracting Goldfinches who nest in the long grass.  We can’t mow the hay because the goldfinches haven’t left their nests, and the lupine haven’t set their seeds.  If you mow too soon, the lupine won’t grow next year.

Tonight, when I took my picture, there was a brief moment in time when there was no distant traffic and I heard the small crackling sound as thousands of Lupine seed heads burst open to release their seeds.

Nature is not silent.  But I need to stand still to hear it.

 

 

 

Three minor skirmishes to remind me that nature and people can’t live in the same place at the same time.  I really don’t like to kill living creatures.  I cannot put a lobster in a pot, I will cup insects in my hand to throw them outside, and probably wouldn’t survive in the wild (except as a vegetarian).

I draw the line at mice.  They are messy and reproduce fast.  This year, they had the audacity to pee all over my cleaning supplies under the sink.  I have my weapon of choice — the good old fashioned mouse trap and have little remorse when I hear the snap.  But when I came upon a tiny new born mouse crawling over my kitchen floor a few days ago, I had a dilemma.  In the end, I couldn’t kill it myself, so I put it outside.  Round one to house holder.

Round two:  The cedar shingled wall next to my cottage front door faces north and never gets any sun.  I have a small lantern light attached to the shingles and I leave it on at night.  Right before I go to bed, I go outside to inspect my night visitors attracted by the light.  I have seen enormous click-beetles and a gorgeous moth the size of two handspans.  This year, however, I came across this:

Did some research online and thought they looked most like a satin moth. Pretty and happy to leave them be.  Until one of my Maine friends told me to beware the brown-tailed moth.  [As an aside, who named this “brown tail?”  I mean, sure, the body underneath is brown but seriously, who looks at that moth and says “brown?”]

Turns out, this little creature is a scourge in the caterpillar phase.  Brown-tail moth caterpillar hairs break off the caterpillar and circulate in the air. Those hairs are tiny fishhooks, sticking into the skin and let loose an irritating chemical that does not break down for years.  Symptoms include asthma and poison-ivy blisters all over the body.  They strip an oak tree of its leaves in no time flat and have infested Southern Maine.

I just missed the caterpillar phase.  Yesterday my power washer took out about 500 of next year’s reproducers.  And I didn’t hesitate for a second.  [note: the water doesn’t kill them.  Feet do.]  Round two to householder.

Round three: Battle to begin.  Pest identified:  Red squirrels.  I can hear them scrabbling up behind the shower wall.  They run out from under the house, run halfway up the pine tree, and loudly berate me as I sit on the deck.  Cheeky monsters.  Which means they have the dreaded babies somewhere in my wall.  I can’t crawl under the cottage to block up the hole until those rat babies are gone.  Grey squirrels are content to live in trees, chipmunks in woodpiles, but red squirrels want to live in your house and trash it.

This isn’t news to me.  It’s right out of one of my favorite books, Miss Suzy, by Miriam Young.

Caption: Miss Suzy is a little gray squirrel who lives happily in her oak-tree home until she is chased away by some mean red squirrels. Poor Miss Suzy is very sad. But soon she finds a beautiful dollhouse and meets a band of brave toy soldiers. 

I don’t have any tin soldiers but I have a have-a-heart trap ready with apple and peanut butter.  It’s going to be a protracted fight.

All the roads around me look like this.

Gorgeous, winding, fun to drive.  My GTI eats up the pavement.  And I know every curve, every rise and fall, having driven them at all hours.  We drive fast, but at a safe distance.  At night, there are no streetlights.  To best avoid oncoming traffic around those curves, keep your eyes on the outside edge of the road.  Looking at the inside line will cause your car to drift.

A metaphor for life.  Stick to the outside edges.  Stay in that lane and travel free.

Upon arrival, I have to clean up the cottage.  Open the windows wide, vacuum up spiders in the corner, and clean up after furry critters who make nests during the winter.  More than a few curse words for the latter.  Then comes scrubbing the deck with my dad’s boat brush.  It’s a long morning, and I usually have two Tylenol and a glass of prosecco by noon.

This year, I brought my record player.  I raided my Mom’s basement last night for my Dad’s old vinyl collection.  I remember a lot of dixie and jazz growing up.  I have no idea what I have, and I don’t think my Dad was a real collector since many of the records are greatest hits or things he got as part of record clubs (labelled “limited edition, not for sale,” which begs some questions).  But he appreciated great music, and spent time in Philly in the 1950’s.

Here are some true standouts that kept me company while I cleaned this morning:

Happy music to clean by.  Music carries on the lake.  Perhaps my neighbors didn’t mind that I started at 5 am.  But consider it payback for suffering through their 80’s rock.

Check them out here:

https://archive.org/details/RedNicholsCollection

https://archive.org/details/EddieCondonDixielandAllStars1939-1946