March 6, 2002
Do you know what I really love about my house? It has absolutely no flow. I'm not being sarcastic here: I really do love the fact that my house has no flow. It's not a HUGE house; the original part is only about 800 square feet, and the addition adds about another 800 (not including the basement). But no matter where you are going, you're guaranteed to turn at least four corners and probably go up and/or down some stairs. I'll have to put up a blueprint of the house to better illustrate this. Outside, it's the same thing. No matter the destination, you have a veritable obstacle course to trevail on the way to your goal. Gates, fences, steps, stairs, corners. I won't even mention the moving obstacles, ie. dogs, cats, ducks, snakes, frogs, mice, and --my favorite--heart attack-inducing encounters with ring-neck pheasants, who burst from silent invisibility out of innocent clumps of grass into shotgun bursts of "holycrapherecomethehumans!!!" survival missions.
Why I love this: one, it all adds up to more steps taken during the day, so, really, you are taking little mini-hikes during your day-to-day business, and in my opinion, that keeps you young. But second, and more importantly, I feel that all this schlepping just makes me more aware of my house. No matter where I go or what I'm doing, I'm consciously experiencing my house, and I savor each and every turn; every time I have to go upstairs to get something from the kitchen, I find myself thinking, "I'm going up the stairs in MY house....who woulda thought?" Since my bathroom isn't finished, when I wake up in the morning, I have to stumble blearily down the kitchen stairs, make my way through the front room, skid briefly through the mud room, plod through the laundry room and finally find myself squinting incoherently in the bright lights of Katie's "seaside" bathroom. Quite a hike, but by the time I get there, there's no going back to sleep, and I've had a nice good-morning inventory of my wonderful, wonderful house.
This spring is turning out to be completely different from last year, and all because of the rain. Last year, the ponds were dry as a bone; this year they are filled to the brim, and there are countless little mini-bogs out in the pasture, and what a difference this makes. Not mentioning all the wild ducks and Canada geese who have taken up permanent residence out there (as well as some new birds that I'm having a heck of a time trying to identify), we have HUGE flocks of redwing blackbirds in our trees. Last year, we had one mating pair living in the big pond at the bottom of the hill. This year, you almost can't think straight from all the mating calls going on outside in the apple trees. It's amazing. I've already mentioned our noisy frogs--I spotted large masses of frog eggs in the big pond last week, and two days ago during my daily check, I finally saw some tadpole action going on. I'm interested to see what kinds of frogs these turn out to be; there are two distinctly different egg blobs, as I like to call them, and I'm fairly certain that neither of them are tree frogs, mainly because our koi pond was FULL of tree frog tadpole last year, and I didn't spot a single egg; one morning it was just full of thousands of wriggling tadpoles that grew up to be bright little tree dwellers. Of course, this year we probably won't have a singe froggy resident in that pond, since the ducks are living there now, and they don't miss much, which is why I'm keeping them out of the big pond. They'd have had a field day with all those eggs.
P.S. Still trying to get grubbygirl.net up and running....fingers crossed! |
