Summer Update
In which we cultivate patience
Dear Everybody,
This is one of those times when I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything, when in fact several things have improved considerably. This newsletter does help me periodically look back and acknowledge how much I’m getting done, even when I feel like I’m standing still.
The driveway bridge isn’t here yet.
We’ve been playing “any day now” for six weeks, ever since Conrad signed the estimate and the contractor ordered materials. I got a text earlier this week that the contractor was about to bring the hammer down on the fabricator who is making the steel beams, because “it shouldn’t take long at all” had long since worn threadbare and they weren’t returning his calls. They finally did, day before yesterday, and he said he would be taking delivery by early next week at the latest. I’ll believe it when I see it, but he’s sitting down this weekend to work out his schedule and he might—might—start work in the first week of July. I’m reserving my enthusiasm.
Meanwhile, one of the things I did in the beautiful early-spring weather just after the last update was to fix the Bridge to Nowhere. I ran short of screws, so I still need to go make sure that each tread has a screw at all four corners, but the treads have been attached and I built a new railing. It’s all ready to spring into action when the driveway is under construction. Once I clear the weeds to make a path out to the mailbox, at least.
The weather has settled down into the gentle sunny dry spell of midsummer. My calendar says that the last week of June has been a scorcher for the last three years, but the forecast is suggesting drizzle this year. A week ago I was running the woodstove because the house had chilled down, and it wasn’t breaking 60 outside all week. That doesn’t mean it won’t turn around and whack us with a week of triple digits by August, but I’m just as happy to have things milder right now. Even if it means I’m way behind on the mowing because things have been too damp.
The amount of silt in the water system has diminished tremendously, which hopefully means things have calmed down from the logging above the watershed five years ago. The drains have been quiet, perhaps because I bought some enzymatic drain cleaner. I haven’t used it, mind (I’ve been lucky to be together enough to do the dishes every few days) but the threat has been enough. It helps that I did, indeed, keep my appointment with Rue to address the kitchen sink faucet. He looked at it, said it seemed simple enough, but was I not interested in replacing it? I replied with some surprise that I had assumed it would be a horrible chore given that the sink is very deep and the connections were probably the next best thing to cast in stone. He said it didn’t look too bad, he’d had worse. So I was ordering a new one from Lowes as he took a sawzall to the rusted-out right sink drain…
It wasn’t as simple as he thought. Mostly because he’s not a professional plumber, and I had to help him figure out installation of both the drain kit and the faucet in the absence of real instructions; I also had to send him back to the hardware store for new cutoff valves (I don’t care if they worked, one of them said “SEARS” on the handle). But he wrestled stubbornly with the old connections while I entertained his four daughters (ages 4 to 12, approximately), and at the end of two more days I had a shiny new faucet and drain. The faucet has a pull-out head and a simple lever handle, and it TURNS OFF. The kitchen has been kind of eerily quiet since. I’m still unused to not having the constant sound of water.
That was the first of this year’s kitchen transformations. I also completed re-tiling the floor, which I had gotten half done a year ago. It’s a pity that the pattern tiles have a deeply inferior adhesive, which prolonged the whole process by two days as I applied professional glue to all of them (I pulled up the pattern tiles from earlier as well, to glue them down properly). They still aren’t all behaving, and I’m in the process of actually nailing the corners down with tacks. I still need to clean the last of the adhesive smears off too. But it looks great anyway, it’s smooth enough for the cats to play hockey on, and it’s so much cleaner.
I had impetus to complete the floor because I realized I really wanted the refrigerator indoors. It’s inconvenient going outside for everything, especially in winter, but I have been managing. However, I remembered how bad the yellowjackets were last year, when I felt positively under siege, and I thought it would be much better to open the door as seldom as possible in the latter half of the summer. Now that the floor was done, I could move in the fridge! …except I thought about how the old hand-me-down fridge rattles, and groans, and I didn’t really want to disturb the fresh silence of the kitchen with the sound of its limping circulator.
So I brought in the small fridge from the mudroom instead.
I bought that one when I was still traveling back and forth between Oregon and California, and my aunt was using the tired old antique in the kitchen, before I had cleared things enough to even contemplate hauling the old one out. I cleared a corner of the mudroom and bought a waist-high dorm fridge, which kept my few groceries fresh without having to bring in a bulldozer while Jenny was still here. By the time she moved out, I had gotten one of the full-size fridges from her old property at the Red Barn, but I didn’t want to move it in only to move it back out to do the floor. And so it sat in the garage for two years.
It’s still out there, holding my homemade pickles and the good feta cheese, ready to chill down a butchered deer or half a dozen heads of bolted lettuce. But the little fridge is new, modern, and quiet. It’s also large enough to hold everything I use on a daily basis. I’m actually considering replacing the hand-me-down with another small one, plus a little cube freezer for indoors to hold things I don’t want to keep opening the deep freeze for… we’ll see. Living alone gives me a lot of options.
The washing machine hasn’t made it indoors yet. I haven’t felt up to confronting the old hose bibs in the kitchen, nor finding out whether it really does work as the person I got it from said. Anything could happen, and I kind of want at least some moral support present.
One last thing I did was a tune-up for the kitchen screen door. I replaced the mesh, added a waist-high rail (which can be grabbed to open it if one doesn’t feel like using the handle), tightened the closing spring, and completely re-built the cat flap in the bottom corner. I am confident it is now highly resistant to insects, which will come in handy when I have to pull the rest of the kitchen doorframe apart to rebuild it and fit the solid wooden door properly. I’ll do that during a heat wave when having the door “open” at night is no hardship. I’ll clean the mortise lock and have the night latch re-keyed at the same time.
But in the background is the rising certainty that Waspageddon is on its way. Last year was unexpectedly horrific, after fifty years of only occasional trouble with yellowjackets. Instead of catching one or two queens in the spring, I caught a total of 17 last year, and still had three or four active nests cranking out enough wasps to make the ground under the apple trees look like an active bee swarm every day. This year I have caught 26 queens (and two bald faced hornets) so far, and I expect to be catching them for another few weeks yet. I had very little luck with traps during the main season, so I have other plans—putting an apron on the early apple tree to catch falling fruit, and putting out the wasp equivalent of ant bait. We’ll see how it goes, but at least I know what to expect.
Talking it over with a few people, we concluded that the sudden increase in yellowjackets correlates neatly with the absence of the barn swallows. The last family left in spring of 2021, and they never returned the following year; some storm pushed them off course or they never made it. The next year was thick with biting flies, which I suffered as best I could. But the year after that was when the yellowjackets, having built up momentum, exploded. The queens, you see, are one of the first insects to rouse in the spring. They’re big, they don’t fly too fast, and they drone in a distinctive way (I hunt them mostly by sound). All of which would make them marvelous snacks for hungry parents and the first round of greedy chicks. But with the barn swallows gone, there was nothing to stop the queens but me and my butterfly net, and I can’t be everywhere.
Help may be on the way. At the very end of May, I spotted a familiar blue and white dot swooping above the yard. And then there were two more. The barn swallows had made it up the last leg from the clearcut a mile down the road, and discovered a lovely open area humming with insects. They went away after a few days, but this week I spotted a couple of them again, having supper in the evening. They know this place is here, and they’ve doubtless seen the old nests perched under the eaves… come spring, if all goes well, some of those young couples may decide to settle here again. I have never appreciated wildlife, even the little brown bats, as much as I now appreciate these swallows. I’ll look up ways I can make the place even more inviting.
I found a mechanic. I started with my tire shop, who referred me to a good oil change place, and when I brought the car in I asked for recommendations for a mechanic. One of the experienced techs gave me a name, and high praise. When I called the number, I got a young guy who did, indeed, perform all kinds of service on cars and trucks. When he found out where I was, he said that he had just transitioned from mobile service to having a shop, and his new place happened to be in my town! Did I happen to know where the old high school is…?
He moved into Tim’s old shop, next door to where Jenny keeps her book collection, in the old Ag building. Walking distance from her house.
Taking that as a sign, I arranged to bring the Accord down, and talked with him as I waited for Recca to show up to give me a ride back. He was happy to see to everything, major and minor, and gave me a very good feeling. He got it done quickly, over Memorial Day weekend yet, and didn’t even charge me for a couple of items that only took a few minutes. The car didn’t fight him on removing the flaky oxygen sensor, which sometimes takes a welding torch to get out. (I think it likes him.) So my car is now in top mechanical shape, with a new timing belt that was definitely due, new battery clamps, a new O2 sensor, and a thorough checking-over. Everything left is cosmetic or minor things I can do myself, like changing a headlight bulb and pulling down the headliner to clean out the mouse nests.
Yes, I have mice in the ceiling of my car. It drives me absolutely up the wall. But there’s no point in dealing with that until I can start parking the car where the cats can control the mice, which means getting a new bridge…
Jenny’s house has been painted a beautiful sky blue with white trim, courtesy of a local professional painter. We need to buy corrugated roofing and outdoor carpet for the porch, and then it will be all set. Well, except for replacing one or both doors—the back door of her house fell apart in my hands the other day, and the front door isn’t great either. But I have a short list of places to call for that, and it’s another thing we can just throw money at.
Otherwise life goes on… I got my dresser out of storage and up to the bedroom, so I now have a place to put my clothes that doesn’t smell of mice; I unpacked my modest library, so I can actually find my books; I cleared all the junk and brush out of the thicket behind the greenhouse; I managed to build a brush pile and burn it before the annual ban descended; and I took my first shot at the old pantry, clearing out ten square feet of shelf space to make room for empty jars and some dried goods. I’ve kept on top of the garden, for the most part, sowing seeds and transplanting things. I discovered that fireweed used to be made into a common tea in Russia in the days of the Tsars, and I’m playing around with leaves picked from the little colony near the upper driveway. And I’m reading up on keeping meat rabbits.
The to-do list is still enormous. My health keeps getting impacted by random things out of my control: the weather, random exposures, sheer burnout. I have been reminding myself that most of the summer still lies ahead, time enough for scrubbing and painting furniture, repairing doors and windows, digging a new creekbed, renovating the office, shoveling out the Shippen, cutting down the overgrown hedges on the north wall of the house, and clearing the garage (again). Time for plenty of dump runs. In quieter times I can continue to work with the sewing machine, finishing off some new clothing and sewing two sets of curtains—I need gauze curtains to keep the blazing sun at bay in late summer, and then thermal curtains for the winter. I have all the supplies, I just need the time. Good thing I have that Audible subscription to keep me entertained…
Lastly, the garden is thriving. I got ambitious and added a strawberry bed south of the dining room windows, and the leaves are now the size of my outstretched hand with runners busily exploring inside the cedar frame. I stopped pinching off flowers at the beginning of this month, and I expect my first ripe fruit by mid-July. The raspberries and blackberries are not going to be so fruitful this soon after being replanted, but I’ll have some. My greatest failure has been that only two out of seven broccoli plants made it, but the Asian cabbage is magnificent, the beets are growing the best they ever have in my life, the garlic is even better than last year, I’ll have sugar snap peas next week, the lettuce is almost ready, and I have two full beds of potatoes. The herb bed is overflowing, with the catnip roaring up to three feet and counting, and I have more parsley than you can shake a stick at. The peppers, tomatoes, and squash are still getting their feet under them, but they look good, and I made room for a bunch of different flowers this year. I even have a row of sweet red onions, which is unusual for me, and I grew some early radishes. I’ll see whether I can do things with them that I’ll like.
I’ve been experimenting with a used dehydrator, drying garlic and peppers, and hanging meat near a fan in the workroom to cure (look up “biltong”, it’s very tasty). Lots of food prep is in my future: kimchi, pickled lettuce and garlic scapes, cucumber pickles, dried and pickled peppers, tomatoes, apples, curing more meat from the freezer. I’ve learned how to make hominy from scratch, and I’ve dried some for future use. I’d like to rely less on the freezer without leaning on the precarious supply chain for canning, which means more pickling and curing, more drying, and more cold storage. I want to apply what we’ve learned in a century of food science to the methods my great-grandparents used.
The cats are doing well, though the fleas have been an absolute plague despite regular and aggressive treatments. I have a small rotating population of mice in the house, as Cricket periodically restocks her playthings; I had to fully assemble the sifter screen on the Hoosier cabinet to keep them out of the baking supplies. Artie spends most of his days asleep in front of the window or on my bed—he’s gotten much less anxious, and no longer has to know where I am every waking moment. The two of them occasionally pounce at each other, but it’s much more in the realm of “gotcha” than aggression now. The house is pretty peaceful most of the time.
Slowly but surely, I’m putting this place in order. I no longer feel like the house is fighting me every day, and some things are much easier. I’m short some modern conveniences I sorely miss, but I can relax some days. That’s progress.
Some things barely need my help: I’ve focused on controlling the bracken fern along the upper driveway for the last three years, without having time or energy to do much else with it. That one action has changed the ecology up there tremendously. While I still had to spend an evening this week pulling out seven-foot-tall fern fronds (they come up with a satisfying pop), what was left when I was done was the most foxgloves I’ve ever seen in one place, with a carpet of baby plants ready for next year. In a week they’ll be in full bloom, and it should be absolutely spectacular. Free flowers!
I’ve posted pictures to the Google photo album. (They can’t capture the chorus of birds out there, you’ll have to use your imagination.) By the next update, we’ll be edging into fall, and I can marvel again at how many bites I’ve taken out of the elephant still looming before me. If you want to help out in the meantime, a Ko-fi donation is always welcome, and locals can talk to me about work parties; if you’re farther away, feel free to hand this newsletter around to anyone you think would be interested. As always, the archives are available at Substack.
I’ll see you in September. Take care!
