LOCAL VIEW –Yo-yo Spring–

We get one day of glorious sunshine, and everyone walks about with silly smiles pasted across their faces, and then we get six days of cold rain, whereupon there is a lot of sulking. In other words, it’s your typical New Hampshire Spring, culminating with the appearance of the most affectionate creature known to man: black flies. They absolutely adore humans. Humans are mean, and do not return the love. Or perhaps we are more spiritual, and love what cannot be seen: Namely the wind. (Because the wind blows the blasted black flies away.)

The effect of this is to make people manic-depressive. Oops. Sorry. I forgot that scientific studies have refuted the psuedoscience, and proven there is no such thing as manic-depressive.

The effect of this is to make people bipolar. (Scientific studies of bipolarism are not yet finalized).

Even ancient people understood this, with celebrations beginning with April Fools Day and culminating with traipsing about a May Pole. Of course, now we are more modern and wise, so instead we have military parades celebrating the mass murder of people who work hard, succeed, and become rich, and we throw confetti for communists. (We’ve become so much wiser).

To celebrate this madcap  moodiness I was going to write a poem starting, “Spring is like a yo-yo…”

Indeed children at our childcare bounce up and down like kangaroos, only they also bounce off walls, which kangaroos avoid as a rule, and therefore I get hopping to move them outside, even if it is pouring. And it has rained a lot. You might think I’d get scolded for cruelty to children, but my wife fortunately subscribes to the old Swedish motto, “There is no such thing as bad weather; only bad clothing”, so I don’t even get in trouble for getting kids out in the mud.

A couple days ago, while watching the human-kangaroos jump dead center into every mud puddle they could find, I began to think the manic moodiness has a reason: It was getting a lot of accumulated poison out of their systems. Likely winter builds up all sorts of crud in bodies, and a good work-out flushes it out of the system. Even the goats, despite their age, were gamboling in the pasture like lambs, and eating lots of greens, which also cleanses the system.

The smaller boys do not gambol; they attack me from every angle, slugging and tackling and head-butting. Or perhaps this too is a gamble, because one of these days I might punch them back, (as a way of enraging the state inspectors and watch-dogs, and consequently getting retired from my childcare business), (Yippie!) but for the time being I just prissily say, “No, no. Naughty, naughty. It is not politically correct to maim your teacher.” I say this to them as they lie looking up at me, stretched-out flat in a puddle. They are in that position because, through there may be laws against belting children, they have not yet made a law against my ducking and dodging, and, when children attack from all angles, I make a Spanish Matador look like a clod. Meanwhile I am thinking of ways to put all their energy to good use.

I had just hit upon the idea of digging a ditch and planting potatoes, and likely was looking up and thanking God for the stroke of genius, which explains why I wasn’t looking down, and got hit by the charging child. The small monster head-butted me at roughly twenty miles an hour just to the left of my solar plexus, (over my operation scar), and I thought it might flush a lot out of my system in a hurry.

But such is spring. Even the flooding creeks, streams and rivers are flushing refuse downstream. I looked at the boy and said nothing, so I can’t be arrested or charged, but the child did look worried, as I decided “Spring is like a yo-yo…” simply wouldn’t do for my poem, and decided upon, “Spring is like a colonoscopy…”

You will be thrilled to learn I never got around to writing that poem. I was too exhausted from planting potatoes. I thought we’d only manage to plant three or four, and then the kids would all start whining, “Can’t we stop?”, but they really got into a groove, (or trench). They wanted to dig, dig, dig, and I had to break up fights over who would next hack with the hoe. They were tireless. We planted all the Pontiac Reds (that ripen early for summer potato salads), the Yukon Golds, Kennebecs and Katahdens (for late summer and autumn mashed potatoes), the Burbank Russets (for winter baking), and the Peruvian Purples (for weirdness). By the end I was whining, “Can’t we stop?” but the merciless slave-drivers shouted, “No! Onward! Onward you lazy wimp!”

I tried to take a break by pointing out meal-worms and millipedes and mites, but the only thing that slowed some them was a bright crimson mite, and even that was merely for a moment.

Then the other mites drove me on.

So that explains why I am hunched over holding my back in a manner befitting a man of my advanced years. My shuffling manner of walking, on the other hand, involves a hike. I thought hiking with the older children might be safer, as they tend to dawdle. I was wrong.

We headed off to look at a tree the beavers had nearly-but-not-quite gnawed down last summer. It was amazing that the tree didn’t fall over. But perhaps our beavers are under achievers.

I wanted to see if winter winds had knocked the tree down. When we arrived we saw a snapped-off hemlock’s top had not only flattened the tree, but buried it.

Now, the hemlock may not have been a big hemlock for the west coast, but it was big for the east; I couldn’t get my arms more than halfway around it, yet it was chopped down by little carpenter ants and by a woodpecker who was after those ants.

Now by now you are probably rolling your eyes, and think I must be pulling your leg about beavers that can’t cut down trees, and woodpeckers that can, but I tell you in our neck of the woods our woodpeckers are not those cute little birds that go “tippity-tip-tap” like Broadway dancers. They are a foot and a half tall with wings nearly three feet across, and give a crazy yell like a jungle monkey,  “Kook-Kook-Kook-Kook-Kook-Kook!” If you happen to be climbing a tree and one comes around the trunk and you are eye to eye with it,  you arrive at a swift judgement: “This dude is crazy. He has the eyes of someone who hit his head into a tree sixty thousand times.”

I tell you our woodpeckers are much tougher than your woodpeckers, and if you don’t believe me take a look at this tree:

I  was getting a bit tired and figured I could scare the kids into heading back if I told them any woodpecker that could do this sort of damage was likely nine feet tall and ate small children instead of ants. The kids were terrified.

Obviously I needed a different strategy, so I whined, “Can’t we go back?”  But no, they insisted, “No! Onward!  Onward you lazy wimp!”

I tried to discourage them by saying we were going beyond the point where kids from the Childcare had ever ventured before. It didn’t work. There is something about the spring that awakes the Danial Boone in people, and rather than discouraging them I only challenged them. Pioneering became abruptly attractive, even to kids who ordinarily whine about walking six feet to hang up a coat. Without asking permission they went plunging off into the puckerbrush, and I had to follow, because I’m paid to keep an eye on them, but I did have misgivings, because a couple of the kids ordinarily go “eek” at a mouse and “ick” at a mudpuddle, (and Danial Boone hardly ever did that). I knew they might change their minds.

Also we were venturing into a landscape not even many adults venture into any more, (though in the old days a few might seek native trout in the swampy thickets.) It is a flat area filled in by glacial sand that around nine little brooks brought down steep slopes from a small mountain, in an area where all nine brooks come together like the fingers of a nine-fingered hand. Beavers then built a most amazing series of curving and branching dams, in an attempt to control nine brooks, and dug canals to connect the brooks, and, over the ten-thousand or so year since the glaciers retreated, they collected a deep layer of mud behind their dams. Occasionally the beavers had to leave, after they ate every tree in sight, but the first trees that grew back were the birch and alder and aspen they like, so they’d move back and rebuild their dams.  Currently the area is largely abandoned, with only a couple beavers around, and the water level is lower in most places and trees are starting to grow back. Even though the dams are rotting away they still form walkways through the canals and areas of mire, and the kids had a fine time exploring deeper and deeper into the swamp….

….but then the rain started to get heavier, and one girl didn’t like it. The other four didn’t mind the rain, but commiserated with their friend, and all turned on me with accusing eyes. “This is all your fault!” they stated.

“My fault!?” I exclaimed. “I wanted to go back! You were the ones who wanted to go out into this quagmire!”

“Yes, but we are young and irresponsible. You are suppose to know better!”

“Ok! Ok! We’ll head back.”

“Then why are we heading forward?”

“Because forward is the shortest way back.”

“But we want to go backwards! Backwards the way back!”

“No, forward is the way back”

“You are talking nonsense! You are trying to drown us all!”

“Look, you are going to have to trust me on this. You just said that you are young and irresponsible, and I know better.”

“Well obviously we were wrong! Help! Mr Shaw is trying to drown us all!”

“Stop yelling! Unless you want to be rescued by a helicopter.”

“Ooooh! That would be fun! Let’s keep yelling! Help! Help!”

I was starting to feel a little embarrassed, imagining what a person outside the swamp might think, hearing the girls scream. Four of the girls were joking, but I was a bit worried about the one who didn’t look like she was joking. Meanwhile the three boys were completely indifferent, and deaf to the girls, seemingly adopting insensitivity as the best policy for dealing with the opposite sex.

The path got tricky towards the edge of the swamp, as the spring floods had washed away most of the old dams. I had to pick my way carefully to find a path that kept water from getting over the tops of their boots. Two boys helped me by plunging ahead and finding the deep places, but they didn’t mind the water in their boots. The smallest boy, aged five, followed me and carefully put his feet where I said, and crossed with his feet dry. All five girls failed to follow instructions, and when water poured into their boots they seemed to have a very good time screaming, and right up until we were three feet from the dry land kept shrieking it was better to head back. (I am convinced some girls simply like to scream for the joy of it.)

Then we had a brief contest, emptying water from boots and declaring the winner of the most-water-in-a-boot contest. Then we left the woods and took a safe road back to the Childcare, with me glancing anxiously at houses abutting the swamp, to see if faces scowled out windows at me. Even now I’m a little amazed no one overheard, and no one dialed 911.

Later parents told me they heard from their children they had been on a wonderful adventure. So it looks like I won’t be reported for child abuse. My retirement is delayed. But not denied. One of these days I’ll get reported, and then, “Free at last! Free at Last! Great God Almighty! Free at last!”

Spring also cannot be denied. During the dark, dank, drizzly spell the woods refused to pause like blooms in a florist’s refrigerator, and a haze of yellow sugar maple blooms spread through the twigs.

Slowly the grip of cold, dank mist weakened,
And though low cloud oppressed, just as dark,
It was as if a lightness was wakened
or a bright spirit indented its mark,
Not on couch cushions like a creepy ghost,
But in every heart, as a sense of ease.

Light airs swung south, as, from some southern coast,
Kind angels came cruising on a merciful breeze
And every heart lifted, without sun to see,
And clenched buds loosened lacy greenery
Despite dark skies. Smiling invisibly
Fortune changed, and was so kind to me
I laughed aloud, and raised up my eyes
And felt warm glances pierce the cloudy skies.

LOCAL VIEW –Snow Goes–

VIEW ON FRIDAY

VIEW TUESDAY MORNING 

We’ve had one of those spells of summer that sneak backwards into spring, just as some winter can creep forward, and make April a crazy month which makes us all behave like bipolar fools. It was 77° on Monday and 83° on Tuesday. (25° and 28° Celsius).

The initial result was two-fold. First it created mud, and can you see the second result in this picture?

What you should notice is a total lack of fighting.  A fit of springtime-ambitiousness so overwhelmed the boys they became too busy to brawl.  I was amazed, especially as it lasted two solid hours.

After the children went home I took a walk out to the flood-control reservoir with my wife, granddaughter and dog to watch the sunset. There was not a breath of wind, and I expected the water to be like a mirror. It seemed a perfect time to think about peace and serenity, but wouldn’t you know it? Three pairs of Canada geese were scoping out a pond which likely is only big enough for two pairs, and they were constantly chasing each other, honking like a rush hour, taking off and landing or running atop the water, and the surface was never like a mirror, even when they took a break between battles.

As if to highlight the lack of peace, a beaver surfaced, saw my dog, and Ker-whack! It slapped its flat tail on the water, (which is their alarm-call for other beavers).

Don’t ask me to make sense of spring. Boys will work like beavers and be peaceful, as vegetarian geese and beavers are anything but. Sometimes it is wiser to just sit back and be a witness.

You raise my eyes from chain-gang shackles
To castles in clouds, but then I descend
And my chains remain. A witch’s cackles
Reminds me my dreaming wakes in the end.

You melt snows with the wild hope of spring
And again I am dreaming, planting seeds,
But again I descend with molted wing
Like Icarus, as my garden grows weeds.

Again You come, and hope ends one more night
But this time I’m not going to pursue
Some distant dream, for I’ve now seen the light
And understand that it’s coming from You.

Why should you seek a far distant star
When the light is shining right where you are?

LOCAL VIEW –Leave It To Beaver–

It is winter vacation for the schoolkids, but not a vacation at our Farm-childcare, for the kids need something to do and there is no snow. All that is left of the little snow we have had this winter are some shady places where the snow was trodden down and compacted, turned to slush and refrozen,  and became the slick ice one has to be very careful about, when walking over. It is in the distance in the picture below, especially past the gate to the upper right. The amazing thing is that a year ago the snow was nearly up to the upper rail of the fence. What a difference a year makes! I had to snow-blow a path across this playground, last February, for the snow was over the smaller kid’s heads.

The toddlers have no care, crossing the treacherous ice just through the gate to the upper right, because they haven’t far to fall, and wear such muffs of snowsuits that when they hit the ground it only makes a fluffy sound. Older people have farther to fall, and parents tend to be under-dressed because they are coming from work, and I noticed something funny, watching parents cross that particularly treacherous patch of ice, when they pick up their kids at the end of a long and hard work day. They take tiny, little steps, and walk with their arms out. In other words, they walk like a child just learning to walk. Meanwhile their own toddler is long past that stage. They charge across the ice like someone who learned to walk days and days and days ago, and for them it is great fun to fall down.

Older children, who have reached the vast age of six, tend to be more easily bored, and I have to figure out what to do with them, when there is no sledding, and no snow-forts, and no snow-man building. (The option of skating involves skates, which involves logistics I won’t bother go into, beyond saying I have been remiss.) In the end I have a bunch of kids roaming about a stark New England which is known for its rocks.

If there is anything worse than falling on ice it is falling on rocks, and if there is anything worse than falling on rocks it is falling from rocks from a tree.

The risky behavior of kids doesn’t actually bother me all that much, because I figure part of childhood is to fall from various places, and back in my boyhood I felt a bit inferior because the other boys had gotten more stitches than I had. One reason I opened my Farm-childcare was because I felt sorry for modern children, who live a sort of virtual and bubble-wrapped existence, where the only time they are allowed outside it is into a concrete playground more befitting of a prison, or perhaps a kennel, than a childhood. My wife largely agrees with me, but beyond a certain point we do tend to differ. For example, she doesn’t like the idea of boyhood involving stitches. Or girlhood. And therefore the above pictures make me a little nervous. My wife might see some danger in them I don’t, and might even forbid my posting them on our childcare-Facebook-page, because she wouldn’t want parents to needlessly worry.

Apparently I am always causing parents needless worry. What I tend to say is that the worry is stupid. That is why it is called “needless.” However just when I am on the verge of telling a parent exactly that, my wife gives me a certain look, and sometimes a certain kick in the shins under the table. I then remember she is in charge of “Customer Relations.”  I head off to have fun with the kids, and she takes care of the diplomacy.

Actually it is a relief there is no sledding. Even if you take kids to a hill that is practically flat, kids somehow manage to make it dangerous. They will sled standing up, and then standing on each others shoulders. So actually a lack of snow is safer.

The problem is: What to do?  Kids make a lack of snow dangerous, as well.

What I do is refer to H.T. Webster, who was a fantastically popular American single-panel cartoonist who wrote his last cartoon the year I was born. (It strikes me as amazing that he is so unknown only a half century later. He belongs up there with Mark Twain.) If there is a situation you have trouble finding the words to describe, he likely has a cartoon that describes it. For example, what is wrong with a lack of snow?

My response to this dismal situation was to take the kids on a hike to a beaver pond I knew of out in the woods. After all, beavers are a good example, are they not? They display industry and other good qualities do they not?

Well, actually, back when I was young and a few still actually knew how to cut down a tree with an ax, if a chainsaw wasn’t available, one of the worst insults you could make to a man with an ax was that his chopping was “Beavering.”

You see, the problem with cutting down a tree in this manner is that you really have no idea which way it will fall. (There are some examples of the tree falling on the beaver doing the cutting,  though such failures haven’t caused the extinction of the species.) (Nor will the examples of similar behavior, now being enacted in Washington DC, cause the extinction of the human race, though I sometimes think our population might decrease significantly.)

In the above case the beaver experienced a problem I have often seen humans with chainsaws experience. Even when humans cut correctly and employ ropes and “come-alongs”, they are dopes and try to fell a tree to the northwest when the wind is from the northwest and gusting, and the wind then gusts mightily and snaps ropes or rips pegs from the earth, and blows the tree to the southeast just far enough to become incredibly tangled to the branches of a tree to the southeast. Rather than a tree lieing flat on the ground you have created a “widow maker”.

(This is off topic, but I should confess that I know about this because I made this mistake,  and created a “widow-maker” back when I couldn’t make a widow, because I was unmarried and aged twenty.

After telling a wealthy customer I’d have their tree down in a jiffy, and waving bye-bye as they left to go shopping, a lone gust of wind blew the tree I was felling the wrong way. It fell much more steeply than the above example, and inclined over the customer’s patio at around a 45 degree angle. I had an hour to hide the evidence of my ineptitude, and, because I was young and stupid and desperate, I ran up the trunk with my chainsaw, cut the limbs keeping the tree from falling, and then, as it fell, reached out to another pine, and climbed down the other tree’s trunk. Then I cut like crazy, swept up the saw dust, and when my customer returned from shopping, all they saw was a nice and neat stack of logs. Live and learn…..but don’t forget to thank God you haven’t died in the learning.)

In the above example, the beaver saw the tree only just barely start to fall before getting snarled in the branches of a nearby tree. The rodent then probably swore a bunch of beaver curses, before going to cut an even huger tree. (Beaver only cut such big trees when they have exhausted the more choice species, which are poplar, birch and alder. The above tree was a beech, and the below example is an oak, which beavers rarely eat. Look at the chip the boy has in his hand. That is one bite, for a beaver.)

If a beaver could take such a chunk out of solid oak, just think what a chunk it could take out of you, if you went wading into the water to cuddle with what you took to be an over-sized Micky Mouse. Beavers have killed dogs that went swimming into the water after them. This is important information to pass on to the young, even if my wife thinks it might be a bit too gruesome, and, because the young man in the picture had stated he wasn’t afraid of an over-sized mouse with a flat tail, I had told him the mouse could take a chunk out of him as big in the chip in his hand, which accounts for his expression. (My wife will deal with the diplomacy with the parents, later.)

There are no pictures from the beaver pond, because the mild winter has made the ice thin, and the kids had to follow me like duckings behind a mother duck, to stay on the safest ice. Of course, humans are not ducklings, and they strayed, and every bit of my attention was used up keeping them from walking blithely to places when they would plunge waist-deep in ice-water. They did see the amazing dam the over-sized mice made, and the amazing lodge (which I called an “igloo” of sticks and mud), but I lost about five pounds keeping them away from the places the currents (and the beavers) make the ice weak. Consequently, there was no time to take pictures.

My tougher friends tend to kid me and make me a bit defensive about the fact I am basically a baby-sitter.  (Calling me a “child-care professional” is like calling a garbageman a “sanitary engineer.”) And I confess I blush a bit when I am like a mother duck with a string of ducklings. It just doesn’t seem macho. James Bond never is caught dead in such situations. But it does help me to appreciate mothers. You can have no idea of the attention it demands, and the calories expended. But, unlike mothers, I go places that make mothers frown.

My poor wife has to put up with me.  She tells me I can’t post pictures of children playing with trees that could fall and crush them. She explains that just because I know that it is physically impossible for the tree to fall, the parents will not know that, and therefore I am not suppose to post pictures like the picture below.

All I can say is that I haven’t lost a kid yet. Furthermore, the kids experience childhoods as free as the one I long-ago experienced, and hopefully get a transfusion of freedom in their veins.  I figure America is finished, if we old coots can’t hand the baton of Liberty to a new generation.

Pray for me. Pray first that the accidents, that inevitably happen, only are the little ones, when they happen to me. And pray second that the so-called “liberals” don’t find out, for we know how “liberal” they actually are.