Solstice Rambles

It has been a long and emotionally wrenching year. Our most fervent hope is that, just as the shortest day of the year comes to a close and the hours of daylight gradually increase, life follows suit and brightens a bit more each week.

With that thought in mind, we decided to chuck all responsibilities while the Resident Teen was out of town with a friend's family, enjoying a snowy getaway up near the border, and just go wandering in our new neck of the woods.

But you know what they say about mice and their best laid plans. At first, Things Were Not Cooperating. We'd planned to center our outing on a visit to Sliders Cafe in Carnation, where Tony would bring his banjo and enjoy a bluegrass jam.

However, this goal was thwarted by the fact that, despite a chock-full calendar of events on the cafe's website, the forbidding news that it was closing down (which we'd learned a few weeks ago) came true, and instead of the bluegrass jam, yesterday was actually the Big Move-Out Day. Showing up with a banjo would've been just silly.

We decided to haul the dog with us and go for a walk in the Carnation area anyway, though I think partly the resident Banjo Player wanted to see for himself that Sliders actually was closed. Driving past the darkened building without a name on it anymore was a pretty good clue that it was.

"Hey, why don't we go to Remlinger Farms and get a pie for later?" suggested the disappointed musician. So we headed east, driving a route we took many times when the Resident Teen was a little one and a farm park with ponies, old-fashioned sweet rides, a fire truck to climb on, and baby goats to pet--with the promise of an ice cream cone before going home--was all that happiness required.

We knew the park would be closed, but thought perhaps the big produce and gift store would be open. We were wrong. No pie for us.

Well, at least we could go for a walk. Or could we? The first two pull-outs on the main road demanded that we have a Discover Pass to park there and set foot on the trail. Lacking said pass, we pushed farther south. And there we discovered a little gem that made all the dead-ends worth while: Tolt Macdonald Park and Campground.

The dog bounded out of the car (as much as she could bound with a leash around her neck) and nearly hyperventilated snuffing up all the rich new smells as we followed a path along the Tolt River. The river, roaring thunderously, galloped along like a herd of mustangs.

We hadn't walked for five minutes before we  heard the creaking cry of a bald eagle. It settled in a tree just ahead of us on the trail.

Across the river, its mate perched  near the enormous nest the two had maintained for years. Another walker told us they'd raised an eaglet there last year and she'd come every day to see the story unfold.

Another bit of walking took us to a curve in the trail where the Tolt joined forces with the Snoqualmie River. A suspension bridge over the roiling waters led to a lush green campground complete with yurts.

A cheerful sign warned us of the usual dangers to expect (oh, you know, little things like cougars and bears), but the only perils present were a pair of off-leash Doberman pinschers. I think Luna would've preferred the cougars and bears to the investigation she got from the Dobies.

As it was, she didn't appreciate walking across slats and having to spread her webbed Labrador toes wide, so she carefully walked like a trapeze artist on the little wooden "sidewalk" that ran down the middle of the bridge to facilitate rolling wheelbarrows full of camping gear across the river.

Finally, the low-lying white strips of cloud sank to ground level, creating that particularly Northwest variety of snow-globe-style drizzle.

Wet and muddy, we returned to the car, drove home, tidied up, and went out again, this time to Willows Lodge for an evening by a roaring fire complete with a glass of wine, a plate of antipasti, and thumping good music played by a young acoustic guitarist and his drum-playing friend. Christmas lights twinkled inside and out, laughing at the darkness of the longest night.

The Garden Awakes, Slowly

Vinca flower and leaves

I ventured out into the garden this past weekend to do more than just (a) throw a ball for the dog, (b) throw a green plastic dinosaur for the dog, (c) throw an orange plastic fish for the dog, or (d) clean up after the dog. Saturday was sunny and warm, Sunday was gray but fairly dry--a good weekend to start poking at the garden to see if it was ready to get up.

Of course, the garden was both way ahead of me and on its own schedule. Things were stirring and had been for weeks. Vinca flowers have blinked on like purple stars in a galaxy seen only by day. Snails are skating across wet leaves and paving stones. The yellow pompoms of kerria have bloomed on the topmost branches. The branches themselves are still without leaves, so the shrub looks a bit like it's marching off to clean some floors, with mops tossed over its shoulder.

Spirea leaves unfolding

My main task was to shift one of the two raised planting beds west by three feet. This may sound rather pointless, and certainly if you are a farmer with acres and acres to till it probably sounds silly, like something you'd accomplish while the coffee brews.

But for this city slicker it was a Morning's Work because it involved a shovel. And digging. And tossing the dirt into a pile. And levering the wooden box up and out of the soil and shifting it.

The two boxes were separated by three feet in the first place as an accommodation to the resident teen, who at the time of their building was still the resident elementary-school-aged child. She protested the building of planting beds in the garden because how, then, could she possibly continue to build jumps and hold gymkhanas in which she was both horse and rider?

She resisted our arguments that, now that we had a dog whose claws tore up the so-called lawn (which had always been a fragile and temporary thing) and churned the yard to mud, we needed to cover up the space with something other than grass. So we accommodated the horse shows by leaving an avenue between the beds and around them, which actually contributed to the setup of cavaletti, oxers, brush fences, and in-and-outs.

Nowadays, as you might guess, the resident teen no longer canters around the garden crying "Tally-ho." And the shrubs to the east of the raised beds have encroached on the sunlight falling on the bed being moved. Hence the digging and shifting.

"Go away and let us sleep."

As I hefted paving stones and dirt, I came across lots of critters who were still snug in their winter beds and none too pleased to be disturbed.

Worms managed to radiate great irritation despite being extremely simple creatures who have ganglia but no brain. (According to one science education site, "They have no brain...so worms do not ponder their lowly lot in life.")

Presumably these worms had some more non-pondering to do before getting busy with springtime chores such as Tilling the Soil, so I made sure to bury them again if I dug them up or place dirt over them if I'd removed their paving-stone roof.

There was also a grumpy millipede living in a miniature cave just below the edge of the wooden frame. It sorted out its legs, scuffling around for its many bedroom slippers, before trudging out of sight into a tunnel. Just down the block from the millipede, a centipede was startled out of hiding. The carnivorous centipede didn't seem as lethargic as its vegetarian neighbor, but it still acted as if it were looking for a ringing alarm clock in a panic, desperate to shut it off.

It tried to climb out of the hole I'd dug for the corner leg of the raised bed. I helped it out (with a stick, as centipedes bite) and set it in a safe place, only to see it run around like crazy and fall back into the hole.

When I lifted up a paving stone that had been leaning against a stone, I found a snail deep in slumber as well as a tiny, round orange insect that appears to be the nymph of a plant-eating true bug of some sort.
Unfortunately, moving the stone had scraped off a portion of a puffy white egg sac attached to the underside. It was filled with small yellow eggs.  

A spider rushed across the stone, lingering long enough for me to take a fuzzy picture, but not long enough for me to see if it had anything to do with the egg sac.

Not being an arachnologist, I can't determine what kind of spider it is, but looking online, it seems as if it might be a Tegenaria species, one of the funnel-web weavers (related to the dreaded hobo spider). But I could be, and probably am, wrong.

The sleepy minibeasts' inactivity was more than offset by the busyness of ants, those "little creatures who run the world" in the words of E.O. Wilson. 

They didn't seem to be much upset by all the earth-moving; they acted more like curious onlookers who were pleased to see other living things moving dirt as they did and possibly commenting on the digger's methods and strategy.

The one below posed most obligingly on a pebble. (A pebble, in my world; a boulder in the ant's.)

Lovable Labrador Luna liked the digging action, too, and especially liked standing in the garden bed, from which she is usually shooed. I looked up at her at one point and wondered why she was standing with her head all tucked in and brow furrowed.

Upon closer inspection, I saw that she was nose to nose with an ant. I was surprised that she could even see the little insect and even more surprised that she didn't slurp it up. As for the ant, I can only imagine what it must be like to suddenly have the equivalent twin horrors of the Lincoln Tunnel and Hurricane Sandy appear before you.

Visit to England, Part 3: Puppy Dogs

OK, the cats got their turn in the limelight on Friday, so I'll start off this week with the canines we encountered in the UK.

Pupsy, devoted Jack Russell who follows my new sister-in-law 24/7.

Alfie, super-vigilant protector of 18-month-old great-nephew.

Dog who taunts and barks at Alfie when he walks by

Alfie with Bobby, Border Terrier later menaced by a sheep

Lancashire Heeler pup--I swear my husband's family just doles out small dogs to everyone. They're everywhere. Though we didn't come back with any pint-sized canines.

Waiting in vain for a share of the grilled sausages

A "Talbot," an extinct breed of hunting dog, atop the 1451 Well House in gardens of Bishop's Palace, Wells; apparently this dog was the Bishop's favorite hound. IMHO, he could've ponied up a bit more money for a better sculptor...this dog is a bit fetal-pygmy-hippo-looking to me.

Dog prints in clay tile, Roman Baths. Always makes me wistful to see humble touches of life in the past like this...just like pawprints in a modern concrete sidewalk. My parents found some among the Mexican clay tiles used to floor their kitchen long ago on Long Island in New York.

Dog playing fetch, mudflats, Burnham-on-Crouch

Dang. Dang, darn, and drat. I specifically wanted to visit Black Dog of Wells terracotta workshop in Wells, and we even parked right next to it. So why didn't I go in? What was up with that? Argh. Oh well. Obviously I must now go back there sometime.

Cake Wrecks, Ultra-Yellow Labs, and Cat-a-Pull-Its

The author in a Zen-like
Becky Home-Ecky cake-
frosting moment. This is
a deceptive sort of calm.

The past few weeks have felt like one of those dreams in which you suddenly find that all your belongings have, for some unknown reason, been placed outside as if you are being evicted, and passers-by are examining them in wonder, picking them up and putting them down, always with the prowling threat that somebody might take something, and it's your job to run around and try to gather everything up and bring it back in the house, only you can't because people are constantly trying to catch your attention like you're a sales clerk during the annual Filene's Basement Running of the Brides. Plus whenever you try to use your phone, you keep misdialing the number, again and again, until you finally get it right but then the person at the other end can't hear you.

Which is to say, the past few weeks have been much like those of any other mom trying to balance a tray full of Responsibilities over her head while navigating her way through a restaurant crowded with people snapping their fingers, unexpectedly flinging an arm or shoving a chair into a pathway, and spilling their beverages.

And all that prologue is to justify a totally random posting of pictures. (Can something be a prologue if it is also pretty much the epilogue? I don't know. Discuss amongst yourselves.)

First off is The Cake.


Behold, Cake Rex.


When my family gathered for Easter this year, we decided to celebrate a host of birthdays as well, because during our year of mourning nobody really felt much like celebrating anything.

The celebration of five birthdays requires an extraordinary cake. So I baked and constructed a four-layer tower of a cake, slathering it with homemade icing that I tried to dye purple but which came out more of a lurid pink.Such confection perfection clearly needed to be set upon a worthy throne, so I hauled out the jadeite Martha Stewart cake stand.

The cake stand had done something weird a few years ago. It was sitting in the china cabinet, supposedly content with its lot, while I sat in the living room, minding my own business, reading a book. Suddenly I heard a loud clunk.

The cats were riveted in front of the cabinet, staring in horror, so I knew just where to look for the origin of the mysterious sound. And there stood my cake stand--or rather, half a cake stand. A huge chunk of the plate had sheared off along some hidden fault line, without anybody or anything touching it. Anything that a normal person (or cat) could hear, see, smell, or touch, that is.

I wrote to the catalog company that had sold me the cake plate, but they were Not Helpful. In fact, they told me they were not responsible for the plate because the catalog was now out of business (correlation, causation, anyone?) and they couldn't tell me who'd manufactured the stand, either. So I glued the thing  together and stuck it back in the china cabinet.

It seemed sturdy enough when I set the giant cake on it. When I sliced the cake into quarters, releasing some inner tension inside it, everybody gasped as each quarter leaned sideways, threatening to fall off the stand. Clearly each Leaning Tower of Piece-a-Cake needed to be sliced rapidly for serving, so I quickly bisected one of the quarters.

That's when the cake stand sheared in two again and the entire cake sprawled across the table. Cake Rex had become a contender for Cake Wrecks.

Waste not, want not. We wanted cake. We ate it anyway.

Other holiday festivity included discovering that our yellow Lab was even yellower than usual:

This is what happens when a teenaged girl discovers that the stamens of stargazer lilies brought in for Easter produce dusty gold pollen that works as a dye when rubbed on a surface.

Django, meanwhile, discovered a roll of ribbon just within reach on the basement stairs if he stuck his whole arm underneath the basement door to snag the end of the ribbon with one claw. He did his best to drag it to the water bowl to dunk it, but though the ribbon cooperated with him for most of its length, the roller it was on would not squeeze under the door, and so he was frustrated in not being able to achieve his goal.

The Parrots of Phinney Hill (Keep Calm, Birders, Not Ones for the Life List)

There's nothing like taking your dog for a walk and running into a pair of colorful parrots screeching their opinion of your leashed predator to brighten an otherwise drab day.

Luna and I heard the parrots conversing from a block away, and I knew it was finally spring indeed (despite the damp, cold weather) because the parrot woman never takes her two macaws for a walk unless it's warm enough for them outside. What a delight it was to turn the corner and see her strolling down the street with a blue-and-gold on one hand and a scarlet on the other.

Panama and Louis are two very happy parrots. It's a real kick to see them playing slide-down-the-metal-railing on their front steps or sitting on their perches outside supervising the yard work.

They have a lot to say about what's going on around them, and they're so darn smart, I'm quite sure it'd be very entertaining, if only I could understand their remarks. My husband recalls a parrot he had as a child that loved to whistle in a way that attracted the family dogs; when the hounds barreled into the room, looking around wildly to see who'd called them, the parrot made mischievous laughing sounds.

Luna usually goes into stalking-mode when she sees squirrels, cats, and crows on our walks, but she is completely dumbfounded by the macaws. She doesn't flinch--she's just stunned. She can do nothing but go quiet and stare at them. Clearly she can't make heads or tails of them, and when we walk away, she keeps twisting her head to look back at them; you can almost see the cartoon-strip question marks dancing over her head.

Turtle (B)log

The ever-joyful Labrador and I went for a walk around Green Lake yesterday with a friend, and it was nice to see some signs of spring in what is proving to be the coldest April on record in Seattle. (It's officially cold, not just impatient-warm-weather-waiters cold, according to meteorologist Cliff Mass; everything is blooming late, the temperature rarely nudges above 55 degrees.)

Football-shaped coots grazed on the lawn, and a pair of hooded mergansers floated near the lake's shore. Mallards were everywhere, followed by their fluffy, tennis-ball-sized toddlers. The red-winged blackbird males staked claims to the cattail beds, flashing their crimson epaulettes and shouting.

All this activity was for the birds, in the minds of the turtles resting on logs along the west side of the lake. As soon as a cup or two of sunshine spills on our fair city, they're stacked like plates on the logs, furiously basking.

From the shore I couldn't see what kind of turtles they were--I'd always assumed they were a native species--but when I took some pictures and blew them up, I could see they were red-eared sliders, the same species that once was sold for pennies to kids who kept them in tiny plastic lagoons decorated with a pathetic plastic palm tree. The poor creatures always died within weeks of purchase. 

These turtles were clearly dumped into the lake by owners who no longer wanted the responsibility of caring for them, but fortunately their existence in this lake is not, so far as I've heard, considered a problem. (Green Lake is a natural lake, but it's been heavily modified by humans, including being cut off long ago from a creek that once drained it.) There aren't that many of them, and the lake is quite large, and they don't seem to be gobbling up endangered species or posing any of the problems that the poor pet rabbits abandoned in the nearby woods did.

We watched the turtles for a bit (not that they ever moved) and pondered the odd fact that two out of every five humans who happen upon the turtles feel obliged to say, "Mmm, soup!" and grin around at everybody as though this is a tremendously clever and original remark to make.

The dog didn't consider the turtles worth watching at all. Waterfowl were likewise dismissed, despite the fact that she's a retriever. The only wildlife worth watching at Green Lake in her eyes are the squirrels.