Toy Horses

Rainy. Cold. Uninspiring weather. Brr. Reminiscing about old toy horses over on my children's-writing website instead: http://christinawilsdon.blogspot.com/2011/04/little-toy-horse.html.

Living Under a Rock (Literally)

Turned over a paving stone in the garden yesterday to see if anything was stirring yet, as spring has been dragging its feet around here this year. Things appear to be busier in the hidden parts of the garden as there were many small creatures bustling about out of sight. They were none too pleased about their roof being lifted, so I didn't leave them uncovered for long--just long enough to take some paparazzi shots.

The most obliging subject was this little mollusk, which I am pretty sure is a Garlic Snail:

The "garlic" in the name refers to its garlicky smell, which it produces when it wants to ward off a predator. This little guy is an import from England, where its pungent odor serves to repel hedgehogs. One would think that smelling like garlic would be a bad idea for a snail, as it might attract French chefs and give them ideas, but apparently it works against hedgehogs.

There aren't any hedgehogs here, so I hope the snail's defenses work equally well against our native predators, particularly this slug- and snail-eating insect that also lived under the stone:

It's a rove beetle (I don't know what species), a kind of beetle with very short hard wing coverings as opposed to the body-length elytra of most beetles. It looks a bit as if it's wearing a short tuxedo jacket with the tails lopped off. Like its snail prey, the rove beetle emits a terrible odor to repel predators. It also takes up a defensive stance, its mandibles ready to pinch and its abdomen arched over its back in scorpion style.

This pugnacity earned it a superstitious association with the devil back in the Middle Ages, one that's clung to it ever since. One species of rove beetle, also an import from the UK, can be up to two inches long and is known as the Devil's Coach Horse, a name that's also commonly used for the thousands of other, smaller rove beetle species. Poor things, all they want to do is eat snails, slugs, and fly larvae, and people run around screaming that these little critters eat sinners and aim their "tails" over their bodies to curse humans.

Another little stinker under the slate was a millipede:

This millipede was very sluggish, acting as though it had just been roused from a deep sleep and had to look for each of its hundred or so slippers before responding to the removal of its roof. Millipedes spend their time munching on decaying plant matter and only produce a dreadful aroma if something tries to eat them, so they're good roommates for the snails.

The pillbugs are, too, as they're not predators, either. This one took offense at my nosiness and did the armadillo thing:

Finally, assuming that I'd gone off to eat other arthropods, it unrolled and trundled on its merry way, shouldering aside garlic snails as it went.

Likin' Lichens

It seems as if it's been raining nonstop for the past few weeks, and when it's not raining, it's drizzling or just about to drizzle. All this water encouraged the growth of lots of moss and even more lichen on the trees in the garden, which actually was really great to see, as they provided bright spots of color in what's otherwise been a gray landscape.

Lichens, as you'll recall from biology class in sixth grade, are a combo of a fungus and an alga (or a blue-green alga, which isn't an alga but a bacterium--are you with me? OK then), with the fungus providing structure, carrying out reproductive and dispersal activities for the team, and soaking up moisture while the alga pays the rent by photosynthesizing food.

Full disclosure: In a moment of supreme hubris, I assumed that identifying these lichens would be easy-peasy. Really, how hard could it be? Unlike birds, these things just sit there, right under one's nose. Grab a guide book, matchy-matchy, ID it, bingo.

Turns out, unless you're a lichenologist, you're unlichenly to identify one that easily. My northwest field guides were useless. Few even bothered to include lichens, and the ones that did only featured a handful, none of which looked like my lichens. Or rather, the apple tree's lichens.

So I waited and waited on hold at the library for a copy of Lichens of North America to arrive. (You know you live in a city drenched with rain for two-thirds of the year when there are two active holds ahead of you for Lichens of North America.)

I'm glad that when it arrived, I had no other books to tote home, because it is a doorstop: It's 800 pages long, two and three-eights of an inch thick, and weighs just shy of 9 pounds. And it's stunning. Flipping through the pages, you'd swear you were enjoying a coffee-table book about coral reefs. Which, as a matter of fact, are beautifully colored thanks to the algae living in the coral polyps, reflecting what's going on with the lichens on land.

However, I haven't made much headway in figuring out the lichen. The gray-green one is surely some type of antler lichen, based on its shape, not that it takes a brainiac to figure that out. It may be a variety called oakmoss lichen, common in Europe but restricted to the west coast in the United States.

I don't have a clue as to what the yellow-green lichen is, because it does not look like anything in the books. I doubt that means I have some stunning rare species in my yard. That much I've learned from birding. Last time I thought a rare bird showed up at my feeder, I was gently informed by the folks at the Cornell Feederwatch program that it was a fabulous sighting but nonetheless not atypical for our area. Oh, and there was that beautiful flower that sprouted in the garden last year that made me think a rare orchid had volunteered there, only to find out while researching it that it was a dreadfully invasive species and needed to be ripped out, beaten with a board, set on fire, and then taken 400 miles offshore and fed to a shark.

I did learn, however, that the people who came up with the common names for various lichens over the years appear to have had a lot of fun. You know how they hire people to come up with names for paint colors and cars? I want to get the job of naming lichens. Below is a picture of the lichen-and-moss-draped trees we saw in the Hoh Rain Forest last year, and below that are the most amazing names gleaned from the Big Book o' Lichens--a total witch's brew mingled with weird diseases, insults, and characters from a spy novel.

punctured rocktripe, lettuce lung, freckle pelt, frog pelt, pimpled kidney, questionable frog, beaded bone, tickertape bone, devil's matchstick, lipstick cladonia, false pixie cup, blood-spattered beard, warty beard, black-eye lichen, bloody-heart lichen, Gritty British soldier, can-of-worms, cowpie lichen, cryptic paw, smoky crottle, pale-bellied dog lichen, earth wrinkles, elf-ear lichen, frosted finger, pixie foam lichen, gnome fingers, gut lichen, rock hairball lichen, edible and inedible horsehair lichen, jelly flakes, jelly strap, blistered jellyskin lichen, lemon-lime lichen, mouse ears, lobed nipple lichen, peacock oilskin, born-again pelt lichen, creamy pepper-spore, mixed-up pixie cup, powder puff, potato chip lichen, lipstick powderhorn, pustule crust, warty ramalina, variable rockfrog, dimpled specklebelly, bare-bottomed sunburst lichen, the dotted line, blackened toadskin

Socks and the Kitty

Django the Art Cat has been experimenting with some new materials as he continues to embellish the dog's water bowl with artifacts to create installations in the kitchen.

Recently, he has stuffed an entire black yard-waste bag into the bowl (no doubt a commentary on water pollution) and padded it with a whole section of the daily newspaper (interestingly, at the same time that I was making papier-mache while helping my daughter make a costume--coincidence? I think not).

One day last week, he draped half a beach towel into the water, then lay on the dry part of the towel sprawled alongside the bowl.

His current obsession is socks--usually whole ones, but sometimes just the cuffs that have been cut off of old, worn-out ones and repurposed:

"I call this one Cuff Lynx."

"And this one is White Sox/Wet Sox."

"This work, jarring in its loneliness, is
'Sock: Lost in Dryer, Now Wetter.'"

He made a valiant effort to add unmentionables from the laundry basket to the water today but was thwarted in this endeavor by the resident bipedal philistine.

Happy Birch Day

If they gave out awards for Best Trees in a Starring Role, I'd nominate and vote for the birch tree, for sure. It definitely deserves a Bosker.*

Why the birch? Well, since you ask...

It's got beautiful white bark slashed with black marks so that it appears to be wisely, mysteriously watching the world with kohl-rimmed ancient Egyptian eyes.

Its leaves are lime green in spring, grass green in summer, and flaming yellow in fall. When they've drifted to the ground, they form a short-lived but beautiful gold carpet that later becomes excellent mulch.

Ants scurry up and down the trunk in summer to visit scale insects higher up in the branches, making for idle amusement as one watches their frantic journeys and laughs at the Labrador who stops in surprise, then thinks "candy tree!" and licks ants off the bark.

My family had birch trees in the front and back gardens of my childhood home. The front-garden one was a multi-trunked specimen, with three trunks that formed a ground-level hardback chair. I liked to sit there in warm weather to read. The back-garden tree had multiple trunks, too, and was much taller. I remember a squirrel who used to cling as far out on a whiplike twig as he could to hang in front of my pet rabbits' hutch and scold the inoffensive bunnies.

During one bracing Long Island winter, we woke up to find the world encased in ice, glittering in the sun: An ice storm had glazed every branch and twig, every conifer needle and blade of grass. It was like awakening in the Snow Queen's palace, surrounded by a cold, fragile, sparkling, yet brutal and deadly beauty. It was a magical fairyland that downed powerlines and snapped limbs and entire trees that couldn't bear the weight of all that ice.

The birches bowed until their crowns touched the ground. Birches are well known for their suppleness--an old Blackfoot legend tells how all the trees were willing to bend and break at the command of the wind, all but the birch, which was punished for its refusal to snap by scarification that created its black slashes.

Peeling bark on the paper birch

As the ice melted, the birches shook off the shards and slowly straightened up again.

But the next time an ice storm threatened, we thought about the neighbors' birches, most of which had cracked in the first one, and quickly built rudimentary frames that would catch our trees at a height of about six feet so they wouldn't bend all the way to the ground. This probably saved them from being turned into firewood post-storm.

We planted birches shortly after we bought our current house about 15 years ago. In the front garden, a graceful Himalyan birch grows in the fill dirt that replaced a monstrous 600-gallon unused residential heating oil tank that we didn't know lurked there until after we bought our house. When it was hauled out, it looked as if we'd dug up a locomotive. In the back garden, a native paper birch towers about 50-plus feet in height.

Two weeks ago, we planted a third birch (another Himalayan) in a corner of the back garden. It's ostensibly there to block out the view of the 3-story house recently built to the northeast of our property. It also felt good to plant it as a way of honoring my father, who recently passed away.

Bark of the Himalayan birch

A birch tree makes a fitting tribute. Dad was a woodworker, and birches have long supplied wood to woodworkers; birchwood has been used to make everything from cradles to canoes. Birches are also an ancient symbol of life in Celtic mythology. They stand for renewal, springtime, purification, and new life.

The word "birch" is thought to spring from a Sanskrit word meaning "tree whose bark is used to write on" (its bark peels off in wide strips and has long been used as paper in many cultures). Because I make my living scribbling, this feels like a nice bonus touch.

The day we planted this tree, I received in the mail a lovely gift from the dear women in my craft group.

A beautiful card informed me that a tree had been planted in a Californian grove in honor of my father via an organization called The Trees Remember.

Dangling from the card was a small silver pendant reminiscent of a birch in its summer glory. (Elizabeth, Rebecca, Ruth, Julie, Rachel--thank you.)

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:

I don't know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

---from "Birches" by Robert Frost

 

*"Bosker" was a lucky discovery as I googled derivations for "bosky" to see if there was such a words as "bosker" to rhyme with "Oscar. I was very pleased to discover that there not only is such a word, but that it means "first-rate, excellent, delightful" in obsolete Australian slang.)

Biking into Spring along the Sammamish River Trail

The eve-of-spring-equinox weekend augured good things to come, what with the supersized perigee moon rising in the East on Saturday night and balmy weather curling up outside like a cat on the porch.

It seemed like a good time to haul out the bicycles and head for the countryside. My husband and daughter had already kick-started the biking season back in January, tooling along the local Burke-Gilman trail on some of the less frigid rainy days of January and February.

For me, however, it'd been at least three years since I'd hopped on a bike, what with One Thing or Another. I had the handlebars jacked up higher in anticipation of this debut in order to alleviate pain and pressure on a newly diagnosed arthritic neck (oh, the joys of ageing), so I was hopeful that I'd be able to stagger along with the two athletes in the family.

Fortunately, other than discovering that a new, broader, more cushioned bicycle seat would be highly desirable, and reconnecting with a pain in my left knee that last manifested itself while riding stationary bikes at a gym in the distant past, I survived and managed to bike 15 miles round trip--and wake up feeling quite good the next day.

Sammamish River

It was thrilling to cover so many miles so quickly (relatively speaking--there are loads of biking enthusiasts here, and I was a slowcoach to them; my ride was pinged with plenty of cries of "on your left" followed by neon-colored Lycra blurs whipping by) and to take in the sounds and sights of spring creeping in.

We drove up to a small park northeast of Lake Washington and set off from there. The Sammamish River drains into Lake Washington, though a friend with a background in hydrology rolled her eyes once when I called it a "river"; during the past 150 years or so, the river's been dredged, straightened, and otherwise rearranged to alter it for navigation, flood control, and the like, its banks hardened and flow increased. Now there's a lot of habitat restoration going on along its shores to make the river suitable for salmon and other species again.

Most plants along the way still wore winter drab: apart from the scarlet twigs of dogwood bushes, the trees and shrubs were gray and brown, the tall grass tan and dry. The edge of one large patch of grass appeared to be woven into a 20-foot rope; I thought perhaps a strong winter wind had knotted them together, but now I'm sorry I didn't stop to examine the braiding because it was, as I later learned, part of a local artist's site-specific installation.

The bare trees and thickets did allow for good nesting viewing, though--a different sort of site-specific braiding installation.

A smudge of green in the willows and a fuzz of pink in the cherry trees were the only spring colors evident.

But a marsh wren sang lustily from a perch in a thicket, and a winter wren, no bigger than a mouse, poured out a river of song from a patch of woodland. (The winter wren is now called the Pacific wren, apparently, not that it cares a whit.) A belted kingfisher rattled in between dives, mallards rab-rabbed, and skeins of Canada geese honked overhead.

No nature-photography awards in store for this snap but I was still pretty
pleased to catch this kingfisher at all from across the river with a small digital camera.

Bikers, strollers, joggers, kids, and dogs were out in abundance, and we even saw some equestrians: two strapping hunter-clipped horses thudded past, carrying two women with the taut, intense faces often worn by Hard Women to Hounds.

Riding back to the parking lot, we fought head winds all the way (which is a totally overly dramatic way to describe our weary pedaling on a minor uphill grade for several miles with a blustery breeze against us, but it's more fun to say). Coming home to a warm house, a huge meal of honey-teriyaki chicken with roast potatoes and broccoli, and leftover banana chiffon cake was a fine way to end the eve-of-spring weekend.

A bend in the river

A row of poplars lines much of the trail on the east
side as it's quite a blustery area and they provide
good windbreaks

Exceedingly large dragonfly perched on a bridge support

Brown Bread from the Emerald Isle

Brown bread was just one of the many scrumptious baked goods that my Irish grandmother, affectionately known as "Mamo," regularly produced in her tiny kitchen in Elmhurst in Queens, New York.

Mamo emigrated from Ireland in the late 1940s and brought with her a wealth of recipes for delights such as lemon cookies, apple pie, custard tarts, Turkish delight, sultana cake, tipsy cake, spotty dog (which was a soda bread), and a yellow cake with chocolate frosting that we have never been able to reproduce and for which the recipe was never written down.

Her recipe for brown bread is as basic as it gets. I've tried several recipes from as many sources, and they all seem to simply tweak the amount of each ingredient; the results are pretty much the same.

Not the best picture of Mamo but the
only one near to hand. She was in her
mid-80s in this snapshot.

My dad, an engineer who was a lifelong fan of hearty bread and a baker of same for the past few years, could not resist fiddling with the amount of the ingredients, either. He saw fit to email me with changes to Mamo's various recipes that involved increasing the amount of buttermilk by an ounce or two or changing the brand of flour.

Every Saint Patrick's Day, I make a big round loaf of Mamo's brown bread. Slathered with butter, it makes for a filling breakfast with a big cup of coffee. It makes me think about Mamo and my other Irish relatives, too.

As a kid, I used to think Mamo was, like, a patron saint or something. She certainly was very religious (we kids said she was "holy"). When I visited her home, I slept on a fold-out cot in her bedroom, and when I awoke, I'd see her sitting up in bed, holding a well-worn, black prayer book, a cup of tea brought by my grandfather at her side. All I would hear is the sibilant whispering of her morning prayers. A painting of the Last Supper arched across the wall behind her.

Oddly, for such a pious woman, she taught me only two Irish phrases: Póg mo thóin (kiss my...erm, backside) and Go hifreann leat! (go to...uh, heck).

I'm glad I got to bake up a loaf of this bread at least once in Mamo's company. She showed me how to knead the gluey mass (today I toss it into the Kitchen Aid mixer and let the dough hook do the work) and how to slash it twice at right angles (according to Mamo, to bless it; according to my mom, who baked this same bread frequently, to make it easier to cut).

I regret, however, that I never asked Mamo to teach me to knit. Wow! What a knitter she was...Aran sweaters, boucle skirt-and-top sets, adorable cabled cardigans for children...and here I can't even cast on and can barely sew a hem.

Go raibh míle maith agat! (May you have a thousand good things!) Here's her recipe. The bread should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom after removing it from the oven. Be sure to put the bread on a cooling rack or lean it at an angle against the wall after you take it out of the oven, otherwise the bottom of the bread will get soft as it gives off moisture. Store it when cool inside a paper bag, not plastic.

Mamo's Brown Bread
(in her words)

2 cups of wheat flour
2 cups of white flour
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
About a pint of buttermilk or sour milk

To make soft dough mix with wooden spoon. Knead it a few times on board or table with flour spread on it. Bake in cooking tray in oven at 400. (Sprinkle flour on tray.) You know how to flatten it on tray and make cross to make four squares.