Landed in Oregon VIII

August 23, 2007

I was watering the yard yesterday, and there was a great ruckus in the trees along the creek. Suddenly, a loud hawk (mid sized) appeared. It was looking down at me. There was a similar squawking from where it came. Had a hawk invaded another’s turf? Then the other hawk flew in. They squawked at each other loudly. After awhile they squawked together. In harmony. Was this like a Hollywood musical? Was I hearing a mating ritual? Or a shouting match? The first hawk took off, landing in the top of a fir a couple of hundred feet away. Looking at me. The other hawk was quiet. The first hawk eventually flew off.

Woodpecker working on the mullein. We saw mullein all along the route to Montana. We need a camera to catch the woodpecker.

Watered along the hillside above the creek. The trees are doing okay -- better than I expected. This may be the last watering of the year. The dawn redwood is so strange. Earlier, I think it got dry and decided that the season was over. It dried up and started shedding needles. When I watered I thought it was dying. When I watered, it thought a new season had begun. Little green shoots appeared all over it. Looks scruffy: the dead needles and the new growth.

August 24, 2007

Second bacon and tomato sandwiches of the season. Tomatoes from the garden. Like tacos, BLTs are the food of the gods.

Watered the lower pasture. Murphy Sequoia looked okay. All the trees are going to make it.

In the goaty boys, Brat’s pasture, there also is mullein and the woodpecker is working them.


August 25, 2007

It is late August, hot and dry, and the hen turkeys are assembling. I think this happens first, by sex, and it is here that they first learn the pecking order. The young hens, high school now, are still a little scrawny. They have started afternoon dusting (I kind of like “wallowing”) themselves in the pumpkin patch. Soon, there will be pumpkins and no leaves or vines or blossoms.

(I wonder if Wallowa Lake is from “wallow?”)

Sun flowers first blooming in the garden. Have one watermelon about the size of a soft ball. .. I’m starting to get anxious. Lots of tomatoes.

Had cucumbers nearly a month ago. In the hot months, real people have sliced cukes with sliced onions, in real cream and vinegar and salt and pepper, chilled. That is what “cool as a cucumber” is all about.

August 26, 2007.

We had A.J. overnight. She enjoyed her raised garden more this time. She ate many tomatoes. They squirt when you chomp down on them and she has promised to never again squirt grandma. Today -- proudly showing me -- she took a box home, saying she would share with her mother. She is two-going-on-ten -- so amazing.

The driveway. It is a kind of embarrassing that I haven’t mentioned it. I guess, when people arrive home, they enter their driveway, come to a stop, and say, “I’m home.” How many people have a driveway 100 yards long? Or, how about: I’m going to go to work now and it is 100 yards before one reaches the highway/road? Everyone ought to have one. Twenty feet wide (legally). A single dirt, gravel lane. About half down hill and half uphill. With a culvert in the middle. Most of it is lined by tall pine or fir. There are places where the canopy is complete. There will come a time when one of these trees is going to fall and close the road. Then we will have to cut ourselves out. “I’m sorry I can’t come to work this morning. A tree fell across my driveway and I need to cut it out.” About one-quarter of its length is fenced (by Gary). Cottonwood and ferns down by the creek (intermittent). There is an effect of driving through a band of trees to reach an opening into the larger property. In the ten years here we went through two bridges. For whatever reason, the price for bridges soared, and we are now trying a culvert. We share the driveway with one other family (soon to be two).

Summer has changed. It is still hot. The range of temperature is wider -- swings of fifty degrees. The heat can be as intense but not as long. It seems the day is slower to heat up and quicker to cool down. Nice.