News From Hawkhill Acres

Just this morning, I was complaining to my brother that I’m already sick of winter in Maine.

“Cheer up,” he said, “You’re not really sick of winter, because it’s not winter yet. You’re still sick of fall.”

How encouraging. He’s probably the person who came up with the Maine Tourism Board’s current headline: “Winter is When Maine Really Sparkles” or some such tripe. As I type this, there’s a couple feet of snow sparkling leering at me from outside the window. Well, I think it’s leering. It was leering at me when I looked at it before it got dark around 3:30. This weekend, we’re supposed to be hit by a Nor’easter with snow, wind and blizzard conditions. How jolly. I’ll lay in another pallet of toilet paper and bread. That’s what New Englanders stock up on whenever bad weather is forecast. I have no idea why.

Me, I stock up on books. This is why I went to the library this morning and returned with several cloth bags just bulging with reading material. Daughter filled her bags with books about fairies, animals, some graphic novels featuring “Fashion Kitty”, one of the Warrior books and a few American Girl books just to round things out.

Son opted for his usual Fantasy novels by R. A. Salvatore and others and some art books. He’s spending so much time on his art lately that he has less time to read. But every once in awhile, like a drowning man gasping for air, he’ll surface from the art and read great gulps of a novel late into the night.

I got my usual mixed bag of fiction and non-fiction. In case you’re really interested, here’s a list in no particular order of what I’ll be reading as the winds wail and the generator burns up gallons of propane when the power goes out.

The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash. ( A bathroom book if ever I read one.) Webonomics by Evan I. Schwartz (so I can see how well he did at predicting what was going to happen to the Net from the vantage point of the early 90s. So far, he’s not doing too well. He says paypal type operations have no future.) Google Hacks by several authors. (Hmm, I’m noticing a trend here.) The Modern Deer Hunter by John Cartier. (Well, maybe a couple of trends.) Natural Ideas for Christmas. (We’re not celebrating Christmas so I have no idea why I got it, but I’m sure I had something in mind.)

The Lobster Chronicles, Life On A Very Small Island by Linda Greenlaw. (She’s the author of The Hungry Ocean, a great read.) When You Need A Lift But Don’t Want to Eat Chocolate, Pay a Shrink or Drink a Bottle of Gin by Joy Behar and Friends. (These are all subjects that Mainers start thinking about sometime between October and May.) Chat by Archer Mayor, another Brattleboro mystery. (I’ve spent a lot of time in Brattleboro and I love reading mysteries set in places I’ve spent time in.)

Three Sisters, A Charlie Moon Mystery by James D. Doss. (This is the series with Charlie’s aunt, Daisy, a Ute shaman, helping him whether he wants her to or not. I’ve really enjoyed every one of them. The characters just keep getting better. If you like Tony Hillerman, try these.)

I’ll preface this by saying that the last book on my list The Intellectual Devotional General Edition has mistakes in it. I found one of them and there are comments on the book’s website citing other mistakes. A tad more editing would have been a good idea, but even so, it’s a darned good book. So there. I got it from the library, but will be buying it and its companion volume, The Intellectual Devotional American History Edition as soon as Ma Nature quits dumping snow on my little corner of Maine.

How can you not like a book which begins with John Smith and the Pequot Wars and ends with The Simpsons and Ronald Reagan? (I love the irony of the Pequots having the world’s biggest casino in spite of earlier attempts on the government’s part to eradicate them from America.) In between, there’s lots of good stuff like a page about James Baldwin. Although I read his novel Go Tell It On The Mountain back in high school, I never knew that he was gay or that this distanced him from the mainstream civil rights leaders because they didn’t want to be associated with a gay man. Of course, many of the leaders like King and Abernathy were also ministers, so this doesn’t surprise me. It angers me, but it doesn’t surprise me.

If you’re looking into the teeth of a Nor’Easter or a Sou’wester or some other directionally-enabled weather, hie thee to your library and check out some books on my list or someone else’s list. Or just browse the shelves, picking books at random to stuff into your book bags. Heck, even if you’re facing a long run of sunny days with beach weather temperatures, you should get some books. That way you’ll have something to read at the beach.

We have beaches in Maine. They’re currently covered in two feet of snow, but I’m not bitter. I have my books. Check back in 8 days when winter officially starts. I may be just a tiny bit bitter by then.

Okay, so I’m up to my wimple in yellow brocade, hemming these sleeves that go down to the floor and look like batwings, when Mark, the pool guy, knocks on the door, Daughter starts wailing that there’s a hornet in her room and Son clomps down the stairs and announces that he can’t get the blue lines off a stop sign, so he won’t have a shield for the next time he fights and besides that, how the heck can he make a lobstertail without the material? How, indeed?

Yanno, according to the free horoscope that I get every day, we’ve entered the peace-loving sign of Libra, where balance is everything. Reflecting the fall equinox, which was yesterday according to my calendar, Libra ushers in a season of sharing, socializing and fairness in business and personal relationships. Time to get together with friends and family, try new things and party hearty. Oddly enough, that’s what we’re doing, which is why I’m sewing, Son is making a shield and we’ll be camping in a field in Maine in September at a re-enactment of a Middle Ages Hunt. I ought to have my head examined.

The pool guy was here to close the pool, because it’s way too cold to swim, even though the daytime temps get up to 70-something. At night, it dips down into the 40s and even 30s, so the water is a tad nippy by morning. He was knocking on the door to let me know that there was a horse in my yard again, so I called my neighbor and she said she’d be right down to get the little dickens. Only a horse lover could call something that weighs as much as some cars a “little dickens” with a straight face. The horse lover’s face, not the horse’s.

The lobster tail, by the way, is layered pieces of leather which go on the back of a hockey helmet, which is what youth fighters wear when they fight like knights used to fight if knights had worn hockey helmets and padding. The stop sign is one that the geek got when the Department of Transportation threw it away and will be turned into Son’s shield, if he can figure out how to cut it into a shield shape with the puny tools that inhabit our garage.

For tin snips, he’s using some clippers that are barely a threat to hydrangeas. Somehow, I don’t think they’re the stuff that Middle Ages’ ironmongers reached for when they needed something to shape a knight’s shield. What he needs is a huge, heavy mallet and some giant, razor sharp cutters that could rip his arm off if he slips while cutting the sign.

Trust me when I say how sorry I am that we don’t have such a thing in our garage or anywhere in the house either, so he’ll just have to use the hydrangea clippers until the geek gets home to help him. (Hey, call me a wimp, but I’m not up for a trip to the ER and I’m a little hazy on tourniquet application for arterial wounds.) Oh, and I forgot to add that the reason helmets have lobstertails is to protect the fighters’ necks and the tops of their spinal columns from blows that might sever one or the other.

Why the HELL can’t males find something safe to do? Why do they always have to be doing something that can result in death if one little thing is overlooked? And why is it that the list of things that can’t be overlooked is always the list that they hand to Mom? While the list they keep is the list of equipment that they need to play the game that will almost certainly result in death, dismemberment, bankruptcy or all of the above. But, what of that?

I paid the pool man and waved at our horse-loving neighbor as she rattled a can of feed at the horse, who ignored her and peevishly kicked over our garden bench. Then I went upstairs and dispatched the errant hornet with a fly swatter, thus freeing Daughter from her room where the hornet had her and about a dozen beanie babies trapped in a corner. (Beanie babies are notoriously wimpy about hornets, Daughter says, and she stayed to comfort them.)

Downstairs, Daughter’s renaissance gown leered at me from my chair, so I glared at it and went out onto the deck to sit in my rocker for awhile. It was very peaceful out there with nary a sign of the horse, my neighbor, hornets or pillaging knights. However, a lot of the leaves have gone over to the Dark Side and are turning colors much faster than they need to. It’s only September, after all, not December.

This is the fall equinox when we start the long, slow slide into cold and grayness that is winter in Maine and New England. We can camp out this weekend. Sure, we can. (I’m channeling Mr. Rogers here, folks.) So what if it’s cold and damp and we wake up feeling as clammy as bait in a cooler? That’s all part of the fun, isn’t it? We’ll warm up, just like the temperature warms up and the mist burns off when the sun comes out.

In September, you can get away with camping in Maine, as long as you have that sleeping bag that’s good to 30 below. Not that it gets to 30 below, but that’s what it takes to keep warm in September in Maine, no matter what the tag says. Trust me on this. And if you need more information… If you can’t get your lobstertail tied on right or if your snood just won’t lie flat, look me up. I’ll be the one in the wool cloak, wool tabard, wool skirt, thick cotton tunic and voluminous chemise, wrapped in the “good to 30 below” sleeping bag and half a quart of mead.

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Shoes don’t usually figure largely in my life. I have a pair of frocs (faux Crocs), a pair of sneakers, winter boots and rubber boots. The frocs and sneakers live in the mudroom. The boots live in the garage. So when I went to put on my sneakers one rainy day last week, I was mystified when they were nowhere to be found. I hunted all over the mudroom, all over the house and even out on the deck, but they weren’t there. (I did find a saucepan, a dish towel and a salt shaker that I’ve been looking for, but no shoes.) I finally gave up and wore my Frocs, which meant that my feet got wet immediately and stayed that way all day.

I was headed out to pick up my kids at camp, which is a nice drive through a little town and then onto winding country roads. With If You Ain’t Got the Do-Re-Mi in the cd player and a smile on my lips, I tooled along, humming and enjoying the scenery in spite of the rain. That’s when I saw the sign. It was yellow and looked like a regular “caution” sign. But it said, “Caution. Blind Chicken.”

Well, I didn’t really know what to do about the blind chicken. Assuming it wasn’t deaf, wouldn’t it hear the car and stay out of the road? But then I thought about the chickens I’ve known over my lifetime and realized that even sighted chickens aren’t too reliable when it comes to cars. That’s when I saw the flock of chickens. There were six or eight of them, pecking around right at the edge of the road. So, I wondered, which one is the blind one? And how do I tell?

They all looked at me with that crazy, yellow-eyed, bugga-bugga look that chickens have, like they’re one anger management class away from blowin’ up the joint. None of them looked blind, but they all looked fully capable of running in front of me. So I slowed way down, after looking in my rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind me, and drove past them very carefully. Than I started wondering.

What if there is no blind chicken? What if the chicken farmer just put up that sign to make people slow down so they wouldn’t run over his stupid chickens. “Yah!” I thought as I got more and more worked up. “None of those chickens looked blind to me. Boy did I just get scammed! And I even slowed down and everything.” Then I thought about that whole thought process and realized that I was really missing the whole point, which is: What kind of wacko would put up a “Caution. Blind Chicken Sign.” in the first place?

While I was mulling that over, I passed a house where there’s a corn stand in the summer. A woman runs it. She wears one of those white kerchief type headcoverings, a long blue jumper and a white long-sleeved shirt. And a raccoon mask. Honest. I am not making this up. I don’t know if she belongs to a cult of corn-worshippers showing their reverence by wearing the masks because raccoons love corn too or what.

I’ve never stopped for corn there, but I’m going to one of these days, just to see if she says anything about the raccoon mask. And while I’m at it, I can ask her about the blind chicken. After all, it’s her neighbor. If I had a blind chicken for a neighbor, I’d know about it. I don’t, by the way. One of my neighbors has an almost deaf Black Lab, but no blind chickens.

Now, you have to remember that I live in Maine, not New Zealand for this next piece of information. Right next to someone’s mailbox, I saw a kiwi pecking at a plant. Long beak. Roundish body. Looked just like the one on the shoe polish can. I know, I know, there are no kiwis in Maine, but what if one got blown off course? That’s what I told my kids when I got to camp, when they told me I couldn’t have seen a kiwi.

My daughter even got out the bird book when we got home and told me that it was a Thrasher. A Thrasher! Who is she going to believe? The bird book or the shoe polish can? Me, I believe that it was a kiwi that got blown off course and landed in Maine. It’s probably wondering how the heck it got here and where all the sheep are. My daughter also solved my missing shoe mystery. They were on the floor in the backseat, where she’d left them when she wore them out to the car to get to her sneakers, which she’d left in the car the day before. Sometimes, life makes less sense to me than a road sign does to a blind chicken.

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