News From Hawkhill Acres

Does anyone else have “issues” with their spell checker? Mine keeps changing words on me. I write “poltroon” and it suggests “pontoon”, which is just silly. Pontoons don’t have livers as any rational person knows. Poltroons, however, do. A poltroon, I’m not, but lily-livered, I am. A species of lily is one of the supplements I take on a regular basis for my formerly wonky – but now pretty healthy – liver. It looks like I may outlive the warranty on my new toaster and may even go on past the sell-by date on Geek Daddy’s latest package of snack cakes.

Of course, this all depends on whether the rest of my vital organs can withstand the rough and tumble of life chez Hawkhill Acres and its environs. This week has given my heart and brain a real workout and made an impression on my largest organ, my skin, too, with a heat rash. It all started when the ol’ Durango started blowing warm air instead of cold air from the AC vents. I made the mistake of mentioning it to Geek Daddy and before I knew what was happening, he had the hood up and was charging the AC with some refrigerant he bought at a yard sale. I didn’t think this was a good idea, but there isn’t much you can do to stop GD when he’s on fire to save money.

He said it was working fine when he was done with the recharge, but that wasn’t my take on it when I drove it to town the next day. Something was making a loud noise every time I turned on the AC.  And because the AC is somehow involved in the defroster system in my Durango, I couldn’t use defrost without that jet engine noise either. I turned off the AC and sweltered all the way home, where I made an appointment with my favorite mechanic, Alan, for the next day.

Alan is a mechanical genius and charges very reasonable rates, but he has an even bigger talent that is the reason that Daughter insists on going with me every time I go there. When you hear what this talent is, you’ll want to take your vehicle to him too. Alan has taught his Golden Retriever to do something that I’ve only read about in books. As a matter of fact, I thought it was a myth until I saw his dog, Biscuit, do it.

Alan places a dog biscuit on Biscuit’s nose and has her stick her nose straight up until he claps his hands. When he does, she flips the biscuit into the air with her nose and then catches it in her mouth, almost faster than your eyes can follow it. While I’m not a big fan of teaching dogs party tricks other than the basic obedience ones, for some reason this just tickles the heck out of me and Biscuit seems to enjoy the heck out of it too. I’m not saying I jump for joy when my car starts making a funny noise or pulls to the left, but it does take some of the tedium and pain out of car repairs when your mechanic moonlights as a dog whisperer.

Another thing that has been amusing the easily amused is a spider who took up residence on my driver’s side mirror for awhile this summer. She’s thick-bodied and black and Daughter noticed her about a month ago as the little arachnid crawled along her web as we breezed along at around 35 mph. As you’ll no doubt remember, Daughter is a scientific type, into animals and ecology and has a love for critters great and small. Even ones with 8 legs, unlike her arachnophobic father. (Of course, if you read about Geek Daddy’s unfortunate encounter with an arachnid with attitude, you’ll understand why he’s not a big fan of the octopods.)

However, Daughter and I have no beef with spiders, as long as they don’t get under the bedclothes or behind the toilet tank – we remove them if they do – so we were fascinated to find that one had set up housekeeping on our car. We were a bit worried though about whether Herself would be able to hang on at high speeds and we wondered what would happen to her web when we whizzed down Rt 95 to Portland or New Hampshire. We needn’t have worried. Even when we went on vacation and  jittered down the washboard roads that lead from Greenville Jct to Kokadjo (population: Not Many as the sign says), the little lady just crawled behind the mirror to re-emerge and make repairs to her web when we stopped for the night.

Every morning for four days, when we left our motel, we’d check to see if she was still there and she was, with a new web woven while we slept. She made it through thunderstorms, blazing hot temps on the 4th of July, dust and grit and pebbles thrown up by the tires and even a direct hit by a small boy’s head when he walked into the mirror because he was watching a fire engine go by. Daughter and I began to take her for granted, but we kind of wondered how she’d do when winter came.

I also wondered what would induce a spider to stay in such a place. Why, when we parked near a nice hedge or field didnt she leave for greener and more stable pastures? What possessed this spider to have such an adventurous streak? Was she, perhaps, born on an RV or did her mom lay her eggs on a tractor trailer truck? Was Papa a rolling stone or did he live on one? I’ll never know. Neither will I know why, the day that we came home from getting the AC fixed and parked in the garage, she apparently decided to leave the mirror for a dark corner next to Geek Daddy’s workbench. When we parked the car, she was there, just emerging onto her web. The next morning, she and the web were gone.

When we searched the garage, we found many, many spiders, but only one that looked like our spider. We’re pretty sure it’s her and want to believe that it is and that she just decided that it was time to settle down and leave the road. Maybe she’s going to lay eggs. We hope so. Maybe someday when we get into the car, we’ll see another web on the mirror and it’ll have a smaller version of her in it. Or maybe Geek Daddy will notice her and call me to remove her. If he does, I think I’ll put her in the basement behind the washer so that I can visit her when I do the laundry.  I guess I’d better let Geek Daddy know where I put her though. For some reason, he has a thing about spiders. And they’re such gentle creatures too.