I'll Just Have Dessert for Dinner

Rustic Rhubarb Tarts and an Apple Pie

And a Sunday River Visit, Too

Saturday Walk Along a Swollen River

The park north of our house. There is a cement retaining wall that separates the swimming area of the river from a sidewalk and the benches. It's completely under water now.

The water in the foreground in the picture above, and seen below, is completely covering the walking path. Some tufts of trees are visible in the middle, with the river and the top of the island in the background on the photo above.

We expected to see fish in the water, too, but only ducks and seagulls on the path. The bike path is on the right of the picture.

A coyote across the river on the island. There was a small group of deer moving along the island behind him but he had eyes only for the swiftly moving water and us, on the other side of it.

For All That He's a Pre-teen...

he's still my baby.

A text message conversation with him, while he was at a friend's baseball game:

S: Spent all yor money mom... hot dog, corn nuts (tooth fell out), sno cone, seeds, and a bottle of water. Luv u

Me: Good boy! I love you too. Are you having fun? How's L's team doing?

S: There loseing by 1... Im having fun...

Me: It's losing, the e drops out with the suffix. Big kisses, glad you're having fun. Xoxo

S: Who cares mom, loseing losing same thing

Me: The Harvard application committee will care and so do I.

S: Ok wot ever... Luv u lots lol jk idk I luvz u mom xoxoxo

Me: U r fun E

S: Ur not good a thes im beter I hav pratice

Me: Freak.

S: I no id is 1

Me: Shut up and watch the game, goober.

S: L lost

Me: Big bummer. Sorry for him. Coming to get jammies? And a good night kiss?

S: And brush my teeth ok see u soon

Coyotes in Cities

On my way to the college this morning I narrowly missed hitting an already-dead coyote on the on-ramp. This particular ramp is close to an expanse of land that ties into the Yakima River Delta, a wild-ish area dense with trees, sagebrush, tall grasses, marshy parts with cat-o-nine-tails, and populated by otters, beavers, pelicans, herons, ducks, deer, all manner of birds, mice, marmots, ticks [shudder], and millions of other little critters. It's an amazing area, full of life, incredible smells, textures, sounds, all nestled between two freeways and poised at the confluence of the Yakima and Columbia rivers.

It's also a perfect example of the modern collision of cities and the "wild". Racing to school, thinking about the rushed morning rituals of showering, making breakfasts and lunches, squeezing in a little time to drink coffee over the paper, I glanced over and saw this beautiful, very dead coyote, and felt a huge thump down in my chest. Coyotes are generally vilified around here--where aren't they, anymore?--but they are still sentient beings with the same basic needs as us humans. Why the coyote was on the freeway is anybody's guess but it's to be expected. Nowadays there are constantly stories in the news about black bears, brown bears, snakes, wolves, deer--you can fill in the blank with any number of wild animals--coming into backyards and creating havoc. The stories mostly end badly for the animal. Heck, even here a cow can constitute a "threat."

A story ran in the local paper last week about an 8 month old bull-calf who escaped his confines and then, when chased by many different people in the middle of some businesses, was shot. Honestly, a calf? He was scared and running wild and confronted with modern life--cars, people, sidewalks, glass. How could he not to react and become aggressive, anything to get back to the safety of his field?

Ever since seeing that beautiful shaggy-coated coyote, dead on the freeway, I've been assailed by (or maybe just more open to seeing) these kinds of contradictions. Modern society and nature. It's an old saw, beaten to death in any number of books, both pro- and anti-nature, or pro- and anti-progress. We want our parks but don't want the rattlesnakes, squeezed out of their habitat, to show up in our playgrounds. We want our river front homes but not the really loud, messy seagulls who congregate there. We want to look at Bambi but we don't want Bambi eating our non-native, expensive, and carefully-cultivated plants.

This is not a touchy-feely anti-hunting, tree-hugging sort of post, here. I'm all for hunting for food. I wish more people did it and really knew where that meat they eat comes from. Or that more people tried to grow their own food and realized that there are plenty of critters out there who also want to eat, maybe even your plants.

No, this is about the inherent contradiction that we live with every day in our modern society. We want great big houses and vast expanses of beautifully tended lawns. We want our nature tame and somewhere else. Maybe in a zoo or something. But not in our backyards. We don't even know how to live anymore in balance with nature. Much better to kill off the scary spider than recognize the good it does in keeping down the insect population. Much better to kill off the brown bear or moose that accidentally stumbles into your yard, when you live smack dab in the middle of a place where you wouldn't even survive without the modern wonders of cargo planes and barges bringing necessary items into the "wild" so you can pretend to be some kind of modern pioneer.

I live in an area that wouldn't even work without the dams that line the Columbia from one end to the other. Without irrigation we wouldn't have agribusiness pumping money into our community. I'm grateful for that, truly; I love where I live. But how can I reconcile the loss of nature at the expense of progress? How can I even try? I don't want to go back to beating laundry on the rocks and growing corn just to keep my chickens going. I do, however, want to figure out how to live a balanced life where wild animals (and a bull-calf) are not seen as the enemy.

Corraling the Girls

We have finally reached a compromise in the on-going chicken war. Okay, "war" might be exaggerating the situation a little, but sometimes it has felt like a constant siege of free-ranging, free-pooping chickens on the one hand and the irritated complaints of 3/4s of my household who like running in the yard barefoot or more strangely, stepping out onto the deck without going on land-mine watch.

I've been siding with the chickens. I like watching them out the back window as I do dishes or sit at the table with my coffee. I like how big and orange my eggs are, I like how healthy and happy the girls seem to be, free to run around, flip in the dirt, or doze in little spots of shade. And isn't chicken poop excellent fertilizer? Yes. However, as it keeps trying to move into summer here I'm finding that maybe there might be a grain of sanity in wanting to be able to sit out on the deck without tiptoeing around poop or having to kick chickens away from my lunch.

Like the good married couple we are, my husband and I finally reached a compromise which should satisfy all involved (well, maybe not the chickens, whose freedom has been severely curtailed, but oh well). And like all of our projects, it's a little funky, our solution. Better Homes & Gardens is certainly not going to be knocking on my door anytime soon to do a spread on us. It works, though, and I should finally be able to get some flowers in planters and herbs in the raised bed without fear of them being demolished by the girls.

Spiders

Millions of little spiders about to be relocated as we work on keeping the chickens off the deck.