Wow - another 10 days gone. I'm still sort of drifting in time - not just 1972, 2020, and 2026 but all parts in between. I just have random memories of my life - and, of course, Bob was always part of it.
I do need to stop doing stupid things. I'm very good about shutting the chickens in their coop at night - but two night this month I thought I remembered doing it but didn't. Thank goodness nothing got them. Must get my brain to brain.
The weather is also messing with my sense of time passing. Last week it was in the 50s. Today it was 80. By next Tuesday it's supposed to be a high of 50 again. But my azaleas are blooming. It's just confusing.
My last post - 10 days ago - I said I was keeping myself open because Jeff was in town. I was hoping to spend some time with him - maybe have him out here for a fire and to listen to the spring peepers, maybe make a pizza for dinner. Alas - work kept him tied up. He was able to slip out for a couple of hours on one of my museum days - he and Suzie and I had lunch, and we walked around for a little while, but that was it. As always, I keep thinking "hopefully next time."
Wilbur the Owl is still in flirting mode. Some days he gets a meatball for dinner, other days he gets a (pre killed) rat or chick. On those days, he's taken to not eating it, and instead saving it to show off the next day to tell us what a good hunter he is.
I did something a little different last week. In mid 2020, when I was still being a bit frenetic after Bob died, I bought a djembe - a small African drum.
I figured I would learn how to play it, and maybe find a drum circle to join. But, of course - Covid. The drum has been sitting in a closet. Last week the senior center was offering a drum workshop so I took it and went. It was fun - the guy running it had drum available for people who didn't have any, and about 30 people showed up, and there was enough chaos that it really didn't matter what any one individual sounded like. They might do it again in a few months.
I had to get domestic in the kitchen for a couple of days. Sometimes Cosco gives the museum produce that is past the sell-by date. They went crazy last week - three boxes, 5 feet on the side. The two refrigerators were as packed as they could get, other food went to rehabbers, and there was still tons of produce that had to be adopted or tossed. So I brought home pounds of spinach, blueberries, guavas, raspberries, a pineapple . . . The raspberries got turned into coulis - easy. The guavas . . . they were the yellow ones, not pink, not ripe, not juicy. I could have just tossed them. But nooooooo. I chopped them up, covered them in water and boiled them to softness, pushed them through a sieve to remove the zillions of seeds, added sugar to the pulp, and boiled it down to make a sort of guava butter. Three hours of work for a pint of butter (I will admit that the flavor is pretty intense).
At least blueberries are easy to free (and I brought home to limes, which have also been cut into wedges and frozen). I've been eating a lot of spinach, as have the chickens. Still need to deal with the two bags of little cucumbers and that pineapple.
I've lost a little bit of my lovely sense of isolation out here. I wrote last year of meeting my neighbor Steve. Yes - there is another house (several in fact) not that far from me, but I can't see them through the trees and I just ignore their existence. But Steve is a little odd - he's been putting up a high fence all around his property (I wonder what his next-door neighbors thing of that). There is an alternate road out of my place (which I never use so I sort have forgotten about it) that when I was getting the roof redone the truck bringing the shingles needed to use, so I had gotten out there to trim away some branches and underbrush. Steve had some out, all concerned, worrying that I was going to start using that road, which runs in front of his house. Strange - it's a public access road (and no, I don't use it).
It's nothing that bothered me - I allow other people their odd ways - until this week. In the area of our (still say that, even though it's technically just mine) land in front of my cottage and on the way down to the stream is a cleared circular area. My walking path is there. In my head, the border between our property and the next one (which is now Steve's) was where the clearing ended and the trees started. The reality (which I've always known, and it's on the map of our property) is that the dividing line cuts across the clearing - and now there's a fence there. It feels intrusive - from the front of the cottage, and the burn pit there, it now stands saying "this is not yours."
I'm thinking that I might train some of the ivy that has taken over the garden over there to climb that wire.
And I know that Bob would be absolutely livid. After 30+ years here, you'd think that we'd have squatters rights to that cleared area.
Stay tuned . . .
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