Tails of Compassion: My 24 Hours with "Billy Graham"

The other evening I arrived home at about 6:00. Immediately my ears became aware of a different sort of sound- an animal no doubt- a high pitched chirpy wine, almost birdlike, but different and more insistent. I followed the sound into the garden to the patch of red clover cover behind the corn, and found who was to eventually become known as "Billy Graham," a tiny furry squirrel with eyes still closed from birth. He stumbled blindly through the foliage, crying and yelling for his mama.

At this point in the story I will stop and comment for a moment. The first thing I will say is, I do not know for the life of me how anyone, I mean Anyone, can encounter a baby animal of any sort and respond with anything other than unadulterated care and compassion. Even if the ultimate action chosen is to kill, is there not a biologically hard-wired response to help and care for the helpless babies? Someone, no names will be mentioned, said to me upon hearing of my night with Billy Graham- "Why all the fuss- it's just a squirrel- a tree rat," and went on to inform me that his/her course of action would be to put it in a bucket and drown it. A) I think that is bullcrap- I don't think this person would kill anything, and B) I am convinced that the response I had to Billy Graham is one that pretty much anyone would have.

First I picked up Billy Graham and talked pretty to him for a good long time while I thought. While I was thinking and pretty talking I heard the demanding chatter of an adult squirrel coming from the woods, not too far away. I followed the sound, carrying Billy Graham in the palm of my hand, until I saw a messy nest of leaves up in a tree in the general vicinity of the chattering adult. I decided to leave Billy Graham in a flat nook at the base of a nearby hemlock tree and give him a chance to be fetched by his mother before dark. I wished him well and set off to do some chores.

At just dark, I returned to the hemlock tree where I had left Billy Graham, and found him curled up in a tiny ball, sleeping soundly. I figured he didn't stand much of a chance overnight on his own like that, so I gently scooped him up, startling him into a brief fit of spastic yelps, and took him down with me to the camper. I didn't have much on hand in the way of baby squirrel formula, so I heated a bit of raw cow's milk and fed it to Billy Graham through a tincture dropper. I tried to feed him slowly enough that it wouldn't give him a belly ache. When I reckoned he had had enough, I put him into a bus tub with dry sawdust and leaves. He immediately burrowed down to the bottom of the bedding, managing to completely hide himself and insulate his wee little body from the nighttime chill.

The next morning, Billy Graham woke up hungry. I gave him a couple more droppers of the warmed milk and left him in his little box under the hemlock when I went to work, hoping that he would wake up hungry and cry for his mama- and that she would come for him in the daylight.

All day long I thought about Billy Graham, wondering how he was faring, and thinking of what I would do if I came home and he was still there. I posed a question to my co-workers: If any of them happened to be a lactating woman, would they extract a little of their own milk and feed it to Billy Graham with a dropper. Most of the answers were a grossed out negative. I was curious where people drew the line. My answer was hands down, without even thinking about it- of course I would. The instinct to help a baby seems so natural and it's not like one that small would require a lot of it.

On the way home from work I bought some goat's milk to feed Billy Graham in case he was still there. My neighbor said that cow's milk is really hard on a baby squirrel but that goat's is easier. When I got home he was gone. I found out that Todd had been up there working and heard Billy Graham screaming and went into the woods to find that he had climbed out of his box and was stumbling around 30 ft away, crying of hunger. Todd fell in love and fed him some milk through the dropper, which was laying out, and returned him to the box. What happened in the 2 hours between that feeding and when I came home will remain a mystery. Did Billy Graham wander away? Did his mother come for him? Did a natural predator eat him up and survive another day by the bounties of the forest?

I am completely comfortable not knowing the fate of Billy Graham. I wish him the best- I knew him to be a survivor with a lot of vitality left in him. Mostly I will remember him for how strongly he made me aware of my core inclination to help animals. Somehow it is comforting to remember that Life wants to perpetuate Life. I believe it is one of the great laws of the planet we live on, and the fact that it crosses the boundaries of species and rationality brings me much delight.

Greasy Beans and Dramatic Weather

Some of you die-hard readers (all two of you) may remember me being pumped about my new neighbor giving me some local heirloom greasy bean seeds at the beginning of this season. Well, I grew them out and Mom and I went out and picked yesterday a bit before the spell of dramatic weather which is moving in tonight. Mom prepped (strung) and cooked a big mess of them for dinner and froze a couple gallons for later. I have to say, as someone who feels entirely neutral about the world of green beans, those things pretty much rocked.




Speaking of the dramatic weather, I have decided that dramatic weather is the thing I am skeered of. As in s-k-double e-red. People are saying we might get 10 inches of rain in the next three days. Yay for the rain. Boo for the dramatic presentation. Last night I got home to the camper in the pitch dark, and started the project of trying to weather proof the leaking spot for the Big Rain. One of the window areas, after caulking and sealing, still leaks in water, and it is right over the foot of my sleeping area. I imagined waking up to the sound of wind and rain driving into my little aluminum box. I could feel the wet feet and hear the angry roar of the storm. It felt kind of familiar to be out in the dark with a flash light, jury rigging something as a guard against weather-induced damage. Standing out there on a chair with a flashlight, duct taping a piece of plastic over the leaky window as the rain began to drizzle, my mind was "flooded" with memories of recent years past. 2 am trips up the ladder in my cotton candy pink fluffy bathrobe to scrape loads of heavy wet snow off the once intact awning... Waking to the deadly sounding crack of a poplar tree falling onto the camper above my bed and opening my eyes to find myself face to face with the long-defunct AC unit which had been mounted on top of the roof... The raging roar of flash flood waters flushing large logs into my camper step, a tile saw from its resting spot in the barn into a culvert under the road, and a large glass door into the creek bank... The clatter of gumball sized hail like bullets pummeling the top of the camper and the little tin shed roof out front. Wading through the raging flash flood river in cowgirl boots and my trusty pink robe to take shelter within the caving in walls of Shorty and Starling Gentry's old house on higher ground.
Oh, the special times I have had with the Ladyhawk.
But I admit, weather and time have made me softer, or wiser, or just fearful of god, and after I rigged up that heavy duty clear plastic over my leaky window and took care of a few other preparations, I turned right back around and drove to Hot Springs, to take shelter in a more sturdy and leakproof shelter for the duration of this bout of "dramatic weather." The final straw was realizing that when nature called (I mean really called) I would be out in whatever kind of rain or storm with my little shovel digging and doing my business in the elements. Damn I need to dig that outhouse...

Stay tuned for Tails of Compassion: My 24 hours with "Billy Graham"

News from the Home Front

With Hurricane Irene pending, I have two items of news from the new home front:
1) I am moving back into the Airstream, where I plan to reside until I move into the house.

2) The upstairs ceiling in the house was completed today, with left over siding wood (white pine from the land- planed, sanded and oiled). The upstairs is now ready to paint.

Tales of Spontaneous Combustion

Act One: It was a clear, crisp, pleasant August late afternoon (yesterday, to be exact), and certain carpenters were preparing to leave their jobsite (my house, to be exact) for the day. A certain M.A., whose humor is so dry and deadpan that I still, after almost a year of regular dealings with him, cannot decipher when my leg is being pulled, calmly and casually mentioned something about a pile of oily rags spontaneously combusting and not putting them too near the house. What he was saying kind of "went in one ear and out the other" until I noticed the aforementioned linseed oil-soaked rags in a neat little pile, smoldering and smoking away.




Act Two: It was a hot, steamy summer day in North Asheville (a recent day this summer), and L.C. was busily working in her family's garden shop in Woodfin. All was ho-hum daily grind, until L.C. noticed that a coconut hull- lined hanging basket had burst into flames upon receiving a concentrated ray of sunlight from a nearby ornamental glass garden globe. Rushing to the site of spontaneous combustion, she grabbed the flaming planter and tossed it into the small creek which runs between the shop and its garden- the very same creek that a poor raccoon met its fatal fate a recent night in a flash flood and became rather grotesquely "hung up" on the small bridge which crosses the little creek.






Act Three: It was a cold late winter day in South Asheville, and J.L. (aka Lil Razz) was enjoying a rare weekend day alone in her shared house. She stepped into the kitchen to find a little snack, and noticed a small round burnt spot on the counter top, where earlier that day had lain a solitary Advil pill. The burn spot was the size and shape of the Advil, and the Advil was gone. After several minutes of concentrated investigative thinking, J.L. realized a ray of sunlight had streamlined through the kitchen window and through a clear glass pitcher of water on the counter in perfect relation to an Advil to cause a "magnifying glass" combustion of this particular over-the-counter muscle relaxing pain pill. Pity the pre-menstrual housemate who came home to discover the pill had ceased to be available.

Act Four: It was a warm spring evening at the Asheville Pizza and Brewing Company, where three friends awaited a cheese pizza. One of the friends stepped out for a breath of fresh air and a look about, and noticed billows of smokes rising from the mulch on the side of the driveway of the neighboring food enterprise "Heavenly Ham". She quickly ascended the steep and uneven steps between the two parking lots and discovered a sizable "mulch fire" just outside Heavenly Ham. Too hot to stomp out, the fire needed "a little something more." The investigative pizza customer noticed a group of young Heavenly Ham employees loitering around a dumpster not far away, smoking cigarettes and laughing. She approached the posse, and said, "There's a mulch fire in your mulch." One of the Heavenly Ham employees sighed and said, "Not again," before casually retrieving a bucket of water and tossing it upon the smoldering wood matter.

When you think about it, there is danger everywhere. Matter waiting to spontaneously combust. Fires waiting to burn. Danger, I tell you. Beware, fellow flesh-wearers, of material that generates its own heat and of glass that magnifies light. As M.W. so poignantly put it: "Prismatic-like objects- they're not just for rainbows..."

Cemetery: Post Decoration

This little cemetery is about a 2 minute walk from my new place, closer than the nearest neighbors. The descendents of the souls who rest here mow and decorate the graves every summer. I find it astounding that these people, some of whom died more than a hundred years ago, are still honored yearly with bush hogging and placement of colorful fake flowers. I have heard people wiser than myself say that a most important part of finding spiritual wholeness in life is to honor ones ancestors. I should pay attention and follow the example of my new neighbors who practice the tradition of Decoration Day. I ought to find a way to celebrate my family legacy- those random, unknown predecessors of me. I should make them known to myself.





I like the way the late summer evening light angling into the cemetery has a presence of its own, like the collective spirits of the deceased, remembering themselves in this place.

News from the Garden (aka: as if the exact thing you want to do in mid-August is read about someone else's damn garden)

Even though it has not rained in weeks, and the very green life beneath my feet is wilting and withering away, I am still pretty pumped about the garden. Even though a raccoon or two is prancing into the garden at night like a spoiled only boy-child in China and sampling ear after ear of corn until it finds just the right one, I am still actually thrilled about the garden. Even though the cucumber vines grow and grow, spilling their lucsious looking selves over this and that and the other yet don't get enough water to actually mature their little fruits, I am tickled pink about the garden. You get the gist. The past two days I have combed the carnage of the raccoonage and salvaged what of corn I could for eating fresh or drying, and with the rest I have salvaged the fresh silks for tincturing. (Don't worry, I didn't gather silks that would have had raccoon saliva all over them...) I have neatly arranged rows of bloody butcher corn on blankets in my bedroom floor, in an attempt to dry them off the stalk for grinding corn meal this coming year. My little green-grey jarradale pumpkin-y squashes are growing, regardless of the dry spell, as are the butternuts. The wild green-headed coneflowers (also called sochan) are gorgeous in full bloom along the garden edges.







My biggest thrill is coming from the compost cage I have built and the righteous mound of decay I am assembling inside of it. Truckloads of leaf and twig chips, manure from the neighbors' barn, and year-old leaf mold in neat rectangular layers really floats my boat. Next I will be layering in the sawdust that I stashed in large piles from the sawmill operation of last summer and more manure from the neighbors' barn. This fall, I'll add freshly fallen leaves and, you guessed it- more manure. Oh yeah, I might also be busting up scraps of drywall from the house and composting that too for the gypsum and such, but first I have to find out if it contains any anti-bacterial agents because that just wouldn't work in the compost or soil. Come spring, the compost cage is going to be bustin at the seams with rich usable, fluffy black gold.




I think I am going to ask a neighbor to plow the whole garden under again this fall and sow it with a winter cover again. Next year I plan to really go at at.

The sky is always pinker on the other side of the state line

Living minutes from the NC/TN state line, our sun always sets in Tennessee.



What my phone camera would not take a picture of was the dreamy pastel rainbow in the clouds above Lovers' Leap on the NC side. It was the stuff poetry is made of. Take that, you lawless, cock fightin', non- snow plowin', knife flingin', crazy muffin top breedin' east Tennessee! We have good things in the sky too, even if they are not breath-stopping neon orange pink sunset displays that make you pine for the open road and the Loretta Lynn Diner and Gift Shop.
(ps-I love you anyways, Tennessee, even if I will never call you home...)