Things come and things go. There is a wind ever through our souls.
A baby cottontail now lives under our house on the mountain.
It is all open crawlspace under the house and only about two-thirds of it is sealed off with any sort of material. Anything—cat, possum, dog, bear, baboon—could crawl in right under the porch, and more than a few have.
What more, the property is on enough of an incline that the outside walls of the house, on the mountainward-side, sit on nothing more than a couple of termite-ridden two-by-fours, themselves resting on naught but dirt. Rotted holes aplenty make speedy passage into and out of the crawlspace for our cottontail.
We catch the young buck or doe before she darts in through one of the holes sometimes. She seems to enjoy nibbling on the part of the lawn where I spread white clover seeds last year. The clover has come back flush and green as ever.
Clover was an idea that started like this:
It's astonishing how quickly four pairs of chicken-claws can turn puffs of overgrown stiltgrass and violets and dandelions into dust, but in an effort to give them some free-ranging, we rotate them, moving their electric fence here and there so our three-toed dinosaurs can get at some fresh greens while letting their previous scoured patch of dirt recover a season or two before rotating them back again.
Even in these humid woods, where vines and weeds and funguses and mosses grow rapacious, it can take a season or two for a chicken-reaped patch of dirt to recover with beads of new green. So I wondered if a bag of grass seed wouldn't speed the process along. But the copious shade of our yard didn't suit any type of grass much at all. However, a bag of clover seed proved to be a cheap and. speedy substitute.
Whether in the cold dewy spring mornings or the frosty late fall or the swelter of the summer, clover doesn't mind at all. And it brings bunnies apparently...
It's the funniest thing to see our baby cottontail out there, nonchalantly nibbling away at clover as the chickens stare their red eyes at her like they would like to peck her bones clean.
But, I must admit, this was all some two or three weeks ago. There is no baby cottontail anymore. We do not know what happened to her. The clover is as full and flush as ever. But she does not come back. Speculations abound, everything from stray cats (a scourge afflicting these residential woods) to the extra hawks we've seen fluttering about. But no answer eases our concern. She's lost. She's gone on to wherever it is that baby cottontails go, whether that is an everafter or another yard, I do not know.
A lot of things like that, lately, it seems. Things come. Things go. Into our lives and out of them again. Passages running, like invisible tunnels in the wind, by our faces. Our time here crisscrossed with things coming and going, till you realize that you, too, are coming from somewhere and heading somewhere else, as well.
In a blink, it'll be time to move on.
That's all from the mountain this perhaps weekly. I promise another shortly.
A baby cottontail now lives under our house on the mountain.
It is all open crawlspace under the house and only about two-thirds of it is sealed off with any sort of material. Anything—cat, possum, dog, bear, baboon—could crawl in right under the porch, and more than a few have.
What more, the property is on enough of an incline that the outside walls of the house, on the mountainward-side, sit on nothing more than a couple of termite-ridden two-by-fours, themselves resting on naught but dirt. Rotted holes aplenty make speedy passage into and out of the crawlspace for our cottontail.
We catch the young buck or doe before she darts in through one of the holes sometimes. She seems to enjoy nibbling on the part of the lawn where I spread white clover seeds last year. The clover has come back flush and green as ever.
Clover was an idea that started like this:
It's astonishing how quickly four pairs of chicken-claws can turn puffs of overgrown stiltgrass and violets and dandelions into dust, but in an effort to give them some free-ranging, we rotate them, moving their electric fence here and there so our three-toed dinosaurs can get at some fresh greens while letting their previous scoured patch of dirt recover a season or two before rotating them back again.
Even in these humid woods, where vines and weeds and funguses and mosses grow rapacious, it can take a season or two for a chicken-reaped patch of dirt to recover with beads of new green. So I wondered if a bag of grass seed wouldn't speed the process along. But the copious shade of our yard didn't suit any type of grass much at all. However, a bag of clover seed proved to be a cheap and. speedy substitute.
Whether in the cold dewy spring mornings or the frosty late fall or the swelter of the summer, clover doesn't mind at all. And it brings bunnies apparently...
It's the funniest thing to see our baby cottontail out there, nonchalantly nibbling away at clover as the chickens stare their red eyes at her like they would like to peck her bones clean.
But, I must admit, this was all some two or three weeks ago. There is no baby cottontail anymore. We do not know what happened to her. The clover is as full and flush as ever. But she does not come back. Speculations abound, everything from stray cats (a scourge afflicting these residential woods) to the extra hawks we've seen fluttering about. But no answer eases our concern. She's lost. She's gone on to wherever it is that baby cottontails go, whether that is an everafter or another yard, I do not know.
A lot of things like that, lately, it seems. Things come. Things go. Into our lives and out of them again. Passages running, like invisible tunnels in the wind, by our faces. Our time here crisscrossed with things coming and going, till you realize that you, too, are coming from somewhere and heading somewhere else, as well.
In a blink, it'll be time to move on.
That's all from the mountain this perhaps weekly. I promise another shortly.