WHAT TO DO IN NOVEMBER

What is there to say about November?  It’s all about waiting.  It’s about absence.  

The very last yellow leaf that held on for dear life, even in the strongest wind, is gone.  Disappeared.  It seems to have happened when I wasn’t looking.  The geese aren’t flying overhead any more.  No ducks are visiting the pond.  Hummingbirds are a distant memory; I think they checked the calendar one day and took off even before there were signs that summer was planning to turn into fall.  I can only wonder what became of the muskrat family that holed up by the pond or the weasels that lived under the patio.  The hawks and turkey vultures disappeared too, after days of graceful swooping across the fields, fields they have now abandoned to the crows.  Squirrels and chipmunks are all I’ve seen of mammals lately.  Not even deer.  It’s rifle season for deer as of November 1^st and they’re not likely to make themselves known.  Yet––and of course there’s an “and yet”––it is still beautiful, especially on clear sunny day that last only until 4:30 in the afternoon when the light turns yellow.

Late afternoon light on the fireplace wall

 NOT November on the Robert Frost Trail:  October fondly remembered

It has in fact been more sunny than dark from September until now.  Our solar panels have generated more kilowatt hours from January to December than they did last year.   (We got the panels halfway through June of 2013.)  One way to measure this by comparing the solar credits we have from Green Mountain Power compared with last year: over $1,700 as of November 1^st , $200 more than last year.  This was not profit as we pay (leasing) for the panels.  So far they have provided 39,000 kilowatt hours since June 2013 and offset 30 tons of carbon emissions.  What is amazing about solar power here in Vermont is how much of it there is throughout the state.  I’m impressed at what Vermont is doing in the direction of carbon neutrality.  Solar companies are putting up arrays with great enthusiasm.  So much so that array siting has become an aesthetic issue.  There is a backlash against very large arrays, say, five acres or more.  I happen like the way our three panels look.  They tend to disappear into the background from most angles and they are far from the road.  However, this isn’t the case everywhere.  In some locations they are unshielded and smack against a road.  In other places large arrays it’s a question of the acreage they cover.  It’s also just the fact that they cover:  panels create ground shade where there would otherwise be sunlight, removing yet another potential area from bobolink territory; these are birds who will not nest in or near shaded areas, and like so many ground-nesting species, they are vulnerable not only to natural predators, but cats and, notably, mowing equipment.  It’s is why in many fields late season haying is their only ticket to survival. 

An ugly solar array in Middlebury at Vermont Sun Fitness Center; across the street is the Cabot Creamery.

On the other side of the season’s arc, fall instead of spring, the maple syrup ritual was replaced by apple cider time.  Our apple trees produced delicious, if seriously misshapen, apples this year on two of our four trees.  Since you don’t need to have male and female apple trees for fruiting (unlike holly, for example), I can’t understand why we have two productive trees and two utterly stubbornly unproductive trees.  Ideas, anyone?  The apples produced by the Good Two trees were deep red and tart, like Empire apples. They made the tastiest applesauce I’ve ever eaten, but, alas, only after endless and tiresome peeling and trimming of their bumpy, crooked bodies.  The Bad Two made nothing whatsoever.  They didn't even try.  Our Huston family next door has several huge old apple trees, plenty of apples for making cider, and then some.  The biggest obstacle to churning out cider is the challenge of efficiently turning whole apples into small chunks for juicing in the press.  A while back the Goudey family came up with the idea of using a garbage disposal that got attached to an old sink the Hustons supplied that turned the apples into mush before they went into the press.  Running the press then became a piece of cake. 

The sink with garbage disposal arrangement for cider-making

Apple cider.  Pumpkins, pumpkin pie. A lot of what's left of November is taken up with planning for Thanksgiving.  

Nothing else to do then but wait for the snow.

WHAT THE SKY SAYS

It was the brightest of days, it was the darkest of days

A week ago––no, only days ago, it was warm, really warm.  Indian summer it would have been called, if there had been a frost later followed by warmth, but there has been no frost.  Not much rain either.  But something, some mysterious condition, lack of condition, or arcane conflation of temperature/light/moisture produced an enhanced red/crimson/orange hue in the foliage this year that critics (we rate fall colors up here, and we’re all critics) say are outstanding.  Red, in other words, is outshining yellow.

In past years this sugar maple's colors went more toward the yellow-orange spectrum

Fiery colors reach for the sky

Sunsets have been striking too.  The combination of immense lumbering clouds over the Adirondacks with gaps in between where the orange sun shoots rays in unexpected designs and then sets, suddenly now, in an entirely difference place than where it used to vanish in the summertime.

The sun will be setting to the right of Snake Mountain before long

Wood is stacked, plants moved indoors.  Local hikes, school visits––now is the time to do everything.  

On the Middlebury College Campus

Atop Buck Mountain (L to R) Audrey, Hans, Ben, Olin (in a customary eccentric pose. Stop doing that, Olin!)

View from the two-story window of the Middlebury Science Building

Our meadow, given a second mowing in late August, is ankle high and bright green again.  The owner of woodland behind our land has been logging for firewood.  I hated hearing the chainsaw, but the result so far is not unpleasant:  A new opening to the forest from the field and an easier walk once inside.  To say “inside” is precisely what it feels like.  You leave the bright light as you walk through the opening and then everything changes.  The sounds are different––birds, chipmunks, other rustlings––and the light is suddenly heavily filtered. Emerging, the sun low and shining right at you, is like coming out of a theater in mid-afternoon.  You may have to shade your eyes.  I don’t know how much more he’s going to be cutting, but the great “room” he has so far created––one bounded by a rocky ridge on one side, a steep hill on the other, meadow on the third side––is a grand space.

New entrance to the forest, the trees then just beginning to change

Speaking of that woodpile…we haven’t burned a stick of wood yet.  That will change almost immediately.  No more days like this one below.  It seems like yesterday that I reclined under the apple trees (trees that produced a decent crop of excellent, if misshapen, apples this year for the very first time!), reading in the dappled light with a soft breeze.  (The book, if you want to know:  Kate Atkinson’s “A God in Ruins.”  Very fine. Companion to her acclaimed “Life After Life.”)

I am called away from my book.  (Perhaps to take this photo?)  Skyler at left.  There'll be no more of this in the weeks to come.

One of the things people do this time of year when you’re preparing for winter is schedule stuff for winter to keep everyone occupied.   I’ve had to schedule two speakers from the Vermont Humanities Council to speak here in New Haven.  One, Rebecca Rupp, whose topic relates not to winter but spring* wrote me back:

            

“Nice to think about spring, sitting as we are on the wrong side of winter. Propane truck showed up here last week, which we always take as a Sign of Doom.  I'll see you after we're all plowed out.”

Our propane truck showed up last week. too.  

Just another great sunset!

DENIZEN

A good-sized snapping turtle, its long neck fully withdrawn

Look at those claws.  The beady unblinking eyes.  The hissing, rasping sound it makes.  It's what you might expect a dragon’s breath to sound like.  Its carapace is flecked with leeches.  The pond holds all this:  snapping turtles, leeches, the animals–whatever they are–that make tunnels around the rim, plus boatloads of frogs.  Right now it brings to mind an African waterhole in the dry season.  We’ve had a dry August, followed by a not-wet-enough September.  The pond water has thickened with inhabitants once spread thin, now crowded like city dwellers.  Small green frogs, probably the tadpoles of spring, sit in the open on muddy beaches that had been covered with water in mid-summer.  The clay earth, my garden, is cracked open by aridity.

Leeches and mud read:  I came from the pond

Getting back to the turtle (chelydra serpentina), this creature is far from uncommon in Vermont.  The above specimen is the second we’ve come across near the pond.  Its carapace was about fourteen inches long.  They can get to be up to about eighteen inches or so.  Snappers like slow-moving water with muddy bottoms, and that describes our habitat precisely. The first time we saw a snapping turtle near the pond it was clear in which direction it was moving so we let it continue on its way, away from the pond and down the slope to the woods, presumably to lay eggs.  It was June, the time females leave the water to lay their eggs on land.  

This time the turtle was in the driveway, ambiguously facing the house.  It’s not the season for egg laying.  So where was it headed?  Ken put on a pair of gloves, picked it up, and, very gingerly, carried it to the pond and tossed it in.  It’s likely, from the evidence I'd say extremely likely, that that’s exactly the place it left behind, and we were forcing it to repeat the trip.  But the alternative was–well, where exactly?   At least in the pond it was out of harm's way (read: ugly encounter with dog or car) and would have an opportunity to rethink the whole tedious trip.  

Low water allows frogs to make use of the pond's new beach

This is the second time Ken has picked up such a heavy snapper.  The first time we found a snapping turtle it was in the middle of Route 23, inching its way to the far side. We stopped the car and Ken got out and picked it up with bare hands–yes! and it was even larger that this one–and staggered across the road, all the time ducking its snapping jaws.  Now, only now after this second snapper-lift, we know better!  A snapper should be grabbed at the far end of its carapace, hands on either side of the tail at the rear (never by the tail itself as this could dislocate the spine that is fused to its shell), and gently pulled, rear end lifted, front claws dragging, backwards to safety.  Next time.

The newly muddy edge tells of visitors come to drink.  (It's off limits to Styler, so we know they're not dog prints.)

A dearth of rain has meant good weather for haying.  Farmer Dan Kehoe got a second cutting done.  The grasses had been so lovely I was sorry it was going to be cut.  There were several acres of clover in blossom, many kinds of wildflowers, milkweed, and a variety of grasses.  The newly raw cut meadow brought to mind the freshly shaved heads of army recruits.  Raw and bleeding.  For a week afterward when we walked in the field Skyler sniffed out and nibbled the remains of mice left among the detritus.

Farmer Dan making hay while the sun shines; the baler tosses the bales into the cart

Looking almost like a ride at the fair, this piece of equipment rakes the hay into rows

I can’t say it’s been as good for the garden as for the hay.  I like to let nature takes its course and rarely water anything besides potted plants an the vegetable garden repaid me in kind.  One eggplant plant equaled one, only one, eggplant.  It was a nice eggplant at least.  The tomatoes had a climactic week and then decided they were pretty much done for the summer.  Likewise the pepper plants.  And I don’t even want to talk about the cucumbers.  There was a summer I planted two cucumber plants and ended up with over thirty cucumbers.  (Cucumber salad, cucumber soup, pickled cucumber, etc.)  Not this time.  They are stunted and few.  Even squash–pattypan this time–a vegetable that by reputation always overproduces and overgrows, produced a single product.  I was so resentful of that plant I have yet to cook it.  I may let it rot.

Good drying weather for the wood pile

A remarkably good yield of raspberries. 

I may be glad in the darker days of fall to come that there was so much heat and sunshine in late summer.  It was, after all, a good year for raspberries.

TIMES IN VT AND ME

BAILEY ISLAND, ME

From the rear:  A board, various tubes, a small green kayak, the Laser (fast sailboat), sea kayak, another board another small kayak.  Not shown here:  The Optie (small sailboat), two rowboats, the punt, and big sailboat (the "Zube")

I want a little red kayak!  Every day I took this little thing out, although it just barely fit me having been Hans's long before he graduated to bigger stuff,  I grew fond of how easy it was to lift and maneuver, even in waves and wind.  I think this would be nice to have on Lake Champlain.  Or Otter Creek.

It's so easy to get used to having the (benevolent) ocean right in front of you each day, as near as stepping out the door.  The lack of amenities (tight quarters: there were seven of us, and would be eleven at the weekend) doesn't matter, unless we were to hit a run of really bad weather.   We missed coming here to Bailey Island last summer, our first-ever miss, because of Ken's surgery last August, although he had managed to make it to Mohegan Island to meet the Zube after the Portland to Camden race.  This year we might have missed out again but for a somewhat flexible chemo schedule for Ken's continued battle with colon cancer.  

An especially calm evening, the tide mostly out

One afternoon we hunted our dinner.  At a small island (Pond Island) that barely jutted out of the sea we searched under the seaweed for mussels.  I found a few, Leah a few more, but it was Olin who found the most, simply leaning over the bow of the punt and scouring the niches in the rocks under the seaweed.  Meanwhile Cliff snorkled for oysters.  There were enough of both oysters and mussels for six servings of steamed mussels, fried oysters and, thanks to a catch of Olin's, baked sea bass.

Crystal clear waters surround the reef/island where we looked for oysters and mussels

Leah looking over the seaweed for mussel potential

Olin–rarely captured on camera of late–deeply into "The Martian" (that I'm now reading) on another day while sailing to Sand Island

L to R: Olin, Leah, Cliff, Caroline on Sand Island
(Hans was in Marblehead, working.  Well, teaching sailing, that is.)

Sand Island:  Privately-owned, empty of people except for us, decorated with the detritus of many presumably welcome visitors (there are guest moorings), all of whom seem to have made contributions to the accumulated kitchy decor.  The boardwalk leads to a high point.  The rest of the island is undisturbed and beautiful.  

The city of Bath on the peninsula north of Brunswick/Bailey Is. is quintesssential old seacoast Maine.  My cousin Fred and family bought their next home there last year.  We were only able to come visit for the first time this summer.  But we hit it lucky as while we were there they had a party and we met all their terrific neighbors, all Bathonians (Bathers?  What's the word, folks?)

On Beacon Street, Bath.  Much renovation still to come.

Briscoe (dog), Mary, Ken, Fred, on gorgeous Spinney Beach, Phippsburg, ME

BACK IN THE VT

Not ME, but VT.  It made me think of Maine though:  Otter Creek at Vergennes Falls Park

More VT waters:  Carly at the East Middlebury swimming hole.  We brought Skyler here to swim, but he prefers water for drinking purposes.

Animal visitors dropped in during early summer (see "The Hole in the Bank and Other Tales.")  There were muskrats in the pond, swallows on the porch, weasels under the patio, snakes in the grass, turkeys in the field, and tree frogs everywhere.  My last sighting of the muskrat was in late July when I came across him (her?) boldly chewing grass not twenty feet in front of me.  When he realized how close I was he jumped into the pond and swam to the other side.  I have not seen a single muskrat since.  My first sighting of a weasel came when I was standing at the edge of our patio one morning.  The weasel popped up on his hind legs and looked right at me only two feet away.  I was startled and made a sound like "Oooh!"  He didn't run, but instead came closer.  And still closer.  I thought he might run right over my feet.  I said "Oooh!" again, probably louder this time, and he ducked under the patio. Was it his home he ran to under there?  Were there other weasels waiting for a report from the surface?  I never learned anything more, and failed to see another weasel all summer.  (Weasels, by the way, are dogged hunters of rodents.  We had spotted rodents living under the patio in early summer, and judge it likely that weasels took over their living arrangements.  After a hearty meal, perhaps.)

'Tho not my photo, this is about how the weasel looked at me.
Quite small, and, I have to say, pretty cute.

Speaking of animals, the Addison County Field Days was a big event this year for Audrey who was showing two cows this year for her 4-H group.  She also exhibited at the state Expo.

Audrey in full command of her award-winning cow.

And still speaking of animals...

One of our most excellent guests, Kelsey, and Skyler caught at an intimate moment

And yes, speaking of animals, most particularly dogs, we dropped in to see the Dog Chapel on Dog Mountain outside of St. Johnsbury on our way home from Maine.  It's the creation of the Vermont artist Stephen Huneck who was prompted by a severe illness and recovery to build a place that would honor the memories of dogs.  Over the years since then the inside of the chapel has become adorned by post-its put up by dog-owners in memory of the dogs they once had and loved.  We left a note, of course, for Harry, our Harry "who was his own dog."

The post-it notes have made the walls nearly as colorful as the stained glass window. Might they at some time become too much of a good thing and considered a nuisance, like the "love-locks" on Parisian bridges?

Amen

THE HOLE IN THE BANK, AND OTHER TALES

The hole in the bank.  Who lives there?

Cycle of Life, I:  On the House and Around It

The sand cherry bush behind the house held nearly thirty goldfinches at once.  That was in May, when spring was still unfolding. Its dark purple leaves hadn’t opened yet.  After the goldfinches the bird visitors were other kinds of finches, plus woodpeckers, cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees, titmouses (titmice?), grosbeaks, and mourning doves that picked up what seeds fell on the ground.  In July the feeder has become a draw for aggressive starlings and a few red-winged blackbirds.  Nevertheless chickadees, finches and grosbeaks still stop by when the big birds aren't hovering.   On a recent hike we found a bird feeder lying on the forest floor, one of those feeders that have a cage around the main tube to screen the seeds from large birds.  We’re giving it a try.  But we weren’t encouraged when we saw a couple of starlings stretching their necks through the opening to cop a few seeds.  We could just stop feeding, but we don't want to.  At least we haven’t had bears at the feeders.  Even when they're hungry I suspect crossing a large open area to get to the seeds would be intimidating.  

A few of the goldfinches decorated the sand cherry bush in May

Come to think of it, our raspberry patch is very close to the woods...

And that reminds me, what exactly was out there that night last week when Skyler got all wrought up?  Around ten o'clock or so he got very agitated and began to whine, whimper, pace, and bark.  He would not stop barking, and kept trying to look out of windows.  Of course we were trying to sleep.  It was nearly two in the morning when I decided to get out of bed and take him outside to face down whatever he thought it was.  (My thinking was, if we confronted what was or wasn’t there––I had decided on the wasn't, that he was only barking at ghosts––he would understand and would therefore stop barking.)  I put him on the leash and we headed out.  The motion detector light had switched on illuminating a circle around the cars.  Beyond that was complete blackness.  I hadn't thought to grab a flashlight so when Skyler started up a low growl I turned us around and headed for the front door.  He didn’t calm down for another hour.

Skyler stands guard against whatever

Woodpeckers seemed bent on eating the house last week.  The pileated, the downys, they were all in on it.  There’s a corner section they seem to favor near the bird feeder where one after another likes to perch and thump away.  Insects underneath rotting wood, wouldn't you think?  A search finds nothing noticeable.  They keep at it.  We look again.  There’s no rotting wood.  No sign of insects.  We give it a heavy dose of bug spray anyway, follow that up with a thick layer of wood filler, and follow that up with a coat of fresh paint.  Later that day, a woodpecker lands on the same corner and starts to peck.  Maybe he’s just showing off.  Nobody’s going to tell me where I can peck!  Or maybe it’s only habit:  Well, it was perfectly fine this morning!  This bears watching.

On the front porch we are on constant lookout for burgeoning wasp nests.  Last year I was slow to notice; too much looking down at book or iPad and not enough gazing at the ceiling.  Glued up there  in places where the rafters toe in tight V’s there were about ten starter nests that I knocked down, each a bit smaller than a golf ball.  As for the swallow nests, we had left the ones from last season thinking the swallows might reuse the nests, hence avoiding the messy (for us) project of making them anew.  They didn’t.  A new nest appeared right next to the top of one of our doors to the porch.  In no time heavy droppings began to appear and thicken.  Eventually four chicks appeared and fledged days later.  The last time we saw the chicks there were three perched next to the nest.  Then there were two.  Then they were gone.  But not gone very far:  it’s hard to say which swallows are which, but five or six or more continue to swoop under the porch ceiling as they scoop insects around the yard and pond.

 

Three of the four swallow fledglings next to their nest.  The fourth has probably already flown off the perch.

Cycle of Life, II:  In the Field

I don’t know how many creatures live in our field.  Many.  Fortunately for them, our local farmer doesn’t mow until August when everything has bred and left the nest.  Birds fly out every several yards as you walk around the paths Ken has cut in the high grass.  Deer nap in groups in the dense cover.  (We see the parted grass giving away where they walked, and the large flattened areas where they bedded down.)

The meadow is full of wild flowers and the grass is getting tall

A turkey with three poults (chicks) appeared in the field last month.  According to my readings, a turkey may lay 10-14 eggs, usually one a day, and incubate them for nearly a month.  (At that rate it could take a month and a half for them all to be incubated.)  The nest is merely a shallow depression, so it was probably right in the field.  Of course turkeys are everywhere, even on suburban lawns, but here they prefer open forest, preferably with oak and hickory with interspersed clearings and fields.  Ideal territory, this.  On the down side (if you are a turkey, that is) there is a long list of turkey predators in addition to man:  skunks, raccoons, groundhogs, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, and hawks, all of which we have in varying degrees of abundance.  To that add: dogs. While Ken was walking Skyler on a long leash Skyler pounced on a half grown chick that popped out of the tall grass onto the trail.  Ken pulled him back, but it was too late.  One dead poult.

Cycle of Life, III:  The Hole in the Bank

Doings in the pond pick up in early spring.  Ducks come to visit:  mergansers first, then mallards.  They hang around for a day or two, then disappear.  The occasional heron.  One duck party left behind a single egg, only discovered last month.  (Were there more?  What happened at the nest?)  A pair of Canada geese stayed the longest.  Wisely, they never strayed from the far side of the pond.  Skyler threw them the occasional bark, but mostly got used to their presence.

One day not long ago we saw something brown swimming across the pond. The long way, from the bank to the bridge.  Almost every day he (she?) swam this same route, disappearing under the bridge.  Sometimes it had a small branch in its mouth.  It had to be a muskrat.  One day we noticed a path in the grass that led in a straight line from a small opening in the tall reeds at the pond edge across a mulched planting of shrubs and on into the uncut meadow.  The trail was only about 6 inches wide and was some twenty feet long from pond to tall grass.  It was as if someone had dragged a small bag of sand across the lawn.  

The mysterious trail

What was more surprising was that once it entered the meadow the path meandered in several directions and circled around on itself in a section of maybe ten yards or so.  We puzzled over this.  The creature that swam across the pond was clearly a muskrat.  Would a muskrat have made this trail?  Could it have?  (Their long tails drag when they walk across land.)  What else, if not a muskrat?  Muskrats build lodges that generally protrude from a marsh or muddy pond (ours certainly qualifies).   But we saw no lodge.  

The disturbed meadow at the end of the muskrat's trails, probably the result of foraging.

A tunnel next to the bridge.  Another muskrat creation.

Wikipedia reports:

“In areas where they become abundant, they are capable of removing much of the vegetation in wetlands. They are thought to play a major role in determining the vegetation of prairie wetlands in particular. They also selectively remove preferred plant species, thereby changing the abundance of plant species in many kinds of wetlands. Species commonly eaten include cattail and yellow water lily."

More than likely the muskrat(s) are entering the meadow for sedges or other plants they like.  I have no idea what those might be, as all I see are clover, a bit of wild parsnip, buttercups, and the usual meadow grass.   At one end of the pond our usually abundant cattails are nearly gone.  Muskrats also eat the occasional frog and tadpole (which we have in abundance). I’m saying “they” because like every other creature muskrats are surely reproducing.   And muskrats reproduce mightily:  Two or three litters a year of six to eight young each is a lot of muskrats. But where are they?  We looked for a small lodge or “push-up” and thought that maybe they lived on the other side of the pond where the water drains into a seasonal stream.  Then I remembered they like to burrow into steep banks.  There’s only one section where the pond has steep sides and that is alongside the driveway.  There it was:  a large hole in the bank just inches above the water.   There were also hints of possible underwater entries.  A muskrat family is what we have.  How many muskrats are too many?  We will have to wait and see what comes of these neighbors.

Entrance to the muskrat lodge