Greedy Critters

   While I love to watch most critters around the Bayou, squirrels have got to be the nuttiest.   (Yes, that was intended.)  These fluffy tailed rodents are ridiculous.  The female goes about all summer in a tizzy as she builds a nest, has the young, repairs the nest, has another bunch of young, repairs the nest again and stores enough nuts to feed an army.  The male chases the female.  Basically, that is all he does.  She does the work, he does nothing.  

  During the winter months, squirrels' appetites become quite intense.  They eat anything...hickory nuts, acorns, sunflower seeds, flower bulbs and stale Christmas cookies.  (I actually found a gray squirrel eyeing the shell wind chimes the other day!)  It is those hickory nuts that cause me to ponder.  Have you ever tried to shell a hickory nut?  It is nigh on impossible to get a morsel larger than a grain of rice out of the nut and that is after smacking it with a hammer.  Yet, a squirrel can gnaw a tiny hole in the end of the nut and empty the contents completely.  Of course, gnawing that tiny hole leaves about ten pounds of hickory nut shreds under the tree.  (I have yet to figure out how one squirrel with one nut can create such a mess.)

  Years ago, Pop told me that it is not the gray squirrels that gnaw the hickory nuts in that fashion but rather the flying squirrels.  That makes the enigma even more confusing as flying squirrels are extremely tiny.  You would think that such a difficult chore would be left to the larger critters.  Who knows?? I am not out much at night when the flying squirrels take their outings.  

  The squirrels of all types are running low on "supplies" already this winter.  The tropical systems that came through knocked down the nuts before they were filled so food is scarce.  Lately more are gnawing on twigs and are begging for handouts.  They raid the birdfeeders as soon as the seed is available.  This causes problems for the songbirds so now I have started including table scraps to the bounty.  Apple cores, squash seeds and any other tidbits are put out for the critters in hopes that they will share.  Not likely as those squirrels are a greedy sort but I have to do something to protect those wind chimes and flower bulbs!

Now, They've Done It!

  Well, I normally claim that animals are far smarter than humans.  Critters have a natural survival instinct that does not leave them time to meddle in other's affairs.  They do their thing and let others do theirs.  That is the way things should be but humans always have to be nosy....and bossy....and greedy.  Critters have got it down pat...at least, some do.

  Along about mid-morning, I thought it wise to bring Son a cooling drink as he had been working on the pier again.  It is hot work and I can no longer help him.  He was appreciative and as I was waiting to fetch his glass back up the hillside, I noticed something amiss.  Thousands of hickory nuts were strewn across the lower section of the yard.  Odd! Hickory nuts should not be falling for a few months yet and we had no storms to knock them from the trees.  This was a mystery that required investigating.  I assured Son that I would not venture too far and set off on my mystery-solving party.

  As near as I can tell, the nuts were knocked down by hungry critters whether raccoons or squirrels (or both)!  It appeared that some of the nuts had the green outer shell gnawed a bit before being discarded. Obviously, the green nuts were not as tasty as the critters had thought but they were determined to find a "good" one so they kept trying and discarding.  Now, they have done it!  With the nuts knocked to the ground, they will not be fully matured.  The meat inside will wither and dry.  The critters' winter supply is going to be short.   In fact, even the nuts on the ground will be gone by then.  Tomorrow, I shall gather them and store these fine things for winter.  They will not be used as food but as fuel for the old cast iron stove.  Once hot, the hickory nuts last a long time and put out good heat.  Sorry, critters...your loss is my gain!

Sweet Little Tassels!

  People are funny.  It seems that most folks are never satisfied with the way life treats them.  They are always looking for other things and the present situation is not to their liking.  This is especially noticeable with the weather.  Either it is too rainy, too dry, too windy, too cold or too hot.  Complaints run amok  with "I hate winter!"  "Oh, my word!  It is too hot!"  "This humidity is killing me!'  I sort of get tickled since all the complaining in the world has never changed the weather.  What the environment throws at us is the way it is going to be regardless of how much we whine.  

  In the dead of winter, most folks "cannot wait until spring" but, once spring comes and the blooms start to pop out, their love of the season changes.  "I hate pollen!"  Well, sorry folks.  If you are going to have spring, you are going to have pollen.  That is just life renewing itself.  Come on...get a grip and a box of allergy meds.  

  This afternoon, I decided a walk was due to work off a bit of that Easter dinner overload.  As I was wandering the hillside, the hickory trees caught my attention.  They were all heavy with "tassels" or blooms.  Yep, those allergy makers are out again!  For the past month or so, the trees have taken turns at making folks miserable.  Not me.  I find the trees' efforts to reproduce fascinatingly beautiful.  In my thoughts, the tassels are a lot better than the nuts that follow.   Until you have been whacked in the head by a wayward flying hickory nut, you have not felt one of Mother Nature's weirdest pains.  There is the instant of severe pain that comes with impact.  Then, afterward, there is that slow-healing bruised feeling that is aggravated with each touch.  Forget washing the hair with vigor, brushing deeply or styling the hair in any manner....for weeks!  Yes, indeed, the tassels are a lot sweeter!

  For the next few weeks, folks will be whining, sniffling and sneezing once again.  Keep tissues on hand, have a supply of allergy meds and dole them out dutifully while listening to lots of complaints about spring and how folks cannot wait until summer gets here.  (Until it is here along with the good, ole Deep South heat and humidity!)

A Bit of Warmth...

  I am one of those weird folks who does not mind using whatever I find to remedy a situation.  It is not in my nature to run buy whatever is needed.  I usually can find a substitute for any given missing element to a problem.  It all goes back to having a bit of ingenuity and being able to survive without outside help if the need arises.  I figure what Pop taught me so many years ago still rings true today.  If something is broken...fix it.  If something needs doing...do it.  If something is needed...get it.  Nope...no buying back on the farm.  We used the brains instead of spending hard earned money.  

  This morning was downright chilly.  The skies were still grey and a slight drizzly rain fell from the sky.  With the north wind blowing a gale, the Little Bayou House was cooling down quickly.  Son had split a lot of wood for the cast iron wood stoves but I had a different idea of what to burn.  Earlier when I had the old dog out, I noticed that thousands of hickory nuts had fallen under the tree on the east side of the house.  Yep!  I was going to burn hickory nuts!  This is nothing new for me, however, as I have been doing it for years in the old stoves.  The nuts put out a lot of heat, burn long and smell great!  It was the memory of all three that had me scooting out in the misty morn to gather a five gallon bucket of the nuts.  That would last me all day and well into the night.

  The burning of hickory nuts would probably not be the smartest idea in an open fireplace as they do occasionally explode and send shards about the place but the cast iron wood stove is completely enclosed so let them pop away!  Once the fire was started and the nuts caught, the slow burn started and the Little Bayou House warmed and smelled nicely!  That, my friends, is thinking!  Pop would be proud.

Flu Stricken and Pondering??

 When a person is sick with the flu, their brain often does not work clearly.  Mine surely does not!  This afternoon, I peeked out the window to see the sun shining brightly and that did it!  I grabbed a jacket, called to the dog and made yet another great escape.  Being confined to a sick house, even when I am sick, is more than I can bear.  While the menfolks were napping like good patients, I was ambling along the path soaking up that glorious sunshine!

  Although I felt well enough for a stroll, the brain kept coming up with strange thoughts such as "How many baby minnows does it take to make a school?"  Do you know?  I do not but there were thousands of the little jokers playing in the shallows.  They were enjoying the bright sun just as much as I was.

  Another thought..."Why do flying squirrels prefer to gnaw hickory nuts from the pointy end while grey squirrels go to work on the side?"  That is another of life's great mysteries at least to a flu-muddled brain.  If you have the answer, it would be great to know.

  Also, "Why do smilax vines so closely resemble a spiderweb?"  Spiders and vines have nothing in common yet their intricate work can be comparable.  (I should have photographed the vine before PJ rent it asunder with his plodding but I was slow on the take and about as befuddled as a cat chasing its tail.)

  The good news?  I felt much better after being out and about.  Fresh air, sunshine, doggy friend and lots of wonders of the world can make all the difference.  Back to the menfolk...they have the three "C's".... crouping, coughing and complaining.  I guess it is best that I escape now and again to try and preserve what little sanity I have left!  Just how many minnows does it take???

Taking the Byways!

  With arthritis setting in on the poor, old hands and the eyesight dimming with age, I was beginning to think that my "artist" days are behind me.  If I do things now, it will have to be "large scale" projects and no longer the intricate detail work of days past.  That does not mean that I still do not get the urge to create.  Just the opposite is true.  I do, more so than ever.  Because my days are not filled with projects, does not mean that the mind is not filled with creative endeavors.  The mind still works somewhat!  The body just does not want to cooperate.  

  However, I still "see" art in everything from the kaleidoscopic displays of sunrises to the mundane, muted colors of a dead leaf.  All things are beautiful when one can view them with the right attitude.  Just today on my hike about the hillside, I found an intense beauty in the commonplace hickory nut.  A squirrel had gnawed the nut right in half and inside was the most delicate design!  The inner portion of the nut (sans the meat) formed almost a mirrored image of itself.  I was intrigued enough to sit and examine the nut while ignoring the billion or so mosquitoes that buzzed about my head.

  The half of hickory nut reminded me of a necklace that I had as a kid.  Granddad had carefully cut slivers off of a hickory nut and stained, then polished them until they sparkled!  The slices of nut were carefully threaded on some twine and then tied to form the necklace.  Not only was I so very proud that Granddad had taken the time to make a special necklace for me, I was enthralled by the design.  Thus, a love for nature and all things of beauty therein, was starting to grow inside me.  

  Now decades later, a single half-gnawed hickory nut brought back, not only a flood of memories of one of my best friends (Granddad) but, also, a renewed idea that perhaps I could still create.  I would just have to retrain my mind to accept boundaries and let the thoughts run wild in a different direction.  Life is good that way.  There are never-ending opportunities if we sort of take the byways instead of always traveling down the straight and narrow highways.  Thanks, Granddad.  Even though you have not been with me for decades, your lessons are still speaking loud and clear.  Geez!  I miss you!

Oh Nuts! Murphy, GO AWAY!

  It has been a month of wrongs.  No matter how I try, it seems that old "If anything can go wrong" Murphy's Law has been in full force here lately.  First, the dining room chandelier went bad.  Mark took me down to get another but that one wound up in a corner of our living room so the dining room is still "lightless".  Then, after a bit of daring me, the washing machine stood up to its threats and stopped doing the spin cycle.  Oh, great!  Hand wringing clothes is not bad but when it comes to blankets and such, I draw the line! Next on old Murphy's list was my stove.  Yep, the burners started going out one by one.  Being the frugal sort, I kept insisting that I did not need four burners anyway.  Then it was "no one needs three burners" and now with another slowly dying, I will soon be down to one burner.  The guys might have a long wait for their supper.  Add to that a refrigerator that has now made its debut as a heater and you can see my predicament. It seems as if I need to go appliance shopping.  Poor Mark!  Then to top it all off, my laptop has a bug.  Nope, it does not have a virus but sure sounds like it has a swarm of bees buzzing around inside it. Son, being our computer tech dude, checked it and said that the fan has gone bad.  Well, that is just not fun at all!  So, as a whole, the month of May was just about filled with catastrophes!

  My brain was reeling with all of the weird happenings as I was out weeding the okra.  Geez!  Something just has to give!  Somewhere, somehow, something has to happen that is good.  I figure that the month of June has got to be better....or at least I hope.  Anyway, as I was down on my knees and up to my elbows in Horse Nettles, I figured I would look for a sign that things were going to improve.  Not thinking I would find some neon-flashing marquee sign hanging in the garden, I looked for anything that could be a positive.  I found weeds.  I found ants.  I found stinkbugs.  None of those seemed to be a promising sign so I searched a bit harder.  Nothing.  

  A bit later, I pondered the past month again.  This time, I was sitting on the yard bench in the cooling breeze.  A bit of sewing needed to be done and it was just too hot in the house.  As I sat in the breeze whipping that needle back and forth, it hit me.  If I have to search for a sign, then it really does not count!  To be an absolute omen, it has to find me, not me find it!  Ok!  Now that we had that settled, I felt more at ease and kept sewing.  Once I completed my project, I stood to head back inside.  There, right at my feet, was a happy!  I found my sign that all was good.  A hickory nut had been split in half by my step and the insides formed the perfect heart!  Yep, this was a good omen!

 In short, I suppose we all look for signs or omens of things to come. Whether we believe in them or whether we shrug them off as just a coincidence, matters not.  What does matter is the fact that we cannot completely leave our lives to happenstance.  If we want things to be better, then we have to get up, get to work and make things go the way we want.  It just takes a bit of hard work...not a broken hickory nut.

Axes to grind while killing the woodshed!

My son, Michael, is a great one to mix up his sayings!  He is forever saying things like "He just isn't the brightest crayon in the tool shed." or " Don't count your chickens on a rainy day." or "  You are not the shiniest bulb in the bag of chips."    I find these things most amusing and giggle each time he intentionally musses some old saying up just to confuse or befuddled folks.  Perhaps, I am the only one that catches these slips of the tongue or the only one that finds them snicker-worthy but I listen carefully to see if I can catch him.  He does it often.

Today, I headed out with my basket to gather some of the many nuts that litter the ground beneath the old hickory tree.  Earlier in the fall, I tried my best to crack a few of these following detailed instructions that I found in an old magazine.  Ha!  I found it ridiculous to even attempt such a feat! I finally gave up my pursuit of the nutmeats inside and left the nuts to the squirrels.  There was such a overabundance of acorns that the squirrels have not even tasted the harder to crack hickory nuts.  The ground stayed littered.  Knowing that this will never do come this summer, I started gathering the nuts.  If left on the ground, the nuts will most likely bring destruction to my lawn mower this spring.  I pondered just what to do with the abundance of nuts.  My answer came in form of the woodstove!  

Actually, I came across this quite by accident.  Following the old "chestnuts on an open fire" idea, I tossed a few nuts on top of the stove to see if they would crack.  They did crack but they also charred!  I assume my woodstove might have proven to be a tad hot for the nuts but whatever, the nuts were worthless.  They were  promptly scraped off the stove and into the fire.  There, they burned brightly for a bit then turned to bright embers!  The heat was so welcome! The "aha" moment struck!  I could gather the nuts for fuel for the woodstove and hence save on firewood usage!

Hence..the mixed up sayings and a few snickers!  While out gathering the nuts, my mind rambled profusely.  It does not take a massive lot of thinking to pick up things and toss them in a basket so I amused myself by trying to think of how Michael would describe the chore.  After much pondering, I came up with his most likely explanation of the chore.  He would probably combine things like "killing two birds with one stone" and "having an axe to grind".  He would most likely refer to the knocking out of two chores at one time..the clearing the yard of hickory nuts while providing fuel of the woodstove but with a definite twist.  I could hear him saying something on the order of  "Well, if you grind your axe with two birds you can kill the woodshed with one stone."  Yep, that fully sounds like something I would be snickering about if he was gathering hickory nuts to burn in the woodstove!  After gathering and snickering, I grabbed my basketful of nuts and headed back inside to the welcome warmth of the old woodstove!

That is just plain nutty!

Occasionally, I come across something that I am truly eager to try. Case in point...hickory nuts! Now don't get me wrong, I have tasted them and most of the time, found the meat to be rather bitter. In the yard, we have several large hickory trees with most being the kind that produce the small round nuts. There is one that produces very large, round nuts but when those are cracked, the meats are dried and black. My take on this..the tree has been damaged by numerous hurricanes and perhaps is diseased. These nuts are much easier to crack than the small nuts but the ruined meat makes the effort futile. Then there is the tree in the front of the house. This tree is not nearly as large as the others although it produces the largest nuts! The nuts of this hickory are not round..they have the appearance of being a cross between a hickory and a pecan if that is possible. The nut is oblong..about two and a half inches in length! Now that is quite a large hickory nut for the trees on the Bayou! This tree has just started producing and this past year covered the ground with nuts. The squirrels and raccoons got the bulk of the nuts and the remainder were eventually washed down the hill into the marsh. I was not thinking or I would have definitely spent some time gathering the nuts.

In the years past, the kids and I would gather a few of the nuts from other trees and try them just out of curiosity. They would take hammers and smack the nuts to pieces! The meats were usually smacked to pieces along with the shells. We tried all methods of cracking. The lever-type nutcracker worked but smashed the nut into such small shell-laced pieces that we were eating more shell than meats. If you have never tasted nut shells, my advice..don't! Those have to be the bitterest things ever created! We tried the hand-held nutcracker and pretty much wore ourselves out trying to open the first nut. Plus when we finally managed to crack the nut, the shells went flying across the room. At this point, I will warn you never to step on a shard of hickory shell! I have a tendency to go barefoot in house and oh, my goodness! Those hurt! Now I have found an article that explains a "surefire" method of cracking those beauties. It seems that a hammer making impact on a specific point of the nut does the trick! The specific point being about one third down the nut from the stem end. Who knew? Perhaps we just never aimed our hammers right! Perhaps young kids with hammers give in to the temptation to smack everything with the power of a jackhammer. Perhaps our nuts were mutant rocks that could never be broken in any sane manner. I can only say that the information in the article could not have come at a better time! The hickory trees are loaded with nuts this year! Late October or early November will see the yard being pelted with the heavy nuts and hopefully, I will be able to beat the squirrels and coons to a few. I would love to try the new method of cracking the nuts assuming my aim will allow me to hit them in the "prime" spot! It just seems such a waste to not at least try to harvest the nuts.

This morning, I noticed a lovely morning glory blooming near the birdfeeders. Not that morning glories are anything special but the way the early morning sun illuminated the blossom was almost breathtaking. The flower literally glowed! It seems such a shame that such a pretty blossom only opens for such a short time before wilting away with the heat of the day.

Midnight Snack

The evidence of a midnight snack is there. Well, maybe not exactly midnight, but the fact remains that there is definitely some nightly noshing going on in my yard. Littered under the large hickory tree are the telltale signs of flying squirrels' mealtimes. It is easy to tell that these are the remnants left behind by the Southern Flying Squirrel as no other squirrel can open a rock-hard hickory nut in quite the same way. These tiny rodents will gnaw a perfect oval hole in the end of the nut and leave what resembles a wooden "cup". The edges are left smooth and the shell empty. The other squirrels just simply rip the thing to pieces. It intrigues me that something so small can do this. Just as a matter of explanation..flying squirrels do not actually "fly". They have no wings just a flap of skin called patagium. This flap stretches from the ankle of the front leg to the ankle of the back leg. When the squirrel wants to "fly" from one tree to another it launches itself into the air, stretches its legs outward and glides with these flaps! Pretty efficient mobility!

Finally! Today, the old parlor stove received its final touches of restoration. This beautiful old cast iron stove had been severely damaged during Hurricane Katrina so I am elated that it is now ready to be reinstalled in the house. The before picture shows the intensity of the rust damage caused by salt water that was blown into our house by the storm. Now, after much laboring the stove has regained most of its beauty. I say most since there had to be some replacement of parts that are not original to the stove. The back legs were completely gone and try as I might, I could not find any that matched. As luck would have it though, the same storm that caused harm to this fine old stove gave me the replacement legs. A piece of some other iron

stove washed into our yard from "who knows where". We removed the broken legs, replaced them with found ones and then scraped and buffed away all the rust. With a new grating and a new cook plate, it is finished! The results..a beautiful, functional cast iron woodstove! Now with some new stove piping and a bit more elbow grease during installation, this beauty will be ready for the first cold spell of winter!