The Rain In Spain

May stay mainly in the plain - but it looks as though, around here, it's going to stay mainly in this part of the state this entire week. Only the northwestern part is expected to see any predictable sun. And summer started yesterday, at least according to the calendar (along with the Summer Solstice - the longest day, which was pretty gloomy for all of its 15 1/2 hours). Now the daily daylight clock will start to wind down minute by minute. Bummer.

There have been increasing numbers of yellow finches at the bird feeder this past week, although every once in a while there's a rosy red one. I spotted a pretty persistent one at the bird feed at the garden feeder at Clewley Farm Restaurant last week along with a few yellow finches, but I have entire squadrons swooping down on my feeder. They seem to enjoy hanging on the brackets of the flowering brackets suspended along the back porch nearby. Of course, if the feeder is too occupied, the birds have no problem dropping in to share the chipmunks' seeds in the three dishes spread out along the bench. Share and share alike as long as the marauding band of gray squirrels don't decide to take over. That's when I need to asset the arm of the law because those squirrels do not take a gentle "Shoo."

It appears I've had a deer traveling across the front lawn in the last week or so by the tracks in the seeded loam. Now if we just had some days for the loam to dry out. The grass is doing well -but the purpose was to fill in the holes created by digging out some boulders - not to create smaller holes created by hoof tracks. :-)

Speaking of holes - there has been a very large hole in the woods at the back of my home. I discovered it over the past year while cleaning up dead wood and dropped branches from winter weather. So while spending a weekend chipping the results of a Spring clean-up (I don't burn), it was my intention to fill the hole. Lo and behold, it appears there is a porcupine living down there in a section of the hole. What a dilemma.

I don't want to hurt/kill the porcupine - certainly don't want to rile him up - or, if it's a her, I don't want to disturb any babies. I certainly don't want it to decide to relocate under my porch. But that hole could trip up a person walking up through the woods or any of the herd of deer that use it during the Fall and Winter months. Anyone have any ideas?

I do remember that porcupines and skunks have the "Right of Way." As a child, when my family lived here at the Pond during the summers and into early Fall, we had a camp - not a year-round home. No in-door plumbing. There was a Ben Franklin wood stove in the main room and an ice box in the kitchen. And there was the "Cathedral" - the name for the outhouse, which my dad liberally sprinkled every day with the cold ashes from the wood stove. Last thing at night before going to bed, my brothers and I made that trip to the Cathedral, usually with a flashlight, hoping we were ahead of Mrs. Skunk and Mrs. Porcupine taking their children on a nightly stroll because those strolls always went directly across our beaten path to the Cathedral. No matter how desperate our need, Mrs. Skunk and Mrs. Porcupine had the right-of-way. And if they were too slow - or they had their children, we had to divert our trips into the woods. That was the way of the "camping experience" in those days - more than 55 years ago. I suppose one could consider it early composting.

And then there was the summer Mrs. Skunk decided to build her nest under the camp. You can be sure we were all especially carefully not to jump up and down and rough house in the main room that year.