Outside The Box

We were determined not to have a garden this year so we could use the extra time to catch up on other projects. Consistent with the best laid plans of mice, men, and gardeners, we had a late garden instead, but just a small one. We only planted squash and corn. And pumpkins. And tomatoes. And basil, turnip greens, potatoes, broccoli, collards, lettuce and kale, sunflowers and zinnias, garlic and onions. And cucumbers. Just a small garden.

Encouraged by generous contributions from the chicken house and the gift of frequent but not excessive rainfall, the squash in our small garden are huge and the tomato plants are tall and laden with fruit this year. Planting late was accidental genius as we missed the peaks of bug infestations, but if anyone asks, we meant to do it that way all along.

Our bear, Ursula, sensing an accommodating but wary tolerance in our protected cove, has settled into a peaceful routine now that her cubs are old enough to strike out on their own. My elders taught me that you don’t push the river. Working with nature is better than working against it, because Nature always bats last and has the home field advantage.

Bears are curious and unpredictable, sometimes dangerous, and they can make a huge mess in a hurry if you’re not prepared for them. On the plus side, Urusula digs and eats every yellowjacket nest she can find, and she is as cute as a bear though not exactly cuddly. Electricity thwarts her curiosity about our beehives, corn rows and tomatoes. With a few precautions, we coexist rather nicely.

She doesn’t seem very curious about our unprotected patch of turnip greens, however. Maybe she doesn’t like the taste, or maybe the hornet’s nest hanging above that patch has dulled her interest. A hungry bear will eat a hornet’s nest too, but I imagine that hunger would have to be extreme. Being stung by a hornet feels a lot like being punched by a spiked fist. Deer do like the taste of turnip greens, but they haven’t taken a single bite this year.

The hornets tolerate me when I’m picking greens. They grew up hearing my voice from the day I first spied the queen’s little ping pong ball nest hanging from an alder branch. Alone, then, in her little paper palace, she came out to meet me when I walked over to introduce myself. She sat calmly outside the entrance of her nest as I spoke to her in reassuring tones, and none of her subjects has ever threatened me as their numbers multiplied. To them, I am just another part of nature, but one who moves slowly, wears a wide brimmed hat and turns his collar up when he picks turnip greens. The spiked fist may find me one day, but in the meantime there is hardly a fly to be found, thanks to our hornets.

“Bees do what bees do,” our dad always said, “and so do bears.” Thus we leave the gate open to the chicken pen at night. Ursula likes to lick up whatever remains of the cracked corn left by the chickens. If we forget to open the gate, she makes her own, and repairing chicken wire loses its charm very quickly. It’s not an ideal situation, so I’ve ordered some electricity for the chicken pen. Bears hate electricity.

In the meantime, I’m using a trick a good friend who kept bees shared with me. He pointed a radio at his hives, and the bears, wary of human voices, left his bees alone. For several nights now, and during the day when we have been away from home, I’ve pointed a speaker at the henhouse.

We don’t get good radio reception here in our cove, so I’ve turned instead to streaming channels on the internet. One of the first stations I came across that was all talk was NPR. I used to listen to NPR traveling and always enjoyed “Car Talk.” Ursula doesn’t seem to like the station at all, because she hasn’t come near since I started playing it.

That electric fence can’t get here fast enough, however, and you will soon understand why. You see, Bluetooth speakers don’t work very well at a distance, and when I came home one afternoon it sounded like one of the NPR talkers was saying that there are many types of “ganders.” I don’t know much about geese, but that sounded interesting, so I walked down to the barn to listen.

Then the talker said she was “gander neutral,” and I thought well, I don’t care that much about them either, but the geese surely do. Right about then one of my hens started trying to crow, and I understood what my poor captive chickens had been forced to hear. No more NPR for them, and I really miss Click and Clack.

Our meager aspirations to humor aside, these are the halcyon days of summer. These are the good old days, and we hope that you are enjoying the telling or your own tales as the days of your lives unfold.

The mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal wrote, “We never keep to the present.  We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight…Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future.  We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.”

We encourage you to pause frequently in your thoughts to examine the moments of your day and write your ongoing story. The trick is in the telling, and the telling brings us back to the present, where all the action is.