Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

In case you’ve been getting radio silence from us over the past few weeks, we’ve been spending most of our time tackling house projects.  The day I got back from England, Sydney started planning out how to build porch columns to replace the old ones that had rotted.  I thought that sounded like a great reason to repaint the house trim, which was four kinds of dirty beige.  Now at least a quarter of it is bright white.  Along the way, we’ve been replacing and redoing: Sydney discovered some rotted wood as soon as he took out the first column, so he rebuilt part of the porch frame and redirected water flow from the roof.  We replaced the porch lights and house numbers and will be painting shutters, gutters, tables, and anything else that happens by at the wrong time. I’ve learned that I really don’t like being up on the roof, and I think I deserve a major prize for painting around a wasp nest at the peak of our roof.  Sydney, however, scoffs, and practically did a jig on the roof to tease me.  I’ve learned that I have almost no practical skill to contribute to my carpenter/gardener/repairman husband, so I’m doing painting.  I’m not good at that, either, but you can’t say I’m not dedicated!

We are also providing entertainment for the neighborhood; Sydney’s muttered more than once that we ought to put out a bucket to collect viewing fees.  Most of the neighbors have come by to inspect Sydney’s construction up close, and at least a dozen cars slow to a crawl, stop in the middle of the road, or pull over so the driver can holler out encouragement or ask for the names of plants in the front yard.  Yes, things are slow during summer in a small town, but people are also just trying to see what all of this activity is going to yield.  Sydney’s construction work will be over, we hope, this week, so that he can get on to preparations for the school year, but I’m sure I’ll be dragging him back into my painting troubles on a daily basis until I’m done (perhaps by the end of the month?).  I am, however, just finishing up my preparations for my fourth course for the fall, so I should be in good shape for the semester.  Of course, I say that now . . .

My perch from near the roof gave me a good view of the backyard.  There are benefits to painting there: I had to put up with being higher than I liked, but each time I came back down I could swipe a blackberry from the vines directly under the ladder:

This picture makes the house look a lot more “done” than it is, but, still, you can see the contrast between old and new under the roof line on the upper left.  Part of me wonders why I’m bothering with the paint, however.  The vine on the wall on the left is a wisteria that will, we hope, soon cover the entire side with beautiful flowers and leaves.  And the little tree in the box front and center is a magnolia that will eventually get quite large.  Soon nobody will even be able to see the outside of our house.

Erin

I didn’t fancy trying to drive in Ireland, so we took a coach tour that got us out of the city limits.  It also gave us front-row seats to Ireland’s wonderfully changeable weather, which is why the sky gets as much attention from me as the castle in the first picture:

My favorite part of the trip was our two-hour stop at the Cliffs of Moher.  I love walking, I love seeing natural beauty that is distinct about a place I’m visiting, and I loved the stiff breeze coming off the ocean. I kept a close eye on my watch as I walked, since we were warned that the bus would not wait, but every curve I passed revealed another curve . . . I’m glad I turned back, though, since our guide told me that the path along the cliff goes on for 15 or so miles, and I wouldn’t have seen any reason to stop for a long time!

It’s hard to tell that the cliffs rise 700 feet above the water, but the presence of a tower lends some sense of scale:

Mom surprised me by loving the wind along the coast.  She and I had clearly had enough of the stultifying heat and humidity back home.

Erin

As is usual with me, what I most enjoyed of our trip overseas was the freedom to walk everywhere.  Only once did I get a bit too much walking in.  On our first night in Galway, we left our apartment late in the evening, looking for food. Without too much difficulty, we found our way to a fantastic Spanish tapas place.  Three “helpful” guys offered to guide us when I stopped to look at street names, but they weren’t local and they heard “tapas” as, well, something else, which really made their eyebrows shoot up . . . After dinner, though, we took a different route out of town to pick up groceries, missed the road back, and found ourselves walking the path along the highway well after 10 at night.  This being Galway, there were not only pedestrian paths, but also random helpful people just when we feared we had left civilization behind.  It was the night Ireland beat Italy in soccer, so everyone in Ireland was in a good mood, and had walked to the nearest pub for the game, so we had lots of help.  Still, when I told Mom we had covered about 7 miles in that outing, I knew it was a low estimate.

Although Mom had every right to be concerned about leaving the apartment with me again, she did it anyway, and we were rewarded with sights like these, of the town and Galway Cathedral:

And then I saw a sign I really need to put on our front door:

Heidi, that picture was for you (you scarred me with all of those “weird signs” pictures from your trips).  We see plenty of “Beware Dog” signs, but this would be more helpful for people courageous enough to enter our house.

Erin

After my conference in Leeds, Mom and I flew back to Dublin to spend a few days in the city.  As I suspected, two full days were enough to tire us out and make us glad for a move to the country.  But while we were in town we made some fun discoveries.  The first was that we arrived in time to see Dublin mark the centenary of the Easter Rising revolt, which marks the beginning of the modern move to Irish Independence.  Copies of the 1916 proclamation of independence were plastered all over the city, our hotel was just down the street from the post office that served as the revolutionaries’ headquarters, and a national gallery was filled with images of the revolt (and Britain’s armed response).  The devastation to Dublin’s downtown looked very much like the pictures of WWI bombings in London that I am used to seeing in my work.  Below is a view of the National Library of Ireland, from the steps of the National Museum of Ireland–Archaeology, which holds several bog bodies that date back to roughly 800 BCE.

Another surprise was just how lush the city parks were.  Compared to Kentucky (which likes its grass, and even that must be golf-green short), the parks in Dublin seemed almost jungle-like!  We wandered among several of those during our city strolls, enjoying rejuvenation from the green before we headed back out to traffic.  Yes, apparently high rain fall really does mean different plant life, to which the parks attested.  Everything was in bloom, too, and they had a lot of variety of trees and flowers.  I have also, apparently, not entirely forgotten my maternal instincts.  I was quick to note playgrounds everywhere we went.  In a former life, those would have been a big help in getting my kids through a long day out and about.  But now, not only did I not have my kids in tow, but even if I did, they would be too big to get much out of the equipment!  Apparently I’m slow to make the mental leaps needed as life rolls on . . .

Erin

As you have probably discerned by now, Sydney is a big bird-lover.  Interestingly, though, he hasn’t been a big fan of starlings, given that they do a lot to drive other birds away.  So it really seemed just too funny that a baby starling adopted our family earlier this month.

Ralph, as we called him, landed on Nathaniel’s knee and shoulder in the yard one afternoon (making Nathaniel smile and then start to cry) and immediately hopped around all of us, making that annoying cheeping sound that is the universal signal for “I’m hungry and I’m going to continue making this atrocious sound until you feed me.”  So, Sydney dug up earthworms all over his garden.  We graduated to canned cat food (yes, there is a cosmic joke in there somewhere), delivered via tweezers from 6am to 8pm each day for roughly a week.  The feedings took place on the deck until we realized that impatient Ralph was all too ready to simply fly in the patio door if given a chance (as it was, our cats watched every feeding with great interest from just behind the patio door).

The day I left for England, however, Ralph failed to appear, and Sydney hasn’t seen him since, but we took several pictures of this bold little bird who would swoop down onto our heads and shoulders (quite ticklish, that) and who didn’t even mind if we pet him.  We’re not likely to get such an invasion of the wild in the future.

Erin

As Erin mentioned in a previous post, I recently went to the Northwest Territories to hunt mushrooms. I spent much of my time tramping through forests burned down within the last two years, peering intently at the ground trying (a) to find morels that were rather similar in colour to the ground and (b) trying to avoid both stepping into swampy holes in the peat and stepping onto the fire-sharpened pointy trunks left of little trees. This area isn’t quite as swampy as some we were in but this picture gives you some sense of the sooty trees among which we hunted for mushrooms:

And this is the prize we were looking for—black morels:

An especially nice patch:

We had, of course, heard all manner of horror stories about how awful the insects up north were: gigantic mosquitoes, clouds of blackflies, deerflies, and so on. They turned out not to be as bad as I had expected. We had very little trouble with most of the insects we had been told about. Even mosquitoes weren’t as bad as I had feared. I ended up not even using the head net that I bought for the trip. Of course, I had tastier people along as decoys … That said, the mosquitoes did get pretty bad a couple of times. On one such day my left hand held still for five seconds during lunch break:

We also heard lots of warnings about bears and for once in my life I actually got to see some. None of the bears seemed at all interested in sticking around once we got into the vicinity, though. See if you can find the rump of the bear taking his leave in this photo (and, yes, this is the best bear photo I managed to get):

Bison, on the other hand, weren’t perturbed in the slightest even when trucks drove by a few feet from them, and they seemed to be very fond of grazing right by the edge of the road. Here’s one such fellow, contentedly chewing away and not so much as moving his eyes to acknowledge our presence:

I see why prudent people don’t want to drive in this area at night. Hitting a deer is bad enough. But hitting something that weighs over a ton sitting on the road because it can’t be bothered to get out of the way?

Of course, we were far enough north that it never really got dark. Basically, we had a couple of hours of dusk. This photo was taken pretty much exactly at midnight from the back of my cabin, looking at the Deh Cho bridge over the MacKenzie:

Finally, a picture of Lady Evelyn Falls:

It’s a beautiful part of the world. I’m not sure why there aren’t more people living there. Perhaps if I hadn’t been sweating in the heat every day but instead had been freezing at minus forty on a dark day in the middle of the winter, I might better understand why there are so few people north of 60. Then again, winter would have brought spectacular northern lights. I think I need to go back in the winter …

Sydney

After two full days of traveling (including a red-eye flight from Chicago to Dublin), Mom and I are finally curled up in a room in Leeds, where I’ll be giving a paper at the Virginia Woolf Conference this week.  After two days of stuffy airport air, we’re thrilled to open the window on a post-rain Yorkshire scene like this:

Erin

Sydney is currently making his way, flight after flight, to Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories of Canada.  He is going to join his brother and sister-in-law for mushroom hunting way up there.  Given the mosquitoes and our children, I thought I’d stay home.  But it’s not terribly comforting to get this email from him while he wings his way there:

“Nelson and Kira have already seen two bears!”

I didn’t think to put “No bear-wrestling” in my list of requests . . .

Erin

This morning, we decided to get a bit more ambitious with our hiking.  The kids had been pretty decent about the walking yesterday, but Sydney and I were keen to try new trails and test the kids’ stamina.  So we started down a path to Gray’s Arch, and the route we took brought us back to our car about 7 miles later.

The kids did very well!  Nathaniel started to clamour for a piggy-back ride, but later forgot all about it, and at the end of the trip, all four of us tumbled down the path with great energy.  We were mostly energized by the variety of the terrain.  The first part of the path was muddy, but also had roughly a dozen lovely bridges criss-crossing a stream, followed by a steep climb that the kids tackled with gusto, near-desert conditions high up (dry, sandy, and large rocks), and then a jungle-like mid-range section that had us ducking through what looked like rhododendrons and a canopy of big-leaf magnolias.

Erin

We decided to stay overnight in the area, and found ourselves coaxing our car up a steep gravel road (Sydney needed three tries to get up the rain-soaked gravel at the peak of the incline), near the top of which we parked our car, and then began our hike up to the cabin.

Start here:

Take a right at the red bench:

Do you see the cabin?

Here it is!

But here is where Sydney (and much of the rest of the family, at different times), spent the afternoon, evening, and subsequent morning.  He got some lovely views of birds from this deck, I read nature essays in the sunshine while the kids napped, and Katherine and Nathaniel had me read our bedtime chapters to them out here:

Erin