around the house

Linden Tree

Wednesday 17 July 2013 | 0 Comments

The Linden tree in Babcia's yard is in full bloom now. The number and richness of the blossoms is astounding. Equally incredible is the constant and unmistakeable sound of bees buzzing around the blossoms.

Under der linden an der heide,
dâ unser zweier bette was,
dâ muget ir vinden
schône beide
gebrochen bluomen unde gras.
vor dem walde in einem tal,
tandaradei,
schône sanc diu nahtegal.

Under the linden tree on the open field,
where we two had our bed,
you still can see
lovely both
broken flowers and grass.
On the edge of the woods in a vale,
tandaradei,
sweetly sang the nightingale.

Or in another cultural context: "Dragostea din tei" ("Love from the Lindens" according to Wikipedia) which became the famous "Numa Numa" video.

Longed-For Morning

Saturday 08 June 2013 | 0 Comments

Rains, clouds, floods, puddles, mud, grey, damp, smeared, uninspired, uninspiring — after days and seeming days of this, to have a morning that looks like this is better than the cup of coffee in my hand.

Surveying the Damage

Friday 07 June 2013 | 0 Comments

We head down to our once-lake-front and take a look at what thousands of gallons of water flowing over a small area in a few minutes can do.

Mud, sand, limbs, leaves, cans — this is what it looks like after a flood.

Plants destroyed, swings caked in muck, belongings strewn through neighbors’ yards. I can only imagine what a real flood would be like.

We go out into the neighborhood, checking on what gifts others received, eventually heading over a couple of streets to a house we’d looked at when we were house hunting. It had been love at first sight. The yard was magnificent; the kitchen/dining area was open yet homey, almost cozy, with a fireplace in the corner. The full basement was finished on one half that opened out to a fenced dog run. Yet a friend advised against it: too much cracking in the foundation walls. “It won’t be a problem now,” he said, “but in a few years, it will cost some significant money to fix.”

We were heartbroken.

As we walk through the neighborhood, I remember that on the other side of the dog run was a small creek — a draining stream just like the one that runs behind our house, and so we head over to see. I couldn’t remember how much elevation there was between the drain and the house.

Not enough.

Talking to neighbors across the street who were out in the yard, we learned that the owners had well over a foot of water in their basement, and that the water had risen to just below the bottom of the window on the outside. I suddenly became very thankful for the two or three inches we found welling up through the slab in our basement.

Flood

Wednesday 05 June 2013 | 0 Comments

It started around five. I called K to see if she'd need to stay late at work and asked her if it was raining.

"It's coming down pretty hard here," I explained.

And down it came, through dinner, through clean up time, into play time. E and I were by the window when I realized how significant the rainfall really was.

Sheets of rain; gusts of wind. I had these terrible images of one of the enormous trees in the backyard falling onto the house. What would we do? How could I protect my children, my wife?

And still it came down.

Looking into the backyard, I saw we had a lake. And it was growing. Within a few minutes, I realized why: the stream was no longer a stream. And within a few more minutes, we were all standing in the carport in shock.

But it was nothing compared to what I saw when I got to the neighbor's yard. Looking into her neighbor's yard, I saw something that literally made be question my grasp on reality. Water flowing out of the house. Pouring. Torrents running out of the house.

The poor folks were getting it from three directions.

Seeing the owner in the garage, I walked in and asked him if he needed help. I could only imagine what might be going on inside the house, and I thought if I could help him move anything at all to higher ground it would be more useful than standing around with a video camera in my hand.

Fortunately, at that point, nothing had gotten into the house. It was just flowing through his garage, he explained. He'd lived in the neighborhood for close to forty years, he explained, and he'd never seen anything remotely close to this.

I promised to return later to see if the situation had worsened and if he needed help.

It turned out, though, that we had our own issues to deal with.

"Where did the water come from?" K asked. Walls? Floor? Who knows. When this much rain falls in such a short time, the answer is probably, "All of the above."

I vacuumed for at least half an hour before I really felt I was making no progress at all.

"Surely I'm just imagining this," I muttered to myself. "Surely I'm making progress. I've emptied this thing at least ten or twelve times, and it supposedly holds sixteen gallons. That's a lot of water for it to show no change," I continued, still rambling to myself. (The more confused I am, the more likely I am to begin talking aloud to myself. Perhaps I'm not the only one?)

I decided to take a quick break and see if the water rose any. That would confirm my obvious suspicion that water was still flooding into the house.

By this time, though, the rain had almost stopped and the water was lower, almost returning to the confines of the small creek.

What remained was a fetid mess.

An expensive fetid mess: the house, about a half a mile away from our humble home, with a backyard so gloriously landscaped I thought it was a park, no longer had a beautiful garden. In its stead was a lake.

It was no Katrina. Flash flooding at the most. Still, enough of a view of what water can do to put famous floods into a more meaningful perspective.

Late Spring Growth

Monday 03 June 2013 | 0 Comments

The garden is growing: snap peas are taking off and the tomatoes are fruiting abundantly thanks, I think, to a new pruning method recommended to me by the manager of a local university's organic garden. The grass seed I sprinkled almost haphazardly in the flat space among the trees at the base of our lot have sprouted finally. (The delay was due, in large measure, to simple neglect: it was an experiment. What happens if you just spread the seed and leave it alone? I guess we have our answer now.)

But that growth outside the house seems insignificant compared to what's developing inside: the Boy is a walker now, able to walk twenty or more steps before collapsing to his hands and knees for something more sure and more familiar.

Today a walker; tomorrow, a runner.

It all happens too quickly.

Mix and Match

Saturday 01 June 2013 | 0 Comments

A busy day, with mowing, smoking, staking, moving, shaking -- a busy June beginning in preparation for a long-delayed first-birthday party for the Boy. It coincides with Dzien Dziecka, a holiday missing from the American calendar, so we'll be having a laughter-filled party (We have Mother's and Father's Day? Why do we leave the children out?)

But there was no time for pictures today. And so we have the mix-and-match: pictures from yesterday (L's kindergarten awards day) and a few words about today.

Neighbors’ Neighbors

Tuesday 28 May 2013 | 0 Comments

Our neighbors, it turns out, still have the same neighbors that foraged in our trash a few years ago and seemed able to get into our compost no matter now cleverly I thought I’d secured it. They were a bit shy at first. Indeed, they were so shy to begin with that I didn’t even realize they were “they.”

But with enough patience, sitting facing the neighbors’ tree while the boy played,

they began coming down the tree. At first, I only saw the parent and one baby. It wasn’t until I looked closely at the pictures this evening that I realized how much we have in common: a couple of kids, an old house, and rings around our eyes.

They shyness continued, with one peaking out for a last glimpse of that strange creature with the odd black appendage that it keeps pointing toward us.

By then, K and L had returned from the pre-recital ballet pictures and the four of us headed out for a walk, dropping the girl off at her friend’s house up the street.

Such an odd little neighborhood. Most houses date from the late sixties, giving them either look of a tired maturity or experienced elegance, depending on the time the owners put into the upkeep. But sprinkled in and about them are newer houses, some obviously less than ten or fifteen years old.

And then there are the mysteries, like the neighbors who obviously spent several thousand dollars cutting down more than ten large trees in their yard while their house has signs of neglect creeping around the doors and windows.

“If I had a few grand to spend on the house,” I laughed, “the last thing I’d spend it on would be the removal of trees.” Of course the large oak with the hollow, rotten core would have been a different story. Still, first on my list ofÂ prioritiesÂ is our tired, tired kitchen, in need of a complete overhaul. A finished laundry room would be a pleasant addition, as would a remodeled guest bath. Cutting down a few trees in the backyard — what’s the point?

But about this time, Â the Boy began reminding us how late it had grown, so we returned to our house with the temporarily fabulous front lawn, the ever-tired kitchen, the unfinished laundry, and the beds.

All Day

Saturday 25 May 2013 | 0 Comments

Saturday morning, blue sky, cup of coffee, 10-20mm wide-angle lens on the back deck. A day like this calls for outside work: the three unfinished Leyland cypresses do too.

Then again, the Boy looks spectacular, and I consider taking him out to hit the links, only to remember that I don’t play golf.

Nor do I play tennis. My tennis racket has been pressed into carpenter-bee-launching duty and the only tennis balls I have are on the bottoms of the legs of the thirty-odd desks in my classroom.

Such a beautiful day, though. It calls for time outside. It calls for walks. It calls for coffee on the back porch.

What such a start doesn’t call for is time spent waiting for someone to rotate my tires only to leave just as they pull my little Jetta into to garage, but that’s just what happens. And that’s okay. Not at first, but eventually — wasted time is lost time, and it irritates me.

Still, the trees are patient.

By the time I get back to the deck again to take the “after” shot, it’s past nine. Dark, quiet, still. The kids are in bed; the day is over — only one thing remaining: document the day.

And then I discover 147Trance’s YouTube channel, and before I know it, it’s past midnight. Technically, I skipped a day. Well, somewhere it’s still the twenty-fifth…

[He] Climbs a Tree and Scrapes [His] Knee

Saturday 18 May 2013 | 0 Comments

My shorts have tears, and my knees aren't the only thing scraped. It's always the same story when I take on the Leyland Cypress trees that provide lovely and complete privacy at our balcony. Privacy that comes with a cost, for just trimming three trees is more than an afternoon affair.

Every few years, though, I decide that enough is enough, that it's time to teach these trees a lesson they'll never forget. To strip them almost bald. To take a couple of feet off the side and four off the top.

And that's no easy task, because these things have trunks that are inches -- multiple inches -- in diameter. And I'm standing on a ladder that's balanced on some limbs that I've crushed into semi-submission, standing on this ladder and jerking my arm back and forth and back and forth. The whole tree sways; the whole ladder sways. Back and forth and back and forth. I think about a chain saw. I think again. Back and forth.

Finally, I'm through. I take the freshly removed log, steady myself, and toss it over the side. I hear the crunch of busted plastic. "Hum, there was that white plastic deck chair somewhere near the tree," I think. "Near the tree, but not that near.

But it wasn't the deck chair. It was the spool I use to store the ridiculously long drop cord I have to use for such adventures. There is a tolerance of perhaps two inches -- it fit perfectly.

How many times would I have had to chuck a log from a ladder blindly over a tree to hit that again?

Taming

Saturday 11 May 2013 | 0 Comments

When the morning starts like this, I know I'll be spending the day outside working in the yard. This in turn means that K will be inside, cleaning, doing laundry, caring for the Little Man. Our own little division of labor.

First up: the row of bushes -- no idea what species -- that runs between our driveway and our neighbors'. Mr. C has told me, "Cut those things back as much as you want." They're planted on his property, but they spill onto ours: I treat them as mutual property. But I take him at his word and usually do both sides myself.

This year, things are especially bad. The briers and honeysuckle at the end of the driveway have taken over. You can't even see the two trees at the base of the driveway unless you look up. Then again, they're Liquidambar styraciflua, Sweet Gums (or as I prefer to call them, Satanically Evil Indestructible Overly-Fertile trees), so who really wants to see them?

I get out the trimmer and decide, in the words of Marsellus Wallace, to get medieval on it.

It's all futile, I know: I've already spent an entire day cleaning out the briers, digging up roots, pulling down the vines. That was some five years ago, though, and I must admit to my surprise at how long it took things to return to their previous condition.