Light until nine

The evening goes on and on. It's perfectly still. Not a leaf stirs, the bird sounds (none of them familiar) are loud, there are not even any insects to wave at. The long grass settles down and gleams in the low light. Talley the Singapura cat settles down in my lap, also gleaming. Her daughter Bertie stalks chimeras somewhere nearby. It's 9:00 here on the western side of the eastern time zone. And there's still a month to go before the equinox.

And Ohio isn't even the far western edge. I lived part of my boyhood in western Michigan and vividly recall playing kick-the can and hide-and-seek until nearly 11:00. It was a summer-long gift, those 5-hour evenings after supper, appreciated as if games were eternal, time were endless. Now life is quieter, a little more sedentary but more appreciated. Even this unfamiliar place makes me content, and I look at my car at this end of the long, thousand-foot driveway, pointed out as if ready to leave in a couple of days, and yes, I miss the ocean, and my wife, but tonight is a gift too, out of time, or rather, back in time.

Ten minutes later, it's nearly completely dark.

The birds of north-east Ohio

I'm about half-way through my month-long, Maine-less sojourn, most of which I'm spending in rural north-east Ohio at my brother's house, staying with my mother while brother and family vacation in Ireland. Today feels a bit coastal Maine-ish - foggy and cool after yesterday's thunderstorm - not surprising since we're only a mile or two from Lake Erie.

My daily routine includes, of course, a walk. Although I don't know Ohio well, this area seems distinct form the rest of the state: flat, mostly wooded, full of little ponds and tiny streams and open fields of hay, a floodplain perhaps for the big lake to the north. The walking is easy, quiet, unspectacular, and the animals I see are mostly domesticated - seven Herefords in a feed lot, a dog frantically barking behind a fence, chickens crowing and clucking, my mother's two cats willfully going in and out of the house. The wild animals I see are mainly birds, the common ones seen most everywhere in the Midwest and New England. Or maybe I could count barking dogs behind fences, on chains, behind doors, including one in a cage that seemed anxious to take a bit of my thigh for his afternoon tea.

Are these birds really wild anymore? I suppose the vultures, robins, red-winged blackbirds, goldfinches, blue jays, sparrows, wrens, and the two geese who seem to have adopted my brother's property could survive without the lawns and fields and seeds and shrubs and roadkill supplied by humans, but it would be much more difficult. Some of the birds clearly don't need us. The pileated woodpecker sounding like a machine-gun, the kill-deer leading me along the road with their piping, the two kingfishers (?) calling a little square dance around a tree before having sex, the blue heron I saw in a swamp in the state park nearby - all these give me the sense of freedom that more settled life might lack, a feeling of hope and of the very long cycle of life that temporary or even permanent setbacks find a place in.

There are deer here also, those lovers of edges, but I haven't yet seen any.

Not that lovers of edges aren't inspiring in their own right. What could be more amazing than a hummingbird in your lilies? I'm just not sure humans are thriving here, even though we have created this new world of borders. Many species do thrive, finding food in spite of danger, finding food because of danger. I live in such places, on the edges of ocean, city, emotion, pain, ecstasy, where I can find food for the body but not necessarily for the soul.

Organizing lobsters

There's a new movement to organize lobster fishermen into a union. The industry must be in trouble if the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers wants to take on the long-standing Maine Lobstermen's Association. I don't have an opinion of the worth of either of these groups, but I do wonder how inside, hourly, company tool guys like IAMAW fit with outside, independent, piece-work trap guys like lobster fishermen. Also semantically speaking, something named MLA would seem to be the obvious choice to represent the economics of our lovable crustaceans, but only if it can distance itself from the main problem: that the lobster dealers - neither company guys nor independent contractors but some queasy in-betweeners - set the prices in this business. Oh, the possibilities for collusion!

On another and perhaps lighter lobster note, I was "interviewed" following publication of my lobster essay last year in PANK, and the interview is finally published.
http://www.pankmagazine.com/pankblog/young-bright-things/the-lightning-room-with-jim-krosschell/

Tree rat sex

Gray squirrels are not common in our area of Maine (we have the terribly cute, feisty, chattering red kind), so I have to observe them in Massachusetts. They probably don't deserve the odium that most city-dwellers heap on them, being reasonably cute, terribly athletic, and fascinating to dogs. After all, their sins are minor: solving the barriers to bird feeding stations, and chewing their way into attics. Perhaps there are more.

Anyway, I spent a lovely few minutes at the end of an even lovelier day watching three of them in the oaks behind our house. Two seemed to be a couple. There was playing and chasing around tree trunks, which I soon understood to be fore-play; a couple of  tentative humpings; then a prolonged coupling, or what appeared to be, since the sun was going down in my face and the sight lines were not clean. Some rest followed, on quite separate branches, and that was followed by what I can only describe as snacking. They both climbed high into the tree, far out into the smallest and tenderest branches, and with their clever hands broke them off and ate the new buds. Twigs were discarded like cigarette butts.

The third squirrel? Just moved mysteriously through the trees like they always do.

Nothing earth-shattering here, just squirrel sex and noshing, but I had never seen either before, and it was a damn sight better way to spend time than surfing news sites for news of the odious marathon monster.