View from a Chair

It came from a long gone thrift shop, a $15 tag affixed to one burly arm, an old rough-hewn chair hammered together in someone’s garage and slathered with a tea brown stain over its anonymous woodgrain. Solid as rock and heavy to shift, it has a slatted back and bottom, strong, heavy arms and was clearly crafted by a person who knew what he was doing. The legs are flush with the floor and solid as concrete pillars impossible to wobble, a chair sumô wrestling champions could bounce upon with complete confidence. 

Four years now the chair with its tacky blue plastic cushions has been my back porch seat looking out into the back half of two acres crowded with old oak trees and swaths of grass ravaged nightly by hungry armadillos digging for grubs. Armadillos are but one the pests preying upon, or living in this quiet cathedral of green. Mosquitos, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, gopher turtles and the occasional snake also call this patch of coastal marshland home and are easily the oldest denizens of the landscape. I am no more than a late coming intruder with ideas of taming the land to my notions of civilization. The wrap around screen of this back porch helps me to believe I’m doing a pretty good job of keeping the less pleasant critters at bay. Like the glass cages at a zoo, the screen puts a barrier between me and the “wild” outdoors.

The chair is also my front row seat to an ever moving flit and flutter of birds coming and going, socializing, quarreling and courting around the bright red bird feeder hung from a fat branch of the camphor tree just off the porch. Despite my almost daily attendance to the bird drama fifteen feet in front of my chair, the names of all the birds remain a mystery. I recognize the cardinals, the beaming red males and rust red females, the bossy blue jays, the doves and nervous sparrows, but there are some I can’t name despite a search through the bird books. One, a small gray and white bird with a tufted head sings with such a powerful burst of sound, caught off-guard you’re likely to drop your coffee cup. He’s a songbird of sorts to rattle even the lethargic gopher turtles.

Another mystery bird is the small gray one with a breast of the most delicate yellow imaginable. There is also a pale wash of that same color on the back of his head. Like the cardinal, this one too has a bland and indistinctive voice. Or perhaps he’s never been inclined to sing around me and my chair.

As for the blue jay, the one I call an obstreperous delinquent, his visits are more than anything else an in-air collision that rocks the feeder and sends birdseed spilling to the ground, which I suppose is a favor to the feeder-shy doves down below. Woodpeckers knock around in the camphor tree from time to time but don’t bother with free seed. And once in a while another of the fierce marsh hawks can be seen perched on a fencepost eyeing the terrain. Often eighteen inches from claw to crown, these birds rake the air with a strident screech, a good match with the murderous claws and downward curving beak.

Rising heat pushes the birds off to cooler shadows and I’m left with the smaller inhabitants for entertainment. Creeping across the screen, eye out for small insects is one of the countless lizards that are usually a part of anywhere you turn your head. These tiny anoles (chameleons) often lay their eggs somewhere around the inside of the porch and every other day has me chasing down a one-inch baby to transplant outside.

Farina the dawg bursts each day upon the backyard scene not long after sunrise, desperate to catch one of the invading squirrels launching themselves at the bird feeder. Her appearance is the long established signal for them to scat. Until dark the safest place for squirrels is high in the treetops, far from sixty pounds of dog that casually leaps two feet into the air.

This is one of those times when the summer heat makes the back porch uncomfortable despite the ceiling fan and the familiar coziness of the big old chair. All the surrounding green and the shadows it casts are pretty much helpless against the heat and humidity of a Florida summer.

Birdland

Been keeping an eye on the sitting redbird in the Queen Palm these past eleven days, checking at least two times each day to see what was going on with mama and her three eggs. She couldn’t have been away from the nest more than two or three times in that stretch of days. I can remember only two times she wasn’t there when I crept close to have a look. I sort of lost count of the days since I first discovered the eggs and was beginning to think they were overdue for hatching. No such thing because when I looked this morning I found no mama but three newly hatched, wrinkled and brownish-pink hatchlings curled up in a ball. I say three but it’s a little hard to tell if that small mass in the nest is two or three babies. And today being the eleventh day since I first saw the eggs, they are right on time, hatching just when the expert said they would.

I’ve seen the mother and her mate fluttering in and out and around the nest several times today and I’m guessing they are bringing insects for the baby birds to eat. From the look of the babies you’d think they would have to force feed them for the time being. They look pretty inert there in the bottom of the nest. I understand that their food at this stage is exclusively insects because of the higher protein needed to sustain their accelerated growth rate while so young. Once they fledge they will begin to feed on seeds, fruits and berries. They won’t have far to go to reach the feeder hanging from my camphor tree full of  Black-oil Sunflower seeds.

Cardinal Eggs

My down the road neighbor, Lamar has asked a couple of times if I’ve found any bird nests in trees or shrubs around the yard, this being the season when birds build nests and lay their eggs. A couple of times I’ve told him, “No, haven’t seen any so far.” Maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough because this morning I stumbled upon a mama redbird sitting in her nest about five feet off the ground. Stumbled is a good word in this case because I was taken by surprise, the last thing on my mind a bird sitting on her eggs. I was cleaning up the patch of papyrus stalks that grow about a dozen feet from the back porch and my eye caught sight of the bird’s nest wedged up in the fronds of a Queen Palm close to the papyrus. I looked more closely and saw a rounded reddish-brown mass nestled down in the nest but still didn’t recognize it as a bird. It looked a little like a decaying flower and when I tugged one of the palm fronds out of the way, instantly the “decaying flower” fluttered up and away revealing 3 gray-brown eggs with dark spots.

The red arrow points to the location of the nest.

 

Male left, female right

Something about the discovery made me almost joyous for a few minutes but then I quickly worried I might have scared the mother away for good. The worry didn’t last long because I tiptoed back for another look a half hour later and there was the mother once more roosting atop the eggs. It’s good to know that I now have ahead of me a daily look at or into the nest to see how the hatching is coming along. Looking it up, I see that a female cardinal lays from 1 to 5 eggs, usually 3 which hatch after 11-13 days of incubation. The female broods the chicks for the first 2 days with both parents feeding them a diet of insects. The chicks normally begin leaving the nest 7 to 13 days after hatching, more commonly 9 to 10 days. The parents continue to feed the chicks for as long as 25 to 56 days after they fledge from the nest. The young birds then join flocks of other juveniles and may begin breeding the next spring.

With me temporarily fascinated by the bird nest, Farina is left to her own devices.

Dawg Seat

Farina has never liked riding in the front seat of the truck. For most of the past year she’s been complaining about her place in the back seat. Can’t blame her for whining and pacing back and forth in a space too small for her sixty pounds and too uneven to give her secure footing. I’m sure anyone, dog or hobbit would be uncomfortable in that narrow space designed more for stowing stuff you don’t want to haul in the truck bed. And for a dog that loves to put her head out in the rushing air, side windows that don’t open are another bummer. At least she has the small window in back that opens.

Since she goes almost everywhere with me, I’ve worried that the narrow back seat with its equally narrow leg well could prove a dangerous trap for Farina under certain circumstances. Reason is, Farina has seizures at intervals of about once a month, a brief but definitely scary situation for both of us. For two or three minutes the dog is thrashing on the floor with foam and saliva pouring out of her mouth. I often worried that if it happened in the truck, she might fall down into the leg well on her back and choke on all that gunk boiling up out of her throat. So I thought about ways to prevent that from happening.

I figured the main point was to close that leg well gap and at the same time widen the bench seat. Why not fit a piece of half-inch plywood over the seat and the leg well? I took my idea to neighbor Randy—the one with all the skills and all the tools. We talked about cut outs in the plywood to fit around the curve of the two front seats and the armrest box between, figured out how to do the two supporting legs in the well and how to pad the surface to make it more comfortable. I went off to Home Depot with scribbled measurements and bought half a sheet of plywood and an eight-foot 2x4.

Like always, Randy did all the work with me trying to help out in small ways. He told me he loved doing this kind of job but really enjoyed working alone. Said he could concentrate on the job better that way. So I left him with his saws and sandpaper and with vacuum, brushes and lint roller I worked at cleaning out as much of the dog hair as possible from that back seat. It didn’t take Randy more than an hour to finish the job. I helped him fit it in behind the front seats and then he tacked down the canvas cover over the custom fit padded bench. We stood back looking at it for a bit then both wondered how Farina was going to handle the jump up onto the bench. Her footwork would have to take into account the covered leg well. She was sleeping over on the apron of Randy’s garage and I called her over to the truck. She looked up at the new arrangement; I said, “Get up!” and in one smooth movement she was up and in, standing with paws on the armrest between the front seats looking out the front. She seemed to be thinking, “Where’re we going?”

I ride a lot easier in the truck now knowing that Farina will be okay should one of those seizures come to call. In the past six weeks the vet has gotten the dosage of her medication to what seems like a good balance. The interval between seizures is lengthening. 

    

Old Lawn Mowers

Was a time when I had little knowledge of or use for things like lawn mowers and weed eaters. That’s no longer the case out here in the country where concrete or paving is minimal and where grass and weeds can grow an inch overnight. I have about two acres of it to subdue every ten days at this time of year and it’s a season when you don’t want to be without a means of keeping all that grass low to discourage the snakes from crossing the fence. Didn’t take me long to learn that tall grass and weeds make an attractive environment for things that slither. My problem from the beginning has been with old and well-worn lawn mowers that have more ailments than a 12-year-old Ford Pinto. I could fill a notebook with all the different mechanical problems plaguing my old lawn mowers. Everything from rusted spark plugs frozen in place to the loss of brakes and steering, you name it, I’ve seen it on those two old antiques.

Last week I went out to crank the Landmaster for a hour or two of mowing and got no response when I turned the key. Not even a cough or the sound of a low battery. That happened not long after three or four other problems that cost me money and left the grass growing high. I have a good neighbor who is at home with his hands inside of motors, so I asked him to have a look at the problem this time. He played with it and got the mower started by pressing a screwdriver against the ignition switch (or something) under the hood. So I managed to get the grass cut that day but decided halfway through I was done with old, played out lawn mowers, that I would look around for a newer machine with a reputable brand and not twelve years old. Things aren’t bad enough yet that I’m going off to Home Depot for a brand new lawn mower tagged at $2000.

Maybe I was lucky to find somebody selling a Husqvarna 23 horsepower mower with a 48-inch deck and only a few years old. (The 48-inch deck means it cuts that width in one pass.) The mower also came newly greased, with new blades and new battery and a warranty. And a big extra for me: free delivery and a discount for giving him the old battered Landmaster. I looked at the Husqvarna website online and got all the specifics so I could at least sound knowledgeable in talking to the guy when he delivered. Otherwise he might try to explain the hydrostatic transmission and see the duh on my face. 

For all the problems I’ve had with previous lawn mowers there’s a repairman not far from here who has served me well. Over the past year he’s tried to convince me that buying gasoline without ethanol for the lawnmower will increase the machine’s longevity. It costs a little more and the closest place to get it is 20 miles away but I’ve made up my mind to start using the no-ethanol gasoline in the “new” Husqvarna. I’ll try almost anything to have the peace of mind that comes with not worrying if the lawn mower is going to start when I want to cut the grass.

The Smell of Cedar

Walking out into the front yard this morning the first thing that grabbed my attention was the smell of cedar. The scent was strong and I thought, “What a great aftereffect to cap an hour of hard work.” A week ago I thought the large dead tree in front yard was a pine tree, information I’d gotten from someone who had their trees mixed up. 

The fact that the big dead tree was a cedar and not pine became obvious with the first cut from a chainsaw, with sawdust spewing out rich with the smell of cedar. The day to cut down the tree was set for yesterday and planned as a three man job but suddenly there were six people, all neighbors coming over to help out. I’ve often said that living out here in the dirt road country of southern Oak Hill has taught me the real meaning of neighborliness. Once that tree was on the ground, it took no more than forty-five minutes to have it stripped of branches, cut into manageable pieces, hauled away and the ground raked clean. The tree’s trunk was eighteen inches across and at its highest about twenty-seven feet. With the yard cleaned up and offering a whole new perspective, my neighbors stood around chatting for a while and then one by one drifted home. 

Scroll down to the March 11 post here and you can see a snap of the tree as it was before being cut down. All that remains now is an eighteen inch tall stump which I have begun sealing as best I can with repeated coats of spar urethane on the cut surface, giving it a clear semi-gloss coating to protect it from rain, moisture and temperature. It will soon be the perfect place to sit out in the yard.

The yard is now open to more sunlight with an improved view looking toward the southwest. Big improvement in the balance of the yard in the opinion of everyone standing around. Besides that, a tall dead tree is not a pretty sight from any angle. Tomorrow good neighbor Randy and I plan to cut one of the branches with a two or three inch diameter into inch thick slices to toss in clothes drawers. Buy the same thing all wrapped up pretty at Bed Bath & Beyond and spend $25 or more.

Don’t Leave Me!

Most of the time when I’m going somewhere farther than next door or down the road, the dawg goes with me. She’s as used to riding in the truck as I am driving it. She expects to go wherever I’m going and all I have to do is open the door and she jumps right in. She knows all the routines of a truck ride, knows she’ll have to wait a few minutes while I run in the store or the library, but also knows that wherever it is, she’ll get the chance to get out and sniff around, “read the newspaper” and have a pleasant, leisurely walk around. That’s most of the time, but occasions arise when she can’t tag along with me and has to stay at home by herself. She’s never locked up in the house, can go out or come in through her dog door, free to spend the time alone chasing armadillos around the yard or dozing inside the house. My guess is, she spends most of that time sitting in the driveway watching for my return.

Farina has a separation complex. People usually talk about that condition in relation to young children, but dogs can have it just as bad. The magazine, Psychology Today says that a separation complex is a normal stage in an baby’s development, that it helped keep our ancestors alive and helps children learn how to master their environment. It usually ends at around age two. To deal with the problem, experts say you should stay calm, be matter-of-fact and sympathetic and that you might say something like, “I know you are upset that I have to go into the kitchen, but I need to cook dinner.” Yeah, if it were only that simple. I’m not sure how it works with young children but I got a lot of experience with the problem in my dog.

In Farina’s case there are only two sides of being left alone: depression and ecstasy. The first happens when it becomes clear that I’m going somewhere and she isn’t, the second when I come home from wherever. It’s pretty hard for me to walk away from the look that comes over Farina when she realizes I’m about to leave her alone. She never follows me to the door, never whines, just retreats to one of her spots, lays her head on the floor and stares at me with big sad eyes. I suspect she stays in that same spot for a while brooding. I try not to stay away for more than a couple of hours but whether it’s two hours or twice as long, when I get home she goes into a frenzy of happiness and relief, jumping up on me, running circles around me, bouncing, dashing off for a spin around the house and yard, back again to jump on me some more.

Unlike a human child, I sort of doubt my dog will ever overcome her separation complex. I should blame myself for nurturing that fear of being apart from her master, but then I also have not fear but regret at being away from my dog. I spend so much time with her at my side that I too am uncomfortable when she’s not there. Lately she has started something new involving closeness. Never anxious when I shoot my .22 rifle or one of the BB guns (just the opposite), when one of my neighbors starts firing a high-powered pistol or rifle, it spooks Farina and if she doesn’t retreat to the bedroom closet, then she presses right up against me, lays across my feet or stands against my leg. Last New Year’s eve she lay tightly against me shivering while the fireworks boomed hour after hour. Maybe I should buy her one of those thunder coats they say soothes a dog during times of loud booms and thunder.

Though I like my dog every bit just the way she is, I do kind of hope she outgrows her fear of being left alone. At almost 4-years-old, she’s no longer a baby.

Simple Choices

One of the good things about life out here on the edge of full-blown civilization is the peaceful nature of days when pressure to get out and about is absent. Like this Saturday, the whole day yawns in front of you with simple choices, all possible with easygoing requirements. Sit in a chair for half the day and watch the wheels go round, wander around the yard to pull a few weeds, pick up a fallen branch, water a few outdoor plants or romp with the dog and a ball. This time it was half an hour with the leaf blower around house and carport followed by several hours in a chair on the back porch reading or watching Farina chase squirrels. 

Sometimes I gaze at the bird feeder wondering where all the redbirds have gone. They used to come around regularly but lately they’ve been off somewhere else. Maybe tired of the particular mix of seeds I’ve loaded the feeder with. Even the squirrels are less interested in getting at it recently. I don’t have the passion to research and run down special (and expensive) mixes of seed to lure them back. Birds are plentiful even if they aren’t gathering around the feeder.

The book I’ve been reading is a crime novel by Nicolás Obregón called Blue Light Yokohama, set in Tokyo, a story about chasing down a serial killer with connections to a cult. The thing I like about this book is the Tokyo setting which the author has done a good job of characterizing. Obregón has made the city another character in the story. I give him credit for doing the job so well considering his semi-brief stay in the city. The back flap bio says that he spent a brief time in Tokyo on a magazine assignment and lives in Los Angeles. Another thing I like is the book’s cover which is a photograph by Masashi Wakui titled Rainy Night in Tokyo. I’ve been a fan of his photography for a while and when I first saw Blue Light Yokohama I felt it was a good sign and checked it out of my local library. I couldn’t figure out the book’s title until I got into it and discovered it is the name of a popular song recorded in 1968 by Ayumi Ishida. The connection is that it was a favorite song of the detective working the serial killer case. I recommend it to anyone who likes crime (mystery) novels with an exotic locale.

Last week I had a day of roof repair and coming up next is cutting down a big pine tree in the front yard. Over the past year the tree has slowly died and now looks a little like it was hit by a sudden freeze or flash fire. Someone is coming out next week to see about cutting it down. Not sure when that will happen since the guy has to look at the tree first and then figure out when he can do the job. What I’ll miss most about the tree is the pretty coat of liverwort growing around the trunk. After a rain it always turns from a crispy brown to a fern-like green. What looks like a big doghouse to the right of the tree is the well house; the larger structure behind that is an unfinished mother-in-law apartment. It’s hard to see the “dead” tree clearly in the picture but believe me, it’s deader than a doornail.

The Saturday air is heating up with a honky-tonk hootenanny back at the sawmill through the trees. Might be the folks there have invited a bunch over for a Bike Week party. I’ve seen a few motorcycles heading back that way and can hear the party heating up. Doubt it’ll be long before the guns come out and the woods ring with gunfire. Poor dawg will have to retire to the bedroom closet where she feels safe.

Pee On It and Walk Away

They grow big on Old Dixie Lane

Without opposable thumbs and a tongue to make words, the dog relies on gentle biting, licking, chewing and her flexible body to communicate with me. Farina’s eyes and the expressions on her face are another way she makes clear what words she would say if she could talk. I look at her every day and understand that by turn she’s confused, angry, happy, impatient or maybe ashamed. With my opposable thumbs and all the words on my tongue, it’s usually me who can’t make himself clear, teed off and impatient that my words and gestures aren’t working and baffled at how a honey-colored bundle with floppy ears and big teeth has grabbed hold of my heart.

It’s slipped my mind where I saw it—probably on a Hallmark card for dogs—but being the dog person that I am, the words struck me as a damn good suggestion and I wrote it down. Here’s what it said: Handle every stressful situation like a dog: If you can’t eat it or play with it, then pee on it and walk away.

Farina went flying out her door this morning, sights set on a squirrel in the backyard camphor tree. I couldn't see what she was bouncing up and down about until I looked hard into the leaves and saw perched on a limb a curved back and fluffy tail outlined against the sky. I brought out one of the two Red Ryder BB guns and took casual aim, not expecting to hit anything. A quiet puff of air, a distant thud and the squirrel went flip-flopping through the air and down to the ground. It rolled to its feet in a second and made a mad dash for the nearest tree with nothing more than a BB dent in its pesky hide. All too fast for the dawg.

Neighbor Randy is a dedicated fisherman and usually out in his boat three or four times a week. He brought over some fresh caught trout the other day. When I think of trout it’s mostly a fish about a foot or foot and a half long. The trout they catch in these parts are sea trout and close to three feet, salt water fish. Randy gives me long, thick filets of it that I batter in Louisiana Seafood Mix and pan fry. Can’t say it’s a Michelin star restaurant in Paris, France but it’s a pretty good supper.

Thorn

Weeds, stickers, thorns and a few dozen kinds of grass flourish in these coastal woods of Florida located at 28° N, 80° W. I’m pretty sure this is the place the man who invented Velcro found his fortune. I can’t walk across the yard without getting patches of Velcro-like stickers all around my cuffs, grabbing a thorny vine by mistake and getting half a dozen burrs on socks and shoelaces. We got it all out here: bedstraw, beggar’s lice, scratchweed and catchweed. Most of the time it’s a minor irritation and plays second fiddle to things like red ants and mosquitos. All part of the big picture out here, which is on most days a good place to be.

A couple of weeks back when I was down the road doing something with neighbor Lamar, the dawg wandered into a patch of grass that was mostly what I call devil burrs, tiny round bulbs spiked all over with needle thorns. Whole thing’s no bigger than a green pea but plain hell to get shed of. Not for the first time Farina came hobbling out of the grass with her pads stuck full of burrs. I did what I always do and pulled the burrs out of her feet, shaking them off my fingers as best I could. I thought no more about it until I got back to the house and felt something in my thumb. It was one of those needle thorns so small I could hardly see it stuck in my thumb.

I tried a dozen times to get that thing out and never even got close. Like I had a sliver of glass in a finger and couldn’t do anything about it. I walked next door to see if Randy’s wife Jean could work the thorn out since she had once before pulled a small splinter out of my hand. She dug around in my thumb for a while, saying she might have gotten it, she couldn’t see anything in there. I went home satisfied but felt the thorn again the next day. I lived with it for a few days, thinking it would work its way out. Never happened. Next time I went over to see Jean she said she was going to try something her mother used to do. First off, she worked a needle around the sore spot to open it up, then took a small piece of salt pork and taped it to my thumb. You coulda wrapped a package with all the tape she used. The salt pork was supposed to draw the thorn out of my thumb. 

But it was all for naught, just as all the digging with needles, spotlights and magnifying glasses were. On the second day of the salt pork poultice I started to worry that aging animal fat pressed against an open hole in my thumb was creepy and risky sounding so I snatched it off and saw the chitterling-sized bit of pork fat had dissolved into my thumb-hole. Now I'm worried that while the thorn is still there, I might contract a case of end-around trichinosis.

Spent a good part of yesterday on the back porch, the air, weather and sky perfect in every way. Hearing the acorns, bits of twig and branch fall onto the tin roof in the breeze, it made me think about the sound of a child’s blocks or Tinker Toys clattering on a tabletop in the next room. The backyard is pretty and trim now with a fresh cutting and the red ants are checking out of their gasoline bathed nests. Sitting there with the newspaper I read that in New York City, a 12 year-old boy pulled a gun on a girl in the subway station and demanded one of her chicken nuggets. She refused to give him one.

Almost forgot, when I was at Lamar’s pulling burrs out of Farina’s feet, Lamar’s fishing buddy was there. He drives a dusty old Chevrolet, faded red with a bumper sticker that says, "Redneck Lives Matter." I wanted to take a picture with my phone but was afraid I might rouse suspicions. 

   

Dawgs & Dollars

Somewhere I read that a long time ago it wasn’t too crazy for a hunter to buy an old mule or horse, take the animal to a remote spot near home, kill it, cut open the hide and then brings his dogs for a feed. A big meal like that could last a good while but sick dogs were common from the decaying meat and the flies. Years later, at a time when dogs still ran free of leashes, when flea collars were unheard of and a can of Alpo was about 50¢, feeding and caring for a pet was still unlike today. Back in the 1950s my dog Jack got by on one can of food a day, didn’t require treats other than a ginger snap now and then, almost never went to the vet and never cost the family more than $4.00 a week. Probably many dog owners spent less than that and had healthy dogs, getting by mostly with scraps from the dinner table. Keeping a dog now is a whole ’nother thing. 

Three years ago when I brought Farina home from the rescue place her diet there was nothing special, getting whatever was donated, what all the other dogs got. Fair to say it was the cheapest dog food available. I changed that in a big way. Thinking a puppy needed healthy food for strong growth, I started out feeding her some yogurt, cottage cheese or oatmeal in the morning, a dish of wet dog food at lunch and a pan of lightly cooked boneless chicken thighs or drumsticks at night. She also got a fat vitamin pill every day. I bought some kibble and put it down for her to graze on but she didn’t much like it. With all that in her bowl daily she went from seventeen pounds to thirty pounds in a month. Sometimes I added carrots or green beans to the chicken or maybe chopped apple or blueberries to the oatmeal. She gobbled that up, loved honey and loved peanut butter. Figured that was all good. She got older and I cut back the amount little by little. All this time the vet was telling me to give her nothing but kibble and friends saying she ought never have people food. The way I saw it, the “people” food such as chicken, apple, carrots and green beans were all 100% healthy for dog or man. 

It took over a year for me, with the vet’s guidance, to understand maybe I oughta try getting away from things like chicken, that maybe that was the reason for Farina’s shabby coat of hair. Her beautiful honey coat started to look like it was thinning, with gray hairless spots along her sides. I tried two different antibiotics and that worked for a while but the hair loss started again. I thought it must be an allergy, maybe  something outside like a plant or a kind of grass. The vet suggested cutting all chicken, chicken meal and chicken by-products from her diet. I did that and the result was almost instant. Within a couple of weeks Farina’s hair was growing back to its natural golden fullness, the gray spots covered by new hair. That was the beginning of a radical change in diet. I started reading labels and eighty-sixing anything that contained chicken by-products, especially chicken meal.

The dawg’s coat was soon back to its natural golden sheen, helped along by no chicken or grain and a supplement of Norwegian kelp (seaweed) added to her new diet of Merrick canned food. She also began eating Merrick buffalo and sweet potato kibble, plus a can of Blue Buffalo beef or lamb two or three times a week.

Only problem now is the cost. The Merrick and Blue Buffalo canned food and kibble cost over $100 a month. That’s hard, even considering it’s delivered free in two days and keeps the dog healthy. But then, what are you gonna do? I figure whatever’s good for the dawg’s good for me too.

Ants Big & Bad

The house on Old Dixie Lane

Roofers came to replace a rusted sheet of tin on the roof, the part over my bedroom that’s been leaking the last few times we’ve had rain. Two guys climbed around on the roof a couple of days back and told me they would come back near the end of the week to do the work. Here they came at 8:30 this morning hauling the materials they needed to do the job and jumping right to it, a big section of the tin roof off inside an hour. Hard to believe but they finished the whole job by noon. The next rainstorm will tell the whole story but no reason to suspect the work was anything but a good job.

The gatepost of big ants

I was closing the gate after the two trucks pulled out and noticed a single ant scurrying up the gate post and couldn't believe I was looking at an ant. Bright red-orange and the size of a small grasshopper, half an inch long with two body sections as big and round as peas. Looked like something with a bite that could take down a full-grown man. With these beasts its both a bite and a sting, the bite to get a grip and the sting coming next from the ant's abdomen. Biggest ant I've ever seen, something you'd expect to see in the Australian outback or the Amazon jungle. 

Around here ants are always underfoot. Until she learned how to avoid the red ants, the dawg got stung a bunch of times. Not too long back I was on the way out the screen door on the back porch and saw a thick line of red ants flowing back and forth along the door edge of the rubber mat on the outside walkway. I pulled the mat away from the door and uncovered a swarm of what looked like two million ants hard at work building a nest in the doorway there on the concrete walk. I worked almost forty-five minutes to clear all the ants out of the doorway. I was out of ant spray so sprayed them with alcohol and Formula 409, ants running every which way, into the porch, up the walls and onto me when they were able. I went batshit over the fiery little devils trying to build a nest in my doorway and went overboard killing as many as I could, eventually crushing the stragglers with my thumb. I felt like a victim in that old movie I saw as a kid, the one where army ants—the dreaded Marabunta!—attack a plantation in South America. I think it was called The Naked Jungle.

While the guys were fixing the roof, neighbor Lamar came motoring down on his senior buggy to get help with something confusing about his health insurance. He has a condition that makes him flustered and angry when he doesn’t understand what’s going on. It’s one part of the MS (Multiple sclerosis) he battles most of the time and the doctor told him to avoid frustration and stress. Transportation was included in his insurance coverage, rides to and from his doctor appointments but they told him he got cancelled out of that benefit. He tried to call Medicare to see what the problem was but they made Lamar crazy with their foolishness. So he asked me to help. I spoke to four or five recordings and eventually three or four people and not a bit of it helped. An hour later someone did help and gave us a number to call about transportation. I called that number and someone said hello just when Lamar was on a streak, cussing loud about fools on the phone. I shushed him quick and we got the problem solved. Now Lamar has a renewed ticket to ride the medical van.

It’s part of the disease but Lamar’s brain gets rattled as the MS progresses. Repeats himself and says a lot of stuff that sounds hard to believe. He loves to recount stories of crime, screw ups, bitches, prison, drugs and murder. I think he's experienced in all but murder but I haven't heard the whole story. When we got done with the telephone business this morning he started telling me about a friend of his who sprayed a room full of people with a machine gun, went to prison and inherited a million dollars. Now does that sound logical or probable? One day coming back from the store we came up behind a police car on the road and automatically Lamar said, "That's probably the som’bitch that arrested me last time." That Lamar, he’s a caution. 

Lamar’s trailer in the woods

Under the Camphor Tree

Away from the noise and distraction, days in the Florida wilds far removed from city sights and sounds pass like a slow drip of honey from the comb. Most days, when the sun is a hand span above the horizon, a line of sight blocked by a thousand old oaks, I sit at the backyard table with coffee and toast, the dog at my feet. But while the horizon is hidden from my view, the first light of morning weaves its way through those trees and floods speckled and golden across the yard, a slow moving kaleidoscope of flickering sunlight. For a long hour the morning creeps lovingly across what seems an uninhabited world, the silence unbroken by birds or the hum of insects. The only things moving are light and breeze, gentle stimuli in the stirring of a new day.

The hour turns and countless small voices rise from trees and grass, the slow arrival of a soundtrack that would sound like armageddon if connected to big speakers. In short time a crowded community of life is moving about the trees, clicking, rasping and chittering in the grass, while in my ear the annoying buzz of a mosquito dodging my slaps and waving hands. Soon the ground around the bird feeder is busy with five or six redbirds, another one at the feeder tossing down sunflower seeds to mates below. I once had no admiration for the female redbird, seeing it as dull beside the dazzling male. Not so any more. The nearness of so many has shown that the darker female is the true beauty.

Yesterday I watched a large, black beetle with white spots rolling a ball of dung through the grass. I could see nearby where the beetle’s prize had come from and looked up at Farina nosing in the grass a ways off. I’ve read a little about dung beetles but had never seen one at work. How did the beetle manage to get his cargo so perfectly round?

I was busy scaring a pesky squirrel off the bird feeder, Red Ryder’s BBs whizzing past his furry butt and I noticed a small bird in a jasmine bush close by. Not bothered by my nearness, it searched for something and I could see its color patterns clearly. A small bird, smaller than a sparrow and with a gray back and wings, white breast and pale yellow at the throat. It also had a pale spot of yellow on its back. I tried looking it up online later but had no luck. Every description I typed in came up blank.

Blank. A good word to describe my understanding of the sights and sounds coloring the life out here among the frogs and leaping lizards. Little by little, day by day I untangle one more mystery.

Flea Market

Pleasant Sunday here in the country. Quiet as usual. In the morning I drove up to the Oak Hill flea market even though past visits have never turned up a good buy. I call it a half-blown business with few stalls and few customers and nothing like most flea markets. I can browse in a well-stocked flea market for a couple of hours, but this local one can be covered in fifteen minutes. I bought a few things this time, mostly fresh tomatoes, yellow squash, limes and carrots. Found a pair of binoculars for $5, something I can use to see birds around the place better. Got an old kitchen crock pot for 25 cents. I put that stuff in the truck and went to the café in front of the flea market and ordered the makings of Clyde mix, what I call the breakfast concoction my old daddy used to stir up on most mornings: two eggs fried over easy, grits and patty sausage with a side of biscuits. Cut the sausage up, cut the eggs up and mix both with the grits, all on the one plate. Eat it up with a sopping-biscuit in one hand.

When I let Farina out this morning there were three squirrels dangling from the bird feeder. Farina went tearing out and leaping up at them but they scattered up the tree in the nick of time. I went out and peppered them with the Red Ryder, scaring them off. You can shoot a squirrel ten times with a BB gun and it’ll still laugh at you. They come back five minutes later. I’ve knocked them off of limbs, put hot BBs on their butts, shoulders, heads and legs and they scamper off with a smirk. Sympathy? Oh, aren’t they cute? Aw, poor things. Don't hurt them. Living out here it doesn’t take long to see the bad side of what are nothing more than rats with bushy tails that carry disease and come in the house if they can find a way.

Hard to understand my neighbors Randy and Jean jumping all over Lamar for fattening a wild hog in his pen down the road. They badgered him so much he finally let the hog go. They tell him it’s cruel to pen an animal up for fattening and eventual death on the chopping block. Wild hogs are popular with hunters in these parts, a delicious meat for the table which is what it’s all about for Lamar living on his small government pension, barely enough to get by on. Jean misses the point and tell him if he wants to eat roast pork he should go to the supermarket and buy it. Last year they sent Jimmy down to Lamar’s place when he was gone and he let loose another wild pig Lamar was fattening. Jean is a forceful kind of animal lover, but she’s given up on me and the pesky critters. I told her she better make sure those not so cuddly armadillos stay on the west side of the fence because I’ll blast them to smithereens without blinking an eye and go off hunting more of them.

Lamar didn’t go so far in school and has trouble reading more than a sentence or two. He brought his insurance guidebook needing help finding an eye doctor from the list of approved doctors. I looked at the book for ten minutes and told him I couldn’t find any eye doctors. Full of dentists, orthodontists and periodontists, without an eye doctor in the bunch. So he took the book on next door to have Jean study it. She’s a former blood technician and helps Lamar out with medical questions. Last time she drove him to the doctor, the man was head down over Lamar’s lab report when Jean snatched it out of his hand to get a look at it herself. When they were leaving, the doctor pulled Lamar aside and told him not to bring that woman back again. 

The county tractor came out Saturday to mow the knee high weeds on both sides of our road. Farina had a conniption fit, running up and down the fence line barking her fool head off. We’ve needed those weeds chopped down for a while now. The last time they sent a guy out here who’d never done it before and he drove his big tractor halfway down into the canal and almost got snake bit before he got out. After her spell of barking and running after the tractor Farina came inside and stretched out for a nap.

Baby Turtles & Southern Comfort

Five weeks after Farina’s coming to this patch of Old Dixie Lane her weight had doubled. From day one she was the perfect addition to this big piece of land under oak trees, home to squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, giant gopher turtles, snakes and the occasional alligator. She spent her early days here dashing from one end to the other, running giant circles around the house at a speed fast enough for the greyhound races. In between that she chowed down on big bowls of food. Other than running and chasing either squirrels or rabbits, the biggest fascination was with the two horses living next door, one a full grown dwarf standing at most three and a half feet from hooves to ears. She did a lot of barking at those horses over the fence, and on walks to the mailbox pulled on the leash when we passed the horse gate. At one stop the dwarf galloped up to the gate tossing his head in a sort of “who the hell are you?” fierceness and Farina almost wet herself.   

Another part of the young dog thing is getting used to holes in the yard, lots of holes. Not many times that Farina out romping around doesn’t miss the chance to dig a new hole or two. I wouldn’t mind a scatter of holes dug way at the back of the yard, and there are a few of those, but the two favorite digging spots are in the driveway and along the fence line. I don’t want her digging under the fence and a driveway that looks like a prairie dog village makes for a bumpy coming and going in the truck. The dog books offer up a cure but there are a lot of holes and the ingredients for the cure take time to collect. “Deposit a pile of the dog’s poop in the dug hole and cover it up. That will put the dog off and prevent digging in that spot again.” Problem is, the book doesn’t say anything about all the available places the dog hasn’t dug up before.

The other day Farina was barking at something out by one of the sheds, her eyes focused on something under a bush. I walked over to see what she was riled up about and there was a baby turtle. It looked like one not long hatched from a buried egg and right off the bat was being tormented by a noisy puppy. But to find the hatchling of a gopher turtle was no surprise. The big ones sometimes wander around the backyard nibbling grass and once before I found a baby crawling out of an old fencepost hole. The one Farina had found I washed off with the hose and took a picture. The babies are more beautiful than the full grown turtles, which are a dull and smelly greenish brown. Maybe the yellow spots fade as they grow and the black turns dark green. 

Lamar and Jimmy were barbecuing Mexican sausages across the fence just before sunset yesterday. Up against the woods where Jimmy’s trailer is set up at the back of Randy and Jean’s yard, mosquitos are pretty bad late in the day. Must have been an uncomfortable picnic with all the mosquitos. Jimmy is Jean’s brother and she told him to get outta the house for a few days because she had company coming, told him he could buy a trailer to park out in the backyard. And he did. Then she upped his rent from $400 to $500 a month. Her own brother. Since he had that quintuple bypass surgery last summer, and with an assumed prognosis of little time left, he’s busy drinking himself to death, trying to spend the $50,000 in savings he’s got left. Jimmy is a Vietnam vet living off his pension, which seems to do him okay. Thin as a rail, somewhere in his middle 60s, I guess. Back in the day he got shot up along those jungle trails and came home with a Purple Heart. Now he smokes funny cigarettes and drinks all day long every day. I don’t see much of Jimmy but sometimes hear his 1970s Jefferson Airplane songs booming out of the trailer. Lamar says he plays it so loud they can’t hear each other talk, have to go outside and sit in the mosquitos.

Looking down Old Dixie Lane toward the river

Speaking of Jean, about a week ago I walked over with Farina to say hello around 4:30 and stayed until 7:00 sipping on Randy’s nasty Canadian whiskey and ginger ale. Jean sat across from us throwing back Southern Comfort on the rocks. At one point Lamar came tooling down the road on his lawn mower pulling a baggage cart, come to pick up some laundry Jean had done for him, a bedcover she said later hadn’t been washed in eleven years. He swerved into the driveway, hit a big root sticking up out of the ground and drove his mower and cart bang into Jean’s new Ford compact, a broadside to the passenger door. In her state of Southern Comfort, Jean didn’t give a damn but Lamar was all discombobulated. Conversation came around to pests out in our area and Jean announced she wouldn’t harm a single pink hair on an armadillo’s belly and even enjoyed watching two baby ones play out in her yard. Two seconds later she told us if she ever got her hands on one of those guys who raise fighting dogs she wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet through his medulla oblongata and walk away like she’d just swatted a fly. Me and the dawg didn’t get home until after dark, treading carefully along the dirt road, eye out for things that bite.

Crime Under Cover of Loretta Lynn

Scene of the Crime

Up at 7:30, I was pulled outside ten minutes later by Farina’s non-stop barking. Barking and snarling at something I couldn’t see and ignoring my shouts to knock it off. Looked normal enough from my perspective, no squirrels, birds, armadillos or passing cars to spark her excitement but she paced back and forth at the fence, on about something she couldn’t see on the other side. 

Around 10 o’clock, the quiet restored and Farina sitting vigil on the backyard picnic table, neighbor Randy came over wondering if I’d seen or heard anything out of the ordinary around 7:30, said he had gotten up to go fishing at 6:30 leaving his wife and brother-in-law asleep in the house. Sitting in his boat out on the water he got a call on his mobile from wife Jean telling him to skedaddle home, the police were on their way, her car stolen, gone in 60 seconds and Jimmy’s truck tossed for valuables. Apparently, the thief walked through the wide open gate in broad daylight, rummaged through Jimmy's truck, then saw Jean's car unlocked with keys on the driver's side floor. Jean looked out the window in time to see the thief speeding out the gate in her Ford compact. 

And there the source of Farina’s barking was revealed. Unfamiliar smell in the yard next door and she stood at the fence sounding an alarm the whole time.

My other neighbor at the end of the road is a good guy with a gap in his front teeth, always willing to help out, full of humorous backwoods tales and with a dentist who works out of the trunk of his Buick LeSabre. Plunks his patient on a folding chair and turns on the laughing gas. Chatting at the gate the other day, Lamar told me, “Hell, I'll shoot the son of a bitch. What do I care? I ain’t got long to live anyways.” He was talking about the folks over the way, the ones with their giant killer dogs, muscle cars, all night Loretta Lynn parties, and Sunday afternoon re-enactments of the war in Iraq. Truth is, the past couple of months the killer dogs are rarely seen, the Loretta Lynn parties on hold and the big gun shoot-outs too. Seems most of what they do over there these days is run heavy duty equipment like road graders and other Caterpillar giants. Hard to tell what it is they’re aiming at with all that big yellow machinery, but what used to be invisible behind a screen of trees is now a house uncovered by the uprooting of trees and brush. With a little imagination you’d think they’re preparing a command post in a palmetto hot zone, 500 feet on all four sides of the house denuded of everything—nothing but flat grassless dirt between them and an encroaching enemy. Farina slipped out the gate one morning and hightailed it for their hot zone. I ran after her and stepping through the open gate was met by a former Marine gunnery sergeant who warned me he was going to shoot Farina dead if she got into his chicken house. Good neighbors aren’t always on the nearest vine.

One-Eyed Jack

In a ‘Once upon a time…’ spirit of remembering, my old childhood neighborhood was a place of familiar faces where boys on bicycles meandered up and down quiet streets lined with old trees and cracked sidewalks and where on most days you could count on Mrs Robert’s bulldog Gruffy dashing from the front porch to run barking alongside the boys on their bikes. Most families had a car, some even an extra one for the son or daughter in college. Back then, cars were big boxy affairs sporting large chromed bumpers and humped fenders that seemed to roll down the streets at a stately pace. In most neighborhoods high school boys at the time had not yet discovered the thrill of frightening the dogs and the elderly with their customized old Chevies and loud mufflers, squealing out from stop signs to leave a signature of black tire marks on the street. It was a different time.

As a boy in that 1950s sample of Americana I had a small brown dog named Jack, one of eleven puppies from Aunt Tilly’s nasty old bitch dog, Nelly. They lived down at the end of the street and I remember the day my aunt came over to say I could pick one of the puppies to bring home. Nelly almost bit a finger off when I reached down to pick up the puppy I had an eye on. Jack grew up to be a good and faithful dog but somehow had bad luck with cars. One day he failed to dodge one of those slow moving boxy cars with big bumpers and crawled out from under with his left eye dangling out of its socket. From that day on he was one-eyed Jack until he met another not so slow moving car and lost the challenge completely. Later on I got another dog, a boxer I named Sabre who lived on for some years after I left home. 

I lived without a dog for many years, figuring my location and particular lifestyle weren’t the best conditions for raising and keeping a dog. The dogs in that old childhood neighborhood of the 50s where I grew up were animals that ran free, going out, coming in as they liked. I don’t think we knew what a leash was. That kind of dog was impossible in a big city apartment. So I put aside the idea of a having dog. Until I changed my mind and came home with a pup I saw making eyes at me from a pet shop window. He grew up to be huge and chewed up most things he could get his mouth around. Took a while but I eventually caught on that Butch was not the dog for a small New York City apartment. I ended up giving him to friends who lived in the country. In his new home he became a happier dog, calm and with less inclination to chew toilet seats and sofa cushions. 

A passage of years and much older, one day I found myself living out in the country on narrow dirt lane with two acres of fenced land that looked like the setting of Tobacco Road and maybe the best place in the world to raise a dog.

Not long after getting settled in the cottage tucked among towering oaks and a bounty of wildlife, I went to a canine orphanage to find and adopt what these days is called a rescue dog. And there I met a cheerful mixed breed pup, a runaway they were calling Kelly. Four months old and clearly stressed from living behind bars in a constant din of barking dogs, her cheerful personality was a bit subdued but after a few minutes together I knew she was the one. Filling out forms enough to get me into North Korea or maybe Fort Knox, I took the dog home to the dusty hideaway I had begun to call Chez Dixie. Kelly would never do and so I renamed her Farina because of a honey coat that looks almost like that old-timey cereal of the same name, and also because it was the moniker of my favorite character in the old comedy shorts, Our Gang.

The day Farina came to Old Dixie Lane marked the beginning of another story, one that has redesigned my days and nights in ways never imagined.