Appearances are deceiving. If you came to our house you would say–or think—Oh. There’s a house and a barn. Living in the country. How cool.
Well it is cool but there’s always a price on cool things. Nobody has to ponder that to find examples.
Groundhogs live under the porch. In fact, groundhogs are everywhere and they don’t just nosh on greenery. We have a pickup truck and one day it wouldn’t start. We couldn’t figure it out. After having it towed to the service station we were told that a groundhog had eaten the gas line. How did those guys know it was a groundhog? They just knew. You should see their young ones. How could anything so cute be destructive one day?
Wasps, bees, and bumblebees all live in the house, behind the walls. When we sit on the porch in the morning, drinking our coffee, I watch all of them enter and exit tiny holes they made. They are not pests 99% of the time until, one night, I was walking in the dark down the hall barefoot and stepped on a wasp. Thank God I am not allergic to them. But it hurt!!
My poor husband was pushed to his limits, trying to garden. He so loves growing vegetables and then cooking and eating them. But what a struggle with the rabbits, deer, and yes–groundhogs. Peter finally gave up and we buy produce from a lady down the road who sells corn, tomatoes, and zucchini. Furthermore, he gave up trying to grow flowers as well. What is growing now is indigenous to this 10-acre piece of ground. That’s a whole other subject in itself.
Our barn is so huge–it could house four separate families. But people have never lived in it. Other creatures have already taken up all the space. Snakes, several kinds, live there and yes–bats live WAY up at the top and yes–during the day they really do hang upside down and sleep, exiting in the dark. Due to their vigilance we have few insects to deal with. If the bats are here to stay you may as well be on good terms with them.
At the top of the barn is a square, cut in by somebody who lived here before us. It’s called an “owl hole.” I really like sitting on the porch and watching what’s going on there from a distance. Sometimes pigeons use it and sometimes owls really live there. If you watch long enough you will see the young owls poking their heads up to see the big wide world. One of my favorite sights.
Finally, the bird colony. I didn’t even know there were so many kinds of songbirds. Peter hung up several feeders and the birds empty them in 2 days. I call it “Bird Central” because it really looks like an avian train station. But, saving my favorite for last–the hummingbirds. They don’t eat bird seed but a special liquid food made up of sugar and water….which leads me to the end of this. There’s a movie with Denzel Washington and in it he’s very annoyed with somebody and he says: “You must be outside your mind!!” That is the way I feel and act when the hummingbirds come to their feeder. Blissed out. An orgasmic kind of joy with no words. Breathless. I can’t even talk.
Just picture my nature-loving husband, shlepping huge bags of bird seed home from the market, filling and filling and filling the bird feeders….We Don’t Really Live Here.
lgmwriting 