Don't Be Like Mike

We have a new term of art in our household: don’t pull a Mike Mulligan. This is based on a classic American children’s book, summarized intelligibly here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mulligan_and_His_Steam_Shovel).

Here’s my take: Mike and his anthropomorphized steam shovel Mary Anne have old-fashioned gumption in a world enamored with newfangled gas-powered machines. They land in an apparently inescapable quandary when they forget to leave themselves a way out of their final excavation site. A transformative solution saves the day.

This came up because Ethan, should he dig out his entry ramp to the foundation from within, could literally pull a M. M. with the rented skidsteer. I, however, am feeling as if the moral of the tale (don’t give up? don't get stuck in a hole of your own devising? be ready be transformed and repurposed by unexpected circumstance?) may apply to my year of down-home isolation.

I can’t yet give you a treatise on transformation, physical or meta-, but I have tried to become a better observer of things. Mainly living things, long my predilection (perhaps that’s why I’m so fond of all of you, dear readers). This is complicated by the medical edict that living things (plants, pets, cut flowers, children, and more than one or two extremely healthy, masked ones of you) are Not Allowed in the house with me for a year. This appears to be why God invented the patio; though come January I suspect we may question the ways of the Divine in this respect.

I was charmed this spring by the antics of a family of downy woodpeckers whose newly-fledged members frequented the suet feeder Ethan mounted just outside my bedroom window. Wingèd toddlers, the downy juniors clumsily tested everything but the suet for edibility: the stucco, the window frame, the glass, the (plastic) windowbox, the dirt, the pansies, and the metal rod from which the feeder hung (embarrassingly slippery). Arriving finally at the mesh-enclosed suet, they clung inexpertly to the top, and chattered vociferously (hello, predators?) until their mother showed up to feed them, from two inches below. If a bird can look longsuffering, she did. We had ten species visit that suburban feeder, in a hierarchy of bravado and early morning squawking led by starlings.

Here in Vermont, I’ve been watching the birds, as well—nearby nuthatches; hawks and vultures circling thermals up the front cliff; osprey, heron and kingfisher at the local wildlife refuge—but also the wind in the trees. If you are myopic, like me, and you take off your glasses, you can sometimes see in the swaying foliage the sorts of faces that appear in well-appointed clouds. In the car, parked outside shops I can’t enter, I amuse myself by trying to identify all the plants growing around the parking lot. Co-op parking seems to have higher cultivated and wild, or volunteer, biodiversity than chain groceries, but my sample is still small. What’s the pattern in your town?

-Susannah