Archive for May, 2008
Monday May 5th, 2008
The reason I don’t call Ben “uncle” is because he’s not my uncle. Well, at least he wasn’t my uncle until he married Aunt Kitty a couple years ago. By then, I was too used to calling him just “Ben.” Besides that, Ben doesn’t really seem uncle-y. He’s taller than the doorway and when he opens his mouth every animal in sight takes cover. Probably that’s why he keeps quiet most of the time.
If I’m going to tell the honest truth though (which on this one and only subject I’m not really supposed to do), Aunt Kitty is not exactly my aunt either. She says my mama was like a sister to her and that’s close enough and then she says for goodness sake if I must keep yapping go yap at the cows ’cause she has more important work to be about.
Once she told me I was an outcast fairy. When I asked her, “Well how come I’m normal sized then and not fairy sized?” she said that’s just what happens when you leave the fairy world. You get bigger. So I said, “Well then, how come I don’t have wings?”
“Bah,” she said. “That’s just a silly myth. Fairies don’t have wings.”
I said, “How do they fly if they haven’t got wings?” and she just laughed.
What I want to know is, what’s so special about being a fairy if you can’t fly? When I asked Ben that very question, he said probably fairies had other magic talents, like talking to animals.
I spent the whole day trying to talk to the chickens. First I tried their language. “BAAAAK!” Then I tried my own, but they just kept cluck-clucking away.
So I thought, well maybe it’s not that I can understand them, but they can understand me. So I fixed my eye on one particularly bright looking chicken and I said, “Come here, chicken.” She didn’t even look at me. So I said, “Fetch me that piece of string, chicken,” and she lifted her neck and cocked her head and I thought, “Aha!” but then she just went right back to pecking at the ground.
Either Ben’s wrong, or chickens are just plain rude.
Friday May 9th, 2008
That’s right. I’ve decided to give away the gathering apron featured in my tutorial of a couple weeks ago. Why? Because I need an excuse to make another one, of course!
Here’s how to throw your name in the hat for this drawing: Tevis needs a birthday! Leave a comment here before Monday and let me [...]
Monday May 12th, 2008
…Mary! I love your suggestion of June 21, the longest day of the year, so Tevis can celebrate her birthday for as long as possible. Mary, send me your mailing address and I will get the gathering apron in the mail to you right away. Enjoy!
And Lily, please send along your mailing address as well. [...]
Friday May 16th, 2008
Most of the time, Pilot is a good dog. He has his moments of weakness, like anyone does, his mostly relating to critters smaller than himself. He can pounce on a mouse quicker than any cat you ever saw, and he’ll dig up a maze of gopher trails till his nose is caked clay-red and his eyes nearly crossed. Those aren’t the bad things, though.
Pilot’s taste for small creatures isn’t limited to mice and gophers. I once saw him swipe a bird right out of the air. Honest! Me and him were just sitting on the hillside one evening watching the sun go down (and pretending we didn’t hear Aunt Kitty hollering at us to wash up for dinner) when all of a sudden Pilot leaps straight up in the air. When I come to my senses–for a minute I thought he must’ve spotted a cougar–there’s a little bird caught between his teeth. Tell the truth, I think Pilot was surprised too. It was hardly a moment before he loosed his mouth and that bird went flying away. The two of us, we just watched it go, neither one of us quite believing what had happened, I think.
But what I’m trying to say is sometimes Pilot has caused us some trouble. Me and Ben and Aunt Kitty, I mean. There was the one time Pilot came home with a real working man’s tool belt and the hammer still dragging off one end. A truck come flying up the driveway that afternoon sending up a cloud of dust thicker than the tule fog. The driver didn’t even get out, just pointed at Pilot and hollered at Ben, “That dog stole my tool belt!”
We don’t have cats and you can see why. The chickens mostly stay in the coop. No bunnies. No guinea pigs. (Why anyone would want a guinea pig I can’t imagine.)
So you can see how it probably would have been a good idea for our neighbors across the creek to let us know when they decided to raise Jersey Giants. They may be big for chickens, but they’re still just chickens after all. I’m sure you can guess–when I tell you that our neighbors came outside this evening and found all but two of their Jersey Giant chickens dead in the yard and a certain dog stuck half in, half out of the chicken coop–I’m sure you can guess who that certain dog was.
Maybe there’s some people couldn’t love a dog after he committed a massacre like that. Maybe there’s some would gladly trade in that dog for half a dozen cats and chickens roaming free. I wish I could explain how it is that I love Pilot more every time he makes a mess of things, even a really big mess like this.
I brought him into my bed this evening and left the door cracked just a hair so I could better listen to what our cross-creek neighbors had to say to Ben and Aunt Kitty. I’ll admit I was afraid they’d demand we shoot Pilot or some other awful thing. I’ve read Old Yeller. I pulled the covers over us both and pretty soon Pilot was dreaming about chasing gophers and mice. I suppose he might’ve been dreaming about those chickens.
And outside my door those people weren’t talking about Pilot or the chickens at all.
“He’s a very disturbed boy,” the lady was saying.
“Julia!” the man loud-whispered back. He seemed to be shushing her, the way Aunt Kitty’s always doing to me in church when I try asking her ’bout repentance or sexual relations or other stuff while the preacher’s still preaching.
“Well, he is!” Julia said. “I don’t mean no harm by it. He just is.”
Aunt Kitty said something then so low I couldn’t make out a word and then I got distracted puzzling out who they might be talking about. I had just decided they must be speaking of that boy I saw across the creek a few weeks ago when I heard Ben turn the latch on the front door and realized I missed the whole rest of what was said.
What I want to know is, what’s disturbing that boy so much? And it better not be me, ’cause I done nothing but say hello to him, real friendly-like.
Wednesday May 21st, 2008
As Ben likes to say, it’s been hotter than Grandma Jean’s final resting place around here. When I asked Aunt Kitty what that means, she just said Ben wasn’t too fond of his Grandma Jean, ’specially after she sneaked a whoopie cushion onto his dinner chair the night he finally convinced Lily Hawkins to come for dinner. Apparently Lily Hawkins had hair fine and yellow as cornsilk, and as such could not be expected to tolerate a boy with poor table manners.
On account of the heat though, Aunt Kitty cut short my lessons this morning. Doing math is fine, she said, and sweating is fine too, but doin’ them both together is just plain torture. She packed up my wanderin’ sack and shooed me out the door.
“Keep an eye out for rattlers,” she said, and I was on my own.
Now, I like to think of myself as pretty intelligent–smarter than the average 12-year-old girl, I mean. Least-wise Aunt Kitty’s always telling me I talk like a foreigner or someone twice my age on account of all the books I’m always reading, and sometimes she threatens to pack the books away for a while. I’m afraid no one will think I’m smart when I come to the end of this tale though. I can hardly explain to myself how I wound up at the top of that old Digger pine, bawling my eyes out over a broken egg.
First thing I did when Aunt Kitty shut the door behind me was whistle for Pilot. He came running quick enough, but when he saw that wanderin’ sack over my shoulder he knew we were going for a ramble and just like that he was off. I tried to keep up with him, but pretty soon I had to stop and pull the foxtails out of my shoes and when I looked up again, he was long gone.
That’s about when the hawk cried out, and it’s also about when I saw the egg laying on the ground at the base of that big Digger pine. I looked at that egg, and I looked at that hawk and I put two and two together. Or I guess I put one and one together. Well if I wanted to be doing math, I’da been back in the kitchen with Aunt Kitty. In any case, I searched the branches of that tree and sure enough, away up at the top, there was a big nest. That hawk let out another cry and there was just no help for it. I knew what I had to do. I put aside my stick, tucked that egg into my pocket, hitched up my pants and started climbing.
I got real high real fast. I’m a pretty good climber, on account of all the times Pilot’s chased neighbor cats up into trees and I had to rescue them to keep Pilot out of trouble. So I was real close to getting that egg back in the nest when I felt something shift in my pants and I looked down just in time to see that egg fall down, down, down until it landed with a thud and a crunch right back in that spot I first found it.
So that’s how I wound up near the top of that Digger pine, bawling my eyes out over a baby hawk that would never see the light of day. Now if you’re a tree climber you might know that getting up a tree is a darn sight easier than getting back down.
Friday May 23rd, 2008
It’s funny how a body can think she knows herself and suddenly one day some little thing happens and all at once she finds herself a stranger. All in all, I would say that moment–when I was so high up in that Digger pine and already upset over my part in the murder of that innocent hawk baby–was a poor time to learn that I was scared of high places. Ben told me once, when I asked him how come he’s still afraid of snakes and thunderstorms even though he’s all grown up, that there’s some fears we leave behind when we get older, but there’s enough things we learn to be afraid of to keep us from gettin’ too full of ourselves.
Apparently God above must’ve decided at that unfortunate time that I was a little too full of myself and at that very moment he smote me with a fear of heights. Of all things. And then He sent the devil himself to rescue me.
It was that boy from across the creek, the one who ran away when I said hello. I recognized him by his lily-livered scent–well, that and the weird black hair that hung long and straight to his shoulders. He came walking up to the bottom of the tree, looked up, and didn’t even try to hide his lousy grin when he saw me holding on for dear life.
“Hi there,” he said.
“Harumph,” I said.
“What are you crying for?” he said, and pushed his hair out of his face, probably so I could see that lousy grin a little better. I looked away, but then my eyes fell on that cracked egg and I felt those stupid tears welling up in my eyes all over again.
He followed my eyes to the broken shell on the ground. “It’s just an egg.”
How could he be so cold-hearted? “There’s a hawk baby in that egg, you meanie!”
“How would a hawk baby get inside a chicken egg?”
I looked down and sure enough it did look an awful lot like an ordinary chicken egg, but “What’s a chicken egg doin’ way out here?”
He shrugged. Not that I was looking at him, but I saw it out of the corner of my eye while I studied that egg.
“Probably that dog of yours snagged it out of the coop,” he said. “Or maybe a coyote.”
And I looked and I couldn’t deny it. That surely was a chicken egg and no baby hawk in it at all.
“Come on down now,” he said, and I just shook my head.
“Can’t,” I told him.
“Sure you can,” he said. “Just let go and I’ll catch you.”
Now it may seem, seeing as how I’m the one stuck in a tree crying about a cracked chicken egg, that I’m the dumb one, but I’m tellin’ you that boy must be dumb to think I was gonna jump out of that tree with nothin’ but his hands to catch me. I shook my head a little harder, in case he missed it the first time.
“C’mon,” he said. “Just take my hand.”
Maybe at this point, so as you’re not thinking that boy was 15 feet tall, I should admit that I hadn’t quite made it to the top of that tree. But it felt like it, it really did.
That’s when I remembered what had been said about this boy.
“What’s disturbin’ you anyway?” I asked him, and I watched his eyes glass over and his shoulders square up.
“Come down,” he said in a new voice, and it might have been Ben talking for the way my body just up and obeyed. Well, that boy did catch me, but whether he was any softer than the ground would’ve been I just can’t say. I rolled off of him and I ran all the way home without once looking back.
Tuesday May 27th, 2008
MATERIALS:
1/2 yard fabric
1/2 yard vinyl-coated cotton fabric
1 1/2 yard ribbon
coordinating thread
a nice long stick
INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Measure a 6 1/2-inch diameter circle on both your regular fabric and the vinyl-coated cotton and cut.
2. Measure and cut two 13 1/2- by 12- inch pieces out of each fabric.
3. Along the top edge of your fabric (the 13 [...]
