Dogs In The Storm

For years, when people would tell me about their dogs being driven nuts by thunderstorms I felt inwardly superior.  They must be doing something wrong.  Maybe they themselves were scared of storms, and the dogs caught their fear.  Or they made the mistake of petting and comforting the dogs at the first sign of nervousness, thus reinforcing the behavior.  Or maybe they just had wimpy dogs.

None of my dogs had ever been afraid of storms.

Pride, of course, goeth before a fall, and now I have not one but two dogs who are terrified of storms.  I used to have three.

This is how it happened.  My now-deceased German Shepherd, Lexi, as her eyes and ears and courage dimmed in the last year of her life, became afraid storms.  And big, black Wolfie and little, red Bisou, who considered Lexi the final authority on all matters of interest to dogs, decided that she knew something we obviously didn't--namely, that storms, as opposed to, say, porcupines or black bears or speeding cars, were truly dangerous, and the only appropriate response to them was panic.

Now Lexi has gone and left me with two storm wimps on my hands.  Or, more accurately, on my lap.

SinceVermont became a province of Brazil last month, we have had a thunderstorm almost every afternoon.  When Bisou gets that wide-eyed, orphaned-puppy look and tries to sandwich herself between me and the back of the chair, I know the daily storm is on its way.  When she tries to crawl under my shirt, I count the seconds until the first thunderclap.

Wolfie, ever the gentleman, doesn't actually climb on my lap.  Instead he paces, and he pants. Then, sounding exactly like a sack of potatoes, he drops his ninety pounds on the floor and drools on my toes. Then gets up and paces some more.  If the storm is especially severe, he takes refuge under my husband's legs (why not my legs, I wonder?).

I have never been afraid of storms.  In fact I always liked the drama, and the smell of the wet earth, and the sudden merciful cooling of the air.  But that daily panting and pacing and burrowing  are starting to get to me, so that at the first faraway rumble I put down my book, go to the window, sigh with irritation, wonder if we'll lose power, pick up the book again, put it down, worry that this storm will finally uproot the big ash tree behind the house...

Who says we can't learn from our dogs?

Apple-Culling Time

This is the time of year when, feeling like King Herod getting ready to massacre the Holy Innocents, I pick up a pair of scissors and go out to cull the apple crop.

Apple blossoms grow in clumps of five or six or even more, and on years when there's been plenty of sunshine and the wind has been still and the pollinators have done their job, every one of those blossoms becomes a baby apple.  Infant apples are adorable.  Plump and green and darkly pink, the size of my smallest fingernail, they thrust themselves up on their stems towards the light, towards life, towards the future.

And then I come around with my scissors.

Sometimes among the five or six siblings in a clump there is a clear winner, a plumper, healthier apple to which the others must be sacrificed.  But often all the apples are similar in size and future prospects.  Then I must choose at random which one will live and which will be severed from their stems, fall to the ground, and be gobbled up by my little red dog, Bisou.

I don't like these choices.  They make me feel like some irrational deity wreaking havoc on harmless beings.  They also make me wonder if there is some invisible demiurge poised above me, enormous scissors in hand, ready to cull me.

Besides, I dislike getting rid of all those potential apples.  The purpose of culling is to enable the tree, instead of producing a large number of stunted, gnarly apples, to concentrate its energies on fewer fruit so that these may attain their full glory.   But all kinds of misfortunes may yet befall the apples that I spare.  They may be knocked down by winds, pecked by birds, attacked by fungi.  It is entirely possible that, at harvest time in the fall, I will end up with only a couple of apples.  Wouldn't it be smarter to leave them all on the tree?

But I ignore my doubts and continue sniping with the scissors.  It takes a while to find all those tiny apples.  This is where I'm glad for the severe pruning I do in February or March.  I keep my trees so small that I hardly have to raise my arms to reach the highest branches.

I'm barely into the second of my four trees when it starts to rain again.  After a worrisome dry spring we're finally getting rain, but it's stormy, scary weather with lightning and thunder and precipitous drops in barometric pressure.   This sends Bisou onto my lap and me into the arms of CFS.

I try not to fret about the unculled trees, the unweeded garden, or the unmade bed.  Instead I close my eyes, breathe in, breathe out, and visualize the water table slowly rising.

They Call The Wind Mariah....

It sprinkled rain on and off all day yesterday. Around six p.m. I heard some thunder and asked my husband if he thought we'd get some significant rain, and he said "Naah."

Ten minutes later a wind from the north came roaring up, the air turned a strange shade of gray, and the rain came down in buckets. By the time it was over:

a patio chair was in the pond,
the patio umbrella had been snapped in two,
my formerly proud peppers, chard and kale were bowed to the ground,
the upstairs floors (where we had left the windows open one inch) had to be mopped,
the garden cart was in the woods, 75' from where I had left it.

This morning we finished filling the second raised bed with topsoil, added compost, and I planted beans. They should be ready for picking by late September, and with luck, we'll make it. The beans are the last planting of the 2010 vegetable garden. Everything else is already producing. We've been eating tomatoes; the banana peppers are lengthening and thickening; the zucchini are converting dirt into food at an amazing speed; even the reluctant eggplants are setting fruit. As for the kale and chard, I picked four pounds of the stuff for the food bank today and you can't even tell they've been harvested.

All this on nine 4'x4' squares. There's nothing like intensive gardening!

Powerless

We had a huge storm two nights ago. The wind came screaming up out of nowhere and the lightning was all around. Poor old Lexi, who never comes upstairs if she can help it, crawled up and spent the night with us and the other dogs.

As a result of the storm we, and 13,000 other Vermonters, are without power (and that, in these rural parts, means without water as well). We have a generator, but can use it to do only one thing at a time: cool the freezer, run water, use the computer...so I won't be posting much in the next few days. But I'll be thinking of new posts during the long (but fortunately not too long, in this season), dark evenings.