Mind-Numbing Weather

Like the inhabitants of a castle preparing against an attack, my spouse and I have shut every window, drawn down the shades, opened the basement door, and hefted the room air-conditioner onto one of the upstairs windowsills.  Hot weather is on the way.

It's the weather that I moved to Vermont to escape, the kind of heat and humidity that reduce me to molluscan status.  Every summer the heat gets stronger and stays longer. If and when the kudzu vines and the cave crickets arrive from the lower latitudes, I'm moving north.

Meanwhile, all I want to do is hibernate or rather, estivate ("a state of dormancy or torpor during summer").  This is unfortunate because, now that the ridiculously long spell of cool weather is over, the garden is exploding.

Instead of writing, I should be out there picking kale to make into pesto.  I should be picking and freezing chard, pulling up the bolted lettuces and planting something else in their space.  Straightening the tomato cages that the daily storms have felled. Weeding the front flower beds, the back flower beds, the vegetable beds.   And pruning the four big lilacs before the job gets too big for me to handle.

But these days the only job I like is picking lavender.  In the morning, after the dew has dried but before the sun unleashes its full fury, I go out with my basket and cut the spears where a single cobalt bud has opened.  It hasn't been a good year for lavender, for although the winter was cold there wasn't enough snow cover.  I lost a couple of bushes, and the survivors aren't flowering well.  But I'll take whatever they give me.

I leave the lavender in its basket on the dining room table, where it releases clouds of scent into the humid air.  I should be tying it into bunches and hanging it up to dry, but that seems like a big effort right now.

Instead, I go and sit blankly by the indoor pond and watch the goldfish play in the fountain stream. Don't ask me to lift a finger, express an opinion, or make any sense.  I'm estivating.

Fish Encore

Someone who knows me well once said that I cannot rest unless I have a certain quota of critters around me.  When I lost a cat long ago, I put a cage of breeding finches in the kitchen.  When we moved and the finches had to go, I got goats.  When my goat days were over I got another dog.  And now that I'm at an all time critter low for me--just two dogs and nine hens--I've developed this thing about fish.

There's the betta in the big glass vase next to the kitchen sink.  And there are the goldfish in the little pond just outside the back door.  But the goldfish are mysterious beings who prefer to hang out in the murky depths instead of swimming decoratively among the water lilies.

So I've been longing for some goldfish that I can talk to and get to know, and now I have a pair.  They live in the house in a tub originally intended for a small water garden.  These goldfish are the round-bodied type known as "fantails."  They look like a ping pong ball adorned with fins and a long swishy tail.  Which is why I have named them Ping and Pong. 

Pong is red and gold all over, and Ping is white with a big red splotch on his or her head.   Pong swimming around in the water looks a lot like Bisou when she runs on the grass, with her red and gold "feathers" waving in the wind and her long ears splaying out like fins.

When blizzards rage next winter, I will look into my little pond at Ping and Pong trailing their tails and flashing their scales and I will feel like I'm on a tiny Caribbean vacation.

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In Flagrante Frogs

Things are heating up in and around our pond.  The frog population is booming and, sensing the coming of fall, the alpha frogs, if there are alphas among amphibians, are mating like mad.

Frog sex is a Zen thing.  The male climbs aboard the much larger female and puts his little arms around as much of her abdomen as he can reach.  She wraps her hands around a couple of dwarf cattail stems, and the lovers float languidly in the water until Bisou comes rushing out the back door and puts an end to the tomfoolery.

This ho-hum interlude, however, is preceded by a much more exciting one:  the battle of the males.  I witnessed this for the first time yesterday while I was roasting eggplants.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw some unusual splashing in the pond and went out to investigate. 

Two medium-size males, green-backed and yellow-bellied, were wrestling among the lily pads.  They had their arms around each other's necks and were tumbling and leaping in and out of the water, blowing up their vocal sacs and croaking non-stop. They looked like little bald, round-bellied men in a bar fight.

Meanwhile, at the edge of the pond, sat the Rubenesque she-frog, impassive as a buddha.  Was she as bored as she looked?  Had she already decided which contender she would take to the cattails?  Was she flattered to be the object of a duel?

I didn't stick around to see who won, just as I didn't stick around to watch the end of the tryst.  I trust that the frogs know what they're about.  Reproduction is hardly their problem:  our pond is brimming over with froglets no bigger than a walnut and pigeon-sized matriarchs.  And all night long their twanging song ("brekekekex-koax-koax," according to Aristophanes) is the background music of my sleep.

In other pond news, after three years of throwing tiny goldfish into the water and watching them instantly disappear, I had given up all hope of ever seeing any of them again.  Then yesterday, when I was least expecting it, two fish, one a good 5" in length, showed up near the surface.  I cannot tell you how thrilling it is to see again something that you thought was gone forever.  The bigger of the two must have survived the winter in the deep end (in Vermont a depth of 3 1/2' supposedly guarantees that the pond won't freeze solid).  The smaller one, a striking orange decorated with black spots, I remember putting in last May.

Encouraged by this development, I promptly bought two more fair-sized goldfish at the pet store.  While I was floating their plastic bags on the pond to let them get accustomed to the water temperature, I saw that the two resident fish had swum up to inspect them.  I cut open the bags, and  now all four of them are hanging out companionably (or perhaps waiting for a chance to kill each other) and looking gorgeous among the lily pads.  Every ten minutes I go out and tell them what good fish they are.

Will they still be there tomorrow, or will they have retreated into the murky depths?  Will the frog wars abate?  Will the lovemaking succeed and the ensuing tadpoles survive to spawn next summer?

I have so little control over any of this.  All I can do is top up the water with the hose if it doesn't rain for a couple of days, and then stand and watch.  I thought that having a little pond would be fun, but I wasn't prepared for the melodrama.

My Green Pond

My little garden pond, now in its second summer, is very green.  It is green because it does not have any of those gizmos--pump, filter, aerator, fountain--that use electricity.  It does have a tiny fountain and an aerator, but they both run on solar power.  Since this is Vermont and not Morocco, the fountain and the aerator run very sporadically.  This makes the pond green in the second sense, i.e., full of algae.

I am pleased with my green pond, and so are the frogs--some as big as squirrels and some as small as my thumb--and the water lilies that are slowly covering its surface, the water bugs and the dragon flies.  For a while, I thought there was going to be a problem getting fish to like it.  The first year, against the advice of my pond guru, I bought two shubunkin (beautiful little spotted goldfish that look like koi).  The minute I released them into the pond they disappeared into its murky depths.  I didn't see them again until I found their dead bodies during the spring cleanup.

This summer, thinking that by now the ecology of the pond should be well established, I bought two more shubunkin.  I rushed home from the store, floated their bag on the pond to equalize the water temperature, and released them.  They instantly vanished into the murk, and a week later one of them floated to the surface, dead.  I fed it to the chickens, and started to think that my pond just wasn't good enough for fish.

I concluded that the problem was the depth to surface ratio.  We had made one end of the pond three feet deep, so that it wouldn't freeze completely solid and critters could hibernate on the bottom.  But the surface area is relatively small--about four by ten feet.  I theorized that the pond was too deep for its surface, and despite the efforts of the little fountain, not enough oxygen was getting into the water.  Pretty soon, I thought, even the frogs would start dying.  So I bought a solar-powered bubbler.

With the fountain and the bubbler going and the water lilies blooming and the frogs disporting themselves, the pond was looking quite nice I thought...but it badly needed some fish--something to provide a flash of orange in all that green.  This time I would be conservative, however, and buy plain feeder fish.  On the way to the store, I had an attack of guilt.  "Aren't we condemning these poor animals to death?"  I said to my husband.  "But these are feeder fish," he said.  "In a way, we're giving them a chance to live."  We bought four, and brought them home.
 
For the third time I floated the plastic bag to equalize the water temperature;  for the third time, I released the fish into the pond;  for the third time, they disappeared.  I resigned myself to having just a plain old frog pond, to enjoy the splash of the fountain (if the sun was out) and the lilies and the water bugs.  I let go of my desire for fish completely.

And then one day when I was sitting watching the frogs I thought I saw a flash of orange in the water.  I blinked, and it was gone.  I looked again, and there it was, under a lily pad--a fish, and not just a fish, but the disappeared shubunkin that I had assumed was dead.  And next to it--oh joy--was a plain orange shape, one of the feeder fish that had also somehow survived.

Since that day two weeks ago, there have been a few more sightings.  Once I saw three fish at the same time.  Clearly there is fish life in the murk, but the fish are so small and the murk is so thick that you can only see them if they come close to the surface.  This of course makes the sight of a fish a far more exciting event than if they were visible all the time.

It's a funny thing about water.  When I'm on the patio there's a lot to look at:  the flower beds, the apple trees, the vegetable garden, the woods, the chickens.  But most of the time, I'm just looking at the pond.

(Please note:  I am working on improving this site, but am managing to make things worse in the process.  Let us hope that that is only temporary.)