I am living about as idyllic a life as my teeny brain could imagine. Up in the Vermont mountains, summer at its peak. The days mostly sunlit, usually with at least a slight breeze, cicadas droning in the trees during the warmer hours. Out behind the house the yard rolls off toward the barn, then to the line of trees and undergrowth beyond which mark the property line. Bright red raspberries have come into their time in that undergrowth, so that any trip in that direction brings an opportunity to pick a few, toss them in my mouth one at a time. In front of the house, the yard gives way to the downslope of the hill, covered thickly with foliage and wildflowers, providing cover for critters. Off the near end of the house, the east end, stands a windbreak, a line of 11 or so fir trees -- a major hangout for birds during the course of the day. Off the far end of the house is the driveway, a 150 or so foot track that leads to the town road and the forest beyond. Insect sounds rise from the grass all around the house, my soundtrack of choice as summer leans gradually toward the days when nighttime temperatures begin to fall and leaves turn.
A little over a week ago, I mentioned here that the crickets had disappeared during my two weeks in Madrid, leaving the place eerily silent, apart from a few other insects singing quietly to themselves in the grass. Yesterday I heard my first cricket since my return eleven days ago, and have heard more since. Which led to a theory re: what happened: 2+ acres of grass gets cut here –- a lot of mowing for one person, several hours worth of work. I usually break it down into sections, which means anywhere from an hour to an hour a half of work for a few days in a row. The grass is usually dense with insect life, the mowing tends to wipe out enough of it to leave it quiet for a day or two, until bugs from other sections of lawn filter in and their sounds gradually reach the pre-slaughter level. A housesitter stayed here during my absence, a conscientious, hard-working woman named Kit. Kit mentioned that she did all the cutting in one day, meaning she singlehandedly wiped out all the lawn critters, leaving behind no crickets to carry on the usual singing, no grasshoppers leaping to get out of the way as I walked through the yard, no nothing. It's taken this long for enough critters to filter back in to get the soundtrack going again.
Mystery solved.
I thought about all that as I walked out to the road for the mail earlier. The Town recently re-graveled/graded the road, leaving a few sizeable rocks off to the side which I've been thinking of collecting and using around a flower bed. I leaned over to heft one of them, a big bugger, see if I felt like lugging it back to the house -- tipping it up revealed a toad crouched in a depression underneath, blinking up at me in the sudden light. I put the rock softly back down, continued on my way.
Yesterday morning: don't know what came over me –- got up and went out to a yard sale. During the warm season here they're everywhere, like dandelions, many running for two days. I saw an ad in the local weekly ad-rag for a several family 'do a ten-minute drive from here, found myself seized with the impulse to go. At 9 o'clock, I parked my car on a country road amid a cars lined up on either side of the lane, got out, followed the sound of the frenzy. What had been billed as a "lawn sale" had actually been crammed into a garage, which meant the crowd of vultures who showed up to pillage and loot shuffled stiffly around, packed tightly together into not much space, brushing crankily against each other as they cast a cold eye over the pickings and pawed through tables of dreck. Within fifteen minutes, most anything of any worth had been hoovered up by hot little hands. Me, I managed to grab a Nils Lofgren CD, a sturdy pair of shorts and a good-sized chunk of rose quartz (don't ask me why re: the quartz -– one more example of impulse buying). The total: $1.50. Not bad, but worth racing out first thing in the morning? Hmmm.
Later in the day, I happened to glance out the living room window where I spied a hawk -- a big one, probably a red-winged -- a few hundred feet away, at just about the level of the window, circling lazily in the air currents above the valley that channels Route 14 north and south. As I watched, it slowly gained elevation, moving gradually toward the house.
A couple of summers back, a sharp-shinned hawk made its home in the one of the taller trees that define the uphill property line here, nesting about as far away from the house as the red-winged hawk was when I first spotted it. That sharp-shinned hawk was a voracious bugger, a fierce hunter that homed in on the songbirds which hung out in the windbreak off this end of the house, little colorful critters used to hanging out here due to the bird feeders that get put out from September through May. Within a couple of weeks the hawk had killed or driven away most of them, leaving a strange silence in their place. (That goddamn silence again!) I began a campaign of driving it off whenever I found it flying around the house, throwing open a window or stepping outside to make loud noise, and in all of that I discovered that the one sound which really seemed to have an effect was a sharp handclap, done twice, a second or two apart. Done right, it sounds enough like a gunshot that the sharp-shinned hawk immediately bolted.
It showed up again this last May, I took to bothering it any time I saw it so that it quickly made up its mind to head off to a friendlier neighborhood. As I stood outside yesterday, watching the red-winged hawk circling slowly above the house, I began the hand-clap thing, producing two of them, over and over. That predator was too big and too bad to display any nerves, too cool, too, er, unflappable to give any sign that the jerk standing outside the house below bothered it. But as I persisted with the handclaps, it altered its course, coming out of the circles and gliding slowly off to the west, disappearing over the trees on that part of the hill and out of sight.
After that the day slowly clouded up, remaining overcast during the night, wiping out any possibility of getting a gander at the meteor shower. The characters at the National Weather Service claim tonight will be a good night to take in the show -- clear, mild, no moonlight to speak of. I may pull my little bod out bed and check it out. We'll see.