I might be repeating a post I made before, but speaking of fog, I have the brain fog that comes with Covid-19, my first bout with it. I’m slowly recovering, and part of the ritual at night is getting up to fluff the pillows so I won’t cough too much and get some cold water. On one of these nights a couple days ago, I stopped in the kitchen, eyeing the deep fog blanketing the dark meadow. Not that I could really see anything, but shapes and shadows. I love fog.
I haven’t written a backyard wildlife post now since late August. Harvest is done, and shortly after that we experienced Hurricane Fiona. Our power once again was out for days. Our bat box fell in the winds, as did several limbs from trees, but we fared better than others, whose houses washed out to sea. We finally got a generator, just to keep our food from going bad.
It just felt like one thing after another from the dramatic transition from summer to fall, yet little pleasantries helped. I’ve been craving shucky beans, and grew nine bean rows this summer, just like Yeats dreamed of. And then I dried the beans and made them into shucky beans, just like my mamaw used to. After harvest, and after the hurricane, we did a road trip to Chicago and back, and, on the way, as soon as we stopped in Maine I found six bags of great fresh green beans. I had promised the fam I’d dry some beans along the way and make some shucky beans for them, too. I had three cardboard flats to dry them, in the rental car, along the way. My sweet niece even wrote a poem about me drying beans.
After a whirlwind of activity–the hurricane, reunion, wedding, and so on–I was back home, feeling sick but still awed by the beauty outside, in the introspective, hushed hours of the wee morning. Finally, now that we’ve been home for three weeks, I am starting to feel much better and have been watching the change of seasons–the leaves still falling, frost on the fairytale pumpkins in the morning, and icing the meadow like confection. Meanwhile, the two bucks are still regularly coming into the yard.
I love being home. Walking into our house after six days of driving (to and fro) was wondrous, even though we both fell ill. Saturday night I started a fire in the wood stove, and tonight we did too. However, we’ve also had warmer than usual weather during the day. It’s the mix of high and lows which brings the fog. I get up once a night and look through the dark windows. Sometimes I step out to the deck, and it’s so black out there I see nothing but hints of mist and shadow. Though I do hear things in the yard. Bucks, night birds, coyotes, raccoons, who knows what lurks and knocks there.
