pameladean

It's November. All over the screen behind a storm window that has been closed for months because the screen has a hole through which once entered a hapless mouse and later a hapless sparrow, the ivy I should not have let grow so high is turning delicate shades of pink and lemon and gold. The inner shaded leaves are still the palest green. Beyond the ivy, the volunteer Norway maple that grew stealthily through the neighbors' peabush hedge is also turning gold. On the boulevard, its probable parent is half gold, half green.

We went to a delightful outdoor MinnStf Halloween party at Dreampark last weekend, and on the house, which is gold with red trim, the same ivy was turning the same colors, like living Halloween decorations. That was in back. In front, there were more than a hundred pumpkins and a host of ghosts and a very large mechanical black cat that turned its head and made you jump. But in the back, the ivy was a very good decoration all on its own. Also I toasted marshmallows for the first time in decades, and talked with many people I miss and value.

I am mired in tax stuff. So much stuff. So very much so very late stuff. If I do not hear back from the accountants via email very soon I will have to pick up the telephone. I loathe and abominate the telephone. Ursula Le Guin once said, "For me the telephone is for making appointments with the doctor with and cancelling appointments with the dentist with. It is not a medium of human communication." Now for me, it is a medium of human communication, but only with people I am intimate with. I do not want to make and cancel appointments on the telephone, nor describe the precise morass I am in with the taxes. Email is ten thousand times better for that.

I quite successfully emailed our excellent handyman, Jake, about the hand-sized holes the squirrels chewed in a different office window. He came out to look at the window, prepared to cover the tempting wooden trim of it with aluminum at once. However, it's in a very awkward place, a basically unintelligible niche between the front porch and the side of my office, which is a sunroom that sticks out from the rest of the house for the better provision of windows to earn its name. The ladder he has won't fit in there, largely because of the porch roof; and also he forgot we have brown trim on the house and bought white aluminum. We didn't actually care about the color of the aluminum, but obviously the inadequacy of the ladder was an issue. In the end he came upstairs and helped David take the air conditioner out of the window, and then hung out of it measuring everything. He will return on Thursday, when it will helpfully be ten degrees warmer outside, with a mysterious structure composed of scaffolding and an A-frame, which he says will permit him to reach the window; and also with brown aluminum.

I will just add that the fascia board than runs just below the roof along the entire front of the house is also covered with brown aluminum from the first assault the squirrels made on the house.

In any case, all these arrangements were made either in email or in person. The telephone was not required.

In other news, I have finally read Caroline Stevermer's The Glass Magician, which was published in 2020 and which I bought then because Caroline, and also because pandemic. But I didn't read it until this week. I loved it a lot. I was quite puzzled by the very pared-down prose and affect at first, but soon saw that this was a reflection of the face that the protagonist, Thalia, shows the world. There is more to Thalia, a lot more, but the spare language made a very effective frame for a story of shapeshifting, stage and actual magic, family secrets, and more. I've never read a book quite like it, so obviously I am going to have to read it again when I want that wry, astringent, slowly accumulating flavor, so rich and layered by the end.

David and I have had our booster shots and Lydy should follow soon. I'm still not going to restaurants, nor going indoors without a mask and only out of dire necessity, say for example because my doctor wouldn't renew a couple of prescriptions without seeing some new lab work. The lab work was unexpectedly good: my A1c has not changed since April and it's in quite a good place. Everything else that was checked was fine. It is apparently not yet time to look at the B12 levels, but I can still feel improvement in the areas I think the deficiency affected, so I'll be content until the next time. I hope when I next need to come under a roof that is not my own, all the numbers will be less dreadful. I've had many conversations with friends about what Minnesota did wrong; the most popular answer is, "Chose our neighboring states unwisely." But there are so many variables, I don't even know.

We're thinking of hosting a small Thanksgiving, with liberal application of rapid antigen tests beforehand. I hope the numbers are better by then.

I haven't planted the species tulips yet, but it will be warmer at the end of the week. Ideally I'd spend one warmish day clearing space for the tulips in the amazing jungle that the yard and garden beds have turned into, and another actually planting them. I'm also tempted to go through my ridiculous hoard of old seeds and fling onto the ground any that say they can be planted in the fall. We'll see.

I've put my book aside for all the tedious paperwork of the taxes, and the only good thing I can say is that I'm starting to see the faintest stirrings of a desire to get back to it. Thus are we spurred to the work that should be our delight, in these parlous times.

I continue to value all of you exceedingly.

Pamela

Hello hello! I have a huge backlog of things I want to write about, from my last hike of the season with Raphael to camping with Eric and doing early voting and going to see Ten Thousand Things' production of Pericles to my adventures with David in recovering my camera from a rental-car company's lost-and-found office in the twilight zone.

But right now I'm hoping some people local to me can recommend a tree service. Things have been neglected around here for too long. We need trees trimmed back from the house and from the power lines; there are bunch of volunteer trees that are a bit large for me to remove, though I could do it if I had to; and there's a big Chinese elm back by the garage that needs some attention.

An extremely nice man came out from Rainbow and opined that, while they would be happy to do the work, most of it did not require the services of trained arborists, and if you asked trained arborists to cut down a bunch of little trees and haul them away, it would take a lot of time and would cost us a bundle of money. He named a number that made me blanch and suggested getting some other bids. So I am thinking of saving the Chinese elm for Rainbow at some later date, and getting some competent people who aren't quite so exalted in their expertise for the rest of the work.

Recommend away, I beg of you! If you are comfortable with saying how much various services charged to do your work, and what the work was, that would be excellent.

Pamela

David went around the yard a week or two ago and took some splendid photos. You can look at them here.

I had a lovely time at Wiscon and managed not to bring any horrible viruses home with me. Raphael and I went to Murphy Hanrahan Regional Park earlier this week and saw clouds of dragonflies, mostly dot-tailed whitefaces with a leavening of frosted whitefaces, common whitetails, and at least one twelve-spotted and one four-spotted skimmer. Over the weekend Eric and I went to Eloise Butler, where we saw dozens of four-spotted skimmers and a goodly number of whitetails; not to mention two large and extremely oblivious wild turkeys browsing under the birdfeeders. We also went to Lebanon Hills Regional Park, where we were too late for dragonflies but delighted to see fireflies twinkling and flashing in the vegetation next to the fire road.

Also, I had a writing date with Pat WINOLJ, made copious notes, and wrote 500 or so new words on the Liavek novel. The style of the novel as written so far pleases me a lot, but it's rather mannered, and getting back into it will be interesting.

Pamela

The snowdrops came up all of a piece, leaves and drooping white flowers, three or four days ago. The purple snow crocuses are blooming in the front flower bed. The peony on the south side of the house is showing red shoots, as is the evil but beguiling Japanese knotweed. The bleeding-heart in the front flower bed has put up red-and-green shoots, already frilled with proto-leaves, right out of its mulch. The blue-and-yellow thug irises are putting up leaves, as is the burgundy one that hasn't bloomed much in recent years. I should feed that one.

The dames' rocket and the motherwort have greened up. The daylilies are four to eight inches high, depending on where they are. The bare earth of the south side yard is filling up with tiny violet leaves, a bit of periwinkle, and the aforementioned Japanese knotweed. The grass is greening up. There are small leaves on both mock-orange bushes, and on the neighbors' peabush hedge. I really ought to rake the leaves off the remaining plants, but I have a deep conviction that we are going to pay for this weather with sub-zero temperatures and a raging blizzard, pretty much ANY TIME NOW. So I walk around in bemusement instead.

Ari and I saw a morning-cloak butterfly a few days ago, sunning itself on the back of a lawn chair. I've also seen various small flies and beetles, but no queen bumblebees yet, and no green darners.

Juncoes are still here, and there are so many I think they may be either passing through or preparing to leave. We have a pair of cardinals, which is always cheering. The chickadees and house sparrows and house finches are singing in their various ways, and crows are rattling.

In a rash frenzy, I ordered a bunch of plants from the Lake Country School just down the street. They used to send out six-year-olds with forms to go door to door, and you never knew exactly what you would get when you went to pick up your plants. But now everything is online. I confidently expect that the edited manuscript of my book, with a short deadline for return, will land on me on the weekend I am supposed to pick up the plants.

The mint hasn't come back yet, which concerns me. If it doesn't, I had better buy three plants of it and put them in different locations. This is a good recipe for disaster, but maybe the mint can fight back the Japanese knotweed.

Pamela

I am so smug. I am always excessively, obnoxiously smug when my failure to do something that everybody else does and that I've been beating myself up for not doing turns out to have been beneficial.

The tree on our boulevard is a Norway maple. All Norway maples are on a schedule that may be Norwegian but may be from some alternate dimension. They stay green late, late in the fall; if there is a hard freeze they shrug off their green leaves and look insouciant; and if allowed, they turn a glorious gold in mid- to late November. Then they like to preen themselves a little. I'm sure that, whatever timestream they hail from, they know exactly when Minneapolis has decided to send in street sweepers to get the leaves out of the gutters. Then they drop about half their leaves the day afterwards, and hold onto the rest until their local human companions have raked their yards clean.

The maple on our boulevard is always the last one to drop its leaves, and the one on the boulevard of our neighbor to the north is the next-to-last to do so.

The entire public sidewalk and a good portion of the walk leading from that sidewalk to our front porch were solid with maple leaves. In a wet autumn, I'd have had to deal with them because wet leaves can become as slippery as ice. But these were dry and crisp. I did try to prevent the leaves from utterly concealing the one step down from our walk to the public sidewalk, but it was so windy that in as little as half an hour after I cleared the leaves, more leaves would gather and obscure the step again.

On Saturday, it snowed, first ice pellets, then big fluffy flakes, then pellets again, for a total of maybe two inches. I had actually planned to just let the stuff melt, since it will be fifty during the day by Thursday. But then I remembered that the person delivering the groceries would have a bit of a struggle if I didn't shovel. The mixture of ice and snow, dyed a delicate yellow by the underlying leaves, looked pretty grim. But it peeled right up from that glory of glories, a perfectly dry sidewalk. The sidewalks of my obsessive raking neighbors aren't nearly so clear.

I am so smug.

Pamela