Revenge of the Chipmunks

    After four months of tending the vines and fending off hordes of chipmunks, we harvested the tomatoes.  Or rather the forty percent of the tomatoes that hadn't been gnawed or dragged off to the provinces.  Victory was ours!   We gorged on the tomatoes, noon and night.   Turns out my innards are tomato intolerant.  Acutely so.
  There's a lesson to be learned here, but I'll be damned if I want to think about it. 

More than Enough

                            "The Bend, Again"  ©2013

   Years ago, I had an epiphany of sorts, courtesy of a piece in The New Yorker.  It told of a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller at the home of a very wealthy man.  Vonnegut asked if it bothered Heller that the host had made more money in a day than Heller had from all of his Catch-22 royalties.  Heller replied, 'No, because I have something he'll never have.'
   'What's that?' asked Vonnegut.
   'Enough,'  Heller answered.
   I have 'enough' but I need to remind myself periodically.  In my frenzy to sell more paintings, I have ignored Heller's message.  It isn't what I want to sell, but that I can paint.  Fifteen years ago, I was a writer.  I dabbled in art to feel closer to my recently deceased mother (herself a professional artist).  My whole life changed.  I studied at the Art League of Alexandria, never allowing myself to hope I would be good enough to make the leap.  Years of classes, encouragement and passion, drove me.  In 2006, I was juried into the Torpedo Art Center. I am a resident artist.
   Even though I grouse about nearly everything, I can write and I can paint.  And, surely, that is enough.

BATS!

The tenants called. There are bats everywhere in the Vineyard house.  The men of their family are away, and the ten women and babies are not up to shooing bats with brooms.   The animal control warden, called by the tenant, exhorted them to abandon the house. There aren't a lot of places to seek refuge in the high season of August.  Odd  things happen whenever this family rents the house. The caretaker helpfully asked them why they keep coming back.
 Replacing the ajar attic hatch would not be too much to expect from a caretaker.  But alas, ours has a bum leg and will not climb a ladder. Reputable repairmen, (though not apparently animal control agents), are loathe to wait in ferry lines to come over to Chappy.  Obama is at the other end of the Vineyard but appears to jam traffic at our end as well.  We called everyone who has worked on the house with its storied past but no one can get there for 'weeks'.
One sister in-law thought we should explain what a vital role bats play in the environment.  Did I mention that one of the tenants had previously been bitten by a rabid bat?

Tomato Debacle

   I love summer tomatoes, so meaty and juicy.  What could be more fun than growing your own?  I admit I have a spotty history where gardening is concerned.  As a newlywed in the 70's, I tried to grow vegetables.  The zucchini developed a manifest destiny complex, over running all other plants, indeed, other yards.  And, I'm quite sure I was the only gardener in upstate New York who had to stake her corn.  It keeled over with near passion.
   In recent years we grew just tomatoes.  We tried the front yard, the side yard, the back yard.  Something was truly enjoying our tomatoes but it was not us.
   This year, my husband erected a six foot wire mesh fence in the back yard.    When we left for vacation we had several plump tomatoes that we were sure would be ripe by our return.  On return, it was  a bit surprising to discover there were no big tomatoes in the garden, ripe or otherwise.  I suspected the neighbors. 
    The culprits, we soon learned, were swat teams of chipmunks. ( I always hated that Alvin song.)  People think chipmunks are cute.  They are not.  They are rodents with good PR.  We doused the ground with fox urine and liquid fence.  They practically laughed in our faces.  In  past years, animals would eat ripening tomatoes.  Now they dropped big green tomatoes to the ground, ate half and left the rest for us.  I can't tell you how depressing this was.
   We tried every humane method possible to dissuade the chipmunks, but they kept coming in waves, like they were being bussed in from the Virginia battlefields.  We resorted to some not strictly humane methods.  So far, so good.  Except this morning in the Washington Post there was an article about evil hornworms devastating the local tomato crop.  How do farmers thwart the vermin and get those juicy tomatoes to the market?
    Next year, we are planting wildflowers.

Will Bleed for Art, part two

                              "White Shutters"   ©2013

   What vacation is complete without a trip to the emergency room?
    I was on the Vineyard, scraping the stairs again.  If I thought about it seriously, I would be tempted to believe the wretched stairs spend each winter shimmying and bucking off the paint like an ornery uncle.
    Last year, when kayaking, I found a hidden inlet that I wanted to paint.   So with the scraping done, my son and I took the kayak across Poucha Pond.  My sense of rhythm is irregular and clearly not suited for team sports.  There was much zigging and zagging.  And muttering from behind.
    The inlet was as I had remembered it.  (Sadly, the photos bear no resemblance.)  On the way back to the kayak, I stepped on something sharp in the water.   I know I am a gusher. My skin is very thin.  It's not a problem as I'm not heir to a throne, and the blood clots eventually. Last year I got knocked down by a roguish wave, managed to keep my camera above water but gashed my knee.  My daughter panicked at the sight of so much blood.  As did my son.  He may have mentioned sharks, but by then we were on land.   I took care of the wound at home and slathered it with anti-biotics.  Two days later it was off to the hospital with an infected foot.

No Hands on Deck

"Mellow Yellows"  (c) 2010

"dinghy jam" copyright 2013     

                                            

I am mystified by my attraction to dinghies and sailboats.  I don't want to sail or to dingh, if that's a verb.  When I was a child we had a small sailboat and Boston Whaler.  My father taught me to sail much as he taught me to swim (as one might a dog, with a mighty heave ho.  I don't even dog paddle well.)  My memories of sailing are sketchy, involving mishaps  of one sort or another, becalmed, stranded on a sandbar, blown out to sea etc.  Once I was out with my brother, Randy, when the day dissolved into a windless fog bank.  We had no idea where shore was but Randy figured that wasn't catastrophic as there was no place deep enough in the bay to drown.  He was taller but I was the one forced out of the boat into the bay to pull us to land.  Or in circles, as it happened.  He still sails to this day (it wasn't his feet stepping on squishy marine life).
    The Boston Whaler was supposed to be invincible.  The ads said you could saw it in half and still float.  But like all things nautical, it wouldn't stop on a dime, leaving me forever leary of brakeless transportation.  The only way to stop it was to bump into something solid.  This was frowned upon by both my father and the owner of whatever solid object I butted .(My older brother, Vance, would occasionally run the whaler onto the beach to stop it.  Vance was the only one who knew how to fix the boat, so I guess that gave him certain privileges.)  My worst solo trip involved a problematic gear box.  I couldn't get it to go forward. I had to navigate through the harbor full of  yachts backwards.
   That may explain why I don't paint motor boats, but none of it explains why I  paint so many wooden boats.  Nor, why I am so very fond of my brothers.

Oyster Strewed

                            "Oyster Strew" copyright 2007
    In England, after a long day in museums and maneuvering up and down the seemingly endless stairs of the Underground, we boarded a crowded train.  I held on to a pole.  Suddenly, a young woman stood up and offered me her seat.  I used to do the very same thing in New York City in the 70s.  I did it for old people.  Rather than being grateful, I gasped, "Do I look that old?".  She smiled.  I took the seat under protest.
   This week I bought annuals for the garden.   Later  I noticed the clerk had given me a "seniors" discount.  She hadn't asked if I was over 60, she just assumed.  Isn't that a presumptuous social gaffe?  Shouldn't she ask and then look stunned or at the very least surprised that I am so old?
  I feel like I'm forty-five.  Perhaps I should look in the mirror.