Early Spring in Dragonwood

     This has been a morning in which every beat of my heart throbs with gratefulness and joy.  Birds sing from every quarter of Dragonwood.  Spicebush is in bloom, making a hazy yellow layer in the understory.  Spring beauties and a few other woodland wildflowers blossom.  We find DeKay's brownsnakes, from a hand's-length red-bellied beauty on the doormat to a foot-long matriarch skimming the leafy ground.
     The bees meet the challenge of an early warm spell by gathering great amounts of pollen and honey from the budding maples and wildflowers.  Maple pollen looks like creamy pale yellow dust, while some of the wildflower pollen is bright red.  Crocuses, too, produce reddish or bright orange pollen.  So much honey is being collected that we put honey supers on two of three hives.
     Every day is a new adventure for 6-year-old Squirrelboy and me.  He earned the privilege of visiting the neighbor's woods (larger than ours) by diligently cleaning up the roadside trash.  His kindness and persistence impressed her, and she apparently values the precious gift of a childhood spent in the woods.  So now, every day after school, I must go on an adventure with my increasingly bold explorer.  I follow his long legs and tousled blond hair into the forest.  He finds paths for me across logs and around thornbushes.  Squirrelboy is a gentleman, too, pointing out hazards and picking up treasures.  We talk about the value of keeping wild places healthy, and how to show respect for our neighbors when we are on their property.  Under his shining blue eyes, the freckles darken, and I fall in love with my beautiful boy all over again.
     I discover bones, and we wonder what this animal could have been.  Sharp teeth and large, forward pointing eyesockets mean it must have been a carnivore that could hunt.  From the size of the skull, I guess it could have been a coon or opossum. 
     Indoors, we hear the voices of eight peeps!  These baby chickens will grow our flock.  Of course, the children have already named them:  Owl and America, the blue/green egg-laying Ameracaunas; Lily and Ginny, the Cherry Eggers; Silvie and Amity, the Silver-Lace Wyandottes; and Lacey and Fire Ammonite, the Gold-Lace Wyandottes.  Can you guess which ones Squirrelboy named, which I named, and which were named by Faerygirl?  We suspect Fire Ammonite is a rooster, due to his petite size, bossy attitude and extra-loud constant peep.
   We at Dragonwood look forward to a beautiful season of garden, bees, chickens, woodland adventures, and unprecedented delights.  It has already begun.

Close Encounters of the Crayfish Kind

As I was pulling a plastic bag from the little ditch alongside my woods, I gasped and then chuckled. Trapped inside was a curious crawdad who had probably gone in to investigate any vestiges of food that had been left behind. I shook it out gently and brought it to Squirrelboy, who was sitting jauntily in the wheelbarrow. He was a little nervous about the small "lobster" crawling around his feet and legs. But I let him know that it would not harm him as long as he was gentle and kind. Soon Faerygirl joined us, and the two children enjoyed playing with their new friend. It reminded me so much of my own childhood, growing up along a creek, and playing with the crawdads that lived there. This particular specimen was a real beauty, with shiny patterned brown carapace, soft-looking cartilage showing at the joints, and a perky demeanor. After a while, we let it go back to the ditch from whence it came. It is a wonder to me that we have crawdads in our woods, for while it is quite wet this time of year, in the late summer it becomes very dry.

I continued cleaning up the trash spread along the north side of our woods. It looked as if a bag of someone's trash had been dragged along the ditch, probably by neighboring dogs, raccoons, or other varmints. The water was cool as I poked bits of plastic out with sticks. This sort of litter I can handle; no one meant for it to be there. However, I am extremely disgruntled by the litterers who think wooded roadsides are the perfect place to toss their used cups and cigarette packages and beer bottles. In the woods to the north of us, I constantly find large piles of beer cans and liquor bottles. This troubles me, since I really don't want drunk kids messing around so close to where my children play. Often these cans have bullet holes in them. Along the west side of the woods, someone likes to drink coffee and throw their giant styrofoam cups into the brambles. It truly offends me that someone would be so discourteous. The least they could do is keep their trash inside the car until they get home.