How to be a Writer

 


  Obviously you are going to make a place to write, a writing station, the more obviously so the better. It helps if you have a writing hat, which makes for a personal cubicle, and makes it less obvious, dependin on your tipping slant or cock, whether you are working or sleeping, maybe to dream of your  theme... and yes a writer needs a theme, lots of themes, a main  theme of mine being birds as  you can see from my  hat and the pullets on the curtain rod behind my seat.
      Then there is no excuse not to write except for lack of desire to write,  or lack of a story, fear of never being able to stop, lack of experience, lack of a story again, or an imagination that is underexercied, and especially due to a mind running mostly on words.
 I have most all of these problems, now and then, and now again a few nights ago I led myself to the writing station and told myself to  improvise a bunch of first sentences Reading them over now, I don't remember any of them.  Some are enough by themselves, some could go on, some should die.  Some are stolen stories.  In some i am carried way to far beyond the one sentence goal.
In the story about the plastic eggs with the messages in them, I must have typed the messages with my fingers out of position, because of the cat in my lap, the extreme lateness of the hour, or fumes from the ritualistic rum beside my chair. Any help decoding the messages would probably be a waste of your time, but go ahead, and let me in on it.  It could be someone coming through from the other side.  Also, if you care to go on and finish any of these stories, just get permission from the characters, and then go ahead.
      So then, here are my midnight improvisations:


Once there was a story which, as told, ended when the lady fell off the street car and landed in a  fruitt stall, but that was not really the end.  Of course.

   Thre were two of him and only one of her.  That was the problem.


   Once there was, or maybe a few times, has there been a person with cheek bones quite as prominent as his, and it was more than he could do, to locate his identiy in anything else, including his outstanding sucess in the farmed Truffel market.

     The Parrot, named Polly because it was the only one ever known in the county, was found beside the rail road track when she was a little girl in Ohio and there is no telling how old it was at the time, being probasbly a performing circus parot, but Bernice had the parrot with her until it died eighty years later, where upon Polly was taxadermined and kept on in her cage  until when Bernice died while well into her nineties. They  had an open casket funeral with Polly, and the two were burried together.

      The moment I walked into the place , seeing thjat it had a dirt floor and only three walls, I expected less elegance than I actuall encountered



  Her third ear was not always obvious, beause of thje swath of hair she pinned over  her left temple, where the ear resided, but of you  ever noticed it, you felt deeply obsrved.

   Every seven years Alistair Clair, otherwiose known as Stomwell Jackson, and Pom;pe Tympanum, would change his name for a year and try out another life, as much as possible avoiding legal fraud, and so on.  The so  on was the problem.

    Four mlonths after she moved in with her cats, he moved into a trailer  in the yard and that was working out pretty well

     When she first mved onto the ;roerty, there was no shed out back, and then one day there it was.

   When I first met her , she had not jet unfurled her wings

       At first she didn not notice the large, ape like creasture in the hot  tub.

           for a week when she had gone to collect eghgs in the chicken house, she had found not regykr eggs, but placstic easter eggs: those two-part things you get with jelly  beans  in them, except that each of these chicken house eggs had a  fortune cookei advisory  on it, like, as in the fisst one, :   nredstr pg upit nrdy wis;oyord/

       ejrm jr eplr i[ om yjr ptmomh . jr trvlpmrf jr epi;fkidy hp nsvl yp c;rr[./

              zoy dsd s fsu ;olr smu pyjrt fsu. rcvr[y yjr dlu esd gs;;;omh.

               When they  sold the farm to the other side of the family, they were able to move into town and live a life where you didn’t have  to worry  about being slammed against the side  of the stall by  a bossy cow, damn her hide

               She did not  notice that she had stepped on a star fish, until it had been with her for a while.


          When she woke, she thought she smelled pancakes. but she lived alone in a doublewide trailer on four acres.  Another morning it was bacon and, maybe   potatoes.


   My adopted brother William was handy on roofs where, because of his lower body dwxarfism, he could wxork all day without kneeling or bending.  Heoccasionally worked on some of our Natural Bone construction projects over the years, most often  sleeping nights on the work  site, sleeping among the tools. No one ever complained, mostly no one noticed. .   He did some garden work on his own and often then, lived in the garden, and sometimes with the encouragements of the ladies.
        One lady in Cayuga Heights believed that gnomes are real physical beings, that William was one, and she was willing to pay him, whatever that might be worth, to be a resident gnome.
       He was nt so sure he liked the notion that he was a gnome, or just exactly what as gnome was, or what was to be expected of him, but he took the job.

       He didn’t have to be there all the time, and she paid him to build a funkty little cottage for his garden stays.  She wanted there to be a steep roof but with the appearance of snow on it all the time.  The artificial snow was a huge pain in the ass for William.  Mrs Truebody was thinking paper mache … but William knew what the weather would do to that.  He ended up using infvlated empty plastic milk gallon and qiuart containers striung up by ropes through the handles and covered all over with agricultural row cloth.  You got the idea, but it didn’t  look all that much like snow to William except when it snowed on it, and  that was long after the garden tours came through.  Mrs Truebody had him extend the fairy garden aspect of her poperty, making laterns and fairy houses  until William just got sick of it all and went out West for a while
 He felt safe and secure sleeping with his tools.  Like   the sons of  Cornell Professors at the time, he was a carpeter, house painter,, At the time of this story , he usually slept in his van   or on the work stie, in a bag, among his bags of tools.  

     For many yeas, she forgot she had ever been to Boston.

   They collided like ships in the night.

       He was the kind of guy who, when he walked into a room, no one noticed unless he coughed or cleared his throat or laughed at nothing, as he often did at odd times any way. No one liked him and he didn;t like anybody.  He would be beneath your notice, except for his particular talent.

        He had been away so long that his dog didnt reconnize him; bit him on the knee cap .

       He had not been to an actual movie in an actual movie theathre for years now and when he sat down at all seemed familiar agin except for one thing ….. there were no oter people in the teatre.  And then the film started.


    It was not long before Mason realzed that the object he had pcked up was a subject. someting alive.

   She attributed her long life and good health to a diet of worms, and because she was so old, many people thought she was serious, and some asked for recipeis.

Ernie Thomas's Gloves

 This pair of wool gloves was knitted eighty or so years ago by Ernie Thomas, famous in my family, but dead before i was born:   a lumber jack, camp carpenter, and trapper, who (with his son Harlan, a Harisville area school teacher whom I actually did meet at my father’s funeral)  had, along with  my Grandfather) built a camp in the late nineteen twenties on the island people used to call Failing’s Island but we call Loon Island, close to  the North Shore of Lake Bonaparte. The camp has a big central fireplace to which they connected a big box stove for heating during the hunting and trapping seasons.
     One winter in the thirties or forties, Ernie Thomas fell through the ice as he was returning from running a trap line in the Bonaparte outlet to Mud Lake.  His body was never recovered.
 But we have the mittens and, for some reason, the moths have spared them completely.  Georgia says it is because we have not put them away.  I never use them.  Don’t want to wear them out. If we ever find Ernie Thomas, he will need them.

William's Way of Appearing

I will illustrate this post with an inappropriate photo because ... you will understand why:

       One dim morning as I came down from the loft, I thought I saw one of our yard cats curled up  on the deck just in front of the sliding door:  it was about cat size and grey-brown, but when I slid the door open, the cat did not jump up to get out of the way or into the house, as you would expect a cat to do;  it just lay there like a giant turd. Because that is what it was. A tightly curled, well-formed  sausage-cat of poop …   implying an animal big enough to eat a German Shepard.
           But I was  more or less  sure there was no such animal, at least not in my  neighborhood.  I was sure that the giant turd was  the work of my imaginary brother William. 
 Who else would go from yard to yard collecting dog shit, just to make a joke?
     So, by this sign  I knew William was back around again and that I would be seeing him soon, though not soon enough to clean the shit off the porch. The last I knew …I don’t know how long back … he was on the west coast wrangling animals, mostly  chickens, for those  period dramas where the streets are dirt and  ducks and chickens all in f flurry.
      I wonder what became of the Hollywood gig, or if his email about that was just another pile of shit.  Guess we will all find out when he shows his face here presently.     The Giant Turd happened two or three days ago.

Return to Wallnut Farm

I return to Wallnut Farm tomorrow. 

We built the house up on the hill in nineteen ninety .  This way up:

   You get a kind of a fish eye view up here.  Flying fish:

Lower Wallnut Farm, as seen from Upper Wallnut Farm:

From up here you can't see that there is at least one  cedar shingle missing from the roof I framed and shingled over the silo back then.

Hunting the Little Chicken mushroom.

 You have to speak their languages: 

Getting Dry

Getting Dry

Our little house is cantilevered over the foundation of an early nineteenth century home on Pumpkin Hill, several hundred feet above Cayuga Lake.  The original farm extended from the lake over the hill to Payne Gulf, but the flat top of the hill at the center of it all has never had enough available water for a family with thirsty crops and livestock. During the early twentieth century, the hand-dug house-well was drilled down a hundred feet, but it  recharges slowly. The  fieldstone cistern in the old basement has tumbled and we now use it as a compost bin.

The single piece of slate that had covered the barn well was broken and tipped when we moved to the property, so we pulled it aside. I cleaned the well out and chipped a foot  deeper into the shale with a digging bar.

We built a deck over the well and installed a fountainhead over a six foot diameter basin excavated in the shale below it, and over a spillway below it, a somewhat larger and longer dug pond with a meandering outlet channel leading to a larger pond, then to larger one, long like a fingerlake.

I installed pumps in each pond, with hoses to circulate  water through the system. I figured that this would raise the moisture level of the surrounding soil for the Blueberries planted along the  banks.

I stocked the larger pond with native aquatic weeds that thrived, then with Crayfish that ate all the pond weed, then with Largemouth Bass which  ate all the Crayfish. I introduced Fathead minnows, which also thrived and  on which  the Bass grew large, spawning and spreading through the flowing brook to the lower pond..

Except for the high cost of pumping the system, this worked well enough during the normally wet years, Unfortunately, erratic is the new normal, and here on this glacier scraped hill, we don’t have the thick layer of clay needed to line a pond and hold water.  Ponds dug into shale loose water the same way they gain it: by trickle down.

A few years ago we had a very  dry summer  during which we lost most of the water and all the fish from our ponds. And this year we just enough water in the main pond for a few frogs. We frequently run the well dry watering our Tomato and Squash plots.

So this year I haven’t run the pumps at all. We do not take a lot of showers, or have a lawn.  I mulch heavily with straw. And this summer we installed  a five hundred fifty five gallon plastic water tank on the old front porch pad, where it is high enough so we can use it to water our upper level crop mounds by gravity feed. I am lining the  basin below the fountainhead with sheet plastic to prevent trickle down, and will eventually also line the next larger basin below that, giving us another thousand gallons that I can pump to the gravity feed tank.

Other than by increasing our water gathering and storage capacity, our most important adaptation to the dry conditions has been to concentrate on cultivating drought tolerant crops, especially volunteer Pears. Pears  are not native here, but they are tolerant of weather extremes, and of our thin, poorly drained, clay-laden soil, and after the Cayuga orchards were cut down by General Sullivan’s men, the Pears sprouted from the stumps, and invaded the landscape, coming up now through the Buckthorn which at first dominates abandoned farmland here. We have hundreds of naturalized Pear trees on our four acres, and I have grafted a dozen different varieties of cultivated Pears onto a hundred or more of them. I never water these trees.

Garlic is our favorite, our largest, and our most drought-resistant vegetable crop. We grow it (and Sunchokes and Asparagus) in mounds on orchard wet spots. Without mounding, there isn’t much soil at all, and the mounding both holds moisture and drains off the excess. Garlic does most of its growing in Spring and Fall when it needs no supplemental watering. This year, despite the dry summer and the fact that we didn’t irrigate the Garlic, we  have our best crop ever. We plant more and eat more Garlic every year. Maybe the Garlic diet protects us from dehydration, if not also from vampires. 

Despite their hardiness, his been a very bad one for our dear Pears, `not because of the drought, but because  of the violent hot and cold flashes this Spring. But given next year’s bumper Pear crop,  I plan to make a lot of Pear cider and drink it when I’m dry, even if it has gotten a bit hard. These are hard times.

Poor Orchard's Almanak: Companion Trees.

 

    My  poor orchard!  last year most of the fruiting was aborted  by heavy a  freeze shortly after pollination.  This year, most of it (other than the few Cherries we have) has already  been nipped in the bud by a heavy freeze just before the flowering began.  Only one in ten of my hundred or so trees that  are of bearing age on the grafted parts, have flowered this season.  The two or three that have flowered fully are on the slightly higher part of the orchard, probably because cold air flows down and the lower part of the orchard. Though well near the top of Pumpkin Hill,  our acres are mostly flat and poorly drained, whether of air, or of water.
  The wooded slopes of Pumpkin Hill are full of wild Pears and this year even there on the wild trees,the bloom , normally very intense along the edges of fields… has also  been about ten percent of normal. Hardly a festival.
          There are one or two trees on our lower section that  have bloomed well, including my favorite tree, flowering as lushly this year as any so far,  I suppose its companion Pine shields it on the North   When the seed Pears have grown up under the Pines, I don’t interfere too much with the pines.