The Spring Blues...

                                       
It is a blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
There is more unmixed color on the wing
Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.

                          "A Blue-Butterfly Day" 
                          Robert Frost                                                    

Spring came to the garden last weekend. Or perhaps I should call its appearance symbolic, a harbinger, if you will, of the loosening of winter's grip, its dreary hold on our emotional well-being. It alighted on a blooming weed and opened its wings to the sun under a spring sky as azure, as iridescent as its wings: a small blue butterfly commonly known, and aptly so, as the "spring azure." Frost's spring butterfly was most certainly an azure as these little shards of blue herald spring from coast to coast across the northern states.

Blues belong to the family Polyommatinae as in "poly"for "many." Washington State is home to approximately sixteen different species of blues. On a late spring day in some locales in Eastern Washington as many as five different species can be seen flying together.To my knowledge
this little vernal messenger is the only blue butterfly that flies in our Valley.

This year's sighting was early (third week in March). Celastrina argiolus (the scientific moniker for the azure, a big name for such a small bug) usually flies here in May. I've seen them on warm afternoons drifting along our arborvitae hedge like windswept scraps of blue tissue paper. By June their cycle is usually finished, but during last year's uncharacteristically hot, dry summer, I observed an azure in late August, albeit a bit tattered and frayed, lazing about the rows in the vegetable garden.

Fluttering in on blue wings, spring--or at least the insinuation of it-- has come to the garden...at last.

(Note on photo: a pair of azures, male above; female below

Flower Filching in the Valley

Between showers this morning Gladys and I decided to ride the Loop. Besides, what are a few raindrops anyway? Just water, aren't they? We had turned the corner onto the upper Loop road to begin the return leg when a box truck heading down Valley slowed as it passed. The driver waved and I saw Va's familiar face.

Va is the Valley's Eliza Doolittle, Tualco's flower girl. Hers is the flower patch closest to the Riley Slough bridge. Last spring I stopped and chatted flowers with her. Our conversation led Va to ask if I grew calla lilies. I told her, yes, I did. She wondered if I had extras to share. It just so happened we had a clump of lilies that needed dividing as they were encroaching on other plantings in the flower garden. I told her next spring I'd divide the patch and set aside a nice shovelful of roots for her.

Since then I have passed Va a few times but could never seem to catch her at work in the field. My frantic waving as she went by caught her attention. The box truck slowed at the Loop intersection, turned around and rolled to a stop next to me. I reminded Va about the callas, wondered if she still wanted some, told her I needed to divide the clump before the stalks began to sprout. Yes, she would like the callas, she told me. I gave her my address and phone number, and she promised to stop by for them soon.

Va went on to tell me she's recently been a victim of theft: flower thieves. Her sister who farms a plot on the south end of the flower fields told Va she saw a small car approach Va's rows of tulips and daffodils, slow, and stop. Someone jumped out of the vehicle and proceeded to pull clumps of budding bulbs from the end of the rows and make off with them. Apparently the thieves were interested in the bulbs only; in the case of the daffodils, they left behind flower stalks.

Va climbed down from the truck and pointed out the disturbed soil where the bulbs were yanked from the ends of the rows.The brash thieves struck in broad daylight, too.

If you have purchased flower bulbs, you know how expensive they are. Va told me her six rows of tulips and daffodils cost her $4,500 this season. She sells the blossoming stalks in bunches at local flower stands and works hard for the income her plot provides. And now some petty thief has cut into her profits. But aside from that, I'm sure she now feels her property and efforts are at risk. Sure, Va lost only a few flower bulbs from the end of three or four rows. But she's also lost her peace of mind: I know a theft of any kind leaves the victim feeling so violated.

I told Va she needed to mount a surveillance camera on the power pole across from her field. She laughed and shook her head. If you're out and about in the Valley, be on the lookout for flower poachers. Seems to me if they'll stoop to stealing flower bulbs, those thieves are apt to steal anything,

Cribbage, Anyone?...

The other day I rounded up the pruning gear and went out to do battle with my summer apple Lodi tree. Despite the fact the old tree is ravished by an apple canker disease that haunts the Valley, some sort of infection that raises arthritic nobs and gnarls on the branches and restricts the flow of sap, it still manages to produce a prodigious amount of new wood every year. Much of the new growth is willowy and withe-like and requires considerable snipping and heading back to keep the tree from becoming one big, interwoven mat. Pruning the tree was particularly challenging this year because I did not prune it last season.

When I leaned my pruning pole against one of the tree's two leaders, I noticed a good half of the trunk riddled with holes a quarter inch deep, not random drillings but repetitive horizontal patterns circling the trunk. The perforations gave the appearance of one large cribbage board. When I first saw these markings, I was reminded of a beetle infestation that killed my two pie cherry trees years ago. Unlike the bored holes dribbling sawdust, these indentations have scabbed over and the tree appeared to be no worse for the poking.

I've seen these holes before on our walnut tree but hadn't noticed the intricate dotted artwork on the apple tree prior to this year's pruning. The holes are the artistic work of a species of woodpecker: the red-breasted sapsucker (Sphyrapicus ruber). With engineer-like precision the bird does its artwork, then returns to slurp the sap and dine off any insects that might be attracted to the syrupy watering holes.

After a bit of research I learned a sapsucker's sap mining can be so aggressive the host tree dies. Even though this stately old apple is a canker victim and now riddled with hundreds upon hundreds of holes, it's a survivor. Come mid-summer I have no doubt the tree will again bear enough fruit to fill this winter's applesauce quota.

This sapsucker business has me puzzled. It must have taken some time for the bird to perforate the bark countless times. I assume the species is not nocturnal, and therefore it seems I should have seen it drilling away as it circumnavigated the trunk row after row. Yet I've never seen its redheaded eminence bobbing about the trunk. In fact I've only seen the species once, and in the attached photo it clings to one of our fir trees out front. One more thing: the bird is a "sapsucker," right? Therefore it must do its work when the sap flow is most abundant, which, I assume is in the spring. Thus the window of time for sapsucker watching must be limited to just a few short weeks in spring and still, I've yet to see the perp.

So now in addition to having a food source growing out back, I also have an entertainment center. If you're up for a game of cribbage, let me know. I'll furnish the cards, but you'll need to bring your own ladder.

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder...

On this glorious late February day here in the Valley, I rolled Gladys out of the garage where she's been hibernating most of the winter and took her for a spin. We cruised on past Ed and Ginnifer's new construction and remodel. The two story breezeway between house and garage is framed in, the windows installed, and the metal roofing in place. I noticed the entryway has been reconfigured and roofed as well, the west entrance canted now to the southwest. During the tear out and construction the Broers family has been living in Ed's shop, and I imagine their homecoming can't come any too soon for them.

As we approach the Werkhoven Dairy, I see a lone figure striding briskly in our direction and assume it's either Steve, Jim or Andy en route to the next farm chore. We meet at the intersection of Sargeant Road where the pedestrian takes a right hand turn onto Sargeant. To my surprise I recognize Sargeant Bob, once a familiar figure in the Valley. We'd pass each other so frequently in our Valley outings we formed a sort of bond and would sometimes walk together and share bits of information about our personal lives. A bizarre incident on July 4, 2010, and subsequent encounter brought our"friendship" to an abrupt end. Both incident and post encounter were the subject of a July 13, 2011 post ("Strange...Very Strange Indeed").

It's been nigh on six years since that fateful collision and today was only my third encounter with the Sarge--post incident. Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder, but when Bob and I passed, made eye contact, the spring-like warmth of this beautiful day dissolved in the vitriol of his glare, and Gladys and I were thrust back into mid-December, a day of chill and frost. And yet again Bob gave me the cold shoulder and so much time has passed I can't remember which injured shoulder it was.

Edible Litter from the Valley...

Afoot in the Valley over the years I've come across many a strange item lying alongside the Tualco Loop Road. Most castoffs have been tools. I've brought home screwdrivers, pliers, a wrench or two (mostly metric), one of which, a hefty box end, could well have been used in the assembly of a 747. Just lately a sturdy paint scraper,... nuts and bolts and other assorted hardware. Nails, tacks, and screws I toss far out into the field to spare a motorist the hassle of having to haul out a spare tire to fix a flat. Stolen mail, condoms still in sealed packages (and others that were not), coins in denominations from a fifty cent piece down to a penny, thirty-seven of which I found littering a yard-long stretch of shoulder several years ago. And believe it or not, some years back on the First of April I found $1,000 in a muddy zip-loc bag.

Day before yesterday what to my wandering eyes did appear but a Snickers candy bar lying in the grass just off the shoulder. At first I thought the wrapper was one more item of litter tossed there by a passing litterbug. On closer inspection I found a fully wrapped, intact Snickers bar, regular size, lying there in the weeds as if it had fallen off the candy shelf at the grocery. "Hmmm," I thought, "this wasn't here yesterday.

Snickers bars and I have a history. In my other life, when I did my best to teach sophomores English as a foreign language, I used Snickers bars as leverage: I dangled them over a struggling student, "If you pass this test, this Snickers is for you." I mostly used them to build rapport with my students in friendly wagers on sporting events, major league baseball match-ups, championship and World Series games in particular.Whenever a student in one of my classes had a birthday, I gifted him or her with a bite-sized Snickers bar in a pre-wrapped gift box ("I need the box back," I'd tell them). Although in all honesty I prefer a Payday candy bar over a Snickers, I picked up the lonely bar for nostalgia's sake, stuffed it in my pocket and carried the roadside gift home for further scrutiny.

Both ends of the wrapper were neatly sealed, as was the seam, and in spite of its lying in the wet grass (a day or two? Overnight? Since morning?), the paper wrap was barely moist. The contents were not squashed, nor was the bar broken in half. Regardless if the sweet hunk came from Wal-Mart or Willie Wonka's chocolate factory, its contents: 250 calories, 12 grams of total fat, 4.5 grams of sat. fat, 27 grams of sugars, and 120 milligrams of sodium, remained well-sealed.

The question of the day: should I eat litter found lying alongside the road? But the the bar was still sealed in cellophane...not like it was opened, half eaten with a stranger's bite marks on the truncated remains. Not the same as fishing an uneaten slice of pizza out of a dumpster, was it? But still, the candy bar was lying in the wet grass just beyond the muddy shoulder of the road.... Do candy bars have expiration dates? That could be the all-consuming factor. Yes, they do. And yes it was....  Don't expiration dates principally apply to eggs, meat, and dairy though? And aren't candy bars sealed to keep freshness in? I rationalized the question to the point I could almost taste the caramel. However, I wondered, what if some sociopath injected the Snickers bar with some poisonous substance, a narcotic or worse yet, a laxative? A flimsy wrapper is hardly tamper-proof.

At this posting, the Snickers bar is cooling its heels in the freezer where it will remain until (it's my hope) I'll have forgotten all about it. And then, what a sweet discovery!

(If in the past three days you lost a Snickers bar in the Valley and would like to claim your property, stop by anytime. To prove ownership, though, you'll have to tell me the bar's expiration date. But for now, it's finders, keepers.)

Attic archives...

The holidays are behind us, thank goodness. Now we can look forward to the excitement of the New Year...if, that is, you're one who finds filing the past year's tax returns exciting. Here on site at The Ripple we have the halls undecked, the trappings packed away in bulging totes, and I've been creaking my way up the ladder to the attic one tote at a time.

The last of Christmas to be packed away is the exterior illumination, the strands of lights that while they herald holiday cheer, also illuminate gutters sorely in need of power washing.The three strings are nearly as old as the house. A few sockets are deadouts but those are hardly noticeable during the day. I can hang the seventy-five feet of lights in half an hour, remove them in fifteen minutes thanks to the hooks I strategically placed in the fascia boards when the gutters were new...and clean.

I coil the strands one at a time in a well-worn Sunbeam mixer box, the contents of which are now a ghost of Christmas past. Gently, I nest them between layers of newspaper yellowed with time, sepia toned--old news for sure. The years pile up one on another, and each season as I layer the strands one at a time, I pack the news of yesteryear around them.

One by one I layer the sheaves dated 1983 to 1991. Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, was wrapping up his administration then, about to turn over the reins of the U.S. government to George H. W. Bush (The Vacation President). The pages crossed the presses two and a half decades ago, ten years before the horrific event which bruised and scarred our nation. Two of the newspapers no longer exist in hard copy: The Seattle P-I and Times thump no more on your doorstep or daily fill your paper box but have hopped on the internet bandwagon.Two pages of  Monroe School District's newsletter The Pipeline (Vol. 8, #2, Dec. 1983), separate one of the strands. The Pipeline, too, I believe, is now defunct.
,

What I have in the tattered box is a time capsule of sorts. Ads show the inexorable march of inflation. Haggens (in Monroe: here today, gone tomorrow), for instance, had bacon on sale for ninety-nine cents a pound. At today's prices, a buck might buy you two thin slices. Priced appliances lately? In 1991 at  Everett's Judd and Black, you could buy a Whirlpool kitchen range for less than $500.

And back then imagine slipping a mobile phone in your back pocket. You might as well have sat on a brick.

Consider the financial markets in the days when the cardboard sides of that Sunbeam box had integrity. From the finance pages of The P-I, vintage 1991: DJIA 2934; S&P 500, 456; NASDAQ, 536. Spot gold a steal at $358 an oz. Oil, $18 a barrel.

And "current" events? The presidential election of 1992, for one (Trump? Who's Trump?). Andrew Cuomo trims his aspirations political to the mayoral environs of NYC; no master and commander of the Free World for Andy. On the home front some things never change. The Seattle School Board, always embroiled in one controversy or another, acting in the best interests of biology and adolescent hormones, decided to distribute "prophylatics"to its students.

And locally, the Monroe S.D. was hoping to refresh its coffers by mounting yet another school levy: public schools, underfunded then; underfunded now; the 3 R's don't come cheap. (At the launch of fiscal 2016, our State is sitting on a 1.3 billion dollar "rainy day" fund: the State gets richer; the schools--more children.)

One of the wrinkled pages of The Post-Intelligencer I smoothed and read proved to be a coincidence. Beneath a half page color photo was an article about Seattle fast food entrepreneur Dick Spady, founder of the iconic "Dick's Drive-in." Dick's had celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Just this past week the drive-in's founder and namesake passed away at the age of ninety-two.

Ninety-year olds are often asked to share the secrets of their longevity. When I look at the cheerful Dick Spady, calorie-packed 'shake in one hand while holding 780 calories of tasty 'burger in the other, I'm fairly certain I've discovered one of his secrets for a long and happy life. On that ending note The Ripple wishes one and all a healthy, happy New Year.

A Dickens of a Tale...

A favorite question in trivia games this time of year is to challenge a contestant to name all the spirits who visit Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, a fairly easy question if one is familiar with the most seasonal of Christmas stories in the English Language, A Christmas Carol (the answer is "4"; can you name them?). A more challenging question, however, might be: "What Dickens' novel hints at or includes a story that is without a doubt the prototype for the most beloved Christmas story in the English Language?" This question is on a much higher plane of difficulty and unless you have read the entire collection of Dickens' novels, the answer is certain to elude you.

Though The Ripple is not one to boast, I'll share the fact I have read all eighteen Dickens' novels, plus A Christmas Carol and the shorter stories "The Cricket on the Hearth" and "The Chimes." Though I've always enjoyed Dickens' stories, I was a casual fan until years ago a colleague suffered a career-ending brain aneurysm. Out of respect for a friend and talented educator, I promised myself I'd pick up the torch and fulfill his goal to read the entire body of Dickens' works. So, concerning the question of which of Dickens' eighteen novels contains the fabric for A Christmas Carol, I've done all the legwork for you, and now for the answer which will have trivia players believing you're a scholar of Victorian lit.

The tale that morphed into the Christmas story as familiar and beloved as that favorite ornament you hang on the tree each year appears in Dickens' very first novel, the book that launched his literary career and secured his finances to the point he could devote the rest of his life to writing. If one were looking for the question and answer that are the subjects of this post and set out to read Dickens' entire body of literature, he need only to have read The Pickwick Papers halfway through to discover a narrative told by one Mr. Warble, "The Goblins that Stole a Sexton."

It is Christmas Eve and Gabriel Grub, confirmed misanthrope (Ebenezer Scrooge) and sexton for the village church, grumbles his way through festive streets, each house alight with Christmas cheer from which issue aromas of Christmas feasts in the making. Caroling children throng the doorsteps, their excited voices resounding the Christmas spirit. Gabriel, described as "a sullen, morose," fellow, has little time for such gaiety ("Christmas! Bah, Humbug!") and is en route to the churchyard to dig a grave to lift his spirits. As Grub trudges along, he sings a different carol:

                                Brave lodgings for one, brave lodgings for one,
                               A few feet of cold earth, when life is done;
                               A stone at the head, a stone at the feet,
                               A rich, juicy meal for the worms to eat.
                               Rank grass above,and damp clay around,
                               Brave lodgings for one, these, in holy ground.

His night's work finished, Gabriel seats himself on his favorite tombstone and takes a long pull on the bottle he has brought along. Just then the old curmudgeon hears a "Ho! Ho! Ho! and turns to see a goblin sitting on an adjacent grave marker. The goblin inquires after Gabriel's business in the churchyard and when he learns the sexton has been digging a grave, he wants to know what manner of man it is who visits graveyards and digs graves on the merriest night of the year. Before Grub can answer, a host of goblins choruses his name: "Gabriel Grub, Gabriel Grub!" The King of the Goblins chides Grub for being so mean-spirited: "You miserable man!" King Goblin and his unearthly host snatch Gabriel away to their underground lair where at the very end of a cavern the goblins conjure up a cloud upon which their captive is shown a number of visions.The first projects a poor family before a warm fire in their small, but clean, apartment. The children welcome their father home from work. Though he's tired, he attends to his children who flock to his knee. The scene is one of love, happiness, and comfort.

Then the scene shifts to a small bedroom in which the family stands vigil over a dying child.The child dies before Gabriel's eyes and the family grieves (sounds familiar, doesn't it?). The cloud shifts to another scene which portrays the world of nature, its beauty and the wonderful creatures that live in it. Between scenes the goblin king calls Grub a "miserable man" and he and his followers kick Gabriel unmercifully. Another scene: poor folk going about their daily lives, cheerful and optimistic in spite of the hardships life throws their way. Vision after vision until the sexton has a change of heart and remarks at his revelation: "...that men like himself, who snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth; and setting all the good of the world against the evil, he came to the conclusion it was a very decent and respectable sort of world after all." No sooner had Gabriel reached his conclusion than the goblins disappeared one by one and he slipped into a deep sleep. He awoke in the churchyard on the same slab of stone, an empty bottle at his feet, "but he was an altered man." ["I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The spirits of all Three shall live within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach." Ebenezer Scrooge]

The Pickwick Papers was written and serialized 1836-7, but A Christmas Carol did not appear until 1843, six years later. During those six years the tale of Gabriel Grub and the goblins gestated in the creative mind of Charles Dickens, shifted like the visions shown the sexton in Goblin Cave and six years later emerged as the wonderful Christmas story known the world over. And there's your trivia question ripe for the asking.

The Ripple wishes one and all the very merriest of Christmases.