The News from Kenabeek

 

MAY 18: The wild violets have been blossoming for a few days now, tiny, white or purple-blue. There’s one growing out of a crack in the rock face by the woodshed!

There are buds on the lilac bush in back of the house … Lilacs do well here, and often you can see a huge old lilac, still thriving where a farm has failed and the farmhouse is long gone.

Forget-me-nots are blossoming all over the place.

May 19: Reading back over my previous entries I can see that my readers, if any, are going to have to put up with mostly garden-related stuff for the next few months! But for a change of pace, I’ll include this from early May:

We were puzzled looking out the bedroom window to see something that looked like a snowbank in the bush behind the woodshed, clearly visible because the trees hadn’t leafed out yet. The snow had all been gone for some time, and it hadn’t been there the day before. A glance out the front window solved the mystery – the lid had been ripped off the garbage container. This was a heavy, reinforced wooden lid which I need two hands to lift. The “snowdrift” was actually plastic shopping bags which had spilled from a big green bag of garbage dragged through the bush by a bear. (I hasten to add that plastic grocery bags are not recyclable in any of the nearest towns.)

So we began the day by cleaning up garbage from the bush. I can assure you that every teabag (and other less appealing stuff) had to be picked up individually. WE thought we got it all, but a few days later found another cache up the ridge, where our visitor had stopped for a snack.

The garbage bin has been deodorized and is now used for collecting kindling – we heat in part with wood in the winters – and we collect our garbage in cans in the garage until we make a run to the dump. Bears are a fact of life here, and although we don’t always see them, there has never been a summer when we haven’t seen some sign of a visit by a bear, usually in spring or early summer. Oddly enough, despite the fact that blueberry bushes start right behind our house and go up the ridge and into deep forest, they don’t seem to come around later in the summer. We have even seen signs of bear on the balcony / deck which runs around the house – including nose and paw prints on the living room windows!