Author Archives: Mark P

Soggy doggy

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We had about 2.75 inches of rain from late yesterday (Monday) through midafternoon today. It was raining steadily when I took the dogs for their morning walk. I dressed them both in their raincoats. Lucy, as usual, treated it as torture and didn’t relieve herself. Zeke usually does OK in his raincoat, but this morning he absolutely refused to go. I thought Lucy might relieve herself if I took her raincoat off and released her, but she just hightailed it back to the front door. I took Zeke’s raincoat off and let him off the leash, hoping for a better result. (Leah scolded me for letting him off the leash, but I thought he had enough sense to come in from the rain. Silly me.) I expected him to do his business and come back. Instead, he went for a three-and-a-half hour romp around the mountain in the cold rain.

I thought he might figure out that it was drier and warmer inside, so after a short romp he would come back. But no. After a while I went outside and called him. Later I drove up and down the mountain, but no Zeke. Leah always asks me whether I call him, but I usually don’t do that. The only reason I called him earlier was to remind him where home was. When he’s been on one of his romps, if I see him and call him, he has never come. He usually looks at me, then turns around and runs the other way.

He’s done his disappearing act before, but this time I wasn’t sure he was going to come back. After lunch I was backing out of the driveway to look for him again when a big SUV pulled in beside me. The woman in the passenger seat rolled her window down and asked if I was looking for a dog. They had found him trotting down Fouche Gap Road and loaded him up in their back seat. He was soaked, and so was their back seat. I was apologetic; they were understanding.

Here’s Zeke waiting for a towel.

Zeke. Not repentant.

Zeke. Not repentant.

He looks chastened, but he wasn’t. For Zeke, it’s all in a day’s work. But he was tired.

Big Yellow Taxi

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Updated: See below

My parents were married 70 years ago today on November 23*, 1943, right in the middle of the United State’s participation in WW II.

I don’t have many pictures of them together during the years before and after they got married. I have posted a couple, but this is my favorite. I’m not sure when or where it was taken, but I think it was after they were married because I think I can see a ring on my mother’s ring finger. I guess it was after the war, possibly when they lived in Akron, Ohio.

Bo and Doris sitting on a tree

Bo and Doris sitting on a tree

They were young when they got married. My father had turned 26 in August, and my mother wouldn’t be 21 until January. Today I think of people that age as kids.

Here is a really blurry picture of my mother lying on a bed. It’s possible this was taken in one of the disreputable apartments they had to live in while my father continued his military training.

Lounging around

Lounging around

She’s just a kid.

The only time I ever did anything for them on their anniversary was for their 50th. I was living in Huntsille, Al. On that day at work I called a florist in Rome and ordered 50 roses for them. My mother said they thought the delivery guy would never stop bringing in roses.

They had been married 56 years when my father died.

It’s hard for me to internalize the fact that they got married that long ago. Of course I showed up only about six and a half years later in 1950, so I have memories that go back almost that far, uncertain though they may be. But since my mother died earlier this year, they both seem to be fluttering away like a yellowed newspaper clipping that slips out a car window. They are disappearing into a faded and dim history, and they are going fast. I can remember them but I can’t hold on to them.

At the same time, distance and my own age let me think of them not as Mother and Daddy, but as individuals who had a life independent of me. (Despite the fact that I am the center of the universe, they were around and doing things before I even existed.) That’s one reason I like to look at old photographs of them, long before they got old and sick and weary.

Maybe what Joni Mitchell sang is true: You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

* My parents had a good-natured, running disagreement about the date of their wedding anniversary. My mother always thought it was on November 22 or 24, but my father said it was on November 23. Or maybe she thought it was November 23. I can’t remember.

UPDATE

I had intended to call or email my brother before I wrote this post to ask whether he remembered the true date of our parent’ anniversary, but I waited around until it was too late. I spoke to him today (Nov 23) and it he said he would check to see whether he could find their marriage certificate. He did.

The evidence

The evidence

It turns out that I got sucked into the running disagreement. Their marriage license shows that they were married on November 24, 1943. So, please reread this post on Sunday, November 24.

It is a little strange that the license says “as appears on record in my office in Marriage Record book … April 1946.” That’s three and a half years after they were married. Did they lose the original license? Did they not get it when they were married? Did the marriage record book have a mistake, and the true date was, say, November 23? Was there some delay in getting the information to the county ordinary’s office? Did my mother mistakenly fix November 23 in her mind during the three years they apparently didn’t have a license? I guess we’ll never know.

By the way, the name of the county ordinary at the bottom of the license is Harry Johnson. I went to school with his son, Harry Johnson Jr.

A few things

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Paper cups, plastic cups, Styrofoam cups.

Plastic water bottles, glass beer bottles.

Beer cans, soft drink cans.

Cardboard fast food containers, Styrofoam fast food containers.

Paper bags, plastic bags, empty garbage bags, full garbage bags.

Bundled yellow commercial telephone directories.

Automobile tires, wheels, bumpers, grills.

Child safety seats.

Plastic tricycles, plastic basketball hoop stands, plastic sandboxes.

Plastic storage boxes, wooden boxes.

Chairs, sofas, televisions, toilets, shower stalls.

Plates.

Half-butchered deer carcasses.

These are a few of the things I hate. I don’t hate them for what they are, I hate them for where they are.

All of these things are strewn along Fouche Gap Road on both sides of the mountain, and both sides of the road, although mostly on the downhill side. I played a game today when I walked the dogs. I tried to see whether I could find a place where I couldn’t see some kind of trash or garbage. It couldn’t really be done, not fairly anyway, even with freshly-fallen leaves covering a lot of sins. I was always within sight of some kind of trash. Maybe something big, maybe something little, like a piece of paper or a broken piece of a cooler.

And if you think that’s bad, you should see what ends up on the dead ends of Lavender Trail. Sometimes it’s construction or demolition debris, and sometimes it’s objects of a more personal nature.

I haven’t walked on any other country roads nearly as much as I have on Fouche Gap Road. I don’t know whether there is this much trash along Texas Valley Road, or whether it’s a function of the elevation of the road, like some kind of orographic trash precipitation.

I blame this at least partly on Floyd County. There is a garbage transfer station about three miles from our house just off Huffaker Road. They accept household garbage and some kinds of recyclable materials, but they don’t allow other types of trash. For that you have to drive about 14 miles across the county to the landfill, and they charge you to dump there. When I was building our house, I made lots of trips to the landfill to dump construction debris, and I made the trip to dispose of the old, falling-down greenhouse my father built behind my parents’ house. But it seems to be too much trouble for some people.

Once I was dumping our garbage at the transfer station when someone came up and tried to dump an old picnic table. The attendant told him that he had to take it to the landfill. So he left. When I went back home, the picnic table was just off the side of Fouche Gap Road.

The county ought to provide free disposal of all types of trash and garbage, including things like picnic tables and toilets, at least for private citizens. But instead they send prison crews once a year out to all the county roads to pick up the trash they didn’t allow to be dumped at transfer stations. Some more civilized communities allow all kinds of trash to be dumped at transfer stations. But not my own community. I guess that would cost money, and no one wants to pay not to have a trashy county.

It’s not all the county’s fault, of course. It’s the people who make up the county, all the people who prefer to dump their garbage near us. My opinion of human nature, at least Floyd County human nature, is not high. Are people in other parts of the country as trashy as they are here?

Persimmon tree

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About this time of year our persimmon trees always remind me of Charlie Brown’s pitiful Christmas tree.

Ripe for the picking

Ripe for the picking

Almost all the leaves are gone, but the ripe fruit hangs on, like ornaments on a bare Christmas tree.

Persimmons are a popular food source, judging by the amount of persimmon seeds in the poop I find around the mountain, but these prime specimens remain uneaten. Something seems to be chewing off the ends of branches of the two persimmon trees at the front corner of our lot. It leaves neat, conical stubs, and the separated branches end up on the ground under the trees. The branches are chewed off from ground level up into the upper reaches of the tree, 10 to 15 feet above the ground. I assume that an animal is chewing the limbs off to get better access to the fruit, but whatever is doing it doesn’t eat the persimmons, either from the tree or from the branches that end up on the ground.

Zeke seems pretty sure that some kind of animal is coming around the trees. I think he’s right. My best guess is raccoons or possums, but so far I haven’t seen any evidence of either except for the chewed limbs.

Fall color on Lavender Mountain

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A few weeks ago I thought our fall color was going to be disappointing. It has turned out better than I expected, but perhaps not quite as good as in some years.

These pictures are from one morning about two weeks ago when I walked the dogs down Fouche Gap Road into Texas Valley. A morning walk down that side of the mountain puts us into shade for a lot of the way down so the color we do have is muted.

This part of the road had some nice color.

Fouche Gap Road in the shade

Fouche Gap Road in the shade

Most of the color is from our maples. The maples tend to be smaller trees scattered in the forest, except beside the road, where they can stick their heads out into the sunlight. Here is one of the brighter red maples.

Maple tree on Fouche Gap Road

Maple tree on Fouche Gap Road

The maples had not finished turning color by this weekend. Even maples right beside each other varied from nearly summertime green through yellow, orange, red and brown.

Most of the large oaks and poplars are brown or maybe slightly yellowish brown. The hickories have been mainly yellow, but their color is not bright and saturated. Here is what I think was a hickory with oaks above it. I don’t remember for sure, but this might have been a tree that I don’t recognize. Hickories have paired leaves on opposite side of the stalk, while the trees I haven’t identified have leaves that alternate. (Oddly, one Web site I went to said that hickory leaves are alternate, but I am 99 percent sure that I have specifically noticed that they are paired on the stem on the trees in our yard that I have identified as pignut hickories; they certainly produce nuts that look like hickory nuts. Could I be mistaken?) The leaves of our unknown-to-me trees are significantly larger than our pignut hickories (I am pretty sure they are pignut; I don’t remember the characteristics I used for that ID, but it took me long enough to come up with it, and I was pretty sure at the time.) Anyway, the leaves in this shot are paired, so they must be hickories according to my identification. The point I was trying to make is that they are yellow, but not bright yellow.

Hickory leaves with oaks above

Hickory leaves with oaks above

Part of our problem is that in our mixed pine and hardwood forest, a large fraction of the taller hardwoods are oaks. The other large trees are poplars (much less common, not much color) and hickories (also less common, some color but not great). From a distance the mountain looks pretty brown. Most of the color seems to be in the understory, where the maples tend to share space with the deep red dogwoods. If you look carefully here and there, our very common muscadine vines provide yellow in some trees that would otherwise be pretty dull.

Even the lowly poison ivy contributes color close to the ground.

Some small maples and pretty poison ivy

Some small maples behind with poison ivy trying to blend in

I haven’t been able to get pictures from the most beautiful places along Fouche Gap Road in late afternoons on the other side of the mountain. That’s when the sunlight streams through the understory and the leaves are illuminated from behind. They seem to glow, and it’s hard to keep my eyes on the road. Maybe that’s an image that’s best built up mentally from fleeting glimpses dominated by the brightest and most colorful leaves.