Polyphemus, Voletaire, and the Hydra

What an exciting time Spring is; everything bursting into life! If you really think about it, that's a very weird expression: bursting into life. Usually, things that burst are either explosive or rotten; but I digress. So... flowers and baby animals are positively everywhere! Butterflies and moths are testing their wings. And everyone in my family is sampling the delights of urushiol oil. We know how to have a good time in Kentucky.

The first person to kick off poison ivy season was Abe, and he did it in style. We went for a walk in the back twenty, which is  not technically a back twenty at all since it doesn't belong to us. It's okay, though, because this time I didn't trespass. We actually have permission to do as we please on this neighbor's property, which includes the pond, field, and woods often shown in the background of my pictures. Honestly, the lawfulness of the jaunt just takes some of the fun out of it. Anyway, we were walking in the woods, and I was having a fine time spotting different species of violets. There are an absurd number of violet species, so I won't name them. I'm sure you'd quit reading if you haven't already...  While I was ground-gazing, Abe must've performed the trifecta of woodland walk no-no's. 1) Do not walk straight into brambles. 2) Do not take revenge on the brambles if you do walk into them. See former entry. 3) Do not rub poison ivy leaves over the scratches you receive from the brambles. Okay, so that's probably not how it happened, but somehow Abe ended up with a nice, long scratch neatly outlined with poison ivy rash. Yay, Prednisolone!!

On the way back from the poison ivy--I mean the woods--we saw the Canada geese who seem to have made a nest somewhere around the pond. They boys went off to catch them, which totally worked--no, it didn't--and I followed at a much more sedate mosey. When I rounded the end of the pond, Abe was trying to stomp on something just a the edge of the water. Upon closer inspection, I found that what he thought deserved to die was actually a million tadpoles. Once I explained to him that these were baby frogs and not mutant bugs, he changed his plan from amphibicide to PETS! The result is that we have about three hundred tadpoles in a tiny terrarium. Every day, Charlie asks me, "How long does it take tadpoles to turn into frogs?" Every day, I try not to completely lose my cool, answering, "As I told you yesterday, assuming we don't kill them, we will see how long it takes." We haven't killed them yet, I think.

On Saturday, the weather was perfectly cool, breezy, and overcast--just the right weather for slaying the Hydra. "Slaying the Hydra" is the name I have given to our ongoing battle with "seedlings" and brambles in the fence row. Call me overly dramatic if you like, but you didn't see the scratches, bruises, and rashes the rest of us had after only six hours of ripping woody vegetation out of the fence row. After a while it did begin to seem like a monster that grew more heads after each one was cut. The seedlings were more like young trees, and you can see in this picture the size of the thorny bushes we had to cut out. Not only that, but a mouse that was literally the size of a chipmunk ran out of the hedge and yelled at me twice for screwing up its habitat. Being myself, I tried to catch it. No luck.

Charlie has decided his favorite activity is mowing the lawn. I have decided not to tell him that this is what most people call work. As he was finishing his mowing, and I was burning out the dead grass along the fence, I came upon another rodent that wasn't, for whatever reason, fast enough to escape me. I thought it was a dead adolescent mouse, but when I picked it up--of course I picked it up; haven't you been paying attention these last six years?-- it squeaked. Then, obviously, I had to put it in an old fish tank and show it to the boys and feed it until I could figure out what it was, because once I picked it up, I saw it couldn't be a mouse. Its ears were flat to its head, and its tail looked chopped off. Its nose wasn't the right shape either. It was a vole! You should know by now that the total inability to avoid puns is genetically ingrained in the Crum side of my heritage. Thus the name: Voletaire. Sadly, Voletaire's luck hasn't been as good as the tadpoles'. Either I poisoned him by feeding him apples, or the boys hugged him too hard, or maybe he was already hurt. He was only with us two days before going to grub for worms in the Great Lawn in the Sky. Thus our rodent friend was not a robust as his French sort-of-forefather, who lived to be 83.

And today, nursing our itchies and scratchies, we decided to annoy Mama Robin to see how her little family is coming along. She has two naked aliens, one cracked egg, and one whole egg in her nest now. She seems quite fiercely committed to them. She flitted about her net like a ninja, screeching at us so much that the daddy robin joined in, and then plopped back down on her babies the moment we vacated the tree. If my children were that ugly, I'd probably sit on them too.

While Charlie and I were performing our clown act otherwise known as "yard-schooling," Abe was digging for buried treasure in the front yard. His optimism seems to have paid off, as he found this fellow:

A beautiful Polyphemus moth the size of my open palm, which I have never before had the luck to photograph in the daytime. Hurrah, my tiny explorers!

I will leave you with a parting thought, just in case you aren't as glib about poison ivy as we seem to be: when hiking, carry a small bottle of Ajax dish soap. If you know you've just brushed up against our urushiol-wielding friends, promptly wash the spot with Ajax and rinse well. Ajax is cheap and designed to remove oils from dishes. It will also remove the oil from your skin if you don't let it sit too long.

I myself have tested this theory in several ways. First, while canning jalapeno peppers last summer, I thought it would be fun to wipe their oils into my eyes! I told you we Kentuckians know how to party. Blind and saying words my mother would have liked to treat with Ajax, I stumbled to the shower. Charlie brought me the dish soap with which I washed my face quite thoroughly. Oil removed! Then, just yesterday, while foraging for pretty perennial bulbs in the waste across the road, I blithely pulled aside a vine which, upon closer examination had those telltale "leaves of three." With my bare hand. You can take it to the bank when I tell you I fairly teleported into the kitchen to access the Ajax. Today, no blisters. It works, my fellow outdoorspeople! And in my experience, it's either that or a full body contamination suit. If you're going to set foot off the beaten path, there's no avoiding the ivy. Viva la Ajax! (I'll be expecting my ad money from your company within the week, thank you...)