|
|
Ol’ JD wrote it once. It must’ve been Teddy or Franny or Zooey or Seymour. I could never keep them straight. He wrote, “The thing to listen for, every time, with a public confessor, is what he’s not confessing to.»
From my resting position here inside the shack, neither birdfeeder is visible. That’s a darn design flaw on somebody’s part. Each feeder is just out of the picture created by the window and dominated by white and blue and the brownish-greens of the short-needle trees. And so, I can see most birds flying to and away from the feeders. I painted the feeders red (candy apple red or fire-engine red; I can’t remember) because I had heard that red attracts cardinals.
I have never had a cardinal come into my feeders.
The two little windows face north, and I never did put in a south-facing window. There was a time when I think I could have. Boy, I could’ve used that therapeutic light over the years in fall and winter. And boy, I could’ve used the warmth year-round. It stays like a tomb in here even in the high summer.
I need never did understand ice dams. There are many things that I should have or needed to wrap my head around but never did. Attic insulation, window insulation, wet rot, carburetors, amps and volts and watts, chicken feed, pine rust.
Some things I did get a handle on. I knew some things like the back of my hand. Teaching dogs to swim, introducing them to the gun, training them in the retrieval of dummies. Most of them never did walk or run at a heal. Only one – the dead one – retrieved on water.
I got one stand up for every 0.8 acres of property. Which, as far as number of stands goes, is overkill. I never shot a deer here. I never even saw a buck here. I only found one thin 4-inch tine on the property. Of course, when we all moved in it changed the deer patterns. It’s tough to have dogs running free and happy and keep does hanging around.
It’s tough for the beaver to keep the long-term dams down on the creek. The big damn below us blew out in ‘15 and ‘21. There’s remnants of a very old one (decades ago) downstream.
So, I haven’t put up any wood duck houses either. I haven’t made any wood duck houses. Without any beaver ponds, I haven’t put up any mallard nests or goose platforms.
I haven’t made any bird houses at all. No bird homes. Wren nor sparrow nor chickadee nor nuthatch houses. Not since I was nine years old, and I got my first toolbox, a carpentry one. I got my second toolbox when I was about twenty, from my father, who seemed to think it was very important for young man to have a mechanic’s toolbox. You should know, please, that I still have it, and still use it.
I had one or two hummingbirds buzz in last year. But I never yet upped the ante: I got an idea from Jim Harrison’s “Brown Dog” for a ‘raven feeding station’ – a platform up on a pole where you throw carcasses to lay there in the sky in the open for the ravens to come in and roost in peace and with ill-will.
I never did power wash and repaint (brick red with hunter green trim) the exterior. We never did pull everything out of from inside the shack into the clearing, to do a deep cleaning, find all the mouse holes and drafts, and to repaint. White. With white trim. Like a damn sanatorium. Like a facility for long-term habilitation without the benefit of rehabilitation.
That’s the confession of the things that we didn’t do.
‘Course, I’m not confessing here to all the things we did do. That would take a book or three.
Leave a Reply