A Scrap of Rain

Thirty minutes after a rain shower mosquitoes are on the prowl in Oak Hill and a bright yellow, heavily scented wristband is coiled about my wrist as I sit on the screen porch pondering the backyard concert played by whistling birds, rasping grasshoppers and their buzzing cousins. The wristband is something called Insect Repelling Super Band and directions say, ‘Just slip it on wrist or ankle and enjoy a bug free day.’ In only ten minutes I’ve watched two different mosquitoes land on my arm a few inches from the wristband and casually begin searching for a vein. That said, it has a fragrance I really like that includes Philippine geraniol (geranium oil), Indonesian lemongrass oil and citronella. As pleasant as the fragrance is, when the third mosquito landed on my arm I added a spray of insect repellant to arms and neck. Since then I’ve been left alone.

Driving here earlier a fleeting sprinkle of rain made me hope—despite the mosquitoes—for my first thunderstorm in this setting. I imagined rain dripping from Spanish moss and frogs croaking in the joy of an afternoon deluge. But it was dry again when I drove through the gate and into the carport. Just as I began to unload the boxes and bags from the trunk, the rain started again but the covered pathway from carport to front door alleviated the problem of wet boxes. I got them inside and returned outside to enjoy the rain falling through layers of green, but it stopped in the space of three minutes. Not enough for me but apparently enough to stir the mosquitoes from their torpor.

Interesting discovery today. On my first occasion to use the bathroom for something other than washing my hands, I found the toilet to be rather like a highchair, a height that made me sit on tiptoe. You have to be over six feet if you’re planning on having feet flat on the floor while sitting on this grand throne. Otherwise, it’s an average appliance.

Received my first mail at the Oak Hill address today. Don’t know why I even bothered to look in the mailbox, but before turning onto my road I pulled up to the mailbox and was surprised to find mail. I’ve never before had one of the long, domed tin mailboxes with a little metal flag to signal mail. Must remember to take a picture of it. If anything ever epitomized rural, this mailbox is it, with its worn wooden post wreathed in weeds and the box itself creaky with rust.

Each day I feel a little more comfortable in Oak Hill, looking forward to the time when I don’t have to lock up and drive back to the beach for the night. Just two more weeks, but something tells me this slow transition to the rural is ultimately the better way of shifting my environment.

Country Folk

One more day of ferrying household goods out to Oak Hill, one more of fine tuning a feel for the new environs out among woodpeckers and low-hanging Spanish moss on surrounding oak trees. Trying now to establish a daily transference of furnishings, those things that I can pack and fit in trunk and back seat of my mid-sized Japanese car. Many would probably tell me that I’m going at it sissy fashion and could finish it all that much sooner if I stuffed the car and wore myself to a frazzled ruin. No thanks to that, the packing and loading and unloading and unpacking of a little at a time suits me just fine. At my slow and measured pace I’ll be in good shape when the professionals arrive on May 2 to move the bigger pieces of furniture and the heavier boxes of books.

A jumble of unpacked things on the mantle and fireplace

Easy does it, a little at a time and hours in the afternoon to sit under a tree and read or contemplate the hum of nature in this still new setting. The workings of the house and its idiosyncrasies reveals itself a little more each day. On this Tuesday, I discovered the remote control that governs both ceiling fan and light in the living room. I filled ice trays and was happy to find them frozen solid two hours later. I stocked the kitchen with dishcloths, paper towel, sponges, soap and a minimum of dishes, glasses and utensils and the refrigerator holds not just ice but an ample supply of iced tea. In the bathroom a fresh supply of soap, toilet paper, tissue and toothpaste adds a touch of hominess. Little by little.

A mostly empty kitchen for the time being

I sat on the screened porch for almost an hour reading and occasionally watching the birds and squirrels cavorting on the other side of the screen. Concerned about a large black wasp trapped inside and looking for a way out, I managed after a while to catch it by one thin leg in the soft rubber clamps of a three-foot litter-picker-upper, gently ushering it outside. It flew away in what I took to be a relieved burst of freedom.

Not altogether pleased with my cellphone reception inside the house. Calls break up and I'm forced to go outside, or at least out onto the screened porch to get clear reception. This is a result of the tin roof on the house, I think.

A view through the open front door

Heading back to the beach in late afternoon, I stopped for a few minutes to talk with my nearest neighbor and was impressed by his friendliness and willingness to offer help in the process of getting settled. From him I learned of another neighbor down the road who may be willing to mow (for a reasonable price) my one-acre yard during the hot months of summer. I'm certain he can ride the lawnmower in my shed much better than I. Continuing on, I stopped at the post office to ask about package deliveries at my rural address, concerned that the mailbox down the road can’t accommodate anything larger than letter-sized mail. Oak Hill’s post office is a one-woman operation and upon inquiring, the young woman dialed up the delivery person to inquire what the standard regarding packages is. Getting no answer, she said she would call me later to let me know. I could hardly believe my ears when I got voicemail a half hour later saying the mailman would happily take any packages the extra distance to my house. Nice people.

Thoughts Under a Tree

Out to the house in Oak Hill with packed boxes, all of it unpacked and piled in out of the way corners, I sit now in front of the bedroom window, future site of my desk when eventually delivered. I thought at first the desk would go in the guest bedroom with its view out onto the large backyard, but on second thought the view from the front seemed better. Inaccurate really to call it a “better” view, but then the giant magnolia now coming to bloom changed my mind. I also like that the front bedroom gets more natural light and is considerably larger. 

I’m finding things in the house I can make no sense of, but can’t really say it surprises me. Switches, lights and ceiling fans have a mysterious electrical order, but more puzzling is the hidden telephone inside a walk-in closet, a phone with a dialtone. Nothing to do with me, I wonder who is paying the bill. One more question for the property manager.

Since my arrival was at lunchtime, I brought a sandwich and ate it sitting on a stool at the work island in the kitchen. The ham sandwich was particularly good and the pleasant setting with views out to both back and front yards were definitely an enhancement. Certainly the perfect quiet helped, a blessing only rarely enjoyed at the beach with its constant tourist soundtrack. Looking out to the long screened porch that stretches across the back of the house, I decided that a small table with a couple of chairs would be perfect on the porch, a shaded spot with its wide view of the backyard extending to the woods. Just the thing to improve the flavor of summer lunches.

Today was my first opportunity to try out the Henry Lever-Action .22 rifle I bought last week. With all the years since I last shot a gun, it was a slow process, performed with exaggerated care and the hope I wouldn’t blow a toe off. The first loud crack of the rifle surprised me and I worried that someone beyond the next clump of trees might be taking cover. Not likely really. I heard gunshots from down the road the first time I visited the property, and talking later with my October to May neighbor I learned that rifle and shotgun fire this far out in the country is usual. Making sure that the direction and angles were safe, I set up a couple of tin cans and from about twenty feet did pretty well at knocking them off the stump. Took me two shots to hit a ping pong ball, but the second shot was right through the middle. Two or three squirrels ran scampering up the tall trees but their alarm was unnecessary. Squirrels are not on my hit list.

To get a better feel of the outdoor sounds I move my chair to a part of the backyard just outside the screened porch. For the moment I hear nothing but the rasp and click of insects. Far overhead an airplane's roar is pared to a fraction, fading gradually into the distance. Waiting in my place under the arch of limbs I soon catch a hesitant trill of birds beginning their shy recital. The first songs come not from my yard but from the nearby woods. The wind is there as well, slight, ruffling the leaves overhead. Occasionally a heavy twig falls with a small thump on the carport’s tin roof. Looking at the tall oaks around me, each one hung with Spanish moss swaying slightly in the breeze, I remember a friend in New York who longs to see this well-known southern sight. Doubtful that a photograph would capture the full effect.

Now a cardinal has flown into the tree in front of me, and on another tree to the left what I believe is a woodpecker bounces on a limb but doesn’t stay long. Another bird out of sight on the other side of the house chirps and whistles with all its heart.

Too soon surely to make comparisons of the beach and the country, but maybe it is enough to say that the familiar peace of walking the surf line on an off-season morning is no more soothing than the calm of a backyard in the country.

Losing Sight of Blue

Preoccupied and muddled with the business of sorting, packing and preparing to move, my eyes have not been focused lately on the daily beauty of this paradise-like beach setting I have called home for three years. With little time for walking on the beach and a mountain of preparations to work through, the sights outside my doors and windows have passed unnoticed these last days. It’s been more like closet dust, jumbled drawers and hidden corners of stashed books. I sat out on the patio a few days ago with friends from up the street but for the hour we spent catching up, I never once turned my eyes to look out at the ocean and sky. And then a friend came out today to pick up his fishing equipment, a well-rounded collection that has been stacked in my utility room for a long time. When he first got here we sat for a while on the patio, him smoking and me gazing out at the deep blue simple of ocean and sky.

After a week or more of not noticing, it suddenly hit me how spectacular this life I'm giving up truly is. I have been blessed to occupy this space along the Atlantic coast for the past thirty-six months. Most people would agree it offers a vista that never grows stale, one that can hold the eye for hours day after day. How many times have I taken a book out to the patio and immediately lost in the view never once opened the book? When I bought this property some years back, it was first of all for the view from the patio, and I expect the new owner had similar thoughts upon first looking out across the sand, surf and ocean blue and feeling something resonate in his bones.

With sunlight losing ground to the shadows of late afternoon, I walked down to the water’s edge on Saturday to wander for a time through the ripples of surf and its endless scatter of seashells. For a change, no boats or ships were in view and the ocean shimmered and heaved in an uninterrupted sweep of one hundred and eighty degrees. Related no doubt to my upcoming move, the scene this time was enhanced by a special clarity that made me linger until the sun faded into shadow.

   

No regrets about trading places at this point. I look forward to enjoying the diversity of country life every bit as much as I have enjoyed the diversity of this coastal setting. Hard for me to visualize now just what the daily cycles of nature will reveal out there on the back side of Oak Hill. But I’m game. 

Small But Vicious

Pygmy rattlers have been known to bite even after they’re dead. 

Not haunting my dreams just yet, but this recent anxiety I have about rattlesnakes has brought them to mind several times this past week. In the right setting, I might even enjoy looking at snakes as long there is a glass wall between me and them. I’ve visited cobra farms in Thailand to watch the handlers do circus tricks for the tourists, but always from the back row. I have a healthy respect for creatures prone to lunge out with a venomous bite. Never been tempted to look for them in their natural habitat and certainly not pick them up. So why are they on my mind these past few days?

Since my first visit out to the house I will move to soon, I have been imagining pygmy rattlers everywhere. They are the reason I went out and bought a .22 rifle and hightop boots. Everyone I mention these little snakes to says, “Oh, yeah. They’re everywhere in Florida. Especially out where you're going.” Just the other day a friend told about a pygmy rattler biting her daughter when she put a hand down into the laundry basket in their utility room. Okay, I know the little devils are not slithering all over the place and curling up at the doorstep, but a seed has been planted and I've been reading snakebite articles on the Internet for two days. What is my concern exactly?

Sistrurus miliarius, or the pygmy rattler is a venomous pit viper found in the southeastern United States. The Dusky pygmy rattler is one of three species found in the Carolinas, Florida and Mississippi. It is responsible for more snake bites in Florida than any other venomous snake. They inhabit palmetto-pine flatwoods, scrub oak sandhills, mixed forests, roadside ditches and the area near lakes and marshes—good description of my home-to-be. They spend most of their time well-hidden among leaf litter and can be very hard to spot, but are also seen in the summer sunning themselves or crossing the road late in the day. Their prey includes small mammals, birds, lizards, frogs and insects which they ambush from a hiding place among leaves and twigs on the ground.

Most pygmy rattlers are between sixteen and twenty-four inches in length. The young snakes have bright yellow tails. The rattles are tiny and almost invisible even on the adults, and very difficult to hear even when at your feet. If you do hear the rattle, say the experts, it will sound a lot like a buzzing bee. The Dusky pygmy rattler is most common in the Oak Hill area and gray with black blotches down its length, including the underside. A series of vaguely circular black markings distinguish the snake’s back, with an orangish or brick red dotted line running down the center between the black blotches. These snakes do not dig their own burrows, preferring to use those dug my small rodents, or sometimes Gopher tortoises. Often turning up in the backyards of neighborhoods, like other snakes their range of movement increases as the temperature rises.

Despite their small size, most will act like they are twelve feet long and ready to take on anything. Some individuals are very aggressive and will strike furiously, while others seem lethargic and don’t even rattle. But they are surprisingly agile and can strike almost the full length of their own bodies. A pygmy rattler’s fangs are full of poisonous venom, and while its bite is painful and dangerous it is not usually lethal. Too small to kill a human in most cases, its bite will definitely give the victim a very unpleasant several days. Children bitten by a pygmy rattler often require a prolonged hospital stay.

The Paper Chase

I’ve never been very good with multi-paged documents. My eyes see complicated lines of small print and when I finally sit down to read and fill it all out, mistakes come naturally. The insurance agent must be pulling her hair out by the roots over my repeated foul ups with the documents required for insuring the contents in my new “old” house in the country. Email has made a lot of things easy and fast, but I was reminded today that had I gone to the agent’s office in person to handle the paperwork all the mistakes could have been avoided. But who wants to drive 100 miles round trip when a click of the send button can do it all in three seconds?

My first mistake was giving the agent an optimistic value of the contents to be insured. My fault in not realizing that the premium would soar if I put a slightly bloated value on my books, paintings and furniture. Call it a duh moment. Receiving the nine pages of documents (email) and shocked by the amount of the premium, I quickly called the agent and said it was too high, to lower the estimated value of the contents. A new premium was easy for her to calculate, but it meant I had to go through the nine pages, crossing out the old value and old premium, writing the amended numbers in and then initialing all the places where something was crossed out. Sound easy? Trust me to complicate it. The next screw up was me dating five pages incorrectly, writing May for April. And then the photographs of the house I sent were missing a side view. When last out at the house taking pictures it didn’t occur to me the insurance company would want a side view. Suppose I should have guessed that.

With half a dozen paper cuts, ink stained fingers and both my scanner and email limping, I shelved all that and moved on to new customer business with the power company. This time no real paper was required, only a telephone and the patience of Job. I would like to strangle the person who first conceived of long telephone ‘conversations’ with a machine. It only took about ten minutes to find a telephone number online for Florida Power & Light. Companies are getting very stingy with phone numbers these days, something hard to figure since an employee is rarely required to field telephone calls.

Ten minutes later my call was answered by guess what? It wouldn’t be half as bad if the recorded voice did not assume that every caller is a complete moron. “Did you say the 15th? Please press 1 for YES or 2 for NO. If you don’t know, press 3.” In opening a new account with FPL I answered recorded questions for a full fifteen minutes—why do they need my high school locker combination—before being transferred to a living representative who asked the same questions all over again. He verified my email address six times over the course of our conversation.

Armed & Dangerous

Mine was a childhood filled with western movies, cowboys and Indians, quick draw heroes and villains and images of Richard Widmark galloping across the plains firing his trusty lever-action Winchester 73. At other times it was Randolph Scott facing down a bunch of marauding Comanches, his rifle firing off a blaze of 30-30 bullets. I grew up wishing for one of those battered old lever-action rifles.

Despite the early dreams of cowboys and rifles, unlike many boys growing up in the sportsman’s paradise of south Louisiana, I never did get a rifle. My father had a shotgun that I was allowed to use on hunting trips a few times and my best friend and I sometimes spent an afternoon shooting his two .22 rifles out in the woods, where we figured birds in the tall trees were fair game. From around the time of high school the idea of shooting or wanting to own a gun receded, never to be revived. Until last month. 

When I got the idea to move and began looking at a house in the country, in our walk around the property the realtor pointed at some rustling leaves on the ground and hinted that it was the kind of place that might call for having a gun around the house. Later, telling friends about this place I was considering moving to, I got the same suggestion from more than one advising me to at least think about it. The immediate reaction on my part was an “I don’t know about that” kind of hedging, not ready at all to run out to a gun shop. First thought was that there are enough people with guns already, that I don’t feel any threat, and for the time being see no need for adding my name to the gun register. 

Still, the idea had been planted and I found myself thinking more about whether it would be a good idea to buy a gun. And for that matter, what kind of gun? Turning it over in my thoughts for several days, somewhere from out of the past rose up those old childhood images of cowboys and their lever-action rifles knocking hostiles off the ridge and rattlesnakes off the doorstep. A little bit of research told me that the same style of lever-action rifle was available in a smaller caliber and I began to think that a .22 might be just the thing to fit my still undefined needs out there in the ‘wilderness’ of south Oak Hill. So, I typed ‘lever-action .22’ into the Google search box and came up with 1,260,000 hits. At the top of the list was: ‘the Henry lever-action, a classic western-style rifle and one of the most popular .22s on the market today.’  I looked at the picture for no more than half a minute and my interest in owning a gun flared. Suddenly I saw myself decked out in raunchy cowboy regalia, a rumpled black Stetson shading my eyes as I sat atop a roan mare squinting into the sun and levering a cartridge into my rifle.

A week later, now $392 poorer, I am the owner of a Henry Lever-Action .22LR rifle. What exactly I’m going to shoot at with this handsome piece of American workmanship I’m not sure, but I’ve already spent too much time striking dangerous gun-wielding poses in my bedroom mirror, closer than ever to feeling like Richard Widmark or Randolph Scott. “Take that you red-skinned varmint!” BAM!

A little unsure just where this .22 rifle is going to fit into my soon-to-be country lifestyle, I must admit to a little bit of excitement in having a rifle that fulfills at least a tiny portion of those long ago childhood dreams of fighting off outlaws and protecting the homestead from rattlers and rapists.