May Maybe Better

April's departure was rude. She left in a cold, dreary huff. May's arrival hasn't been any better – but that will change soon, I hope. Now that it's May, we've come to the greening time of the world. The mountains are starting to shine with a thousand shades of green as the trees leaf out. Each kind of tree has a different hue – the bronze-green of the wild cherries and maples, the gray-green of the alders, the chartreuse of the willows along the river, the vivid green of the larches. The grass on the lawns and in the fields is rich emerald. All that new chlorophyll makes the world look lush and alive. I love the color green.

Green is a secondary color on the artist's color wheel, a mixture of the primary colors blue and yellow. On the light spectrum its wavelength is 495-570 nanometers and its frequency is 526-575 hertz. There are about 350 different shades of green with lovely names like emerald, celadon, verdigris, olive, and jade. Windsor & Newton, the makers of high-end watercolors, lists nineteen shades of green in their pallet. Crayola has eighteen shades of green in their crayon box. Our English word "green" is Germanic in origin. The other Germanic languages all sound similar – German grün, Danish grøn, Norwegian grønn, Swedish grön, etc. The romance languages base their words on the Latin viridis – French vert, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese verde, and so on. All of them trace their origins back to root words related to growth. Green is the color of life. Emerald, my favorite gemstone, is a beryl colored green by trace amounts of chromium. One of the largest, most perfect emeralds in the world is the Rockefeller Emerald. At 18.04 carats, it is worth $5.5 million dollars. That's a lot of green.

The Rockefeller Emerald.

Thinking about emeralds sent me on a brain quest into the world of gemstones on Monday morning. I wanted to find out what the most valuable types of gemstone are. Here's the list of the top twelve from least to most valuable. 

12. Black Opal – $10,000 per carat.
11. Red Beryl – $10,000 per carat.
10. Alexandrite – $15,000 per carat.
9.   Diamond – $15,000 per carat
8.   Grandidierite – $20,000 per carat.
7.   Musgravite – $35,000 per carat.
6.   Taaffeite – $35,000 per carat.
5.   Painite – $50,000 per carat.
4.   Emerald – $100,000 per carat.
3.   Red Diamond – $1,000,000 per carat.
2.   Pink Diamond – $1,200,000 per carat.
1.   Blue Diamond – $3,930,000 per carat.

I'd never heard of some of those gems and know I will never see most of them except perhaps in a museum. I've seen the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian. At 45.52 carats and a value of $350 million, it ranks third in the list of the world's most expensive diamonds. Number one is the Koh-I-Noor. Originally weighing 793 carats and cut to 105.6 carats, it is part of the British Crown Jewels and is considered priceless. Number two is the Cullinan I. The original Cullinan stone was 3,106 carats rough and was cut into 105 different gems, the largest of which, the Cullinan I, is 530 carats, also in the British Crown Jewels, and worth $2 billion. Beautiful stones, astonishing prices, and fascinating histories.

And, of course, there's this gem.

After that glittering start to the day, I went out on Monday morning to see what the night's frost had done to my garden. The temperature had dropped to 28°, which wasn't too bad. The things I covered looked a bit droopy, but okay. The things I didn't or couldn't cover, mostly the lilacs, took another hard hit. It looks like it's going to be a bad year for lilacs.

Later in the morning, I worked with Kurt and Kale in the big garden getting a bed ready for the new strawberries. We laid down new landscape fabric. Then in the evening, Stacey, Miriam, Hannah, and I planted 185 strawberry plants. We rotate our strawberries on a three year cycle. With this new bed planted, we will tear out the three year old bed and plant something else there. I can hardly wait for the first berries in June.

We've come to that happy time of the year when the sun rises early. It's already growing light when I get up at 5:30 and I have to hurry my morning ablutions to be ready to go out on my walk before the sun comes up. I hate to miss a sunrise. We had a spectacular sunrise on Tuesday.

Sunrise on Tuesday.

That red morning sky meant that rain was coming. I didn't mind that. The rain would be good for the newly planted strawberries. I hurried and did the morning chores. The wind picked up around 8:30. The sky grew dark. I waited. The whole day was dreary, but the rain held off until Wednesday.

Stacey left early Wednesday morning, and I mean early, 2:00 a.m., on a trip out west. She flew to Utah to join her two sisters at the Women's Conference at BYU. While she was there, she got to visit Geoffrey and his family and other family members. She also got to see the replica of the Florence Duomo Baptistry Doors on display at BYU. It looks like she had a great time. She will be home tomorrow.

Audrey, Roxann, Cosmo, and Stacey.

At the Baptistry Doors exhibit.

So Stacey left on Wednesday and on Thursday, Miriam and Hannah left to go to the Thayn's for the weekend again. That left me alone in the house for three days and three nights. I have no problem being home alone for the most part. I do have a bit of trouble sleeping. When I'm the only one here, I'm much more aware of every tiny noise inside and outside the house during the night – the furnace coming on and clicking, a car going up the road, the bark of a fox out on the edge of the garden. During the day I have no problem keeping busy – usually. This time was a bit different. All I wanted to do was work outdoors. I had projects that needed my attention. There was (still is) a pile of new gravel in the driveway to be distributed. There were (still are) lots of weeds to be pulled. But the weather was dismal – cold, rainy, frosty, it even snowed for a while last night – so I had to find other things to occupy my body and brain.

A load of gravel waiting to be distributed.

I first turned to books, of course. On Wednesday night I finished the book I was reading, the twelfth of the Discworld books, and was going to go right on to book thirteen, but felt like I needed a little break. That meant a book quest. I'd read an article online earlier in the week about the Nobel Prize in Literature and I wondered how many books by Nobel winners I'd read. The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 116 times to 121 writers (some years the award is shared). I looked down the list and found that I'd read books by sixteen of them, a mix of novelists, playwrights, poets, and historians: Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, T. S. Elliot, William Faulkner, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Beshevis Singer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Golding, and Seamus Heaney. That's quite a group. Then I looked down the list again to see which of the 105 unread prize winners I might like to tackle. I came up with twenty-one possible titles. Then, out of the twenty-one, I had to see which ones were actually available at our public library. I checked the online catalog and found three. That meant a trip to the library. That was my exciting excursion on rainy Thursday morning.

The David A. Howe Library (no relation) in Wellsville is a beautiful building. I love the carved wood sculptures in the main lobby. I love the parquet floors. It has a wing of just children's books. But my favorite part is the stacks in the basement. The more current books are kept on the main floor, the older books go downstairs to the stacks. There are shelves and shelves of them. They live in the dark until you descend the stairs and the automatic lights come on. When I go down, I always take a deep breath and inhale that powerful Old Book Aroma. It's an actual smell. As books age, the cellulose and lignin in their paper breaks down and releases a scent like vanilla, that combined with other volatile organic compounds from leather, ink, glue, and a bit of dusty mustiness, makes for a perfume that I find delightful. I'd wear it like cologne if they made it.

The David A. Howe Library.

David A. Howe (no relation).

Down in the stacks.

I checked out all three books – Only Yesterday by S. Y. Agnon, The Gods Are Athirst by Anatole France, and The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. They are pretty thick books. I decided to read a little of each one to see which appealed to me most. I started with Only Yesterday.

I ordered a new automatic door for my chicken coop and it arrived on Thursday afternoon. I installed it right away. The old door used a solar panel that charged a big battery and it wasn't working right. I had to run an extension cord down to the barn to keep it working. This new one uses two AA batteries that only need to be changed once a year. No more solar panel, no more extension cord. It uses GPS and I programmed it to open 15 minutes after sunrise and at sunset. Technology can be so great at times!

The new chicken coop door.

Friday was the first of May – May Day. In the Old World in some places they still celebrate May Day in the ancient fashion. They put up May poles, do Morris dancing, light bonfires, and such – all associated with symbolic but largely forgotten primitive spring fertility rituals. There is also a more recent political association for the day, but it isn't as happy or charming. May Day comes at the halfway point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. I've never kept any observance on the day, ancient or political. I did learn a song for May Day when I was in third grade. I can still sing it.

The moon shines bright, the stars give light,

A little before 'tis day,

Our Heavenly Father called to us

And bid us awake and pray.

Awake, awake, oh pretty, pretty maid

Out of your drowsy dream

And step into the dairy below

And fetch us a bowl of cream.

A branch of May I bring to you

And at your door I stand.

'Tis but a sprout, well budded out,

The work of our Lord's hand.

My song is done, I must be gone.

No longer can I stay.

God bless you all, both great and small,

And send you a joyful May.

This year's May Day was not a very joyful beginning to what is usually one of the best months of the year. There was a freeze warning on Thursday night, so once again I covered what I could in the garden. Friday morning, the day dawned bright enough, but it was 26° and there was a hard frost. I bundled up and went out on my morning walk at sunrise, down to the beaver pond then back through the garden to inspect the damage. Things were in a sad state. I could almost hear the frosty plants screaming "Mayday! Mayday!"

Sunrise on the first of May.

That made me wonder why the international distress code is the word "mayday." So I looked it up. Back in the 1920s, Frederick Mockford, the officer in charge of radio communications at Croydon Airport in England, was assigned to come up with a word to indicate distress that would be easily understood. Up to that time, they were using SOS, but the "s" sound didn't come across clearly when spoken over the radio. At that time, most of the air traffic was between Croydon Airport and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, so Mockford chose the word "mayday", an English corruption of the French word m'aider, short for venez m'aider, "come and help me." After that, "mayday" became the established voice call for distress and SOS was kept as the radiotelegraph signal. So now I know.

By 10:00 a.m. the sky was cloudy and gray, no more bright sunshine. It was chilly and it drizzled off and on for the rest of the day. I spent the morning cleaning the house. I always feel compelled to do that when I'm home alone for some reason. I scrubbed the downstairs bathroom. I took all the rugs out onto the front porch and beat them. I swept and then mopped all the downstairs floors. I vacuumed carpets. I cleaned out and retired the woodstove for the season. While I worked I listened to a great set of records, "Reader's Digest Great Original Hits of the '50s and '60s" – nine discs, eighteen sides, of great music. I listened to sides 1-9, which covered 1950-1959. It was the perfect accompaniment to my work. I finished that – the work and the music – by 1:00 p.m.

I spent most of the afternoon in the chicken coop. It was sort of outdoor/indoor work. I rebuilt the center pen that I tore out two weeks ago. I used 1/2 inch hardware cloth for the lower part and buried a foot of it in the ground. For the upper part, I used bird netting. I think it will work great. The chicks that my chicken lady is raising are coming here tomorrow. I hope they enjoy their luxury accommodations.

The rebuilt pen. You can't really see the netting in the upper part, but it's there.

While I was working in the coop, the chickens were curious about what I was doing. They stood around and watched. Some of them got in the way and I had to shoo them away. A few of the hens resented me being in there during their egg laying time and made a noisy fuss.  As I was working, I realized that the guinea hen has gone broody. She was sitting in a corner of the coop the whole time and when I investigated, I found she was sitting on eggs. They aren't her eggs. She lays eggs but, lacking a male guinea, they aren't fertile. I came up to the house and looked online to see if a guinea hen will successfully hatch and care for chickens. The answers I found were mixed. Some people said no problem. Others said they'll hatch them just fine, but aren't good at taking care of them afterward. I decided to not let her brood. I went back to the coop and tried to take the eggs away from her. This is how she reacted. That egg you see is one that a hen laid a moment before. The guinea pulled it under her a minute later.

I'll let her sit on the eggs for now. Maybe she'll give up in a while. Or maybe she'll stay and hatch some chicks. Adventures in poultry.

After working in the coop, I was filthy, covered in dust, straw, and chicken manure. I came back inside, stripped off my dirty clothes, put them straight into the wash, and took a shower. After that, I didn't feel inclined to do much of anything. I watched a bit of TV and fell asleep for an hour. I spent the rest of the evening reading. That's how things go when it's just me. Pretty quiet. Sometimes too quiet.

Saturday's sunrise was deceptive. The sky was clear. The world was flooded with golden sunlight. It was 28°. Another hard frost. I didn't go out on my morning walk until it had warmed up a little. While I waited, I listened to sides 10-18 of my record set, covering 1960-1969. I realized while I was listening, that I think of this music as being from a more innocent time. I don't know if that is really true. I think perhaps I was just more innocent. I was overcome by nostalgia as I sat by the furnace grate, waiting for the frost to melt, listening.

Finally, at 10:00 I went out. I had two jobs I wanted to accomplish – whitewashing the chicken coop and mowing the lawn. The grass was still too wet, so I tackled whitewashing first. I'd never done it before. I mixed slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), water, and diatomaceous earth in a bucket and started brushing it on the walls inside the coop. I discovered several things right away. I understood now why Tom Sawyer felt a "deep melancholy settle down upon his spirit" when he set out to whitewash Aunt Polly's fence. The walls inside my coop looked every bit as discouraging as his "thirty yards of board fence nine feet tall." If I had someone as easy to convince as his Jim, I would have gladly traded more than a white alley (a prized shooting marble) and a look at my sore toe (if I had one) to let him take over the job. But I had none of that, so I set out. My next discovery was that dust is hydrophobic – it repels water – and every surface inside the coop was coated with a layer of it. I had to brush over and over again to get the whitewash to stick to anything. And it was very messy, splashing and dripping all over me. So I didn't get very far. I painted their roosts, around the windows, and the main door. By then, I'd run out of whitewash and energy and I didn't want to mix up another batch. I think that's all the whitewashing the coop will ever get.

The whitewashed main coop door.

After that ordeal, mowing was almost relaxing. Or it would have been had it been warmer. It was 42° and that's not a comfortable lawn mowing temperature. I mowed as fast as I could, too fast, and the belt came off the mower blades. I was almost done by that point and too cold, so I stopped and put the mower away and came inside to warm up. So I didn't finish either of my goals. The rest of the day was quiet. And warmer because I spent almost every moment of it near the furnace, my desk heater, or under a blanket.

So far May has been 3-0 for frost. That's three losses, not wins. Frost is always a loss this late in the spring. This morning's frost was light, but it did more damage to plants that have been weakened by the previous frosts. My morning walks for the last week or more have been mostly casualty assessments. But this Sabbath morning was bright and sunny and the frost was gone before I left for church. I've been without a car since Miriam and Hannah left on Thursday, so I caught a ride to church with the Fosters. Attendance at church today was very light, just twenty people, but we had good meetings. Now I'm home trying to decide what to make for my lunch. I'm not very ambitious when it comes to making food for myself. I'll probably just make a quesadilla. Then I'll grab a nap.

Miriam and Hannah will be home later this afternoon and Stacey will be home tomorrow. Then things will return to normal. The house feels so lonely when I'm the only one here. Looking at the week ahead, we might get a reprieve from the freezing weather, but not by much. I want some actual warmth, not this piddling mid 50s stuff. We do have some exciting events this week. Our new chicks arrive tomorrow. Miriam's bees arrive on Wednesday. We'll be busy getting the hives set up on Monday and Tuesday. Then the apple trees can bloom and the bees can do their business and maybe we'll get some apples this year. We'll see.