Farewell to my garden.

I am facing a very difficult task. We are moving to Florida in 8 days. I will have to say farewell to my garden. It's harder to leave the garden than it is our house...where we've lived for the past 11 years.

I am really going to miss sitting on the front porch with my coffee every morning, watching "the traffic". I will miss watching the male robin who is obsessed with bathing. He just stands in the bathing dish, letting the cool water flow around his legs. An occassional splash and flutter, just to keep up pretenses, I suppose. I will miss the doves, the sweet little chipping and song sparrows, and the eternally squabbling house sparrows, the vivacious Carolina Wrens, and of course the cardinals and the catbirds. A feisty mockingbird has been patrolling the berry bush as well.
My heart sorta aches at the idea of getting in our van, and pulling away, leaving all this behind.

What worries me so much is the fact that no-one has purchased our home yet. Our house can take care of itself, more or less, but not the garden. It needs to be tended, and often. I have had to "hire" a young man from our church's youth group to tend our yard once a week until there's a buyer. The thistles must be kept at bay, the bindweed and nightshade kept out of the bushes, garlic mustard ripped out, the grass must be trimmed back to keep it from overtaking the beds, and the pond must be kept cleaned and filled, and the pump/fountain going. The birdbaths must be kept scrubbed and filled, and the feeders. And of course the grass needs mowing.

That's alot of work. I know to most people these concerns are minor worrying. But here's how I see it: It's nesting season. Robins use the mud caused by the splashing of the fountain for their nests. The neighborhood birds ALL drink and bathe in the "stream". Food is free, plentiful, and easy to find in my garden... perfect for the hurried and harried bird parents with a nestful of hungry mouths to feed. My garden has become a necessity for so many creatures. If it's not tended.... the wildlife will suffer. THAT is what concerns me.

I can only pray that all will be well, and that "J" will take good care of it...for their sake!

My Conundrum

December 26, 2009


As my family faces the definite prospect of moving down to Florida, I am faced with quite a task. I have lived in Pennsylvania for 16 years- the longest I have lived in one place in my entire life. I have grown to love the PA woods, the birds, the insects, the wildlife in general, and I undestand the in's and out's of the ecosystem here. I find it very comforting- like old friends. I know what to expect, and who to expect. I know my way around the various habitats, and what's going on in each at any given time of year. It's a very nice feeling.

But Florida is a whole new world. About the only thing I'm familiar with, aside from the water-birds, is the Live Oak, and the Long-leaf Pine. By sight. The nitty-gritty of those two I just don't know yet. But, true to the habit of a naturalist, I am never satisfied until I figure out what is what, where, when, and why. The thrill of the hunt, so to speak. The wonder of discovering new things I didn't know before, seeing strange new things (like the stick insect striped in black and white, like striped pajamas!)

I am already totally entranced with the Sand scrub of Ocala National Forest. To the untrained eye, it's just that- a rather mundane scrubby area. But as I have studied, I am amazed at the fragility of what is likely the most endangered ecosystem in the United States. Dependant on fire and the rapid drainage of the sand every plant is specially designed to live in, the vast majority of all species there are found ONLY in two or three smallish plots in the center of Florida. I have visited the area many times, with out appreciating the amazingness of it all.

So- here's my conundrum: what is better? Is it the pleasant familiarity of my "old friends", or the excitement of making new ones?

I have been wrestling with the various scrubby oaks this week...they don't even LOOK like oaks, and their leaves are all so similar. One may be fuzzier on the midrib, or maybe the midrib is yellower than the others. Very confusing. But I know I'll get them all straight eventually.

So, as we prepare to head back to Pennsylvania in three days, I know I'll see my old familiar friends, and take comfort in them. But, I also know that I'll have that guide to Florida ecosystems by my bed for quite a while. With a highlighter pen!

I think she gets it!

I was saddened to hear of the death of Michael Jackson. I'm a child of the 80's, and I just can't help love his music. What an incredibly talented person, what a horribly sad, tragic, lonely life! Yes, he made some unfortunate choices, but I will not cast a stone. I also have made some pretty pathetic decisions in my life as well. As have we all.

I downloaded Michael's Earth Song video yesterday. I love that video. The song isn't as effective without the visual. Very expressive, and very very powerful. It expresses visually and musically exactly the way I feel whenever I witness the heartless cruelty and wanton desecration human are capable of towards GOD's incredible creation, and each other! I want to wail and scream and tear at the earth too at our stubborn selfishness and greed. It truly breaks my heart and rends my soul.

Yesterday afternoon, Hannah, my almost-5-daughter (who never misses the chance to remind me that her birthday is coming soon!) sat down to watch the video with me. She's a very perceptive little girl, and very sensitive. I was interested to see what her reaction to the footage would be.

She sat there on my lap, and soon got a very serious look on her face. I started to talk, and she said "Shhhh mommy... I'm watching!" In a moment, towards the end, I asked her what she was thinking. She said "I think this makes God very very sad." WOW. Out of the mouth of a babe! She was so touched at the Amazon Natives clutching at the earth in despair. She did not like the dead elephant at all. "The baby too?" Yes, I said, the baby too. "Why???????" Oh my.

She brightened a little bit at the part where the "wind" reverses everything.... the rainforest trees are upright again, the elephant is resurrected- with tusks again- and the tanks are blown out of the city, and the man who was shot comes back to life again. God was blowing all the bad away. I said "only in the movie, honey. It's not real." She was puzzled. I continued. "It would be so wonderful if God really would just blow all the bad away. But he won't. He CAN, but he won't. " She was still puzzled. But I knew this was important, and she really wanted to know.

"Honey... when you do something wrong,like breaking something, and you KNOW it's wrong, do I come and fix it all for you?" "No, mommy. You make me clean it up." "That's right. I COULD clean it up, but I don't. Because that's YOUR job. You knew better, so I leave YOU to do it." There was a flicker of comprehension in her eyes.

"God is like that. The very first job GOD gave us was to take care of His creation. All the plants, all the animals. To care for it, to keep it safe. We all KNOW that, deep down inside. But most people don't do it. They hurt His creation, the hurt the forests, the animals in it, and they hurt other people. We KNOW we aren't supposed to do that, but we do it anyway. So, I believe God is expecting US to do our job. To clean up our mess. He could do it, but we are supposed to do it."

"Mommy?"

"Yes sweetie?"

"Can I see it again?"

"Sure."

This time we didn't speak at all. She was silent for the whole thing. Then she said, at the end, "God made that tree. We shouldn't chop it down! And that's GOD'S elephant! God must be sooooo sad."

She gets it. She definitely gets it. How full my heart is!

Legend of the Dogwood

The Dogwood Trees are in full bloom now, here in Lancaster. I love them so much. The other day I pulled over in the park alongside a lovely white tree. Iasked Hannah to come over, and I told her to pick ONE blossom. Then she she sat on my lap, and, holding the flower, I told her the "Legend of the Dogwood".

An old and beautiful legend has it that, at the time of the crucifixion, the dogwood was comparable in size to the oak tree and other monarchs of the forest. Because of its firmness and strength it was selected as the timber for the cross, but to be put to such a cruel use greatly distressed the tree. Sensing this, the crucified Jesus in his gentle pity for the sorrow and suffering of all said to it: "Because of your sorrow and pity for My sufferings, never again will the dogwood tree grow large enough to be used as a gibbet. Henceforth it will be slender, bent and twisted and its blossoms will be in the form of a cross -- two long and two short petals. In the center of the outer edge of each petal there will be nail prints -- brown with rust and stained with red -- and in the center of the flower will be a crown of thorns, and all who see this will remember."

If A Million People Say a Stupid Thing.....

January 25th, 2008 by hannahsmommy


I was watching "Nova" the other night. I don’t think any TV program has caused me to do so much thinking and pondering. It was called "The Family that Walks on All Fours". It was about a rural family in Turkey that has four adult children that cannot walk upright. They walk on their feet and hands, bent over.
The show started off with some evolutionary biologists trying to make the claim that these unfortunate people were missing a gene that was causing them to display "primitive characteristics"- walking like our pre-human ancestors walked. In other words, like an ape.
I was flabbergasted! I couldn’t believe it. Such utterly ridiculous nonsense, when the real cause was so relatively easy to see. Even I figured it out once the other facts came to life.
First of all, the parents were close cousins. Ah HAH. Inbreeding to be sure. Both parents carried a recessive gene hampering the ability to walk, and 5 of the children recieved it.
Secondly, and vital to the story, the family was extremely poor and relatively uneducated. In fact the whole village was poor and uneducated.
The "scientists" who viewed these 5 people as "fascinating cases of evolution in reverse" so offended the family that the military had to come make sure they weren’t being insulted. In turkey, insulting a Turk is a capital offense. The female scientist had to work hard to convince the guards that all was OK.
Brain scans were done on the 5 afflicted children, and low and behold, each of them had severe brain damage- their cerebellum was greatly reduced. This area is responsible for voluntary motor movement, balance, and equilibrium. In a word, it makes walking possible. Apparently this recessive gene interfered with the development of the cerebellum, and thus interfering with their ability to stand upright to walk. So they did what they knew how to do- basically crawl. What you don’t learn until the very end is that when the children were babies and toddlers, they crawled fine- but they stopped at crawling. They never made it beyond this developmental stage.
The family has drawn ridicule and condemnation from the village, who believe they are being cursed. The family was forced to move. The son gets rocks thrown at him by the village children, and gets taunted more than the others.
Finally someone realizes that maybe they can LEARN to walk. No one has ever bothered to even try that. The scientists invest in a walker, and many of them stand upright and take a few steps. A set of parallel bars are set up in the yard for "practicing". The youngest girl especially liked this. A physical therapist is also called in to help loosen up the necessary muscles. The son is proclaimed too severe to walk.
When the scientists came back several weeks later, all 4 of the girls were walking with either the walker or the bars. Only the son was not seen for a while. Then, you see him walking - awkwardly but unaided, toward the house. He stumbles, takes a few steadying steps on his hands, then rights himself again to walk normally.
I got to thinking about this whole situation. I have come to several conclusions.
#1. It was a genetic mutation that caused them to not be able to walk as well.
#2. The "evolution in reverse" theory is just about the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
#3. Blinding themselves to their dogma, they were willing to throw aside compassion and mercy in order to "prove" their pet theory- no matter how ridiculous it is.
#4. Had this family been in a "developed" nation, a doctor would have recognized the delay in development, and physical therapy would have been given each of those children when they were still small. The family believed it was the "Will of allah" that they children be that way- to test the faith of the father. They had no idea that all they needed was a little help.
#5. Again, if this family had been in the United States, no scientist would dare compare children to an unknown human ancestor. What an insult. The parents would be educated enough to know total bunk when they hear it. The turkish family was poor and uneducated. Easy targets in my opnion. The father expressed concern, however, that his children were in fact being compared to apes, and was afraid of even further abuse from the villagers.
All this to say that too many evolutionists try to prove their theory by assuming the truth of the premise they are trying to prove. For example- in order to explain the handicap, they had to prove evolution. They claimed it was a kick-back to a more primitive pre-human ancestor. In order to prove this, however, they had to assume the truth of this common ancestor. You can’t do that in science. It’s a circular argument. And extremely bad science!
And, even if it was true, no scientific "fact" is more important than the dignity of a family that is already being ostracized by their own community. The scientists were making a bad situation even worse. These people are not "freaks"- just victims of poverty, lack of education and medical facilities.
And victims of myopic scientists.

I Just Don't Get It!!!!

I wrote this over a year ago. But when I read it over again, it still brings tears to my eyes.

January 2008

I don’t get it.
I’ve been collecting photos of each kind of mammal (Each "order") for a class I’ll be doing this fall. While I was searching on-line, I have often come across some pictures that either broke my heart or just saddened me. Big strong "manly men" posing proudly in front of an animal they have just killed. Like a lovely Arabian Oryx. Or big strong manly men clubbing a helpless one-day old seal pup to death over the head with a pick axe. (Mustn’t mar the lovely white fur with a humane bullet, now, must we??!) I just don’t get it. How does killing an animal prove your manliness? Hand-to-claw/fang/tooth would be a better show, I’d think. Now if he could catch that Oryx on foot, wrestle it down, and then kill it- bare-handed- without being skewered by the horns first, that would be something. But a shot from a high-powered, laser-guided rifle from half a mile away????… that’s no contest. Nothing to be proud of.
I actually wept as I looked at the piles of bloodied seals in Canada, and the gorgeous "safari trophies", and couldn’t help but ask God for forgiveness. This scene must just break His heart. He declared it all "Very good", and here we are, behaving like..well, humans. (Animals don’t do that!)
It’s enough to make me ashamed to be a human being sometimes.

But then I find a picture of a man bottle-feeding an orphaned pangolin, or a group of zookeepers celebrating the birth of a baby aardvark, or a fireman giving a burnt koala a drink of water from his water bottle. Or a man running in front of a bulldozer, uprooting the rare ground-orchids they are about to pave over, so they can be transplanted. Then I sigh, and think… OK….there’s still hope.

It may be a lost cause. Humans have screwed up just about every thing they’ve touched. I might not even make the slightest little difference in the big scheme of things. But, when I die and get to heaven, I don’t think God is going to ask me if I saved the Philippine Eagle from extinction. He won’t ask me how many acres of rainforest I prevented from being destroyed. He won’t ask me if I was able to reverse the greenhouse effect. I think He’ll just ask me if I kept trying, if I did everything I could.

And I’ll say yes.

And wipe a tear.

Going Buggy!

I wrote this one in January, 2008.


As usual, wierd things have come and gone in my house. Another school year is half-done, and the fun stuff is about to begin. The 200-odd photos of mammals are gone, since I finally finished that lesson-plan. No feathers strewn hither and yon, since Buster isn’t currently molting. Binocs, spotting scope and field guides are still visible. No skulls presently. (Although I did find a beaver skull in my backseat last month that I forgot to put back on the shelf…)
I have fishbowl of liverworts- a "primitive" non-vascular plant. Another frequently overlooked fascinating life-form. I have a 5 gallon aquarium "phylum garden"- a terrarium with as many different phyla of plants as possible in it. I can’t manage to keep that moss going, darn it!
I am currently in a "buggy" frame of mind. Last fall I did a fascinating program on stinging insects, so I had a few wasp or bee bodies on my desk for study. Nieghbors "donated" them- after spraying the hives. Nuts. I’d rather look at the live ones in the hive- from a safe distance!
And my newest acquisitions are in two more 5-gallon tanks. In one tank are my daughters "pets" - giant cockroaches. One largish male Madagascan Hissing Cockroach, about 2 inches long. He’s a beaut.

The other is "Tuck", a lovely female Giant Cave Cockroach, a wee bit over 3 inches long, with a gorgeous golden shimmer about her shell and antennae that are always waving. She just had 39 babies. (cocroaches, anyone?). These are the perfect pets. They eat anything, don’t stink (really!), and don’t fly, don’t bite, and make no noise. Hiss cost me the grand total of 99 cents! Tuck was given to me.

And in the other tank, is Rosie. Ahhh, Rosie. She’s my new pet tarantula. Hah! She’s very pretty, for a tarantula. She’s a Chilean Rose-haired- her cephalothorax (her "body") is a coppery metallic pink, and her belly is copper. The rest is a beigy-copper. Her toes are velvety black. I do pick her up daily, with respect, since she technically could bite. (Her venom is about equal to that of a bee, so I’m not too concerned about that, but her 1/2" fangs would really hurt!) She’s very mild-mannered. Another cool first pet for anyone with the nerve! (Remember, not all tarantulas are this docile- many will bite first and not bother to ask questions later…. do your homework first!!!)
I have taken my new critters to "bug" programs. (None are actually "bugs", mind you.) I once did a "misunderstood critters" program at a local library. A streak of fiendishness came over me, and I "wore" Hiss on my shirt like a brooch. He’s slow, so I didn’t worry about him scurrying away. The librarian, bless her heart, didn’t notice him until she shook my hand. Hiss took a couple of steps and waggled his antennae. I have never seen a mild-mannered grey-haired librarian move so fast or shriek so loudly! [heeheehee!!] And when I went back to the desk to announce my departure, I was wearing Rosie. Needless to say, the poor woman nearly had a coronary. I’m so bad. A couple of months later, for the next program I did there, I was immediately recognized, and she looked me over carefully-from a distance- before shaking my hand! We all had a good laugh over that. It’s sorta fun earning this "wierd" reputation.
Can’t wait to see the reaction of my highschool students in a few weeks when I bring my critters to class. Who knows… maybe I’ll wear Hiss again. It’s so fun being strange!