Because of the rather mild winter, the public school systems in West Virginia went out for the summer this past week.
When I was child, the date for school to end was usually something like the 7th or 10th of June. If we had some snow days, we could be going up to a week beyond that.
Today, the school systems are required to make up every single day that is missed, and the school system allows so much malleability to the school calendar that it actually is possible for school to be out before the month of June commences.
Whenever this time of year rolls around, those summer days start to well up in my consciousness.
As a child with deeply introverted tendencies, I found the constant interaction that was always required at schools quite exhausting at times.
To make matters worse, I was the son of two teachers at my elementary school, and I lived out of district.
Introverted children who live out of district really don’t have that many friends, especially during the long days of summer.
I grew up on an old farm that my grandparents owned. My dad had been given a section of the farm to build his own house, and that section of the property was in his name.
Thus, my grandparents were literally yards away from me.
I liked to spend a lot of time at my grandparents’ home during the summer.
I would spend long hours out in the pastures adjacent to their home.
And it was there that my imagination served me well.
I could turn a leave of grass into the most amazing animal, and I would then turn that animal into a character that clearly needed a story told about it.
So if you were driving along and you saw me playing blades of grass or little leaves from the nearby bigtooth aspen trees, you might think I was a bit touched in the head.
And maybe I was.
But the truth is I think that being able to tap into my own imagination has always been a skill that has served me well.
I can tell stories. Indeed, my mind is constantly looking at things to see if a story might be made out of it. Phrases, sentences, and paragraphs shoot through my mind all the time. If you see me in one of my little meditations, you may catch me softly speaking to myself. The sentences sometimes must be voiced.
But those long summer days in the meadows and woods honed my imagination.
My desire to know the truth about the natural world shaped what I generally like learning about most.
And having a grandfather who worked long hours on his own in an isolated part of county meant that I had a source for quite a bit of natural history knowledge– knowledge that one would necessarily receive from reading in books.
And I had a grandmother who encouraged me to write and express myself. When I was helping my dad clean out their home this past winter, I discovered several stories that I had written through dictation. And no, I haven’t been able to read them.
So I guess maybe the eggs of this blog were laid over decades ago.
It’s only through my time writing here that those eggs have started hatch.
I don’t know whether these eggs contain lovely birds of paradise or cockroaches– and somedays, you probably don’t either!
But I now know that without those days of summer to train this imagination, I don’t think I would be able to write even the most mundane and boring fact-based post on this blog.
I have to tap into that my sentence-producing stream to bring it out.
And if everyone stopped reading this blog, I’d still be producing it.
I must let the sentences live.
The summer sun only makes them quicken with life.
That photograph could so easily have been taken on the chiltern ridgeway trail where I will be walking this afternoon, except the chalk loving flowers carpeting the ground here at the moment include yellow rock roses, daisies, short stemmed buttercup, thyme and many others the names of which my remaining brain cell forgets at the moment. – oh yes, speedwell is one. Wild roses and hawthorn blossom on the bushes.
I’ve just been trying to read all the hundreds of messages left on the Guardian website concerning the British government U turn on the planned cull of the recently returned buzzard, for the benefit of the pheasant shooting industry. They had to close the topic after just one day of comments on 30th May. The government immediately admitted defeat, nevetheless it is just one of the things which will seal their defeat at the next election. They were so out of touch as to imagine the people in the British countryside were in favour of the shooting element. They were so wrong about that it transpired. Nevertheless it will still not stop these landowning idiots from illegally shooting up raptor nests. They don’t even have the sense to clear away the cartridges from under the trees.
Incidentally, the bird that we call a buzzard in Britain is a hawk which looks very much like a small eagle. The American buzzard is a member of the new world vulture family.
We have buzzards as you would know them. The red-tailed hawk is actually a buzzard. Buzzards are int he genus Buteo. That’s the most common species of buzzard here.
But no American knows them as buzzards.
The “American buzzard” you’re referring to is called the turkey vulture.
Some people call the red-tailed hawk the “chicken hawk,” but they rarely attack chickens. They are much more into hunting mammals like squirrels and rabbits.
The real chicken hawks are the sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks, which are in the goshawk genus.
That meadow is actually a large hayfield. The initial owner of the property was a self-sufficient small farmer who ran a small herd of Hereford cattle on it. Before he had a tractor, he also had workhorses and mules.
Right now the grass is so high that the does have taken to hiding their fawns in it.
The grasses are a mixture of native species and lots that were imported from Europe and even Asia.
I’ve been told that West Virginia looks like a mixture of Ireland, the Harz Mountains, parts of Devon, and Transylvania.
Luckily for the peregrine, able to prosper after the use of DDT was banned, they now build their nests not only on cliffs but on the ledges of buldings in the cities, where they help control the population of feral pigeons, Incidentally in general, predators do not need conrolling by man as they stay naturally in balance with their prey species. If you think you see a lot of crows and magpies etc that must mean lots of the things they eat are out there too. Obvious isn’t it?
The US has very strict protections for all raptors, including owls. I’ve noticed in the United Kingdom that people sometimes keep pet barn owls. That’s virtually impossible to do here. It’s also almost impossible to get a permit to shoot any species of raptor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migratory_Bird_Treaty_Act_of_1918
You also have to get a special stamp to shoot any migratory bird, including ducks and doves.
But it’s very hard to get a permit to hunt hawks or falcons.
Falconry licenses come only through years of apprenticeship.
You can’t just go out and buy a raptor.
Amen brother–maybe its something to do w/ those Schleswig-Holstein genes, but your pattern repeats mine to a great extent.
I grew up in the big city (Chicago), but back then there was an abundance of invertebrate life to be found–I had a HUGE collection of spiders on our back porch–much to my Mom’s horror, and during good weather spent a large part of every day observing the drama of life in the the micro jungle that was our postage stamp back yard.
Fortunately for me, a close friend of my Dad owned a home in Pell Lake, WI, where I spent many of my youthful summers, swimming, fishing, gathering fresh water clams, berrying, harvesting wild asparagus, etc. Many was the time I would stand out in the middle of an oat field, where I could look out and see nothing but oats in every direction, with Turkey Vultures kettling in a robins-egg blue sky and mid-summer highs in the 60s-70′s F, and imagine that I was the only person in the whole wide world.
I wish I could have bottled those days so that every once in a while I could open one up and relive that experience.
Nice read, Scottie. Glad you kept writing.