Coveting.

My friend was given a new bike at age 9. I wanted one very badly. He offered to let me ride it, but I cashed, since I had not learned how to do it. I got an old used one 2 years later and people helped me gain the benefit of “tire inertia” on it. I rode it everywhere in town, high handle-bars, I spray painted it flat mandarin orange–only spray paint we had. Put on BB cards–on the rear wheel mounts, and handlebar grips with red/white/blue streamers–paraded it all over–even in the Maple Leaf Festival–my jealousy had turned to good feeling pride…

Years passed, and my wife and I built a house (her Dad actually was the builder) in exurban Kansas–everyone there had at least 3 acres of land–but we had 1 acre, yet I satisfied myself by “annexing” mentally the adjacent 80 acres of primal forest and the BVHS jogging trail amid it. I didn’t much notice the neighbors’ vehicles or pets, but then development of the 80 acres began full tilt, and our street, which ended at our driveway beginning, was taken down into the forest.

These “do-it-your-selfers” could only construct and destruct on Saturdays and Sundays, the previously quiet moment days for most of us living there prior to the invasion.

I’m not one who covets greatly, but I was sore in the destruction of our little piece of forest, and sore in the grief the noise caused my wife, who stood out on the driveway one sunny, Sunday morning, 7 a.m., yelling at the bulldozers. She then calmly requested that we move back into suburbia, “More children around there for our children to grow up with, anyway.”

My oldest son and I had enjoyed the fauna and flora of that area: we built a large treehouse in a white oak tree maybe 50 feet into the native land. It had a creek and he collected bluegill and turtles, snails and crawdads from it, and built an aquarium and terrarium for miniature catfish, crawdads, and leopard frogs, respectively.

We dug up scrub oaks, walnut, and locust trees and transplanted them, filling our front yard. I rued the day we left there, its septic laterals still fine and functioning, its need for my attending the lawn with my Snapper riding mower, avoiding our corn and potato garden, while zeroing in on robust growths of giant Russian thistles.

I would miss the maturation of our thriving Austrian pines and Colorado Blue spruce, standing as they did over the septic laterals…

Sherman, our huge, feral black domestic shorthair feline was no doubt hit hardest–though one night he staggered in to the garage, too weak to meow, bleeding profusely from sliced wounds across his chest–his last encounter with a raccoon–though the vet’s careful “ER” treatment of him saved him that night, and he returned to his hunting passion: rabbits and opossums. He would dodge into the wood long before we each left the house on our way to big city activities.

On our return, we could tell the number of adult and juvenile rabbits he’d consumed: large (grass-filled) crop=adult, small=juvenile, baby=unknown, probably swallowed whole–not on grass yet. These viscera were left arranged on the driveway and apron. One day I counted 5 crops. The opossums? These were left on the grass, deceased, no part missing or ingested.

One day my brother-in-law, while building a deck on the north side of our passive-solar house, asked me to help with the pouring of the concrete slab. I was flattered, for he was a first-rate home builder. I geared myself up with protective clothing, goggles, hat, and gloves, looking intently at the re-bar he had carefully placed, when I jumped. “Mark, what is with this?” “Huh?” “This thing, I think it’ a prairie lizard.” “Oh, that. Your cat dragged that up here a while ago–don’t worry, it’s dead.”

As I helped, Sherman came forth 2 more times, the second offering a vole, and the third a field mouse. He evinced no intention of eating his game, but laid them neatly in a row, each 6 inches from the other, then sauntered off into the forest.

We looked at each other and laughed. “He must want us to make him a time capsule.” “Or get on our good side?”

The concrete arrived and the massive truck downloaded into the forms; Tom’s offering was made indelible.

Brandy, our beautiful, brainy Irish Setter no doubt would miss the place. We jogged a 4 mile circuit through the area regularly and she retrieved sticks for me from area livestock ponds.

Looking east from our upstairs bedroom window, not long after sunrise, one encountered strata of varied tree flora. One tree–probably a large elm, had a bizarre limb outgrowth which arched skyward, then came down like a rainbow–when fog lay around the Blue River, encircling this “tree sculpture,” and a KC Southern engine blasted its horns, running north on tracks near the river, you could swear you were watching a brontosaurus in the mists eons ago…

I don’t have a firm grip on the feelings of the others in our immediate family concerning leaving a habitat nature space and moving into a more populous, congested area.

I think back on nights without light pollution, when, out on the driveway apron, my children and I gathered to gaze through my reflector telescope at the moon, and Jupiter and its Galilean moons, and the Pleiades, Mars, Venus, Saturn, the Dog star and more, or put up a tent on the cool grass of the back yard, near the garden, (far from the septic laterals) and tell ghost stories… just make something up…And laugh and laugh like nobody heard you!

Ah, those were the days…


People also view

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *