I mentioned my detour to Pet Finder in a recent post, a detour that took me to possible pet bunnies. Lo and behold the next day, as he was hopping into the shower, Carl mentioned that Tinkerbell’s friend was back.

Susan Orleans’ book On Animals has been in my To Read pile for months, so when a friend mentioned it during our weekly call, I took note and brought it down to the basement to read during my biking workout.

I set up my new old manual Smith Corona with a view of its own, out the window. When I sit down, I have my stuffed animals about me and the cats who, surprising but true, don’t react when I start to tap as they do to my flute playing. I would take that as an insult but, in fact, it’s a relief.

Another month gone and my mind is still on holiday. Or maybe it’s just stuck half-way up the wall I went splat against when we got home from the Cal/Can trip. That’s how it feels, I guess, when up against one form or another of writer’s block. As if you are getting nowhere even though those little gray cells in one’s mind are probably working hard, be it for or against you and your fabulous concepts.

A note on practice. In the last post, I wrote about playing a few pretty notes on the flute. Unfortunately, during my next practice session, the memory of those pretty notes dissipated, then disappeared into the distant past. Especially because I still don’t know how my lips are supposed to pucker to play in the new way; the old way is much more familiar.

For years, I have been lackadaisical at best with my flute playing. When my mother moved here in March of 2020, eventually dying, I left my flute to molder, bringing it out a handful of times but to no avail. So how odd that when Carl and I got home from the Cal/Can trip something clicked. I reached out to an online teacher. I’ve started lessons again.

Out the door we went. Twenty minutes into that 6-ish hour drive, with rain and trucks to keep us company, we got a text from Amtrak saying the train was disrupted. Wha-!

They aren’t called sh*tty first drafts for nothing. The writing process, it ain’t easy. At least for me, the daily quest to express myself frequently feels like a muddy slough through a morass of ideas that seem so stellar, only to note their fall into a pit of snakes and swampy doubts. For the past—has it been four years?—I have been attempting to write a play.

After nine months of anticipation, our Cal/Can trip is coming up. Have you heard about it? We leave Saturday, October 21st to go from the east coast to the west coast, and back again, by train. Why the train? Traveling is stressful enough for me. I don’t fly — think carbon footprint and lack of feathers. Carl, ever patient and obliging, would prefer to drive. Our compromise is the train. I am creating a map blog of our trip and will be uploading photos and notes as we go along. I hope you’ll check it out at this link.

We ended up rehoming Toey to a friend of a friend. I have been told that she settled into her new home seamlessly. Here at Darwin’s View, her absence was felt most by her former BFF Flopsie, the hen who kept Toey company through her pecking-order trials. With Toey’s departure, Flopsie plummeted to the bottom of that pecking order; in the chicken world, no good deed goes unpunished.

This is our tent set up for this month’s Jaffrey Riverfest. The decorations draped on the tent are single-use plastic bags. Research has shown that the average family uses an average of 125 single-use bags each month. One of our fabulous JCI members tied together 125 single-use plastic bags and Voila! The tent has been decorated. And fascinating but true…

Here are some books that I have been reading instead of the News. Just to show where I dip and bow. Because no longer do I read about climate change because it’s here. I read about possibilities and how I might join with others to help to bring about the necessary changes. And then fiction to lighten and engage.

Toey is our best mother hen. She is consistently and obnoxiously broody. Unfortunately, when we later put Toey and her seven pullets together with the twelve other hens, they accepted the babies, but not Toey. Drama ensues.

Lice anyone? Bumblefoot? Dirty bums? We had that perfect storm here at Darwin’s View. The result? Two plus full days devoted to cleaning out and cleaning up Cluckingham Palace. And chicken spas.

Nature has been fabulous lately . . . depending on where you live, but I live at Darwin’s View and here the weather has provided a little bit for everyone. I will note that nature is fabulous until ants invade the house and Carl finds a toe-biting beetle swimming in the pool. Then nature takes on a darker, less appealing tone. This day has been one of those days.

Sadly, we lost our Isa Brown, Lucy, this past week. She was the friendliest of our current lot, reminiscent of Ping in her forthrightness and willingness to be picked up and hugged. Her most recent molt had changed her from a scruffy tan and white ragamuffin into a nearly elegant elder. Last Wednesday night, I noted that she wasn’t on the roost but on the floor of the coop. Maybe she was having an egg?

As we returned home from voting, Carl and I enjoyed a different view of Mt. Monadnock: from downtown. Carl noted the many angles of the mountain one can see from the different points of this region, and what a different impression they give. I ran with that thought to perspectives, and how many people there are in the world, each with their own views and opinions. And that returned me, like a boomerang, to a topic that I’ve attempted to write about a few times.

I’m remembering January 2018. I had broken my arm that Thanksgiving. My mother, still alive if with Parkinson's, was visiting. It was a New Year and I got up to write, to draw in the dark of that day’s dawning. I built up the fire in the wood stove because the temperature outside was in the negative numbers. And the chickens at the time were inside the house. Then the fire alarms went off.