Susan's Meadow Knoll Journal

December 1. Yikes! An Internet virus! Somebody sent me a copy of Badtrans on Monday, and it’s taken me all week to clean up the mess. My anti-virus software wasn’t up to date (shame on me), but I’ve always been careful opening attachments and didn’t really worry very much about getting a virus. Badtrans, however, is a sneaky bug. It opens itself, and the next thing you know, it’s sending itself out to all the unopened mail in your inbox—which in my case, is usually quite a few emails. I closed down my email, went to the Symantech site, and downloaded a copy of the Norton anti-virus software. With our slow telephone connection, it took several hours to get it downloaded, and a lot more time to deal with the mess. But I think I’m all cleaned up now. It was an interesting process, and I have a great deal more respect for the damage these viruses can cause.

December 3. Along the path to the lake this morning, I noticed that the bark on one of the sumac shrubs had been torn and shredded. At first, I thought that the damage might have been caused by the beavers that have built their lodge at the foot of the dam. But there were no toothmarks, and no sign that the bark had been forcibly pulled down, as beavers do. This bark had been . . . well, sort of rubbed off. Rubbed? Of course! This little tree had been rubbed by a white-tail buck, who was anxious to get rid of the velvet on his antlers. The velvet is the skin that covers the buck’s new antlers, which begin to grow about the time the fawns are born in the spring. By fall, the velvet is dry and maybe a little itchy, and the buck looks around for a suitable tree, so he can rub it off.

But that’s not the only reason a whitetail buck rubs a tree. He has glands in his forehead that secrete a distinctive scent. As he rubs the tree, the buck marks it, letting other deer, both female and male, know that he’s primed for the season’s serious business: mating. Some biologists say that the chemical signals that are exchanged at a rub stimulate female deer and help to synchronize breeding cycles, while they suppress the aggressiveness and sex drive of younger males. Probably, what I was seeing was a little note left by an older buck, saying something like: "Hey, girls, get ready for some fun. Guys, it’s time to get outta Dodge. I’m in charge here, and nobody better mess with me." All in a night’s work, if you’re a whitetail deer.

December 8. One of the things that keeps me busy these days is the on-line class I’m teaching for Story Circle, "From Memoir to Fiction." The six students are working through six units, which we’ve posted on the Story Circle site. They study the units (on characterization, plot, point of view, setting, and so on), then try using the techniques in their writing. They email me their work, I critique it, and fax or snail-mail it back. This class is the second I’ve taught using the Internet, and I like it. I enjoy working with adult writers far more than with the college students I used to teach. These writers, all women, are (with one or two exceptions) serious about their writing, and work hard at it. It’s fun to see their improvement, and I continue to be fascinated by this new way of communicating with people, via the Internet. What an amazing medium, that allows teacher and student to be so intimately connected, and never meet face-to-face.

December 12. The book is done and ready to go off to New York! We’ve only been working on it for just over three months, although with all the sad interruptions this autumn, it has seemed like three years. Both of us are pleased with it, for different reasons: Bill because he enjoyed working with the complicated plot, I because I’ve enjoyed the interesting mix of characters. Still, it’s a relief to have it done, just in time to pay some necessary attention to Christmas. I’ve been knitting socks and hats (some out of the yarn I’ve spun) for people on my Christmas list. We’ve put up our little tree (we don’t need a big one, with so many beautiful trees all around), strung lights on the deck, and are ready to settle down in front of the fire with our eggnog and Christmas cookies.

December 18. My Christmas present came in the mail this week—a rigid heddle loom that I won on Ebay. Yes, Bill and I both have discovered on-line auctions, and have enjoyed learning the bidding process. The loom came disassembled, and I spent yesterday afternoon putting it together and learning its parts. Tonight, I’ll warp it for the first time and see if I can manage to weave something. Of course, it’s too late to weave Christmas presents for this year. I’ll have to start on next year’s batch.

December 20. This picture isn’t as clear as I’d like but if it looks to you like a grasshopper sitting on a barb-wire fence, you’ve guessed it. However, this grasshopper didn’t land on this fence by choice. He was stuck here by a loggerhead shrike, a songbird that preys on insects and (sometimes) small birds. The shrike is a well-dressed, neat-looking gray bird with black and white wings and a black mask, about the size and shape of a mockingbird. He’s sometimes called a "butcher bird," because of his habit of impaling his lunch on a thorn and eating it in a leisurely fashion. The shrike has a heavy hooked beak, but unlike other birds of prey, he doesn’t have sharp talons. So he uses a tool—a thorn or, as in the case of this unlucky grasshopper, a sharp barb—to fix his prey while he snacks. Sometimes, when there’s a hungry shrike hunting in a field, you can walk a fence-line and see half-a-dozen partly-eaten grasshoppers. I’ve seen shrikes here year-round, but there are more in the winter, as they move south from their Canadian breeding grounds. There’s a great picture of a nesting shrike and more information here: http://www.cws-scf.ec.gc.ca/hww-fap/loggerhd/logger.html

December 21. Whew! Today was our annual Shredding Day. I’m very glad this day comes only once a year, but I’m glad to have the seven (yes, seven!) pickup loads of shredded bark mulch that the three of us—Bill, our helper Miles, and I—produced. Early in the morning, Bill drove to Liberty Hill and rented one of those large shredders, the kind they use to chip retired Christmas trees. For the past several months, Bill and Miles have been cutting cedar and other "trash" shrubbery and dead limbs on our 31 acres, and stacking it in huge piles. The shredding job involves dragging the cedar to the shredder, putting it through, directing the chips into the back end of the pickup truck, and then off-loading the truck in large piles in the vicinity of my gardens. Lots of hauling, pushing, pulling, and shoveling, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. By the time the job was over, I was ready to collapse in a chair with a mug of hot tea. But I was careful to choose a chair beside the window, with an inspiring view of a huge pile of mulch. That’s the stuff that reduces the need for extra water and keeps the gardens from drying up in our summer heat, so it’s definitely worth a few hours of hard labor—especially when I think about how much that mulch would cost if we bought it by the bag. It’s also comforting, somehow, to think of all that cedar being used to protect and replenish the garden, a natural blanket provided by Nature herself, with a little help from her friends.

December 26. Another Christmas come and gone—quiet here, and lovely. It’s been cold enough (highs in the 40s, lows near freezing) to have the fireplace burning all day. I set up my new loom in the dining room and finished a scarf for my youngest son, Michael, who lives in Alaska and (presumably) will be glad of another wool scarf, even if it is rather inexpertly woven. The weaving itself is fine, but the edges are prettily scalloped, instead of being neat and straight. Weaving is nearly as much fun as spinning—I see a fine future here, filled with fleece and yarn and wooly things. I took time out from the loom to make a pecan pie for Christmas dinner, with Bill’s favorite sweet potatoes and baked ham and other good things. Altogether, a lovely holiday, with phone calls from the children (in Colorado, Nevada, and Alaska). The yard is full of birds, and the feeders are crowded—clearly, winter is here.

December 27. Time to get my office in order. I am not a very neat person, and when I’m busy with a book, I tend to stack resource materials and papers all around me. Sometimes I find myself writing in a little island in the midst of a sea of clutter. But when the book is finished, I have a grand cleaning-out. That’s what I’ve been doing today. Not just my office, either, but the storage closet where I keep my research materials, which is an even more daunting job. Old papers, clippings, things I once thought were important but haven’t touched in a couple of years—it’s time to clear it all out. This doesn’t mean that I’ll suddenly become a neat person, of course. When it’s time to begin the next book, the stacks and piles will reappear, and there’ll be jumbles of papers and notes all around. But it’s nice to have an uncluttered office, for a change. I’m starting to think about the next writing project—the short stories that are due March 15th. Maybe a neat desk will inspire me to settle down and start work. Or, on the other hand, maybe the inspiration comes from the masses of disorderly stuff, all jumbled and tumbled together. Who knows?