Susan's Hill Country Journal

January 1. A new year today, and my birthday tomorrow—and for a birthday present, I’m giving myself a week at Lebh Shomea, the silent monastic retreat center in South Texas, where I’ve gone a number of times before. I’ll be driving down tomorrow, and coming back on the 8th. Peggy, our webmistress and a member of the Story Circle board, is going too. We’re taking different vehicles and probably won’t have much of a chance to talk. But I think she’ll enjoy the silence as much as I will, and we can go for walks together.

January 2. We woke up this morning to a magical sight, snow! There’s hardly enough to measure and it won’t last very long, but it has dusted the woods and fields with shimmering crystals. The red pyracanthus berries are a beautiful contrast against the glistening white. I had time to take a quick photo before I finished my packing and got in the car for the drive to South Texas and a week of rest and silence.

January 3. Lebh Shomea—the term means "a listening heart"—is a fascinating place. It occupies 1100 acres of coastal prairie south of Corpus Christi, in a remote corner of La Parra Ranch, which was once one of the largest ranches in the United States. The community is under the auspices of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, which has had a long ministry in this part of Texas. The Big House was built in 1918 as the main ranch house; it now houses an extensive library, a dining room, and guest facilities. I’m staying in a cottage called Jeremiah, a simple little red brick dwelling that I have all to myself; other guests, some of them here for several months or even longer, occupy cottages scattered around the grounds. We meet for early-morning Mass and at meals, but no one speaks, for we are all committed to a reverential silence that allows us to look within, rather than expending our energies in social exchange (which most of us get quite enough of in the outside world!). Silence is not a new thing for me, and I always treasure it—and the extra time for reading, writing, and thinking. And some knitting, too. Peggy is finishing a scarf she started a couple of years ago, and I’m starting a sweater, my first!

January 5. Lebh Shomea is a wildlife sanctuary, and the grounds are full of lovely creatures. This is one of the many deer that browse the grass (still green, since the ranch is far enough south to avoid most killing frosts) around Jeremiah. Pic here There is also a large flock of resident wild turkeys, and a herd of javelinas, the native wild pig of South Texas.

January 6. It’s Sunday, and Peggy and I got in the car and drove to the beach, a lovely sweep of sand along Baffin Bay. This land is all privately owned, so the beach was beautifully deserted and we enjoyed a wonderful hour wandering along the sand, barefoot, picking up shells. We saw a "new" bird, too—new to both of us, anyway. We spotted a pair of crested caracaras, a member of the vulture family. (To see a picture, go here: http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/framlst/i3620id.html) I’ve also been seeing quite a number of beautiful green jays, and the brilliant yellow great kiskadee, both native to the Rio Grande Valley. The kiskadee takes its name from the French phrase Qu'est-ce-que dit? "What are you saying?" It was fun to talk with Peggy about our silent experience, but it’s back to silence again now, at least until Tuesday, when we start for home.

January 11. Back home again, in the thick of things. At Story Circle, we’re working hard to get things organized for the conference, which is only a month away. I’m playing catch-up with my magazine articles, and trying to settle down to work on China’s short story collection. This is the group of six stories that I wrote for the Country Living Gardener website over the last couple of years. I retained the print rights to the stories, and Berkley has decided to bring them out in a collection of 10—the original six stories, plus four new ones. The working title for the collection is An Unthymely Death and Other Herbal Mysteries. It looks like the publishing date will be August, 2003. I started writing those stories for on-line publication with a great deal of skepticism, but once I got into it and saw the possibilities, I was hooked. I’m happy that they’ll appear in print.

January 14. The big news here is our new dog, Lady! She’s another "rescue" dog from the Heart of Texas Lab Rescue Society. Zach is having a bit of trouble adjusting — after all, he’s been Top Dog for over four years. But we’re sure he’ll get used to it. Lady is about four years old, very well behaved, and is learning our voice commands. She spends the day in my office, and sleeps in her crate at night, in our bedroom. I hope she’ll be able to give up the crate soon, though. It doesn’t exactly go with our décor!

January 20. It’s cold enough to put out peanut-butter pudding for the birds—especially the ladder-back woodpecker, who lurks in the cedar elm, waiting for me to put it out. I used to render beef fat to make suet, but I don’t like the smell, which lingers in the house for days. Anyway, it’s tough to buy any kind of meat scraps now. The supermarkets don’t do their own butchering, and the smaller markets sell their scraps in bulk. And around here, you have to compete with the hunters, who buy beef suet to add to deer meat, to make venison sausage. I make my bird pudding with lard and peanut butter, about equal parts of each, with as much cornmeal and birdseed as the mixture will hold. I plaster it into the crotches of a couple of small trees, and the birds flock to it.

January 24. Much warmer again. It’s too early to prune the roses, and most of mine are antique roses anyway, grown on their own roots—so I don’t do a lot of pruning. But today I went out and cut back the dead wood and the crossing branches, and the little twiggy growth that will never amount to anything. The daffodils are all up, and I’m even seeing a few buds. Spring is on the way!

January 26. This is the time of year when Bill trims trees. He’s been clambering around on ladders with his chain saws (yes, plural—he has several of these things, including a nifty electric model that he uses with a generator). Four years ago, we had a huge ice storm that knocked out a great many limbs, and he’s still cleaning out the last of that damage, as well as the usual necessary trimming. We’ll have a big bonfire in a couple of weeks, after we get some rain (it’s pretty dry to burn right now). And he’s added at least another year’s supply to our stacks of fireplace wood.

January 28. A foggy morning, with a light mist that peppers my face as we walk to the lake to feed the geese. The double-crested cormorant winters here, and we see several of them this morning, sailing out of the fog like a small-scale pterodactyl. The cormorant is a large, greenish-black water bird with a slender, hooked-tip bill, orange facial skin, and webbed feet. In the water, I can tell it from the ducks by its size and by the fact that it is half-submerged, sometimes with only its head and neck visible, like a loon, but it its head and bill cocked up. When the sun comes out, I’ll see several sitting on the old oak tree in the middle of the lake, with their wings hung out to dry. It’s mating season for the geese (they start early!), and Major Gander is sailing around on the lake with his courting plumage (the white feathers in his tail) prominently displayed. He looks like a Spanish galleon. Lady chased them the first morning she met them, so they’ve been staying away from the feeding area, at least while we have the dogs with us.

January 30. Among the regulars at the bird feeders in January are the tufted titmice, small gray birds with a perky crest and black beak, with peachy-orange patches under their wings. They love sunflower seeds, and safflower seeds even more, and I love to watch them perch on a nearby branch and crack the seeds with their bills. These vocal, gregarious little birds are relatives of the chickadees, who visit the feeders with them. They make a loud, harsh clatter when I come out to the feeders—that’s their alarm call—but they also have a musical call, which sounds like "peter, peter, peter." When we cleaned out the birdbox last summer where they had nested, we found a nest built of strips of cedar bark, pieces o moss, and feathers from at least four different species of birds. Enterprising nest builders, these titmice.