Lughnasa                                                       Honey Moon

On a few occasions yesterday bees who had not left the supers buzzed about the kitchen as the extractor whirred and Kate ran the capping knife over the frames.  Each time I encouraged these bees to exit through an opened door and in all but five cases they found the way out.  In those others we caught them in plastic containers and freed them.  Two died, one caught in the door and one I don’t know why.  These bees are our partners in Artemis Hives and deserve respect and kind treatment.  Even if they don’t always show me the same.

It’s a repeated observation, but it’s unusual enough that I’ll make it again.  Kate and I share this property with a whole host of other animals who make their home here.  Chipmunks are the most visible mammals, but we also have gophers, rabbits, opossum, raccoons, squirrels, woodchucks, mice, voles and I have seen at least one marten though I realize he was far from his range.  I mentioned the other day snapping turtles transiting our woods, but we have other amphibians like frogs of least two kinds and toads.  Snakes, salamanders, and skinks live here too.  Many birds are at least here occasionally:  great-horned owls, crows, pileated woodpeckers, red-headed woodpeckers, chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, rose-breasted nuthatches and wild turkeys.  Deer and coyote come through our land from time to time, though it’s been awhile since I’ve seen deer.

This list doesn’t include other very important organisms in the top six inches of the soil and the other plants, from perennial flowers to vegetables.  Our woods has many oak, ash (so far), elm, ironwood, cedar, black locust, poplar and, of course, buckthorn.

It is so easy to imagine that we own the land, but it just isn’t true.  We have a temporary use permit, a years long pass to erect a human dwelling on already inhabited premises.  This permit comes from other humans who might want to do the same; it’s a rule of exclusion, keeping other humans away, but it has no effect on these other tenants.  They come and go as they will, choosing their homes in the ages honored way of finding a good nest site, an excellent burrow, a place to raise young under the shelter of a shed.

All we humans can do is enhance or destroy those options.  We don’t create them, maintain them or put them up for rent.  They are the last and true commons, that portion of the earth still used as it was long ago before the scourge of private property.  We only imagine we own it.

Lughnasa                                                              Honey Moon

I have an itch that I’ve waited now some twenty years to scratch and it may be about to happen.  When we moved in, I wanted to nix the lawn and sow prairie grass instead.  Now Kate is open to replacing most of our lawn with prairie grass and perhaps some new tree plantings as well.  I say open because she’s agreed to think about it.

We already have two large swatches of prairie on either side of our lawn, our compromise as we did the initial landscaping.  This notion came to me again while I walked in the eastern side of prairie grass and realized how at home and comfortable it felt: insects buzzing around, wildflowers blooming, a few trees popping up, milkweed ready to burst its pods.