James M. Redwine

Spring

Spring, Humbug

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James Taylor wrote Sweet Baby James in 1970:

“There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highway
A song that they sing when they take to the sea
Song that they sing of their home in the sky
Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep
But singing works just fine for me”

If you side with those who dream of a home in the sky, paradise was populated by Adam and Eve. Their Garden of Eden was perfect but that did not stop Eve from trying to improve it. You know, kind of like some wives when spring arrives. Say my wife, Peg, for example. I can imagine the conversation between Adam and Eve.

“Adam, isn’t this idyllic? Everything is just perfect. However, that one tree needs its fruit plucked. Would you mind just keeping an eye on that serpent while you are lounging around doing nothing?”

It is theoretically possible that was the beginning of humanity’s Rite of Spring where husbands are cast out of their dens by their wives who are intoxicated from the sight of emerging buds, the feel of damp earth and the smell of humas. I am reminded of Peg’s need to transform our perfect new home with paint and flower beds. Spring should be re-named the season of restless wives and “Honey, could you?” Where in the Constitution is it provided that it is illegal, or at least, unpolitic, for husbands to prop up their feet while waiting for a fish to make a mistake?

What estrogen fueled behavior is it that prevents wives from allowing winter to gently and slowly thaw its way to autumn and football season? Or as Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady asked, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” My guess is that Dr. Louis Leakey only found Lucy and not her mate in Olduvai Gorge because she had her husband off performing some springtime chore. Nothing has changed in a few hundred thousand years.

Now, it may not be that the female response to spring is responsible for all the world’s troubles, but I think it goes without question that Peg’s incessant activities both in our cabin and our yard interfere with my desire to fish our pond and watch Gunsmoke reruns. I will leave it to you, Gentle Reader, at least those of you of the testosterone persuasion, what else could it be?

Spring Forward

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JPeg Osage Snake

Tuesday, March 19, 2024 was the Vernal Equinox. The sun was directly over the earth’s equator and husbands throughout the world saw their sublime winter days replaced by wives who feel compelled to build nests, or more correctly, to exhort their husbands to help do so. Peg does not care that we live in the country and no one can even see our yard from the nearest road. When spring arrives, my reverie ends. Watching sports on TV fades in the glow of longer days that demand immediate attention to countless tasks that must be attended to, “Right Now!” Never mind that not one of these matters mattered until the ponds stopped freezing over.

The inexhaustible energy of a wife in springtime is exhausting. What is there in the female biology that cannot accept that Mother Nature provides her own rejuvenation of beauty such as dandelions and blooming thistle. Woman-made improvements to nature’s burgeoning bounty of wild growing plants, that Peg calls weeds, must be addressed with rakes, hoes, chemicals and sweat, mine.

It is not that I wish to ignore home maintenance. I agree that grass should be mowed occasionally. However, where is the sin in appreciating what comes from nature? Do we need numerous areas for flowers and vegetables that are readily available from Walmart? Why did we save for retirement if we are not going to retire? And, what about the welfare of all the little critters we are disrupting and worse with god-knows what concoctions that we spray and spread? I ask you, Gentle Reader, well, at least those of you who are husbands, what is wrong with living with nature? Live and let live sounds good to me.

Another thing that comes with spring is the plethora of Nature’s creations that apparently want to live in proximity with us and which Peg cannot abide. About once each day I am startled by, “Jim!” I know from the tone and decibel level that some unlucky snake, mouse, squirrel, scorpion, spider or bird has been doing its spring things too close to ours and my role is to ruin its day. Never mind that all these creatures want is to eat and procreate on their own terms without our interference, they must be dispatched, by me of course.

There is hope for Peg’s yearly compulsion to control the natural world with my labor. Before long the Summer Solstice will arrive and the moist earth and temperate weather will gradually metamorphosize into sunbaked clay and near drought. Then maybe Peg’s condition will cure itself until she hears the siren of autumn’s equinox and the chores of preparing for winter.

 

Prometheus Revisited

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A few days ago I received a telephone call in the early morning from my neighbor who owns the ranch immediately east of our property, “Jim, can we cross your place with some fire-fighting trucks and volunteers? Our controlled burn is not controlled. It may jump over on you.”

“Sure, anything I can help with?” Of course, as a judge neither I nor anyone else ever expects me to do anything except watch and listen, but I thought I should offer.

“Just keep an eye on things; it should be okay if the wind doesn’t pick up or if it changes from westerly to eastward. My cowboys and I will be coming through soon.”

Controlled burning in the early spring and fall when the land is more moist and seeds are not yet being heavily produced has been a proven technique for range management for many years. There is evidence Native Americans used deliberate burning in parts of America many years before Europeans arrived. According to a 2016 article from the National Park Service the tallgrass prairies would quickly succumb to undesirable shrubs and trees, such as red cedars, without periodic burning.

   

There are some negatives such as possible erosion and excessive smoke from pasture fires, but most experts posit the overall benefits lie with burning. As for Peg and me, our concerns were more with our log cabin and log out-buildings. I stationed myself at the fence line between the neighbor’s ranch and our place and marveled at the hard, dangerous work done by mainly volunteer fire departments from Barnsdall, Hominy and rural fire departments from other areas of Osage County, Oklahoma. I apologize for not thanking each firefighter and company by name, but there were so many volunteers and water trucks and there was so much expert and complex planning going on I do not know whom to thank. Therefore, thanks to all who responded and managed the raging backfires that preserved all of our structures and helped clear out the thatch and undergrowth from a good portion of our trees and pastures.

It was gratifying to experience the thoughtfulness and expertise of the firefighters who were the opposite of the fire company of the town of Dawson’s Landing in Mark Twain’s wonderful book, Pudd’nhead Wilson:

“A village fire company does not get much chance to show off, and so when it does get a chance, it makes the most of it. Such citizens of that village (Dawson’s Landing) as were of a thoughtful and judicious temperament did not insure against fire, they insured against the fire company.” 

It was interesting to see firefighters helping to safeguard our home who understood the elements of fire and wind and how to turn them from a possible dangerous disaster into benefits.

The new growth is already striving to turn the still smoldering old vegetation into wildflowers and new Bluestem grasses. I wondered how the ubiquitous and unfeeling conflagration would impact the deer and other animals that inhabit our fields and make them so much more enjoyable. But just today I observed a coyote gingerly dancing across the ashes as he reoriented himself to his new environment. He looked just as any human might look in the aftermath of some catastrophe, a little confused but hopeful Mother Nature knew what she was doing.

Peg and I will take our guidance from Wily and look upon the huge fire as what Peg might call another one of “Jim’s Adventures”. We are eagerly awaiting the emergence of the Indian Blanket and Indian Paintbrush wildflowers that, thanks to the uninvited wildfire, will soon be gracing our prairie home.

Blame Lucy

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Louis and Mary Leakey discovered some early human ancestors in Tanzania, Africa’s Olduvai Gorge in 1959. Donald Johanson discovered who may be our original grandmother in Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley in 1974. He named her Lucy because he was a Beatles fan and listened to the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” right after his discovery. It may be uncharitable to Johanson and paleontology to point out many believe the song was a paean to LSD. On the other hand, those who question Lucy’s bona fides may find solace in this theory.

At the opposite end of those Doubting Thomas’ is the atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins from the University of Oxford who pushed human origins back to as much as five million years ago and posited his meme theory. Dawkins suggests that it is our replicating genes that determine who and what we are and why we behave as we do. One of his famous analogies to explain the evolution of human biology and behavior is to suggest we envision a long line of mothers holding hands all the way back to Lucy. And, as for me, my experiences with my mother and my wife, Peg, convince me there is some credence to the science of the Leakeys, Johanson and Dawkins.

Let’s envision Lucy, our grandmother, in her African cave while our mythical grandfather, call him Adam, goes out to hunt a mastodon for dinner. Adam is struggling with how to trick the massive beast to stampede over a cliff, but Lucy is back home planning for Adam’s return. After Lucy rearranges the lodge pole front door for the tenth time, she surveys the cave’s interior. She is dissatisfied with the position of the bearskin rug she had Adam move just yesterday. She makes a mental note to have Adam shake out the bearskin and figure out a way to attach it to the granite wall of the cave.

Next, Lucy inventories the two stone cooking utensils that Adam carved out for her last week and decides she must have another small one for their new baby’s meals. Lucy switches the positions of the two vessels for the third time. They look better to her now. Lucy gives the baby a bath in the stream running in front of their cave and realizes with only a few days of work with his stone hoe Adam could divert water right to their cave. Lucy resolves to mention her idea to Adam over a handful of fermenting blackberries when he returns.

Meanwhile Adam is full of a sense of accomplishment because he has skinned the mastodon and is hauling the hide, one ivory tusk and a huge chunk of meat back for Lucy to admire. Adam assumes his work is done for a week or two because Lucy will need to tan the hide, process the meat and make sewing needles from the tusk as she cooks dinner and nurses the baby.

Gentle Reader, you may wonder, or you may not care, why we are discussing the lives of Lucy, Adam and baby from thousands of years ago. Well, I will tell you. About three years ago Peg and I moved into our cabin on the prairie. By unspoken agreement Peg took over all space but my barn. This worked out fine until over the two years of COVID Peg had time to organize every inch of her Girl Cave, the Bunkhouse, the Cabin and even the neutral territory of our garage. Last week spring truly arrived and Peg turned her gaze on my barn. It has not been pretty.

As long as she did not have to look at my laissez-faire system of “if it ain’t in my way, why worry about it”, well, she didn’t worry herself with it. But once she opened the overhead doors and found the mother lode of “my stuff”, she focused her female/Lucy type DNA upon my space. It reminded me of when my sainted mother would venture into my room on a Saturday morning and turn it upside down. Peg and Mom and Lucy and all wives and mothers in between have spent about two million years of two X chromosomal fixation with organization of sons’ and husbands’ behavior. I guess my three-year barn reprieve is over.

Happy Birthday, Peg!

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Happy Birthday, Peg! Photo by Jim Redwine

We are almost one full month into spring, the season of renewal for some wives and ennui for their husbands. There is something about damp earth that calls out to such wives as Peg much as the Sirens called out to the crew of Ulysses. Though it would not be politically correct, the Devil is pushing me to try to lash Peg to the steering wheel of her Mini Cooper so she cannot frequent every garden center within twenty-five miles of our cabin.

Peg must have beaucoup amounts of potting soil, countless plants and varieties of seeds, containers of metal, clay and plastic and every conceivable fertilizer and pesticide that is touted by Peg’s countless Facebook friends as the newest miracle agents to produce award winning vegetables and flowers. Of course, beds must be prepared and organized by color, variety, time of planting and varmint prevention. Do you need to ask, Gentle Reader, whom Peg has in mind for these tasks?

I am not a Nancy Reagan type of astrology buff but I do wonder if Peg’s birthday that falls during the first half of April may have influenced her pathological need to commune with the earth. I offer the following horoscope (taken from the internet) as evidence to support my position: under the sign of Aries the first half of April, “Is an amazing time to chase your most precious goals.” I should also include the astrological caution that April will be, “a month of ups and downs”; that will certainly be true for me as I follow Peg’s orders.

I am aware that one must not fall into the Cassandra dilemma of ignoring the claimed wisdom of the stars. You may recall that Cassandra had been both blessed and cursed by the gods. She had the gift of prophecy but no one would believe her so disaster still occurred, including the fall of Troy in Homer’s The Illiad. Therefore, I will keep in mind the prediction in Peg’s horoscope that April will be a great time for her to reach her spring goals of recreating the Gardens of Babylon on the rocky, arid soil of JPeg Osage Ranch. However, I see nothing in any bird entrails or other devices of divination that calls for me to be involved.

The problem is, just as Cassandra, I may be correct but Peg refuses to recognize it. Her position is that my lot is cast as her garden Sherpa and I had better get off the couch. The only saving grace that I see is that both football and basketball seasons are over, the World Series is months from now and the Cardinals probably won’t be involved anyway. And, by the time you read this article, the 2022 Masters Golf Tournament will be history. Perhaps the better part of valor is for me to just accept my fate and conceal my amusement when the deer eat the tops off of everything Peg has planted but the marigolds.

Happy Birthday, Peg!