More Spring News: Woodchips and Thoughts about Collecting

Saturday, March 27th, I had big plans to burn several large piles of wood (fallen tree limbs, branches, twigs,cut bittersweet, plus odds and ends of building materials that always end up at the cabin). Renters always haul lobster buoys, rocks, shells, and other detritus that ends up on the beach to the cabin, and there's no stopping this URGE to collect, so beach driftwood and building stuff ends up there too.

Collecting is what some of the curious do with time on their hands. I believe it to be a harmless variant of the urge toward war: Get the most goodies, and you win. I know one woman whose house is so full of stuff (every closet is full of empty boxes she might need, or perhaps they're a form of insulation), and when I say, "Edie, you have so much stuff," she turns to me and smiles, "I do have a lot of things," and she's obviously secretly so pleased. Truly, every broken dish is glued back together and put back on the shelf. She has a drawer where there are pencil stubs dating from the 1940s. Dare touch or move something, perhaps throw out a yogurt container that no longer has a top, and she'll haul it out of the recycyling bin.

Our cabin is not immune to the pleasures of collecting. Some of the things I find in the cabin at the end of the season are priceless: paintings on rocks hauled up are a particular pleasure.

At any rate, because of the earlier near-hurricane and a lot of blow-down, the island Fire Marshall, Dickie Clark, said "No fires," though the mainland fire code was favorable. Change of plans: I hired a fellow to chip wood I hauled out to a favorable spot. Hauling wood through the woods isn't easy, but as there was a large maple that had fallen over the road that lead to where I wanted to bring the chipper, there wasn't much choice. The good news is that I have a huge pile of chips to lay on the path that goes from the middle of my father's land at a gap in the rock wall down past my yurt to the cabin. Also, I'll have good hard-wood chips for the garden paths and to lay around the new apple tree I planted last fall and the Japanese Maple that I am nurturing at my home in town. The landscaping continues.

I'm less of a collector, more of an esthete: I like space--lots of empty space. In the space, I have places to go. If there's too much stuff, I can't see the larger geometry, the curves, lines, and more importantly the things humans didn't make. I can't get past the human noise to hear the rain, watch the birds, wander easily in my wonders about plans, ideas--I need space to think. The collectors perplex me. There's still a rock a former boyfriend left by the path, some 5 years ago--it probably weighs about 30 lbs. He had piled a lot of things in a frail shopping cart, and he wanted to put that rock in there too, except the weight of it caused the metal rod between the wheels to buckle, so it was left behind. Every time I see that rock, I wonder, "What in god's name was he going to do with that flat rock, the sort of which you can find anywhere, and why in god's name did he think I would be delighted to haul it from Maine all the way to Massachusetts?" But, another friend had hauled huge rocks all the way from Australia to Maine, so clearly, he isn't alone in the desire.

Spring News: Bittersweet and Landscaping

Every Fall for the past three years, I've battled it out with the bittersweet plants. Rumored to have been introduced to the island by the Navy during WWII, since it grows quickly and thus obscures telephone lines, roads, the like, it has come to take over anything in its path. It snakes up trees and over bushes (including our lovely high bush blueberries that grow throughout our property), and strangles them. It crawls into cracks in a house and plies apart the boards.

I've cut down huge patches of it in the Fall, only to see it just as vibrant in the Spring. Then I used the poison "Round Up" on the leaves. That would kill a certain amount of the bush, but not enough to be economical. And the lobstermen worry the poison leaches into the ocean. Therefore, I now cut the bittersweet to the ground and conservatively paint the cut plant as close to the ground as possible, so the poison goes quickly to the roots. This seems to be working and involves a lot less of the poison.

I also strip the leaves off any shoot I find, since if the plant can't get sunlight, it can't continue to expand. This also works, at least on the young new shoots.

Having cut down a huge swath at the edge of our lawn, there is a lot of burning to do, and then carefully painting just the cut end close to the ground with the "Round Up." My hope is to again have a small bunch of apple trees at the edge of the lawn. There are some old ones that were planted probably in the late 1800s or early 1900s, but they still produce apples that make the best apple pies and apple sauce I've ever had.