the Walnut Diary

I had carefully gone over the new hemlock storm door with epoxy, covering knots and any shakes which could potentially cause slivers. Then it was time to leave the stuff alone so that it could set. So I got into the Kioti and went for a drive through the woodlot. It was the right time of year, and the rain had stopped.

The surprise was a large pile of fresh, green, black walnuts, just lying there on the ground. The pile adjoined an old metal tank, a relic left by the owners who cleared out in 1966. A rodent had dug a den underneath it. By the hoarding behaviour and the evidence of great industry in the nut collecting, I assumed that the red squirrel had run out of room in the den, and was currently figuring out what to do with his crop surplus. I called my neighbour, Lloyd, and asked him if he would like to steal from a squirrel. He responded with enthusiasm.

Lloyd was impressed by the size of the hoard, and we went to work loading pails full of nuts into the box of the Kioti, both of us chuckling about the fun of stealing from a red squirrel.

Grays earn a farmer’s respect, but reds are nasty little devils, and far too quick of foot. Grays are willing helpers on reforestation projects. Dump a pail of acorns or walnuts in the woods, and about half of them will come up as sprouts. If a red finds them, though, every nut will go into a hollow tree or a deep burrow to rot, with no hope of growth. It is for this reason we hate to see red squirrels hoarding nuts. Grays are scatter hoarders, burying their nuts at the perfect planting depth in the sod, then relying on memory and amazing spatial awareness to find their caches under deep snow. It is impossible to watch a gray emerge from a snowbank with a walnut and not admire the little guy. Of course many nuts are not needed or forgotten, and they get to grow into trees in your flower beds and lawn.

Lloyd and some of his friends are replacing dying ash trees on their property with other growth, and the black walnut tree is showing considerable success and hardiness in the changing ecology of Leeds County, so the nuts will either be planted in late fall, or dumped in likely locations to enlist the help of local gray squirrels.

Here is a link to the research I refer to glancingly in the above entry:

https://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/z03-143

CBC ran Joe Biden’s 25 minute Democratic National Convention address in its entirety.

After all of the propaganda, what I didn’t expect from Joe Biden was a blizzard of ideas crammed into what should have been a one-hour speech.  I had to work very hard to keep up with this series of complex thoughts.  It has been a long time since a political leader has shown intelligence, common sense, and compassion on this level.  Yes, he ad-libbed a bit, primarily when he rethought a complex bit of grammar in a previous sentence, but he made an excellent case for himself as President.  

From time to time in the speech I thought of how Obama would have said this same thing. I realized that he would have gone through the material much more slowly, with plenty of time for applause lines and play to the audience. Joe took the ego out of the performance, but left the pride in his country, ambition, and compassion.

While I loved the sound of Obama’s oratory and appreciated his stagecraft, the simplicity of Joe Biden’s diction belied his speech’s depth and intelligence.

Under the maple trees on the front lawn of my parents’ house, Elizabeth Ann Gibson, aged 19 years, on this day agreed to a name change. Then we returned to Kingston for another year of schooling. The following spring we moved into the family home in Forfar and promptly landed jobs in the community. Two years later we built a raised bungalow in the abandoned orchard on the corner of the farm, and moved out of the sprawling family dwelling.

Forty-eight years later we are again preparing the brick house for a young family, as our son Charlie, Roslyn and Ada prepare to move in for a couple of days a week until the pandemic settles down. All agree that it’s better for four-year-old Ada to spend her week days with her competing grandparents rather than in an Ottawa kindergarten or the Carleton University day care at this unsettled time.

Roz’s parents moved from Burlington to a large house in Kingston to be closer to the new grand-daughter, so in March they were able to accommodate Roz and Charlie working remotely from offices set up in their house while Ada hung out with her grandparents.

But over the long haul, there’s also an opportunity for the house in the country as well, as long as the Internet service remains up to snuff.

The old house seems to like the attention. Its wiring is new. The roof is into its second summer. There is a massive new septic system. Stripping the chestnut trim and redoing the pine floors in the master bedroom took me most of last summer. Removing the wallpaper this month took five days of steamer rental. Charlie is repairing the plaster.

This week I have made two trips to the Portland transfer station with my little diesel tractor and dump trailer, a nine mile round trip each time. To the bemusement of the attendants and assembled pickup owners, I backed my little trailer up to the concrete curb above a huge dumpster, pulled the lever, and dumped 450 pounds of old mason jars and aluminum pots and pans. I did not want to have to shovel broken glass out of a regular trailer, so I had cruised down Forfar Road, Harlem Road, Hwy 15 and The Old Kingston Road at 8 miles per hour. On a subsequent trip this morning I unloaded all of the pickle jars stored under the stairs and in the basement, another day’s work of cleaning and 300 pounds or so. The only remaining glassware now is of high quality in a China cabinet, but I’ll deal with that. The closets and cabinets are now all empty, and the kitchen has upgraded lighting and refurbished ceiling tile.

It has taken me five years to get this far.

While I was gadding about the countryside this morning, my fair Elizabeth chose today as a mow-everything day. She did exactly that, using a succession of three mowers and her string trimmer. Self-actualization may come in unexpected forms with long-married couples, but we’re getting by.

I have just spent a half-hour trying to harass a yearling doe enough for her to leave the area.  She keeps coming back.  Young deer get fixated on eating a particular thing, and nothing can get them to leave it alone.  Back in 2007 the doe-of-the-year wanted a particular walnut tree out of a field of 400.  I swore, threw things, and eventually chased her with the Ranger, but she outlasted me and ate the leaves off the tree.  They promptly grew back, but still…

This one, I’ll call her Ivanka, ate the few surviving bean plants last night.  She also has developed a taste for beet greens — the beets I have been nurturing since the snow flew.  I chased her all over the property with the Kioti side-by-side, but she would just turn around and walk back to the garden each time I desisted.  It’s hard to scare a stubborn young doe.  Eventually I chased her to where another deer was hiding, her twin, perhaps.  It seemed genuinely frightened when I roared into the back field with all lights blazing.  Maybe the fright spread to Ivanka, but I doubt it.

It’s time to go bass fishing.  The tactic I used on the other deer was to deposit fish entrails where she most liked to eat my little trees.  Coyotes LOVE fish heads.  Coyotes are copious urinators.  Deer avoid Coyote urine.

So it’s time to go fishing to protect my beet crop.

The decal on the tiller cover reads 321665 and that must be the serial number.  That makes it an early Troy-Bilt Horse II, with a 6 hp Kohler engine, a single belt with two speeds and two ranges, built in mid-April, 1978.  The vendor, a Mr. Armstrong from Williamsburg, went to the factory in Troy N.Y. to buy it.  He assured me that his pride and joy had never spent a night out of doors, and I believe him.

There are 800,000 registered practitioners of homeopathy in India.  In the villages cow urine is the Covid-19 remedy most considered due to the lack of other stuff.  The Hindu nationalist culture ties strongly to a tradition of health care which goes back thousands of years.

To Tackle a Virus, Indian Officials Peddle Pseudoscience

I have a problem with the cultural assumptions of “pseudoscience.”  It echoes the cries of heresy and sacrilege of earlier eras, both of which were used to give a moral stance to outright economic competition.  For example, most medieval witches were midwives, and their accusers were doctors.

Since penicillin and anaesthetics gave rise to allopathic medicine (the use of pills or injections and painless surgery to cure or repress the symptoms of illness), a pharmaceutical orthodoxy has suppressed other systems of thought.  Only where allopathy could not find an alternative was traditional therapy still tolerated.  Smallpox vaccinations, a hollopathic treatment, continued, though.

In 1909 the Flexner Report funded by the Carnegie Foundation in the United States essentially wiped out a thousand years of medical knowledge as a condition of the funding of medical schools in North America.  Nelson Rockefeller’s oil gave rise to the lucrative pharmaceutical industry well before automobiles were a reliable consumer of his petroleum products.

The benefit that allopathy has brought to Western Civilization is extensive and obvious, but Covid-19 is mocking a set of beliefs which may no longer hold the answer.

What worries me is the rapid degeneration of the Trump Party into a death cult with its musings about the value of human sacrifice to restore the health of the stock market.

The basic value of liberalism holds that society has the duty of care for those least able to help themselves.  By and large Canada has elected leaders who extolled this value.

When I read about the immunity passport as a thing, I get worried.

Images of grandparents on ice floes rapidly blur into Covid-19 outbreaks on cruise ships denied permission to dock.  And then comes the spectre of patients abandoned in nursing homes.

What if the end of the world comes not with a flash, but with a long, uncontrolled slide down a slope?

The more TV exposure Donald Trump gets during the Covid-19 crisis, the more obvious his mental deterioration becomes.  Yesterday’s on-camera speculation on ways to inject ultra violet light and disinfectants into the body will no doubt become enshrined in history along with Nero’s fiddling and Catherine of Russia’s fondness for horses.  At the moment the larger media outlets are apparently trying to avoid coverage of the gaffe, though one alphabet soup network (MSNBC?) is giving it full play.

If this intellectual prostration of the President doesn’t affect the stock market today, it is because Donald Trump is President in name only;  his ship’s wheel is no longer connected to the rudder.

Canada is reeling today in reaction to the killing spree an individual undertook yesterday in Nova Scotia.  Today in an address to the people of Canada Justin Trudeau pursed his lips, looked directly at the journalists, and asked them not to use the name of the individual who killed nineteen people, but rather to do their reporting about the victims.

I agree entirely with this ask.  Please see below my 2018 blog post on the subject:

How do we prevent the next loner terrorist?

First and foremost, stop using the names of those who have committed acts of destruction. It is critically important that the media cease and desist from glorifying the actions and the names of these misfits. That photo of the jerk with the old deer rifle on Parliament Hill has probably done more to promote this brand of nihilism in Canada than any ISIS propaganda.

It’s up to you, Canadian journalists, all of you, to shut down that impulse you all have to make stars of these isolated failures.

I suggest that from this point on we use Orwell’s unperson to identify each wannabe terrorist, providing a simple identifier such as “Parliament Hill unperson” or “London unperson” to distinguish among them.

We must no longer provide the significance of remembering their names.  That tribute is for veterans who gave their lives in service of Canada.

Legislation has required a number of changes in the diction of journalism, particularly in the areas of race relations and gay rights.  Would it be too great an effort for Peter Mansbridge to refrain from rolling the name of the latest miscreant off his tongue and reconfigure his script to avoid saying it?