Eugenious

Mom ate matchsticks when she was pregnant with me. I’ve had a serious urge to chew piece after piece of Xylichew spearmint gum; it’s so fresh-tasting it’s like picking mint leaves from the backyard up on the farm where I grew up. Brushing my teeth with Tom’s of Maine spearmint toothpaste is also a treat these days. And I want to smell asphalt. I’ve actually detoured onto Ferry Street so I can walk past the utility construction and smell the fresh asphalt. Before I scare any of the grandparents with thoughts of a brain-damaged baby, I don’t actually kneel down and inhale the fumes — I just appreciate them on my way through.

Yesterday, my employer chipped up some toppled trees and branches from his patch of Oregon forest. He likes the pattern of the lowest understory, the 5-12 inch non-woody plants, so he clears out some woody debris each year to make room for those small plants. I wanted to eat the resulting heady mixture of wood chips, hemlock and fir needles, lichen, and other forest detritus. I picked up a handful and slid it into my sandwich container so it could come home with me.

And even before my surreptitious wood chip-sniffing, I experienced another spring pleasure — a Swainson’s thrush (I think) calling in the treetops. Thrush songs stop me in my tracks; they’re so beautiful and clear and flutelike.

Finally, there’s a family of western screech owls living in a birch tree between our “broken house” (that which is being renovated) and our serviceable rental which is delightfully close to Prince Puckler’s Ice Cream (Sylvan and I were home and even awake when Barack got a cone there last Saturday, yet we still missed him. My politician-dar must have been down.). The owls, of which there are at least three — and possibly four — peek out of the holes in a tree between Harris and Potter on West 21st Avenue. The tree is, for you locals, the westernmost birch of the three mature ones on the south side of the street. The owls are remarkably well-camouflaged on the gray, aging birch. I bet the folks in that neighborhood don’t have any mouse problems.

This entry was posted in the categories Julie, outdoors by julie on Tuesday, 20 May 2008, 15:56. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.