Going out the window

When you are a freelancer, like Beaver and her Domo, money tends to visit you like a pair of parents. It rushes in one weekend and makes itself busy, cleaning things up, cleaning things out, bringing great hope and small presents. And just as soon as it came, it is gone come Monday morning, the house is quiet and creaky, the roof continues to leak.

Checks come in late from numerous sources and are quickly dispersed with tailored marching orders. Off they go to the plumber, to the electrician, to the overzealous snow plower with his great big rumbling truck. Off march our proud, silver dollars to the lender of our mortgage, to the GMAC dealership, to the softspoken man who suggested new tires. Our cash will pay a visit to the horror of all sights, the dreaded fuel truck reaping havoc upon Sandisfield with his hose and his dark liquid the color of squashed dreams. Gallons and gallons are poured into our house, and the oil in pipes has its marching orders, too. Out through the cracks, out through the crannies, out through the acres of weathered insulation goes our heat and cash.

Next year, next year, we whisper under covers. We'll fix the roof, we'll protect all the walls. We'll cover the red house with a gigantic bell jar, and safe will we be from those horrid, harried trucks and the fuelmongers who drive them. They, too, are frightened at night when the temperature dips and the moon starts to shine and their very large canons sit outside waiting and gasping as everything fails.

Get a gander on that dander

Is it the time of year? The relentless snow? Or caged-up paranoia? She moves throughout the house, and the house is filled with cat hair. Cat hair in her noodle soup, cat hair on her trousers, in the shower drain, in the far right corner of every step in the house. The cat hair is black, the cat hair is white, the cat hair is not the color of her actual cat. Mylo never shed before. Is he getting ready for spring? Or is he getting ready for flight?

Leafing September

Before, she thought of them only in leaf piles...crisp pyramids from a fragrant past. Jumping or crashing into a world of certain maybes, sometimes wet and scary. The little bugs. The worms.

But now they fall most everywhere around her, and their presence feels different. Nostalgic, but changed. What are these things that have to be raked? How is it possible- there are so very many- tumbling in somersaults down from the sky. What is the use of putting them in piles? What will become of the grass underneath? How is it that these leaves used to be "dealt with"...They fell, and then they disappeared, ushered away by modern contraptions buzzing in the hands of men with red T-shirts.

Here, there is no buzzing, no humming, no logo-printed truck to take them all away. They fall and keep falling, covering her house in such physical rain.

The 100 Year Floodplain

Good news from country. The beaver's leaky roof, which has instilled great fear and contempt in the three little creatures living under it as of late, has stopped leaking. Several days ago, brave Domo took to the tippy-top of the red house, and started working on it with an Exacto knife, following an ancient technique employed by his grandfather, an artisan pipe maker.

Fear lingered late last night when an belated thunderstorm moved in on the town, sending down torrents of rain and other-worldly lightening upon the little house. Little Beaver crept into the living room with much apprehension to find her duck, Mylo, setting happily on the couch. A couch that was dry
for the first time this season. She checked the other leaky spots that Domo had highlighted with glow-in-the-dark tape, and they too were dry as could be.

Hippity-hop, could the news get any better? Lady Beaver has been working for the Beagle following all sorts of exciting hallmarks such as the acquisition of a brand new Sander for the town of Otis, and a dispute over a roof right here in Sandisfield. Indeed, leaky roofs plague the South County mountains almost as frequently as Mayflies. It remains to be seen if last night was a fluke, but for the moment, we've got two little Beavers, sitting high, dry and happy in their little red house.