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.

Happy feet

After intense deliberation at the massively attended Sandisfield Cultural Council meeting last night, little Beaver has been elected to the board as Grant Coordinator. She will be in charge of deciding what lucky artists, senior citizens and Brownie Troups will get to do what with how much money in the upcoming year.

She is very pleased to step one foot closer to small town immersion, and is also eagerly awaiting the outcome of an interview she has on Friday to write for the region's daily paper, the Pulitzer Prize winning Berkshire Beagle. She has met several local Beavers who are quite active in the small, but strong-willed intellectual sector of Sandisfield, including one bubbly lady who never wears shoes.

This resistance to shoe wearing is something that Beaver has pondered in the past, and she has concluded that it has little to do with one's economical status, and everything to do with one's outlook on life. Some people just find them constraining. Beaver is always cold, so she can't quite understand why one would go without, but she is pleased to meet some new creatures, footwear free, or not.

Tag sales and joint tape

A recent purchase of a 1950's vintage General Electric clock radio at a local tag sale earned Beaver the chance to visit a mini-white house on the river that she'd always admired. Beaver was curious whether the handsome thing worked or not, and the owner of the house invited her inside to try.

The clock, she explained, was used by her Uncle to play music to his cows. The house had taken her twenty years to renovate, "and look", she said, gesturing upstairs, "it isn't even finished yet".

This is the reply of most Sandisfieldians when Beaver says she is renovating a house up the hill. "Take it room by room," they say. "Go slowly." "Triple any estimate." "Start with the most important thing." Underlining everything is the insistence to keep a sense of humor in the face of leaking roofs, hornet invasions, mice, even termites. A sturdy suggestion to do the best you can, and to laugh when the going gets expensive.

Humor is essential when applying joint tape, especially to the cracking corners of a molded kitchen ceiling. Spray bottle of bleach in hand, Beaver mounts her ladder, and with a single spritz she is dowsed with a gentle rain of Clorox right in her eyes. She toils, nearly upside down, scrubbing the spotted ceiling, rubbing her furry head against the omnipresent bleach. It's certainly cheaper than highlights.

Joint tape. Joint compound. Messy, messy, messy. It oozes and goozes and drips on the floor, it cracks at will and disobeys her spatula. And yet she persists. Dreams of a white kitchen call her to move on.

Acquisition of a duck

After a week in the financial quicksands of Manhattan, Beaver and Domo are back in their red house, and green things are sprouting. There is something suspect happening in the right end of their yard; a knotted root of red that smells like mint and onion. Will it be rhubarb? Or some kind of flower? Impossible to tell when one has a webbed paw instead of a green thumb.

After three weeks of struggles with acorns, gum wrappers, and nibbled insulation, Beaver and Domo have a dining room floor. In days of yore, the dining room was one foot higher than the living room for no other reason than the particular owner felt like building up. The floor ended halfway near the wall, revealing woodland depths of dirt and earth below. The radiator sat in the middle of the room, blocking any possibility of installing a proper table. The pantry was a veritable labyrinth of slanting shelves of varying sizes, books were placed with great risk and hazard to never be removed. The ceiling fan had been installed a convenient two inches from the southern wall so that it rocked back and forth and rubbed shoulders with sheet rock each time it was turned on. In short, the dining room was a place of heavy haunting, the last place in the house where one would choose to dine.

But thanks to the Macaw carpenter from Chicopee, it is no longer the pariah of the household and lacks only some salvaged barn wood flooring to make its transition complete. The completion of one room out of seven makes our couple very happy, as does the addition of their new pet duck, Mylo. Mylo is a little mallard they found wandering in the mud after the three day deluge last week. He likes peanut butter rice cakes and green chili and a host of other foods that are difficult to find, but Beaver has taken quite a liking to her duck and it's a pleasure to spoil him in the messy red house.

In other news of late, Beaver has found a nice little shop that sells 8 grapefruits for two dollars. And that's all the news that's fit to print.

If you can't take the heat...

Is there anything more unnerving than having a professional visit your abode for such and such a problem, only to find after the obligatory elapse of 17 hours that he's only made it worse? How do badgers do that? How do they time it so you go to sleep smiling, the check in the mail, and you wake up with no heat in the house, the check already cashed?

It's a perpetual thirty degrees out and Beaver's been toiling in long Johns and a cap, a hot water bottle on her trembling webbed feet. She can work under these conditions, but she dislikes paying someone to make these conditions so. The more the Little Red House gets roughed up by professionals, the more things fall apart.

Kimchi, mon amour

The impossible has happened. Poor little Beaver, a devotee of fermented Korean cabbage since her earliest, furriest beginnings, has been forced to keep her beloved kimchi in a heavy duty contractor bag in the middle of the yard, so repugnant is its smell to her Domo. When she lived in Brooklyland, she wasn't allowed to bring it to her office. Her longings to eat it for breakfast were rebuffed by those around her. But finally, enfin, enfin, it appears she might have found a potential partner in brine. A friendly tabby cat of a neighbor handed her the phone number today of a mysterious duckling who wants to start a kimchi farm. Beaver huddles near the fire in her home as the snow outside keeps falling. There is nothing she would like more than to start a kimchi farm with a duckling! Could her prayers be answered? Will she really find an outlet for Korean cuisine in the middle of the rural hilltops of snowy Massachusetts? Stay tuned. Bring mints. Things are gonna get stinky.

Good luck, Chuck

A key, divided and welded back together. A penny under every single floorboard. A computer chip fashioned to look like a smiley face. It seems the former owner of the little red house was quite obsessed with talismans. The more that Beaver and Domo chew through all the things that were built incorrectly, the more tiny charms they find. Mr. Fix-Nothing put up a beam to support a ceiling that didn't quite reach high enough-- he plopped a good luck penny on top of it in hopes that the roof wouldn't fall.

But when it comes to supporting an entire structure, painted feathers only go so far. Beaver has a jar full of Mr. Fix-Nothing's thingamajigs, but if the house hasn't fallen, it's thanks more to the teamwork of Sir Domo and his new sidekick, the carpenter, a macaw from Chicopee who works fast, and clean.