My Back Yard

Boxes can’t get up and walk away. Can they?

Yesterday I lugged two heavy boxes of Japanese books into the kitchen to weigh down the vinyl flooring. The pretty yet impractical blue-accented white vinyl flooring hasn’t been behaving. It’s lifting up around the edges. So I finally experimented with gluing down one corner.

It’s unusual for me to tackle a home improvement project. I’m more likely to plant flowers or vacuum the rugs. But I had high hopes. I read the instructions on the glue, cleaned the wood underlying the vinyl, and spread the sticky stuff with a brush. Then I checked the glue 30, 45 and 60 minutes afterwards to see if it had reached the right degree of tackiness.

Finally, the glue was ripe. So I grabbed some nearby weights–two boxes of books about Japan. Iggy has been boxing up my collection as a prelude to donating them to a university. If they could help the vinyl adhere, the books would have finally served a practical purpose. I felt good about making creative use of the materials at hand. Surely the flooring couldn’t throw off these heavy containers.

A couple hours later I was surprised to see flooring lifting up. Apparently the boxes had walked away.

Well, they didn’t really walk away. Iggy thought I moved the boxes to criticize him for not getting them out of the house. So he moved them off the flooring and out of the kitchen. I moved them back, but it may be too late to save my glue job.

But at least I have the satisfaction of having tried to make myself handy at home.

The grackles enjoyed two suet squares and my new “water feature”–a bucket with a tiny hole so water drips into the birdbath below. Grackles’ shimmering blue head feathers are their only subtlety, so I’m much happier about the chickadees and woodpeckers that also visit the suet.

Five raccoons spread themselves over two of my neighbors’ trees around 7:30 p.m.–in broad daylight–on Friday night. Rachel Gooseberry, the mother, has four children of varying sizes. Three of the four seem to hang together. Earlier I saw three heads peering over the edge of the birdbath as they stood on the orange plastic chair Iggy put there years ago to ease the squirrels’ access to water. I worry about child number four, the runt.

Also this week:
* Black-eyed Susan’s bloomed in my yard for the first time. They’re transplants from a neighborhood lady’s garden last fall.
* Most of my Oriental lilies bloomed. They got through the season without any beetle infestations. Hurray!
* A couple of my numerous hostas are finally showing buds, long after the neighbors’.
* Some of my bean and cuke plants have flowered.

Away from the garden, Iggy and I biked 18 1/2 miles from Burlington to Bedford to Billerica and back. Turned around after reaching the historic Middlesex Canal.

Iggy didn’t want to get out of bed this morning.

His alarm kept ringing. He’d hit the snooze, then fall still again.

I got up and looked out into the back yard.

“Look, there’s Rachel Gooseberry and the babies!” I said. I’d spotted the little raccoons twining around their mother in the maple tree.

Allan was next to me in a flash. While he has seen Rachel, he has never seen her babies. The opportunity to see them for the first time was more powerful than any alarm clock.

Our next-door neighbors think Rachel’s name is Gooseberry.

I’m a fan of alliteration, so I named the raccoon living in our maple tree Rachel Raccoon.

After Iggy sent his photos of Rachel to Stuart, the neighbor, he learned that Stuart’s kids have dubbed her Gooseberry.

Apparently the neighbors didn’t care for their store-bought berries, so they spilled them out onto their back yard for Rachel to eat. She chomped on some, then spit them out. Hence, Gooseberry.

By the way, I saw Rachel’s kids for the first time on Saturday morning. Three striped faces jockeyed for position under Iggy’s car.