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I’ve saved some pollen in the ol Kenmore Cryobank (assuming refrigeration will preserve it somewhat?) but I’m still waiting to see if this May-December couple will get to live their love.

I have all these caretaker compulsions but little of the willpower. Before leaving the house for the weekend I feel a strong need to finish the dishes and the laundry and clean the cat litter and skim and freeze some chicken broth and tend the plants and make food for the road; I really can’t leave until it’s all squared away; but if I was really going to meet my schedule I probably should have gotten up at 5am. Instead I indulged a funny dream about a world where Helvetica was the only typeface and slept until 9.

[I didn’t really understand this recent NYTimes article on willpower. (Well, I didn’t read it very closely, and I ought to have been working anyway.) Are they suggesting that if I hadn’t eaten all that Nutella straight from the jar before bed, I would have been able to rouse myself earlier?]

So I headed up to Maine a little later than planned. Forty minutes out of the city I noticed that my checklist of roadtrip necessities, which included walnuts and duck eggs, had omitted gasoline. The dashboard light deployed. I couldn’t remember if there were any services on 95. Three exits went by with no designations and I finally took one: Topsfield. I lurched expensively around the ramp and sought any indications of nearby gas stations.

Good sign: Topsfield Road, to Topsfield. Sounds important!
Bad sign: “Road Narrows”
Good: Road gets a double yellow line
Good: Slow, school district
Good: Looks like commercial zone ahead
Really good: Looks like a town center ahead!
Bad: Looks like a scenic town center with village green and congregational church
Salvation: The Cumberland Farms logo. How could this fail me?
Oh: There’s really no gas pumps anywhere near it
Good: Nice kid in Cumberland Farms grins and says “OK, the nearest one is…..”
Hmm: “…one or two miles down Route 1”
Haha: …down a section of Route 1 shaped like the Superman ride

This weird, long-ass, creepy, repetitive Neutral Milk Hotel song was playing the whole time too, by the way. It’s called “Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, or, Will Lisa Reach the Fuel Pumps”. I kept eyeing the waning — then waxing — red sliver at “E”. Anything detectable is good, right?

I did make it. The destination station was actually in Danvers which is easily distinguishable from Topsfield by its characteristic storage unit rentals, long term suites, and continuous adult entertainment. Naturally it was right by the first exit I failed to take off 95.  And thus my dashboard light chorus was reduced to the usual four (Check Engine, Service, blinky up-arrow, and some icon I take to mean faulty flux capacitor) and I sailed on.

Then I got to Maine. Here I am.

I am a sucker for packaging. Sometimes I go to the supermarket and I’ll say to myself, “Oh my, doesn’t that product look nice! If the company that made it cared so much about it to give it such a nice wrapper, it must be very high quality!”

This usually screws me and case in point is Pangea liquid hand soap. Comes in a nice brown bottle with a very nice typeface on it. The soap smells good, but it actually doesn’t really do much apart from coat your hands in gooey perfume. Worse, the soap solidifies on the pump if it’s unused for 6 hours or so, so after that time you need to hit it hard to get any soap out. Usually you get 5x as much soap as you need after you break the dry soap seal. Worse than that, that nice brown container, if it’s near a window and you used the soap the night before, overnight the dry soap seal will get strong, and in the afternoon when the sun is high and the sunlight hits it and warms the bottle the soap will explode out and make the sink sticky. That’s usually 10 or 20 uses of soap right there, every sunny day. So if you use hand soap twice a day, in the morning that’s 5 soaps, then in the afternoon it explodes, that’s 20 or so soaps, and then in the evening if it’s late to break the seal that’s another 5 soaps. So basically that soap doesn’t last so long, which is good because it doesn’t work.

And the packaging that it comes in that supposedly had sweet basil seeds embedded in it, breathlessly waiting to sprout from the landfills and carpet the earth in fragrant herbs? It’s day 10 since we’ve been incubating them under the gro-lite and there’s nothing sprouting but some greenish algae.

This morning I thought I heard my first actual spring robin, chirrup chirree, and I levered myself out of bed and pulled up the blinds. Scanned the side tree and heard him from the back. Checked the back trees — starlings, squirrel — and there on a low branch over my yard he perched, puffy, orange, tooting and laughing for about a minute and then he flitted on.

But I wanted to write about squirrels. I have this complex relationship with the backyard squirrels and I want to be honest about it. I love every living thing including cockroaches and especially including slime mold but last year I hated these squirrels. I don’t know if it’ll be the same this year.

I hated the squirrel aubade at dawn. I did not know squirrels did this but every early morning last summer this one somewhat piebald, scraggly individual sat with his motheaten tail over his head on a dead branch about two feet from my bedroom window, scratched at his mites, and squawked the squirrel welcome to the day. It was harsh, loud, and interminable. His stupid squirrel voice chittered and rasped and squealed and even vomited out his message: Hello world! O happy day! This is my yard! That’s right! In case you do not remember me from every other miserable dawn, it is I!  Squirrel!  Today I have quite an appetite for garden vegetables and a general exuberance for life’s offerings, but I will continue to be careful crossing the street!

Did I really want him dead? Well, did I not have cause? He (or one of his children) ate every one of the green strawberries that blushingly presented itself from the pot on my deck; dug up the bean seedlings as they sprouted; pulled off the green tomatoes in the garden and left them squirrel-chomped on a railing. (Can a squirrel not appreciate ripe fruit? Or was it just a tragedy of the commons and competition that he was forced to pluck the sour fruit before another philistine squirrel got to it? You know it’s that kind of attitude that would lead him, given the right technology, to genetically modify tomatoes so they can’t taste good and then ship them to stores nationwide, all for a lousy buck…)

Following advice from the internets, I tried to protect my seedlings with bits of sharp broken pottery and then the liberal application of hot pepper oil. The pottery turned out to be a fun challenge for him to dig through but at first the chili oil seemed to work. The beans would go untouched for a whole week and then I would reapply. But naturally Mr. Squirrel developed a taste for it. I started to find him on the deck in the morning licking the oil off whatever leaves remained. I’d lunge at him through the window and he’d look back at me saucily: what then? Don’t make me come out there! He always did. When I’d given up on my deck plantings I would still notice the chili oil bottle out there getting moved around and squirrelhandled, tufts of gray fur sticking to the cap.

Yes, he reproduced mightily. His line of offspring would cascade joyously around my yard, up and down the trees, squealing. They tussled and groomed. They curled up and slept in the crooks of trees. OK, they were cute. But I hated their success and all it signified.

Starting around October squirrels everywhere got a lot more serious. No frolicking; just businesslike caching and hunting and planning. The morning songs had stopped long ago. Other than hearing them in the very walls and ceiling from time to time, when it was frigid outside, my relationship with the squirrels has been cool and distant for months. But I am still carrying quite a bit of baggage into this spring. And am hoping for enlightenment, or stronger peppers.

More signs of spring in the city:

• Downy woodpecker sounding his snare against our neighboring trees. I thought I heard him a few weeks back, too, but it may have been water furiously melting off the roof.
• Flock of robins on the city hall lawn. Didn’t hear them singing but did hear:
• A mockingbird mocking robins. “Yeah, and robins, you’re totally all like, chirrup cheerily chippaw, and hey seagulls, you’re all, cree, cree!, oh hey and chickadees you know what you are? You’re like, chickadeedeedee! Yeah that’s right! I said it!”
• Two red-tailed hawks engaged in what looked a lot like mid-air flirting and frollicking
• The season’s first cat hairball

In the country:

• Dopey fireflies looking somewhat nonplussed to be out and about on tree bark and shingles. What is it, 40 degrees out? What were we thinking?
• Something that may well have been a red-winged blackbird. It was black! It darted into reeds!

Well I wasn’t in the country very long. Checked quickly on the bees. They looked groggy yet restless, like someone waking up on the living room floor after a party’s wound down and trying to find his things. Except imagine 20,000 people at that party all doing that.

JinxGuard: I hope I have 20,000 bees! I hope I have 50,000! Won’t check for another week at least.

At the age of 30, I’ve finally gone and gotten my ears pierced. Topologically this changes me from a genus 3 surface (gastrointestinal tract + 2 nasal passages; everything else is a “dead end” and therefore unimportant) to genus 5.

What is cooler than topology?

This paper is devoted to investigating the quasiperiodic route to chaos in the four-dimensional piecewise-smooth autonomous model of a control system with hysteresis. We show how the quasiperiodic trajectory may lie on different kinds of two dimensional tori, including single-, double-, and quintuple-turn tori. We also present a detailed analysis of a scenario for the destruction of two-dimensional torus through a homoclinic bifurcation.
Zhusubaliyev, Z.T. , Soukhoterin, E., Mosekilde, E.

Can you believe these guys?

The unusual plant in the background is a hybrid of sorts. What you do is, take a spider plant. Bury some sprouted potatoes in with it. Sit back and watch!

Well, I managed to keep one amaryllis bulb going for a year and now he’s poking his head up again. Meanwhile the xmas bulb is still going strong (on his second blooming stalk — they do that?). So I’m thinking I should be able to cross them even if there are a few days in between their bloomings. I was imagining that it would involve a q-tip although that conjures up something creepy I read once about cats in heat.

Anyway, I am happy to discover Mr. Brown Thumb and his recommendations for amaryllis pollination! And the ghetto greenhouse technology! I will try to self-pollinate and/or cross these guys!

I ordered a sock-knitting kit from vanCalcar Acres sheep farm and was cuted out that they are running behind on shipments due to the recent birth of lambs. I’ll totally wait for people to dote on lambs! There have been quite a few sets born recently at Drumlin Farm, too, where I volunteer. Things that are cool about lambs:

• They can pretty much walk as soon as they’re born. You try that, humans!
• They are born with wool but still manage to have wrinkly skin like shar-peis.
• You can fit like 4 of them in a ewe. With hooves and everything. I can’t imagine.

Something about sheep always looks so placid and even wise, to me. Hi my name is Lisa and I anthropomorphize!

One way to tell it’s spring, and dawn, is the song of the mourning dove. I first heard him about three weeks ago. I don’t think he’s too nearby, but he’s loud, and about the earliest riser around.

Imagine if we mourned like that. Waking up just before it’s light and keening a lovely, minimal tune for three seconds. Pause, then repeat, for an hour, two. The spaces between the singing feel mournful too because your ear is still tuned to it and waiting for it.

Is my neighborhood dove in mourning? The typical explication is that he is announcing his territory, or calling for a mate. I’m sure that’s true. But he must know how he sounds. I doubt it means nothing. He may mourn. He may startle awake each daybreak. We don’t know how long he sits there before he remembers his duties and flutters to a limb, and starts to call, committed to life’s business, all the while grieving something the other birds don’t know.