Porter made a bonfire in the fire circle -- filling a cardboard box with sticks and setting it alight.  It was a cool evening, but the aggressive spring mosquitos pushed me too close to the fire and smoke.  My naked ankles taunted and tempted them.  Porter methodically sharpened a maple stick to a trident of perfect tines, and he and Nico toasted marshmallows.  A woodcock whuttered rapidly by in the dimness with the cats in futile pursuit.

I stayed up late reading a novel, but was shaken out of it by a shrieking, snarling brawl in the climbing tree.  Two raccoons were fighting -- or at least one was.  The bigger one, making plaintive-sounding noises would approach the smaller angry one, which would attack, snarling, chittering and biting.  The big one would just push on, infuriating the other one even more.  It's the wrong time of year for raccoon courtship, so maybe it was a pair of males fighting - or tough love from a parent driving off a young-un.  Whatever it was, they made a shocking amount of noise and had the whole house up at 1 a.m.

Sun and springtime arriving . . . 

    Finally.

We brought out the grill on Sunday and had friends over for the beautiful, sunny, breezy day.  The kids played, the adults sat or wandered and chatted and drank their beer.  And oh, the shishkabobs were luscious -- lamb, pork and chicken, with grilled squash, onions, peppers, tomatoes.

Andy's fine.

The bump's benign.

They'll nick it out soon

(on the 1st of June).

The Paper Airplanes are Flying!

I can see this is going to be an adventure in medical technologies.  

Today it was an MRI.

After they have subdued you with paperwork, they strip you of your metal -- leaving you with your tooth fillings, your pants' zipper and the eyelets of your boots.  With cheery talk of claustrophobia, they immobilize your head in a vaguely spanish-inquisitionish device and slide you deep into a torpedo-tube.  At the last moment, they slip a panic button into your hands just in case.  (In case of what?  They don't say, but probably it has something to do with the bits of metal you've just claimed to not have in or around your body.)  With your eyes closed and a distracting injunction against swallowing or twitching overmuch -- it's hard to tell what's going on.  But judging by the sounds, they apparently bring out a dozen or so dwarves with pickaxes, tongs and jackhammers to go to work on the outside of the tube.

After an entertaining twenty minutes of that, they bring you back out, and if you don't have nice big sewer-pipe veins like I don't, they poke around with a needle until they can tap into your wrist so as to fill your tissues with gadolinium.  It's a rare-earth mineral that hardly ever ruins your kidneys and almost never gives you an exoskeleton.  It makes pretty tumor pictures.

The dwarves aren't visible within the still-immobilized visual scope, but they are still around somewhere.  And sure enough as soon as I'm reinserted into the tube, they start up with their jackhammering.  And so it goes . . . . 

A resplendent old turkey gobbler made his stately way across the yard, pausing to tug on a stem and scratch over a bed of leaves.  He hopped up onto the stone wall, stepped down on the other side and, blending gradually into the wet and shiny forest, strolled away.

I've gotten along by letting my body heal itself -- avoiding doctors pretty much. I am trying to recall how many doctors' visits I've had in the last 15 years. 2 in Rhode Island to get antibiotics for Lyme disease; before that you'd have to go back to an exam in Maine when I got on Colby's insurance system (2001); once in Kazakhstan because I thought I might have a hernia (1996); once prior to Kazakhstan to get our shots (1994). So (unless you count the pre-marriage blood-test -- 1996) 5 times in 15 years .

That spotty record is a product of equal parts skeptical philosophy, laziness and avoidance.

But now I must suffer medicine's clammy, unwelcoming embrace because I've got a parotid tumor along my jaw. Ignoring it for the past 2 or 3 years hasn't caused it to go away - on the contrary. And when George, our friend the M.D., finally spotted it, the jig was up. So, I'm probably looking at surgery coming up. 80% of these things are benign, so the hope is for a straightforward removal of the lump. I'll know more on Thursday, when I've got results from the biopsy and MRI.

Each day the dawn chorus rings out more richly.  This morning the towhee has arrived: "Drink your tea!"

I spent a weekend camping with the boy scouts -- and came down with a malicious head cold.

April's blackflies gave the forest a relentless flicker and my head was over-stuffed with an intrusive pulsing.  For reading, I'd brought Kosinski's Being There, a satire that plays on the charisma of Chauncy Gardiner as an archetypal wise fool.  Sexless, without ambition or self-regard, Gardiner perplexes and seduces the strivers in the story.  All in all, a strange book to read amid the clangor and striving and violence of camp with four men and 17 adolescent boys.  I envied the calm, cool, dewy emptiness of the fool's mind.

We hiked five miles in sudden mid-80's heat, which I guess kept the mucus from settling too much in one place.  Leafless trees gave only pale striation of shade and the boys were quickly out of water.  The Scoutmaster lets them make their mistakes and learn from them, but we helped them plot a shorter route back to camp.

The scouts cooked their dinner with a clamorous mix of hilarity, recrimination and greasefire.  I slouched off to sit on a rock and watch a pair of chickadees homesteading in a stump.  The bird would enter the old woodpecker cavity, vanish for a moment, then flit out to a nearby hemlock.  If you looked close you could see it drop a fleck of sawdust from its beak before it flicked back into the hole.

Philip and Jacob were over in the afternoon.  The four boys played in the backyard -- killing each other again and again.  They called it man-hunt; when I was a kid in our neighborhood we called it army; my father and grandfather probably called it cowboys and indians or cops and robbers.  The rules always are simple -- when someone is in sight and a person makes the right call -- some version of bang you're dead! -- another person has to fall to the ground (with greater or lesser degrees of theatricality) and count down the required amount.  Then they revive and it begins again.

But the simplicity of this play can't obscure the real game, which is of politics and power.  The nuances of rule and rule-break are negotiated at every turn and every boy (do girls even play this?) -- every boy tries out their strategies and tactics, from violence to argument to cajolery to tears and the threat to quit the game.

Everything important that I know about power and its limits, I first learned at play with other boys and girls.

The warm-blooded skunk cabbage is the first to shrug off the winter leaves.

Vernal pools are alive with arthropods.  The midges, with their innocent, feathery antennae, swarm from the earth at my every step.

A mourning cloak emerges faded from hibernation and basks on a sunny rock.

I startle a pair of blue jays from an apple thicket and they fly off -- oddly silent.  

Do jays fall mute at nesting time?

The hawks are not quiet -- a red-tailed screams at me in annoyance and rides the wind away to the south.

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With Nico the chessmen escape their rigid hierarchies and make unfamiliar moves.

Today they rode the carpet sea on a ship: and a silk scarf sail billowed from their flashlight mast.

His abuela said she didn't want to see pictures of long-haired Porter, but here they are . . .

I heard the discordant call of a phoebe in the yard today.  If the flycatchers have arrived can spring be far off?

I'm bothered by things that I can't comprehend as a whole -- at least after I've tried and failed to grasp them. 

It's like that with electricity and electrical devices for me. I just don't understand how electricity works.  There seem to be too many properties at work or something.

I just take their word for it that it's best to connect the ridged wires to the silver screw and the smooth wires to the brass screws -- but I don't like it.

The house graveyard of dysfunctional lamps was growing, and so I had to take up my wire strippers and needle-nose pliers and start swapping parts around to get a few going again.  And when I plugged it all in nothing caught fire, though I couldn't tell you why not.