Thursday, June 18, 2009 - Pittsfield MA

Fluff in the Strawberry Patch, Home Farm, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, May 30, 2009

It's wild strawberry season

This year promises to be a good one for wild strawberries. Plant life not adversely affected by the extraordinary rains we've had the last few days, like the wild strawberries in my field, is growing vigorously.

I think this darned leak is finally sealed?

We had another downpour last night - there were no leaks!. You can read about my long struggle to find and seal these two leaks at A Tale of Two Leaks.

Night camp

Wal-Mart Supercenter in Pittsfield MA

Wal-Mart Store #2228, 555 Hubbard Ave./Suite 12, Pittsfield, MA 01201 - (413) 442-1971

Good level parking lot
Verizon cell phone service is good
Verizon EVDO Broadband service is good
Find other Wal-Marts in the area
Check the weather here

It was the Crickets

Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.

It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.

more...