So what happened to Friday's post, which did not go live on Saturday evening? Well, it was the bonus book review. Two other writing tasks took priority.
1. I gave another blog the butterfly post I'd written for this week, so I had to finish the next post about the next butterfly. And it's a spectacular butterfly, one loved as passionately as North Americans love our Monarchs, for most of the same reasons.
All the swallowtail butterflies are great gorgeous things--and the tropical birdwing family, whose place on an alphabetical list of swallowtail species means we'll get to them later this year, are the biggest and showiest of all. (A photo I did not gank, but Google can find it for you, shows this week's big rose swallowtail pinned in a display case next to a birdwing swallowtail. The birdwing is at least twice the size of the rose.) The first butterflies I noticed, as a child, were a couple of Tiger Swallowtails. They were one of the odd couples, yellow male, black female. I named them Spot and Stripe, and then called the next few butterflies I saw "Spot's Friend and Stripe's Friend." I was five years old. But I don't remember being disappointed that Spot and Stripe also had smaller friends, or maybe pets, the Spring Azures. Small and common though they are, the blue butterflies are interesting and ecologically valuable too. So are the copper, sulfur, and brown families. We'll not get to them this year but that's because of the hoary tradition of discussing the swallowtails first in butterfly books, not because the smaller butterflies aren't interesting. In fact some of the small ones have the most unusual stories.
And butterflies actually help farmers control "weeds"! They don't keep weeds from surviving and spreading into the garden, because they're not meant to destroy their own food supply. Farmers still have to remove weeds from fields...and while previous generations tried to do that by poisoning the fields, modern technology offers much healthier ways. Apart from our own health, yet another reason why farmers need to be making the move away from "pesticide" sprays is that nearly all butterflies eat weeds, and most pollinate flowers or even food crops. We think of butterflies mostly as pretty little decorations in this world. That's a mistake. We actually need them.
2. And I wanted to write a long, thoughtful review of a book I previewed on Goodreads, Netgalley, and Librarything last winter, which is due to hit the bookstores this Tuesday. That book was worth a long post as well. It's Tim Tebow's inspirational book for unusually mature, thoughtful, serious kids and for young adults. He wrote the book to be accessible to ten-year-old football fans but don't be surprised if they leave it on the shelf until they're in college. It is worth the attention of readers who are in, or have come out of, college.
It's also jolly high time for reviews of some other books whose authors and/or publishers have sent me review copies, and I'm delighted to report that I finished a long project last week and should be doing more reading this week, though the new book reviews won't appear here all at once. For them, too, quick short reviews will appear on Good Reads and Library Thing (more ways of typing for the search engines by all means!) right away. Longer reviews will appear here in due course.
When I read a preview copy well before publication date I like to ask the author, publisher, or agent whether they want the full-length review right away or when the book becomes available to the public. Some opt for the review in advance with further mention of the book when it's published, some for the review on the official date of publication. Tebow wanted the review on Tuesday so that's when you'll see it.
So today...
So writing those two posts took up the night, kept the light on and shadows on the windows...which left the Professional Bad Neighbor, who was back on his feet...concentrating his attention, I fear, on a relative's unoccupied house. \
That house needs to be refurbished and occupied by some relatives who are aware of how much we need our native plants and butterflies and birds and so on, and of what's been happening to our whole neighborhood and why. They need to know that there's room for questions about what went wrong with those well-kept bees, and even with some possible contributory factors to the mysterious disease that caused the beekeeper to die so young. That house of his that's "gone down" so fast lately, next door to the one where they congregated yesterday? I didn't know what was going on at his house at the time, because I didn't talk to him much and because the Professional Bad Neighbor used to be as smart and perceptive as any of us. But I know enough now to know that youall may well ask those questions of that mutual distant cousin of all of ours.
Do not sell any real estate to him.
Do not sell any real estate to a person you trust not to sell it to him, either. Never doubt that, if you were to sell land to someone outside the family who was young and healthy and seemed unlikely to have emergency medical bills, some sort of medical emergency in that family would be arranged. And it would probably look like an accident--like something a child or an animal must have done. The Bad Neighbor may have been able to tell himself that most of his evildoing has been mere pranks that led to "accidents." That is probably the only way he's survived the loss of parents, siblings, wife, and child, with two of the funerals in one week. But he has to know that it's added up to real evil, and he doesn't seem to be stopping, slowing down, or repenting of it in any way.
It would be better not to talk to this man at all. Others have committed more vile crimes, but it has to take our special genes to commit such sneaky ones. This wretched relative of ours sneaked past my father, and I'm not aware that anyone else ever managed that. He's not sneaking past me any more, but he was, for a long time. For years I was almost able to believe that our resident snake, Gulegi, might have been doing the damage to the roof. Since we'd acquired the other places for the older and younger generations of the family to be when the Cat Sanctuary didn't feel quite like paradise, I was the only human who knew the full extent of damage to the roof. Except for the one who did the damage. And I heard him describe the damage, about a year ago. I expect that this summer he'll find a laborer who is completely deaf and be able to use some sort of sign language, but I heard him boasting about the damage to my roof, loud enough for old wossname the driver to share the "joke." (I would guess that his "improvements" to that field adjacent to my property are done, although the field certainly has not been improved. I would expect that he's now motivated to concentrate on fields adjacent to yourall's properties, and to the spring.)
I hope nobody who came to the just-because-it's-springtime gathering yesterday actually drank the spring water, which used to be so wholesome and palatable. There are a lot of chemicals that humans don't taste, that affect human digestion. And the Professional Bad Neighbor was back at home last week, on his feet and in the neighborhood on Friday. Coronavirus can do only so much good in this world.
I'm watching, neighbors and relatives all. Whatever you may have heard, no pranks have been perpetrated by any relative of yours who owns a house in the neighborhood. The father and son, and the siblings, may lay their grievances to rest, at least so far as the property damage is concerned. A few small things may in fact have been done by animals--I did catch a deer putting its feet in buckets set out under gutter spouts, and Rackety Coon was to blame for some losses of kittens. There was never any evidence that it came close to a house but there was, for a few years, a bear. But most of the damage has been done by a man. It was done by a man whose sight, hearing, agility, mechanical skills, ability to plan, ability to move quickly and quietly, and ability to be alert and do all these things by moonlight at three o'clock in the morning, were all extraordinary. This man, whose outline I've seen more than once and whose footprints I've found, is of "average" size, a little smaller than most of our generation, about 5'10", about 150 pounds, and he wears a man's size 8 or 9 boot of a style favored by older men, not the "athletic" shoes favored by the young. He is much smaller than the Young Grouch, as much bigger than I, and he's outlived several other people you may have heard accused. The truck he favors for sneaking around at night is a new one with a smooth-running engine that can be driven very slowly, by moonlight, without headlights.
Come out at night and watch from your own property for yourselves, and those of you who can still be awake all night, and can see by moonlight, will see the same thing I've been seeing. The most dangerous animal in the woods is a man, and you all know his name. For a human name it sounds similar to "Rackety Coon."
I don't know for certain that what broke into the basement was not a bear. I do know that, when I went up to approach those kittens, I was motivated to do nothing that would scare feral cats, like reaching out to touch the wall. I know that I didn't see bear tracks, or any other evidence of bear, nor have I seen such since the last bear was hauled away dead. I saw human tracks that might have belonged to someone who had a right to be there, or to someone who had none. I know that what was done to the spring box had to have been done by a human; whether the owner did it intentionally for repairs, or it was a malicious prank, I couldn't tell. And I don't know what the father and son may have said to each other, but the shed roof and the springhouse that are visible from my property were damaged when the Professional Bad Neighbor was in the neighborhood, sneaking away from my property across yours as he so often did.
Watch, therefore, neighbors and relatives. Look for correlations between mean pranks, especially "pesticide" spraying (especially on your property, where you know better than to spray poisons), ugly remarks made about other home owners in the neighborhood, and the remissions this Professional Bad Neighbor may have from his "aging" and his "Long COVID."
He deserves a long, long case of COVID. Not without the kind of tissue damage Grandma Bonnie Peters survived, the kind of pain his "road improvement" brainwave caused our old Neighbor Gilbert, the kind of bewilderment and vain hope and protracted misery the beekeeper died of, the kind of grief his glyphosate poisoning has caused me, and if there's any justice in this world God will see to it that he knows what my Jenny Wren felt when that appalling mass of eggshell ripped her apart, as well. The reason why we don't take revenge on people like that with our own hands is that they need and deserve so much more suffering than we could possibly give them.
But we can see to it that this Bad Neighbor is the most shunned man in Virginia...and that we should be doing now. All it takes is a little righteous responsibility for your own houses and land, and concern for the safety of a poor little widow. Come out at night, bring your highest-tech gadgets--he'll probably try to operate without his, but he's too "old" to do that as well as he used to do--and let's get on with it. If there is any hope of saving whatever this wretched man has in the way of a soul, he needs to make a public confession, signing over every acre he owns to the people he has done wrong (at least the ones who are still alive). If he has a soul that can be saved, he will agree that he has no business ever again being able to see, much less drink from, a mountain spring.
No comments:
Post a Comment