Gnomes in the Park

 

Of late, The Beloved Spouse and I have been dutifully taking our Alan to a nearby park and forest trail for what our training program calls "Taste of Freedom Walks." We spend time teaching him to mind his Ps and Qs, and urging him to learn--little by little--how to behave in public spaces. 

Alan, born with several siblings to a feral mother in a forest near Bowie about fifteen months ago, had few manners when we got him. His adoption was a bit of a bait-and-switch affair, because we had been told that he was an "adult" dog who got on well with cats. When we met him, we found out that he was about five months old, had just been neutered, and was friskier than we had anticipated. I had already declared myself "too old not to have a dog," but we quickly discovered that we were probably both too old to raise another puppy. 

Still, I had fallen in love with his photo (he was called Fred at the time), and with the name "Alan" after Joyce's adopted mutt in The Thursday Murder Club books. Our Alan and Joyce's had little in common except for coloring and, possibly, intelligence. On our annual Boxing Day trip to Tyler, where Alan met his many canine cousins, he was affable enough, and got on well with them (they were all bigger than he was at the time).

And yes, he was good with cats--in the sense that he had fun chasing them. Molly started it, and has adjusted to him rather well, but isn't averse to popping him across the snout when he gets too fresh.

But Alan grew less in size than in weight and muscle mass over the next few months and can run faster than any dog we've ever known and is strong, willful, assertive, and--as they say in the dog-training community--reactive. He's extremely smart, affectionate, and persistent. But he's also pretty clearly part pointer (the rescue group thought lab and border collie as well) and as such, has a well-developed prey instinct. Unfortunately for us, his prey of particular focus is rabbits. And our back quarter acre is prime wildlife habitat, especially attractive to the local lagomorphs. Early last spring Alan alerted us to the existence of a form (nest) of bunnies in the garden we had built to honor our dog Woody. We quickly got in touch with wild bunny experts who told us what to do, and we secured the nest as best we could, making sure that Alan couldn't get at the three babies, and then fenced it off from dogs.

That crop has long since left, and there was later another somewhere (probably under TBS's shed). We know that because Alan caught another youngling and proudly (and gently) carried it around the yard until we got him to drop it and I was able to help it escape. But that experience was so much fun that every time he sees a rabbit he goes stark staring bonkers. And because I'm a bit (but only a bit) on the fragile side, we have to train him away from this particular trigger so that I don't come between him and his object of desire.  So we found a great online course (Trail and Bone), a sort of Montessori for dogs, and we're about halfway through and showing good results. We're still not ready to face an unexpected rabbit encounter, but we're now good with squirrels, people in general, and many local dogs. 

At any rate, the park is a short drive away and mostly free of triggers and distractions. There's a new disc golf course which means more frequent people encounters and fewer dogs, and we get there early enough to have a good half hour of sit/stay/release work, and then can go out on the forest trails if we're in the mood for it. 

The trees in the main part of the park are quite old. Some of them are actually dead, with great ladders of shelf-fungus and other interesting bits. But all of them have lovely big root flares and nooks and crannies that (we discovered only two days ago) anonymous folks are tucking gnomes and fairy doors and other objects into. 

Now, I'm apparently new to this, because there are conversation galore on Reddit and other platforms (I searched "gnomes in tree trunks"). But to an old lapsed archaeologist/mudlarker/desert rat, this was all grist for this blog. Here's the story so far:

In addition to the gnome TBS discovered first and that opens this post, yesterday we found a much more elaborate construction consisting of a fairy door, a couple of cards with quotations on them, an amulet of some sort (I thought it was made of agate, but it's actually a photo of a very Alan-like dog), and a trail of tiny shells leading up to it.

The cards, which were tucked behind the fairy door, contained quotations from Paulo Coelho, ["When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it"--to which the installation's designer had added, "What does your heart desire?"] and Mary Oliver, ["Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild & precious life?" augmented with "Pass it on."]

The Coelho bit is quite well known, and comes from The Alchemist, his enormously successful 1988 novel. The quotation from Mary Oliver is the final line of her poem, "The Summer Day." 

I should probably mention that I'm not usually attracted to the preciousness of gnomes and fairy houses and such. Nor have I read any of Coelho's books (although I might just go see what I can scare up at Half Price Books). But I have always liked Mary Oliver, and am thus rather sympathetic to the Gnome/Fairy door people/person responsible for providing these particular "pellets" for my little bloggish Wunderkammer. 

And so, I pass it on.

Finally, here's the last of the offerings we found at the park:

This is often attributed to Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), although he didn't write it. But it did make me think that the curator(s) of these little exhibitions might spend serendipitous moments at charity shops where things like this often show up, along with gnomes and fairy doors. If they do nothing more than put a smile on some faces and make the world seem a little less problematic, then they're certainly worth paying attention to. And I'm also going to try to find a copy of Oliver's Dog Songs, which I remember enjoying rather well. Reactive or not, dogs really do help make the world better.

Domestic Stratigraphy

Note: I originally wrote this for Owl's Farm, but then realized that it's just the thing needed to relaunch Owl's Cabinet of Wonders.

"Vallies" by Orra White Hitchcock

We had a bit of a reprieve yesterday in terms of temperature, so I settled in the study, without the air con and only a small fan to blow the air about a bit. Out of doors it was only 93F with a little breeze, so I pottered around in the garden with Molly in the morning and got some things that needed doing done.

But the previous night had been a long one, during which time I stewed and mused about all the things I haven't been getting done and my fuzzy brain landed on my vast collection of stuff, the origins of my tendency to Not Let Go, and what might still be done about it before my time runs out. 

I realized that although I come from a long line of quasi-hoarders, I tend be rather orderly about it: lots of boxes and bins, mostly catalogued and labeled, tucked away into nooks and crannies, the many closets that populate the house, the attic, the garage, and book cases in which books share space with collections of Supplies. No teetering stacks of old newspapers and pizza boxes ready to do us in, like in a Midsomer Murders episode. We once thought that my mother's family were examples of nominative determinism since Hoard was her father's last name, but realized that it's really just an aptonym).

The last year's distractions had kept me from executing the full implementation of my Swedish Death Cleaning enterprise, and the recent adoption of Alan into the household has resulted in the arbitrary inclusion in the Snug closet of shredded plush toys, chewed-up cushions, torn puppy blankets, and sentimentally preserved objects left over from previous beloved dogs. So, atop the boxed-up stuff lie new layers of all that. 

The Museum of Unfinished Projects (AKA the hall closet) also has stuff piled atop the otherwise well-sorted goods, so there is now what seems like the equivalent of a shipping container's worth of goods to be gone through. I've attempted to make it more useful several times, and even wrote a blog post about that once (the link is to a previous post on the Cabinet). Fortunately, it's too hot to even think about dealing with the attic, the garage, the old garden shed, and the greenhouse/Wunderkammer. 

In a little-understood fit of soul-less destructive energy, last week I very quickly went through at least ten years of New Yorker magazines that had been stashed in piles atop an old steamer trunk (maternal great grandmother's) that spends its time on the screened-in porch off our living room. I saved a few covers, plus a few a random articles or cartoons accidentally encountered during the two or three hours total it took me to get through those piles, and a few crosswords. All the rest went into the recycle bin, and what was saved amounted only to about a two-inch stack.
 

Now on the porch there's only left the final boxing up of things for the charity shop, and if the weather holds for another day, that can be taken care of as well. I'm now awaiting a similarly ruthless spell to allow me to toss the uncountable number of dollars' worth of dog toy remnants we've acquired just since Alan joined us at the end of October of last year.

As difficult as it is for me to deal with all the accumulated detritus of my life, I refuse to take full responsibility for the affliction. The genes that made me into an historian/geologist/archaeologist/story teller/reader and whatever else I've become, came from both sides of my family, and I learned packrattery from the best of instructors. My favorite place to visit when I returned to the US in 1962 was my Grandmother's house in Lone Pine and, more specifically, her garage--which I'm pretty sure had never been occupied by an actual car. She also had closets in the house, one of which held a couple of shelves of potential Pinochle tournament prizes, but nothing was nearly as interesting as the contents of that garage: ancient Paiute baskets given her by tribal women she knew while she was growing up in Big Pine; sound equipment from my grandfather's days as a square dance caller; cigar boxes of potsherds and obsidian arrow points; toys left over from her childhood and those of her own children, trunks of treasures I can't even remember specifically, but do remember sifting through, accompanied by her explanations of the contents. My last trip back to her house when she was 99 and moving to a rest home in Bishop, involved helping her son and her niece load up my rental car with mementos large (the metal lawn chairs we sat in to stargaze during summer visits and the Singer treadle sewing machine on which I learned) and small (one of the cigar boxes that held artifacts I later used during archaeology lectures).

A considerable amount of what occupies my own garage involves the remains of several Very Large Boxes shipped to my mother from her incredibly kind and indulgent benefactor, the late Fr. Bartley Scmitz, SVD, of Chiayi, Taiwan. When she was deported for a long-expired visa in the late '90s, Fr. Schmitz boxed up collections of photographs, photocopies, tear-sheets, negatives, household goods, clothing, and innumerable tchotchkes that she had accumulated when she returned to the island in the  '80s. I've found homes for some of the historically useful images. but haven't yet had the gumption to go through the rest.  But I can sense a rift in the sentimental logjam if only a break in the weather will occur before I succumb to the call of the genes and the remnants of whatever came over me last week fade entirely.

The difference between my garage and that of the fondly-remembered one in my father's mother's back yard is that Gram's held some fairly interesting bits of family history that had been preserved in the desert climate of the Owens River Valley. North Texas, on the other hand, with its dank moldiness and suffocatingly humid summers contributes only nesting materials for displaced wildlife. As long as I keep that in mind, I should be able to bag up what needs to go, and finally turn it into a facsimile of Joseph Cornell's (in)famous collection of potentially useful creative inspiration. Unfortunately, Faithful Readers, you'll have to make do with my lame approximations of his shelves of assorted inspirational materials (like "love letters to Jennifer Jones, unanswered" if I remember correctly). My post on Garden Wunderkammern was recently flagged by the Blogger Authorities as containing some manner of contraband, which may have involved copyrighted materials.  So I'm providing a list of potentially interesting and inspiring media sources (books and websites) and showing you a snippet of what lurks in my hundred-plus year-old house's not-quite-as-old garage:

Including more would have involved more sophisticated photo-editing skills than I now possess, but there are two tall Skandia shelves worth of miscellaneous boxes and objects that I plan to make use of for something someday.

Well. I've finally done it. Thanks for encouragement from Tim and others who wrote, and followers who didn't strike me from their rolls during my long hiatuses.

Stay cool, People. Even those of you in Massachusetts won't be immune from the heat for long.

Image notes and resources:

The stratigraphic drawing at the beginning of the post is from the Public Domain Review's archive article,  "Orra White Hitchcock's Scientific Illustrations for the Classroom, 1828-40." I still don't know how to use Procreate well enough to build my own images for these posts, so until I do, I'll joyfully plunder the PDR's marvelous sources.

Some years ago I obtained a terrific multi-media facsimile of Joseph Cornell's Manual of Marvels, in a lovely box, with a disc, published by Thames & Hudson. I've linked the New York Times article about it, by Julie Bloom, which I can now do without your having to pay for it. The link, that is. The book/object will set you back at least 45USD used.

Deborah Solomon's biography, Utopia Parkway: The Life & Work of Joseph Cornell, is widely available at physical bookshops--HPB and other independents. And at my other favorite place to donate money (besides Wikipedia and The Public Domain Review), the Internet Archive. 

Just A Note

In an effort to resuscitate and coördinate my various online efforts, I'm redesigning most of my existing content.

Attempts at doing so recur every few years, and usually fail, but this time I think things might work out. I'm now planning to spend the rest of the endless north Texas summer in my air-conditioned study trying to get my act back together while my cognitive marbles are still rolling around in my aging noggin.

Once again, please bear with me. A new banner is currently under construction, and a new post in the works.