Another unexpected event this week was that the day after the rain, Mamma Guinea Hen came out of the blackberry tangle with 11 new babies! She sat on those eggs and hatched them on the day of the big storm.
It rained like hell here. I left an empty beer glass out on the patio table and after the storm it had 7 inches of water in it. Not lying. Funny how it happened. The night she hatched them, all the guineas except Otis, the father, slept out in the birch tree behind and above the chicken house for the first time ever. In the morning they all went down into the bushes and formed a phalanx around Mamma and the babies and escorted them out onto the lawn.
The whole flock guards them all day. She takes them into the bushes at night and the rest sleep up in the tree except Otis. We hear them in the moonlit night ragging out anything that moves in the field. They are, after all, our principal pot protection. Nothing moves without their knowledge and squawking!
It has been harvest time this week and I have gone nearly blind clipping buds of medical Mary Jane for drying and storing. I will be able to shut off the motion detectors and get a good night’s sleep again.
Things have so changed since I grew my first weed in Damariscotta many years ago. I was an innocent beginner and I didn’t know anything. I planted my little pot plants out in the front flower bed behind the new hemlock hedge.
Well folks, don’t you know? Those plants fed with my chicken manure grew 8 feet tall, much higher than the hedge. Well, God, what was I to do? Biscay Road was the road to the lakes for all the tourists and campers and all summer long we got horn toots and raised thumbs for our plants from all the fancy campers and rigs that went by.
To segue to another subject, we listen to talk radio and the news every morning and I am getting the sense that we Americans are being urged to arm ourselves and be on a permanent state of alert. This is after the school shootings and questions are being asked as to why we don’t have armed guards in our schools.
What has happened to our society while we have been busy earning our livings? When I went to school in King’s Mills all the eight years I attended, we didn’t even have a telephone in the school. If there was an emergency we had to go across the street and ask to use the Chases’ telephone.
If that sounds unbelievable, may I also say we didn’t have running water either. We got our drinking water by two pailfuls over at Louis Bryant’s house and brought it to school and dumped it intol a tall clay jar with a small faucet on it. We had a four-holer for boys and a four-holer for the girls. Shoveled into the brook during the summer sometime.
At home nearly every family had a deer rifle or a shotgun. We did, and I knew how to shoot from an early age. But the thought of using one aggressively against another person never occurred to us. I am having trouble with the idea of an armed cop in grade school. I have choked for years at seeing a county cruiser parked all day at Lincoln Academy for the officer on duty. Think of it.