Time flies

I don't know what they've been teaching 7-yo at school. Actually, I do know. They've been teaching second graders all about spiders and insects. This is why last night at dinner 7-yo shared some of his knowledge with us along these lines:

"Did you know flies see things in slow motion? If you do this..." (waving his arm up and down vigorously) "they see it like this..." (same action, but at 1/16th speed). At this point, Husband and I are looking at each other quizzically. I've never been very good at the whole time/space comprehension thing, and am grappling with the idea that the humble house-fly might be not only more able to understand it than I am, but is even somehow at the level where he is able to control it. Husband, who is a philosophy professor (have I ever told you that?) has a mind that is probably some light years away already on a journey of analysis of 7-yo's statement from historical, ethical and theological perspectives.

7-yo fills the silence with more insights. "They know what is going to happen next. That's what it's like when you see things in slow motion. You can tell what is going to happen next. That's why they're so difficult to swat. They know you're coming." So not only can the house-fly slow down reality, as he buzzes about his daily business, but he can also see the future, (which must be a burden, if it is a future that contains the bashing of himself continuously against the inside of a never-to-be-opened window). Blimey. Evolution got it wrong. They'd be much better at running the world than we are (once they'd got the hang of window catches).

Husband and I agree that this would make a rather good episode of Primeval (which is all the rage with the programme schedulers on BBC America), and the conversation moves on to more pressing matters, such as choice of ice cream flavour for dessert.

I would love to be inside my child's head for a day.
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Nature calls

One of the things I miss most about life in Britain is the countryside, or not even the countryside, just the freedom to potter about in the outdoors. Here, the land outside the city is agricultural and inaccessible to walkers (no paths, barbed wire fences on a huge scale), and let’s face it, very flat and featureless. There are parks in the city, but they’re very small, and what you might call functional rather than beautiful.

We find we pay increasingly frequent week-end visits to the Nature Park. It’s small (a rectangle exactly a mile by half a mile), and surrounded by dual carriageways, so the chirping of the crickets has to compete with the noise of the traffic, and in winter when there aren’t leaves on the trees, you can see the large concrete building and big square orange logo of Home Depot from pretty much wherever you are in the Park. Nonetheless, green space is green space, and I am grateful for it.

The children share our excitement. When Husband and I suggest an afternoon walk in the Nature Park, they’re like little crickets themselves, jumping up and down and chorusing merrily “oh no, not AGAIN, boooring, do we have to? can I get some extra playstation time if I come?” Their enthusiasm is infectious, and we head off, beckoned by the call of the wild.

It was a really beautiful afternoon there today. Warm sun, strong breeze, clouds wandering across a blue sky, autumn colours at their finest. Autumn has always been my favourite season, but I realise now my previous experience of it has been somewhat impoverished. The trees and shrubs here put on a much better show – deep reds, earthy maroons, bright oranges, startling yellows. I don’t say this lightly. I grew up in the Chilterns, so I thought I knew a thing or two about autumn beauty. The beech woods can be stunning, majestic, exhilarating. But here, the season lasts so much longer, the variety is greater, the display more dramatic, and the weather still summery enough to allow full enjoyment of it.

This afternoon, for example, the Nature Park looked like this (you'll have to click to enlarge to do the colours justice):





















There are always turtles to be seen, paddling along lugubriously or sunning themselves on logs, and a few weeks ago I spotted a muskrat in the water. There are elegant herons, and rather overfed ducks, who swim past hunks of bread floating in the water without even a second glance (this is a Nature Park on the edge of a big city, after all, not the wilderness). Dragonflies and damselflies dart in front of us. Crickets sun themselves on the paths, so old and slow this late in the season that we have to be careful not to tread on them before they leap away. Imagine being able to get close enough to take a photo like this (um... you'll definitely need to click to enlarge that one!).


Large spiders sit in the middle of their enormous webs, and 7-yo, who has been learning about them in science, tells us about their habits, and identifies the different kinds of web.

These are hedge apples, which are such a luminous, almost neon, green that we first told the kids that they were alien brains, fallen out of the sky, (but don’t worry, we only kept that story going for a few minutes – we didn’t want nightmares disturbing their and our sleep). They are solid and large (to give you the scale, this one is pictured in four year old hands), and they make a satisfying splash when lobbed into the creek.

I love this place. For me, it offers the perfect blend of familiarity and novelty. I know my way round the color-coded trails, enough at least to navigate back to the car park by the shortest route if legs are tired, or to promise that we’ll be crossing another creek if hedge apples are being collected. The wildlife and flora still seem exotic to me, though. “Get me” I think to myself, “watching snapping turtles on a Sunday afternoon”, and I tuck the thought away so that in years to come I can say “In America, we used to watch snapping turtles on a Sunday afternoon”. Even the complaining which precedes the trip has developed a comforting feeling of family ritual about it (they complain, but we know from experience that they'll have a good time). It was thus when we lived in Scotland (“why do we ALWAYS have to go to the beach or Tentsmiur?”) and I remember it from the week-ends of my own childhood too. But I couldn’t identify a zipper spider (also known as a writing spider) in those days.

I am very cautious about posting photos on the web, and I guard my family’s anonymity carefully, but I thought this one of our shadows on the water was safe enough.











And, getting brave now, I didn’t think back views could hurt. Here are 7-yo, 11-yo and Husband.


And here is 4-yo.

A sad day

I seem to be obsessed, blog-wise, with the wildlife in my back yard. I don't quite know why this is. I suppose school holidays and summer do tend to push you out into the back yard, and there's not all that much that is interesting to write about inside the house. There are rooms, and they are filled with our furniture.

I thought the back yard was coming good on the wildlife front. Fireflies good, mosquitoes bad. Glorious red trumpet vine good, odd-looking fungus bad. I think I'd started seeing it in terms of a scorecard. Fireflies good - fifteen love. Mosquitoes bad - fifteen all. Trumpet vine good - thirty fifteen. Fungus bad - thirty all. You get the idea. I had a feeling that I was winning, or at least getting the upper hand.

I asked someone round to help me learn about the plants, and she came yesterday, gave me loads of helpful information and left me some gardening books to borrow. She told me where to buy a large long-sleeved smock-like garment (a smock, in fact) impregnated with insect repellent, which I can keep by the back door and put on whenever I go outside. I got all excited about the potential of the place. I was planning a triumphant blog entry (perhaps with pictures) about our lovely back yard. I was going to tell you my clever anti-mosquito strategies, the beautiful birds, the squirrels (including Poor-tail, the one who is easily identifiable by his half-missing appendage), and the crowning glory, our little tame rabbit. How lovely to have a tame rabbit in the garden (see how at this point I lapse from the back yard into the garden again). How surprising, given that our predecessors had two cats. He looked like a wild rabbit, but we live right in the middle of the city - where had he come from? He was tame enough that he would not move away until you approached very near. It was easy to get within 4 feet of him. I had set the children the project of trying to get him to eat a leaf from their hands by the end of the summer. We had put out carrots and celery and a bowl of water. I loved that rabbit. He had become our rabbit.

You know where this is going. It was 6-yo who found him. "The rabbit has died. At least I think it's dead. It's got a purple eye." He was right. It was dead, and it did have a purple eye. No other signs of cause of death. Flies already closing in. The children are remarkably philosophical. They are sure that they WOULD have managed to get him eating out of their hands by the end of the summer (although on the evidence of the amount of time and patience they had for the task, I silently doubt it). They agree with me that he died probably as a result of eating something poisonous, that he didn't die a horrible death, just had a poorly tummy and went to sleep, and that it was nice that he had come right up to the house to die - he must have wanted to be near us. I used to opportunity to reiterate the rule about not putting anything from the garden in your mouth (3-yo is a worry on this front, at that age where it is funny to do naughty things, or be about to do them, she has been deliberately putting leaves in her mouth and coming to show me - I don't think she'll be doing that any more. Sorry, rabbit, but I couldn't help using you as a cautionary tale).

I was telling yesterday's gardening friend how I had been surprised by how hostile (a word I apologised for in advance of using) the environment here is, and how that seemed to make such a difference to daily life. I had never truly appreciated how very gentle a country Britain is, in terms of climate and countryside. She understood, and then put it very eloquently: "Here, we do have to try harder and take more steps in order to live happily alongside nature". I know in the grand scheme of things, the death of one rabbit doesn't amount to much. He did, however, make our home here feel a bit friendlier, a bit softer round the edges, a bit less hostile (there, I've said it).

Today it definitely feels like Advantage Back Yard.

An experiment in empathy

In my last entry, I talked about the way we build up day-to-day knowledge over the years. How knowledge is mixed in with experience, and beaten into shape by frequent use. How as a newcomer to a situation, we can get an off-the-shelf knowledge product, but how that just isn't an equivalent.

I wondered if this would feel the same to an American woman arriving in the UK. So I tried an experiment. Try it with me, if you will.

Imagine you have moved to some rural corner of England, and you have nettles in the wild space at the bottom of the garden. Your child tries to pick one and gets stung. You ring a friend, and she says "oh nettle rash, don't worry about that. Just get a dock leaf and rub the juice on, or, um, I think it's bicarbonate of soda that's meant to help, or is that for wasp stings? I can never remember. Anyway, don't worry, it'll go in a few hours."

These Brits, you are thinking to yourself at this point, they're so vague. And dock leaves? What is this? The Dark Ages?

So you google "nettles", and you find an entry in Wikipedia where you get a picture of a limb covered in a rash. See it there on the right hand side? Not very pretty. Then you go to NHS Direct which you think will be fairly authoritative. As you read the article on nettle rash, you very quickly start learning about acute urticaria, chronic urticaria, and within a paragraph or two, you are into angioedema, which can cause swelling of the lining of the mouth, the windpipe and, in men, the genitals. Click down to the “treatment” section, and you see it mentions nothing about dock leaves (which you’re kind of relieved about, as this would only confirm your darkest anxieties about the NHS), but you find it talks about steroids, their side-effects, and emergency hospital treatment if breathing becomes severely affected. See what I mean. You’ve gone from a small patch of itchy hives to emergency hospital treatment in a few minutes, and you’re adrift.

You might also remember having heard about nettle tea. You want to understand as much as you can about this obsession with tea which is such a part of the British life, so while you're on the subject, you have a go at googling that. Why on earth would anyone risk stings, hives, swelling of the genitals and possibly emergency hospital treatment for a cup of tea, when you can buy several different brands at the supermarket? Your search doesn't bring much enlightenment. One of the first Google results for nettle tea tells you that "nettle tea [isn't] better than regular black tea, it's just different".

Not better, just different.

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Bugs

Apologies to those of you who are squeamish about creepy-crawlies, but I am returning to the theme. They have been a feature of the past week or two. The fireflies were a high point; it's been downhill all the way since.

First off, I have discovered that I am sensitive to mosquito bites. Everyone seems to have an allergy these days, so I think I could say this is my one. I’ve had mosquito bites before which become the size of a 50p piece and a bit puffy, but we’re talking different league here. The mosquito here asks “do you want me to supersize that?” as he bites, and my body, without my permission, says “oh yes please”. The bite becomes the size of a beer mat, and then it starts changing shape and moving in a rather intriguing way. Up an arm, round the side of a leg, morphing into less tidy shapes as it spreads over the contours of muscle and joint. It’s red and hot and swollen and angry. The only saving grace is that it isn’t particularly itchy (although if I confess that, I will obviously receive less sympathy), and I am relieved that they’re not spider bites. The first bite had me worried, especially when a very friendly and helpful pharmacist used words like "venomous", and told me to look out for evidence of tracking up a blood vessel. But I have now caught a mozzy in action, which is useful diagnostic work on the one hand, but on the other, not a very cheering prospect for the summer. There are sprays for yourself and for your back yard, and you can eat lots of garlic, but the bottom line is cold compresses and anti-histamine tablets which give me a sort of brain fog for about 3 days per bite. The alternative is never setting foot outside my house, car, or destination, which isn’t very appealing, although it would give me a real flavor of life as an average Midwesterner – ouch, did I say that?

Next,10-yo has been doing a Young Scientist's Camp each morning this week. This involved exploring in woods and ditches. Good childhood stuff. He came home and said "you've got to do a tick check on me". Once I'd finished wearying patient Husband with jokes about putting any ticks I might find in boxes, and whether they'd be ticks or checks once in the box, I realised I didn't know what I was looking for in any case. I have people I can ring up and ask these things, so I did that. Then I looked up the information on the internet. This is always a mistake. in just a few minutes, you can go from hearing that ticks are really nothing much to worry about, to knowing that they can carry Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. You can see what a Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever rash looks like. You can learn that most cases respond to antibiotics, but that 3% don't.

This is one of the difficult things about living abroad. You don't build up knowledge gently over many years. You have to get it brutally all at once. You don't have the backdrop of years of plucking ticks out of scalps, and of your mother plucking ticks out of yours, to give you a reasonable perspective in which to put the very occasional horror story. You can't download that kind of knowledge from the computer. Human memory files work in a rather more cumulative way. I'm not sure you can rely on finding short cuts.

So you can see why I am fed up with the bugs here. I'll have to make sure I go and watch my friends the fireflies again this evening to redress the balance a little.

Fireflies in the back yard

Oooh, another bonus. No-one told me we'd have fireflies in the back yard.

So far, I've found the wildlife rather hostile. There are spiders with bites that can turn nasty (and even fatal, but don't tell my mother that bit). These are called fiddlebacks after the outline of a violin that you can see on them, or brown recluse. The one we saw marching across our basement floor wasn't very reclusive, though. Probably ailing or dying, according to the pest control man who came round to spray the house (oh so tempting to say "Hello Spiderman" when I opened the door to him).

Then there are fluttery moths, large numbers of woodlice (I've never seen so many, but at least they have the decency to stay hidden under stones and bricks and any toy left outside overnight), mosquitoes (lots, apparently, as the summer wears on), ants (many, many), chiggers (which bite your ankles, mine more than most, but you can effectively stop the bites itching with clear nail polish, I'm told), and termites (we know we don't have those, at the moment, as you have your house inspected for them when you buy it).

So it was with great joy that I witnessed the fireflies. I have never seen a firefly before, but have always imagined they would be charming and curious. And indeed they are. They are truly lovely. They are little blobs of yellowy-green light that switch on, float around, and switch off. It is like having magic in your back yard.

Husaband and I agreed that all we needed was a couple of garden chairs and a bottle of wine, and we could have spent some happy time sitting in the warm evening breeze watching the fireflies. Sadly, Husband is off wine as on antibiotics, and we have no garden furniture, although it has been on our agenda (I'm talking two attempted and aborted shopping trips with bored children). But it's very good to know that the fireflies are there. I'm so pleased to have met them, and I'm going to enjoy getting to know them better.