It is dark as midnight and it is almost 7:00 in the morning. We have already loaded the three market trucks and everyone is right now putting up tarps in various suburban parking lots and unloading crates of greens while I sit here in my summer-cluttered house and wait for daylight. Tomorrow is the end of Daylight Savings and the mornings will start earlier again. Personally I don't really mind the early dark in the evening because it lengthens the time we can spend not working.
Anyway. On the way back from the stand this morning I saw a box turtle crossing the road in the dark and I thought of my father. Many things still make me think of him, of course, as I am still driving the same roads we drove 30-some years ago. The view has changed completely but the destinations are the same, with one farm at each end of the daily trip.
Whenever he saw a box turtle, it delighted him. In those days our world was full of salamanders and snakes and turtles, before all the houses were built on our borders. We lived down the hill in what seemed like an endless woods. There was a busy stream, Dad dammed up a pond and there was a road on the dam that took us across the stream to the Tractor Shed and to the path through the woods that went uphill through the Moutouxs to Grandma's house.
Right next to the Tractor Shed (where our bedrooms were on the second floor) there was a Bath House. The Bath House had a bathtub with plumbing that was somehow attached to the pond that was about fifty feet away. The bath water was brown. My dad was just tickled that we had a bathtub. This Bath House was a salamander haven. I don't remember electricity out there, but I do remember the salamanders skittering away when we arrived, so perhaps there was a light bulb.
In those days we had no inkling of what would come to our borders. As kids, we had no feeling of borders. Our tiny piece of property seemed to go on forever as there were no neighbors. There were trails for horseback riding, there was a marsh and creeks, it was wilderness. By the time our own children were born, most of that wilderness was hemmed in by houses but the boys still mourn the loss of all that wild space. They missed the salamander and box turtle era and they never knew that.
In the pond my father put a rowboat. As a teenager, he had built rowboats and canoes, so maybe this boat was one of his creations, I don't even know. But I remember spending hours and hours floating around that tiny pond in the rowboat, writing poetry with Libby and Nell who lived up the hill in the house that my mother now inhabits. There was a huge black snake that liked to wrap itself in the roots of a tree that hung over the edge of the pond. We did not go near it.
Back then my parents rented that house and we lived in the Tractor Shed during the summer months. With 50 years of hindsight, I see now that they were doing everything possible to find enough money to fund this crazy enterprise. They rented every space they could, as another income source, and we lived in buildings with dirt floors. It was totally normal to us since we had no reason to question our parents' choices.
This era of living down the hill in the woods lasted until my parents sold our DC house and we moved to Virginia permanently when I was 11. We moved into the real house and left the Tractor Shed and Picnic Shed and salamanders behind. Salamanders and weasels and turtles and skunks. They are gone now.
This is the first turtle I have seen this year. I didn't touch it (my dad used to collect them up and put them in a cage for a while, as entertainment, like an aquarium). It just reminded me of the days when there was more diversity around here. Now there are deer and groundhogs and rabbits and foxes. Very few toads. No salamanders at all. It's not great.
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