June 23, 2024
First In Flight
This morning, I woke up sore from yesterday’s activities. My wife and I were in good spirits as we sipped our coffees on the couch, planning our day. After feeding the dogs, we changed clothes for a walk down the main road. My wife took along a small container of cat food, in case she ran into Garbage, her favorite neighborhood feline.
When we left the house, it was already warm outside, and the humidity was at eighty-nine percent. Luckily, thick clouds covered the sky, making the weather seem cooler. When we were about a mile down the main road, we saw a cat off in the distance. As we approached, we saw it was Garbage.
This was my wife’s happy place. She fed the cat the container of moist food and petted and talked to her little friend. After, we continued along our morning walk. The sun popped out from behind the clouds during the last half mile, and we were happy to arrive back at the house, where we grabbed some water and sat on the floor under the ceiling fan.
My wife made soyrizo breakfast burritos, which I washed down with another cup of coffee. As we ate, we planned out our day. While talking, I saw a small herd of deer in the pasture. There were two adults and a fawn, so we thought it was the doe, young buck, and Natsu. When I looked through my binoculars, however, I saw both of the adults were females. A few minutes later, the young buck arrived. This meant that Natsu was bedded down nearby, and I confirmed that the fawn we saw was Roku by its spots. The two mothers with new fawns and the young buck had joined into a small herd.
We wanted to get some work done in the morning before it got too hot, so we changed clothes, sprayed down with insect repellent, and went outside to grab our tools. I stopped at the barn to grab two metal fenceposts, but they were bent. As I tried to hammer them straight, my wife told me she found two decent posts in the shed, so I grabbed those instead. We loaded up the cart with the posts, a post hammer, two rakes, two shovels, pruner, sheers; braided fishing line, and headed down the trails to the newly cleared area where I was building a bird feeding station for photography.
The weather was hot, and I was sweating before we even started working. After considering the terrain, I moved my blind to the opposite side of the cleared area. Where it stood, there was little space between the perches and trees behind them. Moving the blind to the opposite side would allow me to have a larger space between the focal point and the background, which would create more bokeh in my photographs, even when using smaller apertures.
Moving the blind was no simple task. We had to rake and shovel all the cedar mulch, filling the cart, and laying it down on the other side of the clearing. Once we did this, we positioned the blind over the mulch, which would help control the insects in the blind. I looked at the new setup and knew moving it was the right decision.
Next, my wife and I separated in the woods, looking for large sections of trees to be used as perches. I found two pieces and hauled them to the cleared area. When I went to find my wife, she was carrying an enormous tree by herself through the forest. I helped her carry it back to the work area. The branch she found was perfect.
I told my wife about two sections of log I wanted to pick up for the feeding station. One log was small enough to carry, but the other stump was large and heavy. I wasn’t sure if we could pick it up, or if the cart would hold its weight. The heat had rocketed, and I was tired by the time we arrived at the logs. We took the larger log, barely getting it into the cart. The cart’s wheels almost looked flat from the weight as we took turns pushing and pulling the cart through the forest.
After catching our breath, we arranged all the pieces of trees we brought to the area, standing up one long piece that had a natural base. This required us to dig a large hole to set the piece. I started digging and decided I wanted the pointed shovel we had left in the forest when picking up the large log. I walked back to get it and finished digging after I returned.
My wife got the vertical post balanced, finding rocks and breaking branches to place underneath it for stabilization. I added a metal fence post and then we filled the hole back up with the dirt we had removed. The other large tree scissored nicely on the post, and we placed a third tree in front of the whole feeding area. My wife cut some overhanging branches I used to help camouflage the blind. We then placed pieces of dilapidated wood in the area and a large feeding tray made of a single piece of tree bark about four feet long.
The last piece was the project coup de grâce. My wife took a cool-looking piece of tree that had been slowly eroding and stood it up vertically. The wood was moss covered, and the erosion left a skinny vertical line with small perches on either side of the wood where branches had once grown. My wife said it would look good in the pictures and I agreed.
Taking a step back, we studied our work as we tried to cool off. We had finished the project, and we were happy with the results. We loaded the cart with all the tools and hauled it up a hill back to the house. There was no way I would have finished the bird feeding station without my wife’s help. She worked so hard, and I always told her she was a beast!
When we got to the house, we drank a lot of water, and after we cooled off, we showered and got dressed. It felt good to be clean, but we were famished. My wife learned her uncle, who lived in New York, was dealing with a heat wave while having no air conditioning in his apartment. She was working fast and furiously to send him a portable unit that would help get him through the summer. I drove us to McDonald’s where we tried out a new spicy chicken sandwich my wife raved about. It was pretty good, and nice to purchase a chicken sandwich on a Sunday. My pleasure.
Tired from all the work, we lied down when we got home. My wife napped for forty-five minutes while I slept for almost two hours. When we woke up, we gathered all the trash and made a run to the trash service center. It was still toasty outside. While we were cleaning up the backyard, we noticed the trees started moving. Even if the wind was blowing hot, it was still nice to have a little relief from the heat.
In a moment of inspiration, my wife pulled out her new kite and tried to get it up in the air while in the backyard. We bravely fought off the gnats and dealt with a few knots coming loose on the kite. After several failed attempts, we moved to the front yard.
In the front yard, we got the kite to stay in the air for a good half minute. I was running around, trying to pull the string to make the kite climb. When I came to a standstill, I was so focused that I didn’t realize I was standing in an ant pile. Fun.
My wife didn’t give up, and she got the kite above the tree line where it finally grabbed the wind. I ran inside the house to grab my phone, so I could take a picture of her, and when I came out, she had the kite at the end of the string, a good hundred feet in the air. It was glorious, and we were both happy. North Carolina, first in flight, indeed. She landed the kite like a pro, and we gathered the string and went inside to cool off from the summer heat.