Nostalgic for my roses

Tiffany

I've been a fanatic rose lover ever since the morning I stepped outside and discovered that the bud on my mother's new Tiffany hybrid tea had opened overnight. Up to that point in my life - I was about nine years old - I had never beheld such beauty, and rarely have since. The perfectly formed petals had a silvery sheen, and in the early morning there were droplets of dew or raindrops that caught the sunlight, forming glistening diamonds in the round. I squatted as close to the bloom as I could, inhaling the famous perfume and just trying to absorb the reality of such an extravagance of beauty.

Fast forward twenty-something years. I had recently moved to a little valley in the north of the island with my son and, joy of joys, there was a garden. The landlord gave his permission for me to plant a few roses along the front wall and the first bush I purchased was, of course, Tiffany. I also got Princesse de Monaco, Garden Party, Olympiad, and another of my mother's favourites, Queen Elizabeth.

Garden Party

The roses gave us a lot of joy during those years despite the never-ending battle with black spot in our damp, humid valley. The first blooms on the Garden Party were the hugest I've ever seen on a bush - glorious creamy globes that glowed in moonlight. Olympiad became my favourite red rose ever despite efforts by other enthusiasts to woo me to the likes of Chrysler Imperial and Mister Lincoln. Princesse Monaco was outstanding in form, colour and the sheer number of blooms on the bush in any flush. I remember my son shocking a neighbour across the street by identifying a new rose she had bought, Double Delight. (He had fallen in love with it in my books and wanted me to get him his own bush. In typical kid fashion, he loved the bi-coloured and candy-striped varieties that I found way too garish.) So many vignettes...

Olympiad

We left that valley in 2000 and went off on our various adventures. I bounced around a few countries and for the last few years have been living in my mom's house in a different part of that same valley. Things are different now, though. She has a garden, but doesn't grow roses and even if she did, they would be her show; she is very territorial about her yard.

Princesse de Monaco

I miss my roses. My vases are packed in boxes (like most of my books, photo albums and other treasures). I look forward to the day when I'll have a garden of my own once more, with roses I raised from scratch. I want to get up in the morning and cut one perfect Tiffany bud, with the dewdrops still on, for my desk. Of such are the great joys of my life made.

Carpe diem - again

Raymond on the peak of 

El Tucuche, Nov. 2010   

My first piano teacher was a short, rotund, elderly nun. Sister Lucy was so ravaged with what I now believe to be osteoporosis that her upper back was U-shaped and her chin rested on her chest. She could barely manage to show me the proper placement of fingers on keys, but her keystrokes as she demonstrated the movements were strong and sure. She had clear grey eyes magnified by her glasses and was a gentle soul. I think she came from Ireland like the other foreign nuns at St. Joseph's Convent and it was under her tutelage, in one of the tiny music rooms that barely managed to fit a piano, two stools and a metronome, that I discovered the joy of playing something that at least approximated music. I distinguished myself under her guidance - far more so than under her successor, a chain-smoking, gentlemanly English lady who terrified me.

I graduated from high school and went out into the not-so-wide world of work in the same town where I had gone to school, and every once in awhile I'd remember sweet Sister Lucy and resolve to go and visit her. I never got around to it, and when I heard that she had died, along with remorse at my procrastination, I began to understand that for most young people, the reality and inevitability of death is not a concept that can readily be grasped. I realized then that putting off a visit to an elderly person means that when you're ready to make the effort, the person might be gone - forever.

Which brings me to November 2010 and an e-mail I received from an elderly gentleman here in Trinidad. I had written a blog post about hiking my favourite mountain, El Tucuche. He told me he had discovered the post and enjoyed it tremendously because that was also his favourite hike and he had scaled the peak more than 100 times in his ninety years. In fact, he had celebrated his ninetieth birthday just weeks before by climbing El Tucuche once again, a feat that attracted quite a bit of media coverage.

When I finally wrapped my head around what my new friend, Raymond, had achieved, I told him he had become my inspiration: I could think of nothing I'd love more than to be able to repeat his feat if I lived to his age. We began corresponding, found each other on Facebook, and he invited me to join him on his next hike in early 2011. This one would be to Paria Waterfall, a lovely trek along the north coast and into the forest that I had undertaken several times in my earlier hiking years. I decided to work on improving my fitness so that when Raymond and his group next hiked El Tucuche I'd be ready.

The hike to Paria was postponed four times. We had an unseasonably rainy dry season and the weather simply refused to cooperate with our plans. When the hike finally came off I didn't go; Raymond had probably tired of having to call and tell me about postponements and didn't want to disappoint me again. The next time we communicated was in July when my niece graduated and he left a gracious comment on her photo on my Facebook page. By this time the true rainy season was in full pour and hiking was out of the question. The months flew by imperceptibly.

Three weeks ago Raymond contacted me on Facebook and told me he had suffered a heart attack three months before, but was on the mend and spending several days a week in his store. I was assailed by a sense of urgency; I told my friend I'd visit him at his store that week. He said he was looking forward to finally meeting me face to face. I asked if he would be at the store on Thursday or Friday. When two days passed and I did not hear from him I felt a deep foreboding. That Friday night I left a message on his page: "Well, maybe another week. Thinking of you and hoping you're okay, Raymond." The next time I visited his Facebook page I learned he had died on November 10, three days after his ninety-first birthday.

It felt like Sister Lucy all over again. I will never be able to hike and not think of Raymond pounding those trails in his nineties. He is indeed my inspiration to seize the day and to understand that living fully has no correlation with the number of birthdays accumulated..

Write that book. Sail that ocean. Climb those mountains; Raymond climbed them at 90.

In memory of Raymond "Don Ramos" Banfield, hiker, former Spanish teacher and vice-principal, mentor of many, practitioner of healthy living. I will climb El Tucuche again, and I know he'll be walking right there beside me.

Bachac attack

Photo courtesy Santiwah blog

Anyone who's been reading this blog for a while knows that I live in a forested valley teeming with wildlife that often gets much too close for comfort. Vipers, hairy spiders the size of dessert plates, centipedes, bats, foul-mouthed frogs, quarrelsome manicou families - we live intimately will them all. I've never mentioned bachacs, though, because they've never posed a problem.

I like walking outside at night, and sometimes I open the front gate and stroll in the street for awhile, enjoying my favorite time of the day. It's a quiet street but I don't go very far, just to the end of our wall and back. About a month ago, as I strolled along the grass verge, I saw something strange: a dark, foot-wide swath stretching across the paving. Closer inspection revealed it to be thousands upon thousands of bachacs going about their business.

The bachac is Trinidad's leaf cutter ant. It's about half inch long, medium brown, with a hard body and mandibles that can give you a painful pinch but not take the piece of flesh off like its cousin the tac-tac. Bachacs are a common sight, bustling along in single file, each carrying a shorn piece of leaf back to the underground colony where they grow their fungus gardens. Never, ever, have I seen anything approaching the numbers of them that I saw crossing the street that night, those going away from our wall carrying their cut leaf sections on high, those going toward the wall carrying no load. My eyes swept the wall. There they were, a wide band of them, moving up the wall like a dark insect wave and disappearing down the other side into in our yard.

Photo courtesy Maniac Muslim forum

There's something very unsettling about the sight of millions of insects, apparently moving with one mind, coming at you. When we lived higher up the valley, a four-inch wide column of large jungle ants marched down the mountain, crossed the neighbour's lawn, entered our yard through the chain link fence and began to swarm the laundry room which was separated from the house by a narrow passageway. It took a lot of wild scrunching of ants and dispersal of cans of insecticide before they got the idea that they weren't welcome. Watching this bachac invasion didn't come close to that hysterical experience, but it was still somewhat unnerving.

I couldn't imagine which plant they were decimating but I wasn't left in suspense for long. Over the next week or so we noticed that a line of variegated crotons planted on the inside of the wall was beginning to look a bit sparse. Days later, they were naked twiggy sticks shorn of every leaf. That was when my mother took herself off to the garden store and brought home a small plastic bag of bachac bait. She scattered it around the base of the wall. The next night the bachacs were still there, crossing the road in a thick swath. When I checked on the second night there wasn't a single bachac to be seen. The poison had done its work.

As always, when we tamper with nature I feel a twinge of conscience. I even feel it when I kill poisonous snakes in the yard. But it had to be done. My mother's vegetable garden has been devastated by the heavy rains; now that we're entering the petit carême, the short dry season in the middle of the rainy half of the year, she's putting her yard back into gear: ochroes, dasheen, sweet potatoes, patchoi, peppers, lettuce and tomatoes are all going into the dirt. With food prices going through the roof right now there's no way she'll allow the bachacs to reap what she's busy sowing every day, pottering around in her big ridiculous straw hat, holey jeans and the bright green Crocs I got her in the hope that she'd stop ruining all her good shoes in the yard.

Inspiration from nature

I'm across at the Novel Spaces author blog today. Does being surrounded by nature take you into 'the zone'? It certainly does it for me!

Natural Inspiration

Random yard shots: purple petrea goes berserk

Toward the end of the recent drought the purple petrea by the front gate struggled to flower for weeks, managing only a few scattered sprays. Two weeks ago the rain came and it got a good drenching. This is what followed:



Looks a bit like photos I've seen of wisteria, but not as drapey, and ours is a shrub, not a vine. The pink poui has also been displaying itself for weeks, almost too beautiful to be real, and now its gold cousin is popping all over the hillsides and verges. Makes me glad to be alive!

[I took these photos with my ratty cell phone camera. My son needs to drop by with his trusty Canon to do this thing justice.]

El Tucuche, sacred mountain

Let me tell you about my favorite mountain. It's in the northern range of the island, to the east of Maracas Bay, that very bay featured in the masthead above (Ed. note: the masthead changes so the one you see might not be the one that features Maracas Bay). See the cloudy area at the top right of the photo? Go inland a bit, and east some more, and there's my mountain: El Tucuche. In school we were taught it was the second highest mountain on the island, and according to local lore, it was considered a sacred place by the Amerindians. The only known Amerindian glyphs in Trinidad occur on a rock outcrop here. I've hiked El Tucuche twice in my fitter days when I belonged to a naturalist group.

That first time was the hardest hike I've ever tackled, and I've been on quite a few. It makes No Mercy Hill on the trail to Paria Bay look like something in a child's sandbox. The first time I ventured up there I didn't think I'd make it home alive. On the way back down the mountain I was sick and trembling and wanted nothing more than to lie at the side of the trail and die. But, with the help of a fellow hiker (wonder what became of Vibert?) I made it down more or less intact (although my toenails slowly turned black and fell out and took forever to grow back).

El Tucuche, Trinidad
Image courtesy Carole Anne Ferris/CafeMoka Gallery

But the climb was so worth it. It's another world up there on the peak, where mists swirl through the trees and imbue everything with an eerie other-worldliness that defies description. The vegetation is different, and so is the fauna. Strange bird calls abound, and the frogs are painted in such brilliant colours they must surely be poisonous. This is the home of the El Tucuche golden tree frog, found only here and on that other bump on the local landscape, El Cerro Aripo. The ground is cushioned with super-thick, bright green moss that's a balm to feet that have been abused for hours.

After the last steep scramble there you are, on the plateau at the summit of the mountain, with the world spread at your feet. At first you're too exhausted to do anything but sit or lie there, semi-comatose, dreading the long, arduous hours of descent still ahead, but as your breathing slows and your heart stops pounding and there's a glimmer of light in the dark vortex of weariness that has become your world, the euphoria begins to set in. You did it! My first-hand experience of the devastating beauty of the physical world, especially on these hikes where I'm able to climb above the clamour of man-made existence, is one of the main reasons I'm not an out-and-out atheist. To me, it's as irrational to think that the universe is some random accident as my strange substantiation of intelligent creation must be to a nonbeliever.

But I digress. The second time around, El Tucuche was still a long, hard, exhausting climb to the top and back down, but I fared much better. The "never again!" of the first round gave place to "well, maybe I can be persuaded to make it a hat-trick".

There's an amazing footnote to the El Tucuche anecdote. Some years ago, there was an announcement that more accurate measuring technology had revealed that El Cerro Aripo, formerly believed to be Trinidad's highest mountain, was actually the second highest, and El Tucuche assumed its rightful place as the point on the island that comes closest to touching the heavens, a fitting tribute to that strangely shaped rock at the top of the world. Well, my world anyway.

...and another amazing footnote:
Raymond Banfield contacted me after reading the article above. He's a 90 year old veteran climber who has scaled El Tucuche more than 100 times over his lifetime - and still climbs it! His most recent ascent was earlier this month as part of his 90th birthday celebrations. The local media covered the event; the link to the Trinidad Express article is here.

Raymond "Don Ramos" Banfield gives the thumbs up signal on his historic
ascent to the summit of Mount El Tucuche, November 2010

Raymond is planning his next hike to the top for early next year. I can think of nothing I'd like to do at 90 that tops this. Keep on climbing, Raymond! You have become my great inspiration. Hope to see you on the summit some day soon!
- November 20, 2010

Note added 19-Nov-2011: Raymond passed away on November 10, 2011, three days after his ninety-first birthday. I'll climb El Tucuche again, and I know he'll be there hiking next to me - in spirit.

Random yard shots, March 2010 edition

The drought has been terrible and the hills are burning, but in my mother's parched garden these plants continue to pleasure the eyes and the spirit.

Ground orchid

Another orchid in a hanging basket. Don't know the name of this one...

Or this...

Oncidium or bee orchid growing happily in rubble in a basket

Marigolds in the background. Phlox and chives in the foreground. Yeah, my mom mixes it up, vegs and flowers in the same beds and borders.

Photos copyright R.S.V.P. Studios. Please contact blog owner for permission to reprint.

Almost Paradise

Photo courtesy Richard Voisin

In the valley where I raised my son, there's a waterfall just a few minutes walk away - up the road, on to a forest trail, a short hike up a boulder-strewn stream... and there it is. It's a little waterfall; everything here is island-scale. It cascades over a rim of rock into a pool of cold, fresh water. This waterfall and the area around it is my son's favorite place on earth.

Photo courtesy Richard Voisin

High above the first waterfall, further into the forest, there are other pools, other cascades. I've never ventured beyond the first falls because, well, it's lonely and isolated up there and hikers have been robbed repeatedly. One pool goes by the chilling name of Coffin Hole, and the myth is that no one has been able to fathom its depth.

Photo courtesy Richard Voisin

A few weeks ago my son did a photo shoot with some models up there, and the images blew me away. This has existed a few minutes away from me for all these years? No wonder, I thought, my son loves this area the way he does. For all those who insist on thinking I live in paradise, these shots should add weight to your argument. Paradise indeed.

Photo courtesy Richard Voisin

Photos copyright Richard Voisin / R.S.V.P. Studios. Please contact the blog owner for permission to reproduce and/or transfer images used in this article.

Random yard pics: Bougainvillae

I was with my mother the day she bought this plant. We had gone to Central Trinidad to look for bargains - or rather, she had. I was just along for the ride, providing her with company and a sense of security as she doesn't like to drive far from her familiar haunts alone. The plant was little more than a twig in a pot, but it was covered with masses of the most beautiful bougainvillea flowers I'd ever seen. (To be botanically correct: the tiny white splotch in the middle of each bloom is the real flower, and the colourful parts surrounding it are actually bracts or modified leaves.)

"Should I buy it?" she asked, indecisive as usual, eying the exorbitant price tag.

"You'd better," I responded.

That was at least two years ago. It's still in a small pot, but the twig is somewhat larger now. Several times a year, particularly during drier spells, the flowers emerge, and they're a sight to behold. When they fall they continue to enchant, looking like the most delicately hued rose petals scattered in the grass. That was money well spent.

The small white flowers in the background are periwinkles, or 'Old Maid' as they're known here. Our common varieties of periwinkle are so hardy they flourish in cracks in concrete. We tried planting an entire border of the more exotic, hybrid varieties and they all died out in a few months. That was not money well spent.

Random yard pic of the week: Heliconia

Heliconia flowers in border

I started fiddling with my cellphone cam again since my son showed me that I can change the resolution etc. etc. Yeah, yeah, I've had it for a year and a half and didn't figure out I could do something about the teensy tiny images I've been getting. That's what children are for - to point out the blatantly obvious to their technically challenged parents.

Took a bunch of yard shots but most are badly pixellated (my son's word) so I'll have to tinker a bit to get the hang of things. The one above is of my mother's heliconias in a border, mixed with a miscellany of other plants that all grow happily together. Too happily, if anything. Ignore it all for a few weeks and it turns to jungle.

Blog vacation

The blog is tired. I'm tired. Over the past three months my part-time, low-stress day job has morphed into something else altogether with long hours and triple the responsibility.

Hopefully, things will revert to normal within two to three weeks and I'll have the time and mindset once again to take care of my writing and my blog. Right now it's a struggle to balance all the facets of my daily life, so for the next few weeks I won't be blogging unless something spectacular happens that I just have to share with the cyberworld. I'll still be posting over at Novel Spaces when my turn comes around, and I'll still drop by your blogs to see what you're up to now and then.

And now for some good news. The house wrens, our tiny, animated coco rachelles, returned after a prolonged absence and have been making happy sounds around the eaves on mornings. One even paid me a visit, hopping and chirping along the rafters in my bedroom. And the manicou (opossum) family has also reappeared; I hear their sounds at night and even spotted one making its way along the back fence. I take the flourishing of the wildlife as a good omen for, oh, life in general.

Blessings, all!

Maraval in the rain

An old photo of the Saddle, a narrow pass connecting the Maraval and Santa Cruz valleys. (Photo courtesy the Trinidad Guardian archives)

If you've read Café au Lait you might recall mention of the Maraval Valley. The novel is a work of fiction, but this valley isn't, and I drove through it today to pick up my nephew from school. I lived there once, right after I separated from my husband, and for years I traversed this valley every day on my way to work. It was a longer drive than going through Port of Spain and taking the highway, but there was no traffic and the drive through valleys and over hills was lovely. My son was just five during the months that we lived in Maraval, yet he has vivid memories of the birds hopping around on the windowsill of his bedroom, of playing with the children who lived on the ground floor, of listening to music with his mom.

That was a weird time in my life. My ailing marriage was finally over; I had to come to terms with the prospect of raising my child alone; I was living on my own for the first time in my life. I surrounded myself with beauty as an antidote to all that I had suffered through: the special brand of coffee that I liked, music, my plants, a perfume I'd always wanted, long visits from an old friend whom I'd neglected during the tortured years of my marriage. He'd visit and we'd talk far into the night, catching up, drinking wine, playing Scrabble. After work each day I'd pick up my son and we'd go on an 'adventure' before going home. Some days we went to the mall, others we'd stop by the Queen's Park Savannah and I'd buy fruits from the roadside vendors while he ran around and climbed the trees. Or we'd drive to the marina in Chaguaramas, or to the back of West Mall (this was before all the high-rise condos went up) and sit and watch the sea. It was a shadowed yet strangely happy era. My son still loves the music of the 80s best of all; he says it takes him back to the Maraval time.


The Maraval Valley in the rain today. Photos taken above the golf course at Moka.

My son grew up. I left the teaching behind, lived abroad for awhile, came back. I haven't driven through Maraval in years - until today. It was raining. I like the rain. It was cool and lovely, the hills misty and shrouded, lush, green. Naturally, time has not stood still in the intervening years. The channel of the river that runs alongside the road is wider. There are large supermarkets and pharmacies higher up the valley where before there were only small shops and minimarts. Entire high-end developments have sprung up, and many others are under construction. Enormous brown gashes wound the hillsides which have been bulldozed for even more 'development'. The house with the tall rose bushes that I admired every day on my way to and from work is now indistinguishable from the numerous other houses flanking it. The house is there; the roses aren't.

So much has changed. The narrow bridges have been widened, and the road too in places, but the traffic jams, they tell me, begin way up in the valley where the road begins to rise sharply into the hills. They also tell me that the Saddle, that pass into the Santa Cruz Valley pictured above, is itself unrecognizable, bulldozed and widened, no longer the dark, one-lane tunnel with the sharp blind curve at the Santa Cruz end where I drove for so many years on my way to work, horn blaring to warn any unseen oncoming vehicle.

Those were different times; the Saddle Road was practically deserted then, and if the thought of being blocked and held up at gunpoint ever entered my head, it was for a fleeting moment. My solitary drive through Maraval, into the Saddle, then the descent into Santa Cruz where scarlet immortelles blazed over cocoa trees and pouis splashed the valley with riotous colour, was a daily adventure. It was spiritually refreshing, buoying me for the struggle ahead, and soothing me as I made the return trip when the battles had been lost and won for one more day.

I didn't get as far as the Saddle today, and I dread the day when I'll see for myself the mutilation of this lovely spot. Despite all the change, though, the valley retains its charm, its essence. But for how long? The prognosis, in view of what I saw today, is not hopeful.

Seagull in flight

As seen on the blog of my compatriot, Guanaguanare, the Laughing Gull. There are no words.

The virgin orchid & fruit of the vine

I mentioned the orchid we call the virgin back in my birthday post. The small white flowers cover the plant and last just one day. Yesterday it bloomed again...



And here, somewhat out of focus, are the first grapes from my mom's vine. They're small and not at all sweet, but we love them.

Rain

It's one of those days. Woke up to darkness when there should have been sunbeams streaming over the mountain and setting the valley aglow. Woke to blowing rain, rolling thunder, a lovely chill in the air. Today's rain is devoid of anger. It's mellow, dreamy almost. Even the thunder seems muted.

When I stand at the door and look up at the hills they're half veiled by low grey-white cloud and streamers of mist. The rain slivers down in silver streams. Makes me smile and hug myself. Makes me want to dance. Or something.

Here's a double tribute in song to my favourite kind of day: Rain, by SWV, the multiple Billboard and Grammy Award winning Sisters With Voices, and I Can't Stand the Rain by Eruption. I love both songs - and today I'm cool with the rainy-day memories, okay MysteryMan? (You know who you are.)

Mother's Day photos

An anthurium lily basks in the shade of the mango tree

My son took these shots of my mom's yard today, then he and I went off to attend an art exhibition at the Creative Arts Centre in St. Augustine. One of his friends who's a student there was exhibiting, and we had a lovely afternoon watching paintings, sculptures and dramatic costume presentations. Richard and his surfboard even featured in one of his friend's paintings. As we stood there admiring it (she's good, and I'm not saying that just because...) strangers would look at the painting, then at my son, then back again. Then they'd approach him and say: That's you! - at which point my son would try to look mystified while the rest of us (the girl's parents, her brother and I) burst into laughter. It was a lovely way to spend the afternoon.


The tomatoes are fantastic this year, huge and plentiful


She has chives planted everywhere


My brother brought her some dahlia tubers from Florida and she planted them in pots. This is the first flower to open.


An oncidium, the bee orchid


Another orchid by the back step. Don't know the name of this one.


The julie mangoes are coming along...


Marigolds, known locally as stinking susie, growing wild near the front wall.


Impatiens drooping in the afternoon heat


Lettuce, with water grass competing for space


Bee in cosmos


This makes a great ground cover and is virtually unkillable. The small purple flowers are the icing on the bush.

...and now the gold!

Last month I posted about the pink poui trees that had burst into bloom all around. Some of them are still flowering, and now the gold have come out everywhere, shimmering with vibrant colour, dotting hillsides, savannahs, parks and verges that were a uniform green just a week ago.

Vive la poui, the sunshine tree!

Photo courtesy http://www.painetworks.com/pages/eu/eu1127.html
Photographer: rob and ann simpson

The pouis are back

In 2003 I was out of the country. I heard that this valley, unscathed by the drought and fires of the dry seasons during the years I had lived in its embrace, burned that year. By 2004 when I was back home it was the same as I'd left it: green and lovely. Since I've been back the dry seasons have been barely that, with rain throughout, so I have so far, thankfully, never seen this valley turn brown. The pouis have bloomed in abundance every year, as if to remind me of what I'd been missing, and to chastise me for the despair I often feel over the state of my country.


Every year, around this time, the pink poui (Tabebuia rosea) dot the hills, the verges, the fields and savannahs with clouds of shimmering colour. Words cannot describe the sight, nor can pictures do this blooming tree justice. Few joys compare with standing on a carpet of pink under one of these mammoth trees, staring up in awe as showers of the trumpet-shaped flowers rain down on one. At moments like these even my doubting soul acknowledges that yes, there must be a God.

The pink variety, which can be any shade between palest pink and vibrant lilac, has burst into bloom once more. Everywhere I turn, it seems, the incredible beauty is stopping me in my tracks, making me catch my breath. In a few weeks the show will be over, and the golden poui will be everywhere, equally startling, equally breathtaking. The golden variety is like the sun, dazzling and brilliant. The pink is... softer. More delicate and ethereal. Less... brazen.

I love them both. But I have to admit, I love the pink more.

Sunday afternoon visitor

One of these guys scared me almost out of my wits some years ago when we lived higher up the valley. I was at home alone when I heard loud knocking. I investigated and realized the sounds were coming from the backyard. After several heart-pounding minutes - which I will not describe, especially the part where I armed myself with a kitchen knife - I discovered a woodpecker like the one in the photo tapping away at a dead grapefruit tree in the backyard. I had never seen one before, so once I had ascertained that a murderous thug was not trying to break into the house and hack me to death, I sat at the window and watched the bird until it finally flew away.

Today one of its kin appeared in the yard, tapping away at a wooden fence post. This is the first one I've seen here; I called my mother, who was doing something in the front yard, and we stood at the back door lost in admiration. It didn't seem to notice us about 12 feet away, and if it did that did not distract it from its hunt for insects in the dead wood. After about 10 minutes it flew away into a neighbour's plum tree.

This woodpecker is quite large, about a foot from tip to tail, I estimated. The beak looks lethal. Hope he/she makes a habit of dropping in on us.

Close encounters of the bird kind

Last night the electricity went. Again. Over the last three weeks this has been an almost nightly occurence, so I performed the requisite cussing routine then went to bed although it was only about 7 PM. By midnight I was up and on the computer, with the rain falling and the wind gusting. It was altogether quite a cosy setting.

After awhile the rain eased up, the wind died, and something landed on the roof. For the next hour or so, this creature stamped back and forth, creating a rather interesting uproar. I decided it had to be a bird of some sort. From the sounds it was making, I deduced that it must be an albatross.

I went outside, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner echoing in my head, hoping to catch sight of the monstrous presence on the roof and fearing that I would have to defend my life against this humongous bird of prey. I could just see the thing gliding down, grabbing me in its talons and swooping off to some distant aerie to devour me at its leisure. I know what you're thinking, that it would take some bird to even lift the likes of me, far less to swoop away with my poundage dangling from its claws. All I'll say in my defence is that you did not hear this thing. I did. This was a big bird.

Peering up at the roofline revealed nothing, so I briefly toyed with the idea of hurling some stones on to the galvanize to scare the creature away, but my mother was sleeping and would not have taken kindly to rocks crashing on to the roof in the dead of midnight. I went back indoors and after a while, a long while, the stamping and clattering stopped.

My sister scoffed when I mentioned the albatross adventure to her today. Fie, I say to her. Ridicule me all you like. So what if the albatross is native to Antarctica?

I know what I heard. She didn't.