I piled ten long wooden stakes from the roadside work last year, the shovel and my violin back up onto the walker, put the plastic bag away and headed off when I heard the door of Willem's car shut. I thought about the turtles that would son lay their eggs in the gravel underfoot. And the three turtles I know live in the pond somewhere down in the murky bottom.
I walked along the highway watching the foliage in the ditch alongside the road, scanning for the few tamarack trees we had missed in pulling up trees the other day. Willem drove up, so I had him pull over so I could kiss him goodbye and so I could get a plastic grocery bag from him for the tamarack seedlings I was going to transplant to the Sedge meadow around the tipi.
It was nice to see my sweetheart. He's such a darling. I'm so blessed that he loves me so much. He's so full of love. He was leaving an hour earlier than usual but didn't think he'd get home any earlier, as it was going to be much heavier traffic at this time of the morning. He was one of the only cars on the road for quite awhile. The vehicles at this time of day were cars, as they had a long way to commute. Later it will only be pickup trucks that venture past, going to work in the smaller towns closer to us.
I dug around and pulled up five tamarack trees. A couple or three of them had pinky-thick trunks, but the others had smaller ones, darning needle sized, even.
I put them in my bag and walked slowly up the road allowance looking for more of them. Deciding I had gotten them all, I came back up to the walker on the paved shoulder and moved on toward sedge meadow tipi.
At the path down into the roadside, where it is over a foot steeper, I tossed down the stakes, the shovel and donned my boots that I'd kept there yesterday as I left to go back up to the house. I carried my laptop and violin over to the hammock in the back entrance to the tipi and returned to plant the tamaracks. I dug slices into the wet black oil and pushed them each in, then pushed a meter long wooden stake into the ground beside it and hammered it in with the back of my shovel. I replaced a couple of tiny thin markers with stakes and added stakes to tamaracks that I'd discovered yesterday when I clipped all the grass away fro the little trees.
I planted three along the edge and just inside Snowshoe labyrinth and a couple on the north or the road side of the tipi and another couple on the other side, hoping that in years to come they will grow up and create lots of privacy for my little tipi area, as well as nesting sites for the birds and animals.
I washed my hands off on the tall grasses, which were covered with dew; a good clean washing so much water droplets gave!
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