tap tap tap...

After a terrible fall down the stairs leading from my hiding-hole in the house to the rest of the storage container we call home... I have FINALLY remembered who I am and where my blog is. Being that I am almost fully recovered from my accident, I thought I might just drop in and leave some hint of myself scrawled here on the cyber pages of what has turned into a rather freaking boring and uneventful chronicle of dysfunctionality.

Hi.

Okay, I admit it, I did not really fall down the stairs, I just made that up.

Only days after the Finch Family began their nest and my little world became filled with the hope and promise of new life I showed up at work last Monday (much to everyones disappointment, but with my hair brushed) and discovered the nest had been raided... one egg had been tossed out and lay smattered on the ground below. Dried up egg-guts baked on the cement slab and another egg precariously sticking out of the ransacked twigs of the nest waiting to meet the same fate of its fallen clutchmate were visual cues indicating something horrible had gone down. A couple House Sparrows in the vicinity seemed to be the likely culprits... those bastards!

No sign of the Finch Family. I wonder if they moved on to nest-building elsewhere together or upon finding their pillaged nest if they didn't just stop and look at each other in disgust - deciding they should divorce and find a more suitable member of the gene pool who could build a safer place to raise a family.

I miss the bubbling sound of the finch chatter.

The nest remains as a silent memorial... I am sure all the birds involved are not dwelling on the incident, they have moved on going about the business that birds must do by design. I am the only idiot left mourning the loss.

So with the exception of the vandalized nest, the little fenced in cement and gravel smoking area has returned to its prior state of nothingness with one slash of life in the form of one sickly tree growing out of the bottom of the neighboring warehouse.


As you might guess, this tree has been a never-ending source of entertainment for me. I am easily entertained by just sitting and watching things - any things, I am not picky.

My ability to find hours of entertainment in what seems nothing to most observers was refined at a young age in the house at Poughkeepsie New York. One of my step-mothers favorite forms of punishment was to lock me in my room for indefinite amounts of time. Usually this punishment was mandated by my refusal to call her mother (or any derivative of the word that might indicate her having an actual maternal relationship to me)... her words were: "If you insist on not acting like part of our family, you will not be treated like part of the family." And so I spent many quiet hours in my room staring at the fantastic wood grain patterns of my paneled walls. I saw demons, angels, fairies, friends, creatures... you name it. They were all trapped floating with their frozen expressions, eternally encased in wood all around me. Many stories were fabricated about them in my imagination...and even though some of those faces were quite scairy, I was never afraid of them - I knew they could not get out of the wood.

I totally went on a tangent.

The point is, the stupid, sickly tree sprouting out of the slab has eeked out an existance for about 4 years now and has fascinated the hell out of me. I study it every chance I get. The tree is so covered in tiny white fuzzy aphids that the tree appears to be stuck in a perpetual snowing state. Tiny white puffs constantly drift away from it. The tree is covered in aphids and most of the leaves are curled up in protest of having its life-blood unwillingly sucked from its body.

A master gardener told me that plants in this state are mistakenly only treated for aphids - when really, the presence of so many insects is more an indicator that there are other more serious health problems with the plant. i.e. the great number of aphids are the warning alarm on mother nature's rectal thermometer. Aphids are opportunists, if there is a weak plant - they are ON it.


Any way, the tree has become a fully-fledged mini-ecosystem. Lady bugs by the gazillions have come to this tree to gorge on aphids, lay their eggs, pupate, whatever... you can find many different species of lady bugs in any stage of their life at any given time on the leaves and bark of this tree. Birds also come to pick their fill of all the tasty insects living on this dysfunctional tree, - even a nice network of ants has developed - here to milk what ants seem to think a treat - aphid juice.

Such a remarkable little world attached to this one tree! I love the tree, it makes me happy.

My boss knows I am a tree hugger and delights in getting my goat. Every time we happen to be outside on a smoke break together she always manages to find a way to wander over to the tree and mumble about how she needs to have THAT tree cut down. I know she will eventually, if not, the electrical company will because its branches are getting too close to the power lines, or maybe the folks who own the warehouse attached to the slab that the tree is sticking out of will cut the tree down.

Just like the Finch eggs, one day here, one day not, but this time a whole little world lies dangling by a thread.