Jeanne saw it pass the window and called out: a huge bird with an eight foot wing span. It perched on a hemlock limb ten feet from the drainage edge of the pond. We had seen herons in the past, lifting off from a pond like a lumbering 747 super-sized aircraft, but nothing to compare to the size of that bird. After consulting two of our bird books and watching it with binocular amplification, we knew it was a turkey buzzard. Its body was larger than a wild turkey. In order to see it fly, I opened the kitchen door, which faces the end of the pond, to startle it. It flew. Its broad wings were at least eight feet long, end-to-end. I called to Jeanne to make certain that Attila, the smaller of the dogs, was in the house. From the books we learned that our new, unannounced guest was a meat eater.

Attila is substantial, but the turkey buzzard could have carried him off to his lair for a meal; adistasteful thought. In addition to its large turkey-like body, that breed of buzzard has a bright red face; a dead give-away if ever you are in doubt. After a time, his powerful wings carried him elsewhere in search of prey. Good riddance.

When we returned from the city at dusk one recent evening, we heard the quacking. The ducks, wherever their nest on the old Sour farm, were fighting off crows. I can't attest to that, but I am convinced of it. I could see circling, screaming crows, and between their screeches, the distressed calls of the Mallards. I was concerned enough that, still in city clothes, I walked as far as the power line clearing to determine if I could be of assistance to the ducks. All, ducks and crows, were deeper into the forest than my blue city suit and black shoes would enable me to pierce. The commotion continued for some time. We haven't heard nor seen the ducks since.

Morel gathering has only been fair. Yesterday, after modest rain the previous day, I spent over three hours roaming the forest; I returned with ample mushrooms for two, twice. Recently, I was walking the steep Bradley ridge, the same ridge I rested upon before setting out to get myself lost, in search of the usual inch-to-three-inch long morels. This day, I came down the western slope and onto earth laid mostly-bare by ageless rains. I looked to the right and in the middle of a four foot patch of nothing was one of the largest morel mushrooms I have ever seen: eight inches high, seven and a half inches around the base of the pocked crown. which covers the head of all morels. I didn't gasp, but I was stunned. I thought to myself: "This is like Boogie and the guys who hunt deer in Jewell Hollow coming upon the perfect twelve-point, haughty old buck."

I knew I was the more fortunate: I didn't have to kill a graceful animal to capture my prize; only stand for a long moment admiring it on the sun-soaked slope before gently breaking it off at the point it emerged from the earth and the fungus below.

Sunday
"There has been a robbery," were Granny's first words to us on a recent morning. Eighty-five year old Granny is with us again this spring, after a flight from Michigan.

"I saw them bury the loot. It was just at the break of light. A car came slowly up the Hollow, turned around in our parking lot. A man jumped out and carried a white thing this wide; it was probably a pillow case with the loot. Then he buried it. I could see him the entire time. Then the car came down to meet him, he jumped in and it raced off."

Quite a happening in Jewell Hollow. Granny, an extremely early riser, had witnessed all of this at-the-break-of-light activity from her rocking chair at the front window. We were at first relieved that the robbery had not been conducted against us; we knew it was curious that the dogs hadn't sounded the alarm if persons of ill-intent had invaded our turf.

The next thought was that if loot has been buried within sight of the cabin, perhaps we shouldn't be the ones to disturb it. The robbers might become more than ill-tempered at the only persons within a mile, if their booty should be missing.

Granny and I walked around the rim of the pond. I asked her to sit in the same line of sight she had from the window. I walked onto the state road and began looking for fresh signs of digging. I found nothing. Granny followed me and pointed out a ball of twine on the ground. I moved toward the twine and saw that it extended upward. I looked as the twine rose, to a large, white helium-filled balloon, soaring just above the tree level.

"Granny, what happened this morning that is unusual?"

"Well, this car pulled up, a man got out..."

"No, I don't mean the robbers; what else?"

My Socratic questions didn't work.

"Remember the spray planes zooming over the cabin this morning? Everything you saw did happen. A man got out of a car carrying that white balloon over his head, came down here and attached it to this log and let it out to mark where the planes were to spray the gypsy moths. Granny was embarrassed over the misinterpretation of her early morning sightings.

The morel mushroom season ended yesterday. I found a few stragglers, but the subterranean fungi have quit flowering -- period -- now. On Thursday, we gathered a hundred mushrooms; Friday, a few; then the end. Boogie claims that the season ends May 10; if anyone could calculate the comings and goings of the mysterious morels, it would be Boogie. They are mysterious to me because I don't know why proven patches don't produce each year. Each day during the morel hunt, I walked around the rock wall where years ago I picked the giants and was confronted by the copperhead snake; nothing. Perhaps when the giant morels emerge it's as a final blowout of a particular fungus. Whatever, the morels are, day-by-day, where you find them and nowhere else. Over three weeks, we picked nearly five hundred morels, a successful season.

The time is now upon us to saw, split, and stack firewood for the approaching autumn and winter. When the temperatures fall into the twenties, we keep two wood stoves burning; it is a part-time job in the depth of winter just to keep them blazing. By October, we will have a dozen new stacks scattered about the forest, wind-drying wood ready for winter stoves.

Saturday
It is celebration time in Jewell Hollow. Yesterday, Jeanne mailed the check which frees our cabin and rocky acreage from bondage. At last, indebtedness has been removed. Now the only conceivable way this tiny piece of mountain wilderness can be lost to our family is by the failure to pay the de minimus property taxes.

Twenty-nine years ago our piece of Jewell Hollow was purchased for the price of a modest new automobile today. Over the years, it has been used as security for numbers of loans for various purposes, high-blown and low. Now, it is out of our hands, in trust to our sons. No matter how tempted, we no longer have the power to encumber this tiny piece of rock and clay, backed into the slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Little Amy and Avery and their cousins, God willing, should be able to pass their piece of Jewell Hollow onto their children; that thought pleases us very much.

Sending that last check to the money lenders was a triumph beyond belief, a sublime relief and concurrent explosion of the spirit of victory: arms thrown to the sky in exaltation and imaginary high fives all around. No matter what occurs to us in our years remaining, we pass to our family three decades of the generations (now four) living and learning from nature and each other. It will go on and on, long after Jeanne and I are burrowed deep in the red clay and boulders, out near the parking lot.

Monday, Memorial Day
The cabin is crowded with four generations of five adults, two pre-four year olds and three dogs. Motion is constant, with our grandchildren, Amy and Avery, seemingly always on the move. Today is sunny, warm and perfect for outdoor work.

My thought was to saw up the top half of a pine which had fallen to the ground in a heavy wind storm. Before the state road crew came to saw it into four foot lengths, it blocked vehicle traffic on the state road.

Months earlier, the pine was struck by a massive lightning bolt. The lightning was seeking an old metal wheelbarrow which I had balanced on the trunk. The lightning hit midway up the forty yard high tree and then slashed down to the metal wheelbarrow, tearing a three inch wide gash in the bark as it went. The force of the lightning was strong enough to tear out a four foot length of bark and hurl it into the pond, the edge of which is ten feet from the tree. One day I was puzzled by the bark floating at the edge of the pond; none of us had thrown it into the water. As I looked around for an explanation, Connie, our daughter-in-law, discovered the lightning gash on the pine; that explained the bark strip in the pond.

Electrical storms are terrifying when we are cabin captives. The dogs hide in the bunk room and under beds in other bedrooms. For we humans, it's a pain and threat as well: many tall, adult trees -- oaks, hemlocks, poplars -- any one of which could destroy the cabin on its way to the ground after a solid lightning hit.

Chainsaws can be temperamental. Ours had been sitting, unattended in the screen house during the winter months. The saw has a choke, which is pulled open; the throttle trigger is locked open by a button on the throttle-trigger grip. Then, I hold the saw by the round circular guard around the engine with my left hand and pull the starter cord with my right hand with a sweeping motion. After a few pulls, the spark plug is designed to fire the gasoline in the engine and very noisily begin spinning the cutting chain. That is how the chainsaw is designed to work; today it didn't function, period.

Delbert was working across the state road cleaning branches and limbs from the timbering which had turned some of his hardwoods into cash. I talked to him from the edge of the state road where the lightning-demised half-pine stands. He came over and walked with me around the pond to the outdoor work bench between the cabin and the screen house.

"I used to work on these things thirty years ago," he said as he unscrewed the spark plug. He looked at it, replaced it to the connection at the top where it gets it electrical charge. Watching the end of the plug which is supposed to spark and ignite the gas, he slowly pulled the starter cord. No spark. No functioning chainsaw. No pine sawing today. Delbert and I talked about his plans to build on the high ridge across from the pond above us, or over the stream across the state road in front of us. He is married to a Sours, one of the nine surviving children of the couple who coaxed a meager living out of the ninety acres of red clay and stone, now divided into large lots. When the family sold, Delbert bought ten acres of the old home place for his wife.

With a busted chainsaw, the work of the day could have been over, but that would have been slacking it on such a lovely day. The green tide must be turned back or the cabin will be lost to the forest.

Since the hemlocks have been dying much more light seeps onto the forest floor near the cabin. It is surrounded by growing green plants of every description: hundreds of tiny oak trees, massive nameless ground cover, ferns, dandelions -- green, green, creeping and growing.

We maintain a clearing of ten yards around the cabin. I must regularly attach the creeping green with a golf club-like cutter, with deep serrated edges. I get into a rhythms back and forth, putter-like swing and cut away the green growth as I move about. Combustion engine mechanical gadgets exist to do such work, but there would be no exercise and the challenge of improving my imaginary putting would be destroyed.

Perhaps we would be still sawing logs with a cross-cut if two of us were always available and eager for the back-rendering work at the same moment; it would seldom happen. Given that fire wood is needed on a predictable schedule, it must be methodically sawed, split, stacked and dried. We long ago accepted the noise and smoke of the chains for the cords of wood that one aging lawyer can put aside over a warm, gentle summer and golden autumn.

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