It's early in the morning and I can hear a motorcycle revving its engine, racing down a local avenue at breakneck speed. The entire landscape of our fair city, from bulbs to redbuds are coming alive, proving that, like motorcycles out for their first test run, acceleration is the true mark of spring. Dogs are barking, lawn mowers are getting their mojo on, and gosh darn it, our lovey-dovey duck friends, Maude and Claude, have returned to waddle around our porch pretending they don’t know us. Maybe there are too many ducks out there…
By the way, for those of you who are regular followers of Knee Deep, I write about Maude and Claude every year and although I can’t be sure it is the same pair, I’m sure Claude murmured something like “there’s just too many stinkin’ Jeffs out there!” as I pulled out of my driveway the other day. Very suspicious, wouldn’t you say?
Out there on the road, I come face to face with motorcycles everywhere. It’s not quite warm enough for them to be out in my opinion, but bikers are diehards and love the feel of that blacktop passing under their boots. Not long ago, when one of those Harley guys, probably a Jeff, pulled up next to me and vroomed his engine, it was I spit my hot coffee out all over my clean white t-shirt and my radio switched to heavy metal. Yikes! Too many stinkin’ Jeffs out there!
I tried to ride a motorcycle a couple of times, but my attempts didn’t end so well. I understand the clutch and the shifting, but on a motorcycle – not so much. In the back of my head, I think I still hear my father’s voice telling me if he ever caught me on a motorcycle he’d tan my hide. He’d had seen one too many accidents in the emergency room as a physician, and he didn’t want one of his kids to be one of them.
I should have listened to him, but youth, they say, is wasted on the young. On a short getaway last summer to a Cincinnati Reds game, my wife and I noticed the green motor scooters – sort of pay-as-you-go Ubers – that are plopped along the sidewalks and streets.
Let’s try one!” I said, grabbing the handlebars. “We can zip around downtown and see everything in fifteen minutes!”
Downloading a frustrating GO! ap, we fired up our Uber-and-Under scooters and began to weave around benches, beeping the horns that sounded, well, kind of like an angry duck now that I come to think about it. My wife’s scooter skills quickly went from rookie to decent. I wasn’t progressing quite as fast, and had some points taken off when I attempted to fly over a speed bump. Turns out scooters do not like being air born, and mine sputtered a couple of times and shut down, eating up nine minutes of Visa bill on my next billing cycle.
Shortly, we decided it would be cool to zip down to a municipal park slash botanical refuge, a gorgeously designed park laden with paths, perfect for a scooter couple who want to sight-see in a botanical kind of way. About thirty-nine and a half feet in, our urban puddlehoppers made a butt-ugly noise and croaked on the spot, turned off by an invisible GPS barrier just inside the garden. That left us pushing our scooters back out to the street, past a sign made of recycled beehives that read, NO SCOOTERS! And underneath it, in small print – you got it – it read, “Just too many stinkin’ Jeffs out there!”
Now, as the sun stays up longer each day and we begin to spend time in our own botanical garden here at home, we pull up our wild violets and yank out the crabby grass so that our annuals have a chance to take root. Robins hover within a few feet of where I’m working, ready to swoop in as soon as I leave to pick out their choice of worms and bugs.
Every time I see a robin lurking nearby, I remember some oddball research that was done to figure out how they find a worm. Do you think robins feel the worm underneath or hear it moving under their feet? Turns out, scientists have done all kinds of experiments, from blindfolding to playing recordings of worms digging to see what the robins would do. I don’t know how in the world one would record an earthworm digging, but apparently earthworms are pretty rowdy when they get to diggn’. I’m thinking they are tossing back tequila shots down there, but as it turns out there’s another theory that hit pay dirt. If you watch a robin hunting for a worm, they turn their heads to one side and stare until a worm pops its fat head up, and then, hello snack-time! I’m putting in annuals, minding my own business, while a bunch of one-eyed robins are waiting to go in for the kill!
My neighbors ask me why I don’t grow some veggies, but I’m more of a decorative gardener than a farmer gardener. People will tell me there is nothing to it, and they are right of course, as it would be ultra easy for me to plop some tomato plants in and reap the harvest. I get that, and I’m envious when folks roll out the farm fresh. So in honor of Newcastle Australia, I decided on a clever compromise a couple of years back and planted a red honeysuckle, something pretty but also sweet I could nibble on if the mood struck me. Each year, with a little training, that honeysuckle plant etches out another section of our fence, spurting out dozens of blooms throughout the season and flowering our yard with the smell of red, whatever smell that is.
Since the beginning of time, which was three years ago, I’ve taught my grandchildren how to gently pull the stamin through the tube for that one drop of sweet nectar. You would think by the looks on their faces they were eating ice cream as they capture those glistening drops, one after another. Right now, we have about forty-five thousand blooms along our fence, enough to sell on the honeysuckle black market, if there was such a thing. Extracting the nectar one day, I thought it might be fun to eat the whole flower and pretend I was a vegetable gardener. I loped off a half dozen red flowers, lazily chewing my way towards some imaginary honeysuckle high. About mid-swallow, it occurred to me that I might be poisoning myself, a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me before. I ran inside to google whether honeysuckle flowers can kill you, but on a whim, changed my mind in lieu of a little fun with my wife:
“I’m feeling a bit flushed,” I told her, “and I don’t feel so hot. Do I look red to you?”
“What do you mean, red? There’s red and then there is fever red,” she answered.
“Like bright red,” I said.
“Why? What happened to you?” she asked.
“Well, I was eating some of the honeysuckle nectar off the vine and decided to eat some flowers too – about a dozen of them. Then I realized they might be poisonous and I could be dying,” I said, panicky.
“In my opinion, you could use the sweetness, but…”
“…no serious, do I look like I’m swelling? Am I bloated? I think I’m starting to (cough, cough) wheeze. And my eyes scratch (cough, cough),” I added.
“You mean itch, not scratch, don’t you?” she said, yawning and stared at me, like one of those robins with one eye.
I went back outside, took a big whiff of those powerful negative ions in the air. A motorcycle was accelerating down the highway, Maude and Claude were making out in my yard, and I knew there were earthworms digging ferociously underneath me. There may be too many stinkin’ Jeffs out there, but too much Springtime or honeysuckle wasn’t going to change that.