There’s energy and optimism in the air the weekend before Christmas that I find does not exist the weekend after.   The holiday parties, grown children returning to the roost, family photos and news arriving with Christmas cards from childhood friends and college pals of 30 years ago, pretty packages growing slowly in number beneath the tree that hasn’t yet dried out and sagged and dropped ornaments.

This weekend brought me to my friend’s annual holiday gathering at their farm and elegant food shop in Borodino, N.Y. on Rose Hill Road, near the flashing light on Route 41 beside Skaneateles Lake.

Products on display at the Borodino Market, Schoolhouse Farms

Becky's kamut grain salad with vegetables and feta. Yum!

Becky and Richard Malcolm demonstrate the possibilities of the products they sell in a healthy, light, adventurous culinary sampling. Champagne and wine add to the cheer in this novel historic, one-room schoolhouse setting of unusual domestic and imported items.  Superb.

This afternoon I just finished rendering beef suet which I strained and combined with some egg shells I’d been saving and a big spoonful of peanut butter.  It’s all cooling in a loaf pan at the back door so I can slice it, place it in the suet cage outside my kitchen window and await the woodpeckers. I’ve become the crazy bird lady of the University neighborhood and admit to delaying important tasks so I can spy on the birds with binoculars.

I have dozens of plump and satisfied cardinals, chicadees, pygmy nuthatches and red-breasted nuthatches, titmice, junkoes, gold finches, house finches and purple finches.  I’ve seen a hawk out back which I don’t know how to identify because they all look the same in the bird book and I can’t get close enough, even with binoculars, to get a better look at his markings. 

By far my favorite backyard visitors are the woodpeckers.  I have five varieties and one particularly beautiful and bashful one, the red-breasted woodpecker which made a dozen appearances at the suet cage yesterday.  The red-breasted woodpecker doesn’t seem to have a red breast as much as it has a brilliant, orange-red band extending like a mohawk from the beak, up and down the head and ending at a perfect cape of delicate black and white stripes.  Best yet, he announces his arrival at the feeder with a loud cluck so I can stop what I’m doing and admire him.

A chickadee comes in for a landing at the sunflower seed

This weekend I’ve also kept close tabs on my friend Dee who is snowed in with her three boys in northern Virginia.  Dee is a native of Syracuse so she knows snow, but she doesn’t know it well anymore for having relocated to the south after college.  This weekend she got reacquainted real fast with two feet of snow dumped on her yard by the Blizzard of ’09.

Like her old Syracuse days, Dee gets snowed in in Virginia

Don’t you admit to feeling just a little left out of all the fuss?  I know 2 feet will fall on us too eventually, but the scenes of a white White House and gauzy Rockefeller Christmas tree gave folks up and down the coast a little something that we couldn’t have this weekend.

Still to come before darkness descends on this darkest time of the year; my walk with Eika around the neighborhood which is getting soaked in sunshiny vitamin D today, only this time I’ll tape a note to the door advising Otto not be allowed outside until the shepherd and I return.  Scroll to the article before this one and you’ll know why.

Maureen,

I really love your blog. I found it when I was googling “Sounds of Late Summer” and fell into your site. I started reading one article but found myself reading them all! I was happy to see that like myself, you love birds. I find myself searching the sky at every turn to see a new or interesting bird. I have even resorted to “calling” the Osprey when I ride on the canal on most days. It is amazing how much you can see when you really start to look. The same is true when you really listen. I have been blown away by the cicadas that practically “scream” during the midday sun in these late, summer days.

Through the years I had enjoyed watching you as the ever charming and professional TV Anchor but I never knew your real talent as a writer. I enjoy reading your insights on different topics and also the insights and comments of your subscribers. I will definitely find myself as a “regular” to your site. Thanks for sharing your wisdom, thoughts and a piece of yourself with others in the CNY area. Linda Quinn

The aforementioned comment is from a kind and knowledgeable lady I’ve known for many years.   Linda Quinn is a registered dietitian and someone we turned to as a credible source for our stories about food while I was employed by WTVH-TV.  Linda now represents New York State Apple Growers and they are lucky to have her.  She is a treasure.

I last saw Linda at Dana Decker’s wine store in Old Fayetteville several months ago.  It was great to reconnect and to meet her husband for the first time, so Linda, this article is inspired by you.  Thank you for your lovely post.

____________________

I wonder if readers most enjoy my two-cent observations about the news, or stories of my every day life, or tales of my family history growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts.  It’s hard to tell because all comments are ridiculously positive.  Someone level some criticism, please, and kids, I don’t mean you.

Now to the birds.  I have become the Crazy Bird Lady of Berkeley Park.  All who know me realize I pick up hobbies at the exclusion of everything else.  Last winter I had beads and pieces of silver and wire spread all over the kitchen table for two months as I dove into my jewelry habit again.   We ate our meals in the dining room, or more often standing at the little kitchen island, because the table was “taken over” by one of “mom’s projects” as Charlie affectionately refers to the mess.

See the chickadee perched atop the feeder?

My ebay obsession has occupied the dining room since February.  All the junk I’m pulling from the bowels of the basement and the rafters of the attic get pulled to the first floor for photographing and temporary storage near the dining room window while I wait for my online auctions to end.  My lovely room in the center of the house masquerades as an antique store turned post office with “treasures”, boxes and bubble wrap all piling up.

Now it’s birds.  With apologies to Christian and all who enter my home, more often than not, you’ll find me frozen still like stone in the middle of my kitchen, watching the dive-bombers come in from the woods to the five bird feeders and one suet cage hanging around my patio and outside my kitchen window.  If I move I’ll scare them away and they’ll face certain starvation.   They need me.  How they found sustenance between the last time I was into birding at my old house fifteen years ago and now, I’ll never know, but I have a reason to get out of bed every day.

In yet another way that I have turned into my mother,  I marvel at the variety of backyard birds visiting my feeders.   Mom used to speak of the goldfinches, titmice, chicadees and cardinals that she spotted at our home on Chandler Street in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Now I’m doing it.  In fact, had I not had this involuntary training in backyard birdwatching as a teenager, I might be starting completely from scratch at identifying the most obvious of backyard birds.    So thanks Mom, for your daily lessons in which bird was which, because they are all visiting me now in Syracuse.

A bird feeder and a suet cage attract nuthatches and woodpeckers outside the breakfast room window

What surprises me even more, is Christian seems entertained by the activity out the window too.  He doesn’t show any interest in knowing one species from the other, but he does stop on his way to the refrigerator to notice there’s a bird hanging upside down eating fat just outside the window.  Is he going to turn into his mother too someday as I have?  Or will he become his dad and smoke cigars?  Ick.

Today, under the threat of rain, I cooked my own bird suet.  Now that’s pathetic.  I rendered beef fat from the P and C grocery store at Nottingham, and added peanut butter, bird seed, cornmeal, popcorn and stale cereal.  As of this writing, it’s still solidifying in the fridge, but the little bits I attempted to spread on the bark of an oak tree and which fell to the ground were gobbled up quickly by Otto, my combination garbage-disposal-mini-dachsund who will probably begin throwing up or pooping on my bed around 2:00 am.

Robins love the birdbath and I love the giant wind chimes by the patio

Linda, you refer to the screaming cicadas at this time of year.  Are you hearing the crows as well?  We have a roost or a pre-roost, I’m not sure which, in the University area and as soon as the weather chills, thousands of crows begin to migrate here from dusk till dawn until spring.  It’s another sign of the season.  The crows haven’t blackened the skies yet, but the Syracuse University students returned to the neighborhood today for the start of classes on Monday.  Soon I’ll hear the roar of football fans in the Carrier Dome right from my front yard, and I’ll hear the crows in the trees out back.

Instead of exercising, I stand like stone at the birds at these feeders, so I don't scare them away from outside the busy kitchen

So far, I’ve observed northern cardinals, chicadees, tufted titmice, white-breasted nut hatches, hairy woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers and gold finches at my feeders, along with the robins, crows and bluejays who swim in the birdbath.  Please tell me what you all have in your backyards.  I’d love to know.

Now can someone please post a comment about vacuuming?

The title of my last article was The Canary In The Mine, and it had to do with taxes and downtown development.  There’s a reason why I put a bird in the title.  Birds are my latest obsession.

I just mounted my third backyard bird feeder, one designed exclusively for upside down-feeding goldfinches.  No takers yet but I’m not worried.  It took two weeks for birds to find the first one I hung.  That was all-purpose and there are now many customers; chickadees, nuthatches and a whole family of cardinals that are so cute, I could watch them all day instead of vacuuming and doing dishes and laundry which is exactly what I’ve chosen to do.

I had a bunch of feeders at my old house in Bradford Hills.  A pergola just outside the family room window was perfect for hanging and filling feeders.  When I moved to the new place in Berkeley Park, I had my hands full with four growing children and a job, but what I did not have was a pergola.  I had giant oak trees with no low branches.  I never devoted any thought to figuring out how to mount the bird feeders.   I devoted all my energy to feeding my family and my cats instead.

Fast forward to 2009.  My TV news job is gone, three of the four children are out of the house and need cash instead of cooking.  The last cat is elderly and lives on a shelf in the garage because he’s afraid of the dogs in the house and I finally have time to figure out it only takes a wrought iron plant hanger screwed into the tree to get the bird feeders up and running again.

The system is humming along.  The elderly cat is no longer a threat to the birds after many years of thoughtful gifts of dead mice, moles, chipmunks and birds delivered to the garage floor.  It would break my heart to lure these lovely and fragile creatures to my backyard for a last meal, where a black panther-like feline lie in wait, another reason why I didn’t rush the bird feeders here.

Bird food sits at the back door

The dogs now keep the cat in check, I keep the dogs in check, and it’s all clear for the birds who are better than TV, except for Mad Men.  Nothing is better than that.

All this food creates some storage issues.  I buy everything in bulk and storing it is well, bulky.  The old cat has lost his internal regulator and will walk into the giant bag of cat food and eat himself round.  Although I’m a stickler for storing things close to where they are used, I had to remove the cat food from the garage to save him from blowing himself up, and instead stick the food in the kitchen broom and coat closet.   It didn’t take long for the cat to walk into the bag of dog food, so I had to move that too,  into the little hallway near the cellar stairs.

Some bird food gets stored in the garage as the cat has shown no interest in that.  Yet.  The rest of it is just inside the door because its too big for the little space left in the closet.  The fresh produce which I pick up at various farm stands; Borodino Market on Rose Hill Road for tomatoes, squash, beans and sunflowers, Delaney’s on Kasson Road for silver corn, all sits on my crowded counter top.  At this time of year I eat fresh produce until I don’t like it anymore, which occurs around the first frost when it’s no longer available anyway.

Cat food crowds the kitchen closet

This unique food storage system assures my home will never be featured for a house tour.  Who would pay good money to see this?

It’s funny how every creature I feed knows just where to go when it’s hungry.  Christian goes directly to the refrigerator and the pantry shelf where we keep the cereal.  Otto the dachshund makes a racket until I get up and follow him to the back hall where he knows I keep the dog food.  I pour it into the dish.  After all that effort, poor Otto has to wait until Eika the german shepherd gets up from her nap and eats most of it first.

40 pounds of dog food are out of view near the cellar door

The cat starts howling from the garage.  I grab a fistful of cat food from the kitchen closet and drop it in the cat bed.  Poor guy doesn’t even have enough room on the shelf where he lives above where the dogs can get him to have a bowl.  Besides, the ravenous thing probably finds some comfort in falling asleep with the scent of his meal beneath him.

Now the birds chirp out my window.  My obsession guarantees the feeders are full and ready.  It’s the plump and colorless cardinal babies demanding food from their dad that tells me it’s feeding time out there.  They hang out on the ground beneath the feeder while their brilliantly colored father with the funny face brings sunflower seed directly into their mouths.   For some reason it escaped me the last bird feeding phase of my life sixteen years ago that cardinals get fed by daddy.

Fresh produce for mommy who will turn into a tomato any day now

All of this feeding carries responsibility.  Everyone is counting on me.   Since my children don’t need me for much beyond being a walking ATM machine, the animals remind me my existence on the planet is vital.   And in this heat, I have to clean and fill the bird bath twice per day.  If I don’t do it, all those birds will go thirsty and dirty and die, I’m just sure of it.  I must do this.

Sometimes I feel like I’m feeding the world.   My people, my dogs, my cat, my birds and I didn’t even mention the deer population of Syracuse that survives by eating my flowers and the fox that sometimes grabs hold of the trash in the garage and rips it apart all over the grass thanks very much.   What better purpose to spend the day?  A whole life?

Oh, and I’m even feeding the dust mites that have no problem finding sustenance all over the house while I turn my attention outdoors.