We walked down the road from the tennis court and stopped off at my parents’ house, still closed up for the winter. It would be several weeks before my parents arrived in Rock Harbor for the summer, and by then the asparagus would have gone to seed, so we picked enough for dinner and enough extra to bring back to the city for another meal.
I also picked a fistful of rhubarb to sauté with maple syrup for dessert. Susan disliked rhubarb, but I loved the lip puckering tartness. The taste transports me instantly to The Farm.
My parents, living and working in New York City, had purchased an 1840s farmhouse on 85 acres near Greenwich, New York five months after getting married. I was born less than two years later.
Although The Farm served primarily as a weekend getaway for the next five years, it dominates the geography of my earliest childhood. A stream of nostalgia gilded memories flow from this pastoral source: exploring the time-worn barns, absent livestock except for those conjured up by my energetic imagination and the swallows which darted in and out, building nests in the rafters, gliding like darts through dusty sunbeams; vegetable gardening with my mother; tending apple, pear and quince trees with my father; eating fresh rhubarb, strawberries and blackberries; discovering deer and raccoons and snakes and even a snapping turtle.
Plain as cuspid skull, winter’s lumbering bandit, furred, furtive, no more.
Sometime poems, even haiku, compose themselves. Or nearly so.
When I reached out to ask if anyone recognized the skull that appeared mysteriously behind the carriage barn recently, I received several helpful responses. Joel (@mountain_man_fur) and Heather (@evergreen_lakeside_living) were the most prompt and the most decisive. Raccoon. The skull was once the proud noggin of a raccoon (Procyon lotor). Some quick research cross referencing visuals, and I agreed.
This sent me digging back into our trail cam photos and videos from last fall, winter, and spring.
Rosslyn Raccoon (Source: Geo Davis)
I included a mini video on Instagram. Portly raccoon swaggering, lumbering into and past the camera.
At root, this is a memento mori, of sorts. A reminder of the fleeting gift of mortality. Won’t dwell in that further now. Instead I’ll close with the first visual to confirm the raccoon hypothesis.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. ~ Henry David Thoreau
I’ve never successfully grown sweet corn at Rosslyn. Not until this summer, and the reward has been as much psychological as gastronomical.
One of those trademark tastes of summer. Corn on the cob. Fresh out of the garden!
As a boy my family grew sweet corn. I don’t recall it being a challenge. I do recall the splendor of towering stalks and flowing silks. Mostly I remember the joy of walking through the sweet corn “forest” and choosing the ripest ears. I remember sitting in our “stone sitting room” (and area of our front lawn with sofa-style bench seats made out of stone arranged within a rectangle of stone walls) husking corn, growing excited each time I started a new ear, witnessing the shiny kernels, their size, their rows. Sometimes I nibbled uncooked corn as I worked, sweet, crunchy and cool despite the summer sun.
Most of all I remember the taste of eating something delicious – closer in my young mind to a dessert than a vegetable – a taste that had taken months to transform from a withered and lifeless kernel into a delicious treat. Magic. Every time.
But since coming to Essex and gradually revitalizing Rosslyn’s gardens and meadows I’ve shied away from growing sweet corn.
Gardening at Rosslyn
During the first couple of summers, the garden was still too small to accommodate a corn patch. And my gardening hours were too rationed to undertake more than the essentials: tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce, spinach, carrots, and radishes (French Breakfast Radishes!) But each summer the garden grew and the variety of vegetables we planted increased. Sweet peppers and hot peppers. Eggplant. Peas. Green beans. Watermelons. Cantaloupe. Brussels sprouts. Leeks. Onions. Cabbage. Artichokes. Beets. Kale. Swiss chard.
But no corn. Not until last summer.
Rosslyn Sweet Corn
In the spring of 2012 I decided that we finally had enough space and time to plant sweet corn.
I remembered that staggering the planting was helpful to avoid having the entire crop ready to eat at the same time, so I planted a couple of rows.
Within a couple of days the squirrels and chipmunks and crows had picked every last corn kernel out of the ground. So I replanted a single row, and this time I lay boards on top of the seeded row. I planned to lift the board daily, inspecting for sprouts, and when they began to emerge I’d move the boards and plant another row, proceeding gradually until all of the corn was planted.
The sprouts emerged, and I rolled back the boards. Unfortunately they were near enough to the edge of the garden that an overly hungry lawnmower savaged the entire row!
I gave up. Until this year.
Rosslyn Sweet Corn, Round #2
When I returned to Rosslyn in May from a Santa Fe roadtrip, I discovered that the generous neighbor who accidentally mowed the corn down last summer had grown and delivered several flats of 12″ to 15″ tall sweet corn plants. I counted almost five dozen plants ready for me to transplant into the garden. Which I did.
And despite June’s incessant rains, every single plant survived. Most were stunted from the water volume, but all have produced sweet corn. And for about a week now I’ve been eating corn on the cob.
Each bite is a gift. But all gifts come to an end sooner or later.
Racoons Love Sweet Corn
The first sign that racoons had gotten into our sweet corn.
A couple of nights ago a family (perhaps an entire clan, considering their impact) of raccoons held a late-night picnic in our sweet corn patch. The images capture the mess, but overlook their efficiency. At first I was stung by the injustice of it all, after sooo many attempts to grow and eat corn.
But then I began to notice how meticulous the racoons had been. They selected only the ripest ears, plucked them from the towering stocks, feeling perhaps a bit like I did as a child. Thrilled with anticipation in the linear corn forest. The peeled the husks down expertly, and then ate the kernels off of the cob directly as we do. I imagined their little hands and eager mouths. And my disappointed waned. After all, they didn’t take all the corn. And these meadows had belonged to them for half a century. I suppose they still do.
They ate 37 ears of corn.
And last night they came back for me. Only a couple dwarfish ears of sweet corn remain.
Perhaps next summer I’ll skip planting sweet corn. For now I’m mostly hoping that our neighborhood raccoons don’t develop an appetite for tomatoes. Or melons…
