Toddville Tidewaters

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The Marsh! The Marsh Is on Fire! - Part II
2007-02-05 02:02:00
For anyone who doubted the validity of my first story on the burning marsh, I figured I better post a picture to show it.They've been burning the marsh since October, and, until the story a couple of weeks ago, all I ever saw were the charred results. Today, for the first time, I saw the fire in the daylight. It was quite a distance from the road, but a couple of people were out there setting the blaze. There are no roads that far out in the marsh so I reckon the wardens use a boat to get out there. It appears they burn the marsh in sections through the fall and winter months instead of burning it all at once.Now, what gets me is it is Superbowl Sunday. The wardens were too far away, but I wonder if maybe they had a portable TV and some beer in the boat. The fire would make excellent toasted marshmellows and weiners to go with that beer.Peering through my binoculars, though, it looked like they were really working and there was no Superbowl Part y.© 2006Mark DarienAll rights reserv...
More About: Mars , Fire

The Snow Moon
2007-02-03 03:51:00
Today is a special day on two counts: Ground Hog Day and the full moon, named the Snow Moon by the Native Americans.Native Americans and our early settlers relied on the phases of the moon for all sorts of things from time-telling to seasonal changes to crop harvests. Every full moon has a name related to something significant about that time of month. Most people are familiar with the name, Harvest Moon, the full moon in October that allowed farmers to harvest their crops well past sunset. Past that one, a full moon is just a full moon to most everyone.Last month's full moon was the Wolf Moon. This moon signified the dead of winter and earned its name because howling wolves were known to hang around the Native Americans' villages and settlers' camps. Food is scarce at this time of year and the wolves hoped for some scraps from the people.This month's full moon is the Snow Moon signifying the month known for its heaviest snows. This year, the Snow Moon falls on White man'...

The Marsh! The Marsh Is on Fire!
2007-01-25 04:25:00
Sure, the title is a cheesy rip-off of a song, but it got your attention.The marsh really is on fire, though, – on purpose. The Department of Natural Resources began the annual, controlled burnings a couple of months ago. The only signs of the burnings most people witness are the charred remains of the marshland.Despite traveling Shorter’s Wharf Road (which becomes MD some number or other, which becomes Maple Dam Road) every day, we’ve never seen the fires. Wait a minute. Let me back up here.Three names for one road? Don’t ask me. That’s just the way they do things down here. You drive a few miles on one road but you never know what road you are on because along the route, the name has changed a few times. What the section of the road cutting through the marshland is called, I have no idea. All I know is if you come in from the Cambridge side, it’s Maple Dam Road. If you come in from the other side, it’s Shorter’s Wharf Road. Somewhere in between, it’s MD...
More About: Mars , Fire

Winter Finally Arrives!
2007-01-22 07:37:00
To some folks, Winter Final ly Arri ves! May sound like a boring headline. Big deal, winter arrives a month late. To some folks out west, they might be thinking, “Good, take our winter from us. We’re sick of it.”To Keith and me, this is big news. We aren’t used to being bitten by mosquitoes well into January. Last weekend, I got a lot of yard work done and I still broke a sweat. I’d have taken my tee shirt off, but I thought that would be kind of weird it being in the middle of winter and all. The weekend before, we saw something even stranger than the January mosquitoes. Frogs hopped across the road and we watched a blue heron catch a foot long snake. Frogs and snakes are supposed to be hibernating, not hopping and slithering around in the middle of January.Today is a big contrast from the last two weeks, though. Temperatures never got out of the twenties and it snowed. I decided what a great day to take a Sunday drive around the marshlands and tour the old cemeteries and C...
More About: Inter , Finally

You Might Be a Redneck If…
2007-01-15 03:37:00
Jeff Foxworthy has made a lucrative career off his redneck jokes. If you’re like me, though, you’ll laugh, but deep down you know that his jokes are exaggerated for the comedy effect.One of his jokes goes something along the lines of you know you’re a redneck when you cut your grass and find a vehicle. Surely, this has to be an exaggeration.Maybe not.Giant reeds, or phragmites (frag-mahy-teez), practically surround our house. They took over the side yard right up to the driveway and looped around the back of the house, leaving only a narrow foot path between them and the house. You can see in the picture how tall and thick they get. I cut them back off of the driveway almost to the property line, but in two weeks you can see how fast they regrow.Technically, phragmites is a grass. It’s definitely not a grass you would want to make a lawn out of, but it is a grass all the same. I started cutting them down with my little brush-cutting weed whacker, but I wasn’t making good h...
More About: Redneck , Neck

Where the Heck Are all the Birds?
2006-12-21 03:55:00
Down here in the Toddville Tidewaters, birdfeeders are funny places. With over 250 different species of birds in the area, and being right under the Atlantic Flyway, the major route for many migratory birds, you’d think a birdfeeder would be the happening place, at least in the bird world. After surfing the Internet and looking at the many colorful birds supposedly all around me, I invested over fifty bucks to feed our feathered friends.As a kid growing up on the Eastern Shore, I always had a bird feeder. The usual visitors frequented my feeder: cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, nuthatches, downy and pileated woodpeckers and an occasional flicker. I did attract plenty of tufted titmouses (or would that be titmice?). They aren’t colorful birds, but are handsome in their own right. They sort of remind me of a drab-colored, but smaller, cockatiel. Oh, and my feeder attracted the obligatory, and obnoxious, squirrels, too.But I could never attract the really pretty birds I saw in the...
More About: Birds , Here , Bird , Where

Toddville Tidewaters' Welcome - Part IV
2006-12-04 08:16:00
Note: If you haven’t read Toddville Tidewater s Welcome parts I, II, & III, you may want to read those first to make sense of what this final installment means.After cracking open my beer, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. As I lit my cigarette, my neighbor across the street pulled up. As he got out of his truck, he yelled over, “So how do you like living here now?”“It’s an adventure, but fun!” I walked to the middle of the road and struck up a conversation with him. It was my first meeting with our one and only neighbor.Mr. Dawson turned out to be an elderly man, but I couldn’t tell you how old. I’ve since learned that life on the Eastern Shore must be hard on the natives like Mr. Dawson. Everyone looks a good fifteen years or so older than they really are. Must be from a lifetime of working in the sun as a fisherman or crabber.We did talk for about a half an hour as a light rain continued to fall in the strong breezes. As we talked, we heard a tree fal...
More About: Water , Dewa , Come

Toddville Tidewaters' Welcome - Part III
2006-11-27 04:18:00
If you have read the first two parts of the Toddville welcome, you’re probably wondering where the third stooge has been hiding throughout this whole play. Two guys can’t move a one-bedroom apartment in a U-Haul and pick-up all in one trip; they finish their move as a tropical storm moves in despite having a whole week prior to the forecasted storm to move; they buy a house where the roads leading to it sit inches above the water and then they wonder if they are going to flood; and then coming home after a major storm, they can’t see the road is flooded and blindly plow right into it.Summarizing the story like that, I reckon I would wonder where the third stooge in this play is at, too. But there’s something about tidal wetlands that, unless you live there, the picture in your mind of a flooded road is radically different than what actually happens.At the point we hit the water, the backcountry road, even thought it is the main road, winds its way through the marshlands. The...
More About: Welcome , Tidewater , Water , Dewa , Come

Toddville Tidewaters' Welcome - Part II
2006-11-15 03:54:00
Our big move-in day was Labor Day weekend. We started moving the week prior, and what a hectic week, to say the least. We should’ve taken the U-Haul experience as an omen of what would come. That experience, though, is a post for another day.One thing I learned through the whole experience: I’ll never quit my day job and become a professional mover. One U-Haul truckload on Sunday plus a pick-up truckload, and another pick-up truckload on Wednesday, and on Thursday, we still had more junk to move. We went back on Thursday to get the rest of our stuff, and guess what? We still couldn’t get everything in the pick-up truck.You might think we were moving a mini-estate, but, no, we were moving a one-bedroom apartment. It’s not that we had a lot of junk to move. We just didn’t know how to pack it all.Thursday, we had to be out of the apartment. Our landlord collected our keys while we were moving and told us to make sure we locked up behind us. “No problem,” we thought, “we...
More About: Welcome , Tidewater , Water , Dewa , Come

Toddville Tidewaters' Welcome - Part I
2006-11-10 04:25:00
The best way to welcome you to Toddville is to recreate our welcoming. Sit back and enjoy the ride.Oh, and you might want to buckle up.Keith and I found the house back last June. Eight acres priced so cheap, we expected to see a rundown shack, but we had to check it out because the land looked so enticing. (We’re avid gardeners.)We took a Sunday drive knowing we’d enjoy the day, but not holding out for a promising house. We had been disappointed more than I can count since autumn over offers we could afford, but sounded too good to be true. We expected to fall in love with the area, but turn it down because we couldn’t afford to fix the house up to a livable condition.Once we exited the highway to find the house, we drove thirty miles through breath-taking woods and tidal marshes on a winding, country road barely two lanes wide. All the way down, the road literally ran less than a foot above the water. Most places through the marshes, the road was only inches above the water m...
More About: Welcome , Tidewater , Water , Dewa , Come