Chicken Lot

CHANDLER LAKE, Mich. – The winds are brisk off the lake, from the south. The skies gray. The rain goes from a spatter and sputter to a cascade with a whimsy that makes me smile.

All along the lake, the hardwoods are changing their colors, mainly at the treetops. Bright oranges, reds and yellows capping a girth of green beneath.

The last place we lived, on Five Mile, I dubbed Hilltop because that’s where it sat.

And yet here, again, we sit high up. This time a lake spreads below. We don’t have a name for this place yet, though we will. The Weavers have a tradition of naming their houses. I don’t know how unusual that is – perhaps it’s pretentious – but I think it’s wonderful. 

Quickly … name five personality traits of your house. I bet you’ll have no trouble. See? Now fashion a name. We tend to find names for those things that are dear to us.

My folks, as young marrieds, named their tiny first house in Columbia, Mo., the Nut Hatch.

Perhaps we’ll call this place the Nut Knocker.

Odd?  Really, it’s not.

I’ll describe the house in the next post. But first, let me introduce you to the wide outdoor deck off the main floor, which actually is the second floor.

You can reach the deck from either our living room or sun room. It overlooks the lake, Chandler, and the view is to the south. Nellie, our Great Pyrenees, already has found her favorite spot on the deck, at its southeast corner. There she can look south toward the water or east toward the woods that separate us from our neighbors.

She lets her nose do its work. Thrust between the vertical railings, her big, black sniffer expands and shrinks like a beating heart, collecting every smell for her deliberative brain. 

That’s where Nellie was perched when it hit.

Doink!

An acorn the size of a watermelon tumbled from one of the mighty oaks above our deck and bonked her on the head.

Now, Nellie’s head is big. So I’m not sure it even caught her attention. But it caught mine, because of the noise … like a ball-peen hammer on a hollow coconut.

I looked at Nell, worried. She looked at me, very unworried. Perhaps this wasn't the first time.

She turned her nose back to the railing, ready to sniff some more.

Such is life on the deck these days. To sit and admire the lake and passing sun requires a football helmet … and shoulder pads if you have them. 

That's because this is not the occasional small acorn that falls, nor even the average-sized one that caused Chicken Little’s panic. No, the average acorn here seems as fat as a plum. And even the small ones seem weighted like a leaden minie ball of Civil War fame.

And it’s not just their size and weight that seem extraordinary. It’s their number.

With even a slight wind, they fall in sheets. A heavy wind sends a torrent. 

Pop! Bang! Thunk!

Along the water’s edge, a different sound. More fluid, lengthy, muffled.

Goiiink!  Kaalump!

We hosted our neighbors on the deck recently – Bob, Cindy, Ron and Wendy – to share Ron and Wendy’s history of the lake. Iced tea and pilgrim bread were passed all around.

It was a relatively calm day. Even so, we all worried. None of us had been spared these falling skies. I knew this, because I could hear the echos up and down the shore and atop their roofs.

So each of us sat, wary, ready to dodge the bullet glancing off the table, ready for our own destiny with “doink!” 

Ready for that chosen nut to plop in our drink … God’s hole in one. 

These Chandler veterans said they’d never seen the acorns fall so big and thick. We speculated as to why – the moisture from the 200 inches of snow last winter, perhaps, or the very short and cool summer. I wanted to say global warming but stopped myself. The Big Warm-up tends to get blamed for too much these days.

Regardless, you would think the squirrels would be ecstatic. And perhaps they are. 

Squirrels, after all, bury these nuts in the ground to provide nutrition through the winter. They plant a lot of trees that way, too. So this is a squirrel’s cornucopia … Moses’s manna … right here in their tight, little grips. 

But I think this year, it’s a bit too much. Our gray- and black-furred friends seem tired … worn out. Nature’s been telling them to haul and dig and bury so many nuts this season, it’s like knocking in the 20^th run in a 20-0 rout.

Ho hum. 

Plus they’ve had to dodge these missiles, too.

No, I don’t know what we’ll call this new place of ours. “Nut Knocker” has promise, but I worry about that on a welcome sign by our road.  Neighbors might not talk – they'd understand – but strangers and the UPS man would.

So we’ll think on it a bit. Plus the nuts are but one season. Soon the snows will come. 

I can guess the names inspired by that stuff.