Search Results for: dean worbois
And a Tunnel of Light By Dean Worbois For the most part, my dad was a rule-respecting guy. But what was he supposed to do when there was a major construction site to check out and no signs
My mother had a way with plants, and her flowers were a summer-long frenzy of color.
She always planted daylilies, their long stems holding up orange clumps of color to the height of car windows passing by the southwestern corner of our Boise property. This was one-half of a block of land my folks bought in 1947, when I was two. The block was a garden and cow pasture owned by a Mr. Quarbridge, who had never developed it. Continue reading
The second time I spotted him lolling about on the top of the feeder, I grabbed a broom and rushed out the door, waving my threatening wand and yelling like a mad dog. The squirrel rather curiously observed all this until I actually started to swing, at which point he quickly and rather casually jumped down to run off. Sure, I pulled my swing, because I didn’t want to bash apart the feeder or actually hurt this talented squirrel, but I figured the near-miss and my angry scolding would teach him a lesson.
Silly me. Teach a squirrel a lesson where food is involved? Instead it only seemed to make an alarm of the back door latch. Now the squirrel had time to saunter off. Continue reading
At a freeway exit west of Caldwell, the landscape dips as it stretches west to Sand Hollow, a valley of rolling fields feeding a trickle of a stream lined with cattails, poplar, and purple loosestrife.
Farm homes dot the landscape, many of them surrounded by planted forests. A friend who goes by “Speedy” lives in one of these little forests. He loves the owls and quail and rabbits and hummingbirds and the occasional cougar that all make his abode part of their regular rounds.
Hoping to attract a croaking toad to his garden a few years ago, Speedy decided to dig a little pond between his small yard and the dense trees. The water did attract a more abundant population of critters away from the irrigation ditches, but he soon found himself with a problem—algae loved the pond. To control the algae, he purchased a dozen “feeder fish,” what I’d always known as “inexpensive goldfish,” but what keepers of larger fish call “feeders” for a reason. Continue reading
As a male, my first inclination was to bust right through that quarter mile of brittle little twigs and emerge triumphant on the other end, beating my chest at the might of my hundred-and-seventy horses.
But I thought of all those broken bits of tumbleweed sticking in every bearing of the drive train and every joint of the suspension, and decided to go around.
Going around was not as easy as you’d think. Continue reading
