Today I have officially opened my outdoor office for the season. From here I can survey most of the yard as well as the horses next door, who are all standing around looking sleepy. The woods are full of white bloodwort; the hellebores are blooming at the base of the stairs from my perch on my balcony and the path into the woods is lined on both side by nodding daffodils. The only thing marring the picture is the neighbor boy (one of the kids we call either the Loud Boys or the Bad Boys, for reasons that would be obvious if you spent any time here) who is tearing around the path around the pasture on some kind of small and noisy ATV. He does not, however, seem to be disturbing the horses in the least. Quite unlike all those Chinese paintings of horses standing in fields where each horse is doing something different (I seem to recall a legend attached to these pictures, but no longer remember what it is) these horses are all in nearly identical positions of ennui, standing facing nothing in particular and occasionally flicking away flies with their tails. Even the children desperately waving carrots on the other side of the pasture cannot attract their attention.

The flies are becoming a bit of a problem in our yard too, although not because of the horses. It seems that something crawled under the narrowest part of the deck and died. It has, in the last couple of days, become rather odiferous, necessitating the evacuation of our screened porch. We are not quite sure what to do about it, as the smell is emanating from the part of the deck that is so close to the ground that we cannot crawl under it. Moreover, it seems to have fallen into the well of a basement window that no longer exists, which means we can�t even retrieve it by using long sticks. It appears the only way we can address the problem is by dismantling the deck, by attempting to sift quicklime through the slats of the deck, or just waiting until it goes away. Knowing our past tendencies of passivity when faced with confrontations with wildlife, it seems that we�ll probably choose the latter tack. Unless the flies start organizing.

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