Wild Turkey artifact

This photo is documenting a wild turkey on Nairobi Place, around the corner from where I live, near Chimes Creek. I swear it's in there. My dog was pulling on my leash and barking at the time, and I always manage to capture my finger with the camera phone. Yuki is very animated around large birds. Ravens sitting on telephone posts and vultures also set her off.

Find the turkey in the picture: If you look at the Y shaped branch, a crooked branch crossing the upper part of the Y with sunlight on it, you will see a small greyish turkey shape perched on top of it. Really!

A Hardscape in the Making

Today we talked to a resident of Hillmont Avenue who has been slowly constructing a hardscape in her front yard with her bare hands. Her hands show all her hard work. Her clothes are as old as the ages and show all the materials she has ever worked with. She has a husky who barks constantly at my dog as we pass by from behind a gate. This woman has intimate knowledge of different kinds of landscape cloth, how large loose rocks need to be so your blower won't blow them around when you are cleaning off the leafy debris, how to pour a concrete path using special forms so your path will resemble flagstone (without the cost), the costs of coloring concrete (one product is cheap, one not). She cut off a piece of landscape cloth to give me. It is gray, the better to blend in with rock, and apparently does not let in runners, which are the bane of my existence. I had black landscape cloth and gold rock on my sidewalk strip but it has all been taken over entirely by the crabgrass. This woman's plantings will consist mostly of birds of paradise. Since they have been successful (and have been there longer than she), that's what she will plant. The secret is to dig a hole at least two times as wide and one and a half deep. In Roxanne's opinion, they are messy, but I love to cut them and in my old house, I would arrange them in a black vase purchased especially to show them off.

You get to know your neighborhood through walking

I live on an island, a hilltop neighborhood sandwiched between the 580 freeway and MacArthur Blvd., Seminary Ave. and Edwards/73rd Avenue. Because my dog Yuki demands it, a daily walk occurs nearly every morning around 9am, and my neighbor Roxanne usually accompanies me. These walks and talks have spawned a constant stream of discoveries--about the neighborhood, about us, and about Yuki. She tells us which way we go, quite often. Quality Donuts pulls one way, Yuki pulls the other. Sometimes a house comes on the market, and we visit, because Roxanne is a real estate agent. We call Yuki, the "real estate dog." Recently, she has seen a fair number of houses. Three or four times the number of houses are for sale in our zip code (94605) than in all of Berkeley. Roxanne can correct this number if she wants. Yesterday, the amazing sight of the day was a wild turkey in someone's backyard, by Chimes Creek, at the end of tiny Nairobi Place. My couch-loving dog suddenly becomes the "bird dog" par excellence and starts barking wildly. Today, a neighbor we couldn't even see, yelled out a greeting to Yuki as we passed by. Today we saw the most amazing giant tulips, on Delmont. Tomorrow?