Actually, let's start with early spring: Among the trees I selected for felling was a big bitternut hickory way down in the woods whose uppermost branches were starting to infringe on my view of the Shawangunks. It was 20 inches in diameter and about 80 feet high, and would supply about a third of my total winter heating fuel needs. The bottom couple of two-foot logs, each close to 200 pounds, got wedged in between the hickory's stump and the trunk of a nearby maple tree, and I ended up having to split up one of the logs while it was lying on its side, in order to take enough weight off it to free it up. Then I was able to knock the other log free with my splitting maul.

Got all the wood trucked up to my backyard and stacked. But about early to mid June, I started noticing little piles of sawdust on and in between the hickory logs in my woodpile. And little holes. And on a few occasions, sawdust being actively pushed out of a hole from within.

I made some phone calls, exchanged emails with a D.E.C. entomologist, and spent a lot of time doing online research. Managed to grab one of the borers with a pair of tweezers when he was careless enough to poke his head a little way out of the hole while doing his housecleaning. Took several photographs of it and sent them to the entomologist.

My fear was that these were the larvae of either the powder post or false powder post beetle, which could attack the framing and flooring of the house once the firewood was brought indoors. I would have to remove all that hickory from the woodpile and dump it in the woods. Turns out, the critter is almost certainly the larva of the painted hickory borer, which is not a threat to any structure. The entomologist was “100% certain.” I still harbor a doubt, since the false p.p.b. remains a possibility in my mind, and the entomologist acknowledged that he was not very familiar with that particular varmint. Will keep the hickory out in the woodpile till a cold January day and split a few of the logs. The (benign) hickory borer overwinters as mature beetles, the false p.p.b. as larvae, so there should be no problem confirming which it is, prior to deciding whether it's safe to bring the wood into the cellar.

One morning during the latter part of May, I entered my barn just in time to see a raccoon tail disappearing up into the attic, above the chicken coop. Let the chickens into the outside yard, closed the hatch behind them and left the barn door open. Then I fetched a ladder and easily found the coon in the attic. It descended, and I saw it exit through the open door, as I had hoped. Over the next week, it managed to get in again, twice, until I had successfully blocked its entrance by stapling one-inch wire mesh to virtually the entire wooden door to the outside yard (the coon had chewed a big hole in the half-inch plywood door). Luckily, it had never bothered the chickens, preferring just to freeload chicken feed from the feed box.

The bear in this column's title was a huge, fully-grown black bear that suddenly appeared, in broad daylight, while my cottage tenant was working on his car. It then passed between the cottage and house, which are less than 40 feet apart, before heading down the meadow and into the woods. My tenant phoned me instantly, very excited. I was in the kitchen preparing a meal, and would have seen the animal myself if I had happened to glance out the window at the right time.

Summer projects: a little painting, but mainly, building a new well pit cover, which involved joists, Styrofoam insulation, plywood and peel-and-stick roll roofing. The job went without a hitch, and I was even able to sell the leftover two-thirds of a roll on Facebook marketplace. Also built a new sawhorse, or sawbuck, as I've learned it is more properly called, entirely from leftover lumber stored in the barn.

My mulberry tree and wild black cap patches produced virtually nothing this year, after banner harvests in recent years. Fortunately, for the first time since 2022 there was a good huckleberry crop. Made two trips to Minnewaska, on July 23 and 31, and came home with 17 pints (4 of which I made into jam), which should see me through till next summer.

In between carpentry and berrypicking, I read a short (84-page) biography of W.C. Fields, by Robert Lewis Taylor. Fields was from an era before my time, but I'd always been curious about him. I hope to someday get to see one or two of his movies, though I'm not sure the humor would really resonate. But there was one particularly memorable anecdote from the biography: One afternoon during the Second World War, Fields got to discussing the war with his Hollywood friends Lionel and John Barrymore and screenwriter Gene Fowler. They were all vociferously anti-German. They had quite a few drinks. “Around four o'clock, in full battle humor, they got in a car and drove down to enlist.” At the time, besides being in their fifties and sixties, most of them were suffering from an incapacitating physical ailment of one form or another.

“The girl at the recruiting center, after her first shock, had them fill out forms, upon which she noted doubtful entries. John Barrymore gave his age as nineteen. Fowler outlined somewhat more military experience than General Pershing's, and Fields requested duty as a commando. The girl looked them over carefully. “Who sent you?” she said, “the enemy?”

Awash in cucumbers; tomatoes were late, so I broke down and bought some tomatoes at the beginning of August, so I could start enjoying Greek salads. Some things can't wait.