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bittersweet jihad
Monday, June 15 2026
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Gretchen took Neville to the bookstore with her today, leaving Charlotte with me. In the past, Charlotte has tried her best to get into the car with Neville in such situations, but today she could tell that she wasn't invited and just watched from near the front door and then retreated into the house, where I gave her some bread with peanut butter on it to make her feel better.
I didn't have a lot of motivation today for some reason, which was unfortunate given that the weather had remained sunny but temperatures had dropped into the 70s (and even the 60s). I tried to take Charlotte for a walk down the Chamomile, but she saw me carrying the small GreenWorks chainsaw and decided it wouldn't be a fun adventure and bailed out early. I ended up clearing a walkable path for several hundred feet further down the Chamomile as occasionally green frogs leaped to get out of my way. I found my third volunteer Japanese maple seedling growing in the creekbed down there and wondered if I should transplant it to somewhere it could thrive better.
On the way back up out of the Chamomile gorge, I carried a nice sandblasted slab of flat creekbed blusestone to the eastern part of the Chamomile Wall and used it to help repair a small collapse that had happened in the last month or so. As always, the repair encircled a new chamber in the wall, spreading the base (and stability) of the wall out further than it would've been had I piled the rocks compactly and creating a place for creatures to live as a side-effect.
Back at the house, my initial plan was to further attack the wood in the rotting pile just north of the driveway. But then I got distracted going on a jihad against all the bittersweet vines forming a thicket in that area. (Well, I thought they were bittersweet and have been referring to them as such, but once I started reading about bittersweet, it was clear these vines were something else. It turned out they were some invasive wisteria.) They'd sent up vines high into a now-40-foot sycamore I'd planted over 20 years ago, and I didn't want them to start strangling that tree like it had some silver maples I'd also planted nearby. So I climbed up into the sycamore, using its trusty limbs as rungs of a ladder to climb as much as 20 feet into the tree, removing all the vines along the way. This was the first time I'd ever climbed a tree that I myself had planted. (That's not something a young man can really do!) I mentioned how stout the sycamore's branches were, and I mean that in comparison to other trees I've climbed lately (mostly hemlocks, white pines, and red maples). Sycamores clearly produce stronger, stiffer wood than those other trees, and even a thin sycamore branch feels substantial and safe to put weight on. Because this particular sycamore had spent its entire life growing out in the open, it had plenty of branches within reach from ground level up high into the tree. As for the "bittersweet" (that is, wisteria) vines, one was over an inch in diameter but was so soft that a pair of brush snips could cut through it in one movement, in this case revealing nine growth rings.
For dinner tonight I made my "low effort" chili, this time keeping the effort extra low by using canned beans instead of the kind you have to cook for an hour in an InstantPot. There was also broccolini Gretchen had bought that I cooked as a side in broth and sauerkraut brine. This all made for some good tacos (the way I like them, using stand & stuff taco shells).
Immediately after dinner, Gretchen had scheduled us a meeting with the male half of the couple living in the Brewster Street rental. But Gretchen suddenly had one of her endless meetings about saving laboratory test dogs and I ended up going to the Brewster Street meeting by myself.
This was my first chance to see the results of the concrete casting I'd done a couple weeks ago, and the results were surprisingly good. There was a void in the vertical face of the new concrete step and the top surface was a little irregular, but it actually looked better than I'd expected it to. As for the meeting, the couple renting from us is getting a divorce, with the woman remaining in the house (and probably getting roommates; it'll probably end up being a flophouse, which is the destination of all tenancies in that house!). Since the man who is leaving had been receiving a $50 handy-man discount on the rent, he wanted to show us all the work he'd done, seemingly to justify the discount. That had been Gretchen's idea and I didn't really care about it one way or the other, but I played along and grunted approval at all the little things he'd done, including the replacement of hinges, the fixing of drywall, yard improvements, and that sort of thing. Another issue is that the oven part of the stove had stopped working, so I gathered as much information as I could about it so I could buy another igniter (or whatever it needs).
When I returned home, I took a much-needed bath. The many insect bites on my arms and legs that had begun to fade before last weekend were all aggravated once more by having been exposed to the fly-rich Adirondack environment this past weekend, and soaking them in hot water is always a good idea.
The cross-section of the biggest wisteria vine I cut through today, thinking at the time it belonged to a bittersweet. Click to enlarge.
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