The Good Life in Aggtelek National Park Part XXXI: How Many Chucks Could a Woodchuck Chuck...?
The Good Life in Aggtelek National Park Part XXXI: How Many Chucks Could a Woodchuck Chuck...?Just above the stone wall at the front of the property there stands/stood an enormous acacia tree. Several times over the last 2 years we have had to call the electric company to clear the electrical cables of fallen branches from this tree. After the big storms this year we made the difficult decision to have it cut down. Although we cringe at cutting down any tree, the proximity to the house and the condition of the tree made this necessary. On the recommendation of our cheese-making neighbours the Vargas, we called a couple of young guys from Szendrő to take care of the job. Since the tree consisted of three main trunks that weaved every which way, they needed to call in a tractor and cable to ensure that it did not fall on the house. The acacia tree is used as a symbol in Freemasonry, to represent purity and endurance of the soul, and as funerary symbolism signifying resurrection and immortality. Egyptian mythology has associated the acacia tree with characteristics of the tree of life, such as in the Myth of Osiris and Isis. Some biblical scholars claim that the acacia, while unspecified in the Bible, was the Burning Bush. Interestingly, the Hungarian translation of the Bible is very specific in its reference to the Rose hip bush.
One of the many repairs/construction projects we have had to initiate this year, and not a minor one, was the wood shed we had built last week. It is one of the very few unfortunate characteristics of living in Hungary's poorest region that anything left outside tends to disappear quite quickly. Therefore, before we ordered the 8-10 m3 of dry wood to get us through our heating needs next year, we had to build a lockable storage area. After our friend Lennard designed it, Kata's ex-husband Laci came down to build it with help from the Lakatos family. The shed had to be made out of bricks for obvious reasons, but we left spaces between the bricks to assist the seasoning of the wood. The only things missing now are the gutters and the wood. We can now also reorganise our storage area and transfer the firewood from it to the new space, leaving us with much more room for tools, bikes, lawnmower and the new wheelbarrow.
After already trapping one fox and relocating it a couple villages over, we were anxious to reunite it with the rest of its family. Again, we watched astounded as a fox ate all the bait and sauntered out, only to be trapped the next morning in an empty trap. We think only the baby fox now remains to be found and rejoined with its parents. In the meantime, a new animal visitor made an appearance in our garden - a 1.5-2m long, so we are told, Caspian whipsnake (haragos siklo) - the largest snake in Europe. The haragos siklo is not supposed to be found around here, and there is a 500,000 HUF (1600 Euro) fine for disturbing one. It now lives in our stone wall alongside (or instead of) the family of blue-green headed lizards.
I am also happy to report that a long-lost childhood friend, Mark, found me on LinkedIn this week. It has been something like 35 years, and we have no proper recollection of how we lost touch. It was with Mark that I took sailing lessons (never used) for two summers in Boston Harbor; and bought my first album, Billy Joel's Glass Houses on 8-track tape at Strawberries. 8-track tapes, like pop-top soda cans (the rip-off kind, not the fold-in type), seem to be technologies that bypassed Hungary.
