Oh Rotty Deck, It's Time to Go

Oh my. What a bittersweet thing, to come back to this post I finished on September 11, and see our beloved Curtis Loew loafing along all through it. He was wound into our lives in the most beautiful way. I have not had the heart to post on the blog since he left us on September 12, but as Robert Frost noted,

"In three words, I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on." 

So you can see my little gentleman again, all through this post, and read the words I wrote when I hoped he be here for weeks, months, even years to come.  

I've just waved goodbye to Shila, Marcy, and Bruce. They arrived around 8 AM and the birding off the deck was so good they stayed until 11:30! The list stands at 44 species and I'm sure I'll keep adding to it as the day wears on. Friends: they help so much. Birds do, too.

I had a secret in back of my house. It was a rotting deck that had been built by the folks we bought it from. It had served us well as a birding  and flower platform, but weirdly, we never used it for sitting or dining out in summer. 

That had a lot to do with the wide, view-obstructing boards, and the extremely splintery wood. That wood was always a huge hazard to anyone with bare feet. I had to go to the ER for a gigantic plank I ran into my pawpad when I was pregnant with Phoebe. I was almost too big to lie on my stomach for its extraction. Traumatic memory unlocked!

Lately, a human foot-sized rotten hole had opened up, and I realized that I could not have more than a hundred people and kids swarming my place with a hole in my deck. Time to call D & L Construction and Backhoe again! (I had actually arranged this almost a year ago; they're busy people!)

Teardown commenced in the first week of June. 

I was not sad to see that deck go!

Before I knew it, the house was deck-free!

Here's what it looked like from inside the living room...Eeeek!

It was a thrilling week, watching the new deck go up. 

The deck stairs and railing were still under construction when most of the BWD Magazine staff came for our annual content and cover planning meeting--the third one, all held here. Can we really have been putting this magazine out for three years?

From left: Advising Editor JZ (Whipple OH), Editor Jessica Vaughan (Columbus OH), Photo Editor Bruce Wunderlich (Marietta OH), Managing Editor Dawn Hewitt (Marietta OH), Publisher Mike Sacopulos (Terre Haute IN) and Publisher Rich Luhr (Tucson AZ). In one day, we put together issue plans for 2026. Then we stood on the new deck! I love my co-workers and publishers, and feel very, very lucky to call them colleagues. 

The stairs hadn't been built yet. Here they are--wide and generous, with a nice landing, and I can carry lawn chairs and plants up and down them without a problem. Couldn't carry anything easily up the old  narrow stairs. 

Curtis loved the new deck and its easy to climb stairs. 

That evening, Liam came home and got to see it too! I'm glad I got the lightest color of composite for the decking; it's beautiful and it doesn't get too hot to walk on barefoot, even on a scorching day, I'm happy to report.

Railings are aluminum, I believe. 

It is divine. And we love the outdoor living room underneath. No rain falls through the composite boards; it is channeled out of holes in the end of each one. If you click on this photo you can see the holes. In a heavy rain (I'm told; we haven't had a heavy rain for a hella long time) the end boards of the deck will sort of spurt water, but everything underneath it will remain dry. It's so awesome to have my air chair and lawn chairs down there and not have to haul them in every time it rains. Well, it never rains any more, but still. 

The deck also protects the HVAC system from crap falling into it (literally) from above. The old deck had wide spacing between the boards and, when we had a lot of raccoons around because I was still feeding birds in summer, they used the back corner of the deck as their latrine and it would fall down INTO THE AC UNITS now how GROSS is that? Just another reason why I don't feed the birds in warm weather!

See those diagonal struts? Donnie designed and added those, contributing immensely to the solidity of the overall structure. He said before he built those in, he could push the structure and make it move! Coudln't make it move now--it is super solid. This is a very new deck system, and it isn't cheap, nor was it easy to put together, they said; the instructions need work. I am so glad I got total pro's to build it. The distributor told Donnie he'd priced out dozens of these, but this is the first one he'd seen that actually got built. 

Well, somebody had to go ahead and buy one! 

The deck is made by Timbertech. And I adore it!

It follows the trend of most of my recent renovations, using Hardieplank siding on the house (that holds paint really well, never rots, and doesn't need to be replaced).The greenhouse is incredibly sturdy double paned thermal glass and aluminum; you can walk on the roof.  I used metal on the new roofs. It's guaranteed for 40 years. Yep, that oughta do it, at least for me. We long-term homeowners take a dim view of rotty things.

Pretty much everything is a platform for plants...

the gray squirrels haven't ventured up here yet to eat my last big hibiscus.

And now it's safe in the greenhouse, so there. 

I have eaten practically every dinner out here since the deck was finished. It's heaven! And the railing doesn't impede the view much at all. I really like the slender railing.

Curtis got his tick checks here, and I brushed him out in the mornings on the deck.

We are out there all the time. This fall, I've been holding little warbler watching parties there, birding by butt. It is DIVINE to see the birds at eye level in the birches just off the west side. So much easier to get good photos when seated and steady!

I love how it looks with its feet in flowers.

Yep, this deck was now wedding-ready, a month and a half before the big day. Mission accomplished!

And from the comfortable remove of having done it, I am now hugely enjoying birding from the west side. I go out there just after 7 AM and don't come in until about 9:30, my joy-cup full of warblers, vireos, tanagers, thrushes, nuthatches...holy COW it's great! 

A wee bit of what I've been seeing:

Chestnut-sided warbler, ahhh

a very bright male Cape May warbler (one of dozens on dozens)

The birding has been fabulous. And on the deck itself, Salvia guaranitica attracts all the rubythroats to the second floor.

Curtis Loew

You looked into my eyes, came forward

Pressed your forehead into my breastbone and 

the world went still and fell away

And with it, any doubt that

You were coming home with me.

You stood on my bag so I couldn't leave the shelter without you.

You also used the full power of mind control.

Feburary 19, 2019, CHA Animal Shelter, Columbus

You'd been chained near Gallipolis

the first four years of your life

and when you got loose, you chased four-wheelers

Fought with other dogs, ran like a deer.

No chains from now on. Not even a leash. 

Curtis, you won the lotto. But. 

If you wanted your freedom

you had to come home. That was the deal. 

I had to trust you. You had to come home.

First a bell, then a tracker, and we settled in. My hair went gray.

Three hours was my limit. Sometimes, five. 

And then I'd suit up and come find you, sometimes hurt, always sore

But living the life you deserved and most wanted, at last.

A leaner, a hugger, a wagger

Deeply loving, never overbearing

Clean and quiet, barking only on the chase.

Not much for toys, you played with rabbits, coons, 

and once a bobcat, who raked your side and drenched you in piss.

One year, you grabbed four skunks, perfecting your hold.

I gave you these woods, these fields

Good food, warm beds. You led us through grief

with your solid body and velvet ears,

the steady gaze of your chestnut eyes. 

The soft curl of you by my side in the mornings

Toenails on the stairs, then the whump of your landing on the bed.

Six years, six months and twenty-two days were not enough by half.

But I got what I got. Cancer made the call.

My house is empty and I am gutted

Barely quelling the rising howl each time I look

and find you gone.

Curtis started coughing around Thanksgiving 2024. His guts had been a mess for a few years by then, and no fancy food or probiotic could touch it. On July 2, a nasty-looking chest X-ray sent us to MedVet Columbus,  where he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. Rare in dogs, and untreatable, they said. 
Oh, I said. So this is how it ends. So soon. 

We recalibrated our hopes, begged the cosmos for time to get us through Phoebe and Óscar's wedding on July 26. We told no one, kept working like mules through our grief to build the happiest day of their lives. If that sounds backward and hard, well, it was. God knows, there is enough sorrow in this world, and we wanted our guests to see and greet him as well and whole. So we held it all in. For them, and for him. That boy hung in there, wore a laurel collar, and, as the only man in my life, walked me down the aisle. 

Then, the slow fade, the growing grief, the knowing, and the end. If wildlife rehabilitation has taught me anything, it's knowing when an animal is finished. 

September 12, 2025 Photo by Shila Wilson.

My friend Mike came and hand-dug a grave by the mistflower at the end of the orchard, where he loved to sit and look into the woods, where he'd stop, look back at me, and pose, knowing how magnificent he was. A dog should know he is magnificent, and loved beyond measure. He was, and he is, forever.

Curtis Loew

December 1, 2015-September 12, 2025

The Brushpile That Wouldn't Leave

We planted it in September, 1999, just about this time of year, 26 years ago, when I was big with Liam in my belly--he would be born only two months later. A palm warbler landed in it just as Bill and I stepped back from laying a running hose at the base of its slender, whip-like trunk. It was a weeping willow.  The palm warbler's benediction seemed like the ultimate good omen. I remember the bird was backlit in the willow's small leaves, and wagging its tail, and Bill and I were agog. 

Six years later, here is Liam, growing tall, setting up a dangerous train trestle on the old deck railing. And there is the willow, trying to touch that railing. 

It grew so huge in such a short time, it covered the entire lower part of the yard. I'm pretty sure it was dipping into the septic tank by the time it was this big, too. I had fought Bill hard about planting a weeping willow, but he had sentimental memories of a willow from his childhood in Iowa, and could not be persuaded to plant a native tree like serviceberry, instead of Salix babylonica. Boy did I learn a lesson, but it was a lesson I kind of already knew. And by the time that tree crashed down, it was entirely my problem to deal with. 

When he said we also needed some mimosa trees, I DID put my foot down. Have always hated those things. We'd have a small forest of them here had I yielded to that one. Sorry, B. Most of your big ideas were pretty awesome, but some just didn't fly.

The huge willow had started to die by the time a derecho came through on December 11, 2021. I heard a resonant fwump! from the studio and there it lay, snapped off at its rotten base.

Would you think it would take me until late May 2025 to get rid of a dead willow tree? Well, it wasn't for lack of trying. 

I had my friend Mike Crum haul it out to the meadow that spring for burning. Or at least that was the plan. I've learned a lot about willow wood since then. Learned a lot about myself, as well.

Knowing that the brushpile was destined to burn, I added to it. It was a place I could take all the brush I cut, all the invasive multiflora rose, all the autumn olive, and might as well throw in a couple of 32 year old blue spruce trees that had died of spruce decline as well. Oh, and three decaying Russian prune trees from the driveway hedge. And, and, and, and...I was a damn BEAVER for three years. And by the time I realized I had to get RID of the brushpile, this thing had a footprint as big as my HOUSE. You think I'm kidding? Just yooge. This is a monument to my industry. And it very nearly stayed for eternity.

I hired  a crew to try to burn it in February 2024. Emphasis on "try." Look at the unmelted snow around the perimeter of the "burning" pile. That thing ain't goin' nowhere. All the kerosene in the world wouldn't light that pile. We made two all-day attempts, and we got maybe a quarter of it burned, but the flame always stopped dead at those wet old willow trunks. Plus, it was too spread out and long, and we had no way to pile it up higher so it could burn better.

I talked to a lot of people about it, and the thing that surfaced was that, in the center of the pile, the old willow trunks were still there, and they were still full of water, as willow wood is, and much of it was still ALIVE. As in growing, sending up shoots and leafy tops, and there's no way to burn a live tree from a cold start, especially if it's a willow. 

Feeling more and more foolish about how I'd piled mountains of brush on top of and all around those problematic willow trunks, I posted about it on Facebook. And somebody said, "Why don't you have somebody with a dump truck come haul it all away?

That made sense to me. And I hadn't thought of that alternative. It's odd what I don't think of.  But I didn't want to just move the problem elsewhere. So I thought, what if we just get those non-flammable trunks out of there, push them down the slope and pile them inside the woods on top of a mess of Japanese honeysuckle, and then pile the rest of it up real high, and try to burn it in place?

So I called Mike Crum, and asked him and his son Parker to get me out of the pickle I'd gotten into in early 2022 when he first hauled that willow out to the spot in the meadow. You may need to turn the sound down, I am chortling so loudly as I watch those damned wet trunks get lifted and transported out of the pile. That's the sound of hope. Hope that I will not have to look at that brushpile, sprouting with willow tops, multiflora rose, and blackberry, with 10' tulip trees coming up through it, when the wedding rolls around.

Get that thing out of there!

Once the wet trunks were removed, Mike and Parker came back in with a brand new attachment--a grabber! With it, Parker piled up the brush to make a pyre. I loved watching these men with their new toy! Now, and only now, could we burn it. 

Mike brought a leafblower to fan the flames. It still was no walk in the park to burn this pile; it was enormous. But at least it didn't have a pile of wet immovable trunks at the center. 

Brushpile burn, May 27, 2025

Finally they got it down to a manageable size, that still wouldn't burn completely, so they left the Bobcat there until the fire had time to go out and go cold. It was raining a lot then,  so it didn't take long. 

They hauled the remainder of the pile out of sight in the honeysuckle hole, and that was that. It could rot slowly and provide habitat in the woods. And now I had my big patch of bare soil. I had dreamt of that patch for four years. I had ordered a bunch of native prairie seed from Ohio Prairie Nursery (opnseed.com)

and when I got back from  my trip to Arizona (whew, there was a lot going on this spring), my dear friend Anne and I raked the soil with iron rakes to prepare it for the seed, and we sowed it.

This little gizmo has a hand crank and it throws seed in a wide circle around you as you walk slowly. I cut the seed with rice bran (ordered separately from opnseed.com) that's white and because it shows up on the dark soil, it tells me where I've been--very important!

Here's Anne sowing--we took turns.

Being methodical women, we took a string and a couple of sticks to show ourselves where we'd been as we spread the seed. 

A couple days later, I spread two bales of straw on the seed, hoping it wouldn't all get washed downhill in the next rain. By now it was June 14, and it had almost stopped raining for the summer. The straw helped hold in what moisture there was. 

I had zero expectation that the meadow would be in bloom by July 26. My only goal was that the gigantic brushpile be GONE, and after the burn, that it not be a big black scar on the land growing up to Japanese stiltgrass. 

I went out, after spending most of yesterday working on the blog, to take some shots of the  meadow as it looked on September 10, less than three months after planting it from seed. 

Thanks to all the soil disturbance, there's a lot of invasive Asian lespedeza in the upper part of the bed, but the lower part is thick with plains coreopsis and lance-leaved coreopsis, which will bloom next summer. There's red gaillardia sprinkled in, partridge pea...it's already quite pretty down there. 

It definitely beats an unburnable mess! THAT I will never do again.

Next: Rotty Deck Must Go.

Jurassic Garden

Once the renovation was complete, my focus turned back to the outdoors. There was the matter of the vegetable garden, protected by Jurassic era fencing of four different kinds and heights.  It dated to the early 1990's.  Every time Bill and I had another type of critter get in--a baby rabbit or a woodchuck, for example, we'd slap another layer of fencing on it. Stock fencing, two layers, chicken wire,  and black nylon deer netting, which made up the original enclosure until we realized everything small could get through that. It was horrible, and impossible to weed, too, with the grass and weeds all coming up between those layers of fence. Frankly, it was in shambles. The wood had long since rotted and fallen apart.  Somehow, it still kept the rabbits out, but barely.

The view from inside, late in the fall of 2024:

and the ramshackle fencing and warped door and rotted planks dating to 1994 or so. Ugggh. 

 Because there was so very much to do in the next three months (by now it was April, for a July wedding), I kept telling myself nobody would mind that I had a shabby vegetable garden, but I knew it wasn’t true. I minded, very much. It was time to demolish this monstrosity and make something better. It's funny what you can overlook and get used to until you know you're going to throw a wedding on your place. Yes, you can take that as a warning, if you're considering doing something crazy like throwing a wedding on your place.

And so in April 2025, I asked my friend Donnie Schott to design something beautiful for me. First we talked about raised beds within an enclosure, but I was loath to give up even a square inch of growing space to mulched paths between high, isolated raised beds. I laugh now to think of trying to grow my German Pink tomato plants (about 7' tall) and sprawling grape tomatoes in those neat galvanized containers I was looking at. 

Nope. It wouldn't work for my style of gardening. I wanted complete freedom to plant huge plants, and to plant my peas and string beans in the long rows I'm used to. 

So Donnie came up with a critter-proof enclosure that is quite ingenious.

                                

I never dreamt that the thing would go up in only one day! I thought I'd have time to get the soil delivered before it was finished. Nope! As I watched them moving at warp speed, I had to call Greenleaf Landscaping and scramble the mushroom compost I wanted to dump in there the very morning they started work, because we had to get it dumped and spread out before the last side went on. Three inches of mushroom compost--that ought to do it! 

They spread it out nicely with the backhoe!

Before the rebar reinforcers went up on top, and before the netting went up, this is how it looked at the end of Day 1.

We re-used the deer netting from the old garden. Pretty impressive that it's held up since the early 1990's! It keeps the deer out, but has enough softness and give so that it doesn’t kill any bird that happens to fly into it. You definitely can't say that about wire mesh fencing. Winning! 

No mammal has gotten into this garden--not even a chipmunk. Well, the cardinals fly down into it to macerate my snap peas, but that doesn't really count. I expect that every year. :) Donnie built me a citadel to vegetables! 

I asked him to stand next to it for a photo, as he is rightly proud of his elegant design.

I was absolutely racing to get the garden finished and the peas planted before I left for an April bird festival in Arizona. When I got back they were well up, and I had to do a thing backward. I had always intended to line the sides of the garden wall with foam, to protect them from moisture and to keep any wood preservatives from leaching into the garden soil. Well, thanks to the same-morning delivery of the soil, I didn't have time to do that before I had to leave for the festival, so I settled for getting the peas planted and figured I'd deal with it when I got back. Oh my, what a tedious job it was to do it after the peas were up.

I had to dig deep but careful trenches next to the already growing peas, apologizing as I went. It was a two day job. 

Then I cut the foam to fit, cutting around Curtis, who found the big foam sheets to be a wonderful place to sleep and collect kisses.

Next, I slid the foam down into the trenches and filled around it. My poacher's spade, with its straight rectangular blade, was a great help in all this.

When it was done, you could see the green foam edge all around. It makes me feel better about using preserved wood for the enclosure. It should make the wood last longer since it won't be in direct contact with damp soil, too. 

  Donnie built a citadel for tomatoes, tuberoses and beans, a glorious enclosure that would keep the deer and chipmunks and rabbits out of my food, replacing a monstrosity with an elegant, additive structure. 

Being me, I let the volunteer Grandpa Ott morning glories, who thought all that soil disturbance was their call to arms, clamber all up the netting. Oh, they were so beautiful. But they were a bit too enthusiastic, and they set seed with a vengeance. And they cut a lot of sun from the tomatoes and beans! 

Obviously, they loved the manure in the mushroom compost! Ut-oh. 

So when they were done blooming and quickly going to seed I spent a huge day ripping all the vines out of the netting by hand. In the process the dried up vines dropped approximately 1.6 million seeds into the garden, and around it too. (There were still 8.2 million seeds in the vines, so I had to dry them out in trash cans set in the sun, and then burn them.) The precautions I took in June, mulching with newspaper and soil all around the outside of the citadel, will likely not keep them from coming up next year. And they're going to come up like gangbusters in the garden proper. Well, you live and learn. I will be weeding nonstop come spring. But at least I won't be weeding grass coming in from the sides!

Speaking of living and learning...the day after I ripped the vines down there were a zillion morning glory seeds all over the bare ground around the outside perimeter of the structure. I was thinking I would vacuum them up to save weeding next spring. I came out to take another look at the situation and found a chipmunk, stretched out dead with not a mark on her, right on the bare soil. I looked at her tracks, and could see the circular tracks and bare soil where she had snarfed up a bunch of seeds. They were missing from all around where she lay. Gathering those seeds would be her last act. Morning glory seeds are both hallucinogenic and deadly poisonous. I hope she saw some wild visions before she checked out. Another reason not to let morning glories take over my vegetable garden! No fair to the naive animals (and maybe birds) that might eat the seeds.

Here's the enclosure as it looks now, in September, with tuberoses blooming their heads off, and beans telling me they need to be picked, and tomatoes telling me it's time to can, and gobs of basil telling me it's time to make the pesto! There is no rest for the weary.

Suffice it to say I was proud for our wedding guests to see it, and very, very glad I'd pulled the trigger on getting it built! Many thanks to Donnie Schott, D & L Backhoe and Construction and the wonderful crew for this modern-day barn-raising! You have made me so happy.

D & L Backhoe and Construction's next target: the rotting raised wooden deck behind the house. The spiffier the house became, the worse that old deck was looking...