Year's Best SF 17

The flushing thing is partly about water and partly about the septic tank. Kaylee’s friend Morgan’s house has a septic tank too, so Kaylee already knows it’s best to use them as little as possible, and that there are things you can’t put into them or the biology of the tank will get messed up and smell. If you happen to mention anything to Jane about, like, your new SmartBerry, or a hot music group or even the Anderson High basketball team, the Bearcats, when they went to the state finals, she just looks blank, but once when Kaylee asked a simple question about why Jane didn’t clean paintbrushes at the sink, like her dad always did, Jane talked animatedly for ten minutes about bacteria and “solids” and drain fields and septic lagoons. Kaylee’s friends laughed their heads off when they heard about that (“So she’s going on about how the soil in Anderson County is like pure clay, duh, so it doesn’t pass the ‘perk test,’ which is why she’s got this lagoon, and I’m thinking ‘Fine, great, whatever!’ and trying to like edge away …”). Kaylee’s seen the little outhouse in the trees on the other side of the driveway, across from the clothesline (clothesline!), for dry spells when flushing even a few times a day would use more water than Jane wants to waste. That would normally be in late summer. Kaylee’s relieved it’s spring right now.

The computer Kaylee has to use for data entry here is a million years old and slow as anything. She couldn’t believe it when Jane said one day that when and if DSL finally made it this far into rural Kentucky, she planned to sign up.

But the thing that makes all that beside the point for now, is that Jane has been monitoring certain species of birds here for years and years, and knows just about everything there is to know about them. Anything she doesn’t know, she looks up in books, or on the Birds of North America website, and then she knows that too.

On the Garden Box page Kaylee fills in blanks. Species: Tree swallow. Date of visit: 05/04/2014. Time of visit: 4:00 PM. Number of eggs: 0. Number of live young: 6. Number of dead young: 0. Nest status: Completed nest. Adult activity: Feeding young at nest. (Both parents dive-bombed Kaylee today for the entire ninety seconds she had the front of the nest box swung open, swooping down like fighter pilots, aiming for her eyes, pulling up just before they would have hit her head [she happened to have forgotten her hat]. When she was done they chased her all the way back to the house. Tree swallows are beautiful, sleekly graceful little birds, white and glossy dark blue, but Kaylee is so not crazy about the dive-bombing part.) Young status: Naked young. (The babies—“hatchlings” she should remember to say—hatched out only two days ago, and resemble squirming wads of pink bubble gum with huge dark eyeballs bulging under transparent lids still sealed shut, and little stumpy wings.) Management: No. Everything’s fine. Comment: Leave blank. The only thing not ordinary about this nest is how early it is, the earliest first-egg date for tree swallows ever recorded on Jane’s farm. Everybody on NestWatch is posting early nesting dates. Climate change, is the general assumption. Kaylee’s parents think climate change is a hoax. Kaylee doesn’t care whether it is or not, but saying so makes her project feel more dramatic, like, more cutting-edge. Submit.

Next site: Barn. Species: Black vulture. Date of visit: 05/04/2014. Time of visit: 4:00 PM. Number of eggs: 2. Number of live young: 0. Number of dead young: 0. Nest status—and right then Jane’s NOAA Weather Radio emits its long piercing shriek.