FIELD NOTES: A day for watching...

(Super Bowl Sunday: Patriots v. Giants – not that I follow football - just making historical note for all TRUE New Englanders.)

...the CBS Sunday Morning show and wanting to find things to write about…A Typewriter Renaissance added a little ‘sweet’ to Sunday coffee and muffin making…and a little ‘bitter’ because my late father one day decided to get rid of the classic 1940’s Royal typewriter that had predominated his desk like a pipe organ since he had closed his furniture store…I had typed my school papers on a more ‘modern’ version of the manual - a Smith-Corona - out in the backyard…on the picnic table in the Mays and Junes of the 1970’s…then moved on to feeling quite elite when one of my first jobs landed me at the keyboard of an IBM Selectric with changeable type balls and white correcting tape on the ribbon…just in the brief shadow of the Wang on which I learned the magic of word processing…what a pain it had been to have to cover up ones mistakes on paper…who wants to see where our fingers and thoughts had gone off key?…funny thing, I want that Royal typewriter…and if I want another one, it will now cost me to acquire one from some stranger…maybe human beings need to leave dimensional marks and brush strokes on paper…at craft fairs, they make jewelry out of old industry…at a flea market in Seattle, I found myself pawing through boxes of keys…of question marks and exclamation points and capital letters… keys that had been pulled off their type-bars with needle-nose pliers…I found D…brought it home, fused it to a bezel, hung in on a chain and took a picture of it around my neck…like baby teeth in a tooth fairy jar…I seemed to feel some strange and innocent magic…

A Story of Thanksgiving for Christmas...or The 1st Thanksgiving:

Navigating new territory with no device on the dash...

             It is not until I come up to that familiar hill that the idea of it all strikes me; I am going to my parent’s house for Thanksgiving, as usual…but, there will be no parents there. I have an inkling that perhaps a professional colleague was right: maybe don’t go there…order a package deal from the grocery store…or go out? “Or hop a cruise ship and eat Spam?” I replied with tongue in cheek. But my youngest brother had suggested “the house” (which now legally belongs to my oldest brother) and so I took great pains for the day, trying to think of everything my mother would have thought of…and the men would not…and then some:

            I had started with what I knew best: pies. There was Mom’s “secret” piecrust recipe for my homemade mince that my oldest brother anticipates yearly, and my crumb-topped French apple and the pumpkin adorned with shiny hand-cut leaves. They turned out to be works of art this year – inspiration from heaven. The second thing I knew best: ambiance (my brothers told me it was all mine!). I inherited the family silver, but all the china remained at the house. Tablecloth? Centerpiece? Candles? Napkins? Condiments? Servers and potholders and pots and pans? A mixer, a masher, a gravy boat? My list was sounding like an old-fashioned nursery rhyme and I packed it all up like a Conestoga wagon with cloth carry bags and baskets and Rubbermaid containers.  Like moving up a company ladder - ready or not - I found my usually relaxed pace of a holiday morning transfigured and I would not know until I got there if I had packed too little…or too much…

            I arrive at the house; my brother says he spent the entire day yesterday vacuuming and dusting. The dining table is out; its brown table pads are lying naked like a patient waiting to be attended to. My tablecloths are too short for the table leaves - my brother doesn’t know where Mom’s tablecloths are – but like experienced stagehands, my elder son and I make scenery appear. I go to my mother’s kitchen, her cabinets still familiar to me even after all these years, albeit my brother has had the fortitude to throw out the burnt, the broken, and the hopelessly obsolete. I discover that somehow, as the only daughter of an only daughter, instincts and tradition suddenly kick in on automatic pilot. And without much compunction, I ease in some changes. I stand at my mother’s sink peeling organic yellow potatoes, smiling about how hers were lumpy and ordinary because they were too-much-work-why-else-would-they-have-figured-out-how-to-put-them-in-a-box? She also puzzled annually about how to keep food warm at the table, but eschewed my idea of purchasing warming dishes like she was going to come up with an easier way for an easier way without buying something new. As if to tease my critiquing, a little gray mouse motored across the floor but I chided him in return by informing him I used coupons to buy the warming dishes…so there!

            What’s more, I tell the mouse, I have been kindly ushered in by strangers to this new way of celebrating holidays. At Bed, Bath and Beyond, I had circled around the island display of serving dishes, electric and candle-powered, setting my sights on a white ceramic set that matched my French White Corning ware at home. They would be perfect – and practical enough for Mom – but the shelf was empty. A store worker came by and seemed only too glad to help. He searched around the stock shelves, wheeled two over and gave me the cart. My face must have lit up; I thanked him and he added cheerfully “It was my pleasure! I hope you enjoy your holiday!” which is what I expect store workers are trained to do, but he appeared much more sincere than that. Then, at the grocery store, as close to Thanksgiving as I dared, the path to the deli was gridlocked, an elderly woman was proceeding like a slow-moving vehicle in a passing lane because another pair of women were chatting obliviously on the shoulders; the man that had entered the store about the same time I did joined in this bumper car venue along with me. He edged his way to the number dispenser, pulled out a tag, turned around and handed it to me with a smile. I was taken aback, not by his action, but by the doubt that perhaps I had not appeared as outwardly phlegmatic as I had thought. With straightened shoulders, I put in my deli order expediently. Later, while looking over the squash, the man touched me on the shoulder and with his well-padded cheeks up to his eyebrows, said “You have a nice holiday now.” Two men, two different skin colors, neither one with mien that would turn a lady’s head, perhaps appearing like Clarence Oddbodies to remind me of something lost.

            At the end of the day, nothing important is lost. After a cooperative (if not disquieting) search it is my oldest son who triumphantly holds up the yellow gravy boat from where my mother had put it last. I remember to check the high cabinet in the stairwell for the tablecloths. And like new heirs we sit in our parents’ chairs: one brother in my father’s, I in my mother’s.  We say grace and most heartily thank our parents for being our parents. My grandmother would promise every year to do something in the next, God-willing, and with a collective, not-evolved-yet groan, we would push her crystallizing words away like a snowball down a hill, not cognizant that she was (in her very Polish way) molding a handle for us to take with natural grace. We start passing plates; I am here by inertia, like a vending product filling the empty slot up front.

            There is one more thing to do. The dishwasher conked out long ago, my parents believing a new one at that point in their lives unnecessary, and I ceremoniously wash the china and silverware in the sink, distracting my brother with small-talk. My mother shooed away would-be assistants, and I remember seeing her back as she faced the yellow-flowered wallpaper under the fluorescent light in an almost meditative glow. What did she think about?

            I am warm with satisfaction on the drive home. I think about doing a good thing for my brothers. I think about getting this first holiday “just right”. I think about my parents giving us the thumbs up.

            I can’t think any farther than that…

10 Minute Poem

Museum of Sorrows

(on being Polish)

Some show

hearts on sleeves,

unashamed

public displays,

everyone knows,

even those who don't

need

(or want)

to know:

but

not Polish.

Polish are like statues

- beautiful statues -

marble,

mute,

and statuesque,

that viewers want to touch

but can't

go

beyond

the velvet ropes,

the cordoned rooms,

the carefully crafted

chambers

in a long museum

of sorrows

end to end.

 Henryk Gorecki, Polish Composer

 

FIELD NOTES: I have been to another world...

THE EULOGY I COULD NOT DELIVER

Victoria Rose Embros Kucinskas

March 22, 1922-August 27, 2010

Donald Kucinskas

January 1, 1921-January 6, 2009

          I am not sure how a daughter actually delivers a eulogy about a mother, how her voice can hold still if her mind is actually aware of what her mouth is saying, how her eyes can remain a dam against the release of thoughts that are not yet fully translatable even to herself, and to be articulated intelligibly before a gathering of people who surely knew her mother in different ways, their vibrations filling the atmosphere around the speaker; it does not seem possible…or adequate. But I will write it now…at least some of it…

          In the folder from her 60^th High School Reunion, there are pages of “Fun Type Questionnaires for the Graduates of the Class of 1940”.  To the question “After you graduated were you doing what you always thought you would be doing the rest of your life?” my mother wrote: “Yes – being a wife, a mother and a grandmother.” She added a note to the bottom of the questionnaire: “I just want to thank God for all the blessings he’s bestowed upon our lives.”

          As children of immigrant parents in the Great Depression, she and my father were taught not to throw away anything that might be reincarnated into an alternative use or buy anything new unless something had truly worn out (read: disintegrated). She could sew, cook and nurture plants; he could wire, plumb and construct. Therefore, we children grew up not a house of “treats” but a house of resourcefulness, ingenuity, integrity and respect for stewardship. If my parents couldn’t repair something, it truly was broken…and you didn’t necessarily get another…

          My mother’s world was very small; she was proud of saying she lived in Terryville all her life in a great big triangle. She remembered moving from their first rent by walking down the street carrying her little celluloid duck under her arm. As she grew up at the second rent, she made a point of going out to the icebox in the hallway when she heard a certain young man coming down the stairs, a certain young man whose father owned the White Eagle Bakery and whom had delivered bread, for a time, by horse and cart. She was third in her class of thirty-six and was voted Best-Looking. She wanted to be a nurse, and volunteered as a Candy-Striper at the Bristol Hospital, but on her mother’s insistence, she became a secretary and found a place at the Phoenix Insurance Company because it was handy to ride the trolley into Hartford. There she made more life-long friendships with a group of women who called themselves the Gabby Girls until, one day, she said yes to a tipsy baker-turned-sailor on the phone from California; she and her mother planned a wedding in two weeks. After the war, the three-family house on the hill that her father had always greatly admired was for sale. She and my dad and my grandparents never left it. Her world was small, but the space she leaves is large.

          I did not know my mother as the beautiful, young woman with the great legs in the black and white photographs that showed off her inherited skill for sewing fashionable outfits, but I do know that friendship and family were very important to her as evidenced by all the little pieces of writing and drawing and cards in piles around her house. Visually, I knew her mostly in the teased hair of the 60’s and 70’s and enjoyed playing with her pointy, shiny high-heels. I characterize her personality as the good sport at family picnics and the “nice lady” around the town when we went on errands or shopped. Later, I admired her as a “business lady” in my dad’s new adventure called Cheshire Wayside Furniture, her grace to withstand local politics when my dad was mayor and her humbleness at drawing the attention of Polish customers at the bank when they discovered a teller who could speak their native language. She married a sailor, but she never liked to make waves.

          All I wanted to say was this:  “I had good parents.”

          If you can read between these four simple words, then you know how much weight they carry, how little else needs to be said in our complex, grownup world. Now, as a teacher of other people’s children and having had to learn the language of educational standards, I am struck by the idea that my parents somehow supported all the best practices of parenting without even knowing what they were called.

                                                        

Thanks and Ja Cie Kocham

(that’s “I Love You” in Polish, pronounced Yacha kocham)

Victoria Rose Embros Kucinskas obituary

FIELD NOTES: Behind the scenes is where I am most content…

Through the window

…I went to visit mom…she was lonely…we had tea and read the newspapers…I did the crossword puzzle my father used to do…I drove home…alone,not lonely…transported elsewhere by public radio’s Echoes…cutting through the hills on 254 to Litchfield, imagining the horizon line like former tribes of Connecticut…the day was a confusion of weather…cloud-cover one minute, a peek of sun the next…wind…calm…drizzle…I felt taken back behind the scenes to nature’s weather board…cue: cloud blanket above horizon…now spotlight trees in hills, cue: sunlight…wait…cue: raindrops…just a few…no, cue ominous dusk…ah yes, I am home…behind the scenes.

FIELD NOTES: A Story of Pie

First Sunday of December The kitchen is quiet except for the clearing of her throat and the squeak of the table as she works. The old sash windows draw the pale November sun through its panes, filmy with the environment, and strain it onto the blue, cracked-ice Formica tabletop with the chrome trim. The Spry shortening is measured out using a cup filled with water, then drained and plopped into a big bowl as the kettle on the gas stove is working up a boil. An eyeballed tablespoon of milk is splashed onto the shortening directly from the bottle. The stainless steel sifter is filled with the correct proportions of King Arthur Flour and Morton Salt. The kettle’s whistle is answered and a quarter cup of its contents is poured into the mixing bowl. She tilts the bowl, raises her fork and with the precision of a fan blade begins whipping the concoction until it rises up into peaks. It is doubtful if even a fire could call her away from the next step of quickly cranking the sifter and covering the mixture in a blizzard of powdery white. In a miracle of kitchen chemistry, within minutes a soft ball of pie dough is rounded up and delivered into her bare hands. Sprinkles of water are flicked from her fingertips onto the Formica. A crisp sheet of waxed paper is snapped, serrated and suctioned to the moistened tabletop. The warm, pliable dough ball is coaxed down onto the paper and another sheet is used to cover it. A heavy wooden rolling pin squeals pleasurably as she rocks it back and forth over the sandwiched dough. Every now and then the rolling pin is silenced; her fingers, creased now with age and the labors of the hand, feel around the waxy, unctuous layers testing for consistency in thickness, estimating if the current circumference will sufficiently drape a nine inch pie plate. Now the moment of truth: As if a button on a remote has been pushed to change the channel, the blue tabletop is gone and I am in my own kitchen. My hands are the hands making the pie dough in a November light. The heavy wooden rolling pin is here, as is a stainless steel sifter, King Arthur flour and the Morton Salt Umbrella Girl, but there is a CD playing and a microwave beeping. It is still the moment of truth: the wax paper is re-positioned and the top sheet is discarded. In a confusion of bravery, faith and dexterity, the circle reaches its target, the paper is peeled away and the dough settles gratefully into the plate to officially become Crust. Knuckles, fingertips and the round handle-end of a fork flute the edges unconsciously. This handcrafting is impossible to translate into any recipe. It must be observed, it must be practiced and it must be failed before it is perfected. I am the third pie maker and I get to choose the fillings now. My brother gets his homemade mince of light & dark raisins, candied lemon & orange peel, apples and spices, complete with a good dose of rum and a pie bird vent stuck in the middle to prevent the copious juices from spitting out into the oven. There is pumpkin simply for the reason that there must be pumpkin (whether one likes it or not) with a maple leaf shape cut from the dough trimmings. This year I got adventurous and made Bosc pear with ginger and lemon. Then there is the apple: French Apple from Cortlands with a single crust and a crumb topping (straight from Betty Crocker’s All-Time Favorites, copyright 1971). When I measured the sugar, my hand got a little heavier because I realized I didn’t have to hold back for the diabetes any more. My dad was the Pie man; even on his birthday, he wanted pie. I thought of leaving a slice at his resting place, but he would have thought it a waste of a good pie! My story of pie is sweet and warm and full of strong hands and colors and kitchen music. It is a wonderful story of pie. Spry Water Whip Pie Crust Recipe

FIELD NOTES: A day for stones...

Sunday rest

…home doing nothing, (a rare occurrence only because I have a head cold) I am eating breakfast on the couch with the CBS Sunday Morning show. Bill Geist brings out a gentle segment about stone skipping and a competition in Franklin, PA. It looks so simple, so pleasantly old-fashioned and countrified, I wish I was there! I am fascinated not by the stone skipping as much as I am fascinated about how it relaxes me, takes me to the summery memory of my father showing off one of his ’dad skills’ by demonstrating how to skip stones across our favorite swimming hole, a pastime he perfected during his Depression-era childhood. It may seem like a waste of time, to go around collecting potential skipping rocks like world record setter Russ Byars does, but what a refreshing step back from the world of business…&…it must be no coincidence that I chose river stones for wallpaper on my laptop because I find them soothing to look at…&...it must also be no coincidence that a card slipped out of the medicine cabinet today for Magic River Stones™, the ones I had purchased to arrange around the lucky bamboo plant in the green-glazed pot. I stopped to read the card: “These beautiful stones are jasper, quartz and agate. They were naturally shaped by an ancient river in China, which for more than 2,000 years has been a pilgrimage site for people collecting lucky stones. Beautiful stones have always held a fascination for people from every culture. They are wonderful to carry as personal talismans or for use in fountains or to put around plants to slow moisture evaporation and to add a bit of beauty, luck and magic to your life.”…&…another non-coincidence must be the trail I followed from a blog comment that led me to wildramblings.com and an article about a stone wall in the woods adventure…&…might it be another coincidence that I created a “Zen rock bottle” for myself. On Labor Day, I quelled my impatience waiting for a family member by sitting on the front steps and counting the tiny pea gravel from the walkway as I dropped them one by one into a Soave Italia wine bottle. The wine was not particularly memorable – I had been persuaded by the bottle’s balletic bend of the neck and its green tint with spare silvery gray graphics – but it was a calming, meditative physical action to wait by dropping stones into a bottle. I got up to 400 and when I picked up the bottle to put it back inside, the glass with the rocks was warm against by body. And I would remember that. Today, I needed some vitamin D for my cold, so I put 200 more stones into the bottle. It was a good day for stones….and all because I have a cold….


(Yes, this is what 600 tiny stones amount to!)

FIELD NOTES: The shape of things took form as I drove through our New England hills…

Labor Day

...to my childhood home to keep my mother company on her first Labor Day without Dad. I took ‘the shady way’ via Woodbury instead of Litchfield because I had been driving 202 all week for staff development. It’s my favorite kind of driving: old fashioned highways with trees, places to pull over and room to think. Yesterday’s worm and last Friday’s behavior workshop came to mind, as well as tomorrow’s puzzlingly controversial Presidential school speech. I’ve also been thinking about the landscapes we grow up in since last March when I saw my first mountain west of the Mississippi. Landscapes shape us. The worm, with no eyes, legs or arms, saw me in a way I never will. In the behavior class, we discovered that we are all difficult to somebody. On the coasts, I look out to the ends of the earth and to the depths of the ocean; in the east, I see Boston Common, in the west, Pioneer Square. In the mid-sections, I kept looking up with awe to heights I could never imagine reaching or, looking ahead to focus on driving through the flatland that seemed to spread out forever before me. In the south, I see only paradise in palm trees and perpetual sun. In Maine, I look for trees and lobsters and the Way Life Should Be slogan. The landscapes we grow up in shape us…how we eat, work, worship, recreate and opinionate. The next time I vote or offer an opinion, I will have something new to consider: what if I had been born into a different landscape?

FIELD NOTES: I have a compost bin...

Not your usual TGIF (the end of Spring Break)

...of chicken wire and pressure-treated wood at the side of the shade garden where red worms (the good ones for composts) are free to come and digest…banana peels, melon rinds, wilted lettuce, eggshells, coffee grounds…I flip over a season’s worth of dirt and organic scraps from the left side, sift it through the homemade screen into the storage barrel and toss what’s left (usually the last scraps added before a hard freeze) back into the right side of the bin. Left, right, left, right, lift, sift, toss…it is repetitive, physical labor, but out in the new spring air, one of my first…and most satisfying and meditative…outdoor chores. I love jumping right into the bin and filling my shoes and cuffs as I work. To gardeners, this is real ‘black gold’. I will churn it in the vegetable garden or fertilize the plants with compost tea. My father made the compost bin for me when we bought our little house fifteen years ago…and it’s still holding up…it’s still returning to the earth what belongs to the earth, and turning plain, old dirt into beautiful soil. I have a compost bin…

I have discovered there are about as many different ways to make a compost as there are to make meatloaf - and you can't screw it up! Email or leave a comment if you have any questions about simple - and free - backyard composting - I'm not an expert, but I've made plenty of mistakes!

Here are some links - when I find more I like, I'll add to the list:

Tips for the Lazy Gardener
Smartgardening
Groundwater
Better Connecticut urban compost video

FIELD NOTES: Special soil...

The day of the funeral

We are thankful for the sun today even though its rays are not rays, but icicles. As we drive up the long cemetery road in the black limo, there are sailors frozen in the landscape reminding me of the little sailor from my parents’ 1945 wedding cake top that I used to play with. I wonder if the bugler standing next to the flag pole will get his lips stuck to his instrument. I see four more in a line over the horizon readying their rifles. It is not the part of nature I seek to observe, but it will be observed none the less. As we calculate how we will navigate the frozen ground from the car to the green carpet, my mother worries that my father would not have liked putting us all out like this on a January day, but I want to see the flag on his casket and the marker on his grave because, even though only a fraction of the world knew this man in his eighty-eight years, it will be made known to the entire world that he was a veteran of the Second World War…and that says a lot….

Not that I didn’t know it before, but with my father’s passing, it comes to my forefront that being a teacher (in any capacity) is the greatest service there is. As the Chinese Taoist philosopher, Lao Tzu puts it: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” In my experience as a Head Start preschool teacher, I can say with certainty that any child would be lucky to have a father like mine who is capable of preparing you for the world, who questions you, but lets you question him as well, who warns you of mistakes, but lets you make them on your own anyway, who doesn’t give you answers, but tells you where you can look them up. It’s astonishing how much he taught me and, I suppose, I have to give credit to his generation – the one that came out of a great depression and war - as well as the immigrant community he grew up in that never whined because they knew about bootstraps, the horns of bulls, where the buck was supposed to stop and that the impossible just takes a little longer. I hugged and kissed him, but he was not a “hand holding” type. I knew he was telling me he loved me when he asked how the car was and if the outside faucets were turned off for winter and if the mortgage was being kept up-to-date and when he fixed my appliances. It is a fact that he did not get everything he wanted; most of the “luck” he was allotted at birth went to the coin toss that took him to the gedunk for ice cream instead of putting him in the path of the torpedo that struck the USS North Carolina. In his retirement we sometimes ribbed him by calling him an “old fart” or a “stick in the mud” as he confined his world to clipping coupons, tracking down senior discounts and broken things to repair, doing crossword puzzles (in ink!) and watching the UCONN Huskies on TV…or Animal Planet…or Suze Orman. But we knew from his stories (the ones he was willing to tell) that he had had his fill of “adventures”…and that there was too much plastic in the world because it was harder for him to repair things now…I don’t quite know what he is doing in heaven, because there can’t be much to “fix” up there, but I know when it’s my turn to go through those pearly gates, they will be swinging smoothly, evenly and with nary a squeak.

We stand like tents in a downpour – holding up unless the sides are touched – but... Taps must be played, the rifles fired, the flag folded with mechanical protocol and placed in my mother’s hands along with the eight shells that were just fired. As cold as it is, as hard as it seems, there is an affirming landscape that presses our feet to the ground. I recall telling a young Ugandan student of mine who was relating a Sponge Bob cartoon segment to me, that Sponge Bob doesn’t get hurt when he falls down because he is not made of flesh and bones as we are. “Well, we are made of soil. Not what you see here,” he said in his accented English as he gestured with a sweep of his hand and a finger point to the air, “but special soil. From Heaven.”

Death is Nothing At All by Henry Scott Holland: Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room, I am I and you are you, Whatever we were to each other, that we still are. Call me by my old familiar name, Speak to me in the easy way which you always used, Put no difference in your tone, Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow, Laugh as we always laughed, At the little jokes we enjoyed together. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, Without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant, It is the same that it ever was. There is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind, Because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, Somewhere very near, Just around the corner, all is well.

Kucinskas Family Tree Online

FIELD NOTES: The pineapple sage is closed down like an umbrella...

“Sick” Day, through the window

...due to my unintentional neglect. I called in sick to work because I feel similarly. I rinse the breakfast dishes in the sink and wonder, what now, has blown into the backyard. Sometimes it feels as if I am deliberately placed downwind from the debris of others. But not today, it is not a bright pink candy wrapper, but a lone impatiens blooming in the middle of the lawn! Last summer the deer availed themselves of my hanging baskets as if they were salad bowls and now perhaps they have brought back one of the flowers (albeit with less than delicate means) as a peace offering. I am reminded of my father's wit in the story he liked to curb my wishing moods with, the one about the little girl who wanted a pony and all she got was manure, but her optimism was so great that she declared "Oh goody, goody! I almost got a horse!" How lucky I am today to have gotten a flower. Thanks, Dad.

FIELD NOTES: Ill-will came upon me like a sneeze...

First weekend of August, 2008

...my rite of ownership reacting to a perceived irritation and briefly closing my eyes to the rite of nature. The mower rolled up the bank by the side of the driveway and I let it roll back over a small gray movement. I had once seen my father stomp on a mole that had percolated up from the earth where we were extracting some woody overgrown yews. My mother and I had winced and screamed while my father asked if I liked the mole tunnels heaving up my lawn. Well, no, but I didn’t have the World War II navy training that conditioned my dad to weigh in a split-second the future consequences of his current actions. So with that in the back of my mind, I now let the mower roll back over the small gray movement. I had once accidentally mowed over a garter snake with bad timing, the result being instantly fatal and not at all pretty, so it surprised me that I would now seek out such an act. In horror I saw the small gray movement was not a mole at all, but a good little toad, eater of garden insects and the sign of a healthy habitat. I peered over the side of the mower as I saw him hopping away and tried to count his little limbs and fingers and toes. He appeared to have them all! I was grateful that I keep the mower blades high because I don’t believe in stressing the lawn with buzz cuts and I was relieved that the most damage I had done that day was to scare the heck out of a toad…and probably make him a little deaf.