A Bit of This, a Bit of That.

It’s 10 til 8 and I’m ready for bed. To tell the truth, I was sleepy at 6. What am I going to do when the time changes and it gets dark at 4? I need a social life or a trip to NYC. Either that or simply cave in to the advanced teaching the cats are giving me which can be distilled down to 2 handy words: Sleep More. They’re all konked out around the kitchen in various relaxed positions, basking in the warmth of our jotul wood stove. Richard and I and our visiting friend Vasily did some major strengthening of our stove’s piping system yesterday as well as some major root canal work in our lined chimney flue. After having no trouble at all with our wood fires this month – and we’ve been having a lot due to a cooler than usual October – the smoke backed up on a fire we were starting last Friday morning, seeping through some wider than usual seam cracks in our metal pipes that diagonals up from the stove to the flue. We extinguished the fire, and immediately got on the horn to our trusty chimney cleaning guys, who were at first unreachable and unwilling to return phone messages and then were found to be booked, so we gladly took matters into our own hands. We did what we could on the kitchen level - disassembling the pipes, shop vac-ing up the hard ash coating on the inside of the pipes as well as sucking up bits of crud in our flue base. Then I chim-chim-chireed up to our roof spine to unplug a creosote clog, due, we realize now, from a combination of burning a lot of pine and birch wood lately and at low temperatures. There was a hefty clog up there. I could reach down the chimney a bit with my arm and crunch through it, and then I continued the clean by detaching the hose from our shop vac and feeding it through the flue, first from the top down and then from the bottom up. (We learned later that the local volunteer fire department will loan you a chimney cleaning device they have at their station which sounds as if it’s a wad of fuller brush brushes connected to a heavy chain that you fish down your flue and then give it the ole up/down, up/down.) But still, success!! We cleaned our chimney ourselves. Down from the rooftop, we reconnected our pipes with heavier, tougher, tighter screws and have begun burning our fires hotter to burn off the remaining plaque of creosote. A job well done. Feels good.

And back to today and my fatigue, there’s a reason I’m wiped - I’ve been working a good part of the day toting wheel barrows full of wood chips to cover the winter rye grass seed I’ve been sowing on our newly muddied pond banks. Our pond cleaning excavation is done, a good deal of the rich silt bulldozed up and mounded on the shore. To keep it from seeping back into the pond, we have sculpted it pretty well into the landscape and where a mound might be more vulnerable to erosion, we have placed fallen logs as barriers, that and sewn rye grass which we hope will sprout and grow before a solid freeze sets in. Today’s wood chip cover should help the germination. And the pond is refilling quickly. With a couple days of rain coming, the fill rate should increase. It’s good to see it coming back. Richard’s happy, the geese are happy, the locals are happy. I’m okay about it. It has been funny seeing all sorts of vehicles slow down to gaze at our empty pond and question what’s going on – hunters, mail carriers, school bus drivers, neighbors, bank tellers, on and on. It’s proven to be quite a conversation piece. No one seems to have ever seen an empty pond. It’s looking good, though. And not just the pond, but we’ve been thinning the woods beside the pond, cutting a majority of the saplings that were growing in profusion. It’s really spruced up the surroundings. And opened them too. Like a clean, new canvas. What would we like to create next?

I don’t think I’ve told about the wood chipper yet. It was a gas, a full day of feeding this machine piles and piles of thinned saplings and branches and various and sundry pieces of wood around and about our property. Monumental. We really began on Thursday night when I rented the machine and brought it home, hooked on to my Subaru Outback, and set out to grind up a bit of refuse in the rain to get a jump on the job. Friday morning we woke early and continued on through mid-afternoon when I had to get the chipper back to the rental place. It was purported to be able to grind 6” diameter trees! We never tried that, but it really sounds as if they’re stretching the threshold of credibility there. No way. That said, though, it very impressively dispatched trees with 4” girths and I find that impressive. The job was fun and tiring. By the end of it, I was spent, spent, spent and aching. But in the dark back from having returned the chip meister, I carried on, strewing the aforementioned rye seeds in order to get them on the ground before an all day rain the next day.

And speaking of the next day, as a sort of reward – though it had been planned for a month or so – the next day we drove down to Hartford Stage Company and spent the entire day enjoying a marathon viewing of Horton Foote’s “The Orphan Home Cycle” – 9 hours of theatre. It’s New York bound and though it still needs a little honing and toning work toward the end, it’s a spectacular achievement. What a great gift after a day of labor, a full day in the theatre. And rich, compelling, enthralling theatre to boot. My body thanked me, my spirit thanked me. It was grand. And it’s apt that Horton’s play cycle was given its world premiere in New England because he wrote it all, this legacy of a Texas life, while he was living with his family in the backwoods of New Hampshire in the mid-to-late 70’s.

Richards going to a chicken swap on Sunday in hopes of thinning out his flock. The clean up of prodigious amounts of chicken poop every morning and the prospect of that continuing throughout 6 months of winter I think is getting to him. He hopes to thin out the coop by a third. I’m wondering what we’re going to do with the goose poop when the hoses ice up. We use them three times a day to spray the green stuff off our porch. Of course, soon there won’t be any green stuff to eat or defecate. Just a corn/sunflower/grain mixture. Still … well, this winter with the birds will be an interesting journey of discovery, solution, and opportunity.

Almost 9 now and it’s so quiet here. Just a slight hum from the fridge and little metallic clicks from the wood stove. I like it. Richard’s off teaching an acting class about an hour away and I’m here with the cats and the fridge hum and the fire, slightly sleepy, maybe ready for a book or two, maybe a little more writing on another project. Life is good.

Ginger and Mary Ann and our drained Pond at peak color

These were taken about a week or so ago around peak color. Now you have an idea of what walks with our geese look like. Also our pond has excavators in it as I write, mucking around in the goo. The plans are to put a new drainage pipe in today and then we'll decide whether to let the pond fill back in or allow the sides to dry and scoop out a little bit more of the gunk a few weeks down the road. We shall see.

Amazing seeing the silt build up from decades. The geese wandered over with us this morning to take a look at the progress. They hang close behind us, striking various meditative poses, as if they were silent advisors, emissaries flown in from the bird kingdom to offer their 2 cents worth of wisdom. They're pretty terrific padding about on the carpet of fallen leaves, perfectly comfortable and content to be with us. Yay.

Leafy Memories

I’m sitting here listening to Aaron Copland’s “Our Town Suite” at the suggestion of a friend of mine and it’s simply gorgeous. Arresting and sad and flowing, a sense of majesty, and that swelling force that all of Copland’s music has for me, a sense that life goes on and on and we’re ALIVE! Embrace it all, the sad joy of it, the surprising heartbreak, the little miracles, the beckonings, like music, urging you on and on and on. Copland is so American, the essence of being American to me, the deep flowing, discordant all of it. And “Our Town” is just splendid. “Appalachian Spring” has always been a favorite and recently “The Promise of Living” has become a close second, but “Our Town” – so New England – may pass them both. If you’ve never heard any of these 3 pieces of music, treat yourself to them.

It’s been a full day of outside chores and shoring up for the winter. We were treated to a sunny day today with a touch of warmth which was most welcome. It’s been coooold for October, in the 20’s a lot, 18 this morning. You know what? I know I live in Vermont, but that’s too soon for these temperatures. Today, Richard and I finished planting the new trees we just got over the weekend – a Robinson crabapple and 2 Norway Spruce, all 3 on sale in Thetford at a spectacular nursery. Chris, a friend of mine who works there, kindly offered to drop the trees by since he lives in the vicinity. What a mensch. The trees seem so suited to our land. We’re glad to have them here and welcomed them with mulch, top soil and plenty of water.

I’m such a sucker for trees, always have been. I loved our towering oaks in our backyard in Fort Wayne, loved to climb them, up, up high, as far as I could go and sway in the wind clenching on to the thin trunk up high there, at one with the leaves. Pretty glorious.
Here in Vermont, I love the ancient sugar maples, of course, but oh the birch and eastern larch, the fir and spruce and pine. And the ash, splendid. I’ll take them all! Oh, what would my life be like without trees?

But back to chores. We’ve been moving wood that’s been curing all summer down into our cellar, a job that’s almost done. And just in time too, because the next pile in need of curing is ready to take its place. This afternoon, with our neighbor Royce’s help, we felled 4 HUGE gnarled trees, I think they’re called “Popples”, at least that’s what Royce calls them, which is the eastern name for Aspen. Royce tried to discourage me from piling it up for fuel wood for next year, claiming that it doesn’t put out much heat, but I was not dissuaded. I want to experience it for myself. Besides, Popple is not going to comprise the whole wood supply. We’ll have a good variety of hard and soft woods, deciduous and evergreen. Until sunset, the air was filled with the buzz of my chainsaw as I cut and sheared and trimmed the fallen giants, with Richard toting or dragging the branches and logs to various piles, in wait for the chipper we’re renting this Friday. Sawdust will fly!!

All morning was filled with insulation work up in the old hay loft of our “once” barn. We measured and cut all sizes and shapes of 3 inch thick solid foam insulation, puzzled them into the appropriate spaces, and then spray foamed any remaining gaps into non-existence. Next up? Sheet rock and/or blue boarding.

I’ve been trying to get to writing this particular for a while now, but chores and travel and friend’s visits got in the way. The other grey afternoon, I was driving down to White River Junction for some errand or business and was listening to a CD of Donald Hall poems read by Mr. Hall himself, and there’s one poem about leaves that starts with he and his family after a football game in Ann Arbor years ago, walking home, kicking the leaves, the autumn leaves, and this action conjures all of these memories connected to leaves. And listening to that magnificent poem did the same for me. Autumn, late autumn memories, leaves past peak, most of them on the ground. I remember my sister and I playing in the leaves that late November Saturday and Sunday, refusing to come in to watch the coverage of John F. Kennedy’s funeral. “It’s history!” my parents pleaded. And I was a history nut as a kid! But oh the delight to run and dive into piles and piles of brown oak leaves in our back yard trumped history hands down.

That is unless Mrs. Macy had come out to spray our piles of leaves down with her hose the night before. Mrs. Macy was the “crazy woman” who lived next door to us. Among other weird things, she thought my sister and I were trying to kill her. I don’t know where she got that idea, but it didn’t help matters much when I was in our back yard once playing with my bow and arrow and I shot my arrow straight up in the air and the wind took it and it landed SPROING! just a few feet from where she was tending her garden. There was a scream and I cringed thinking that wasn’t going to help her paranoia much. She claimed our leaves blew over into her yard. And that’s why the late night leaning over our fence to hose our piles of unruly leaves into a soggy compost heap. Not much fun tearing into that spongey mess the next day. Yeck!

And she was a bit crazy. I remember coming home from Methodist Youth Fellowship one Sunday night in December and saw a paddy wagon in her driveway. She had walked into our across the street neighbor’s house in her bathrobe and slippers, locked herself in their bathroom and crawled under their sink, refusing to come out. They finally had to take the door off its hinges and the doctors took her away in a straight jacket. And what does this have to do with autumn leaf memories? Nothing, but it’s a good story, and lets you know that things were really hoppin’ in Northern Indiana suburbs in the mid-60’s.

My mom and sister used to mail me autumn leaves from Indiana when I was going to school in California. I went 3 years without experiencing autumn and my heart ached. They knew this and would send me envelopes filled with red maples, yellow elms, maybe a hawthorn or a sassafras. Oaks definitely. And what color did oak leaves turn? Didn’t it vary? I forget. I just remember them in brown piles on the ground.

Oh, raking leaves! I forgot about that too. Now that was not fun, no matter how much I Norman Rockwell up my autumn memories. And yes, Mrs. Macy, the wind would definitely whip up those leaves, which was especially frustrating if you were raking leaves for a little extra pocket change and the wind was not in an agreeable mood when it came to keeping leaves in neat piles long enough for you to come back and stuff them into large plastic bags.

The smell of fallen leaves. Mmmmm. Slightly musty, woody, comforting, like walking into a tobaccoists shop, that big honkin’ humidor with all the aromas that makes you want to take up pipe smoking immediately. I was walking on the wooded paths back to the end of our property a couple days ago, and the whole forest floor was strewn with a carpet of gorgeous leaves. And not crunchy, not a sound, just a comfortable, padded, forest support. Oh, and the whole forest floor was covered for as far as I could see. And I looked up and there was the sky again, no leafy green canopy, no, not until Spring, not until May, mid-May. Now it’s bare branches reaching up toward the sky, the stars, the sun. Just a few leaves left. The leaves have left. And the leaves left look like tree teeth in an elderly tree mouth. And that just reminded me of Jack-o-lantern smiles, those big grins with carved single teeth.

And now, I’m spent. I must to bed. Nothing more to say. And I’m left with an image from Donald Halls’ poem that I’d like to share with you where he talks of coming to his New Hampshire grandparents during college, up to help bring in the last vegetables and then pile maple leaves up against the foundation of his grandparent’s home, weighted down by spruce branches, this to insulate their home for the winter. Afterward they would sit silent in the kitchen – Donald Hall, his grandmother and grandfather – all sipping black coffee that his grandmother had made, rocking in rockers, nothing to say. There’s a kinship I feel with that long ago image, with that shoring up the home for winter, rocking around a wood stove to give one warmth, satisfied after a good day’s work out in the cold, with nothing left to say.

It’s a scene that could've been accompanied by Aaron Copland music.

Autumn check-in

It was a frosty morning this morning. Yesterday's snowfall was gone, but for a few crunchy traces as I walked up our hill for an early am glance at the color. The temperature was a bracing 20 or so with the whipping wind making the trees dance and wave. I enjoyed the cold. It warmed my heart, made me smile. Funny, that. A moment ago I had been conversing with Ginger and Mary Ann after we had had our ritual wing-flapping dashes back and forth across our hill to wave away the night's cooped up feeling and welcome the day. As we carried on with our post-dash gabble I could hear the faint cry of goose calls high above us and when I looked up, sure enough, there was that familiar "V" high in the sky heading south. Over the past few days Ginger and Mary Ann have tilted their eyes skyward whenever they've heard that sound and its frozen them in place. In wonderment? In curiosity? Is there a longing? Do they recognize it as a group of their early summer friends? Who knows? It's comforting though this expected familiar ritual. And I've seen it in some form since I was a child at this time of year, but being out in the midst of nature, I feel closer to it, more intimate with it. It's stunningly beautiful.

We're past peak color now, just past, but still the colors continue to change and marvel. It was fun sharing the season with my mom who has now come to visit at all times of year. She's a vigorous 79 and was eager to help pitch in with moving our firewood pile from the side porch where it's been curing all summer down into our bulkhead and then stacked once more in the cellar. She was lateraling those logs down like a pro and she had no aches the next morning. Good for her. Over the weekend of her visit we tooled around all over the state and on Sunday we took in the Apple Pie Festival in Dummerston, Vermont, down near Brattleboro. It was alot of fun taking part in this little town's annual event of baking and selling 1500 pies - slices and whole pies - and having their little ville invaded by tourists, most of whom came by motorcycles. So incongruous seeing all these leather clad post-50 and 60 year old cyclists striding around this quaint, clapboard Vermont town. Sort of silly and wonderful all at the same time. It was a good day for coffee too and we tried all kinds throughout the day - in the food tents at Dummerston, at Dirt Cowboy in Hanover, at the rest stop on the 91 heading south out of White River Junction, and of course at home, care of Vermont Kingdom Coffee Roasters at home (thanks Rob and Yves!!). We were pleased with all the coffee suppliers. Yum. [Vermont Kingdom Coffee Roasters is Reason oh, let's say 29 I love living in Vermont. Excellent, EXCELLENT coffee!]

That's all for now. Hope everyone's enjoying their autumn!

Cockfight Club

Yesterday, my mom (visiting from Indiana) and I were treated to a showdown in our backyard. A host of wild turkeys had meandered down our back hill and were congregated around our apple tree just up from our garden, feasting on the fallen fruit on the ground. There were 15 to 20 birds in all, big and impressive, with at least 3 toms in amongst the bunch. Most were staying around the tree, but a few were beginning to wander down toward Stony Coop, Richard's main chicken coop. That's when Mumble Stump, our speckled sussex rooster, decided to march into the fray and set boundaries.

Richard and I have noticed how protective Mumble Stump is of the other hens. But yesterday as he walked into the field of battle, proud and decked out in his colorful plumage, I noticed how much smaller he was compared to all the turkeys, especially the toms. It was a David and Goliath confrontation in the making. He was not deterred. He marched right out to where they were and then began pecking away at the ground, no direct confrontation, just an "I'm here now, let's see what you're going to do" stance. Slowly one tom after another came to confront him and contend his dominance, spreading that impressive Thanksgiving array of tail feathers like a good hand of cards, but each time Mumble Stump would face them down and they'd sulk off, the tail feathers drooping behind them. It was truly impressive. I was so proud of him. He had good reason to wave his wings and crow his superiority. Then after facing down 3 males he began walking right into the whole bunch of them in an attempt, I take it, to move them all on. This is when I really feared for him. But there seemed to be no fear in his confident gait. He was erect, determined, brave, at ease. Around this time, I began wondering where the goose girls were through all this hubbub, whether they'd even taken notice, and just as soon as the thought came, as if they were mind readers, there were Ginger and Mary Ann, calmly making their way up the slope. And then, as if the torch had been passed, Mumble Stump stalked away from the field of battle and let the girls take over clean-up action. His work was done. I watched as Ginger made her way to the apple tree, neck out, beak open in her version of a hiss, Mary Ann protecting her rear. The turkeys decamped and harumphed their way up the hill toward Royce's and were soon gone.

I quickly went to get a victory munch for Mumble Stump, a nice plastic container of corn. Chickens came from all over the hill to join in the celebration. And another first, Mumble Stump ate out of my hand - just one peck, but that was progress. What a beautiful bird he is. And how brave he was. I wonder if that's simply instinct? He did it because that's what was called for, no thought. He just did it. What a great show!

And this morning I woke to the field of "battle" blanketed in our first snow. Ah Vermont.

Go Fish

The other night in fading light and wearing fashionable hip waders, I found myself knee high in muck at the bottom of our recently drained pond, scooping up struggling trout and transferring them to a large plastic bin that Richard and I (and his visiting mom, Frieda) then drove down the road to our neighbors where we waddled the bin down to their pond and new freedom. A successful fish transfer. It was a harried affair, but we did feel better afterwards, having saved about 18 trout, good-sized ones too in the bunch.

We'd been trying to net them for about a week, but they proved elusive and quick. It's tough trying to communicate with fish and assure them that what you're doing is for their own good when it looks just like when you're trying to catch them and fry them up. However, they should know better since we always catch and release here. Dumb ole fish. The other night, though, I felt so sorry for them, their water supply having dwindled away, and now swimming in murky, muddy water. I wondered what their gills must've been like struggling to breathe in that soup. After dumping the 18, I returned to the pond, flashlight in hand, Richard's cars headlights focused down from the road, and tried to get a few more, but it was just too dark. That night it rained and the next morning the level of the pond had risen to a recent level above the old dented, graphite drain pipe put in 40 years ago. Harumph. But those fish remaining must've been in heaven with refortified water levels courtesy of both the sky and nearby springs. You Go Fish.

Plans for the pond? Scooping out that puppy, digging some silt ponds on the border of the pond proper where the water coming in can deposit its siltly gunk without filling up the larger body of water. Also, we hope to extend our lawn area over there and dry out the silt over the winter to be able to use it later as treated top soil in gardens and on lawns. Learning, learning.