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.