Summertime

The boy who made this splash was too quick for me

All About Town....or should I say All About Country

Traffic jam!

Not the way I would do it....

This bright and pretty pastoral scene met our eyes as we stopped at Bellinger's Orchard to buy a box of peaches....an activity I highly recommend by the way........mighty fine fruit that....

However the participants in this tableau also almost met our car. 

Head on. 

The horse pulling the cart either didn't like the pony being hauled behind or was just not well broken, so he was slatting around raising heck, all over the road. The pony took occasion to sit back against the lead rope now and then as well. It was downright interesting. Not the way I would do it....

However, they sure looked pretty in the mid-morning sun.

Even if

You don't have an iPhone, you can still have fun on a snowy winter day. A couple of sleds, some snowballs, a little time off from school and you are good to go.

Hunting for a Hackney

No luck here.

Amish Parking Lot

This buggy horse was tied far from any house or barn, right between the road and the wire fence. A ways up the road goats and calves were tied in a similar manner. Gotta stretch those pastures somehow I guess. Waste not want not.

Something Going On

In the Amish world today. Early this morning, as I lay squashed under the mountain of comforters, blankets, and afghans that is necessary to prevent freezer burn in this climate (I felt like a particularly insignificant leaf, pressed in a particularly thick dictionary) I heard horse after horse clopping by.


I paused on the stair landing and watched yet another, seen only by a vague green light from whatever he was using to make himself visible to passing traffic, as he pounded down the road well before dawn.


I wonder where they are all going. 


And have you noticed that almost every single one of their horses is lame to some degree? Watch for the tell-tale head bob when the hurty foot hits the ground when they trot....or listen. You can hear that little hitch in their git-along too, especially in the quiet of the early early morning like today.

Anyhow, something is happening somewhere.....




****And on another note, I am SO GLAD that moose are uncommon in NY (although I am sure most local folks will remember the one in Fonda a couple of years ago. Do click the link above then click on through to read the whole story. I know a lot of tough women, but to drive away an attacking moose with a grain shovel...at 85 years old and 97 pounds...well, that is amazing.

Sundays Stills...On the Road

We have great road names here in the Northeast, like Frog City road

Wish we could have made it up for a shot at the Pumpkin Hollow Road sign

Can we say rural?

Do click to see who's walking here

Lots of Amish traffic on our roads

What would a post about roads be without road apples?

Notice the grooves in the pavement from the buggy wheels.

This was fun! Thanks for riding along!

For more Sunday Stills.......

Breaking up is Hard to Do

Breaking down ain't much fun either. Mom posted a litany of stuff at their house that has recently passed on to its reward on Facebook yesterday. Pretty awful. By mid afternoon we were in the thick of it too. Computer monitor died. Alan moved the office one out here. Broke my reading glasses, which I need for computing, in the process (can't wear the dollar store jobs, mismatched eyes). Then the bathroom faucet threw its shaft out of joint. Thankfully the boss was still up and heard the little Niagara in there. No showers til he gets that fixed. Arggghhhhhh

The boss was buying stable cleaner parts up at Hands one day a year or so ago. He was grousing about it breaking down and costing a lot all the time. The Amishman in line behind him was holding a five-tined fork and said, "Oh, mine broke too, so I just got a new one," and brandished the fork.

Ayyup, you can clean out behind fifty cows with a fork. We didn't have a stable cleaner behind twenty-two of ours for decades. The boss and his dad cleaned them Amish style.You can do it....but it is a misery. Especially on Sunday morning and all.

You can compute without glasses too, if you are a communication and fun with Zuma junkie like I am. But you get a little cross eyed.

Only got one calf out of all the excitement yesterday, yet another behemoth bull. Our calf buyers love them, but we sure would like some heifers. ETrain was foolin' and still hasn't had her baby. We were thinking that Liz's cow, Foolish, who was born on April Fool's day, hence her name, might calve yesterday on her birthday, but she didn't either. Oh, well.

The Flashlight

In her job as a milk inspector, Liz visits many farms each day. A number of her farmers are Amishmen. Such was the case one day last week when she stopped to perform a routine inspection. As she checked out things in the milk house, she observed a grain truck blowing corn meal into an overhead bin in the barn but didn't pay too much attention.

When she finished in the milk house she pushed open the door into the stable to check on things there.

The door was wedged almost completely shut. She crawled through into the stable to see what was wrong. Corn meal was falling from the open bottom of the grain bin chute and had piled up against the door. The farmer's mules had pulled the chute open with their teeth. Thus as the trucker blew the grain into the bin it flowed down onto the stable floor below, right in front of the cows, horses and mules.

She tried to get the trucker's attention but he couldn't hear her over the noisy truck.

So she climbed up on a cow stall and hammered the chute shut herself, twisting her back in the process.

Then, because the animals were eating the feed as fast as they could gobble, she raced to find the farmer.

He was not at home, but she knew he farmed with his brother, so she drove down to his house and roused him instead. Kids with shovels were just climbing into her truck to go sort out the mess, when the missing farmer arrived driving his horse and buggy.

She said he left her truck in the dust, pounding down the road to his barn to save his livestock from overeating on the rich corn meal. Those standardbreds can fly when they want to.

She offered to help with the clean up, but he thanked her over and over and said that she had done enough just closing the bin and running for help. At least a ton of corn meal had spilled onto the floor but that much again had been saved by her quick actions.

At home that night she realized that somewhere in all the excitement she had lost the fancy little flashlight she uses to check the inside of milk pipes and such. She figured that it was gone forever somewhere in the mess of corn meal at the farm.

However, a few days later our milk truck driver dropped it off right in our milk house. The Amish farmer had found it and made sure to send it home on the truck so she would have it if she needed it (he has the same driver as we do.)

When she turned it on she noticed that it was brighter than it had been....the batteries had been going a bit dead...so she popped it open....and there was a set of brand new batteries.

Pretty Corny

Last night just at chore time
I heard a great clatter
and sprang to the porch to see what was the matter.

It was three Amish boys with a quick little trotter....oh, heck, enough of that nonsense..I'm too lazy to rhyme today.

Yeah, three Amish lads with a wagon drawn by a snappy little brown horse showed up peddling sweet corn last night. We have been been bamboozled persuaded into purchasing field corn for our dining pleasure by some other members of the group, so I asked to examine an ear before purchasing.

It was clearly sweet corn, so at a mere two dollars a dozen I bought a bag.

The cheerful youth in charge of sales then asked if the "old man" that his dad had met previously when looking at the hay loader was around. He wanted to sell him some corn too. I explained that said old man was my husband and would be eating the corn I had just bought.

The boy ducked his head a little as if thinking and then said, "If you'd like I'll give you another half dozen for free."

I agreed that this sounded like a real good deal. If I had had more money on me I would actually have bought a couple more dozen for the freezer but I don't trot around the farm with much. He chose another small bag of fat green ears and said sheepishly, "If we go back home with this corn we have to can it all tonight and we don't want to do that."

Kids...guess they are the same all over. I laughed and thanked them and they spun that little brown around like an English kid doing donuts with his truck and were off down the driveway with a rumble of heavy wheels.