Graduation day

The youngest Northview kid comes to the end of his public school career today. In August he will be moving on to SUNY Cobleskill to begin studies in fisheries and wildlife. I am pretty excited about that and can't wait to learn vicariously about fish and snakes and deer and such. It has been that way with both the girls. They learn amazing and interesting stuff and they share....as someone who dropped out of college I treasure all that vicarious knowledge. Fisheries and wildlife is going to be icing on the cake.

Anyhow, I have been much asked over the past week or two how I feel about the graduation of our baby.... Melancholy? Sad and depressed? Really proud? Getting old in a hurry?

To the first couple I have to say, not so much. The end of high school in itself is actually going to be something of a relief. The boss was on the school board when it voted not to reinstate the infamous bottle bombers to the football team. It was not a popular decision and we always felt that the girls suffered for it. By the time this kid came along it wasn't so pronounced, but it was there in the background for years....a sad commentary, but there it is. There were and are many fine teachers who disagreed but rose above it and I salute them....like them in fact and will miss them. And there are some pretty silly things going on in schools today, such as making the kids drive around to places like the welfare office so they can learn how to sign up....I don't hold much esteem for that nonsense either and won't be missing it.

As for the real proud part, we are sort of equal opportunity, real proud of all the kids, pretty much all the time, type parents. Along with loving the kids as expected, we like them. They are fun to be around, interesting people. Growing up has made them more fun and more interesting then ever. They all, each and every one of them, have much to teach me, both what they have picked up in school and how to live better. As another blogger said last week, they are truly much better, more finished, mature and thinking people than I was at their age (or at many ages later too). Graduating is rather just another expected step in life. I am more likely to feel real proud when the kid comes home and tells me one of his friends came to him for advice on some thorny, adulthood-approaching-in-a-hurry problem, and he offered a truly helpful and mature answer than about being done with school.....or when he takes a hold and gets things done unexpectedly and well (thanks for chopping out those paths, buddy). Or when he comes home from driving with his newly-minted driver's license and tells me about some wise driving decision he made. Everybody pretty much graduates from high school. Not everybody grows up to be somebody you like to be around and want to spend more time with.

I will miss hearing about the hilarious antics of the Spring Sports Club though. That is a pick-up sports league some of the boys invented in order to play sports, mostly hockey, without the hoopla that goes with the parents and coaches getting involved. They played every night after school, policed themselves and each other and had a heck of a time. That makes me real proud indeed, as well as reminding me of some of the things my next younger brother and I got up to....we were an independent pair too. There was that underground newspaper we ran off on the mimeograph machine in the parents' cellar....and playing the fish cheer when our rock and roll band was invited to perform for a school assembly (quite an honor that, and WE sang it right....can't say the same for our classmates in the audience.) Inevitably I will see less of the kid pretty soon and I will miss him like only a parent can imagine. He claims to be my favorite, and although parents aren't allowed favorites, and darned well better not have any, he certainly is my favorite son....and he can claim to be one of my favorite kids...one of three can't be that bad can it?

As for the getting older fast...been there, done that, and got three tee shirts. I can still hobble around though so I guess it's not too bad.
I hope he has a great time in the either way-too-hot or way-too-cold auditorium today.
And that college is all he wants it to be.
That he is ready to take life by the horns and make what he wants from that too.
Good luck Alan
Your mama loves you!

Happy Birthday Brother

I really, really, really, really LOVE it when you catch up and are the same age as I am for a few days every year.
Love,
Sis


PS, Hope your day is filled with love and fun and music....personally I am going to go picking strawberries

Brothers

(When I was younger I spelled that without the "r", but I have gotten plumb fond of them over the years.) Youngest bro and his sweet wife both work hard at their jobs as well as running their small farm. In their "spare time" they weave. Here are their looms

Weaving beautiful blankets on a barn loom

And rugs on another loom

And still another lovely machine....these are so beautiful that even aside from their function it is delightful just to look at them...the rich old wood polished by years of use, the colorful thread, the amazing maze of moving parts. Matt and Lisa both did a bit of weaving for us....amazing to manufacture useful and beautiful materials from just balls (or should I say cones) of wool and cotton. I have a wool blanket Lisa wove that I keep by my Sunday chair. It is real wool, warmer than anything you can imagine and pretty too. I never put it away even in the summer.

Tour de Cure

Once again, my handsome younger brother is participating in this wonderful event for the excellent cause of fighting diabetes. I support him each year the best I can and link to him in case anyone else can do so as well. He is a great guitar player, song writer, a fabulous drummer, good dad, husband and as good a brother as they make. (Not to mention a professional engineer.)
(My baby brother is a great guy too..I really lucked out in the sibling department.) Hope he does fantastically well in this endeavor again as he has every other year. Good cause, good guy, what's not to like?

Laugh until it hurts

HT to Apple for this story of some young gentlemen who found a really, really creative method of getting into some very serious (but hilarious) trouble.

Go
Read
Laugh...you will be glad you did.

Honorable fingerpain (no T)

You can't see the grooves that occupied these fingers last night, but they still sting a bit. Yesterday was our annual either too early for 2008 or just a shade late for '07 brother, sister and kids and cousins Christmas gathering. Part of the tradition is that next younger brother and I play some guitar. He is good, I am awful, but if I play real quietly no one says too much.

We played Leo Kottke's Pamela Brown
John Prine's Paradise
John Denver's Country Roads
Danny's Song

Mike played Amazing Grace.....I watched. It was beautiful. He is so good I get cold chills.

We played Coming into Los Angeles, which we used to play with the band. You would think I would remember the chords, but I had to watch his fingers and could not quite keep up.

Then there was LA Freeway...same situation with the chords. (I should really, really, really practice more, but every time I sit down with a guitar, people feel that if I have free time I should spend it talking to them rather than tuning it and learning new songs...so I have more or less given up.... whine, whine...)

It was a very happy time. There was talk of doing it more than once a year and I hope we do. He let me play his best guitar (mine stayed home as the neck isn't quite right. He plays a lot of songs with a capo....put a capo on mine and all she does is buzz). Because I was playing his best one, he played his 12-string, so his fingers were almost as bad off as mine. I have perhaps the best pair of brothers to ever be created. Dang, I love em.

It's senior picture time

We have been fed again

And very well too! I thank our benefactor. Good stuff

Marnie

I have been reading a number of blogs, which feature marvelous insect photos and lots of interesting posts on such things as tagging monarch butterflies. Today Burning Silo had a photo of a "surprise" indoor monarch, which reminded me of an incident that I had forgotten.


You see once upon a time we shared our home with a butterfly too. It happened one fall when Alan was quite small. An early frost had struck overnight ending the growing season with a decisive bang.


We were driving up the hill to the house, which was not our home yet, when Alan called out, "Look mom, it's a butterfly." And sure enough, among the bushes that straggle willy-nilly beside the drive was an empty chrysalis with a butterfly clinging below it.



We crawled out of the car and rushed over to look. He was young enough then that such a sight was a new and truly exciting event. (Eh, I admit it...we would still be just as quick to stop today and he is a senior in High School now.) As we got closer we could see that things weren't good for this poor insect though. "Her" wings had only half opened and had hardened into a crumpled, curled-over black and orange mess. I suppose the frost may have been the culprit. We left her there and went about our business, but at night she still hung there, wrinkled and weary. We decided that since more bad weather was forecast and since Alan was a little boy who hated to see anything suffer we would take her home.



At that time we lived about a mile from here in a house in the village, as the boss's folks lived here. There didn't seem to be any serviceable jars for monarch housing, and with those wings we didn't figure she would be going anywhere, so we released the critter, christened Marnie by her benefactor, in our tiny bathroom.


Since the kids had studied butterflies in school Alan knew enough to make sugar water, which he offered her in a soda bottle cap. She promptly obliged by sitting on his finger sipping neatly through her cunningly unrolled "butterfly straw".


Thus began about ten days of feeding her interesting sweet things, checking your toothbrush for butterflies, and finding her sitting on your shoulder when you went in to wash your hands. We brought bunches of late flowers in for her and she knew just what to do with them. She had to work hard to fly well enough to join you as you prepared to shower, but fly she did. Alan took her for "walks" outside, perched on his outstretched finger. She stayed with him, seeming content. Someone was always hollering, "Don't let the butterfly out of the bathroom," every time they heard the door open.


We really enjoyed her; it was fun to have a butterfly in the house. However, there were a number of close calls when she escaped from her little prison and found her way to kitchen or closet. It was not easy to find her again and I was afraid that one of these incidents would lead to disaster or that she would be injured when someone picked up a towel or something (she often chose to perch on towels).


Therefore, one brilliant sunny afternoon when over 30 wild monarchs (with properly flat and handsome wings) were sipping at the mums in the side yard, I took Marnie for a walk. I wasn't sure what would happen, but I needed the story to have a happy ending for her very young benefactor. I wasn't planning on bringing her back to the house.


Amazingly, as soon as she felt the sun beating down over the bank of glowing flowers, she lifted off my finger and spiraled off over the lilac bushes. She circled higher and higher until she was out of sight, flapping diligently off toward the river.


She was an insect, (not necessarily even a "she" although anthropomorphically we called her one.) I don't imagine we even existed for her and that her landings on our persons were incidental rather than planned. I rather doubt that she made it to Mexico or lived to reproduce. Those wings probably didn't carry her very far on that late fall afternoon of freedom.



However, we have comfortable and fond memories of sharing the bathroom with a butterfly and an everlasting soft spot for Monarchs just the same.

Finally

I'm thinking this is Best Three Females Class, Altamont Fair 2007. We didn't win the blue ribbon, but it was a groundbreaking, watershed, revolutionary, first time kinda thing just the same. Check out the guy on Mandy's halter...

You are very special to me

One of the most kind and caring, intensely moral, upright and decent people I have ever known.

Hard working

Talented

Much loved

Did I forget handsome?

Happy Birthday "little" brother!

Just fine

Yesterday Alan got to go to a big tractor pull....way out near Buffalo, the Dansville ESP Tractor Pull. The rest of us stayed home.

Which was fine.

Until evening milking time.

First the boss went out to bale up a load of hay and unload a couple of loads into the mow....

Which was fine

Until every single bale began to hang up in the chain on the hay elevator. When the girls and I went over to milk he was on his sixth trip up the ladder into the mow and about as happy as a hornet on a hot plate. (Not quite so fine.)

Eventually he got things working and got the hay put away while the girls and I got the cows grained (Liz), the milker set up, and the herd brought down from pasture and put in the barn.

Which was fine.


Until we discovered that Encore was missing. She is a little summer yearling of mine (sister to Etrain) Liz kept up to show. When she decided to take a small string this year we turned her out. It was after seven before they found her hiding in some brush as far back in the pasture as you can get. Then we couldn't catch her, because for some reason a couple of full sisters, Beech and Butternut, decided that they really needed to beat her up. Every time we got close to her one of them would come and throw her with their head and she would run away again. Eventually Liz got her hands on her and wrestled a halter onto her head. What with driving all the other cows out of the yard, closing the gates, getting her into a stall, which had to be set up as all were full, it was nearly ten PM before we got done with chores. Two hours late is plumb painful, especially on Sunday, which in theory, should be and easier day.
The kid got home from the tractor pull about ten minutes after we came in from the barn, just in time to miss all the fun.

Which was fine.

***The top photo is of the Supernatural, which belongs to a friend of ours.

Still a good man

My brother is doing this again this year, as he did last year. He is a fine man, it is a good cause, and if you can find it in your heart to support him that would be special. Thanks in advance.

Todd Fritsch Cheyenne City Limits

Every now and then I write the Farm Side about barn music, (and the wars that sometimes accompany it)...that is, what we listen to while we partake of the staggering ennui produced by milking the same cows over and over again every twelve hours infinitely (or so it sometimes seems). We are a musical bunch, some talented (not me) some just appreciative (yeah) and there is always something playing; Jason Aldean, Kieth Anderson, Trent Wilmon or sometimes George Strait. And sometimes Queen, very loud, if no one is around but Alan and me. Northview has a wee advantage over my thousand-word weekly moment of newspaper fame though. Here you can actually listen to what we listen to.

Or at least you can if you click on Todd Fritsch over in the side bar...or right here.

(Mattie, bro, I am talking to you here....you will like this guy if you can get your dial-up to download it. I just wait it out because it is worth it.)

Somewhere on the site (it moves around) you will find a little juke box. Once you find it, might I suggest Faith Ain't Faith, Bob Wills Song, The Cowboy Song...(or really anything else on there)? This guy is somewhere between Chris LeDoux and Garth Brooks and sings cowboy songs in a sweet, warm voice. He is a real Texas rancher so he knows what he is talking about too. I can listen to him all day (and in fact I have been listening to Faith Ain't Faith for the past twenty minutes.)

"Cheyenne city limits, ridin' a busted thumb, saddle over my shoulder, headin' back where I come from.
Rank broncs they left me, broke and all tore up....
An old man stopped to give me a lift in his beat up pick up truck
I crawled in and we drove off through that dark Wyoming night
It was downright eerie how that old man read my mind.
He said, son you've stopped believin' you can ride in the rodeo
Remember what your grandpa said, when you were twelve years old..

Faith ain't faith until it's all that you have left. Ridin' high is easy, but the lows are life's true test. Do your best to keep believin', the good Lord'll do the rest.
Faith ain't faith, son, until it's all that you've got left."

Following Michael's fingers

Sitting there today I reflected on how many hours, how many years, how many decades even, I have spent watching his fingers fly over the fret board and copying as best I could the chords he made. It has never been more than a poor facsimile, my part of the music, but it sure has been fun doing it.

Making music together began perhaps in my aunt’s yellow convertible out by the curb at 14 Bloomingdale Avenue, listening to fifties rock and roll and singing along. We were small then, and that car was the epitome of glamour and adventure.

Doing dishes together, him washing, me drying, and belting out Beach Boys and the Dave Clark Five. Even then his high, pure voice put my rumble to shame, but we had fun anyhow.

Then the “band” came along, that first one we started, with him playing on an antique wooden drum set that came into the shop and me wishing my short, untutored fingers would somehow learn to bend into a chord on his wonderful black guitar. Neighbor kids who couldn’t play anything either jammed into my bedroom with primitive instruments and an astonishing lack of talent. We made a lot of noise anyhow.

A couple years later we got a bit more serious. We learned to more or less really play our instruments. By then I knew enough chords to actually play a few songs…as long as they weren’t too hard. A better sort of musicians joined the gang, a lead guitar player, a pianist and a bass player. We began to practice in cellars and garages and to play at school dances and even actually got paid… usually about enough for gas money and solder to fix the always broken wires on the PA speakers.

Long before that time his talent was evident. He wrote music, played drums amazingly, learned guitar and other instruments.

After a few years of playing bars and local resorts the band broke up. We grew up, moved away, got married and grew apart, but always a couple of times a year we got together to play. He still took his music seriously and took it places, singing and playing in church, taking lessons, always getting better and still better.

I took cows seriously and never really had any talent to begin with…tone deaf as a dog howling at the moon. I still play the same second-hand imitation Gibson I have had for over thirty years…on the rare occasions that I play at all.

Still when we sat down in living rooms, on porches, at camp, at his house, at my house, at someone else’s house, I could always follow his fingers though songs that I didn’t know. Even though I had often never even heard them before, I could always read the chords he made like a sort of musical mirror and follow somehow. He would drag me along on his tuneful coattails and for a while I could fly on borrowed wings.

As we celebrated a late Christmas with his family, mine, and that of my younger brother today, he played John Pryne’s Paradise and I followed his hands. We played LA Freeway and soared a little…( at least it seemed that way to me, I am not sure how the people listening felt about it). He rattled off a Guy Clark song and I missed a few chords, but his lead was solid and by the end it fell together nicely. We did Danny’s Song and he let me sing the lead on the chorus in my scanty little voice and held me up with his rich harmony. It gave me cold chills.

He’s a pretty good brother, my next younger one. I think Ill keep him.

***I am going to keep the other one too, the baby of the family. He is such a lovely guy. He brought me diamonds today, great, gleaming chunks of them like ice glittering in the headlights on the highway.

*** Herkimer diamonds that is, but I love them anyhow.