The Farm Side is a Friday column, so here is a link to this week's right on the heels of yesterday's.
Northview Diary is sort of an offshoot of the newspaper column, which I started writing ten years ago last March. At the time I was working on a novel (and no it never got published) and a friend was writing the Farm Side. He and his wife thought of the name when he was asked to do a farm column for the paper thanks to his excellent letters to the editor. He asked me to spell him once a month as he has a large and very busy farm and a batch of grandkids that need time with grandpa. After a while he asked me to write twice a month and then after a year he decided to call it quits and left the column in my hands (or at my mercy if you prefer).
I enjoyed the chance to write about farming and about life in the valley so much that three years ago in August I started this blog. The first photo here was taken with a disposable camera....how things have changed since then....I have enjoyed this just as much as writing for the paper, mostly because of the dialog with folks who comment. I feel that I have made friends from Canada to Mexico and Florida to California, as well as meeting new people just across the river from the farm. I am thankful for everyone who reads either the Farm Side or Northview Diary....it has been good to get to know you. Thanks for stopping by!
Has been given a rather special honor. We are pleased and proud. Read about it here.
I have also hired her to move Northview to the new Blogger template. I simply don't have time to move all my links and gadgets, but I am sick of Blogrolling being so unreliable. I like to read most of the blogs I link to and it is frustrating to never see them in the sidebar. Anyhow, I am sure for a couple days until she gets it all straightened out it will look a little strange here, but please be patient with us. Thanks!
Hey threecollie's daughter here. Northveiw is moving to the newer blogger. If you notice any links missing/ not working drop us a line in the comments or at breezey375@yahoo.com and we'll make sure it gets added.
I'm having a tad of difficulty getting all the link working and or to show up at all. And frankly mommy scares me and she's very attached to this blog...
As of Monday the paper I write a weekly column for, the Recorder in Amsterdam, has a free website. Thus if you wish to read the Farm Side each week you can do so. Here is a link to last's week's column.
After a stretch of exceptional fall weather it is raining again. It never really dried out but now the mud has the consistency of grease. Hard to walk. Hard to work. No corn will get chopped today. These photos are from yesterday, when it was fine enough to pick tomatoes and try to dig out the roots of those giant sunflowers.....unsuccessfully I might add.
Also, yesterday, Alan and Becky made the long trip south to get new piggies, a pair of gilts this year. They are remarkably fuzzy and quite different from last year's pigs. However, we have never gotten one that didn't grow really well from our pig farming folks and I am sure they will be fine. Last year we ended up with the best sausage ever, so we are going to make a lot more this time....believe it or not everybody liked it better than pork chops.
A collage of blue jays gobbling seeds as fast as they can stuff them in their bills and a video so you can see exactly how fast that is. They clean two or three of these big sunflower heads every day....and this is the last one I have. They are such beautiful birds though that I always am glad when they come out of hiding in the fall when baby rearing season is over.
Objects in the mirror are sometimes closer than they appear. And sometimes things around the house have greater value than their surface might seem to warrant...value that only appears when you use them and remember how you found them.
This stainless steel milk pitcher is important to me in that way. Like rubbing a lamp for a genie, every time I pick it up to water the plants in the living room, (for that is the job that falls to it now) I remember the day it came into my possession. .
The boss and I were returning from dropping off milk for the church chicken and biscuit supper some years ago, when we passed an intriguing looking garage sale. We were soon glad we stopped as the folks who were running it were a retired farm couple. We had a terrific time comparing stories about the farming lifestyle and playing do you know......? Although we had never met and had never heard their names before we had dozens of acquaintances in common and they had read the Farm Side so they felt as if they knew us. We soon felt the same way about them, in the way you sometimes do when you meet an unexpected kindred soul.
Unfortunately, although they had a great time showing us around the place, there really wasn't much in the sale that we had any use for. The one thing that caught my eye was the little steel pitcher. They had used it to bring milk to the house for years, but now it was just another bit of left over clutter to them. I liked it though...it is nicely proportioned and simply caught my eye. However, I couldn't get the lady of the house to put a price on it....even though it was in the sale....so that I could buy it. After at least an hour and probably a good deal more of enjoyable farm talk we climbed into the car to leave empty handed but full of the pleasure of good company.
As we were backing down the driveway, however, the lady came over to the car and tapped on the window. When I rolled it down she put the pitcher in my lap. I would have happily paid her for it, but she would take no money.
We have never seen them again or heard word of them, so that short time at their garage sale was the only contact we ever had or probably will ever have. Still I think of that kind lady every time I water my plants (and as I have a lot of them, that is quite often) and remember her fondly. And I treasure it all out of proportion to its intrinsic value and I am sure I always will. You might say it is closer than it appears.
Years ago my late and much missed mother-in-law planted an apple tree. Her late husband, Grandpa Delbert to my kids, planted a grape vine. They were close together.
Too close in fact.
Now the grapes grow up the apple tree and hang down in festoons of luscious fruit, tempting, tasty, and just out of reach.
Enter a determined younger daughter, a nice long shepherd's crook, and the decision to make grape jelly today.
It took a while, but it is sunny and Indian summery and it was nice to work outdoors. If you watch the video closely you can see apples caroming around as Becky pulls on one of the grape vines after hooking it down with the crook (now you know where by hook and by crook came from). I think maybe the apples high on the tree are finally ripe, so maybe I can make more apple jelly with them. Anyhow for the first time ever I made grape jelly that actually set! Yay!
Probably isn't as bad as even the least of the doom sayers think. Seems the folks who blame cows are including deforestation in the Amazon in their figures. Personally....there were a lot of ruminants on this continent (think so many bison that they shook the earth and took hours to pass) when we got here. They all ruminated then and there was no excess of warmth.
***If you are wondering what I am doing making so many posts in one day...well, I just finished making apple jelly and you know how it is...you deserve a break today and all. Plus I dumped a jar on the counter, burning all the fingers on my left hand so...(but you notice I can still type...it hurts but anything for the cause.)
Anyhow the apple pie jelly was a success. I had people coming out of the rafters to taste it as soon as I had the foam skimmed off. I couldn't find the allspice so I just added a little cinnamon and nutmeg, but the result sure is a lot better than plain apple. I will do this again. As soon as I get more sugar, more apples and my fingers feel better.
******PS, Florida Cracker mentioned Picasa 3 in his post today. I have been using 2 for quite a while, but I downloaded 3 to try it. All I can say is WOW! Lots better. Lots
Arrgggh!!! I have most of my friends in my bookmarks menu too, but I normally use my own blog roll to read everyone's blog whenever I have time. The update feature is real handy.
According to word in the Blogosphere the site was hacked. Frustrating indeed. It may take a while for me to get around to say hi to all my friends and mentors,,,,and most frustrating of all, I made a new friend, to whom I would like to link, but my linky thingy is all gone!
Anyhow, you can still visit Life on a Colorado Farm.....and when Blogrolling is working again I will put up a proper link.
Spoke at a farm meeting we attended last night. He was brief and informative and showed a good comprehension of farm issues. He is, in fact, on the Assembly Agriculture Committee. As a small businessman I suspect that he understands the challenges such folks face better than a good many career politicians....and believe me, farming is a business, no matter how much we would like to perceive it as something else. (Here at Northview our farm is our sole source of income...unless you count the small stipend I get for writing the Farm Side.)
Some time ago a farm group I belong to reached out to Mr. Amedore to begin a dialog on farm issues, as he was new to the Assembly and to state politics. He willingly met with us to discuss the problems facing us as stewards of the land and business men and women. This sort of dialog is essential to continuing to even be able to farm at in NY or anywhere else in the country. For example consider Proposition 2 in California. Worded as it is it will virtually eliminate a large amount of animal agriculture in that state.
It is a positive thing to sit down with your legislators and tell them why certain taxes or regulations are damaging your business. Sometimes, and in fact oftentimes, laws are passed to address one issue and impact something completely different, entirely inadvertently. Take for example new state regulations aimed at keeping monster semi's full of reeking garbage out of small towns in the western part of the state. The governor wants to keep those trucks on the interstate as much as possible (can't blame the truckers too much..the state raised tolls ridiculously) to protect the quality of life in those towns. However, powers that be neglected to exempt farm trucks, such as those hauling corn silage from the field to the farm, from the rules. Can you imagine if every farmer had to jump on the Thruway with his big dump truck full of corn on the way to the pile? As farms by necessity grow larger, many of them have no choice but to travel on the roads hauling their crops. Many of them have abandoned wagons in favor of trucks, as they are safer on the road and faster for the farmer. This is the kind of legislation farmers need to discuss with their legislators.
NY Farm Bureau has named Amedore to its legislative Circle of Friends too. The Circle of Friends is a pretty good yardstick for measuring the agriculture savvy and policies in the Senate and Assembly. Our area is fortunate in its "Friends", as our state senator, Hugh Farley also regularly makes the list. Agriculture is NY State's number one industry, despite the perception that the Big Apple is the only apple in town. Upstate has a few apples too...but most of them are grown on trees. We need people in Albany who understand that our industry and lifestyle provides NY folks with everything from apples to wine, to fine cheese to enjoy it with.
You know...business in the front, party in the back. Liz and I, thanks to some heifers which got out about five times the past three days, have been cutting brush out of the electric fence.
It is in and of itself a miserable job. Even though it is crispy cool, after half an hour hacking wild rose bushes higher than your head out of the wires and cutting raspberries higher than they are you are hot. Sweaty. Itchy.
We forgot to take water so after the first hour we were thirsty to the point of misery.
We work with the electric fence turned on so we can find the shorts. You don't want to make a mistake in what you touch.
However, as in most farm jobs no matter how painful, there are compensations if you know where to find them.
I put the big camera in its case in a thick plastic tote and took it along for the ride. Here are some of the things we found while discovering that there was a bad clip holding two wires together so there was no charge at all on most of the fence.
A collage of fall colors from the ride yesterday. All taken from a moving car, but you get the idea of how pretty things are these cool autumn days.
Sorry about no post yesterday. Seems we are so busy it is like we are hurtling downhill in a race to get who knows where or why and no time to stop for anything. I am having a hard time even getting all my comments answered and I apologize.
The first frost came night before last. Just a light one in some places but hard enough for ice in others. Any tomatoes that weren't covered are toast. I am going to have to pick all the rest...maybe today if I get the Farm Side done in time. It is 33 now so we will probably get another before dawn. I picked some sunflower seeds to save yesterday as the blue jays are mowing through them with amazing alacrity.
The boss and I ran over to Altamont to pick up a beef we had processed yesterday. It was a Holstein steer that didn't finish all that well so we had it all put into minute steaks, hamburger and stew beef. Tested the first last night...very tasty. Beck made gravy with minute steaks...very tender.
Picked up half a bushel of apples on the way. I have been craving apples and ours are still so green as to be barely edible for some reason. Most of the winesaps split from late heavy rains I guess so the best they will be is jelly...which I would like to make if they ever ripen. These are galas, golden delicious and Jonagold...all terrific varieties. The Delicious won't keep long, but you can't beat em at this time of year...especially chilled. I had the first one on the way over yesterday and it was icy cold from sitting outdoors overnight. Indescribable!
Take one solid, not to be seen through unless you have x-ray vision, milk house door. Add milk filters, long (wet) snaky tubes of fiber used to strain impurities out of the milk. Add one man who is always in a hurry and who tosses them in the stable cleaner (which is just outside that same door) when he tears the machine down.
What you get is disgruntled family members, who, as they turn out cows and carry milking machines to the milkhouse, have been hit many.....many, many, many....times with wet soggy filters. In the face. Around the neck. Or if you are lucky, just in the knees. You simply cannot duck fast enough when that door opens to get out of the way of that missile of doom.
Enter one mischievous teen aged boy and assorted sneaky and conspiring other family members.
Ha! Gotcha! ....and we did last night, when we were tearing down the milker and he was coming in from breeding a cow. He was a good sport about it. ...as he wiped half a river of milk off his face and neck. I am sure this is not over but.....
Then take a naughty border collie who just has to go after the cat. Add a cat in a metal dog crate who knows the dog can't get him and reacts accordingly. We were sitting in the living room eating supper last night when there was a tremendous bang in the kitchen and Nick came hurtling into the dining room with his tail tucked between his legs. He leaped into his crate and huddled there trembling hard enough to make the whole thing rattle like a freight train. We figured he had banged into the kitchen crate trying to get the cat and scared himself. Alan shut him in his crate for the night and we forgot about it until this morning.
Enter crime and punishment. As I was getting milk for my morning coffee out of the fridge, I found a large, soggy, half-ripe tomato lying split wide open on the floor right next to the cat crate. I had set a bunch of them on there the other day because I am simply running out of room for tomatoes.
Update the scenario. Dog bangs crate in frustration over smug (safe, and he knows it) cat. Add gravity and set an object in motion. Objects in motion tend to remain in motion and to hit whatever happens to be in their way...such as mid-sized black and white dogs. Splat! Take that you brat!
Who ever imagined that poetic justice would involve vegetables and cleaning devices? I'll bet the dog thinks the cat can throw stuff now.
****The kid actually is faking dismay and likes his new hair cut. (and I like knowing that he still has eyes.)
As expected I am getting as much fun out of his college education has he is...maybe more, I don't have to write any papers.. I knew he would come home and teach me things I couldn't wait to know....I have never gotten tired of learning about the outdoors and wildlife and herptiles and such.
So far, I have learned from him that sedges have edges, rushes are round and grass is jointed. I have gotten to attend, albeit vicariously, field trips to count salamanders and frogs, which resulted in him seeing newt efts and wood frogs for the first time. My brothers and I grew up surrounded by bountiful little orange beauties and spring singers up at Grandma and Grandpa's camp, where the wood frogs breed in vernal ponds and there are newts under most of the logs, but I think the soil and ponds aren't acidic enough to suit them down here in the valley. We have mostly red backs and green frogs here. I have gotten to hear all about electroshocking fish for censuses and species identification (and therein lies a tale that I don't dare reveal....ask him about it. lol). I worried about that trip but I didn't need to...guess it was just a mother thing.
Next his lab class will be going birding. (I wish college had been this much fun when I went. Maybe I would have a degree rather than just a handful of meaningless credits.) There are rumors that the birding expedition may entail a trip to Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. We have taken the family there a number of times, although it is barely within the "between milkings" range that allows us to all leave the farm at the same time and still take care of the animals. However, we have never had the benefit of an expert to guide us around the waterways and swamps that make up the amazing refuge and we have always had to be in such a hurry... Can't wait til he gets back from that one. I actually look forward to milking on Thursday nights after those exciting Fisheries and Wildlife labs....just can't wait to hear about all the plants and critters and ecosystems and all.
Brandy Lord of all he surveyed and very fond of my truck (You knew my first car was a pick up truck, right?)
Florida Cracker's post and hilarious video of a Bear transporting (or was it transponding) a chicken got me thinking about some dogs we used to have....back in the day...... I don't talk about them much any more as we have been border collie people for most of the last few years. And that was a different part of my life.
However, a long, long time ago I worked in a veterinarian's kennel, as a generalized dog holding, cat box cleaning, dog doo shoveling, porcupine quill pulling, kid of all work. While I was so employed a yellow dog was brought into the hospital with major injuries. He had supposedly "fallen down stairs". (He sure broke a lot of stuff for just a little fall. We always sorta, kinda thought that something else just might have happened to him. Something involving feet and kicking.) Anyhow my boss patched him up and for some bizarre reason I fell for him.
Two Bears, Airs above the ground
He looked amazingly like a border collie except for the yellow part. He was also a hog and messed his cage and kennel run up in horrific fashion every single day. And I cleaned it every single day. He was loud and active (giving deep meaning to the word hyper) and a pest, but I liked him a lot.
Because of his many broken bones he was with us a long time. His vet bill, even in the days before pet vets as neurosurgeons, reached staggering proportions. Finally the day came that the casts came off and the pins were pulled and his owners were called to come get him
And to pay that massive bill. They didn't show.
The boss kept calling them. They kept not coming. Weeks went by. We never heard from them again....or least not until a number of years later when a similarly damaged kitten was brought in to be put to sleep. That was back before animal rights was a big deal and there was nothing we could do....couldn't have proved anything anyhow.
Who would want a crazy dog like that? All he did was mess up the cage and bark. Although he grew up pretty he was a homely pup and not much liked by anyone but me. The boss decided to put him to sleep.
Enter 18-year old me. There was just too much dog there to just erase as if he never had been. I begged my boss to let me have him rather than put him down. He thought I was nuts and wouldn't. Finally on the last day before what would have been his last day my employer relented and I took him home. (Fortuitously my folks were at camp or our relationship would have been quite short. He was a very bad dog in those early days. For the most part he got over it.)
Thus began 14 of the best dogs years I would ever have. I took Brandy, as I named him, through several levels of dog obedience. Let's just say that he got it. He would literally do anything of which he was physically capable if I could communicate to him what I wanted. Anything at all. My obedience teacher scorned him because he was a mutt, but he aced all his classes. He beat labs and goldens at Frisbee. He would dig if I asked him to, where I asked him to (He and his daughter Two Bears actually helped us lay water line at our camp. They would dig frantically around large rocks until we could get a hold of them to get them out. No lie.) He would climb a ladder and walk around on the roof of the cabin and then climb back down if I asked him to. He walked scaffolding. Jumped to the roof of the cap on that orange pick up and back down if I waved my hand. He wore clothes and was the funniest ham you could imagine when dressed.How he could strut. He just loved clothes. (He also bit people, but he never bit anybody that I wouldn't have bitten were I a dog.) And was he shaky about the house training thing. And stole parsnips and hid them in the walls.....quirky you might say....chewed stuff up too...a lot of it.
Bobby, one of the few dumb ones (but lovable...very lovable)
I could brag him up all day and probably sound like a fool, but my little bro who reads this will remember all the crazy things he did and can vouch for the veracity of the tale. We loved that dog so much that (what with our irresponsible youth and all) we mated him to a dog we met along the way, named Sparky, who was part coyote and his exact duplicate in brains and ability. (Not to mention destructive bad dogness.)
We called the resulting pups "Cracker Dogs" after the little dog that went cracker dog in the James Herriot books. There were several generations of them. They all had this way of tearing in circles radiating joy and vigor that we just loved. Like their parents they were hellions. Besides being trainable they got bored easily. And destroyed things. I was poor. No dog crates.
Two Bears, Capriolle
We loved those cracker dogs. At one point I had five of them. (Somewhere I have a picture of all five leaping off our garage roof into ten-foot snow drifts.) Two Bears, perhaps the best of them, (except Brandy, of course) would catch any chicken in my large flock that I pointed out to her and fetch it to me...handy....they all would have herded stock for me if I had a clue how to train them.
Two Bears, thinking, "Take me to the chickens, boss".
After Brandy died, Two Bears used to drag poor Bobby, one of her sons, off to the hedgerows to dig out woodchucks. She would bark. He would dig.
The last cracker dog was a second Sparky. When we discussed her intelligence, a box of rocks often entered the conversation. However, she adored the kids and would not bite them. She raised them all through their dog learning years and never did one thing wrong. (Or at least until she met Mike, the first of the Northview border collies, who showed her that there was food on the table and treasure in the trash.) Once someone stole her out of our backyard and dumped her in another city. (Thank God she had tags so we got her back. Believe me when I say that they would not have stolen Brandy or old Twoie.)
Sparks died just a few years ago when cancer entered her spinal cord. Thus ended an era that lasted decades ....the cracker dog years. I love my border collies, but dang those homemade hounds were fun.
........I have an entourage. However, mine does not include a manager in reflective sunglasses or a clutch of roadies with do rags around their heads..... mine is more low key and countrified.
Everywhere I go, indoors or out, I am always accompanied by anywhere from one to three black and white dogs. Supposing I sit down in the creaky old chair here at the computer. Thump, thud, clunk, three sets of border collie elbows hit the floor. Heads curl into tails and a chorus of snores begins. (Okay I know I am boring, but come on guys....). I don't know what they think I am going to get up to if they let me out of their sight, but they sure are afraid that they are going to miss something. Someone always has one eye open under all that snoozing fur. If the washer stops cycling and I rise to hang up laundry, it's a three-dog stretch, then they all lumber after me out to the pantry. And into the parlor where my five (count 'em, five) sets of laundry bars reside. They all stand in the door way watching me hang up towels and blue jeans, tails gently waving, until I head back out to the next thing.
Nick is youngest and good about staying out from under my feet. Not so much the old dogs especially Mike. They have discovered that if they hem me in with slumbering bodies they will not, despite all those blindness and deafness issues, be left behind when I move on. Oh, they may get stepped on. They may hear some language not fit for tender canine ears, but they won't miss the mommy train.
On one hand it drives me crazy and causes me to miss a lot of phone calls (hard to get to the phone through the scrimmage of awakening canines.) On the other hand, it feels right to be surrounded by dogs...I am after all a dog person, through and through. A canine escort is thus not a bad thing right?
Of late my road crew has a new member. He can only be out of his personal dog crate when Nick is outside in his run, as Nick likes members of his species. With ketchup. But when Nick is out he is free to prowl.
Elvis is a cat (AKA Mr. Kitty, or Monsieur le Chat ). However, he seems to have decided that he is a dog. He fetches. He catches things you throw to him. He hunts and eats flies (one of Gael's favorite pastimes in younger days). He understands words (especially the word "can" in reference to ones full of cat food). He stops doing bad things when told to. (He even knows when he is doing a bad thing and stares at me slyly while extending claws ever so tenderly toward my chair. If he sees me look up he withdraws the claws and grins.)
He also follows me from room to room, plopping down among the dogs with just as loud a thump whenever I stop. I find that I enjoy his company as much as I do theirs. This is puzzling to me. I have not liked cats much since I was a kid when anything with fur, feathers, scales, claws or warty skin was wondrous fine and fair to me. I tolerate them, but you won't catch me picking them up to pet them. Feeding them. Talking to them. Or any of that mushy cat person stuff.
However, as we speak he is lying near me ( on an antique chair he knows full well is off limits), just a little away from the dog-rug surrounding the chair. I swear he isn't a cat...he is a dog in disguise. I mean, I voluntarily buy those darned cans he loves so much....somebody stop me.
(Or, you can find anything on the Internet...anything at all.)
Sunday afternoon the younger two early adulthood persons in the family and I trekked to Schenectady to the public library book sale. It was bag sale day so you could get all the books you could stuff into a paper grocery bag for two bucks.
The sale was insane. Full NFL gear would have been a useful option in the book stuffing scrimmage that occurred the instant the floodgates opened to admit the throng waiting in line. The outside of the library looked like the gate to a rock concert. We came home with five bags of treasure but we wrestled for every page and dust jacket.
One of the treasures I purchased was Big Weatherby Mark Svenvold. It is about the author's adventures in 2004 chasing tornadoes with famous storm chaser, Matt Biddle. Although Mr. Svenvold is fond of using challenging vocabulary and convoluted sentences it is a fascinating read. In one chapter he described a video of a tornado in Attica, Kansas lifting a house entirely off its foundation and tossing it to the ground.
There is a certain fascination in big weather....so I entered the search terms, "Attica Kansas house tornado video." The top link offered connected me to the video described in the book.
This tree has nothing to do with books or tornadoes, although2006 summer's almost tornado passed right over it....and I suppose you could make a book out of it if you really wanted to.
As I was dragging yet another snarl of tangled, soapy hair out of the drain in the bathroom sink I wondered. What do you suppose would happen if I went on strike and never again did any of the taken for granted nasty jobs that fall to mothers? I’d call it Momstrike, and what a fascinating notion it could be. You see I am blessed by not one, but two, long haired daughters who would never contemplate such a bizarre act as cleaning out the drain. I am also confounded by a long haired son, whose housekeeping proclivities are much overshadowed by those of his female siblings. He has a dandelion mane of yellow hair that gets pretty outrageous sometimes. He calls it his “’Fro”. (I wonder where he got the idea that pouffy blond curls could ever constitute a ‘fro.) Their combined efforts at shedding are worse than a dozen border collies. Supposing I stopped cleaning out that dratted drain whenever I noticed that it needed it. Would they clean it themselves? Or would a hairball form in the sink that would rival the sort of bezoar an African bull elephant would develop if elephants groomed like barn cats? Or would they think that it was a rampant opossum and call the dogs?
And then there’s the wastebasket under that selfsame sink. If I didn’t empty it every now and then would little cardboard tubes and puffs of bedraggled tissue mount toward the ceiling until they spilled over to form a paper mache carpet in the puddles around the tub? Or would someone else do it? How about the other appliances and furnishings in that particular room? What would happen to them if I struck?
You can see that it would be an interesting experiment to go on Momstrike. Obviously I can’t give up milking my share of the cows every twelve or so hours. Calves must eat; shovels must shove and bills must be paid in a timely fashion, but what would happen if nobody carted out the paper plates from the TV tables in the living room? Would they just pile up until they cascaded to the floor and the dogs chewed them up? Would the accompanying forks and spoons snuggle together to create a free-form metal sculpture, or would someone get stabbed in the toe and bleed all over the carpet? Would they notice that since the carpet is bright red? Would anyone but the stick-ee even care?
How about the dishes? If nobody did them for a week or so, would anyone care when they ran out of silverware? Would they spelunk that same living room carpet in order to find the missing pieces among the scattered plates and injured family members? Would they offer triage to the folks dancing around the living room with forks sticking out of their feet? Or would they merely dig around the cupboard under the cereal and find the plastic ones we use for camp?
Laundry is another ignore-it-and-maybe-it-will-go-away nuisance. Liz does hers. Everyone else doesn’t. If I just walked past the socks huddling around Alan’s chair, with my nose in the air (way, way in the air in fact) would he pick them up and wash them? Or would they coalesce into a funky sort of dog bed and offer Mike an odoriferous but comfortable lounging spot? (Then he wouldn’t have to pull the Afghan off the couch to curl up in front of the TV on it.) And all those jeans and sweatshirts draped so gracefully on the furniture and floor. Would they turn out to be a new art form that the kids could sell to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art? Or would the Guinness Book of World Records arrive with measuring tapes and scales and offer us a mega bucks prize for the mostest messiest motleyest house?
I dunno, but I think I will try it. I will spend all my sink cleaning, laundry round-up, dish rodeo, housework, time either planting bulbs for next spring or reading a nice trashy novel. For a week. All you other hairy-sink-plagued moms out there want to join me? Do you think anyone will notice if we join forces and strike?
What a fickle fall this has been. After weeks of weather that felt like August we had that extraordinary rainy spell. Then a warm, soft period arrived. Imagine, even here along the river, not having the inaugural frost of autumn until the first week in November. Fall colors have been subdued indeed, but we have enjoyed an exceptionally long spell of their blushing beauty. Last Saturday I sat out on the swing in the side yard throwing the roof of a plastic birdhouse for Mike and Gael. (It made a perfect Frisbee and was handy.) I had a cup of warm, sweet coffee and a good book to fill in the spaces when the old dogs got too tired to tear down the driveway after their improvised toy. The temperature was nearly seventy. The sun was comforting and the air as fragrant as June. Across the river a lone maple, with leaves as red as a summer sunset, tossed its branches above a grove of dull green pines as if shouting, “Hey, look at me.” I like that little tree and look for it every day when I go outside. Most of the other maples around the area are just a drab sort of yellow.
The valley reverberated to the rumble of trains across the river and small planes crisscrossed the sky. At the water garden the frogs were out. They are half hibernating and look like they had a rough night when they claw their way through the vegetation to lie in the sun. Summery weather is not normal for November but I will take all I can get. By the weekend it is supposed to be cold and dreary again. I guess that is to be expected in the next to the last month of the year.
****I wish the old dogs still had the gumption to chase things like the roof of an old birdhouse. Mike couldn't even see it any more and Gael has just lost interest.
Erin, at Raising Country Kids, has an excellent post about some of the phrases a farm wife hates to hear. Although we have milk checks instead of calf contracts, I can identify with these so easily....especially the dreaded, "How much money is on the check book?" (To which the universal answer is always, "Not enough!"
A large percentage of farm work is repetitious and indeed often downright boring. Even a responsible job like milking is largely routine and done exactly the same way twice a day. Cows like routine. Farmers try to give it to them. Driving tractor can be fun when the weather is nice and the scenery fine, but it can also be monotonous. Round and round and up and down hour after hour. I have known folks to fall asleep driving and only wake up when they bumped up against the stones in the hedge row.
Enter the mouse. I never heard of this mouse before tonight, but both of the men, who routinely do the field work, were aware of it. I guess over the past couple of years it has offered them a little entertainment when they were out doing field work. You see, for quite some time it has lived in the dash board of the White 2-105 tractor. There was a gauge dial missing in it leaving a handy hole and sometimes it would peep out at them, clinging by its little claws to the edge. Other times it would come racing down the tractor hood when they were driving and dive below the dash before they could swat it. Some days there would be little mousie foot prints on the hood next to pools of dew where it had been drinking. It wasn't an exactly welcome guest as it once ate a hole in the air cleaner, but they were never quite able to catch up with it.
Then last week we traded in the White. It was time and past time for it to go and the "new" tractor is a huge improvement over it even in its better days. Still they had a grudging affection for the old thing. After all it had been here longer than I have.
Since it was raining and spitting drizzle today the guys went over to Jim McFadden's auction (that is who we traded with) to see it go under the hammer. The crew there had cleaned it up so it looked pretty good too. Imagine Alan's amazement when he glanced over and there was the mouse sitting on the tire. (He actually (believe it or not) looked around for a soda bottle or something to bring it home in......) As he watched it jumped off the tire and ran around the feet of the folks in the crowd, terrified by all the commotion. Then it raced up an unsuspecting farmer's leg, reached his fanny and jumped to the ground again. The man never even noticed it! (And Alan didn't tell him either.)
After a few seconds it vanished under the tractor and wasn't seen again. However, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if sometime next week someone heads out in the field on their new White 2-105 and has a heck of a surprise when a little grey mouse peeks out of the dashboard at them. Alan was sorry he couldn't catch it. Me, not so much.
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