Archive for April 2013
Meditative Burning
It rained Sunday night, but that didn’t stop me from reigniting the brush pile yesterday afternoon. It is a fascinating exercise to witness the ebb and flow of fire energy, as it slowly, but surely consumes tree root bundles. You can’t leave it untended, if you want to make constant progress. There is just too much moisture stored in the roots, and they don’t really want to burn. You need to keep feeding the fire wood that is dry enough to burn well, and stoke those coals to keep them glowing red-hot.
Still, the fire will tend to grow calm, as the burn consumes the immediately available fuel. It is mesmerizing. Then, a simple adjustment of the pile, by poking around in the coals, followed by the addition of some new wood, brings a rush of sound and fury. It is energizing.
I completely understand why someone I know explained that her husband took a picture of her when she was lured out to tend their brush pile burn, while still in her bathrobe. The task has that addicting allure.
Last night, I had a tough choice: the addiction of the fire, or the addiction of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament championship game.
The brush pile will still be here today. The game won out last night.
Disappearing Day
Maybe this can be attributed to the old saying, “time flies when you’re having fun,” but it seemed like yesterday did more than fly. It just plain disappeared.
In all fairness, we did get a bit of a late start. We enjoyed a leisurely beginning to our day, and then dove into chores to prepare for a late brunch with our children and their significant others. As the noon hour came and went, Cyndie and I stepped out to putter on some outdoor chores while we waited for the kids.
We made our way down to the barn, where we started the process of clearing the eagle statue and the rocks used for landscaping, from the area to the right of the door. We will be creating space to drive the tractor around the back side of the barn, and that is going to involve removing some dirt. Before we can move the dirt, we have to get the rocks out of the way.
We barely got started on the project, when kids arrived. After a brief tour to show off the fence progress, we headed inside to prepare the feast for serving. It was a classic “Cyndie brunch,” with her homemade waffles, and oodles of fruit. When the meal was done, we didn’t even clear the table, but retired directly to the comfortable seating by the fireplace, to visit.
With the afternoon sun showing dominance over the thin clouds, we were lured back outdoors, where we explored for something to do. I decided to see if we could get any of the branches in one of our brush piles to ignite, with the hope of picking up where we left off last fall, burning them.
The process of burning brush can be real mesmerizing. We made it a challenge to start the fires without any paper or accelerant, which I’m sure occupied much more time than any of us realized. Once we achieved a spot with some good coals, it became a process of finding the driest stumps and root balls to pile on top of the flames.
It seemed like just a short time, but when we finally dragged ourselves away from the fun, and back up to the house, it was almost 7 p.m.! Holy cow! Where did that day go?
The tough thing about this experience is, we can now see so many outdoor springtime tasks already deserving attention, the phenomenon of amazing disappearing days is going to become an all too common reality for us.
It’s like magic! Luckily, we like magical things.
Wanna watch us make a day disappear?
Frozen Dirt
The frozen dirt of spring keeps grabbing my attention as I wander the areas where running water from snow-melt is carving paths and shapes. Overnight, things freeze up, capturing new spectacles to be discovered each morning.
Something’s Wrong
It has been about two years since I first noticed a pain in my left hand that felt like I must have done something while playing floor hockey to injure it. I figured I probably landed on it, in the heat of action, and then didn’t notice the pain until I had stopped playing. Maybe a strain, or a sprain. The kind of thing a little time would heal.
Unfortunately, time never did end the pain. It was a low-level irritation, somewhere in the middle of the bones of my hand, eventually growing so familiar, that it became my new normal. Something about the pain led me to imagine it might be the beginnings of arthritis in my joints. There is family history of arthritis in hands, so I chalked it up to growing older.
Over time, the irritation did show signs of getting worse. It is hard to measure, because I think my familiarity, and tolerance, for the discomfort would keep adjusting along with the increasing increments of pain. I was becoming aware of more things that were difficult to do with my left hand, though.
A few days ago, for some unidentified reason, the pain changed dramatically, becoming highly sensitive to certain pressures or movements. Finally, after two days of increasing debilitation, I sought professional diagnosis. I am hardly able to do anything with that hand without excruciating discomfort.
With no open appointments at my regular clinic, I headed to an urgent care location in hopes they could recognize a problem and refer me to a specialist for care. Nothing was identified in the initial examination, so I was sent for an x-ray.
I must admit, even though I was looking for a reason that I am experiencing chronic discomfort, I was extremely happy to hear that the x-ray did not show any indications of arthritis. However, that left me wanting some other explanation.
There are no broken bones, and no dislocations. The doctor said she didn’t have any x-rays of a healthy hand with which to compare, but something looked wrong to her. I was pleased, because the area she took notice of, aligned exactly with the spot where my pain seems to have localized: the base of my thumb, where the metacarpal meets the trapezium. (Whut? Okay, I looked it up.)
She said it didn’t look like it was seated quite right. She wondered if it might be a joint subluxation. Regardless, there was nothing she could do except provide a referral to an orthopedic hand specialist. It just so happens, my sister knows one that she highly recommends. I have an appointment to see him at his very next opening, …two weeks from now.
The Urgent Care doctor said the radiologist had not reviewed the x-rays yet, and she would call to let me know if he had anything more to offer. Before the end of the day, I received a message that the radiologist “read the x-ray as normal.”
Humph. What does that mean? We’ll see what the orthopedic specialist says. I know that something is wrong.
Got Boards?
Progress continues on the fence project. I think they chose to attach the boards on the lower end of the paddock now, so they won’t need to be working down in the muddy areas in the coming days, since temperatures are predicted to remain high in the afternoons for the next week.
There is still a lot of snow in the fields that has yet to melt. The drainage ditch beyond the paddock now has a babbling brook flowing, non-stop. Last night, just before sunset, I followed the flow to the end of our property toward the south, and discovered that it doesn’t immediately drain into the ditch that exists along the border of our property line and the farm fields next door. It is spreading out to form a large wet spot on the edge of our cut field.
I can tell, now, why some of that wasn’t already cut when I was mowing the area with the brush hog last fall. It probably remains wet most of the time, when we aren’t experiencing drought conditions.
Maybe I can dig it out a bit, in order to encourage the pooling of water (instead of fighting against it), creating a small pond. It may take a few years of seeing the seasonal tendencies of water behavior here, before I take that kind of action. Ultimately, my goal would be to work with the natural tendencies, and not endeavor to reshape them away from the natural. No sense digging a pond if it is only wet for a few weeks in the springtime.
I also want to be on the lookout for possible springs on the property. Most recently, we were informed there may be one near the willow tree that has now been made part of this first paddock. I am confident the future horses will help reveal the presence of a spring, if there is one there.
Something leads me to believe that the springs here will all be seepage springs that create wet spots, or dry out, depending on the amount of precipitation and ground water levels. The recent trends have delivered longer and hotter heat waves, and increasing drought conditions around here, so I am not inclined to expect any possible springs will be dependable for offering pools of water for more than short periods of time.
I have much to learn here. The last few nights I have been noticing how far along the horizon the sunset has changed already, from not so long ago.
Every day here –certainly in the period of our first year– is a brand new experience. In addition, the changes we are introducing on the property since we arrived, are reinventing the place from what it was before.
Yes, Mary, change is good!
Winter Receding
A little artistic rendering of the transition from winter to spring. I like how the compilation of grass, ice, and dirt turned out in this shot. Check out that great looking “M” in the ice!
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More Posts
Monday is the weekday I don’t drive to the day-job, with my 4-day work week, and yesterday provided me the opportunity to witness the process of fence posts installation. I discovered there is a lot more to the task than just digging a hole and dropping a post down into it.
I am very grateful to see the crew we hired are very particular about getting the posts precise, to assure we end up with not just a functional fence, but one that will look good, too.
With each post, they have to watch multiple things, simultaneously: first, that it is the right distance from the previous post, but then also that it’s set to the right depth, level in two directions, square to the line which the cross-boards will run, and ultimately, in line with the rest of the posts.
When they finally achieve all of those parameters, they need to back-fill the hole, packing the dirt tight as they go, without allowing the post to move out of position. When you are setting a lot of posts in a line, one bad one can really stand out of the bunch. They have to repeat this series of steps over and over, with sustained vigilance to meet each goal, for every post. I think it’s pretty impressive.
They also agreed to create a radius, which I didn’t think they wanted to do, so the fence by the new driveway will follow the arc of the loop.
While that work was happening, we received one more truckload of sand for the driveway, and then the trusses for the hay shed. The dump truck driver informed us it would be the last load for now, as he discovered the route has been posted with road restrictions for reduced weight limits, due to the spring thaw. That restriction will likely last into May. We got close, but we were intending to put at least one more load than was delivered yesterday. Luckily, we have the fill we need for work on the shed to commence.
Here is a wide shot that shows how the fence line will arc with the driveway, and where the hay shed will be located beside the driveway loop:
New Posts
We have fence posts! And that’s no April Fool’s joke. The first ones were placed on Friday. It is still very wet down there, so progress will be limited to hours when the ground under foot is mostly frozen, but fence posts are a great visual of progress that has been long-awaited. An actual fence may be days away yet, but that is better than being weeks away.
Yesterday wasn’t a big day of melting, but it did get above freezing, and the angle of sunlight is high enough now to be productive in causing melt, even if air temps don’t get very high.
There was a fair amount of wind, and the air blowing across the fields of snow felt noticeably chilly. In spots where there was a wind break, the solar energy was unmistakably warm. You feel it instantly.
Elysa and Anne were visiting and we played for a bit in the melting snow piles, creating paths for drainage, which quickly became babbling brooks of runoff. What a wonderful playground we have here!
Relative Something 