Archive for July 2015
Lily Show
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We are enjoying a period of wonderfully comfortable summer weather. Our variety of Asian lillies are popping open like a July Independence Day fireworks show.
The dew point temperature is in the refreshing 50s (F) and we are well-between rainfall events. The sunlight still lasts summer-long, but the grass has finally slowed to a reasonable rate of new growth. I hesitate to mention that I have spotted some leaves on the ground under one particular tree that has already decided to start the change process from green leaves to yellow.
It is the pause of breath before the big exhale toward fall. The raspberries have yielded a bumper crop this year, but the bushes now look like we’re arriving at the end of berry season. In contrast, the plum trees are just starting to reveal their fruit, cherry-sized green orbs becoming apparent.
Down the path a ways, one of our volunteer apple trees in the woods has decided to drop its fruit a little early this year, providing a trigger for another passing thought about the relative shortness of our growing season.
This time of year I find myself mystified by the incredibly extreme amount of change that happens across the span of seasons where we live. The number of what seem like endless winter days trekking along the frozen trail that Delilah and I stomp into the snow around the perimeter of our property becomes a surreal memory in relation to the lush green landscape and warm breezes we are treated to in July.
The colorful explosions of flowers like our lillies become an icing on the cake that is summertime.
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Uninvited Supervisor
Cyndie and I were working on a little project in front of our house yesterday and I looked up and spotted someone spying on us. It looked like we were being supervised over the lip of the gutter.
The reason I suspect the little critter was checking us out is that after we moved on to other things, he left. Cyndie had wanted to get a picture with her camera, but by the time she got out there, he had disappeared.
Something tells me the gutter covers we bought aren’t guaranteeing that I won’t need to occasionally clean the gutters. Down at the barn we’ve had birds creating nests in the downspout, and now on the house we have amphibians making themselves at home in the channel.
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Got Shade?
We’ve got shade by the round pen now!
Yesterday, Cyndie stepped outside with Delilah and the dog made a beeline for a spot where there was another rabbit’s nest. It is pretty obvious that they breed like rabbits, because Delilah keeps finding new nests filled with babies.
In this case, Cyndie tried to rescue a couple of them from becoming Delilah’s next meal, but I don’t think she had much success. She walked back into the house and said, “I guess that’s why they call them ‘dumb bunnies’.”
Apparently none of them were smart enough to evade the resident predator.
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First Test
Despite my desire to get the already too long grass mowed yesterday, due to an all-afternoon soaking precipitation on Thursday that delayed getting started early, I ended the day without ever having turned the key on the lawn tractor. As so often happens, activities unfolded with total disregard for my feeble plans.
Knowing we had an appointment scheduled for George to trim the horse’s hooves at noon, I chose to dip into a project down at the barn, finally assembling the shade gazebo that we purchased over a year ago. I threaded nuts on bolts for hours on end throughout the intense afternoon heat.
Cyndie provided valuable support, including going to the trouble of making a temporary fence to enclose the horses on some of the too-long grass outside the paddock, so they could do some “mowing” for me.
At the end of the day, we decided to save the work of stretching the canvas over the top for this morning when we would have fresh energy. That turned out to be a really smart decision, especially since I have yet to drive the anchors into the ground.
In the middle of the night, we were startled awake by an incredibly intense storm. We both fully expected to find the spindly frame tossed into a tangled mess, pressed up against the round pen rails nearby. Lightning flashed at a shocking rate, wind stressed our house, and the power went off for a couple of hours.
The generator kicked in perfectly, but the sound of it tended to fuel the dramatic feeling of alarm over the significance of the storm raging outside. Alarms chirped occasionally within the house, at the sudden absence or intermittent return of AC power during the outage. There are only a few essential circuits that the generator maintains, so much of the rest of our electronic devices remain at the mercy of the power grid.
Getting back to sleep was a challenge. I always think about how the horses are faring when the level of intensity of thunderstorms is so extreme. By the time we find them in the aftermath, they always seem so unperturbed.
This morning they were happy as could be. I wondered aloud if Legacy knew that today was his birthday. The elder statesman of our herd turned 19 today.
To our joint surprise, as we came around the woods and the new gazebo frame came into view, it looked exactly like the way we left it last night. It survived its first test with an excellent result.
Now we need to walk the trails and see if all our trees held up nearly as well.
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Dust Busting
It’s funny how much clutter we tolerate, until we can’t. Or we don’t have to. Sometimes the tolerating is born of a necessary survival mechanism of prioritizing.
When Cyndie was working her previous day-job, her efforts often overflowed the office hours and consumed vast amounts of her time in the evenings and on weekends. Putting energy toward areas of personal interest became a luxury that she rarely had time to indulge. She has been home now for less than a month and in that time has begun to shake the dust off a surprising number of things and places.
The dustiest of them all is, without a doubt, our barn, with its sand floor and the lime screenings surface under the overhang, toward the paddocks. Daily, the horses kick up dry clouds of dust that waft into the barn, covering absolutely everything. Keeping surfaces clean is a losing battle in the barn, so I rarely bother trying.
Last Sunday, late in the afternoon, when I was winding down toward gathering my thoughts of returning to work the next day, Cyndie began moving things out of the barn. We definitely operate on different schedules of inspiration. The hose came out and the barn received a serious makeover for the next few days. 
All that remains outside the roof now appears to be objects she left as a hint to me that she’d rather we find a different place to store.
Last night, about the time I was considering turning in for the night, Cyndie began moving things out of the over-packed storage room in the basement. Dust and clutter are no longer safe around here. Cyndie is home!
It has been a rude awakening to me of how much I was comfortable tolerating during the time I was home full-time. I had no problem overlooking clutter in some locations while I focused on projects in other areas of my interest.
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Thrilling News
We are giddy with anticipation over our good fortune to have our friends, the Morales family, returning to visit us again in a few weeks. Since we have adopted each other as family, it is like a reunion of precious relations. Cyndie has unleashed her irrepressible inspirations and fearless energies toward making plans and preparations that have me questioning how she intends to bend time and space in her physics-defying scenarios of everything she wants to happen while they are here.
If you are one of the crew of local followers of “Relative Something,” this is your chance to get in on the action! For those of you who won’t be able to join us, you can trust that my stories and images describing the summer spectacle will be the subject of posts in the days that follow…
.We feel incredibly blessed to live in this wonderful place with our special animals, and it brings us immeasurable joy when others are able to be here to share in the experience along with us.
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Baggage
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lately
it’s as if
everything that ever was
perpetually lingers
unresolved
in a present tense
dreamlike
yet anything but a dream
and despite my urge
to embrace and inflame
some perceived affront
threatening my peace of mind
..a choice is available
free and unencumbered
. . .to not
and in this moment
to choose instead
noticing the sunset
painting the evening view
casting a golden hue
riding the evening breeze
into a summer cool
a welcome soothing balm
breaking imaginary locks
likewise invented chains
releasing concocted bonds
allowing unrivaled gains
filling here and now
with an absence
of baggage claimed
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On Hold
All activities are currently on hold or significantly curtailed —including writing blog posts— because of Delilah’s (too) close encounter with a skunk last night. Welcome to dog ownership in the country, John and Cyndie.
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High Balance
It has been a while since I cleared out the pine trees that died in the last year, leaving 6 or 7 feet of trunk standing from one of them, in hopes of creating a balancing rock sculpture on top of it.
Yesterday, I got my chance.
I hadn’t set out to accomplish that when I started the day, but activity has a way of evolving here, if you let yourself go with the flow.
I was trimming the growth beneath our fence line along the perimeter of the hay-field, and decided it would be worth getting the tractor to cut some of the areas of tall grass left after George cut the field for hay.
While out there mowing, I took advantage of the opportunity to move out some large rocks that had been left in a corner of the field last fall by the crew we hired to fence in the back pasture. I had wanted to get that done before the field was mowed, but this was the next best time to do it, with all the grass now short.
The first set of rocks I picked up were smaller than the one in this picture, so on a whim I decided to drive up and see if I could maneuver the tractor in place and roll one onto the waiting tree trunk.
Despite a few precarious moments, including one where the small rock tipped over in a breeze just as Cyndie had bent over pulling some weeds so I had to startle her with a warning, the process worked as I had envisioned.
I put the small rock back up, in a more secure position, and we now have the tallest installation of curiously placed rocks that I have ever done.
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Bales Stacked
The day after the classic scramble to get a full field of hay baled and stacked under a roof has a disorienting feel to it. There is an obvious sense of relief in the reality that the shed is now stocked with provisions to feed our horses all winter. It’s like everything that needs to be done, is done.
But, it’s not.
It feels sort of comical to now have to mow the short grass of the lawn, a mere pittance of a harvest compared to that hay-field.
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Relative Something 