Archive for October 2021
Unintentional Art
Cyndie borrowed my phone to take a picture. She took three. When I got the phone back, I showed her the last one and asked if she meant to take it.
She hadn’t.
I like it. It’s got an aesthetic that appeals to me.
A happy accident.
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October Realities
There is a feast underway over the decaying roots of the tree we recently removed from the small paddock.
If any of those mushrooms are edible, I don’t think they interest the horses. Our horses chew wood, but not so much the squishy fungi that feed on wood.
We are enjoying a summery October so far. I tried mowing the grass one last time yesterday. That’s the second time this fall I hoped I was cutting for the last time.
It’s a pain because I want to cut the grass short in preparation for the coming snow season but then it keeps growing and gets so long it is hard to cut short again. I took extra time to avoid excessive clippings laying around and also cut at an odd angle to offer the turf a break from the natural ruts forming where the tractor repeatedly rolled throughout most of the cutting season.
It looks pretty good today. Now if the growth would just go dormant, that’d be just great.
Just to push the universe in that direction, I drained the oil from the engine after I was done mowing. I’d love it if I could also drain the gas and park the machine until next spring.
I was hoping to be fastidious about the oil change and was very pleased to be able to drain it while the oil was hot. With pan in place, I attached the extending hose to the not-very-reliable plastic drain apparatus and pulled the piece open. A little oil leaked onto the frame and then the extending hose came loose and dropped into the pan of hot oil.
While rushing to try getting the hose reattached, the entire plastic piece pulled off and oil got all over the frame and ran along the edge to drip almost beyond the pan below. That had me racing to wipe oil while adjusting the pan while inadvertently getting the rag in the primary stream of draining oil.
Fastidious, it was not.
It didn’t really wreck my mood because that had already been smashed by having gotten the rubber clipping deflector on the end of the deck caught against a fence post on an incline and wrenching it out of position. If I would have simply stopped to get off and reposition the tractor, calamity could have been averted. But, no, I forged ahead and suffered the consequences of my bullheadedness.
Maybe all the bullheadedness of so many people refusing to accept reality is rubbing off on me.
I’m going to be able to clean up spilled oil, I’ll figure out a way to fix the clippings deflector, and I will strive to be open-minded about the possibility our grass will continue growing in October 2021.
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Contagious Fog
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.Is fog contagious?
This morning the air is a visible thick soup of gray that obscures the outlines of everything a few yards away.
My mental acuity is slurred into a porridge of blurry inconclusiveness. Coincidence?
I think not.
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Get it?
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Precious Moment
There wasn’t anything particularly special about my taking on the afternoon chores after work yesterday, other than it is usually Cyndie who fills that role on days I commute to the far side of the Twin Cities. She was on adventures of her own in the Cities yesterday, so I changed clothes when I got home and took Delilah out for a walk.
The rain shower I had driven through to get home had moved on but it had soaked things enough that the trees were subsequently dripping almost as fast as drops fall from a rain cloud.
Delilah veered off the trail in pursuit of some enticing scent. I had no intention of following her and stood my ground until she figured it out and retraced her steps back to me. She is so funny in the way her face communicates that she understands the drill and quickly resumes her position on the trail ahead of me, as if to demonstrate doing so was her plan all along.
When we came around to the barn, she marched inside to the spot we always hook her leash to and waited patiently while I tended to the horses.
They were all calm and quiet, and a little wet from the rain. After I dumped manure on the compost pile and came back to collect their empty feed pans, Swings approached me at the fence. I offered some scratches and a little loving attention.
She soaked it up and stayed engaged with me for an extended session.
The longer she lingered, the more I wanted to love her up with scratches and massage.
It became difficult to tell who was doing the loving and who was on the receiving end. The warmth was definitely flowing in both directions.
It was a truly precious equine moment.
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Different Greens
As the tree leaves lose their green color, different greens become much more apparent. Moss growth that has been around all along suddenly stands out much more vividly.
The carpet covering the forest floor that we have been walking upon all summer with little notice now resonates its emerald hue.
It will soon be our chance to spot the lingering green leaves of the invasive common buckthorn that I hunt and remove this time of year in an effort to avoid it overtaking more desirable native growth. The buckthorn leaves stay green longer than most of the other trees and undergrowth, making it relatively easy to find during walks around the property.
That is a different green we’d rather not have around, except for maybe an intentional hedge that is maintained with regular trimming. There are places along our property border where I might be inclined to let the buckthorn grow into a natural wall.
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Rearranging Fiddles
I’m sorry to lead off with a fresh version of being a “Debby-Downer” but reports on my radio during the commute home yesterday left me feeling like we are all just playing fiddles and rearranging deck chairs while Rome is burning and the Titanic is sinking.
There were multiple topics that wracked my sensibilities but the kicker was a statement –the umpteenmillionth from climate scientists– that we need to take action RIGHT NOW! to avert global climate calamity, or else.
Yep. We sure do. Meanwhile, all the fossil-fuel-burning cars around me, mine included, just kept driving down the road. Coal-burning power plants kept burning. The lights stayed on. Factories kept churning. Politicians towed their party lines.
Honestly, it sounded like the siren call that should have tripped some magical trigger forcing everyone to stop the runaway train right now. Instantly jump us all back to the early days of the industrial revolution and use present-day knowledge to solve the challenges of replacing old ways with new ones.
Instead, the way we are going, the poorest people are paying the brunt of costs during this gradual intensifying of impactful events going on around the world in the form of heatwaves, drought, fires, and floods.
It just feels so wrong to keep carrying on with normal activity while we are sinking/burning.
At the same time, it also feels wrong to mope about it, so that challenge is available to address in the face of the slow catastrophe unfolding across the world. There are people devising brilliant alternatives for the things that contribute to the climate crisis. We need to grab the threads of these alternatives and inflate the possibilities of change for the better.
Set down our fiddles, leave the deck chairs as they are.
Let’s replace old ways with new ones without waiting for countries and governments to lead us to action.
I’ll be turning down the radio during the stories about global warming for while.
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Less Color
Not every plant bursts with color this time of year, but the changes still look cool.
Close to the forest floor, Cyndie snapped this shot of leaves with an eye-catching fade from green to an absence of color.
Walking through the woods yesterday we marveled over the carpet of leaves that are a perfectly distributed parquet of colors in certain sections. Under a few other trees, it’s one dominating color where all the leaves of individual trees dropped in a short span of time.
It’s interesting how they will soon all turn brown and not long after that, the ground will be covered with white.
Less color, indeed.
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Works Slick
It made for a great workout that got me huffing and puffing, and soaked in sweat out in the great outdoors. Getting exercise by splitting firewood beats lifting weights in a gym because when you are done, you have a beautiful pile of firewood. Simple as that.
I wouldn’t describe it as quick, but splitting wood with my new tool, the Splitz-All was definitely faster than with my Swedish patented Smart Splitter. The additional benefit of the Splitz-All being portable will likely lead to this being my primary weapon of choice for a while.
Using the supplied chain to bundle the cut logs and hold them upright even after they split worked just as advertised. Also, popping the tool back out of a log that isn’t splitting easily took less effort than with the Smart Splitter.
The dead tree from the paddock is now all split and stacked in the woodshed.
One reason the splitter is such a good exercise workout is the efficiency of hammering away, one after another, on the bundled logs. There is no pause needed when moving immediately after a split to pounding on the next log.
I look forward to getting past my urge to split every log as fast as possible just because it works well enough to allow for that and slowing down to a more sustainable pace so I won’t bonk before everything is split.
When I’m no longer capable of splitting wood with muscle power, the next tool will likely involve hydraulics.
Until then, Splitz-All is my weight lifting machine. One that produces the bonus output of a valuable useable product.
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Maximum Transition
Wintervale is currently undergoing the full range of extremes in the transition from green tree leaves to none at all.
Very few of our trees seem to reach peak color on every branch at the same time. The majority become a mosaic of the original green that seems to resist the inevitable, the ultimate brilliance of autumn color, and the shriveling past-peak remnants bound to fall to the ground within hours.
The tree in the above image was sporting the most vivid reds two days ago. Yesterday, I noticed some of them just kept getting a deeper and deeper red until becoming almost black. Most of those have now fallen to the pavement below. Yet, there is still a limb or two with completely green leaves.
We experienced a couple of heavy rain showers yesterday, which surely contributed to bringing down batches of leaves en masse.
We are socked in with low cloud cover this morning which effectively dulls every view, but despite the few trees that have dropped many leaves in the last 24 hours, it still looks pretty special. I captured a long view yesterday before all the blue sky and sunshine completely disappeared.
The horses are growing their winter coats and the extended warmth and humidity we are experiencing had them sweating. The swing away from that to this morning’s cooler, wetter, and cloudier conditions provide a welcome change.
The season of bare tree branches is nigh.
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Outliving Dad
The reason I easily remember the last time I saw my father alive is that it was my wedding day on September 19, 1981. Forty years ago, October 2nd was a Friday. Just out of college with a degree in education, Cyndie had unexpectedly nabbed a job with the Edina Police Department and I had yet to find employment. That Friday, on our first week home after our honeymoon, she was on a ride-along with a patrol officer.
I was home alone for the first time since we’d been married and the guys at the station found it humorous at first when I needed to contact her in the middle of the shift.
“Is it an emergency?”
“Well, sort of.” I was in a state of shock over having received the news in a phone call from my younger brother. “My dad died.”
Cyndie came home early from that ride-along shift.
Myocardial Infarction. My dad was 62.
On October 2nd, 2021, I am 62, a fact that seems to mean more to my doctor than me when it comes to my ultimate longevity. But I can’t deny a certain level of awareness about reaching this milestone.
I’ve spent the last forty years navigating being married, working a technical career, and raising children without my dad available for advice or guidance. Now I will embark on the rest of my life journey without having had his example of being an old Hays man.
After Cyndie and I returned from honeymooning up in the woods on the North Shore of Lake Superior, with a stop in Hayward for a couple of nights on the way home, we were taking our very first steps navigating life together in an unfamiliar rented duplex on Cedar Avenue near Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis.
A few days into our first week, it occurred to me that I should pay a visit to my parents before my dad took off for his weekend jaunt “to the lake.” The little fishing cottage on the north shore of Lake Mille Lacs was his version of heaven, I think, or simply a place he could go to be away from, well, the rest of what he found depressing at home.
It was Thursday afternoon and Mom said, “You just missed him.” He got a jump ahead of weekend traffic leaving on a Thursday. I would never see my dad again.
The story I was told is that it appeared as if he had pulled the bedcovers back, sat down on the edge of the bed, and fell back, dead.
This was six months after an initial heart attack that he described to me from his hospital bed as being “a pain I would never wish upon my worst enemy.”
That description helped inspire me beyond merely not wanting to be a depressed alcoholic like him, but not wanting to develop that classic beer belly and clog my arteries with an unhealthy diet. My doctor thinks that still might not be enough. He worries about my genes.
Other than having my older brother, Elliott for a sibling reference, I am now in uncharted territory.
I hope you are taking good care of your ticker, E.
Mine is just a little uneasy today over all the remembering. I expect its got plenty of mileage left, though. I work to keep my heart filled with plenty of love, both coming in and going out.
Thanks, Ralph, for everything you have taught me, in life and in your sudden death forty years ago today.
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Relative Something 