Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
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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Next Project
It’s going to be another solo weekend for me as Cyndie will be at her mom’s house in Edina and that will give me a chance to make all sorts of racket with my newest wood splitting tool. It is one I ordered online last winter and had to wait to receive it until long after I had any interest in wrestling with it in the heat of summer.
I tested it on a few logs last April and quickly learned the metal-on-metal banging demands serious hearing protection. The gist of the mechanism is basically the same as my old splitter except it doesn’t glide on a stationary post, so it’s completely mobile!
It’s got two handgrips and I can take it to wherever the cut logs are piled to split them right there.
It just so happens we have several such piles after last weekend. When I cut up the trunk laying in the paddock, we also took care of a tree that was laying across one of our trails, one that was leaning against others in the woods between the house and chicken coop, and an old dead tree in the middle of the woods where I had just cleared a new trail.
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I will bundle those little logs with the chain shown in the image above –which is supposed to hold everything in place while splitting– and chop away with reckless abandon.
Then I’ll have piles of split firewood to collect with the famous ATV trailer that Cyndie bought as a replacement for the one she sold in her big barn sale, thinking we no longer needed it.
I’ll also have an upper body workout taken care of without needing to go to a gym. It’ll be a project with multiple benefits.
We’ll see if reality is able to live up to my ambitious visions.
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Colors Intensifying
It’s already as dark as can be in the morning when I depart for my commute to the Cities and almost as dark before dinner’s barely finished so the swing of seasons is unmistakable. What I miss while I am at the day-job is the rapidly intensifying colors unfolding in a select few of our trees around Wintervale.
Luckily, Cyndie is home to capture the spectacle for me.
Soak it up with me…
Is that fun or what?!
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Well Kept
Keeping most things neat and tidy is one area where I am happy that Cyndie and I tend to agree. Overall, we strive to avoid allowing items to pile up around the property unnecessarily. If something can fit in the shop-garage, barn, or hay shed, it should get put away regularly. Brush piles should not exist indefinitely. That’s why we have a chipper!
Now if we would just get around to using it one of these days.
It’s interesting that we both independently agreed about allowing the knocked-over tree to remain in the paddock for a while after it fell. Likewise, that we each came to the same conclusion when it came time to remove it.
The old scratching post is now just a pile of cut-but-unsplit firewood.
While I was making the afternoon pass through the paddocks to scoop poop after serving up the horses’ feed pans yesterday, I felt a sense of satisfaction for the pristine confines we provide them. Cyndie and I are in firm agreement about regularly cleaning up manure from within the paddock fences.
We leave it where it lands out in the fields, but under the barn overhang and throughout the rest of the paddocks, we pick it up daily. It’s a way to reduce the throngs of flies that manure attracts but it also offers a level of respect to the horses that they get to live in a cleaner environment.
It makes the space more inviting for us to spend time communing with the herd there.
You know the old saying… cleanliness is totally loveliness!
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Looked Up
I looked up and this is what I saw:
It was one of those days when the sky doesn’t look cloudy, it just looks white.
That is all today. This writer is plumb writered out. Enjoy the variety of leaves.
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Sunrise Serenity
It was about as peaceful as our place can be this morning as Delilah and I made the rounds. The serenity was only interrupted once when Delilah felt the need to respond to the distant barks from a dog far across the valley. The only other sounds humming along were the cooing of the barn pigeons and the munching of four horses happily chomping their feed.
Our labyrinth is glowing with the fall colors in the trees that surround it on three sides.
We are looking forward to a run of several warm and sunny fall days ahead.
I intend to soak up as much serenity as I am able. [big sigh]
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Relative Something 