Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Another Way
There is about as much information being blasted into the world right now as there are virus germs and sanitizing spray. It’s all a bit mind-boggling, but the crackpot theories are a particularly fascinating dose of lunacy. I suppose all human conditions tend to amplify in times of global crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic sure has taken attention away from the equally global threatening planet-warming that industry and fossil-fuel dependence has hastened.
The Associated Press provides clean reviews of falsehoods around the virus and politics that serve to expose some of the deviously manipulated claims that then get shared and reshared on social media so many times they gain believability points among the less astute.
Even within the credible reports about which surprisingly common underlying health conditions are making the coronavirus more severe, there is such a vast amount of pertinent detail it gets overwhelming. As much as we assume it’s lungs that are taking the primary hit, evidence reveals the heart is being damaged from within.
As often happens, I find myself thinking about things in another way. As we begin to take a more focused look at how the virus can spread by our actions, it reveals how often we’ve already been sharing. Think about how many contacts we have had without getting incredibly ill. All those sporting events we attended, the concerts and plays, lectures, public transportation, shopping carts, and doorknobs grabbed.
The number of germ-phobic people who hyper-sanitized their way through daily activities was minuscule compared to the majority of us who took our chances and tried to remember to occasionally wash our hands after touching anything publicly shared.
It’s a wonder the time between pandemics was as long as it has been throughout history.
Here’s another way to think about this pandemic. Don’t be gullible to every crazy thing you see or hear. Recognize your emotional response and reasonable fears, and then check and contain them. Seek credible sources of factual information over and above the entertaining drama of wild reports and survival-of-self-above-all-others mentalities.
Participate in and demonstrate actions that are part of the solution to this pandemic and not part of the problems. Don’t become a pawn in the panic-buying dysfunctional human response.
Even though we may not be able to know if undiagnosed people around us are shedding the coronavirus, they still all deserve to be loved just as much as we do.
Yes, even if they believe crackpot theories that have no basis in scientific fact.
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Bad Dreams
I reached for something that wasn’t really there and despite the nonchalant attempt at pretending I meant to do that, it was obvious to anyone looking that something awkward was going on. It’s hard to fake being in control when there isn’t control to be had. When the brain snaps to attention and static is the only result, it’s hard not to suspect the worst.
When limbs won’t move and words won’t form, I think something deep within us begins to recognize a dream is underway and nudges consciousness toward the surface.
How can sleep be restful when a spectacular theatrical extravaganza is going on in a mind and driving the heart to pound like a hammer?
How can sanity be maintained when virus-mania is boiling over from every reporting entity at a-mile-a-minute?
Thankfully, I can happily report that there have been no positive COVID-19 test results for anyone at Wintervale up to this point. Of course, take that news with a grain of salt because no one here has been tested, either.
In that same vein, we will not be attending any NBA games, but we had no plan to do so, regardless. I will miss watching the excitement of the men’s NCAA March Madness basketball tournament this year, but I’m happy that sports businesses have joined the growing movement to postpone or cancel events that involve stadiums, or theaters, or classrooms full of people.
There are going to be a lot of folks out of work at the same time that the financial machine is melting down and my feeble mind is at a loss as to how this is all going to play out.
I have a feeling that not being able to watch spectator sports is going to become the least of our worries.
There will be unprecedented opportunities to practice the art of beaming love into the world in proportions greater than any suffering this latest pandemic might dish out.
May we all rise to the occasion.
Oh, and wash your hands out there.
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Morning Surprise
When I pushed my nose up against the glass of the door to the deck in search of the critter that was setting off our motion light on Tuesday night, all I could report seeing was a few surprise snowflakes floating down. It was only a surprise in that I hadn’t noticed any other precipitation starting before that. My impression was that the predicted weather event would start with light rain that might eventually include a mix of snow.
Waking up yesterday morning with a two-and-a-half inch layer of sticky snowflakes coating everything was quite the surprise.
It made for some fabulous morning scenery.
I was darting off on my morning commute to the day-job in the Daylight Saving Time darkness of the early hour, so I didn’t get much chance to ogle the spectacle. By the time I reached the far side of the Twin Cities, there was no evidence anywhere that any new precipitation had even fallen there.
Knowing the snow at home wouldn’t last very long after the sun came up, I sent a message to Cyndie asking her to take pictures.
I’m really glad she did because, by the time I returned home in the afternoon, all the new-fallen snow had disappeared completely. It was if it had never happened.
My, how quickly things can change.
Early on, Cyndie reported the chickens appeared highly miffed over the sudden return of the cold blanket of white covering their stomping grounds. Happily for them, the annoyance was short-lived and they were out on patrol scouring their surroundings in execution of their primary responsibility as insect pest controllers when I got home.
It’s very rewarding to have them get after that task at the very instant bare ground begins to reappear from beneath the winter snowpack. They are champions of natural fly and tick reduction.
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Few Views
Here are some more views captured during our walk last weekend in the bright sunshine while the snow was melting fast and the water was flowing freely…
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Living History
With the onset of this current global COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting financial repercussions underway, it is becoming obvious the incidents and impacts of these days will be noted in historical records for future reference. What is it like to live through national or global newsmaking events as they are happening?
I don’t really know.
And I’ve lived through plenty of them.
Life just seems to go on. People who don’t lose their lives or family members and friends find ways to adjust to temporary impacts on normal routines and employ a wide range of coping mechanisms to get on with doing whatever needs to be done. In the moments, it often doesn’t seem quite so historic on the personal level. It’s the collective impact of large segments of a population and the subsequent mass media accounting of details that tend to provide a bigger significance to things.
Even with that, being alive during historic circumstances never seems to feel as significant in the moment for me as I expect it should.
In my life, the impacts of newsworthy events haven’t been particularly acute. They are often shocking, such as the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster or the terrorist attacks against the United States in September of 2001, but none completely life-altering. Even for Cyndie, who was flying frequently in 2001, the change to her routine was short-lived with respect to the immediate grounding of flights for a time and then only minorly impacted after flights resumed.
I remember the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee by followers of the American Indian Movement and feeling like it was a significant event at the time, but it was really just a story on the news from where I lived.
As the 444 days of the Iran hostage crisis played out between 1979-1981, it felt awful to carry on with my activities as if nothing was amiss, but there really was no noticeable impact on my life beyond seeing a lot of yellow ribbons tied around trees in symbolic support of the hostages.
In 2008, there was what is now referred to as “the Great Recession” which just might end up comparing to the current financial “correction” in the markets. It’s possible we are about to experience the recession of 2020. Maybe it won’t be as “great.” I somehow plodded through the years surrounding the Great Recession with minor suffering. My net worth wasn’t so large that I had all that much value to lose and we were lucky enough to be in a position that our homeownership wasn’t threatened.
Somewhere in my collection of family history, I have the original “Quarantine” sign that was attached to my father’s home when he was [I believe] 12-years-old and contracted polio. That seems like a significant event for my father and his family, yet I don’t recall him ever mentioning it. The amount of subsequent paralysis he experienced from that was virtually imperceptible. Without my mother having mentioned it and giving me the sign the family had saved from his door, I wouldn’t have known.
I don’t really know what it’s like to live through historic events, even though that’s what I’m doing right now.
Maybe it’s simply like living the life that I’m living.
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Ground Moves
The snow melting continued with full momentum yesterday, exposing a lot more ground than the day before. We walked the property to survey the progress up close and witnessed more evidence of how much the ground moves this time of year.
The free-standing angel statue is once again a “lying-prone” angel. Poor thing takes a lot of abuse left on its own to deal with the elements. It’s not really alone in that predicament, though, as the peace pole beside it that is only anchored by an 8-inch stake will also tip over as soon as the frozen dirt around it melts enough to let the slightest breeze put pressure on any side.
Happens every year.
One thing that hasn’t happened until now is the arrival of an aggressive digging gopher within the confines of the labyrinth, but we can now add that to the ongoing saga of nuisances.
There were three or four additional locations of similar soil disruption messing up almost a quarter of the circuitous paths. I’m not looking forward to the struggle to redirect that beast’s attention elsewhere this summer.
When we reached the paddocks, I discovered it is very easy to see the distance two of the posts have been pushed up by the freezing and thawing of the ground. The telltale stain at the base is a clear gauge of how far they have come up in the last few days. There is an additional faded line that is a record of a previous, or possibly the original depth to which the posts were set.
We are just a week into March, so I am readying myself for a few more rounds of freezing and thawing cycles and probably one or a few snow accumulations before this kind of havoc changes to thunderstorms and tornado threats that will be grabbing our attention. It’s always something, you know.
Luckily, between all that calamity we will enjoy some glorious weather, too.
We’ve never been denied interludes of luxuriously blissful weather days, but have you ever noticed how the nice weather never ends up being as earth-shaking and attention-getting as the troublesome days?
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Runoff’s Flowin’
The impact of 50°(F) March temperatures was obvious yesterday and not unexpected. Our drainage swales were flowing with zeal in stark contrast to just 24 hours prior.
Where it doesn’t flow away, it puddles up and can even hide just below a cover of old snow.
I thought stepping in deep snow-cone snow was risky, but it’s nothing compared to plopping a boot into a puddle of melted snow that rises over the top.
Green growth and leaf buds can’t be far behind!
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Retreating Snowpack
Wave goodbye. The snow cover over our fields is fading fast. It is fascinating to watch it slowly progress, day by day as the hours of sunlight grow longer and the temperatures moderate. Winter is loosening its grip on our latitude of the northern hemisphere.
The ground is making its annual reappearance. It is also heaving dramatically where the frost was deep, pushing fence posts and chicken coops to new misalignments. Seriously, the coop has leaned another few inches since I last wrote about it. It’s the new leaning tower of Wintervale.
The trails are rising up in a bizarre center crown where our constant foot traffic packed the path solid all winter and drove the frost deeper than the surrounding earth. I don’t understand the physics of why it pushes up so much in the spring, but I’ve watched it for enough years now that I accept it as a regular routine.
One year it was so pronounced that I worried it would be a challenge to drive the 4-wheeler without bottoming out on the high ground between the wheel ruts. After a few days of thawing, the center of the trail surprisingly flattened out like nothing out of the ordinary had ever occurred. If I hadn’t watched the changes every single day when walking Delilah, I wouldn’t have had a clue about it.
On the subject of walking Delilah, if I hadn’t been so pressured by her to go out at sunset at the expense of finishing the movie I’d started during dinner, I would have missed the brilliance of Venus glowing all by itself in the western sky over the gorgeous orange glow radiating just along the horizon. The glow transitioned impeccably from that deep orange to a faint yellow that became an infinite variety of baby blues to almost black as the sky made its way toward night.
Opposite the bright spec of Venus, the waxing moon was on full brightness in the east, starting to cast tree shadows on the snow before darkness had barely started to establish its dominance.
I owe Delilah a debt of gratitude for allowing me to experience that early evening show as we waved goodbye to the day.
Frankly, the movie I had been watching didn’t hold a candle to the twilight scenes available outside.
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Not Level
This isn’t the first year I’ve had the impression that the chicken coop is leaning away from level, but it’s now become more obvious than I am able to ignore. Every time I walk past it, I fight an urge to walk over and push it back to level, but I’m the one who buried those six posts 3-feet deep each. A little push on the side of the structure won’t do anything to press the far posts back down to where they started.
Part of me wants to think it’s just an optical illusion given the relative reference of the surrounding ground. The view from the other side doesn’t look all that bad.
If I’d bother to walk up to the shop to get the level there would be no questioning it, but the issue is an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” level concern and has yet to warrant the intentional hike in order to verify my instinct. Wouldn’t really make any difference, anyway. There is nothing I would do about it either way.
Actually, I don’t need the level. If you didn’t already spot it, go back and look at that first image. There is an easy reference line –two actually– revealing a straight verticle in the items hanging on the outside wall. Based on those lines being straight up and down, the horizontal boards are definitely not square to that.
The frost heave that occurs in the ground is in charge of the angle of this structure. The legs of the coop were not installed like footings for structures that must meet building codes.
Luckily, our hens don’t seem to give a cluck about it.
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Big Melt
If it was possible to measure, I’d claim yesterday as the day when the balance tipped from winter to spring around here. It certainly appears so in terms of the snowpack. That glacial iceberg that was covering the land has suddenly transformed into a massive snow-cone ice dessert spill.
Look at that texture and try to convince yourself it doesn’t appear as though a shaved ice machine must have overflowed.
Even though there are a lot of places where the ground has become fully exposed, there still remain significant areas in the woods where the depth of snow is almost to my knees. Imagine what it’s like when you step in snow-cone shaved ice that is deeper than the top of your boot.
Yeah, like that.
Out by the road, there was a clear delineation where the edge of winter’s glacier was receding.
Our local forecast is teasing a chance for 60°(F) over the coming weekend. That will be a pleasant “welcome home” for Cyndie, who is currently in Florida with Elysa for a short visit with Fred and Marie. A warm weekend here will be like a cool night down there.
I’m back to entertaining the pooch non-stop from the moment I walk in the door after work until I put her to bed in her crate. She was insufferably persistent in begging for attention last night, only the first day without her mamma around. Lucky for Delilah, that sweet face is pretty irresistible.
She won several full-body massages and multiple exploratory expeditions around the grounds. My writing is slowed significantly when typing with one hand while the other is fending off her insistent snout pleading for interaction.
I’m clinging to the evidence supporting how much emotional benefit there is from having the companionship of a dog.
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