Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Horses Unconcerned
One day after that hilly adventure with Rich on our bikes, I found myself greatly lacking in my usual get-up-and-go. After a forced effort to plant some grass seed, in which we later discovered we didn’t have the seed we thought we had, I came back to the house and conked out on the deck for an impromptu nap. Neither Cyndie nor I ended up completing plans we had discussed at breakfast by the end of the day, but we still chipped away at a few tasks.
I’m particularly pleased we finally cut back the Japanese Silver Grass shoots from last year in all four of the places they are now established around our property. We walk past them every day, and I’ve been looking at that job needing to be done for weeks. That triggered me to cut some grass in those same areas, and while I was there, I decided to haul away one last pile of branches we had skipped the last time we were working on that project. Those are all tasks that provide rewarding visual feedback in our frequent jaunts along our many pathways.
While I was in the woods between the house and the back pasture, I spotted evidence that our trillium is alive and well for another year.
The fawn lilies and bloodroot flowers will soon have some competition.
All that was well and good, but it all got eclipsed by the drama after sunset. Cyndie had taken Asher out for his last walk of the day, and suddenly, I received a phone call from her about a fire at a neighbor’s property. I found her and Asher down by the horses. She was very disturbed by the sight of so much flame, but I immediately recognized the visuals of a controlled burn of their field.
I thought it interesting that the horses didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by the unusual sight.
The neighbors had chosen an evening of absolutely perfect conditions, as we are just now starting to dry out around here, and the undergrowth is still damp, and last night there was no wind. Cyndie decided to spend a little time giving the horses massages, and I stood with Asher and watched the flames in the distance.
At least they won’t need to do any mowing in that field for a while. As I stared at the spectacle, I noticed myself feeling some envy.
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Valuable Miles
Saturday afternoon was darn near perfect for our World Labyrinth Day walk for peace. We had 8 people join us, which isn’t the smallest number of folks we’ve hosted for this annual event. They were all precious individuals, but the one person who was a particularly pleasant surprise was a neighbor we’d never met who dropped in after seeing an invite I posted on the Nextdoor app.
If anybody is wondering, my annual measurement of the trunk of the transplanted maple tree in the center of the labyrinth revealed a 3/16ths of an inch increase in circumference since my initial reading a year ago.
Yesterday, I took the day off from chores and went for a bike ride with Rich Gordon, one of my special friends from the annual bike ride in June. He was kind enough to drive all the way to Beldenville to join me in a loop of country roads over hills and through valleys of the driftless region around our home.
We are always looking for opportunities to season our butts against our bike saddles in preparation for days of long mileage in June on The Tour of Minnesota.
The Rush River valley offers some beautiful scenery after ten miles of farm fields.
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I was pointing out the top of the ridge visible through the trees that will soon be obscured by leaves. Climbing out of that valley was probably the most daunting of the many climbs we pedaled up, as may be discernible in the graphic above showing the elevations we traversed. We weren’t even halfway into the loop, so that effort made the rest of the route seem a little more taxing on our now-tired legs. When we reached the top, we paused for a snack break in the shade and quickly made friends with one of the residents who lived at that address.
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The second biggest climb came when we departed from El Paso. Rich made it look easy.
Compared to the biggest beast of a hill, it was a little bit easier. There was also the psychological boost of knowing we were that much closer to our finish line, and none of the remaining hills would be as long.
I’m encouraged by the fact that I was able to accomplish all the climbing without needing to rely on an assist from the battery I was lugging along in the frame of my Trek Domane e-bike. Having a friend along on the ride was a morale boost that prevented my usual lack of determination to push myself quite as hard.
My body will likely offer up some complaints today in the form of muscle stiffness, but I’ve got plenty of my usual physical activities on tap, tending to things around the ranch to keep me moving.
I’ll probably wait another day or two before my next conditioning ride of any substantial miles. Maybe I’ll opt for a nice flat trail ride to complement yesterday’s hilly terrain.
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Sisyphean Endeavors
Happy World Labyrinth Day! Even though I had mowed the center of the labyrinth pathway with the push mower, a lot of tall grass remained around the rocks where the mower blade couldn’t reach. Ever the perfectionist, I was unable to resist the urge to do a little touch-up with our battery-powered string trimmer. The more I worked, the more I noticed additional areas deserving a trim.
The next thing you know, I had walked back to the shop to get the gas-powered string trimmer in order to trim around both sides of the rock barriers for the entire length of the circuitous path. This is not a zero-time exercise. While I was toiling away on this struggle to get the spinning plastic line into every nook and cranny without constantly breaking off because of impact with rocks, it occurred to me how Sisyphean the activity is.
My life is a Sisyphean effort to control nature’s endless tendencies. The rock always rolls back down whenever it nears the top.
When the sun shines in the spring, every growing thing takes off at breakneck speed toward achieving maximum potential. When I try to control where we want some things to grow or where we don’t want other plants to grow at all, the universe laughs.
It never ceases to amaze me that blades of grass can push up through the asphalt along the edges of our driveway.
The other winless battle I wage is against the flow of water. Try as I might, I cannot convince water to only flow where I want it to go. Water will not flow uphill; that seems easy enough. However, water will gladly choose any alternate route that offers less resistance to a lower elevation at a given moment.
Every spring, I try to shape the ground to guide snowmelt or rain runoff away from the paddock gates. Every spring, that effort ultimately fails.
At least I get to enjoy how things look for the brief day or two after I’ve rolled the symbolic rock most of the way up the hill.
Cyndie has prepared a few treats for refreshments, and I intend to light a small campfire by the labyrinth for our “Walk as One at 1:00” today. Feel free to send your own beams of peace pondering into the universal consciousness wherever you find yourself at 1:00 p.m. in your local time zone. The wave has already started traveling around the globe on this first Saturday in May in the year 2025.
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Between Showers
We received rain in several waves that lived up to the weather forecast for yesterday. Despite the precipitation, we pulled off a few good projects on our to-do list for this week. First off, the horses had a morning appointment with the farrier.
Heather reported a significant amount of growth in hooves since her last visit. The horses were reasonably well-behaved throughout each of their trimmings. Mix was unnecessarily fussy about the confinement we forced on her for all of an hour and a half, but stood well when that was required for Heather to do her thing. The herd returned to calm as soon as halters were removed and gates all reopened. They didn’t waste much time getting back out on the fresh grass.
For my next project, I decided to set up under the hay shed roof to cut some blocks of wood for the shade sail posts going into the ground.
The plan is to screw these blocks onto the 6×6 posts to add a ledge that will resist forces pushing upwards. I decided to get fancy and cut angles in the bottom side of each block so there won’t be a flat surface to push against from below. Since these blocks will overlap on one end all the way around the square, I made one additional cut at a compound angle to mate the slant of the adjacent block.
Go ahead and try to picture that in your head, if you can figure it out. It was all rather experimental for me, having no experience with this level of carpentry. I’m understandably chuffed that I achieved the result I was after and only needed to cut one extra block due to a mistake.
For reasons that escape me, the horses came back to the paddocks and hung around nearby as I worked. You’d think the repeating loud buzzing sound of the saw starting and stopping would drive them off, but it was just the opposite. It made me happy to have them linger in the vicinity while I was in production mode.
When I was finished with that project, I looked at the radar and saw that time was limited until the next batch of rain. I decided to take a crack at mowing the labyrinth between showers.
I made it all the way through the labyrinth and cut a lot of the surrounding area before it started to sprinkle again. It was light enough rain that I was able to keep mowing until I finished everything I wanted cut.
For the first time in several years, we are expecting a dry, sunny day for World Labyrinth Day tomorrow. We are not in the best climate zone to show off our Forest Garden Labyrinth in early May, but we make due. It’s a little like having a flower show without any flowers. That doesn’t mean a person can’t enjoy taking a meandering stroll down the curving path while meditating on global peace, but it would be that much more inspiring to have leaves on the branches and flowers on stems.
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Rough Start
The day dawned full of promise yesterday, and I had a long list of things I wanted to accomplish. The biggest thing I ended up accomplishing was overcoming a series of frustrations in the morning that threatened to derail my whole day. It was one of those times when an attempt to knock off a few easy tasks backfires because one thing after another goes badly until it seems like each failure is feeding off the one before it.
The head of a screw breaking off is annoying but the steel tines of a bedding fork snapping at the handle was uncalled for.
I switched to something with less risk of failure. Beyond shredding the flesh of my forearms on tangles of bramble, the hauling away of the piles of vines we have been extracting the last few weeks was the beginning of a trend of success for me. In addition to the vines, while we were in that mode of hauling, we accomplished a couple more loads of piles of branches that litter our woods.
Eventually, it became time to crank up the riding mower to conquer some of the lawn grass that has been doubling in height by the day lately. We won’t be participating in any no-mow-May campaigns this year. My mowing started in April.
Cyndie thought the mowing tracks in the grass were worth a picture.
I was pleased with my ability to minimize muddy skidding in wet areas on my first time operating the zero-turn in many months.
Today, I hope to tackle the labyrinth with the push mower in preparation for World Labyrinth Day on Saturday. It will depend on the 50% chance of rain being forecast. Timing is everything. If I had mowed too many days before the event, the grass is growing so fast this time of year that it would be longer than we want.
The grass in the pastures is already getting beyond the rate of the horses’ grazing, and they are spending most of their time out there. Granted, I spotted a fair amount of napping going on on the high slope of the hay field, so not all their time out there is being spent gobbling grass blades.
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Different Surprises
My day started with a most rewarding surprise yesterday, compliments of Swings. Cyndie and I have been listening to “The Telepathy Tapes” podcast, which has made me more conscious of all the chatter and earworm songs going on in my mind when I’m with the horses. With Cyndie’s past experience hearing communication from horses telepathically, I’ve long believed it is likely that the animals end up tolerating the constant noise in my head.
Yesterday, I put effort into calming my mind, focusing on telling the horses I love them in my thoughts as I scooped poop among them under the overhang. I wasn’t aware that Swings was paying any attention to me until her face was right on my ear. I assumed she wanted to exchange breaths in their common method of greeting, but before I could act, she surprised me with the most precious, gentle boop on my nose instead.
Cyndie came out of the barn and found me grinning and giddy and asked what was up. Just the power of horses to melt our hearts, that’s all. I got booped on the nose by a horse! How cool is that?
An hour later, I was on my way to the dentist for a cleaning appointment. I expected a quick and harmless session, but instead, I was given the news that I would need a filling. It was my lucky day; they could fit me in right away, so I didn’t need to return another day. Oh, joy.
I left for home with a numb face after a much less welcome surprise of the morning.
After a little rest to allow my nerves to wake up, Cyndie and I took on the work of bringing the landscape pond out of hibernation. Putting a net over the pond to capture fallen leaves has been a great way to make spring clean-up easier.
Then, Cyndie did some vacuuming while I pulled out the dead reeds from last season.
There is still a lot of rock arranging I’d like to do to call this job complete, but we got the pump and filter installed and started the waterfall at a minimum.
We left it at that to go feed the horses, and I did a little mowing with the push mower before dinner.
Work on the shade sail posts has been rescheduled to next Monday, in hopes the ground will be a little drier by then. As far as surprises go, it’ll be a good one if the holes we drill turn out to be dry at the depth we hope to achieve.
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Just Observing
I was watching part of a climate-themed exposé on Public Television last night where two men were having a conversation, obviously in front of cameras, although those were out of sight. There were different cameras aimed at each person’s face, allowing directors to edit it so the view constantly alternated back and forth as they spoke.
Since I was not fully engaged with the topic of their conversation and wasn’t really listening to their words, I found myself thinking about the apparent sincerity of their exchange, while their peripheral vision must have been filled with a camera lens and the person holding it. Reality shows have so normalized scenes of people purportedly behaving normally despite the presence of camera crews that it begins to feel like we should be able to watch everything happening at any time, anywhere in the world.
Saturday evening, I witnessed something in real life that wasn’t recorded. Asher and I were relaxing on the observation knoll at the high spot of our undulating driveway, watching the horses graze near the road in the hay field while the planet rotated our view of the sun ever closer to our horizon. When the unique loud buzz of a couple of dune buggy-styled side-by-sides came racing down the road from the north, it startled the horses. They took off like the race horses they once were. It is a spectacular sight.
Beyond the pure beauty of a thoroughbred sprinting at top speed, there was also the sound of pounding hooves from all four horses.
Yesterday, Asher and I were sitting there again, watching the sky.
It looked like it was the air that was racing this time.
Cyndie was on her way home from the Cities, and called to ask if I had seen the waves of clouds in the sky. She stopped and took pictures, which looked a lot like mine.
I like the fact that we were seeing the same thing and that we both decided to take pictures of our views.
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Annual Occurrences
The smell of blueberry pancakes and delicious breakfast sausage frying on the outdoor grills lingered in my senses all day long yesterday. Under a beautiful blue sky, we mingled with locals, leisurely devouring the sweet maple goodness while enjoying one of the great storytellers I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Tom Sherry owned “Best Built Fence” when we moved here, and he and his wife, Sue, helped us design the layout of our paddocks and pasture fence lines.
Tom is one of those people who radiate the fullness of life with dramatic tales about his many adventures. He will always define, in my mind, our experience of moving to rural Pierce County, and what it is like to live here. I always feel better about being here after spending time with him.
Another annual event kicked off yesterday as our neighbor to the north plowed the field adjacent to our property.
Asher was barking up a storm over the presence of the highly revved big tractor slowly making its way back and forth on the other side of our natural fence of piled tree limbs. I spotted the son following along on an ATV, picking rocks, and saw it as an opportunity.
When Raymond stopped to survey his progress, I hollered to him, and he trudged across the field to appear friendly. I see him as being the opposite of Tom in terms of storytelling. Getting information from Raymond requires a sweet-talking effort, and even then, the responses sound a bit like forced confessions.
He tells me he intends to plant alfalfa in the field this year, but he seemed to feel it was unlikely to happen. I gather it had something to do with how wet the field is. There was no concern about the value of the fieldstone his son had collected. My place was as good as any other to dump the small wagonload he had amassed.
I hope the threat of possible thunderstorms tomorrow doesn’t result in us experiencing one of those downpours that wash his freshly tilled soil over Cyndie’s perennial garden again.
The first forest wildflowers of spring are showing up. The annual blooming of Bloodroot blossoms is always a fun accent to the orchestra of greens emerging after the ground truly thaws.
Just a few hours later, with the sun dropping lower into advancing clouds as the day was coming to an end, the flowers were folding up their glory.
The speed of growing grasses and leaves is picking up, and soon that patch of bloodroot will be a carpet of large leaves dominating the vicinity. Watching it all unfold in a few days’ time is one of the many rewards of walking a dog multiple times daily through our woods. Daily throughout the twelve months of changing seasons is a pretty great perspective to gain about a lot of things.
Nature’s annual occurrences are always fascinating performances to witness in person.
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Spring Grazing
We are trying something different this year. Instead of confining the horses to the paddocks for a few weeks to protect new growth in the fields, we have left the gates open. The horses are getting a natural, gradual adjustment to fresh grass grazing this year instead of the controlled exposure we have done in the past, where we increase their access time in small increments each day.
At this point, it’s hard to see if this might negatively affect our fields in the way literature on the subject warns. I’m happier letting the horses’ digestive systems adjust to the transition from dry hay to green grass without our needing to control it.
I also like that they aren’t suffering the stress of confinement when they want to be out grazing in the fields.
For these thoroughbred mares who have been rescued from some dire situations in their lifetimes, seeing them so completely contented now is deeply rewarding.
Cyndie and I are heading out to a pancake breakfast at a local maple syrup producer this morning to purchase our annual supply of the sweetness. We bring our own wide-mouth Mason jars, and they fill them at a discount. We first learned this practice from the people who designed and installed our fences. They had to stop working on our property one day to go to the limited-run event and offered to bring us back some syrup.
I felt like I was engaged in some illicit activity when I met them at the end of our driveway, and they passed me two large, unlabeled jars filled with what looked like dark moonshine liquor or something, and then drove off. After one taste, we realized this was something that we needed to make a priority every year.
This morning, we are meeting the couple, Tom and Sue, at the pancake breakfast to catch up on each other’s lives and also reminisce about those months when they got to know us as the suburbanites making a leap into their world in rural Pierce County, WI. They taught us a lot at a time when we didn’t have a clue about how much we were about to learn.
It’s going to be sweet, in more ways than one.
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Relative Something 