Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Week Before
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‘Twas the weekend before deer hunting opener, and all through our valley
Neighboring hunters were sighting rifles, firing sequences of annoying volleys
With a snap and a caar-ACK!, the serenity kept being interrupted
Our precious peace and quiet, over and over was corrupted
For some reason, this year the gunshots appear to unsettle Asher more than we’ve seen in the past. The horses always get a little jumpy about the discharge of firearms. The annoying repetition of startling rifle reports is a fact of life around here this time of year, but this weekend was particularly bothersome. From the sound of it, the neighbors who hunt must have spent a chunk of money on ammunition this weekend.
I assume the reason the shooting was so noticeable is that they were doing the sight aligning in closer proximity to their residences and not off in the woods in their deer stands. The week before the deer opener is probably more unsettling than the two weeks of the actual hunting season.
We don’t have a heavy influx of gun-toting hunters flooding our area, so the numbers are limited, and the sounds of shots being fired tend to be restricted to the hours around dusk and dawn. Plus, they are only shooting when they see a deer, unlike what we experienced over the weekend.
You’d think all this shooting would chase away the deer to far safer places to hide.
I’m guessing it’s a buck who has been rubbing the bark off the young poplar trees in the north loop field, but I haven’t spotted him yet. In six days, the Wisconsin deer herds will begin having their numbers reduced. I wonder if someone will get him. It’s an annual event that has never been a part of my life. Since living here, it’s become a minor nuisance we observe for two weeks in November just beyond our borders.
The weekend before hunting season serves as a warning to our nerves and a reminder that it’s time to pull out the blaze orange outerwear.
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Cat Rehomed
After just one night of housing the friendly little stray, we found someone who wanted to claim the beautiful orange cat that showed up on our property. Cyndie was asked to help treat an ailing horse of a frequent This Old Horse volunteer and now friend, Michelle, first thing in the morning. In a whim of afterthought, upon completing the horse care, Cyndie brought up the story of this cat that showed up at our place.
When she showed Michelle pictures of the cat climbing on me, the reaction was instant. It looked just like Michelle’s beloved cat, which had died some months ago. She asked if she could come by later that morning to pick it up.
Done.
After checking with neighbors to confirm the cat was not one of theirs, we decided the affectionate feline was a possible victim of being dropped in the country to fend for itself. It was definitely not feral. A sad reality that is visited upon rural property owners with disgraceful regularity.
Asher seems to recognize that the cat has left the premises. He still checks mechanically on the scent around the hay shed, but without the manic fixation of the previous week.
I can’t deny that the purring ginger furball took a little piece of our hearts after just the briefest of encounters.
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Fool’s Errand
Backstory: My initial lesson in how water flows across our land was after the first winter we moved here, in the spring of 2013. It is a powerful thing to witness large amounts of water begin to flow toward the next lowest spot on the way to the nearest river.
When the big melt started that spring, snow had filled the main drainage swale along the southern border of our property. It was impossible to see the water moving beneath the snow cover, but when the flow became too much for the situation, that snow became a dam. The water backed up until it spilled over the bank and flooded our neighbor’s farm field.
It became obvious to me that neglected growth had begun to clog up the western end of the drainage path. That caused the snow to jam against the little trees and thick underbrush until it formed the blockage.
Every year since, I have endeavored to keep our span of the drainage path clear before snow season starts.
Nowadays, most of the flow happens during heavy downbursts of rainstorms, but just in case a big snowfall might still happen, I continue to clear growth from the center of the swale.
Yesterday, I used the string trimmer to carve a path down the middle, instead of the brush cutter pulled by the big diesel tractor. The big tractor flattens much of the tall grass, and then the brush cutter just passes over that without actually mowing it.
Clearing the path right down the center is the fool’s errand, because the flow of water doesn’t care that I want it to stay in the middle and follow the lane I have carved. Runoff carries a lot of organic debris and silt. Anywhere the flow slows, floating material settles out, creating a high spot, so the water then moves around it. Water carves its own path.
So the actual washed-out gully that forms zigs and zags on and off the path I cut. As long as the tall outer sides of the swale are intact, the ultimate purpose is achieved. My choosing to cut the path down the middle is meant to guarantee there will be nothing to collect snow if that situation were to occur again.
Another fool’s errand happens indoors with our dog, Asher. When we picked him up from his foster home, it was obvious he LOVED being on their furniture. We weren’t sure about giving his large 90-pound frame free range on our furniture, but he won us over to a partial degree. Our bed is off limits, and he learned that right away. Cyndie bought covers for the couch and one chair in the living room.
Lately, he’s decided he’d rather choose the tight confines of an uncovered chair.
We can’t resist his sweet little face and don’t really care –his hair is everywhere, regardless– but it is comical that he seems to flow wherever the spirit moves him, regardless of our attempts to guide him.
Seems a little like the water in our drainage swale.
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Cat’s Back
After a day without sightings, the orange cat reappeared last night. In this instance, I was leaning against the hay shed door, waiting for the horses to finish eating their feed. Cyndie and Asher had returned to the house, so I was alone. Just as I took a step toward the barn, I heard a little mew.
My first thought was of the possibility that it was a new kitten because it sounded so small. I turned and stepped toward the spot where there is an obvious divot from critter traffic. Out popped the head of the orange cat.
I’m not certain, but I think it’s a female. She showed every indication of desiring my affection, so I gave her plenty.
After she crawled all over me, I decided to pick her up and walk to the neighbors up the hill and across the road. We arrived to find their orange cat (a little less orange than this one) sitting against their front door. At least I got verification that these are two different cats.
The neighbor’s cat didn’t bother to acknowledge our presence. Since there was no sign of animosity between the two, I set the dark orange stray down in their yard and started walking back to our place, hoping it would stay and the two of them would keep each other company.
I didn’t get very far when it became clear the stray was going to follow me all the way back. I sent Cyndie a photo of the cat on my lap and asked her to bring down a cat carrier. When I went into the barn to retrieve the feed buckets, the cat followed.
It wasn’t clear to me whether she had found Asher’s water dish while I was out with the horses, but when I tried to encourage her to drink, she showed no interest. She also turned up her nose to my offering of a few bites of the horses’ senior feed.
When Cyndie arrived with the carrier and a can of cat food, that cat became laser-focused and climbed right in to eat.
We decided to put her in the shop overnight, since it is heated. I had a tub and some cat litter stashed in there, so we set that up for her. Since Cyndie had posted on the Nextdoor app about this stray, she went back and left a note for one person who indicated interest if nobody else claimed the cat.
It behaved so affectionately with me; it’s a shame that Asher gets so riled up over cats. We’d be more inclined to give it a chance. I feel bad that nobody seems to be looking for her, since she shows every sign of not being a feral stray. We’ve had plenty of those paying visits to us, but their wild behaviors are very different from this little loverball.
I’ll follow up with details of how this plays out after we find an acceptable solution.
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Animal Activity
When out on a walk around the property yesterday, Cyndie came upon a love message from the burrowing gophers that wreak havoc on our turf.
I guess they’re trying to get on my good side. We definitely don’t have any problems with soil aeration. I assume all the mole and gopher activity is an indication that the world below the surface has plenty of living organisms on which they are feeding.
It would follow that the large population of moles, voles, and gophers around here is why we also have so many snakes, owls, hawks, and coyotes, too –the circle of predators and prey.
The horses were quietly chilling in their post-feeding morning lethargy when the backup-warning beep of the forklift vehicle down at the road put them on alert.
Light ran down to the gate of the paddock, which didn’t provide her much of an advantage because the truck was out of sight over the hill. She stood there for a second with her head held high and ears perked, then returned to the higher ground under the overhang.
I don’t know if the horses have come to recognize the pallet of white bags as their sustenance yet, but as soon as the funky vehicle appeared over the rise, they all relaxed their attention and returned to their previous stupor.
Later, when I rolled the trash bin down to the road with Asher just after sunset, I spotted the horses all grazing in the back pasture. Yes, there are horses visible in that photo, hiding in the darkness below that orange glow in the sky.
When Asher and I got to the road, there was a grain trailer parked in the field yonder that I felt might tempt him to leave our property to investigate. As I tried to park the bin precisely, I was also fumbling to get my hand on the controller for his e-collar in case he didn’t obey my command.
I saw the white flash of a cat dart away from the trailer about the same time that Asher did. My commands didn’t stand a chance. He disappeared after it into the tight rows of dried cornstalks before I could find any of the buttons.
Beeper. As if.
Vibration. Whatever.
Shock. Nope.
Is this thing working? I started pushing all the buttons, trying to hit the control to increase the shock’s intensity. The moderate breeze rattled the dried stalks enough that I couldn’t tell if it was wind or Asher, and I couldn’t see any sign of him in there.
Before anything truly problematic occurred, Asher reappeared around the corner at the near end of the cornstalks as if nothing had happened.
I use the controller so rarely that I need to remember to pay better attention to what I am doing, but I also think we should tighten the collar so it won’t be easy for him to ignore the signals at his choosing.
The day provided a powerful feeling that we are but a small fraction of the much larger amount of animal activity going on around us all the time.
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Pizzas Gina
It was with heavy hearts that Cyndie and I recently learned one of our most revered pizza restaurants back in Eden Prairie, Gina Maria’s Pizza, had abruptly gone out of business, closing all four of its locations. It felt like another indicator of our aging was being manifest before our eyes.
“Remember the good old days when we were able to buy pizzas from Gina’s?”
Back when I was working in Plymouth, MN, I would order a half-baked version of our favorites and bring them home whenever it was my turn to cook dinner.
When Cyndie would come home to visit the year she worked in Boston, MA, she would order a pizza while still at the airport and pick it up on the way, carrying a fresh deep dish in the door when she arrived.
Well, to our great relief, news got out that a manager from two of the locations had acquired the recipes with the blessing of the former owners and arranged to reopen the Eden Prairie location under the new name “Pizzas Gina,” which I think is brilliant.
I happened to be in EP yesterday to attend the funeral of the mother of one of my high school classmates, and the church was just down the road from our cherished pizza place. From the parking lot of the church, I ordered a rendition that, back in the day, Cyndie would have been able to speed dial her phone and ask for “the usual.”
With 30 minutes to kill, I took a slow drive to the cul-de-sac location of the house I lived in during my middle school and high school years. I almost remembered the family names for each of the houses along Cedar Ridge Road. It’s been over 45 years since I lived there, but plenty of the same trees I used to mow around were still in the yard of our old house.
Dinner last night was as delicious as ever. Maybe even more so, after a period of thinking we would never be able to taste our old favorite again. We are so grateful that the previous owners supported the new family’s efforts to keep the recipe alive and reopen the restaurant under a slightly different name.
If you ever find yourself in Eden Prairie and are a fan of pizza with an incredibly rich tomato sauce, make a point of ordering from the new Pizzas Gina on Mitchell Road.
As our typical (early) bedtime approached last night, Cyndie’s phone received multiple alerts from an app monitoring the intensity of the aurora in our location, so we took Asher out for a late walk to check it out. At the high point of our driveway, we lay down to ease the strain on our necks while staring at the sky.
We expected to see the radiating colors to the north, but we found that the display was happening straight up over our heads and stretched across the sky from west to east.
Some lingering clouds infringed on our viewing a little bit, yet they also occasionally added some interesting drama to the spectacle. We experienced an impressive combination of reds and greens. The show we enjoyed rivaled some of the nights when we were in Iceland last year.
I also spotted a shooting star/meteor streak, adding to my wonder and awe.
It all seemed a fitting compliment to our special treat of a favorite pizza dinner. Pretty much out of this world!
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Double Napping
Why don’t I have a story to tell today? Maybe it is because I unintentionally succumbed to a nap on two separate occasions yesterday. I guess because I could. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was either walking Asher with Cyndie, cleaning up after and feeding the horses, or chilling on the recliner with deep dives into classic rock performances from the 70s on the you tube.
After watching the theater release of the Bruce Springsteen movie, I’ve been reading a biography on him, and that triggered my search for some of his old performances from before he became larger than life. One feature led to another, and soon I was watching a wide range of artists doing renditions of their hits on obscure TV shows from a time when I was too young to notice.
So, when I wasn’t napping like an old man, I was watching music performances from the soundtrack of my youth. Not much of a story, that.
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Faint Dusting
We have officially received our first snow of the season overnight. With temperatures well below freezing, the flakes were dry enough that there was no threat of the horses getting wet, which is a relief. We hadn’t ended up putting blankets on them.
Cyndie did, however, put blankets on two of the evergreens in the labyrinth.
They are wrapped in burlap to protect them from freezer burn during the winter.
When I saw the wind chill was down in the single digits (F), I pulled out my quilted Carhartt overalls, which are a significant part of what I call my “spacesuit” against the winter conditions. It’s that time of year, I guess. I hardly needed them the last two years. Maybe this year will be different.
We have had an orange cat behaving more boldly about being on our property lately, which is putting Asher in a bit of a tracking frenzy. Two days ago, the cat showed up in our barn while Cyndie was down there to retrieve the feed buckets. Luckily, she had left Asher in the house on this occasion.
The cat kept meowing at Cyndie and approaching her, so she decided to walk toward the closest neighbor’s place to see if the cat would act like that was where it belonged.
Yesterday, the cat showed up again, this time while I was cleaning up manure among the horses, and Asher was watching behind the gates of the overhang.
When I spotted it and hollered to Cyndie in hopes of her confining Asher, the dog saw it, too. Chaos ensued.
Asher squeezed under the fence and raced toward the cat. The horses startled and took off in a sprint, just missing clobbering me. I hollered at the dog, Cyndie hollered, and the cat waited until Asher circled just enough for it to dash off for the nearest tree.
We succeeded in luring Asher away with the help of his e-collar, but the cat remained in that tree for long after.
Cyndie posted a notice on the Nextdoor app in search of a possible owner. She feels the cat was behaving less like an outdoor stray, of which there are many in the area, and more like an indoor cat with a relationship to people. I’m not equally convinced.
There was no sign of it this morning, so maybe Asher’s harsh confrontation was enough encouragement to persuade the cat to seek attention elsewhere. That would be great for my heart. Facing the possibility of getting trampled by the horses was a little more adrenaline than I care for first thing in the morning.
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Fourteenth November
We are in our fourteenth November on these twenty acres and marveling over the thought that we have been tending these fields and forests for that long. Thinking back to when we first arrived, one particular vivid memory stays fresh in my mind. The very first time I ventured off-trail in our woods, I came upon the fresh, blood-red skeleton of an 8-point buck in a circle of hair and paw prints.
We had heard the excited yips of a pack of coyotes during the night a week before that, but didn’t realize how close to our house they were or what the ruckus actually meant. We’ve heard similar howling packs over the years since, sometimes triggered by an emergency vehicle siren, but haven’t come upon any similarly obvious evidence on our land like that carcass.
A stray bone is not uncommon, though.
Cyndie recently trained me in recognizing the invasive garlic mustard plant she has worked for years to disrupt, and we spent some time during an afternoon last week pulling sprouts in the areas off-trail that are less obvious. I found it a little overwhelming because it seems to be everywhere. We did what we could until my ability to cope was exhausted.
I can see why she just makes it a habit to pull whatever catches her eye when on our walks. She stuffs her pockets with plastic shopping bags to always have a way to bag and dispose of what she pulls up, an essential step in eradicating the highly destructive invasive.
There was a tiny oak sprout that caught my attention, barely tall enough to stand above the dead leaf blanket covering the ground in November. The leaves were so perfect. Apparently, too young to keep up with all the bigger trees that have the fall routine figured out.
It looks like today’s precipitation is sliding to our south, which is both good and bad. It’s nice that the horses will get a break from needing to deal with wetness in these cold temperatures. Their natural winter coats are coming in nicely, but their shaggy look quickly flattens out in the rain or wet snow.
The bad part of missing out on some rain or snow is that Paddock Lake is dry and will make for lousy skating this year. The residual growth was almost fluorescent green in the low spots.
My footprint was a result of retrieving the horses’ Jolly Ball that had rolled into the middle of the muddy remains of the “lake.” It’s always interesting to find the ball has been relocated from the spots where I place it, handle up, in hopes of enticing them to play.
We rarely have the privilege of catching them in the act. Occasionally, the ball disappears from the paddock. When it happened one time when the hay field grass was tall, we didn’t find it until the hay mower had sliced into it.
Fourteen Novembers of wonder and joy.
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Making Preparations
Our health insurance provider has notified us that they will no longer offer coverage in our location in 2026. Each time I have spoken with a new provider about their plans, they have mentioned being flooded with calls from people in our county in the same situation as us.
I found a plan that appeared to fit with my needs, but it didn’t show my primary care clinic in its list of providers. Several calls led me to the option of using my regular doctor and having my clinic send the bill to the company whose plan I intend to select. All parties appeared to be in agreement.
When I tried enrolling online at Medicare dot gov, I got stuck because it didn’t have my doctor in the list of choices. When I tried enrolling at the site of the company I had chosen, it tried to direct me back to the Medicare enrollment site. I called them and explained my predicament. Their solution was to snail mail me the application to fill out and return.
It’s a good thing I’m not shopping for major coverage. All I’m looking for is the basic annual preventative checkups. I can’t imagine how crazy it must be to find complex coverage.
With phone calls done and paperwork in the mail (supposedly), I headed outside to get a little exercise with Asher. Next thing you know, I’m busy raking leaves off the front yard.
The wind was blowing in my favor; otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered. Most of the trees, other than the oaks, have dropped the majority of their leaves. Just maybe that’s the last of the lawn raking for the season.
At this point, the next thing to do would be to locate where I stashed all the snow shovels from last year. You never know, maybe it will snow this winter. I like making preparations. It’s a little like preventive medicine. Or insurance, even, only with much easier enrollment.
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Relative Something 