Labyrinth Water
I only accomplished a short portion of my list of things deserving immediate attention yesterday. First and foremost, I completed the project to install a hose spigot for water to the labyrinth garden. Despite my 3 attempts to achieve a leak-free set of connections at the bottom of the hill, I quit while there remained a slow drip and deemed it good enough for now. Perfection isn’t everything, you know.
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If you look closely, you just might be able to spot the transplanted maple tree by the large rock at the center of the labyrinth. It appears to be holding its own in this first summer out in the open sunlight.
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Attention Now
Like the sleepy let-down after a sugar rush, the day after all the exciting energy of a multitude of birthday salutations can feel particularly empty. There is a bird outside that keeps whistling the classic “call” of wheeeee-ooooo-weeeet, as if it wants some attention. Cyndie and Delilah are down with the horses and I can hear Delilah’s repeated shrill bark that indicates she is tied up away from the center of the action and feels left out.
I didn’t take a single picture of our adventures yesterday, but not because it wasn’t beautiful. I was just going with a relaxed flow of whatever grabbed my attention next, and it never involved the camera. I had hoped to get all the mowing done and maybe fit in an afternoon nap, but that nap showed up much earlier than I would have planned. I let it happen in the morning. Everything after that just moved along slowly.
So, the mowing is only half-done this morning. I need to finish the installation of the water spigot down at the labyrinth. The fences and grounds are in dire need of a trim with the brush cutter. The trails need to be mowed. The compost needs to be turned. Poison ivy needs a second spraying. The sour dock weeds (Rumex crispus) growing in the hay-field need to be pulled. Our hay needs to be cut and bailed.
All tasks that deserve attention now.
Too bad they only happen one at a time. The challenge today is to see how many of those tasks I can move off my list. Full speed ahead!
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The Twentysixth
On this day, many, many years ago, I was born. I wonder if I subconsciously knew what I was getting into at the time. In so many ways, I am still the little boy who was trying to figure out which way to go.
I haven’t ever noticed any maturation of my inner consciousness. In my mind, I have always been the same age, or ageless. I have a recollection of one day realizing that I was able to reach the Dixie Cup dispenser in the kitchen of my childhood, on my own, but that was strictly physical growth. It was a memorable milestone for me.
It meant I could drink milk whenever I wanted, because we also had a milk-can refrigerated cooler/dispenser with a heavy knob lever that pinched a rubber hose to control the flow of milk. Lifting that lever brought very cold milk that flowed so quickly it would create a froth on top.
Eventually I would be holding bowls of cereal under that hose and getting ice-cold milk on my Cocoa Crispies, or Sugar Puffs, or Cap’n Crunch. My sugar habit started way back then, back before the introduction of corn syrup. In the 1970s, things began to change in the food industry and my addiction was off to the races.
I consider myself lucky to have let my sweet tooth run free for so many years and not suffered outrageous weight gain. I have no idea whether it would be accurate to blame my prolonged high-sugar diet for my depression, asthma, arthritis, and belly fat, but more than one source I have read seems to implicate it as a potential cause for those afflictions, and more.
It makes sense to me that we are dealing with something we don’t completely understand, given the relative short span of our entire human history in which we’ve been consuming such dramatic amounts of sugar annually. Sugar was a rare luxury for most of the world until the 1800s when granulated sugar was invented.
I don’t believe our bodies have evolved enough in the last few generations to effectively deal with the onslaught of glucose that is altering the balance of enzymes and minerals which regulate bodily functions and deliver nutrition to our cells.
In many ways we are healthier than ever before, yet at the same time, we may be undermining the best of our health by the over-sweetening of the majority of packaged and prepared meals and snacks which we consume today.
I’m now closer to 60 than I am to 50 years old. This year I am working to undo the years of accumulated sugar consumption in hopes of reversing a trend toward diabetes and possibly clearing up a few other nagging ailments. It’s a little like being born all over again. It’s not the first time I have made a conscious decision to change course and start down a new path toward better health.
As always, I seek optimal health. It’s one of the best birthday gifts that I can give myself. Happy June 26th!
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Full Disclosure
I came home to some good news yesterday, and some bad news. Both involve growing things. The good news is that our berries look to be coming in with gusto this year. The bad news is that the poison ivy I sprayed has come back to life already. Full disclosure on that organic weed killer that I was so excited about: It will take more than one application to kill poison ivy all the way down to the roots.
I haven’t looked closely enough yet to know for sure, but at first glance, it looked to me that at least 80% of what I had first sprayed as my test case has sprouted new leaves from the same stem. I don’t think that’s a big deal. Now that I know, I will be more studious about returning to stifle any new growth with another spraying as soon as it appears.
I have received a fresh batch of concentrated weed killer and will be mixing batches of it for use in my new backpack sprayer to apply on the next warm, sunny day that I am home. This is a fight that the poison ivy will not win.
There are other good things blooming at our place right now. I wish I could offer up the amazing aroma emanating from our Japanese tree lilac for you to enjoy. That tree puts out one heck of a powerful perfume.
There are other bad things happening here, too. That cute little stunted spruce tree in the foreground of that image is a favorite location for several nesting birds. Last night as I was holding the front door open for Cyndie to step in with her arms full, I spotted Delilah up on her hind legs under that short tree.
Our sudden shouting at her to get down did nothing to dissuade her from plucking a poor innocent bird out of its hiding spot. One of my first thoughts was that this was a precursor to the challenges we will face if/when we get around to having chickens.
That dog is just a natural-born predator. It may be overly callous, but since the damage is done, I guess I can look at it as one less bird trying to get our berries before we do.
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Road Shots
I may be home and back to the old grind (have I mentioned that I returned to the old day-job a while back?), but my mind is still lingering on the bike trip. Here are some images from this year’s trip that keep going through my head…
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Four Inches
I expected to see a lot of water in the rain gauge after yesterday morning’s early deluge, but four inches was a surprise. I knew right then that walking the property with Delilah was going to be a messy adventure. After the rain stopped, we received a couple of dramatic gusts of wind that audibly torqued the house and visibly stressed the trees. I prepared myself for the possibility of damage to buildings or trees.
Happily, the wood shed withstood the gusts, due in large part to the added anchors that we installed when Mike Wilkus and I rebuilt it. I do need to get out there and re-stack one row of logs that has fallen over, but that collapsed long before yesterday’s weather.
We found only small debris of branches and leaves on the ground for as far as we ventured. It was just too wet to take the main perimeter trail through the woods, so that remains un-inspected.
The horses seemed entirely nonplussed by the excitement of the downpour and wind by the time we happened upon them. It seems to me they are getting used to the flash-flood situation that happens in their paddock every time we get heavy downpours.
One good thing about the wet ground was that it made it easier to bury the new irrigation line down the back yard hill toward the labyrinth. We opted to go low-tech and just slice a little opening with a shovel and drop the tubing under the sod. If I had tried using the tractor with the ground so saturated, I would have made one heck of a muddy mess in the yard.
It feels a bit odd to be working to get water to the labyrinth at a time when it least needs it, but it will feel great when things eventually dry up and we grow desperate to provide the optimum amount of hydration to all the growing things down there.
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Stuck
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late at night
past the flickering city lights
the warmth of summer at the solstice
mixes gently
with the chill
that settles in the low spots
where crickets keep their beat
a time signature set by heat
or possibly the lack thereof
sleep swoops in slyly
crescent moon
hangs there dryly
where nothing ever happens
life is stuck in possibility
awaiting aimlessly
for the next wave coming
just in case
it eventually does
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What’s Next
With my vacation over, I find myself feeling a mixture of calm and uneasiness. My mind is surprisingly quiet and my body is somewhat tired. I hopped right into the routine of chores yesterday, with a trip to Hudson to pick up supplies and then an afternoon of mowing grass.
I finally received some irrigation tubing I have been waiting for, which will allow me to bury a water line from the house down to the labyrinth garden. Just to keep me from getting too cocky about my plans, almost immediately, I allowed the line to kink while working with it. Curses!
The day of working on the endless number of things that deserve attention —not the least of which is the management of growing things that never pause in their attempts to extend their reach— exhausted both my mind and my body.
It troubled me a bit to be feeling so burdened by the daily chores after having just enjoyed a week-long break. Shouldn’t I feel renewed and energized to get back to the tasks at hand?
Part of it, I think, might be related to my sense of a lack of progress toward launching an actual income-generating business from our horses and the place we have created. I have noticed it causing me to feel my efforts to prepare and manage this place were becoming an exercise in futility.
That may be about to change. When I got home from my trip, I found a copy of Cyndie’s resignation letter from her job as Chief Academic Officer of Anoka-Hennepin public school district on our counter.
Uh oh. No wonder I’m feeling some uneasiness. What will happen next?
Are we going to make that leap of faith?
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Tired Legs
I’m home again. After a week of biking, my legs feel much stronger, yet thoroughly worn out, if such a thing is possible. I was awakened by thunder this morning, at the hour we would have been just waking up to pack our tents for the day, extremely grateful to be in my own bed and under a roof.
For the most part, the weather during our adventure was good for biking and camping. We even enjoyed a few occasions of a tail wind, which always provides a much appreciated ego boost when traveling by pedal power.
My body developed some stiffness from all the exercise, and probably from sleeping on the cold hard ground, but I didn’t develop any specific nagging issues from the prolonged hours of pedaling. That is something that I find particularly rewarding, as it hasn’t been the case every time I have done this trip. Joint pain or muscle strain can really mess with the pleasures of day-long riding.
I think most of my stiffness was a result of just a few games of pickle ball in Albert Lea on our day off from riding. I found that to be enough fun that it was worth the muscle soreness.
Participation this year was split almost half-and-half between returning riders and those who were doing it for the first time. Meeting new people becomes one of the highlights of the week for me, and this gave me plenty of opportunities for that.
I rode to breakfast with a group that included one man whom I felt had been with us before, but when seated in a booth beside him, discovered he was from Kansas City and it was his first year on the Tour of Minnesota.
As always, I was carried along throughout the week by the incredible support and precious energy of friends Gary Larson, Julie Kuberski, Rich Gordon, and Steve Reynolds. I struggled with the challenging limitations of creating blog posts and taking pictures with my phone, and Rich and Julie were kind enough to offer some of their great photos to help me out.
I’m not quite the mobile device guy, and I am extremely happy to be back on the laptop today, writing and editing my words and pictures. Something tells me I may resort to my old ways of writing posts in advance again next year.
Today I have plenty of laundry to do, and if the rain stops and grass dries up, a lot of lawn to mow. Pequenita seems happy to have me home and has stayed close to my every move. Delilah appears to have bonded stronger to Cyndie again, in my absence. The horses show no change at all, though they each gave me some intimate moments of breathing in each other’s scent when I stopped down to say hello.
It’s really good to be back home, tired legs and all.
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Picture Party
The party’s over, let the party begin! We ride home today, saying goodbye to precious friends and new connections. I fell short of my wish to capture all the joys and charms of this ride on my phone for posting here, but luckily, my friends have provided some of their pictures to fill my gaps. Time for a picture party:
A very common sight
Steve making a call
Rich and me trying to warm Laura /photo courtesy Rich Gordon
Steve and I paced together a lot /photo: Rich Gordon
Julie, Steve, and me on the road /photo: Rich Gordon
Doobie visits garage sale /photo: Julie Kuberski
Gary dressed up! /photo: Julie Kuberski
Rhonda testing fit. /photo: Julie Kuberski
