Posts Tagged ‘patience’
No Hurry
The luxury I enjoy to come and go as I please is not lost on me. In the absence of a time constraint on my drive to the lake, I was saved from any stress when I caught up to a long train of vehicles following a giant farm tractor at around 38 mph.
A younger me would have grown increasingly frustrated that the tractor was traveling for so many miles on this road without bothering to pull over and let some of the backed-up traffic pass. Yesterday, I didn’t let it bother me. I had packed snacks and had them well within reach since I was traveling at lunchtime.
The slower speed gave me a good opportunity to munch while driving and listening to a random shuffle of my music library.
The large pickup truck that raced to pass many vehicles in the train caused me no concern, unlike the driver of the car ahead of me who sped up in an attempt to block the truck from getting back in our lane ahead of him or her. It is really pleasant to not need to be in a hurry and to not care about other people causing delays.
Upon arrival at Wildwood, I found Cyndie on the deck doing some painting in the sunshine.
We were alone for a night but expecting to see Elysa and Ande later this afternoon to add a little family energy to the weekend. It’s quite a contrast from the vibe of 13 rowdy guys here a week ago.
One common feature is the multiple channels of Olympic competition available for viewing. There’s less swimming and more track and field but the same energy of medal-seeking international athletes pushing for their best and chasing record times/scores.
No hurry, but I’m chomping at the bit to watch the Men’s gold medal Football match between France and Spain.
Allez, allez!
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What Responsibility?
Sometimes I question what my responsibility is to direct Asher’s activity on walks. I understand there are times when training a dog to heel –as in, to walk obediently by my side– I would completely be directing his behavior. That is not what is happening when I take him out to burn off some of his energy on a walk around our property.
These are times when I am granting him the freedom to be on a sniff-fari and to explore to his heart’s content within the confines of our property borders. Here are a few things that happen when allowing him to determine our agenda:
- Asher picks up a fresh scent on the trail and immediately decides he must follow it at the highest speed he can muster, regardless of whether it exceeds my top speed or not.
- Asher freezes and stares to find a squirrel that may be prancing around, oblivious to his presence. Then he dashes off after it, again, at the highest speed he can muster.
- Asher smells the hint of a rodent’s presence and turns into a crazily obsessed predator that must destroy the log or brush pile to get after the prey with the passion of a stray dog that might not find another meal for days or weeks if he fails.
More than once I have stood by and watched as mice bail out in an emergency evacuation as Asher attacks the far side of their quarters. It has yet to quell his impassioned battle against the wooden fortresses. One was an 18-inch log with a diameter of about 12 inches with mouse-sized holes in each end. He chewed on both ends of that log until his saliva was starting to soften the hardwood but he never came close to making any functional progress toward reaching a reward that might still be stuck inside.
Is it my responsibility to interrupt his useless battles? Am I being negligent in allowing him to obsess to such an intense degree? From my perspective, he’s getting time to chew, which he LOVES to do and which we encourage in the house with an endless array of chew toys. He’s getting his mind occupied and exercised as he tries to figure out what angle to bite from since the previous attempt didn’t work. If I wasn’t allowing him the opportunity, he would be in the house whining for something to do, so I figured I might as well let him have at it.
It gives me a chance to practice being patient while standing in the fresh air of the great outdoors, forest bathing, and listening to bird calls in the wind.
Yesterday, Asher went to work, not on a log, but on an entire downed tree trunk.
The snow below was all white when we showed up. The wood dust and shrapnel are what Asher has clawed, bitten, and spit out in his lust to reach some reward his nose seemed to promise.
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I felt a little guilty at times during the 30 minutes he toiled away since he was working so fervently at a lost cause. Although, it’s kind of cute to watch his belief in himself as he thrashes against this ancient tree-trunk beast as if he actually stood a chance.
Honestly, whether or not it should be my responsibility to talk him out of these epic potential conquests of mouse houses, I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt because attempting to tear him away always creates a battle of wills that I’m barely capable of winning.
Maybe, just maybe, I’d be more responsible being a cat guy.
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Developing Patience
If you aren’t sure you have as much patience as you should for dealing with life’s challenges, get a “teen” puppy that needs to be trained. You will be able to practice over and over on developing your ability to be patient.
Asher had a grooming appointment yesterday and the report from the groomer was that he was so dirty she needed to wash him a second time. He’s like a whole new dog. Except for the lack of training. That’s at about the same level.
Although, on the bright side, he is showing signs of being relatively quick to grasp what we want from him. Progress on the “Stay!” command continues to impress us. I don’t expect we will make impressive headway on more than one thing at a time so convincing him that our bed is off-limits will have to wait. He really likes to jump up on our bed.
Even though he could easily defeat our temporarily leaned gates to keep him out of the kitchen or our bedroom, he is respecting them and will eventually lay beside them and wait. I guess he is showing us he’s got some respectable patience of his own.
We did battle against some insanely intense vines that were choking out every helpless tree they could reach.
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The tree above was trying to grow despite the constriction of the vine. I don’t know what kind of vine this is but it is different than the common grape vines around here that sprout little shoots to wrap around branches. This vine just grows around and around so efficiently that it is the wrap that holds tight to branches. In springtime, it is much easier to spot these vines before leaves pop out everywhere to conceal what is really going on.
I need to work on my patience for rooting out the infestations of these insidious vines even though it seems like a losing battle.
I wonder if Asher could be trained to sniff them out. I’ve seen evidence he is more than capable of digging ’em up if we can just locate the main roots.
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Within Weeks
Indications hint at our fiber broadband connection coming within 4-6 weeks. We’ve been waiting for about a year since our rural Pierce Pepin electric cooperative announced the launch of a new subsidiary, Swiftcurrent Connect, to provide high-speed internet service to members.
Tuesday evening I received an email announcing it was time to sign up for the connection to our house. I logged in and signed up immediately. Just 12 hours later, Cyndie reported seeing a utility truck on our road.
They were hanging fiber optic cable on our electric poles. By the end of the day, I noticed a drop from the pole on the other side of our driveway, coiled up and ready for connection to a line to be buried alongside our electric supply up to the house.
I don’t mean to be greedy, but I’m really hoping we don’t have to wait the full number of weeks for that line to the house to be installed. Maybe the fact that the cable showed up on our electric pole about the same time they contacted me for sign-up is a good sign of their efficiency.
Either way, our wanting something like this for the ten years we’ve been here makes waiting a few more weeks seem like something we should be able to handle. Soon, we will be able to discontinue delivery of Blu-ray discs from Netflix through U.S. snail mail for our movie entertainment desires.
I look forward to being able to update software without fretting over consuming the majority of our allotted monthly data. We have been living under the arbitrary limitations of GB of data per dollar I was willing to pay. Our service provider gladly offered to sell us more full-speed data whenever we used up our initial 15 GB in a month but it was at what I felt was an excessive price.
Feels a little like we are catching up with the current century. Or, it will in a few weeks or so.
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Tested Patience
If you were engrossed in a book that was an ultimate “page-turner” of a story, you might stay up a little too late reading extra chapters. A good story captures the imagination and gets in our heads. The characters hang around our thoughts all day. The fictional world merges with everything else going on in our minds.
At least the stories that are compressed into two-and-a-half-hour movies compact all the mix-up of brain interaction into one brief distraction. Somewhere between the movie and a good book lies series dramas with roughly 8 to 12 episodes per season. When well crafted, these become powerful forces for binge-watching.
Beware of what you are subjecting yourself to when you choose to check out the first episode of season 1. The best of these series build up amazing energy toward the cliff-hanging end of each individual episode such that the urge to watch the next installment is overwhelming.
It becomes a real test of patience. Do you sacrifice another hour of other things that should be getting attention to satisfy that longing to find out what happens next? You would be forced to if it was only broadcast over the airwaves one day per week. That’s not how it works anymore.
We have the entire season of episodes readily available to stream online, one after the other, or a boxed set of all the seasons can be purchased on DVDs if you are still into 2018 technology.
That’s what we ended up doing when we found ourselves addicted to “Longmire.” We streamed the first few episodes when we were up at the lake. We wanted to continue when we returned home but we don’t have enough bandwidth to stream video so we rented DVDs through the mail.
At the completion of the first season, there was a wait to get season 2 so we solved that by purchasing all six seasons to be delivered the next day.
Take that, patience.
Now we’ve stumbled upon the British crime drama, “Broadchurch” from 2013-2017. Saw the first episodes up at the lake. (When will I learn.) When the story ruthlessly tugged at both Cyndie and me on our first day back home, we found the DVDs could be rented from our online account. The thing was, though, we already had two other movies in the queue that were already being (slowly) mailed to us.
We would have to wait. That takes patience.
Checking our bandwidth usage, it looked like we could commit to streaming one episode to tide us over. Oh, but that cliff-hanger. You can’t just stream one.
Last night I ended up deleting the two discs from our queue that would have completed the season because the urge to binge was stronger than the will power to be patient.
It appears we might have our speed throttled by our ISP before the month ends on our account in 16 days.
At least there is good news for us and our powerlessness over directors who create addictive episodic series. Our electricity coop is currently in the process of installing fiber-optic high-speed connectivity along our rural roads.
Waiting for them to get service to our house has been testing our patience since last September.
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Spontaneous Transplantation
Last night presented one of those moments that would unfold without us having a clue where it would ultimately lead. Thankfully, due to Cyndie’s willingness to run with it, we took a step that was long overdue.
She transplanted some volunteer sprouts of oak and maple trees.
It started with her walking the dog and me doing some work in the shop. I had the door open and some music playing. Suddenly, Delilah popped in to say hello. Cyndie paused to trim some growth around the vicinity.
While pulling weeds, she discovered the saturated ground made it easy to pull out the new tree sprouts.
We’ve been talking about transplanting trees for weeks, but never really formulated a plan on where they would go when we finally take action. Since she now had a stack of multiple beauties fresh out of the ground, it presented an urgency to decide on a new location for them.
I honestly have no idea why I didn’t come up with this before, but it hit me in an instant that planting them just outside the paddock fence would someday offer a natural shade for the horses inside the fence.
So, that’s what Cyndie did.
It will require some care to give these babies a fair chance at survival, but given the vast number of new sprouts showing up every spring, we will always have plenty of opportunities to try again, in case of any failures.
This is another thing that I would love to have done years ago, to have already taken advantage of that time for growth. The shade I’m looking forward to could be a decade away, to get the trees tall enough and filled out enough to cast a useful shadow.
It’s like our story about growing our own asparagus. People told us that it takes at least three years after planting to start harvesting stalks. For some silly reason, that information repeatedly caused us to not take action. Inexplicably, our response to something that required waiting a significant amount of time for results was to do nothing. Over and over again.
After three years, I mentioned that if we had just planted some when we first talked about the possibility, we could be harvesting already.
Then Cyndie came across the brilliant idea of not planting from seed, but buying a 2-year-old plant and burying it in the ground.
We are learning to get out of our own way.
In this regard, the spontaneity becomes our secret weapon. We will always get more progress if we just do it, and not wait for the “perfect” plan. We need to not worry so much about the possibility of failure.
My old mode of thinking involved not wanting to work hard on planting trees if they are just going to die, but I’m getting over that now. Maybe the four tries to succeed in the center of our labyrinth have softened my resistance.
We transplanted this group yesterday without any planning or preparation.
I have no idea what the result will be, but at least we have taken the required first step, thanks to Cyndie’s adventurous spontaneous effort.
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Snow Going
We dodged a spring snow storm overnight. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Obviously, we didn’t do any dodging. We stayed right where we are and didn’t flinch, while the white stuff slid past a little bit to the south of our region. Too bad for those folks.
I guess we all get a turn at weather adventure.
This leaves us with the adventures of watching snow melt. I am fascinated by the way anything of color absorbs the solar energy and melts a perfect pattern into the otherwise reflective snow.
Meanwhile, that reflective snow mass is radiating an amazing chill that offsets some of the best efforts of warm air to tip the balance. Taking a walk across the crusty surface in our open fields feels like a trip down the frozen foods aisle in the grocery store. The sun is shining warmth, but, brrrr, there’s a cold draft wafting up from everywhere!
We can now see where my winter plowing has torn great gouges of turf from the edges of the driveway and sprayed rocks in a wide array across the grass. New cracks in the old asphalt of our neglected driveway look another significant degree decayed.
I’m amazed anything survives unscathed. The concrete apron in front of the house garage looks to have moved its slope another degree in the wrong direction, inviting the snowmelt and rain runoff to drain toward the foundation instead of away.
And in terms of heaving earth, the waterer for the horses in the paddock has shifted dramatically off-kilter so that one side overflows and the high side holds inches less water.
Where is all the hope and renewal of spring?
It’s waiting. Biding its time beneath the surface. We must be patient. It will come.
The trillium we have transplanted will bloom again. Volunteer maple trees will sprout in mind-boggling numbers everywhere we turn.
The snow is going.
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A Chance
Have you noticed the lone lopsided tree left standing to the right of the ones we took down over the weekend? A number of people have suggested it would make sense to cut that one down, too.
There are plenty of reasons it would be a logical choice, but who am I to let logic get in the way of my emotions?
One key reason I am letting it stand is that it isn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. It has carved out its meager existence and endured despite the shadow of the larger tree. Now that it is no longer crowded out, I’d like to see how it will respond.
I want to give it a chance to take advantage of the unobstructed afternoon sunlight and the uncontested space to spread out in every direction. It is very birch-like, but I haven’t specifically identified it. Black birch, maybe.
What does it cost me to wait a year or two to find out if it shows signs of renewed vigor? Just some ongoing questioning of my decision-making process, but that’s something I can tolerate.
Cyndie and I were surveying the space left after the trees were removed and discussed whether it would make sense to transfer some of the multitudes of volunteer maple seedlings that sprout all around our place each spring.
It’s an odd little corner of our property. The primary drainage ditch that nicely defines the southern border for most of the span of our open fields takes a little turn inward and orphans a fair-sized triangle of grass up to the road. The neighbor to the south is more than happy to tend to it, and he cuts that grass when cutting his adjacent strip along a cornfield there.
Honestly, I have reasons to believe he would consider it madness to plant new trees in that spot. He once offered to come cut down trees behind our house to create a larger space of lawn for us. Our opinions of what is more valuable are in stark contrast.
If we plant new trees, we will start by placing them along, or close to, the drainage ditch. I’m happy to work slowly and give him time to adjust to our changes.
The chickens show no sign of needing time to adjust. They showed up instantly when we drove to one of our trails to distribute a load of wood chips. I think they wanted to help spread them around.
In reality, what they were really doing was, scratching away the chips to get down to the dirt below, which was comical. They could do that anywhere. In fact, it would be easier to do it where we hadn’t just laid down a new cover of wood chips. Instead, they looked as though the new chips were a real bonus.
I’ll give them the benefit of doubt. Maybe there were bugs in the chips that dropped to the dirt below as soon as the chips got tossed on the trail.
There is a chance there is a logical method to their madness.
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Shaping Up
It has snowed and then melted again, so the ground here is well saturated, but not frozen. It was time to tend to the raised circle in the paddock before the earth becomes hard as rock. It’s been a year since I last shaped it and the definition was fading to the point it wasn’t really performing as a raised perch above the wet.
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Try as I might, I am not able to pack it firm enough to support the weight of the horses, but if I keep reshaping the circle as they stomp around on it, eventually it will become what I envision. It worked in another spot that we created when the excavator was here digging out our drainage swale.
That flat mound is visible in the corner of fence in the picture above on the left. Since it was made from slabs of turf scraped from the swale, there was a lot of grass in it that seems to have added a lot of stability. The circle I am creating in the middle has a lot of layers of hay which the horses’ hooves punch through with ease. It becomes a pock-marked uneven surface.
On the plus side, residue from the hay includes plenty of grass seed that wants to grow and will help firm up the surface over time. If I keep tending to it, I’ll get what I’m after. In the end, it’ll seem like it’s always been that way.
Good thing I’m a patient person.
Dezirea supervised my progress while Legacy grazed from the slow-feeder behind her. I get the feeling the horses recognize what I’m trying to create, and they approve.
When I came out from taking a lunch break halfway through the project, I found Cayenne standing beside the circle on the ground I had just raked flat.
It was as if she wanted to be close to what I was doing, but didn’t want to mess it up by stomping on it too soon. I appreciated her discretion, but in no time, the results of my reshaping will be hard to perceive amid the multitude of hoof prints.
Watching the horses all day long, you get the impression that they don’t really move very much. They don’t appear to cover much ground in a day. However, if you survey the ground over time, it becomes evident that there isn’t a spot where they haven’t been at one time or another.
In the long run, they are definitely shaping the ground of their confines.
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Trying Again
Despite a strong inclination I have had to just shut up about the tree transplanting —at least until we finally meet with success in this one particular spot— I can’t stop myself from reporting the story. We have waited for most of the summer to pull out the previous dead tree from the center of the labyrinth, even though it was long ago obvious it hadn’t survived.
There was no hurry, because our plan for the next attempt was to wait until the trees drop their leaves before trying again.
The trees have dropped their leaves.
Earlier in the summer, when we knew we would need to try again, I searched through the saplings beneath the magnificent maple tree that has been my inspiration all along. I like envisioning what one of the offspring of that beauty will look like in the middle of the labyrinth garden when it reaches the same maturity of years.
I selected and marked a tree that I liked. Then we waited.
Yesterday was the day we picked to execute our fourth try at transplanting one of our maple trees to the center of the labyrinth. Cyndie dug out the hole in preparation and when I got home from work, we set about the challenging task of extricating our selection from the spot where it originated.
It didn’t want to come out easily.
With daylight fading, we finally wrested our new hope from the earth’s grasp. Using a wheelbarrow, we transported the tree to the labyrinth and slid it into the hole.
With all the tender loving care we could muster, we prepared the new home for this tree. Now we wait. Nature needs to do the rest.
And if it doesn’t take, I’m just going to keep trying, all the while debating whether I will do so covertly, or choose to continue chronicling the possible repetition of failures.
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Relative Something 