Posts Tagged ‘reminiscing’
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.
.
.
Trip Back
Not only did I make the trip back home from the lake yesterday, but I selected a route that was a trip back in time for me. I received a message that my boots were ready to be picked up at the repair shop in Stillwater, so instead of driving straight home, I cut over through Osceola to cross into Minnesota on my way home. It cost me $30 to get the flaps resewn on my boots. I’m satisfied with that outcome.
Before leaving the lake place, I checked a map to refresh my memory of the route we used to take over and over for years from the time the kids were born. We picked an alternative set of rural roads to avoid heavy traffic on the 3-plus hour drive from our Eden Prairie home to Hayward. It provided a good variety of potential places to stop when someone needed to use a bathroom or have a distraction in the form of a treat. We ended up locating a variety of off-the-beaten-path restaurants that became lifesavers when anyone became too “hangry” for the rest of us to tolerate.
When I passed the turn that would have taken me directly home, the road before me became like a weird dream of scenery I vaguely recognized mixed with things I’m certain I’d never seen before. A lot has changed in the fifteen or more years since I last drove that way to and from the lake place. There were no roundabout interchanges on that route when we used to travel in that direction.
As I approached the first of several key turns of the old routine, I sensed it, but the crossroad was labeled as a more significant state highway than I felt was right. I opted not to turn, and as I rolled straight through, I glanced to the left and recognized it immediately. That was what we called the “roller coaster road.” There were a couple of steep rises in a row that provided a second of that zero-gravity feeling if I hit them with just the right speed, which I almost always did.
I made a quick U-turn and went back to follow that road, regardless of what it was now called. Soon, I was passing familiar old farmhouses and Trollhaugen ski hills, “Ward’s Bar,” and the torn-down place that was named “Best Place by a Dam Site” that was beside a dam. I had a flashback to chanting “We’re nowhere, we’re nowhere” with the kids when we were in the middle of the bridge between Minnesota and Wisconsin. There was the gas station where we would pause for fuel and some candy bars. Julian and I recently remembered we would get a “Whachamacallit” bar. The Dairy Queen was still at the end of the bridge in Osceola.
There were many trips on the rural roads along the St. Croix River when Cyndie and I imagined what it would be like to live in a place like that compared to our tiny corner lot in the suburbs. We had no idea at the time how great a place we would eventually find.
The horses were successfully trimmed by the farrier while I was away. They are all looking their muddiest best. Where they once were making horse-angels in the foot of snow, it is now just a sloppy meltwater mess of muck that they are rolling around in.
I brought Cyndie a pizza from Coop’s in Hayward that we had for dinner. I had a great time away, but it is really precious to be home. I intentionally planned it so I will have a full day with Cyndie before she heads to Florida tomorrow for a week, just when our temps are about to climb to almost 70F. Our kids will be joining her for a visit to their grandmother’s winter getaway.
Here’s hoping they get plenty of sun and a complete lack of alligators.
.
.
Almost Healthy
The splitting headache is no longer splitting, and her vital signs have returned to normal. Cyndie seems back to reasonably functional. She helped with horse chores and has taken Asher for a couple of walks in addition to a trip to the Post Office as Santa’s little helper. Goodies are in the mail, and the neighbors will find a bag of holiday cheer has been dropped at their doors.
At this stage of holiday preparations, it’s hard to tell that Cyndie was off her game at all.
In support of all her Elf-ish energy, I have been mining the far reaches of our Apple Music offerings to find appropriate holiday sounds. The first few notes of an Andy Williams Christmas album instantly transported me to a big old farmhouse on the border of Edina and Eden Prairie, MN, and the 5-year-old me arose from within my depths with visions of leaded tinsel being draped across branches from outstretched arms of a person standing on a folding ladder above me.
The result of that surge of nostalgia left me feeling lonesome for the clamor and banter of my siblings buzzing around me.
The branches of that family tree have sixty years of growth that have spread us out beyond the conveniences of frequent contact.
That 5-year-old me would only have his father around for 17 more years. I will always remember the time he almost convinced me that he had heard something on the roof in the minutes just before I showed my face one Christmas morning. I was old enough to know better, but I’d never experienced my dad putting on such a believable act before and was gobsmacked by it.
I like to think he was rewarded by the innocent astonishment that must have shown on my face.
Much less astonishment came over me when I stumbled upon news of a school shooting recently in Wisconsin. That innocence is long gone.
Looking at our trees, I was grateful they don’t need to know such things happen. Same with the horses. Then, I realized how attuned trees and horses are to the universe, which means they probably sense each and every atrocity through the connectedness of all things.
They keep calm and carry on their existence, and so should we. I’ll pretend we are almost healthy.
And now I miss the innocence of my 5-year-old self more than ever.
.
.
Old Images
I was exploring old images and came upon these shots from 2013, our first spring on this property. We were in the process of installing new fencing to create the paddocks outside the barn and trying to build the hay shed.
That spring was so wet the main post holes that had been dug for the hay shed sat filled with water week after week. I remember thinking the pole shed might never happen.
It pains my brain to think about all that I DIDN’T know back then. Somehow we forged ahead to eventually get where we are today. It involved a lot of making things up as we went along. Looking back on it, I’m happy now for all the wild ideas we entertained back then.
Makes me wonder about what things I might not know today that in ten years could become our everyday.
Probably hovercrafts.
At the same time, it always feels presumptuous to assume I’ll be here in ten years.
.
.
Thrown Back
The other day I was hunting for the U of MN site that offered access to a library of historic aerial images and found several different views of the farm my grandfather bought back in the early 1950s. (https://apps.lib.umn.edu/mhapo/) That property was called “Intervale Ranch” and the name became the inspiration for our choosing “Wintervale” for the land where Cyndie and I now live.
My family was living there when I was born in 1959. The farming was mostly done by then and the barns and nearby surroundings became a large playground for my siblings and me.
Looking at the various images I found of that land has thrown me back into years I recall fondly. The weather I experienced for the first ten years of my life seemed like a reliable and relatively consistent pattern of seasonal transitions. For all I knew, that’s the way it had always been and would always be.
Hah! Ten years out of the incomprehensible span of time from the forming of planets to the human-influenced environment of Earth we are experiencing today. I expect the naiveté of youth is why that time of my life seems so envious now.
In the most recent ten years we have experienced increasing instances of rainfall during winter months (instead of snow) to the extent it is no longer a bizarre occasion.
I was also thrown back to fond memories of the media commonly on in our home. There were a mere five channels of broadcast television to watch. Walter Cronkite on the national news. Dave Moore on the local station. Boone & Erickson on the radio. If you wanted to know if school was closed due to a snowstorm, you listened to WCCO radio. After they gave the ag reports, they’d read the alphabetical list of communities with school districts that were closed or running two hours late.
On my transistor radio in my bedroom I would tune in KDWB or WDGY to hear the latest hits of popular music.
We moved from the house on that property to a neighborhood of around twenty houses when I was ten years old. It was my first exposure to the fact that the world wasn’t as static my young perspective believed.
Slowly, but surely, television changed, personalities came and went, and I grew into my teenage angst.
In a way, nothing holds a candle to the first ten years of my life for the bliss of being surrounded by my family on the remnants of that farm near the border of Eden Prairie and Edina in Hennepin County, Minnesota, U.S.A.
.
.
Album Collection
If I were ever to venture from this moment to visit and romanticize a period of my history, I would gladly focus on the pinnacle of my young experience, and it would have everything to do with vinyl LP record albums of my most adored recording artists.
My parents and older siblings all had records and I became familiar with listening to the music and studying the intricacies of the covers and printed inner sleeves. I would guess I was in my early teens when my sister Linda offered to take me to a record store so I could pick out an album of my very own. My first.
I recall having no clue what to pick and walking up and down the aisle looking at too many choices of which I knew nothing. When I happened upon one in the front of a stack that had a brightly colored sticker touting a hit song, I decided that was the one I wanted. I’d heard the song on the radio, Black Sabbath’s “Ironman.”
When I grew old enough to know better, probably only a year or two later, I realized that choice was barely on the fringes of my genuine interests. Of course, interests evolve. I ventured in a few odd directions that seemed a stretch for me over time, but the constraints were more financial than musical tastes. Albums didn’t come cheap and it was prohibitive to buy an entire LP for interest in just one particular song.
If you didn’t own the record back in the day, you were at the mercy of a radio station to play a song you wanted to hear. Dropping my dollars on an album and bringing it home to break the seal of the clear plastic wrap was a momentous occasion. After setting the needle on the outside edge of side one, it was time to study the images and soak up every word on the jacket.
There is no experience like it today. Not when almost anything you can think of is available in a search of the internet.
The album art was almost as much of an experience as the quality of the music emanating from those vinyl grooves. Or is that, vinyl groove?
My first job after high school was selling records at the local mall. That broadened my exposure to new music and gave me the ability to bring home promotional albums I wouldn’t otherwise have bought.
When Cyndie and I got married, our similar but surprisingly rare number of duplicated albums merged to become one precious collection. That treasure was pared down drastically when digital music became the norm and I sold off all but one hundred gems that were either rare or meant enough to us we couldn’t part with them.
Yesterday, Cyndie pulled them out with a mind of continuing her momentum of purging possessions that we aren’t using. I’m considering pulling out my old turntable to find out if the belt on it is functional at maintaining 33 & 1/3 RPMs.
As much as I’d love to once again hear the music from old records I never digitized, I think I’m finding it even more pleasurable simply seeing the artistry of all those classic album covers another time.
.
.
Early Start
Like a couple of young newlyweds, Cyndie and I got an early start to the holiday weekend and hustled north to the lake by ourselves a day before the massive crowds that will follow. A stop at Coop’s Pizza for our favorite choice in Hayward, then some authentic ice cream decadence at West’s Dairy for dessert, and we were in full lake-place weekend mode before ever reaching the “cabin.”
For the record, I splurged with one scoop each of Coconut Magic Bar and Chunky Musky.
There was some reminiscing about dining at Coop’s on our honeymoon almost 40-years ago, back when it was located in a former gas station on Highway 63. Cyndie burned her lip so bad when hot cheese pulled off the crust that she blistered.
After we unloaded the car, we topped off our night with access to satellite television Tour de France coverage rerunning the stage of day 6 and another Mark Cavendish sprint to the stage victory. We were happy as clams.
It has been longer than I can recall that we have been up at the lake two weekends in a row. This could get to be a habit. Thank goodness we have found a willing animal sitter in Anna, a student at UW River Falls.
It feels particularly summery, which is just as it should now that we are into July. Obviously, we don’t live in the southern hemisphere.
Watching the professional cyclists racing after having just spent some extended time on my bike tour along the Mississippi River in Minnesota provides a valuable perspective. Their accomplishments are so much more amazing than they make them appear.
I hope they get to have ice cream at the end of their daily races.
I visited a couple of Dairy Queens after my days of biking.
It was an early start to foiling my goals of eating less sugar than my addiction longs for. I can attest that doing so wreaks havoc on my attempts to control the brain’s tendency to crave sweetness full time.
Good thing my healthy routine will be able to resume as soon as this weekend is over. My summer brain is starting to think I should have ice cream every day.
I’m afraid the rest of my body takes exception to that kind of thinking.
.
.
Recent Past
While I was working on a project that had me perusing some of my old photos from the last decade, I developed a yearning for the good ol’ days of about 4 years ago. (That’s the time period I was viewing when the nostalgia hit.) It has me missing our horses anew.
That was back before we added doors to the hay shed. I don’t miss the years of sun-bleached hay reserves. Of course, I don’t miss needing to put up a winter’s worth of hay anymore, either.
Our lives and focus of attention in 2015 seem so far removed now, yet at the same time, pretty recent compared to all the years even farther back in our history. I suppose I’m experiencing something of a near-term nostalgia.
I can’t help but think it might also be related to wanting to be back in a time when US politics weren’t a worldwide embarrassment.
I was so much younger then, four years ago. Delilah was, too. In that series of pictures I was reviewing, there were many where I was putting dog and horses in particularly close proximities, hoping to develop a safe and friendly bond between them. They never became close pals, but the horses offered a gracious acceptance of Delilah’s tendencies to nip at their heals or bark vociferously around feeding time if the horses got rambunctious.
Then, there are pictures of me throwing discs for Delilah to chase off-leash in the fields. That was B.C. (Before Chickens). Unfortunately, we can no longer trust the dog to spend any time off-leash, as she has no impulse control over her urge to follow her carnivorous canine instincts.
Ahh, those were the days, four years ago. Remembering those times feels like wrapping myself in a snuggly blanket on a cold day.
I’ve learned a lot in the years since, though (and Delilah, too, I think), so as 2019 closes in on its final weeks, I’m feeling good with our lives. I just need to remind myself to avoid the constant barrage of horrendous news and put my energy toward sowing seeds of love to all.
That will become a memory I would like to look back on in a few years to remember fondly.
.
.
Remembering Woodstock
Ten years ago, on the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, I wrote a blog post musing about how that event influenced my taste in music. In honor of reaching the milestone of 50 years hence, I’m going to re-post those thoughts once again…
Have I mused on music already here? I don’t remember.
It was 40 years ago now that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was held. Three days of peace and music. I was 10 years old. I don’t have any recollection that I had any clue it was occurring.
I’m not clear about what point in my life it was that I got hooked by the music being made by artists like the ones that were so well represented at the Woodstock concert. The first album that belonged to me was a gift from a sibling or siblings (anyone remember?). It was the Monkees, “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. That album was released in November of 1967, so maybe I got it Christmas of that year. I remember they pranked me with the trick where they taped the album to the cover of the box the present was wrapped in so when I lifted it and looked in the box, there was nothing there.
The next record I recall getting was one that my sister, Linda, allowed me to select for myself, as a gift from her. I didn’t have a clue what to pick and went with what I saw before me when walking the aisle of the local record store. Black Sabbath’s “Ironman” was something that I recognized as having heard on the radio and it was in the front of a stack down at my eye level. I picked it and remember her trying hard to make sure that was what I wanted. I’m pretty sure she could sense it was not a well thought out selection. But I held firm, trying to portray that I was making an informed decision. I wasn’t.
Eventually, I came to revere the music of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The first concert I ever saw in person was The Allman Brothers Band. I was a fan of The Beatles, Derek & the Dominos, America, Loggins & Messina and a wide range of related groups. I have always liked live recordings and I think my favorite albums from all the above artists or groups are their live concert recordings.
Impressionable years
Somewhere in my very impressionable music years, I heard the live recordings of Santana, The Who, Richie Havens, Country Joe & the Fish, Canned Heat, Ten Years After, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joe Cocker, John Sebastion, and I’m sure others who performed at Woodstock, and those songs all locked in my consciousness as foundation blocks.
I probably heard them on the soundtrack of the documentary film released after the concert. From those songs, I built a fascination for Leon Russell and records like Mad Dogs & Englishmen, The Band, “Rock of Ages” and “The Last Waltz”, Little Feat, “Waiting for Columbus”, George Harrison and the musicians he recruited for “Concert for Bangladesh”.
This wasn’t music that was played on popular radio (remember the AM band?). This is what record albums and FM radio were all about. Eventually, I got a job at a retail record store for about a year and became immersed in more albums than I could comprehend.
I wasn’t old enough to be aware that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was happening at the time, but later, it became a very significant part of my music world because of the recordings made there. And the music that was made there came from the spirit of that moment. Woodstock was a very important event for me, after the fact.
Increasingly more so, in the accumulating years following that August weekend back in 1969.
.
.
Memory Lane
I traveled down the depths of some great memories last night for a 50th-anniversary event of the company where I launched my industrial high-tech manufacturing career, as an inexperienced fresh-out-of-tech-school entry-level Electronic Technician. I had the good fortune of working for that company in many different roles over eighteen years, putting me in contact with almost every department at one time or another.
That made this celebration event with current and former employees an extra special treat for me. I talked myself hoarse sharing stories over the clamor of hundreds of other simultaneous conversations all around me. From Assemblers to Scientists, Marketing, Purchasing, Fabricators, Software Developers, Facilities Manager, Calibration Technicians, Mechanical and Electrical Engineers in both Manufacturing and Research & Development, Human Resources, Customer Service and even the First Responders team, I came to know a lot of amazing people, almost all of whom I could describe as friends as much as coworkers.
It was difficult to finish a thought without getting interrupted by another fond greeting of long-separated colleagues. Many people asked if Cyndie was still a Principal and wondered what I was up to. I labored to explain how we moved to the country onto a property to have horses, but that we don’t have horses any longer, and I commute many miles to an unrelated day-job that is not all that different from the old high-tech industrial electronics job I did 20-some years ago.
So much has changed, but not that much has changed.
It was a blast seeing the faces of so many people from my years with that company and recalling some of the adventures and laughs we shared. One person reminded me of the times we used our lunch hour to play wally-ball in the company gym. Those were the days.
For some perspective, during the years I worked for that company, we transitioned from pencil drawings on vellum paper to digital CAD drawings. I interacted with my first desktop computers while employed there. I was part of a team that designed a custom system for 3M that they used to manufacture some of the first compact disc optical storage media.
We were dumbstruck that they would be able to store an entire set of encyclopedia volumes on one little disc. What would they think of next?
One night of being immersed in flashbacks to that previous life is a little disorienting. I sure had no idea at the time that I might someday be dealing with broody chickens. Makes me wonder a little bit about what I might think of doing next.
.
.
Relative Something 