Posts Tagged ‘rural life’
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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Endless Critters
Get a gun, they said. You should have a gun. But I like not having a gun. We made it for nine years on our rural property without owning a gun. Then the great raccoon boom of 2021 happened. We enlisted the services of a pest control company that happily started collecting the masked bandits in cages for us.
Sometimes, two at a time in a single cage.
Each time I would check our trail camera, there were always more roaming around after the captured ones were trapped. When the count reached ten and Cyndie told me we were paying a hefty fee for each animal removed, my aversion to spending money like there was a leak in our financial pipes put a dent in my resistance to owning a tool that can kill.
Researching humane ways to euthanize raccoons brings repeated pleas about NOT drowning them. Number one choice is a CO2 chamber. I’m not likely to build such a contraption. There is also the injection method that a veterinarian can provide, but that doesn’t solve the problem of dollars flying out of our pockets.
Shooting them is an accepted method that would involve a more controlled initial expense.
My dream of shooing away the raccoons with miscellaneous aversion tactics was far inferior to the draw of our chicken coop and all the messes of spilled chicken feed and captive birds within.
If there hadn’t been such a prolific baby boom of raccoons this year, we might have gotten along like we always did before. Meanwhile, a few nights ago the packs of coyotes were making a heck of a lot of howling racket in our woods. Our plan to open the courtyards of the coop up to allow the first days of free-ranging next week is driving a new perspective about weapon ownership.
Maybe I need to do a better job of befriending the local guys who like to hunt coyotes. I suppose if I knew how to shoot a gun it would give me some cred.
I’ve got another day to ponder the situation. Today is the 4th-of-July game day for the association of families at our Wildwood lake place. There are water balloons to be filled, watermelon to cut, Bats vs. Mice T-Shirts to distribute, water sports to be played, sunscreen to be applied, a feast of foods to be prepared, and endless frivolity and laughter to unleash.
Dealing with critters will have to wait another day.
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Magnificent Days
We are enjoying magnificent weather this week for the month of September, although in the back of my mind the very summery temperatures echo too well some of the anticipated ramifications of the warming planet.
No floods or fires in our region at the moment. Just high heat (80°F!) and evolving colors in the tree leaves.
Wandering down the backyard hill toward the opening to the labyrinth, the leaves are still primarily green. Beyond that, there are brilliant splashes of gold, orange, and red showing up with surprising speed.
Our growing season seems to be ever-lengthening, but the end of this summer’s agricultural period is undoubtedly near. The declining hours of daylight aren’t being altered by the changing climate and plants don’t grow so well in the dark.
On the bright side, I think my lawn mowing might be done for the year.
Yesterday morning at work I received a sweet text from Cyndie letting me know that she heard “Rocky the Roo'” making progress on learning how to crow. She said his call had a definite sing-song inflection that was recognizable as the vague hint toward the ultimate “cock-a-doodle-doo.”
I wonder if the magnificent weather days will be just as mesmerizing with non-stop echos of rooster crowing reverberating across our valley. We didn’t check with any of our neighbors about how they might feel about the prospect. At the same time, none of them have ever asked us if their gunshots, barking dogs, hollering for missing cats, or high RPM farm machinery soundtracks have been any problem for us.
I think it a feature, not a bug, of living in the country.
Where pretty much every day is magnificent, no matter what the sounds.
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Weak Link
There are many days when the Wintervale connection to the world via the internet is annoyingly flakey. The problem is mysterious and invisible, frequently interrupting progress in the middle…
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Hi, I’m back. That’s the way this works. After a seemingly interminable pause, activity resumes as if nothing is amiss. You wouldn’t notice a thing, unless you were attempting to visit with others via Zoom.
“Your internet connection is unstable.”
As soon as that message appears, even as I rush to write a chat message to everyone to explain that I could hear them all even though my image may have frozen to them, my fate is doomed to closing and then immediately reconnecting, minus all the text I had just entered in the chat window.
It’s life in the country. For all the advantages we enjoy living out among farm fields and forests, it comes at the expense of having a reliable internet connection. The industry can’t balance the economics of running fiberoptic cable to handfuls of houses scattered across many wide miles.
We don’t stream. We rent DVDs through the mail.
If we want to accomplish something without interruption, it takes a lucky combination of atmospheric conditions and an absence of too much competition for the limited bandwidth. Oh, and we can’t have already exceeded our cap of monthly allotted usage.
In all of the Zoom meetings I have participated in over the last month, I was the weakest link.
It’s too bad because I love the possibility of connecting with my multiple remote communities, but I love living where we do even more.
Cyndie pointed out that our new openings around the two big oak trees beside the driveway allow for excellent viewing of the rising moon.
Since our internet browsers weren’t having much success loading pages, we were more available to get out and enjoy the lunar view.
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Luck Ends
Our surprising run of luck with keeping our latest eight free-range chickens in the wilds of rural Wisconsin farm country ended yesterday in a very similar fashion to our first attempt a couple of years earlier. In the waning hours of daylight, when Cyndie went out to close the chicken door on the coop, there were only three hens on the roost.
A cursory survey of the surroundings turned up one body and one pile of feathers. No other clues were found.
Some predator or predators had a good meal last night. It, or they, made off with four gorgeous hens.
It was a real joy while it lasted. Unfortunately, it is not joyous at all when lives come to an end. The cycles of natural life can be harsh.
The unwelcome drama made for a pretty crummy end to an otherwise rainy, gloomy day.
And then there were three…
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Relative Something 