Milkweed
October 21, 2012 § 2 Comments
The milkweed pods have opened. The seeds blow into the wind.
Have you ever pulled them out, felt how soft and almost weightless they are in your hands?
Throw them into the air. Watch as they ride and twirl through the sky.
Be glad for prairie. Wildflowers. Nature’s wondrous details.
Mid-autumn
October 17, 2012 § 4 Comments
This is the time when the most vibrant oranges and reds and yellows begin to deepen and fade; when the blaze has already peaked and now we must slide toward winter.
But there are yet colors to earn attention here. The rust-orange of leaves. Grasses and forbs within a few shades of my golden retriever’s coat. The slate and gray and cool blues of sky. That sky against the shape of trees and the slopes of wheat-colored hills.
No, I don’t mind this part of the season. It makes you take more time to notice. The subtle things often seem the deeper things, to me. As temperatures become more reliably chilly an extra sweater and a jacket are more appreciated.
There is a stillness here before the holiday rush surrounding autumn’s end and winter’s beginning.
Tassie and I, we will walk through it.
Autumn
September 27, 2012 § Leave a comment
Yesterday I went for the most wonderful drive. Morning, and straight east into red-orange hills. Classical music on the radio, golden retriever in the backseat, a jar of steaming coffee in the cup holder. I was going out to Brett Laidlaw’s place, Bide-A-Wee, to borrow a cider press for our upcoming festival. Brett had come to our brick oven workshop in August, and also happens to be the author of Trout Caviar – both a blog and a book about foraging in the north woods. His two griffins came to greet me; Tassie hesitated and even growled a little at these unfamiliar dogs, but eventually she got over herself enough to run around the acreage and explore their space. They followed her with interest and a bit of determination to retain their territorial rights.
The air was September crisp and the hills were so burning with color that you could almost smell smoke. This is the time for woodstoves and campfires. Brett met me with a smile, we caught up on ovens and farms and projects and festivals, and then he showed me the pieces of the press, how to put it all together, how the apples will grind and press into cold, delicious cider. Bright sun, plaid shirts, vests, boots, cast iron, goosebumps. I shivered in the cold but also the very delicious autumn of it all.
Once we had loaded the press into the back of my truck, we talked about France, which always makes me glad, especially to find someone else who loves it the way I do, and not for all the popular things people love it for (ooh la la!) but also for the countryside, the small gîtes and the regional ciders and the roads winding through woods and hills that look so similar to here. Then back in the truck, me and my girl, to make our way home, my mind full of old memories and future plans, and a sense of the season’s reliable goodness.
September on the St. Croix
September 2, 2012 § Leave a comment
Yesterday evening we went hiking.
This is what one ought to do on one of the last weekends of summer, when the sun is warm and the breeze begins to feel cool.
Interstates Park (the states being Minnesota & Wisconsin) is full of climbable rocks, trails along the St. Croix River, a small lake, and many trees.
As the sun slanted its low evening light, we followed the terrain up and down.
Scrambled just enough to where I felt scared, momentarily, on a too-steep wall, which gives such a nice rush of adrenaline. Rested at the top.
The view!
We wandered back down the trail to another along the Lake of the Dalles, listening to children play at the beach and the shouts and conversation of kayakers. I tried to sit on a rock and read, but a certain golden retriever kept trying to pull me into the water.
So, we made our way down to the pet-friendly picnic area and watched the mist and the evening settle over the St. Croix.
Peanut butter and honey and a sweet sixteen apple.
I read Brennan Manning, whose words have often brought my spirit solace and joy.
“It is always true to some extent that we make our images of God. It is even truer that our image of God makes us. Eventually we become like the God we image. One of the most beautiful fruits of knowing the God of Jesus is a compassionate attitude toward ourselves. . . . Healing our image of God heals our image of ourselves.” (Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus)
It is right for me to be in these places of beauty. It is right to make time to reflect. And to remember my truest identity, which has been established by a Creator’s love.
Happy sights of the day
August 19, 2012 § 2 Comments
1. A birthday cake (flavor-of-the-week) ice cream cone from Leo’s. Two scoops.
2. Yarns, yarns, yarns, and three ladies watching me sort through skeins and books and then inviting me to their Thursday knitting nights. The textures and colors in that little store just ask for you to take the stuff in your hands and make something of it.
3. An old honey tin, the size of a paint can, advertising an apiary from Thorp, Wisconsin – the very town where our family van broke down on this summer’s vacation. (I laughed, and bought it.)
4. A Corgi named Tillie.
5. A man in a striped shirt guiding a young, merry sounding couple in a gondola down the St. Croix River.
6. Two bi-planes gliding low over that same river, nearly skimming the surface before I lost sight of them.
7. A young man with black hair and a camera case, walking in front of me easy as can be, by himself this Sunday evening. When I stopped walking, turned around, and crouched down to peer under the bridge to where the planes had gone, I looked back to see him, 20 yards away, doing the same thing.
8. Twelve flowers in a glass on the kitchen counter. Zinnias and black-eyed Susans leftover from yesterday’s event. Such cheerful faces.
Washington Island
August 12, 2012 § 2 Comments
I don’t remember that I ever felt especially excited about islands. I gave them a fair level of fascination, from books such as Five Have A Mystery to Solve and of course all of the Anne of Green Gables series. But I grew up in spaces where the land stretched wide away from us, and a far horizon of earth greeting sky was the view to admire, as we watched storms and sunsets and the overwhelming blue of summer.
My father would say, and I would agree with him, that living on an island must make a person feel bound, with the land running out so quickly, cut off by water. Islands had an element of fear, in one’s inability to escape the small society they compelled. No, thank you, I thought. I may visit islands, but I wanted to live where I could ride my horse for miles and miles and miles; where I might get up one day and go as far as I please, and see where I end up.
Oh, but then.
Never say never. Life tends to turn one’s decidedness on its head (or, at least, mine does!). On our Door County adventure, we took a day trip to Washington Island, which is just off the tip of the peninsula, and now I am enchanted with islands, and that one especially.
The island is 23.5 square miles, and while tourism is its main industry (having overtaken fishing and agriculture) it still has a calm, even sleepy feel to it. The houses are primarily older and either cabin or farmhouse or gingerbread in style. There are docks and boats, of course; there’s a fantastic fiber shop/school, and a gathering place called Fiddler’s Green where artists and locals get together, especially in winter, to talk and be and do life in a way that recognizes their interdependence.
One of our first delights was a remarkable wooden church, called Stavkirke, which seems like it fell out of a fairytale. Behind it a prayer path meanders through the woods. We would miss church on Sunday so this gave us a moment of grounding in our faith. Reflection. I spoke blessing over family, and gratitude for this place, softly, but nonetheless with reverence. I think J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis would approve.
We visited an older couple on their Scandinavian horse farm, featuring Gotlands and Icelandic ponies and a Fjord. The couple was quiet and kind and their horses were spunky and beautiful. They had a big white dog that looked like a Great Pyrenees, but wasn’t, and an affectionate black cat, and splendidly colored roosters and chickens, and chattery, cheerful ducks. I think this couple, and me, we are cut from the same cloth. This was just the start; as the day went on I began to feel as if this island was full of what Anne Shirley would call kindred spirits. It seemed as if I had discovered a mini, U.S. version of Anne’s beloved P.E.I. I skipped alongside my mother and told her so, and she laughed, and nodded.
For lunch we ate at a cafe run by a Methodist minister with six adopted children and a kayak museum in the back, displaying evidence of her days as a fairly renowned expedition kayaker. If one were to live here, I thought, what other sorts of people would one run into? What draws a person to a quiet island, a half-hour’s ferry ride away from shore? But I knew. The franticness of the rest of American society seemed . . . distant. It didn’t belong here, and it felt farther away than a boat trip past Death’s Door, the watery passage where many a boat has succumbed to the intensity of Lake Michigan funneling into the Green Bay. This is a place for refuge-seekers.
Somewhere in the middle of the island we climbed a tower, to get a view of the farmland interspersed between the trees, and the water in the distance. And there is a Farm Museum, with a lovely barn and all sorts of old implements, snowshoes for horses, old churns and tool sharpeners, memories of a life I sometimes wish I might have lived, and sometimes think I might still.
“Just think,” I said to my father, “for Grandpa, this isn’t really history. Not like it is for us; this was normal life, a lot of it.” My grandfather has been gone for twelve years, but I am still fascinated with his life, a boyhood throughout the 1920s and a teenager during the Depression, a young man during World War II who had to stay home and farm his Dakota land. He ran a team of horses but saw the changes through the 40s and 50s, the rise of the tractor and chemicals and farms getting bigger and bigger. If he can see us from heaven, which I kind of suspect he can, I wonder what he thinks now. Of how agriculture is going, and how his stubborn granddaughter believes, in many ways, that going “backward” is going forward.
After a visit to the little Nautical Museum we needed to go back to the ferry, so we might get back to the mainland for ice cream and a swim. I wasn’t quite ready. And to think we almost didn’t go to the island in the first place! I hope it can stay as it is for a good long time. I hope I can go back again soon.
*Thanks to Kim & Elena Romkema again for many of these pictures, as my camera decided to hit the dust! There was so much more I wish I could have captured from this trip . . . guess there will need to be another!
Summer Evening
July 3, 2012 § Leave a comment
The sandy cat by the Farmer’s chair
Mews at his knee for dainty fare;
Old Rover in his moss-greened house
Mumbles a bone, and barks at a mouse.
In the dewy fields the cattle lie
Chewing the cud ‘neath a fading sky;
Dobbin at manger pulls his hay:
Gone is another summer’s day.
– Walter de la Mare
Heat, water, and work
July 2, 2012 § Leave a comment
My goodness gracious, it is hot.
The dog and I have been in the river twice today, once with iced coffee in hand. Otherwise I sit in here and sweat, and she sits in here and pants so heavily I can hardly think. Just now we are still damp and sprawled about the office/living room avoiding awareness of the air’s heat.
This week has been a doozy!
We began with a day and half ecology inservice at my job, where we spent time learning the native plants and birds of this region. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Afterward, I remembered to renew my Audubon Society membership.
Today while sitting in the cool, shallow flow of the river I listened for birds. It is like getting to know one’s neighbors. Learning their names brings you into relationship with place. I smile to walk past common milkweed, daisy fleabane, and orange hawkweed and to know their color, the shape of their leaves, the creatures that like them and the purposes they might serve. I am tickled pink to recognize the “fire-fire, where-where, here-here” of the indigo bunting, the “chhrrrrrrrr” of the clay-colored sparrow, and the “chip-chip-chip-chip-chip” of the chimney swifts darting above my roof.
Halfway through the week we brought in an expert to teach us how to build a ferrocement tank.
This involves pouring a cement pad, building up the structure with rebar, mesh, and EML in the shape of a short silo, and mixing sand, portland, water, and glue to sling mud onto the structure. The purpose of the ferrocement tank is to catch rainwater from the roof of the polebarn and redirect that water as needed for agricultural use.
Guess who helped a bunch? Or rather, supervised with affectionate brown eyes and a good deal of panting?
The work was fascinating and sometimes tedious, and by the third day with the heat of the sun beating down, our relief upon nearly finishing was significant! We ended the workday by unloading hay into the barn, eating a fine late lunch, and heading to the river for a swim followed by a nap. Keith (our instructor) gave us a brief information session on how to finish putting a roof on the structure, and then we went merrily on our way to an early bedtime. Though I made brownies and ate ice cream first.
And now, thank heaven, it is Monday. I am doing small work tasks like marketing workshops, updating facebook, and switching water lines as needed. But otherwise, this is a rest day to make up for the week’s hard work and large amounts of people time (I am one of those sorts who need a balance of people time and by-herself time). It is a satisfying kind of day, one where you feel you’ve earned your rest, and are excited for what’s coming next.
Life is good. Even in summer’s heat.
Aaah.
May 31, 2012 § Leave a comment
A clean look. What do you think? Better?
I do feel refreshed and relieved, as I do when I buckle down and really clean my house.
Speaking of cleaning, I have piles of boxes in a room upstairs, all the things from my whole life that have been dragged along with me or hanging out in Mom and Dad’s basement. Now that they are downsizing I have all these boxes handed over for me to sort through. I am not eager about this overhaul. It becomes necessary to decide which memories must be attached to the tangible. And which ones will stay in my mind.
This is a week for organization and planning and at the end I suspect I will feel even better. But thank goodness for someone who takes care to remind me that even in the midst of the mess, it’s important to get up and take a walk!
Kinds of Honey 