arrival

Does everyone have their own cue for when Spring is "really" here?

For many folks, I think it may be plants - individually or collectively - that close the door on Winter. Maybe it's the first sign of ferns:

or daffodils.

Maybe it's the soft and delicate columbine:

or the dazzling pool of color provided by a crocus cluster,

or even the first sight of an insect enjoying the pollen within:

For me, amongst all the signs and sights, 

there is one cue that signals Spring Is Here. 

The appearance of the first bloodroot:

I've been watching. It appeared this morning.

No matter what wild weather we may experience in the weeks ahead, it will not mean Winter was just taking a breather and has come roaring back.

For me, Spring is here.

What are your personal cues for the arrival of Spring? Please leave a comment and share your unique view, whether you are heading into Spring or Autumn or some other season in your world right now.

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but my wheels won't go

I often sing a bit while doing chores.

Sometimes I sing to focus my mind and remain calm when life is complicated.

I think Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" got me through chores the entire first year after the 2016 election.

Sometimes I sing to distract the goats while they are being combed. I'll bet my goats know more Hamilton material than just about any other goats.

Even my own special segue from "The Room Where It Happens" into "Quiet Uptown." Whew, I can almost make them cry with that one.

Well, do you remember the Cat Stevens* song, "Fill My Eyes"?

This song has become the whimsical sound track for my morning chores these days:

"I'm just a coaster but my wheels won't go..."

I own two wheelbarrows, a garden cart, and - a very recent acquisition - a tiny open trailer designed to be towed behind a utility tractor or whatever those machines are called. Every one of these items was secondhand and, except for latest, each has already given me years of yeoman's work.

Unfortunately, at the moment, none of my four cargo-movers has its requisite number of functioning wheels. In fact the wheelbarrows don't have one functioning wheel between them and my fanciful idea of cobbling one sound undercarriage out of parts from two very different wheelbarrows hit a snag quite early on.

If the pandemic hadn't put a crimp in even my limited amount of normal "travel," I would have made a determined effort to get the garden cart in working order by early April. I knew at least one tire was in sad shape last Autumn. Once the snow is gone, I rely on the cart to move bales of hay from the roundtop to the "central distribution landing" between the barns. The bales I'm feeding now are particularly heavy, and - although I don't like to admit it and have had to prove it to myself over and over again - I cannot carry a whole bale that far. So I have to open a bale in the roundtop, stuff flakes of the hay into a big plastic bin, and carry the bin out to the paddocks.

It takes three or four trips per bale. Four to six trips per day.

"I'm just a coaster but my wheels won't go...
my legs are weak, my heels are low."

After the initial rebuild, 2015

The extra work isn't a bad thing in and of itself (I could live without it), but every time I open a bale, some hay falls to the ground. Every time I grab a flake to stuff into a bin, some hay falls to the ground. Every time I put the bin down to open a gate, carry the bin through the gate, then put it down again to close the gate, ditto and ditto. I've been trailing hay all over the place, several times a day, and the wastefulness is very frustrating. Considering how often the goats hear a lecture about not wasting hay, this very much smacks of "Do what I say, not what I do!" 

Still going strong in 2016...right through 2019

So on today's early-morning walk with Piper - which is when I got all these fern portraits you may have been wondering about - I decided to Take Steps. As soon as we were home and Piper was having her breakfast, I got online and found a bicycle shop a half-hour away that is open, with appropriate levels of distancing and caution. I've emailed my cart details to the shop with a request for an estimate. The tires may be standard bike tires, but the axle of the cart is different from a typical bike axle, so the job may hang on whether the rims are still in good shape.

I'm hoping this won't turn into one of those decisions about replacing an entire  item because the relative cost of parts is so high. I don't enjoy those decisions.

On the other hand, this little cart has worked very hard for a long time and "doesn't owe me a thing," as the saying goes. Do you remember the state it was in when I found it?

2014: the original "cart" - a jumble of metal parts

~~~

*  "Fill My Eyes" 1970 by Cat Stevens, who later changed his name to Yusuf Islam and stepped away from music to focus on doing good in the world, and now, later still, is known by both names and for using music as a vehicle for doing good in the world. He's always been On The Road To Find Out, that fellow.

~~~~~

wordless wednesday

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the color of january

There's plenty of color in January.

A New England winter may not be as green as other seasons,

but it's beautiful all the same.

~~~~~

briefly

Just a quick word to thank Maywyn and Mike and Umme Yusuf for their helpful comments regarding image software. After following up with some online reading and general poking around, I am experimenting with the free version of Zoner Photo Studio. I may end up starting from scratch with different software, but for now this seems to be working. Of course there will be the customary "learning curve." With image software, part of this process always seems to be figuring out where the heck things are going.

I'm trying to be patient and methodical in shifting files from the old laptop to the new, so that nothing is lost. In my previous switch - no wait, it was probably three laptops ago - I misplaced all the images from a trip to France, which is rather sad because it was my first and very likely only visit there. But hope springs eternal, and I keep a happy thought for someday discovering those images in a buried folder labelled "Charts" instead of "Chartres" or some such.

~~~

Piper and I actually got into the woods before it became unbearably hot today - hooray! We spent a couple of hours by a little streambed - now nearly dry - where a lot of DrawingAugust2015 took place.

No actual drawing occurred today, but I like to think that feeding Piper treats and watching water bugs and listening to the sounds of the forest was "mental preparation" for DrawingAugust2016.

Anyone feel like joining in?

It's very good fun!

~~~~~

a week of winter

A week ago, the weather finally shifted into Winter.

Billions of tiny ice pellets fell from the sky, met a surface of unseasonable mud, and formed a layer of frozen slush with a smooth crust strong enough to support my weight. In fact, it supports the weight of even the heaviest goats and is very slippery. All the goats are having trouble getting around, as am I.

Then there was a light snowfall.

And another.

This made the ice look like a soft and harmless dusting of snow, but in fact it made the ice even more slippery.

Despite the metal cleats attached to my huge insulated muck boots, this surface can take me down. I have fallen flat at least three times, and "caught" myself several more times.

Question:
do you think falling is worse than doing that awful jolt-and-flail in an effort to keep from falling? I'm not sure; I think it may be easier on the body to Just Fall. But it's painfully reflexive, that adrenaline-flavored effort to stay on one's feet. I never seem to have a nanosecond to choose whether to relax or fight gravity.

Piper has the right idea about how not to fall:

remain airborne as much as possible.

~~~

It's been gloomy and grey quite a lot this week. And very, suddenly, bitterly cold. Time to start feeding the wild birds! Before putting the "squirrel-proof" feeder back up, I scattered handfuls of seed on the ice and was thrilled when a flutter of little birds appeared only minutes later. Here are some (pretty terrible) pictures, taken through hazy grey air in the late afternoon:

(I am not expecting a call from the Cornell Ornithology Lab

asking to use these images. Heh.)
~~~

Saturday brought a welcome change: the sky was blue and the sun was bright. Saturday is the day my town dump is open, so I loaded my bag of Still Making An Effort at Cleaning the House rubbish onto the hayboggan and slid it - wheeee! - down the driveway to where the Little Green Sportswagon is parked at the bottom. And there I found a little gem of ferny glory, lit through with morning sunlight:

Ahhhhhh.
Such a relief for eyes weary of gloom!
~~~

When I did the evening chores tonight, it was 9F (-13C). After feeding and watering everyone, I sat in the barn for a while, wrapped from head to knees in my ancient down coat but still feeling the cold of the barn wall gradually reaching my shoulders like one of my icepacks. In the dark, I listened to the sound of Dara pulling hay from the manger on my left and chew-chew-chewing away. I just love that sound. Then I had stereo, when one of the kids (I think it was Tansy, but I couldn't see her in the dark) started nibbling hay on the other side of the barn. Through the open doors I could see the lights on the tree, reflected from window to window on the porch. Like this:

This makes me so happy.
It may become a new tradition for me:
not just a Christmas Tree, but a Winter Tree.

Makes sense, really, since the association of a decorated, lighted tree with Christmas is very recent - Queen Victoria, was it? - while the bringing indoors of greenery and light in Winter is old. Maybe as old as the human need for hope and cheer in a cold, dark season.

Right this moment, for example, it's after 3 AM.
I've been awake since midnight with a few aches and pains.
Not complaining; it's just the way it is.
But this is my view from bed:

So magical.

Better than narcotics.

Truly.

Good night :)
~~~~~

wordless wednesday

 

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