Paths in the Snow

When we get a real snowfall it visually changes the landscape around us. Physical markers disappear, changes in the topography are erased. Driving down the road after a heavy, accumulating snowfall finds the demarcation between the edge of the road and the sharp drop off of the ditch now invisible, suggesting a wide, flat expanse from road to field that is present at no other time.

The sights of this moment will also change as the wind picks up, blowing the snow into drifting patterns that shift as the strength and direction of the wind ebbs and flows. In other times of year what we see varies with the season - the buds of spring, the verdant hues of summer, the colors of fall - but no other time of year is so dynamic as winter with real snow.

The weather changes the landscape, and then we follow behind and change it again to suit our needs. As we venture out, we cut our paths through the snow to allow our footfall, and the wheels of our vehicles easier transit. These, again, offer an ephemeral visual change seen only now, only in the moment.

For our human purpose, we may make large changes to the winter landscape - clearing out the driveway:

Or smaller ones to make moving about the yard easier:

But we humans aren’t the only ones who need to find the way through the snow. Here, Calamity Jane is content to use the path I’ve shoveled, but she has other places to be, other things to see, than I. For those purposes she - who patrols the property tirelessly - has forged her own trails:

This is the type of path you get from a canine with six inch legs who is nonetheless not to be swayed from her self-appointed duties. And, other members of the canine contingent - who may not, themselves, be quite so motivated - do appreciate the benefit of her efforts:

And all of these things are self-evident as you see them. But then, on occasion, you encounter other, less typical pathways or tracks through the snow:

For perspective, it’s helpful to know that this shot is taken from an upstairs window, some 20’ above, and at least 20’ out from the closest marks. There is real space between each track - at least a foot on some cases, certainly more in others. This leaves one to wonder what exotic creature has ventured into the yard to take such strides...

And then one realizes: this is what the snow looks like after an Australian Shepard has bounded through like Pepe LePew chasing his true love (of the moment), refusing the indignity of simply barreling down the snow in front of her in favor of what must seem, at least in the moment, a far more elegant solution.

The Kerr Shortbread Cookies Carry On In The Old Homestead

The Holidays are upon us with all the trimmings and merriment, but also the hustle, bustle and fretting too. The frenzied running about, decorating, gift wrapping and shopping for food and gifts.

What gifts to get our loved ones? Will they like it or hate it? Be creative with a gift or go with money? What to cook, will it be loved or abhorred? To put giblets in the gravy or not? Which dressing to make? Serve ham, turkey or both? Decisions, decisions and even more decisions to be made. One can easily become overwhelmed and forget what Christmas is all about.

Add a very ambitious and busy high schooler to the mix and one can easily vacillate between a crying heap of jello or a raving lunatic. I can feel the stress, worry and excitement pouring off my teenager as they study for finals, work on dance in preparation for trying out for show choir and the musical, The Little Mermaid. Also my teen has started a new organization at the high school, Gender Sexuality Acceptance or GSA. I am a proud Mum to be sure, but wow that’s a crazy schedule.

Seemed like time for Shortbread.

The moment my hands started to cream flour, soft butter and sugar the stress melted away, much like a well made shortbread cookie should do in one’s mouth. In the heart of this Grand Old Lady generations past and present comforted my troubled soul by reminding of what is truly important.

My Dad was here to guide me through a process my Grandma, Muriel, once taught me long ago; A recipe that was taught to her by a baker family member from Glasgow. My Dad has since made it a mission to carry on his family’s tradition. My Dad even taught our child, Devin, a few years back.

The memories of eating Grandma’s shortbread always signaled Christmas and family gatherings. When we still lived in Canada, I remember the times I watched Grandma mixing the butter, flour and sugar with her hands. Listening to her say “mixing it with the hands was one of the most important ingredients”. The heat of our hands helped melt the butter and sugar together to create that melt-in-your-mouth taste.

The hands also could feel the proper consistency your shortbread dough should be. It had to be done by sight and feel. Too little flour and the shortbread spreads out turning into more of a sugar cookie. Too much flour and your shortbread would be too hard. Neither my Dad and I have the experience that only comes from making hundreds of batches of shortbread. My Dad solved this problem by doing a “tester cookie” with each new batch. You put 1 cup of flour down, then 1pound butter followed by 1 cup of flour and 1 cup ultra-fine sugar. The recipe gets a little less exact after that. Grandma would always say somewhere between 3 to four cups of flour more or less.

My Dad rolls out his dough somewhere between 3 to 4 cups of flour and bakes 1 cookie. If it spreads too much need more flour. He just adds a touch more flour and bakes one cookie again till he is happy with the texture and taste. “Can always add more flour, but can’t take back too much flour”, Grandma would say. What a genius move on my Dad’s part, that tester cookie, making it easier for me to learn without ruining a whole batch.

Grandma would talk about the variety of variables that would cause the flour level to fluctuate. The house is too dry or too humid; The brand or batch of all purpose flour you use; The temperature of your hands or the kitchen. Sometimes the pound of butter has more or less water in it.

I did try a batch with homemade Amish butter, which was wetter and needed a bit more flour. The batch with Amish butter was quicker to melt in the mouth as well as having a different but delightful taste. My Dad and I theorized that, because it was hand made, the Amish butter better replicated the butters of Great Grandmother’s time, and my Grandmother’s, as well as his childhood.

He has fond memories of being a child, climbing up onto counters to get at his Grandmother’s butter, which he would eat straight from the butter dish. Butter, he says, tasted creamier and different then than the butter does today.

I used a rectangular cookie cutter Grandma gave me from her own set of cookie cutters. She needlessly worried that it was rectangular and not round like the one she used for her cookies. She fussed that she had given the other round ones away. I reassured her the shortbread would be the same whether in a circle or rectangle. Either way my shortbread would bear the Kerr family mark - the mark of a fork pricked in the top in 3 rows. Every family had their own combination of fork marks so one could tell who had made which shortbread. She politely mused that some shortbread with certain marks were to be coveted while others were avoided.

As my Dad and I made shortbread together the previous generations of my family were present with the previous generations of this old home. The German/Mendota origins of my husband with my Canadian, Scottish and Ukrainian roots brought inspiration and joy to this Grand Old Lady as well as bringing peace to my harried soul.

Just like the amount of flour changes because of different variables, so does life. I admit being intimidated by so much in my life including making shortbread. Without realizing it my Dad reminded me to start small, try, be flexible and find balance.

As my hands crafted the shortbread dough, I had to be patient with the ebb, flow and balance while not forcing it. While doing this I realized in my own life there is lack of balance and inclination to force things.

My husband and child came home from their busy days while I was still creating. There in kitchen they ate shortbread as we chatted and for a moment all of our stresses melted away. This became a time as a family to recharge and refocus. Never underestimate the power of making an old family recipe while creating new memories. It is those recipes and traditions that will be cherished and held more dear than any gift you could buy.

Thank you Grandma and Dad for sharing your wisdom and time, I love you both.

With those thoughts I am off to enjoy a spot of tea in my Grandma’s tea cups alongside her shortbread. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New year with simplicity and balance.

As I finish this writing my husband has admitted to possibly surviving on mostly shortbread for the last two days. I am also certain that my child and their best friend, Angelique, have used shortbread to fuel their final exam studies this weekend.

The Mantis Strikes!

A handful of times over the years I have encountered people who have found and caught Praying Mantis’s. For myself, however, despite an abundant amount of time spent in the out-of-doors I have never personally come across one.

Not until this summer - now I’ve seen three.

The very first was found by LB, who saw it along the north wall of the old barn, and pointed it out to me. I’m not sure I would have noticed it myself, but there it was. I considered myself lucky for this encounter.

Then, a few weeks later I came across another, in grass that was perhaps a little longer than it should have been around the garden. This one I came across on my own, and I spent a little time with it.

At first it did not notice me, too busy trying to navigate its way through the long blades (did I mention the grass may have been too long?). But then it turned and saw me and my phone there, intruding on its personal space, and took offense...

This Mantis was here to say "I will beat your ass if I have to", and showing it’s martial arts cred for the world, and more specifically, for me, to be aware. We stayed in this position, the two of us, for a short while. If I moved in and out the Mantis would reassert, making certain that I would not forget the danger posed by its arcane knowledge.

Finally, détente reached, the Mantis took its leave of me, satisfied that I would fear and respect it, and all of its kind for the remainder of my days (Dude had quite an opinion of itself).

The Praying Mantis, or Mantis Religiosa (yup) is apparently not native to North America but rather, like Columbus (and ourselves), is an invader. Wikipedia (which is never wrong) actually lists its page on these critters under the title European Mantis. I actually thought that it might be the case that the versions we were seeing in the yard were some different variety of Mantis, since the outer carapace was a light brown rather than green, but apparently they come in a variety of colors.

And that fancy pose, warding me off and striking fear in my heart? It has a fancy scientific name, of course. This is the deimatic display, and is intended to make it look big and frightening and show off that extra set of eye marks on its upper chest (and who wouldn't want to show those if they had them?).

My third encounter - the day following, as it turns out, which I did not realize until I saw the dates in Photos - was the one that I included in last week’s post. That fellow, of course, was happily munching on a bee when I encountered it.

That one did not attempt to ward me off. One might assume it was too taken with its meal to notice me, but I suspect it is because it was confident that it’s comrade had sufficiently cowed me the day prior such that I was no longer a concern. I was now beneath notice.

Given history as a prelude, I may never see a Mantis in the wild again, but this summer has certainly offered a rich array of experiences with them.

Late Summer Oasis

At one corner of the property we have a stand of tall plants primarily dominated by goldenrod and false sunflowers. When I first started taking pictures of the stand, it was with the thought that I would research and write a piece about the plants themselves, in a vein similar to the one about Chicory a short while back.

I enjoy learning about the things around us, especially about the things that are ubiquitous in a way that we often take them for granted. In many respects we think of these as ditch weeds, things that grow in areas that we do not tend and likely don't care much about.

Goldenrod is everywhere in the Midwest in late summer, and sometimes blamed for allergy flare-ups. Still, according to Wikipedia (which is never wrong) this is an error of association - ragweed is in bloom at the same time, and can be readily and more appropriately assigned that blame (f&%king ragweed!).

I remember the Goldenrod from childhood. The false sunflowers I do not, though that could simply be due to fuzzy memory or a childhood lack of attentiveness. They are also everywhere now, blooming along the roadside. And I should note that I believe these are false sunflowers - a bit of research makes me question that a bit. Multiple sources indicate that these plants grow anywhere from 16" to 59" tall. I think we can all agree that a five foot tall plant is a respectable height, but here's the thing - I'm about 5'8" tall, and I was standing up straight when I took this picture:

...and this picture:

As you can tell from the angle of the shot, I'm looking up at these plants as I take the pictures. They are easily six foot tall, if not a bit taller. So, either these are a different type of plant, or my internet sources, including Wikipedia, have inaccurate or incomplete information about the growth range for these guys.

---

Like I said, I started out approaching this with the intent of writing a piece about these plants. Then I got in close to the stand for more pictures...

Now, before we moved out to The Homestead I had grown a small garden of native wildflowers, so the fact that there were bees buzzing about didn't entirely surprise me, but the sheer volume of them did.

This batch of late summer blooms is one of many across the countryside, but most, like ours, are little islands, oases in what must otherwise seem a floral desert to our bee friends. I know that the potential for getting stung can frighten some people when they come across something like this. Still, I, and I suspect many people with gardening experience, have typically found that the bees are content to tolerate your presence as long as you aren't disturbing them. As my Grandma Marie would often be heard to say "if you don't bother them, they won't bother you".

And speaking of bothering them, I also came across this fine specimen:

I've always known that their name, while referencing an appearance that suggests penitence, also reflected a predatory nature. Still, I've rarely ever seen them in person, and certainly never seen them in action. Given the decline in bees that has been going on, I briefly considered trying to free the victim - he was still moving. But nature is as nature does, and the mantis would undoubtedly catch another.

Ultimately, what I love about areas like this is that they become their very own ecosystems. The bees and other small insects are there, of course, and the presence of the mantis shows that they, and likely other critters are also about, preying on the pollinators. There is something pleasant and peaceful about having something like this, right there, nearby.

yard War II

The sky was a steel gray as I approached the battlefield. There, across from me they stood. Some of the names I knew - Chinese Mulberry, Euonymus, Woody Nightshade, Canadian Thistle - while others were mysterious. Still, I feared them not, for I knew my weapon was fear. Fear, and... amongst my weaponry was... let me come in again...

I feared them not, for I had my weapons at hand - pruning shears, pruning saw, and - of course - my trusty axe. I knew the battle would be difficult, but that glory would be mine if it was victorious.

I moved in strategically at first, long-handled shears in hand, facing my opponents in the rose garden. I snipped off my opponents one by one in precision strikes, clearing the field to face the heavy infantry. Recognizing now that the situation had changed, and not to my advantage, I retreated and regrouped. I cast aside the shears and pulled the pruning saw into service. The saw represents a compromise - more powerful than the shears, but still precise. But it takes time and effort - considerably more than the shears, and so I must watch for attack from behind while I work (Euonymus are known for their surreptitious strikes).

As I clear the field, leaving roses standing, unaccosted now by the encroachment of the scourge of the Chinese Mulberry, I heave a sigh of relief. Even as I do this, I know that, while this battle has passed, the war is not yet over. I look across the yard to the hillside, and gird myself for the next campaign.

Along the hillside the enemy has encamped along multiple locations. As I move in I consider my prior strategy, shears in hand. I march along the hillside, and begin my attack and, moments later, I look back at my arsenal. I toss the shears aside and pick up the axe and begin to swing.

...and swing, and swing. Carmina Burana begins to run through my head¹, and I am now a Viking warrior, taking down opponents with my axe like a scythe through sheaves of wheat. There are brief moments when I think "this moment perhaps requires a more subtle tool", but then I swing my axe again, and the thought flees my head as if it had never arrived.

When the dust clears I look about and survey what I have wrought. The bodies of my enemies lay on the battlefield like cordwood².

The sweat and sawdust drip down my face and I realize it's time to shift gears.

I harness my trusty steed to the wagon and pull around, calling out "bring out your dead". I pile them up and take them around to their final resting place, their future pyre. One valiant foe proclaims he is not dead yet, and attempts escape from the wagon. This is to no avail, and I collect him on the way back. As I return him to the wagon I look at home and wonder - what manner of foe is this?

Seriously - does anyone know what kind of tree this is?

And now, as I cast the last of the fallen on the pile, I know the battle is done. I may see these valiant warriors again one day in Valhalla (or next year, most likely), but for today it is done.

If you gotta do yard work, you may as well have some fun with it.

---

1. Actually, If I Had a Million Dollars was playing through my head all afternoon - I have no idea why.  ↩

2. Literally.  ↩

Chicory

As the summer winds towards a close the landscape begins to change a bit. The first hints of drying of the leaves of the corn and soybeans begin to show, and the chicory begins to bloom along the roadsides. The picture here was taken a few miles from home on one of my Sunday rides.

Many years ago, when I first started driving through the countryside to commute to work, I became fascinated with learning what the variety of things I was seeing growing in the ditches were. In this quest I came across the UofI Weed Identification Site - which is honestly the sort of thing that one wouldn't even consider would possibly exist unless one were looking specifically for it.

I've learned a lot about what is around us by using that reference, but discovering that the multitudinous pretty blue flowers coloring the roadsides in the late summer were, in fact, chicory, was one of the most surprising. In most cases my searches would simply involve looking through the pictures and seeing that the items I was pulling had a name - "Oh - so you are lambsquarter. Nice to meet you - now get the hell out of my garden..."

But chicory is different. Here was a discovery that a thing I'd heard the name of for years was actually a thing right nearby, indeed, perhaps under foot. Anyone who is a fan of westerns, or civil war-era fiction, will have heard of chicory. Soldiers or traveling cowboys will be found to be brewing and sharing it while they camp by the roadside. It's one of those tiny references to historical fiction that gives the era being described a different feel and helps put one in the place of the story.

In those stories chicory is being brewed like, and in the place of, coffee. The implication, often, is that the characters in the story are living rough, and so chicory is what they have to work with. This has apparently been a common usage, as the Wikipedia entry illustrates, using chicory in place of coffee, or at least blending it in with coffee to make it go further, in times of scarcity. The Wikipedia entry on the plant illustrates this quite nicely.

That practice of mixing it into coffee still stands, though now by choice and for flavor, something we learned when friends from Louisiana shared coffee with us a few years ago.

The can, sadly, is empty now, but it made for a delightful change of pace, and felt a little like drinking history with each cup.

Critter Patrol

When one gets a dog, one anticipates many of the features that accompany such an animal. They offer affection and companionship. They provide warning of new arrivals and intruders (albeit at their discretion). One thing I didn't expect, even with a lifetime of dog experience, was the level of vermin management that our canine team offers - indeed, seems to revel in.

We've detailed some of our issues with the Trash Pandas here, including the roles the dogs have played (and frankly, which we wish they would not play) in rounding them up. But the pest management goes much further than that - our furry exterminators offer more comprehensive services.

It is not at all uncommon for us to find, typically in the grass by the patio and back step, one or more recently dispatched members of the family rodentia, as well as the odd North American marsupial and periodic avian remains. To date, the list of gifts we have been left include:

• House mice
• Deer mice
• Opossums
• Shrews (I originally had moles on the list, but Wikipedia now has me convinced that what the dogs have caught were actually shrews)
• Rats
• Raccoons
• Various and sundry birds

We have rabbits at the edges of the property - relatively recent additions. Thus far the dogs don't appear to have caught any of them, though it's not for lack of trying. There are no squirrels in our vicinity, but I'm sure they would be a target as well.

For the first few years at the Homestead we had a contingent of outdoor cats, brought in with the explicit intention of pest management. They were a fine batch of felines, as far as it goes, but at this point it's fairly clear that our canine crew is far more effective - perhaps because the cats didn't always see the need to quickly finish their prey off. The dogs are, however, perhaps less discriminating about what they eliminate - the birds are not pests, and possums are not problematic.

All of which brings me to the event that made me think of sitting and writing this post. Almost every morning, when I get up to make my coffee, Calamity comes to the back step to greet me through the window. And when she came to see me this morning this is the view that greeted me:

Because of the color of her fur you have to look closely to see it, but sure enough, she has a bird in her mouth.

And one might think: "okay, but she probably found that dead somewhere - a dog can't catch a bird". And that might be true for this particular bird - I can't say. But I can say that I've watched both Rosie and Calamity run into flocks of birds on the ground and scoop up individual birds as they start to take flight. And to be clear, I'm not looking to encourage this - we don't see the birds as pests to manage - but it is both surprising and impressive to see.

When I was very young we had a dog - a male rat terrier named Gladys (thanks Mom) who would routinely bring captured mice to the back step. This sort of thing is common for terriers, as I understand it, but our dogs are not terriers - they are herding dogs.

And they apparently like to herd a variety of critters right off this mortal coil...

Peaches

A couple of years back we made the first foray towards planting what we hope will become a small orchard. This first group of three included a pear, cherry, and cold-hardy peach tree.

I was, I will admit, somewhat skeptical at the prospect of planting the peach tree. I think of peaches as being a southern fruit - Georgia Peaches, anyone? - and so the idea of them working out here, weathering through a winter on the open prairie, seemed dubious. Still, it's been two years, and not only has the tree survived, its faring far better in the war against Japanese Beetles than my cherry tree.

I check the trees periodically for the beginnings of fruit throughout the spring. This year, for most of the spring I saw almost nothing. The cherry tree seemed uninterested in offering anything at all, and the pear tree made an early attempt at a couple of fruits, which then later simply vanished (though I'm sure our local wildlife had something to do with the vanishing...). And in all of this the peach tree, for the second year in a row, turned its woody nose up and refused to display even the beginnings of anything fruit-like, as near as I could tell.

As near as I could tell indeed, because I was walking towards the tree on my way to the shed last Sunday afternoon and I saw something... Honestly I wasn't sure what I was looking at from a distance, because I really had no expectation of finding that the tree was bearing anything.

But sure enough, it was:

There are only just the two of them on the tree - it's still very young - but they are absolutely there and look very healthy. I can't imagine they were quite ripe yet, but I'll be checking them periodically. And I've gone from skeptical to cautiously optimistic. Given that it does look like the tree will yield fruit, even here on the periodically frozen northern prairie, it may be worth it to plant another of the same variety to allow for better pollination.

And - of course - the real bonus is that, in the near future, I'm gonna get to eat a peach!

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Update: Somehow, when I was discovering the two peaches on our peach tree, I missed a third. It was apparently hiding, lower in the tree.

I've looked over the rest of the tree pretty closely, and I don't believe there are any others - three appears to be the limit. Of course, I thought I had looked over the entire tree before, and it's really not that big...

Clothesline Tech

A clothesline is a handy, and almost deceptively simple technology. On a warm and sunny summer day, particularly out here in the wind farm, clothes hung on the line will often dry more quickly than they do in the electric dryer.

Our clothesline is something special, as clotheslines go. Often when one sees a clothesline it's 10 or 15 feet of cotton line stretched from the side of the house to a mounting point. A trip to Amazon will find you a rotary clothesline perfect for a small backyard area. But our ancestors, given ample yard space and an apparent sense of industry, left this for us:

The posts are solid steel, a good three inches in diameter and about six foot tall. The cross-bars are also steel and, given how well they hold and how long they've been there (I remember them from my childhood, and I'm sure they are older still than that), the posts are almost certainly set in concrete. If the distance between them seems vast, thats only because it is - they are set a good 70 feet apart. No cotton clothesline here - plastic-wrapped wire line is the rule of the day.

Given the length of the span, the line will tend to sag as clothing is added to it. I've followed family tradition on this front, and built a very fancy support pole to be placed somewhere in the middle of the line (it's a hunk of old door frame with a couple of notches cut into it. But it works). LB recently made a second pole for the second line, using the trunk of a weed-tree they recently cut down, continuing the long family tradition of, shall we say, repurposing existing material...

Probably the most challenging part is getting and maintaining a taught line across the space. It's difficult to pull the line tightly enough when putting it up, even with a significant amount of elbow grease. Even if one does get it pulled to a state tightly enough that one is content, the line stretches over time. However, MLW discovered these nifty clothesline tighteners and ordered them from Amazon.

I'm sure these aren't a new idea. The mounting points on the clothesline poles themselves have eye bolts on them, undoubtedly installed with the idea of doing much the same thing. However, due to age and rust and paint these are well past the point of being useful. But I put the line tighteners into place, and was able to pull both lines taught enough that Nik Wallenda might find them attractive were he to wander through our back yard.

What I especially like about them is that they promise the possibility of addressing future sag with just a turn of the handle rather than needing to pull the line off and try again.

Having the clothesline in place and available was especially a boon over the last few months, when our dryer started to signal it's intent to retire by requiring three or more cycles through before getting things completely dry. It was a greater benefit still when, a week or two ago, that self-same dryer decided to call it quits entirely (here I had been hoping it was just feeling a little tired, and would recover after a bit of rest. Sadly for the bank account this turned out not to be the case).

Simple Pleasures

The final day of a long weekend out here on the prairie, particularly when the weather cooperates as it has been, offers some opportunity to appreciate the simpler things.

The sun and the wind of the open prairie present an option that we don't take advantage of often enough. It's a little more work to haul the clothes out to the line than it is to simply toss them in the dryer, I suppose, but it requires 100% less electricity as well. Besides, there is something nostalgic about seeing the clothes on the line, and something rather therapeutic about hanging them there. This is an activity I watched, and helped, both my mother and my grandmother with many times as a child. Something feels right about it.

Working around the yard yesterday I was greeted multiple times by the peonies in bloom:

While all of this is happening, we also have sun tea brewing in a gallon jar on the sidewalk.

This will provide many delightful glasses over the next week or so. I add a few orange tea bags to the mix for mine - just a hint of extra flavor. No sugar or sweetener here tho - those seeking "sweet tea" will have to take that up with the McDonalds in town.

Lilacs in Bloom

The beginning of this second week of May finds the lilacs in bloom. One can see the lovely purple or white flowers swaying in the breeze, and can smell the sweet aroma wafting by. For myself, and for many of us, these bushes in bloom bring out happy childhood memories of time outside in the warming weather of spring - a harbinger of the end of the truly cold season.

These bushes are, and have been, very popular throughout our region. One can find them - and often in profusion - in many, if not most, of the yards of the older farmhouses in the region. A smaller house down the road from us actually has hedgerow covering its fence line consisting entirely of lilac bushes. While the lilac is not native to North America, it's apparently been here nearly as long as European settlers have been coming to stay in earnest.

Our old house has three lilac bushes - one white, two purple. They have been here as long as I can remember, and based on their size, likely considerably longer still. They bloom every year, reliably, about this time. And they offer this gift despite the apparent neglect I've been engaging in towards them, as one should purportedly prune them every year. Next month will mark the beginning of our eighth year in the homestead, and it will also mark the eight straight year in which exactly zero pruning of the sort described in the link has occured.

My Grandma Marie spent a considerable time working on things in the yard - in her garden and otherwise. It is certainly possible - tho I don't recall it - that she diligently pruned these bushes each year. But in more recent seasons benign neglect has been the law of the land.

Which isn't to say they've had no attention at all, despite the rough condition of the bush above. The nature of how they grow allows for things to take seed and root inside the bushes, and we do spend time each season removing those interlopers. And given the age of our lilacs, each season I do spend time extracting dead material. Lilacs can apparently live a couple of hundred years, depending on the variety, so it's possible that these have been here nearly as long as the house itself. I say nearly because, in the case of at least one of the bushes...:

Whether it was John Foulk and his immediate family who planted them sometime after taking that picture, or a later generation, it's clear that these bushes have been here for many decades at least, and each year blooming to herald the coming of the warm season.

Derilects

One of the more striking things about rural Illinois is the number of abandoned buildings. This includes buildings on properties that are otherwise clearly in active use - the old, empty barns tumbling down alongside newer, occupied machine sheds and similar types of buildings, to be sure. But also included in that list of unoccupied and unloved structures in the scenery are more personal places, like old schoolhouses and homes.

In some cases a place may just be clearly empty, but otherwise in good repair. It may be a home that you drive by regularly, across multiple times of day and night, and simply never see a vehicle in the drive, never a light on in the window, perhaps the care of the grounds isn't routinely attended to. These places seem to simply be waiting, hoping for new occupants to arrive and reinvigorate them.

In other cases, you will find former homes in various stages of tumbledown, sometimes at its earliest stage, where an enterprising homeowner might have the opportunity to pull it back from the abyss. Other times it's clear the building is beyond all hope.

In many ways these abandoned places simply reflect changes in the way people live, and in the way we move about. Fewer people live in rural areas now than they used to, and our small towns used to be part of the major thoroughfares for travel. Highways used to wend their way through rural towns, often directly through the downtown business district. The interstates have usurped that role, and often now people from other places recognize a small town by name only if it appears on a highway exit sign. Even then, what they know of the town itself may be limited to the gas stations, restaurants, and hotels that appear around the exit.

But while these decaying structures often just sit and embrace entropy, there are cases where property owners reclaim the space for other things. It might be hard to believe, but this lot, not terribly far from home, used to hold a small house and a couple of outbuildings:

I remember the house well from growing up out here - the bus went past it every day. It was nothing special - painted white, a story and a half, and perhaps 1000 square feet of floorplan. It was no architectural treasure, and likely no one will mourn its loss, myself included. Since taking the picture the piles of earth have been smoothed out, and the space is indistinguishable from the farmland that used to surround it. It will likely soon host a crop of corn or beans.

Ultimately, it seems likely that this is what will continue to occur out in these parts - this very rural area will become much more so, with homes themselves ever further and fewer between.

Burdock

If you have spent any time exploring unmanicured areas in northern Illinois you have undoubtedly encountered Burdock.

The Wikipedia entry for Burdock describes its role as a food item in Asian countries and as the inspiration for Velcro, which is all well and good. What Wikipedia fails to do is to accurately describe this plant as a hateful, invasive weed that is designed to wreak havoc on the coat of medium to long-furred canines passing by.

It's slightly possible that I have not been as diligent as I could have been at trimming around the old barn. One consequence of this oversight seems to be that of allowing a burgeoning colony of Burdock to grow in and around that area. What's more, if I wasn't aware of my lawn care failings of my own accord, Rosie, our border collie/Australian shepherd mix has been helpfully making me aware.

I need to do some further research here, but based upon our recent experiences, it seems quite possible that border collies and Australian shepherds were selectively bred as Burdock seed distribution devices.

Sometimes you can catch the seed pods shortly after they have attached, at which point they can be removed fairly easily. However, miss a day or two of grooming, or fail to detect the presence of one of these things during a grooming session, and it can work it's way into a mat of fur that seems to require divine intervention (or scissors) to remove.

It appears that it could certainly be worse than we have it here, as a quick google image search confirms. Still, this fact does not prevent this plant's placement on my "I wonder if extinction is always a bad thing" list.

Rotties and Woodpiles

In the back yard we have an old concrete slab that used to serve as a floor for a garage no longer present. On that slab we keep a Coleman fireplace for the occasional fire and, not coincidentally, a pile of firewood.

Over the years I have periodically walked past the wood pile to find it in disarray, pieces knocked to the side, bits fallen down. My typical strategy has been to look at this and (at best) sigh, and reassemble the pile. I've always assumed that this was the result of a dog jumping on, or perhaps into, the pile in pursuit of a mouse or similar prey, my wood-stacking abilities not sufficient to construct a pile with the integrity to withstand the errant canine snout poking it in just the right spot.

I had no idea.

This afternoon I discovered mice in my tool bucket (f&@king things). I wanted to dump out the bucket to separate the vermin from my wrenches and other sundry implements of destruction, but I was at a loss as to where to dump it. The driveway and garage floor weren't options, as I had no specific idea as to what was in the bottom of the bucket beneath the mice, but I knew there was a good likelihood that at least some of it was sharp. And I certainly didn't want to dump the mice anywhere near the house.

LB suggested I dump it on the slab, out back. I pronounced this a brilliant idea, and we set off towards making it so.

As soon as the bucket was upended the mice skittered. We'd counted at least three babies and one mother when we viewed it from the top. Once dumped there were at least five juveniles that scurried out along with mom, and most headed straight for - you've likely guessed it already: the woodpile.

All of this happened under the watchful eye of Freyja, our Rottweiler mix. She immediately began sniffing about at, and sticking her nose into, the woodpile.

I have personally long had a bias towards breeds that fall into what one traditionally thinks of as part of the herding group - border collies, cattle dogs, shepherds, and the like. I like those breeds because they are bright, capable animals who work with you rather than just obediently follow. Lots of owners want a lovable dufus, but I am not one of them. Casting them in with that lot, my attitude towards Rottweilers was the same as I held towards most other breeds: disinterest.

Again: no idea.

While Freyja is smaller than a full-bred Rottie, her head is much too big to poke in between the logs, which one would expect to ultimately stymie her attempts at mouse hunting.

One, perhaps, did not expect the problem-solving that followed:

Apparently, when you are a Rottweiler and you cannot get your (huge) head in-between the logs you just remove the logs in a canine game of Jenga until you can.

And she did - she steps away at the end with a mouse in her mouth.

...and left me, once again, to re-stack the woodpile.

What's He Growing Out There?

Something... different is happening around us this year.

We are surrounded on all sides by farmland, and three of those four sides are owned by my cousin. Most years he plants corn, but sometimes soybeans or a mixture of the two. We never know which until we see things start to sprout, and that's a bit of the adventure of living out here.

Yes, we could probably ask, but one of the joys of country living for this introvert is that I'm not routinely interacting with my neighbors. I suspect most of the people living around me have a similar perspective - it's part of why one chooses to live out here.

At any rate, this year is different.

What's coming up around us looks like clover (and I've learned something new today: apparently there is a dating app called Clover, and it occupies the first four hits on Google). It looks like this up close:

And looking across the field:

A Google image search doesn't help much, since much of it seems to focus on either idealized images or a couple of specific types of clover.

The Wikipedia page on clover suggests good reasons why it might be planted around us - apparently the plant is related to peas, and fixes nitrogen in a similar fashion, refreshing the soil. Its also an important component of hay, which is my cousin's primary crop.

Eventually I'll probably get around to asking him. But for the moment I'm rather enjoying the mystery. What's he growing out there? What the hell is he growing out there...

Warm Weather Approaches

We've had a very cool spring - I could hear the furnace kick on periodically well into April. As we got through May, however, things finally warmed up. Temperatures around these parts have stopped shy of the 90's so far, but we've had some solid mid-80° days.

Temperature control year round is an issue for our old house. We've talked quite a bit here about taking measures - some more successful than others - to manage the cold. Hot weather is also a challenge, though less-so than winter.

We do have central air conditioning. This was something that we had installed by the second year or so that we lived here. My grandparents did not have it, and my uncle will tell sad stories of summer nights in his bedroom just wishing that his sister - my mother - would open up her bedroom door so that the southern breeze entering her room could be shared across the hallway into his.

As I understand the story, she never gave in, selfishly hoarding the refreshing summer breeze to herself; The story, at least, as my uncle tells it.

While we have the central air available, however, we use it sparingly. It gets hot here now, and it also got hot back in the 1860's, when the house was built. With the absence of technological interventions like air conditioning, they employed other strategies to keep the building relatively cool. Those strategies, and the support systems for them, still work today.

Most of this involves keeping the house closed up. Part of this is focused on making sure all windows and doors are sealed during the part of the day in which the outside air is warmer than the inside air. Having it sealed prevents temperature exchange, and the inside will stay much cooler than one would expect without the help of AC.

Another part of being closed up refers to covering windows - particularly those facing south and west. This decreases heat gain from sunlight, keeping rooms that would otherwise be scorching hot from reaching those temperatures and sharing them with the rest of the building. You can see this strategy employed in one of the few very old pictures of the house that we have:

If you look closely you will see that this picture - clearly taken in the daylight in summer - shows that every window has shutters on it, and every shutter is closed. They were external shutters, in this case, which also had the benefit of protecting the glass in high winds. A few of those shutters are still around, incidentally. My grandfather repurposed some of them into use on the enclosed porch windows (the windows were also repurposed from the old bay window that was taken out - the shutters covered the bay windows as well), and into a closet door. Others are out in the shed, far the worse for wear. I'd love someday to be able to use them as a template for new versions, though that's far down the list.

The final part of the strategy for staying cool is something I am thankful my ancestors took care of for me: shade.

We have very large trees to the south and west of the house, planted by enterprising relatives likely both to cool the building and protect it from the wind. It's a gift that just keeps on giving.

To be clear, we still give in and kick the AC on when the weather gets too hot, and particularly when it gets too humid. While I love the care and attention that my ancestors paid to keeping the house cool, that love only goes so far on a 98° day with 95% humidity.

Barn Swallows

If the Red-wing Blackbirds are a sign of early spring, the arrival of the Barn Swallows indicates that Mother Nature is finally confident the season will persist.

These birds are truly amazing - arial gymnasts that pluck insects out of the sky in mid-flight. They are a country phenomenon, needing open space to fly and structures in which to nest. This time of year you may encounter them when driving down a country road; or, if you live out here, mowing the grass will bring them out in droves, which is why you see them flying about in this video:

(Because they are relatively small and move so much, they can be difficult to pick up on a mobile phone camera)

I, personally, embrace any critters that decrease the resident population of insects and vermin, though opinions vary within the Homestead household (LB will not now, nor has she ever seen fit to suffer a spider to live). More than most animals that provide this contribution, though, these birds put on a show that is delightful to see throughout the spring and summer.

Damp

The past week, and the entirety of this weekend (thus far) has been rainy and cool. This is part of spring in this section of the country, of course, but it gets old. It also illustrates one of the limitations of country life: Most of the year, in both sun and snow, there is something attractive about spending time outside. But this type of weather is really just... Damp. The ground is saturated, the moisture clings to you when you are outside. It's not inviting.

Of course, the glass-half-full way of looking at this is to consider it an opportunity to enjoy some quiet time, alone or with family, reading, writing, or catching up on episodes of favorite shows. Our old house offers spaces for each of those activities. With the multiple rooms and amount of space in the home, there's room to gather if you like, but also multiple spaces offering a quiet, secluded nook if that's what you prefer.

The struggle comes when what one would prefer is a space to move around and do something more active. Because of its 19th century design, the house is big, but holds many rooms within that space. There are larger rooms on the main floor, but once furniture is in place there's not a great deal of room for continuous movement (e.g. For something like a martial arts form).

This isn't, of course, much of an issue after a couple of days of rain. After a week of it, though, it is something one becomes more aware of.

Spring Birds

One of the delights of life out on the Homestead is the veritable orgy of birdsong in early Spring. This recording was made yesterday morning, standing in the back yard with an iPhone in the air (you can hear the spring winds in this in addition to the birds).

Joining the array of LBB's and Cardinals that remain year round are the Mourning Doves, Robins, and one of my favorites, the Red Wing Blackbird.

In addition to the delight of the birdsong itself, the sudden preponderance of avian activity whips both the dogs and the cat into a frenzy of activity. Outdoors the herding dogs make great efforts to "guide" the flocks of birds from tree to tree, while indoors Malcolm the cat sprints from window to window (and we have a lot of windows) in an effort to see and, one strongly suspects, in hopes of catching an errant bird that might, somehow, wander in through the glass.

Spring Snow

When I awoke this morning this was the view out the window at the top of the back steps:

This is the latest I have ever seen snow on the ground in this area. Occasionally we'll see bits of wintry mix - snow intermingled with rain - in early spring, but this is unusual. It doesn't usually stick.

It won't last, of course. The mist in the distance is the snow sublimating away in the morning sun, and open patches are already appearing in the field to the south. The high today is projected at 50°, so everything that isn't in northern shade will likely be gone by midday.

Still, it's like winter is hanging on with one last, desperate attempt to remain, to be remembered.