The Other Melugin Grove Cemetary

This has been a bit of a quest.

Back when I wrote about the Melugin Grove Cemetary I noted that i had become aware of it because my uncle had told of it. As I mentioned then, it was a bit of a goldmine of former ancestors, and provided helpful technical information - birth and death dates and, in at least one case, allowed me to identify a marital partner for a cousin of a couple of generations back.

When I told my uncle about it he laughed a bit and said "that's not it", and noted that the one he meant was down a hidden path, lost behind the trees. I've been looking for it since, all along Shaw Road - lots of miles logged on the bike in that search, and many hours in the satellite view of Apple and Google Maps. I'd begun to think he must be mistaken about the road it was on, and that he was perhaps remembering a different place - something like Inlet Cemetary, which is a registered Cemetary not that far away that also happens to be in the middle of a field, behind some trees.

I should not have doubted him.

To say that this cemetary, which contains the final resting place of Zachariah Melugin, the man after whom the grove was named, is "down a hidden path" strains the definition of the word "path". But it is here, and it has the appearance of being maintained still, thanks to Boy Scout Troop 85.

The graves are old, with some dating back to at least the 1850's. At least, because the majority of them are at least partially illegible, and many completely so.

There are perhaps two dozen graves visible. One of the sources I used to locate the site indicates that several of the graves had to be uncovered. What is visible makes one wonder if there might be still more here - the clearing it occupies is much larger than the space in which the stones appear.

And those sources? How did I find it? I think this one I'll keep close to the vest. It seems like a thing this hard to find wants you to work to find it - nothing this special should be casually obtained, or revealed such that it would seem easy prey to vandals.

Melugin Grove is a Place

Finding and exploring the back roads in the region seems to have stimulated my appetite for information about the geography of the area, and led to some wondering as to what it must have been like to live here during that time.

I realized - not for the first time, but this time it must have sunk in - while looking at a map of the area this morning that, as far as that map is concerned, Melugin Grove is still a place. This may be an odd thing to say, I suppose, but I believe I come by it honestly. There are dozens of place names on the area map that no longer correspond to anything that people traveling today, at 60 miles an hour in a car, would consider a separate place. The towns of Compton and West Brooklyn, for example, tiny as they are still contain a small arrangement of streets and houses that make it clear that they are places - self-standing entities, of a sort, a thing, a village or town.

But as you look on the map there are other "places" that appear in the area, with names - The Burg, for example, at or near the intersection of Shaw Road and Rt 251, or Shaws, at the intersection of Shaw and Inlet roads - where it is difficult to understand, even when one goes there, how these were considered a place worthy of a name. Sometimes, with practice, you can begin to see what might have led to it. Shaws, for example, has a a few houses in closer proximity than typically seen along a country road, a former church, a decaying gas station at the intersection, and the tumbledown remnants of what appears to have been a one-room school house (there are more of these out here than you'd think). The Burg, alternately, provides nothing to suggest anything was there, no visual hint to why it would have a name.

There are similar peculiarities - running through the area is Beemerville Road, which one might expect would be part of the straightforward naming strategy seen in the area of naming the roads after the places they go. West Brooklyn Road goes to West Brooklyn, Compton Road leads to Compton, Paw Paw Road... You get the idea. But Beemerville road? No sign of a "Beemerville" on the map anywhere along its approximately five miles of length, not even as a forgotten place name, an atavistic map icon. Was it a place once? The Melugin Grove Cemetery has has its fair share of Beemers laid to rest, so one suspects it may have been. But apparently no longer.

But Melugin Grove is still a place, at least according to Apple Maps, falling in an oddly-shaped territory framed by Carnahan Road to the west, Richards and Melugin Grove (natch) Roads to the east, Shaw Road to the south, and Butler Hill Road to the north.

In the grand scheme of things it's a small place - a little over 650 acres - but at the slower, smaller scale of moving through it on the ground, in my case on a bicycle, it feels substantial. Like so much of this little area, it's heavily wooded to a degree that can make one feel pleasantly separated and, when looking in toward the area identified on the map one sees a far higher proportion of trees and grassy clearings to crops than in most parts of the region. It has the feeling of a different place - more central Wisconsin than Northern Illinois. It becomes easy to imagine why an early settler, particularly if he or she did not fancy themselves future farmers, would choose to stop here.

Melugin Grove - beyond the bean field - from the North.

Back Roads

I complained a few months ago about the lack of wooded areas to hike in and explore on the prairie, grousing over the rarity of stands of trees. While this is technically true, it is, perhaps, an unfair characterization.

In our immediate area the land is relatively flat and open, to be sure. Still, one doesn't have to travel far to get some geographic variation. A few miles away is an area historically referred to collectively as "the groves" and, as the name implies, these areas are considerably more woodsy today, as they were back when they'd first attained that name.

To be clear, there were several groves, one of which was Melugin Grove, where I found the cemetery containing Joel Compton's grave. This article discusses, among other things, how the groves were an attractive site for early settlers, offering wood for building and fuel, and what was undoubtedly an abundance of wildlife for hunting.

While the land is almost certainly different than it was back then - a fair amount of it is cultivated for agriculture - the features of the area still leave it feeling more wild than the flatter land a few miles away. In parts this is almost certainly because the area is marshy and challenging to work with.

Most of the property is private, which in and of itself continues the complaint that I made back in late winter. However, public roads run through them, which makes them accessible by foot, by car, or by bike, which is my preference. Head out on these lightly traveled back roads, and within a fairly short distance things start to seem very remote indeed:

For better or worse these areas didn't become the long-term thriving communities that the early pioneers perhaps pictured. As such, many of the roads are still gravel, and several are single-track passageways that are barely wide enough for a single car to travel. It offers a very nice opportunity to get back to nature, and a bonus, lets one feel a little of what it must have been like to travel through this land back in those pioneer days.

Family Trees

The long weekend offered by the Fourth of July has provided an opportunity to address a number of little projects that have been sitting, waiting. Among these is making a digital copy of the family tree that my uncle had put together.

Constructing a physical family tree is a bit of a logistical nightmare because of the way the tree fans out away from whomever your starting person is. My uncle is decidedly, and unashamedly, a man of physical media, which is why his solution involves paper and tape:

I am, of course, taking the opportunity to photograph and take scans of this document so I can have a digital version both for my reference, and for preservation. My uncle's work on his tree has been entirely non-digital, and so it provides a valuable verification source against which to compare my online research.

Much of my homework on the family tree has been done through Ancestry.Com. Anyone who has used this source is almost certainly aware of the amount of metaphorical heavy lifting it completes for you in terms of research. Being plugged into a huge library of census and other records is a huge boon, and the fact that others are also often researching parts of your family tree means that there is an uncoordinated group effort which can be very helpful.

So why the paper version? While I'm a fan of technology in general, I am well aware that the accuracy of the information gathered online is only as good as the expertise of the people putting it together. The reality is that neither I, nor many of the other people putting their trees together, am really expert in constructing a tree. For many people, myself included, it's an activity undertaken in fits and starts, when a large enough bit of free time presents itself to allow for the extended time sink that is family research.

The digital versions offer ways to manage large volumes of information relatively easily, and to provide reports on that information in attractive and interesting ways. Ancestry.com has an app for the iPad, for example, that lays out your entire tree in multiple views, and provides background information that you've assembled for each person on the tree. This is great, and again makes it easier to put this information together. But because of the time and effort this all takes, I periodically worry about the information I've gathered in that spot because it is essentially held by that company.

While the company is functional and healthy, it's in its financial best interests to ensure that one has easy access to one's records. This isn't the part that concerns me. But what happens if and when the company is no longer functional and healthy? What happens when Ancestry.com goes out of business?

For this reason I actually maintain two family trees, one through Ancestry and one on private geneology software. And even that is vulnerable to the perils of obsolescence.

All of which makes it clear that the paper and tape solution also has its advantages.

Recycling

My grandparents were the last inhabitants of our old house. They were not especially well-to-do, but my grandfather was handy. The combination of these two facts can be seen around the home. Probably my favorite example, which I touched on briefly in another recent post, was the repurposing of materials from the old bay window that was on the south side of the house:

At some point in my grandparent's occupancy that window began to leak, and my Grandpa Ray made the call to remove it and replace it. In its place he installed a large multiple pane picture window, which still occupies that space today:

This decision seems to have been a practical one - either the bay window was worn beyond repair, or perhaps to a degree that was beyond Ray's capabilities to rectify. In either case, however, removal of that item did not signify the end of its useful life.

Two of the windows, and their shutters, were repurposed. If you look closely at the first, older picture you can see that the house originally had an open porch entry into the back door:

It's since been enclosed, and a close look at the second picture shows that Ray repurposed two of those windows for service on that enclosed porch:

And, not only did he repurpose the Windows, but the shutters continue to grace them on the inside:

This seems again, eminently practical, as the porch windows face south, and the temperature in the space can otherwise heat up considerably.

This is all pretty straightforward, of course, but there is also at least one example of some real imagination and out-of-the box thinking:

These shutters - which appear to be the same shutters as those on the porch - are serving as a closet door for the room that was once my grandparent's bedroom. Two of the shutters are fastened together on one side, and the other is free, to make a sort of double door.

I saw this closet door many, many times across the course of my childhood. It was so familiar to me from such an early age that I don't believe it had ever occurred to me to ask, or even wonder, why the door was made from shutters. Having been away for a while, and coming back, combined with having the old pictures of the house to compare against has given the the opportunity to begin asking, and understanding, about these things. In a lot of ways it helps me to better get to know my grandfather, who died when I was only six.

It also means that, with the closet door and the porch windows, seven of the eight shutters from the original bay window - shutters first built in 1861 - have survived to current day. This might seem a small thing to others, but to me this is a pretty cool thing.

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.

Mother's Day

Mother's Day in our Homestead makes me think about my mother, of course, and it also brings me to think about family and lineage and all that entails.

Many generations of family lived here in the homestead, and that's been nearly a continual thing since the 1940's. My Grandparents moved in to the homestead in that era, and left their stamp on the place. Going back through records and pictures we came across this picture of my Grandmother - Marie (Foulk) Johnson:

It's in a little folding paper frame, and on the facing cover she had written "Oodles of Love - Marie".

I suspect the picture comes from a time period before she lived in this house - she grew up in a house just down the road. But I love the tiny window it offers into her personality. I had the good fortune to spend a great deal of time with Grandma Marie growing up, and I have very fond memories of her - cooking in the kitchen, working in the garden, talking about family and family history, and chasing away the cats - the many farm cats that she professed to hate - who were perpetually trying to get into the house. She'd swipe at the cats with her feet or broom and shout ”Here now!" (though "here" was pronounced "hair" for this particular task).

When frustrated she never swore, but would utter oaths in German - I remember heil ich Miona and ach du Lieber Strosak. She didn't speak German - as I understand it, her generation was encouraged to learn English, perhaps to better assimilate, perhaps so that adults could speak freely without being overheard by children, perhaps a bit of both.

I am blessed that I got to know her very well, and this due to a clearly strong relationship between her and my own mother, who grew up in this very house.

This is a picture of my mother and her brother, Mom striking a jaunty pose, he looking dapper in his uniform, just outside the back porch at the bell post.

We lived for several years in a house a mile across the field from this one. I have enduring memories of my mother talking with hers on the phone - our wall-mounted kitchen phone, with the cord (that had to be twenty feet long if it was an inch) stretching across the room, ear piece cradled on her neck - while preparing breakfast, writing checks, or what have you. I always knew, if I'd heard the start of the conversation, that it was Grandma that my Mom was talking to, because the call would start out with Mom saying "Ma'am? Sam here".

In fact, I have a received memory - one I don't recall directly, but retain from the story being told again and again - of my mother catching fire (briefly) while on the phone with her mother while working in the kitchen, and my toddler-age response being "telephone hot, mama"...

These memories are often on tap, and I firmly believe they remain stronger still with the surrounding homestead to help keep them in focus. On this Mother's Day I find them in sharp focus, and that makes me very happy. My mother did a fantastic job raising us, and the close relationship between her and her mother was a wonderful model to see.

Thanks Mom - I Love You!

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.

Orchard Update

Last summer we planted some fruit trees - a cherry, pear, and cold-hardy peach - to join our loan apple tree on the property. Planting new trees is sometimes a hit or miss proposition. We seem to have been fortunate with this trio:

All three trees seem to have made their way through the winter (I was a little worried about the peach tree), and two of the three are flowering. This suggests the potential for a little fruit this season.

Orchard under way!

Melugin Grove Cemetary

My journey down the road of researching family geneology comes in fits and starts. It occurs when I have some free time (often a rare commodity) or when I see or hear something that sparks my interest.

At a family gathering a few weeks ago my uncle mentioned a small cemetery in Melugin Grove, hidden behind some trees. This piqued my interest and so, a few days later, when the opportunity presented itself, I decided to see if I could find it.

It was easier to find than I expected, aided in part by the fact that it's early spring, and the trees that would typically hide it were still bare.

As I suspect is true of all places, there are many small regions in the area that carry obscure, nearly forgotten place names that were probably more sensible and useful when travel was done on foot or via horse. When you are moving through the countryside at four to eight miles an hour it makes sense to give distinct names to locations that are a few miles apart. A trip from Shaws to Melugin Grove - about 9 miles - would have been a two-hour walk or ride, perhaps trimmed to an hour if your horse was willing.

We lose that now, when the same trip takes about 10 minutes. Rather than learning about the landscape and making note of it to tell where we are, it becomes a thing to move through, an obstacle to endure, or perhaps to enjoy briefly as scenery, but not much else.

Melugin's Grove (pronounced "Ma-lew-jin", according to my uncle, who I suspect is right, this being an area about which he knows a great deal, rather than a variation of "Mulligan", which is how I've always pronounced it) is of interest to the Homestead because it's the place name given to the area just outside the town and area of Compton, Illinois. And Joel Compton was my Great-Great-Great (or "3rd Great" in the parlance of Ancestry.Com) Grandfather on my mother's side.

So this meant the cemetery might yield some interesting things:

Joel Compton has always been sort of a minor mystical figure in my mind. The Village of Compton is, and always has been, a relatively tiny place - a little over 400 people at its peak in 1900, considerably fewer in current day. Regardless, it's a bit of something to have a place named after an ancestor and, for me, that abstract fact was the only real information I had on Joel Compton. A gravestone is, however, a solid, tangible thing, making his existence somehow more real.

Also present were grave sites of several of his family members, and others, including my Great-Great Grandparents on my mother's side, Benjamin F Johnson and Arilla (Compton) Johnson:

It's a sign of the era that Benjamin's marker has his full name, and Arilla's says "Arilla His Wife"

There are lots of these cemetaries in the area - larger ones, like the ones you find on the outskirts of town, and smaller ones, little municipal cemetaries like Melugin Grove. There are also private cemetaries in local churchyards, and sometimes family plots, often with a dozen or two grave sites, or sometimes fewer, moldering away on small back roads. At Melugin Grove Cemetery I found these specific sites on my first pass through, and saw many other family names that are familiar - some because I know them from living in the region, but some because I believe I have seen them in the family tree. I'll be back here later on, when I've had a chance to look back through those records and see who else I can find.

Spring Birds

Homestead Spring Birds 3-26-16

Erin Wade

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.

Non-Deprivation

One of the assumptions that might be made about living in the middle of nowhere is that it's a harsh, simple life. Limited entertainment, limited options, etc. This was true when I was growing up out here. Televisual entertainment was limited to three, or sometimes four or five, channels. Where we were at in Northern Illinois we could get the three major networks out of Rockford - ABC, CBS, and NBC. Occasionally we would get a couple of additional channels - 9 out of Chicago 9 - WGN - which carried the Cubs games, I guess, but more importantly carried The Bozo Show - and channel 32, which featured Son of Svengoolie, among other televisual delights.

If this sounds like I'm trying to make something big out of something pretty limited, you're right. It was what we had.

What made access to those far away channels even worse was that they made us aware of exotic possibilities in far away lands - the Old Chicago amusement park, shopping at Insurance Liquidators, or buying carpet from Empire. There was always the promise of things I could have, if only I lived in a more urban, more cosmopolitan location.

A delightful reality of the modern age is that most of those limitations have been eliminated. Want something? Order it from Amazon - it will be here within a couple of days.

Yes - things are different now. This very evening I'm playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombie with LB and her cousins. They started out on the XBox One and then moved on to the iPads so that we could play a cooperative game together. Delightful.

The upshot of all this? It's no longer the major sacrifice it once was to live out in the country. It's true that our home is still well off the beaten track. Still, with the Internet in its various forms, and delivery services being what they are now, it's not a life where the trade off for peace and quiet is deprivation (we can even get a pizza delivered out here). Rather, you can access the things you want and the big city - if it really seems necessary - is an hour down the road (Rockford) or an hour and a half away (Chicago) by rail.

Return to Normalcy

As has been hinted at before, I've reluctantly been party to allowing an animal of the feline persuasion take up residence in our house. What has not been mentioned formally here, is that we now also have a part-time inside canine companion as well.

Let's get something out of the way here: I love animals.

I cannot remember a time in my life when, the opportunity being present, I have not had either a dog or cat as a part of the household. As a child growing up in the country my earliest memories were of a dog - a male dog - named Gladys (thanks Mom), who was my constant companion as I ran around the yard engaged in different outside adventures. There were a series of different farm dogs over the course of my youth and, when we lived in situations where dogs were not an option, typically there were cats.

And this is not to suggest that the cats were merely dog substitutes. We've had a lot of personality in our feline companions, with cats that would fetch, cats that would walk on leash (hiking with a cat on a leash brings much apparent amusement to others you encounter on the trails, I can personally verify; more amusement still when said cat gets startled by something and jumps, claws out, to cling to your leg... But I digress). Our current cat compadre is no exception, frequently, suddenly, running at speeds of 90 mph from one location to another in the house for reasons that are clear to no one except, maybe, himself.

My reluctance has little to do with the animals themselves, and more to do with their potential affect on the home itself. As I've likely mentioned here before, buildings of this era were typically constructed with the materials locally available. The upshot of this, in our case, is that much of the wood in the house, including the floors, is soft pine.

It's lovely stuff, taken from a big picture perspective. It takes both paint and stain beautifully; it feels wonderful under bare feet, both warm and pleasantly textured. The problem is in the operative term "soft". The wood in these floors has a Moh's Hardness rating slightly above that of modeling clay. Have a rock in the tread of your shoe? Now you have pits at regular intervals across the floor. Slide a chair out from the table on to the floor? That action has now been recorded for generations of enduring posterity. God forbid one sits in an office chair with wheels and actually rolls back and forth along this material.

And so our companion animals, it turns out, have claws. The upside with our feline friends is that they are retractable. The canine ones, not so much. Allow a dog to go marching along the floor - especially an 80 LB Rottweiller mix who wants to engage in bounding play with a certain feline - and you end up with fascinating cross-hatch patterns in the grain that will likely entertain future generations for hours as they try to puzzle out their origin. Or so I imagine.

...Ahem...

Fortunately, it turns out that there are potential solutions for this sort of issue. MLW researched and turned up...

...drumroll please...

Dog socks.

So here you have a product designed with exactly our problem in mind. They completely cover the dog's claws, up to and including the dewclaws, and as a bonus also have traction areas on them to help the dog better gain purchase on the slippery floor (much to the cat's dismay). And, as an additional bonus, you get to watch the dog struggle with the irritation and embarrassment of having socks on.

Ultimately this solves a couple of problems for us. Aside from the floor issues, two of our three dogs are completely comfortable outside virtually all of the time (fear not - they have shelter available outside and we do bring them in when it's beastly cold), but the third - the Rottweiler mix - has shorter hair, and doesn't seem to have the traditional Rottweiler undercoat (a result, no doubt of the mix, which seems likely to be Boxer) that purebred examples have. Her temperament also makes her much more suitable to extended stays inside. Our high energy herding dogs spend most of each day and night on patrol about the yard, while this one is perfectly content to patrol her dog bed for hours at a time.

What does this all mean? For the moment, at least, it means that we've got a way to have this critter inside, along with our new feline friend, without worrying about the utter destruction of the house. Which means life seems a little more normal for us.

Out of the Woods

For a large portion of the past three weeks or so I've been home sick with one ailment or another. When cold and flu season rears its ugly head apparently it can take anyone down, even if he's had a flu shot...

I was finally feeling up to moving about at the end of this week, and fate put me in Rockford with an afternoon largely untethered, so I headed out to Rock Cut State Park. With temps in the 40's for the past couple of days the hiking trails offered an... interesting mix of surfaces for the hiking boot to address. It turns out that the combination of ice and snow plus dirt in temperatures above freezing may not be the ideal recipe for traction.

Fortunately, I only fell on my ass once, and that event did not appear to occur in front of people.

I've made reference to Rock Cut here a couple of times. For a person who spends time in Rockford IL, and is looking for a bit of woodsy nature to take the edge off, it's a reliable port. Taking the opportunity to work one's way back into the deeper part of the woods during a melt does not disappoint, even with the risk of an occasional slip and fall.

I sent the picture above to MLW a few seconds after I took it. She asked if it was a picture from Walden, and I thought, more or less, yes. Rock Cut is not remote - there are few parts of the park in which one cannot hear traffic on nearby streets, even when one seems to be deep in the woods. But then neither was Thoreau's site at Walden Pond. He was within just a few miles of his own home and, if memory serves, living on land owned by a friend. It wasn't an exercise in harsh survivalism, just in retreat to nature.

It illustrates to me the differences that context can make. I've watched the snow and ice melt here at the homestead over the past few days, and mostly what it makes me think of is the mud with which we will be, and are, contending. At home it's a problem to be dealt with. Walking through through the trees at Rock Cut its an inconvenience to be tolerated, and this despite the fact that I'm much less likely to slip and fall at home.

Our homestead is a beautiful place most of the year - we have trees, and open space, and privacy. Still, one of the things the prairie offers very little of is anything that one might truly refer to as woods. There are stands of trees that one can see if one looks off in the distance. However, these are often narrow patches a couple of hundred yards wide, framing a stream of one sort or another - not the sort of thing that allows one to feel truly lost and removed from all else. Besides that, these are typically private property, most notably not mine and, oddly, not everyone is enamored with the idea of strangers marching around on their land.

There are actually similar options in the area. Just south of Mendota is a small, wooded park called Snyder's Grove. This was the site of many scout trips and picnics in my youth. The Little Vermillion River runs through it, and the park has hiking trails. The travel time to this location from my home is similar to the time that it used to take me to wind my way through the traffic and stop lights of greater Rockford to get to Rock Cut. And, of course, given all of that, how many times have I gone there in the nearly seven years that we've lived at the homestead?

That's right: zero

Now is the Winter of My Discontent

It's not a popular position to take, but I really enjoy winter.

The first real snowfall of the season always makes me smile, and I'm more than happy to make the trade off of cold temperatures for fun in the snow.

The key word here, in case it's not clear, is: SNOW

Of course, this is a commodity of which we've had precious little this year. Of course, this is in part because we've had weeks of temperatures in the 40's, a fact that it's hard to complain about, even if it does mean that my cross-country skis sit, dusty, lonely, and unused, in the rafters of the garage.

All of which would be fine if it weren't 14° outside as I write this on a Friday night, working towards a low of -4°, with 20 mph winds coming out of the northwest. The deal, as I see it, is that we deal with the cold, and then we get to play in the snow. Clearly, Mother Nature has reneged on the deal.

Do you think I can get her to renegotiate our contract?

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Update

Today, a couple of days after I wrote this, we are in the middle of a snowstorm. This would seem to be a counter to my complaints. But the high temp on order. For tomorrow is 34°, and 38° for the day after. By Thursday next they are calling for temps in the 40's.

Snow today means nothing if it won't stay. Under these circumstances, it's nothing but fluffy rain.

Dirty

Early on in the text of one of the homesteading books we own (The Self-Sufficiency Handbook: A Complete Guide to Greener Living by Alan and Gill Bridgewater) is a warning that country living is typically a dirty thing. By "dirty" here they are referring to literal dirt ("Mud, mud, and more mud!"), and they are so very correct.

As I write this we are experiencing a pseudo-spring here in northern Illinois. Temperatures the past couple of days have seen highs in the 40's (F), lows in the 20's, and that looks to be something that will be sustained yet for the next couple of days. The temperature itself makes one think about the possibility of doing things outside.

That is, until one actually goes outside.

The terrain during one of these partial thaws is somewhat interesting, from an academic perspective. It's warm enough outside that one ventures out in flannel or a sweatshirt - sans jacket - for short periods of time. The snow from a few weeks before has melted, but not entirely - it's spared in those areas where it had drifted into especially thick piles, or where there is not sustained sunlight sufficient to cause it to yield. Where it remains it is changed - no longer the bright, stark landscape covering and conquering what is below, it instead now begins to incorporate that landscape, presenting in shades of gray.

Meanwhile, the ground itself has begun to thaw, but only at the top layer. This leaves a semi-liquid layer of topsoil floating on a solid substrate. It slides and squishes beneath the feet in a fashion that would feel familiar to anyone who has ever had the joy of mucking out an animal stall.

This weather presents what is likely the only time of year that I find myself envying, if slightly, the town- and city-dwellers. The proportion of concrete to soil in town means that one is only really experiencing the upsides of the warm weather, and can ignore the niggling frustration of the mud by simply avoiding it.

Sudden Cat Toy

As I walk up the steep back steps of our old homestead, as I mount the first landing and turn to make my way up the second, shorter flight, I find myself face to face with a sudden cat toy.

When we moved out to the Homestead we had four animals in our entrouage - two cats and two dogs - all of significant advanced age. Three of the four, though beloved, struggled to retain their bodily fluids, choosing (or, rather, not) instead to share them with us throughout the home. Often this occurred in unexpected and intimate places, it becoming not uncommon to find the need to change bedding before going to sleep, a laundry basket now reeked of something more than the human sweat of the day.

The fourth member of the coterie didn't seem to have this problem, surprisingly enough. He, struggling with Canine Cognitive Disfunction, simply could no longer remember his name, and wandered throughout the house following the other dog, often appearing slightly surprised at each location, though they were not new to him.

After these companions moved on I announced, as the man of the house, the king of the castle, that there would be no more inside animals.

As did Henry VIII, I have discovered that, king or not, there is still a parliament to contend with. I have been outvoted. And so there is a cat toy, suddenly there, at the top of the steps.