Leaf(s)

Same reference photo, but wood vs canvas. This image made me hate negative space SO much.

Oak leaves.

One solitary floating sycamore leaf after a flood.

Fall has been nice (scenery-wise), but I do hope we have a good, cold winter this year.

I'm ready for this. But with more snow.

Rock

This is my favorite rock.

There are other massive limestone chunks about halfway up the mountain, quite some distance away. This one, though, is just sitting at the base of the mountain all by itself. It is perfect for sitting on (or beside). It's incredibly calming. It's a great rock.

Leaf

Yesterday evening, on the second-to-last dogwalk of the day (eye-roll), I was enjoying the leaves behind the ridge. I picked up Just One, as one does. Then more. And more.

If you want to paint or draw them, feel free.

The tower road

Yesterday evening we saw a big tractor-trailer and several other pieces of large equipment leaving Home Farm. A man from the radio tower company saw me a couple weeks ago and mentioned that they were going to fix the huge ruts in the tower road (that I also use to get up to the fruit trees on the ridge.) I'm hoping they did a good job fixing, and I'll be able to drive up there without worrying about my car's undercarriage. Fingers crossed!

Dog walking

The first dogwalk of the day was lit by the last light of the super Hunter's Moon. It was lovely, especially with the crunch of frost beneath our feet, but I had no way to photograph it. The second dogwalk of the day was midmorning.

Lady, the leader of the pack, dramatically backlit as she surveys her domain (the yard and garden). Rosalie was unphotographable, as she was lurking under my feet.

The smoke from the woodstove drifts out across the field, mingling with rising mist as the frost goes back into the air.

Big logs waiting to be cut and split into firewood.

I didn't think about counting the rings on that tree slice before I started painting on it. I sat down with the second one, though, and made as careful a count as I could. The rings at the outer edge are so narrow that it's hard to be certain of an exact age, but it's definitely over 100. It's amazing, honestly, that it lived over a hundred years and stayed so small! Also, it seems to have started off with a double trunk, which is not the best. I originally thought it was from a dead ash, but Husband said it was elm. It may have gotten Dutch elm disease near the end of its life, and cut way back on growth because of that. It had been standing dead for a few years before it fell, but we could estimate that it sprouted around 1910.

There's about 15 feet of log like this that could be cut into 'cookies' for painting. Also a smaller-diameter section that could be fun, too.

Damp October

The rain stopped, at least enough for me to take Lady out for a walk. As Sondheim said, Into the Woods!

Happy dog, drippy woods.

Here is a little bit of a new trail the Bike Boys have been working on. This section goes across the slope instead of straight up or down.

Many, many tiny shelf fungi.

Cottage

I've recently seen several critiques of 'cottagecore.' They seem to hinge on the fact that the folks presenting and consuming this type of content are (I'm searching for words, here) more about appearance and aesthetic than actual life. It's a bit thought-provoking for me.

I have a garden and an orchard. Chickens. I frequently walk around barefoot. I have long hair. I know how to milk a cow or goat. I make jam, forage wild foods, and can vegetables.

Am I cottagecore? (seriously, if you're a follower and have an opinion about this, you may share it)

As I read and learn more about this, I think that I am probably not. However, I could make an argument that I'm what cottagecore would like to be. I've lived this way all my life. My mother, grandmothers, and further back lived this way. Nothing that I'm doing here is done to be 'cute'; it's all 100% functional. Hero happens to be cute and functional, but he's allowed to be. He was born cute.

It's just weird to read and essay or watch a Youtube video that critiques cottagecore by claiming that this stuff is kinda misleading and made-up-for-internet-clout (it sure can be) and that people don't actually live that way. We. uh. Some of us do. And were doing so a long time before the internet existed. Makes me feel a little weird about posting my farm stories, to be honest.

I've been posting garden 'progress' pictures every month on the 25th since my husband planted the first things in March. How can six months go by so damned fast and also seem subjectively like two years? Things are close to wrapping up, now.

Beets, carrots, potatoes, and sweet potatoes are all still in the ground. I need to dig them, but they're happy where they are and low on my list of priorities.

The bell peppers produced exuberantly. My husband took a bin of them to a church with a food giveaway last week. They may produce more, or may decide they hate the wetter weather and give up.

Kale, chard, basil, zinnias, and tons of unwanted weeds just going to town, here. As soon as my oven is fixed I'm making a big tray of kale chips and another big tray of roasted root vegetables.

I - don't know what this is. It volunteered in the asparagus bed. There were small, decorative gourds in there last year, but this is quite a bit bigger. Winter squash? Gourd? Hybrid monstrosity? Who knows, certainly not me. As long as they don't start walking or talking, I'm fine with them.

This brick and concrete reservoir up in the woods used to store spring water and feed, through terracotta pipes, the two nearest houses. It must have been a LOT of labor setting it up, but perhaps less than digging a well would have been. I'll have to get a better picture sometime when it's full, it's still lovely in a sad way.

Biking

My son the downhill mountain biker has a friend who also loves cross country biking. The funny part is that she's older than I am, and a surgeon. Apparently, whenever she's not in surgery or sleeping, she's biking. This past weekend they both worked quite a while building an offshoot of one of his downhill trails that runs across the slope of the mountain instead of straight down it. It's a lovely trail, he took me on a preview walk last evening.

Yet another surprise that has me looking slightly perplexed and muttering, "ok, I guess that might as well happen." I think I will stick to horses. Bikes just never really appealed to me. I'd have to live somewhere really flat to appreciate a bike ride!

Unlike THIS maniac. Dearly beloved, voted "most likely to drive me to drinking."

Damp Sunday Morning

Item one: Let Hero and Missile out for grazing time. This morning, having figured out the schedule, they were waiting right there for me.

Item two: hike a little way up the ridge to give Lady some running/sniffing/digging time. I'm being followed by a complaining tomcat.

Item three: WHAT??!!

What beauty! What fine color! Who is she?!

I actually saw this fungus a few days ago, before the big rains. At that time, each 'shelf' was only half the current diameter, and had a blocky, made-of-playdough look. They started out yellow, with a red blush in the center where they attach to the tree. Its mature color and form are stunning.

On, across the top of the ridge we go.

Return home, pausing to pet a chestnut brown snoot and a white snoot. Collapse. I really do feel awful, lately. Even the smallest exercise leaves me feeling exhausted.

When the sunlight has left the hollow, but the tops of the trees are still lit {little heart eyes}

[ID: Two photos of tree tops lit by evening sunlight, contrasting with deep shadow at ground level.]

Oral History

@quite-quirksome got me thinking about oral history. Some years ago a man who lives nearby and was, at the time, in his late seventies, called me and asked if I would help him with an oral history project. This was more than a little bizarre to me, because, while I've known him all my life (he was a friend of my parents) we weren't exactly close. And he has two or three children? Why did I get elected to the position of transcriptionist? However. I gathered up my son's laptop and went over to his house. We sat for several hour-long sessions while he told the story of how he built his house, Stonestack. I can type rather fast, although not well. I had a lot of editing to do after our sessions.

He had an amazingly sharp recall of every detail of the construction of this house, and was able to tell the story very coherently. At times, however, he'd think of a side story, and go off on a tangent. Those stories were, to my mind, even more interesting. So, for your edification:

Roger at the swimming hole

  Growing up on this farm I didn’t have many playmates. Early on in life I always had the interest in building huts. The first was on the back side of Slippery Ridge, a lean-to type structure. My cousin Larry and I dug out some dirt to create a level spot, which was a challenge because the ridge has a 25% grade! But, when you’re ten years old, so what? One day Larry and I had our great friend of a horse Old Roger, a 1600 pound Belgian sorrel, at the hut. Roger stepped on a 4 inch pole we had cut for the lean-to. He went down, rolling downhill and mashing saplings as he went, until he rolled against a larger tree that stopped him. We were in a panic like you never saw, “He must have a broken leg, he acts like he is in pain!” I ran as fast as I could back to the farmhouse to get my older brother Bill and old George M. They grabbed ropes and raced to the lean-to. By then, Roger had gotten up. He was favoring his back leg, but it was okay. We got some none-too-favorable comments from Bill, “Why did you boys have Roger in such a place?!” We walked Roger back to the barn unharmed, with great relief.

Swimming hole

   Just below the lean-to is a mountain stream with pools. We created a swimming hole with the addition of some old corrugated tin. The mountain water never seemed to warm up even on the hottest days of summer. It was a great place to hang out under the giant native pines with the blanket of pine needles on the ground next to the swimming hole. There is a birch tree nearby with my initials carved in it in 1953. One day I looked down from my lean-to and some girls were swimming in my swimming hole. “Look, a little boy is up there!” I left the hut and would come back from time to time after that to find the water all cloudy from those older girls using it. The birch tree still stands to this day, the only mark left on this farm of my ten-yr-old self. [note: photo of tree above, the initials are faint, but readable: F G]

   Other huts were built, but they were near the farm buildings. Roger, my pal, died at Fort Hill stadium. He and Pattise were pulling a covered wagon in the celebration of Cumberland’s early history called “the Pageant.” The culprit was moldy hay. This was my first experience of real grief, losing something I really loved.

[Note: Old newspaper photo of Roger and Patisse hitched to a parade float.]

After we did the oral history, he took me and my son on a hike to see the site of the old swimming hole and the tree he carved his initials on. As you can imagine, the creek in the photo was beautifully clear and cool.

His house, his son's house, and the barn are all "in" this picture, but hidden by trees or the curve of the hill. It's a three-generation farm, but likely won't have a fourth.

Daylight

Pruning back branches that are blocking a trail is called 'daylighting.' Today I finally got my act together to daylight one of the cell tower roads.

Not a minute too soon, either. This sycamore had four branches growing out into the road low enough to hit the truck or a rider. K managed to scramble up onto a stumpy little almost-dead branch and use that as a platform to cut the other branches back right at the trunk. That's much healthier for the tree than just cutting the part that's in our way and leaving a stub.

This LOVELY oak also had multiple branches scraping the truck, it looks much better, now. I took over the pruning saw at this point, because my arms are still considerably stronger than my (very petite) daughter's. I am not truly a big person; it's kind of weird to me that I was much bigger and stronger than my mother, and K takes after her. We also started having to prune sweet birch at the far left, here. Such a delightful aroma! It lives up to its name. Lady was puttering around through the forest having a wonderful time; Chance pooped out and asked to be put back in the truck to rest. Poor old boy.

Before (looking forward) and after (looking back). We tried to do an extra-good job and cut enough that we won't have to redo the project for a few years. We also removed several whole saplings that were way too close to the road and to other trees. We found a really amazing bunch of stump-dwelling mushrooms, but my camera refused to photograph them well. Maybe K can send me the photo she took. I haven't ridden Hero since K got home from college and started riding with a friend all the time. Looking forward to coming through here, though, and not having to duck. And hour & a half of good exercise and we got something useful done, as well. Hopefully Lady will be a little more chill the rest of the day.