Wouldn't it be nice to be twelve again? Tubing in a cool creek. Who can make the biggest splash.

Night song

Crickets, katydids, and cicadas; sing the night fantastic.

Fair

Last night the kids (and Roommate) and I went to the county fair for the next county north of us. We wanted to see the livestock barns, watch the rodeo, and then stroll the midway. Unfortunately, the grandstands "fill up" an hour before the event, so in order to find seating at all, let alone together, we had to park our butts on the hard, hard concrete stands an hour early, and we missed our seeing-the-livestock time. I say 'fill up' in quotes because the stands were only half full, but most of the remaining half was covered in seat-saving blankets, cushions, drinks, etc. "You can't sit THERE, that seat's saved!" That is a real nuisance, actually. I think they need a better system.

The other issue is that the grandstand faces due west. The setting sun roasted, broiled, and fried us as we sat FOR AN HOUR on concrete. The actual rodeo was ok. Everybody cheered very hard for the 'mutton-busters', preschoolers attempting, occasionally successfully, to ride sheep. There was way too much flag waving in the opening ceremony, a feeling that the horse the flag-bearer was riding apparently agreed with. He was happy enough to trot around the ring, but when she tried to get him to stand still while the announcer droned on and on and ON about patriotic fervor, he was doing everything but hold still.

The only actual rodeo events amidst the kids stuff and the interminable filler (dad dancing contest? help!) were barrel racing and bull riding. The barrel racing was pretty good, and the two very young riders (thirteenish) made me kinda happy. Most of the horses were really into it, and there were no big wrecks. The bull riding was. Uh. Only ONE guy made it the full 8 seconds to qualify, and a large majority of the others were dumped in 2 seconds or less. Out of the gate, on the ground. It was close to 9:30 when they wrapped it all up, at which point my hip bones had had THREE HOURS to fuse irrevocably to the concrete. Ay-iy-iy. Standing up was a slow and careful event.

The Tilt-a-Whirl was, as always, awesome.

Poke greens; poisonous raw, delicious when cooked properly to remove the poison. I know, not for everbody . . but I do enjoy a mess of poke greens every spring. It's a stronger taste than spinach or lambsquarter, but so good as a side for pork dishes. Hmm. Bacon . . .

Maddening. A fully-loaded gooseberry bush (the tiny berries still have the spent blossom hanging on) that will cast ALL its fruit before they get any bigger than peas. I had a gooseberry bush at my farm twenty years ago, and it set fruit and then lost it every year. I asked a person from the Ag services, and he told me that there was a pathogen (connected to white pine? maybe?) that caused this. To get fruit, I'd have to spray it every two weeks from the flower stage onward. I didn't want to do that, both because it's too much hassle and because I just don't want a food plant around that can't do its job without chemical warfare.

This massive, luxurious bush down at Home Farm made berries one year, about five years ago, and since that time it has just dropped the fruit like mine used to. I'm going to cut it down (grumpily, probably whilst cussing) next winter.

The lovely barn behind it my father built when I was a child. It was the barn for goats. It's been empty since 1992, but it will soon be a mews for a hawk. For a while. Then, who knows?

This (erosion) is a mess, and I don't know what to do about it. Fixing something that big takes large equipment, and also stuff like complicated government permits. (Pinching my nose and looking haggard)

Odd heaps of soil, trash, and beautiful flowers. My father's legacy, in one image.

Screenshot from a realty website for the town nearest me. The housing crisis is very real, but there are also houses sitting unsold in rural areas because more people move away from this county than move in. If I had searched the whole county instead of just the town, I'm guessing the median value would be a bit lower. "Median" btw, is a good measure for this sort of thing, if you ranked the listings from lowest to highest, median is the value right in the middle.

Mist, fog, and dripping branches. Good morning, ya'll!

One of my neighbors has a security light. I can't imagine why, but sometimes it's pretty, shining through the trees.

Brrr, it's go-to-bed-fully-dressed time of year, wear three layers to sit in my work-room time of year, breaking ice out of the stock tank time of year, heat-a-rock-on-the-woodstove time of year.

Our farm house IS insulated, so we're far better off than we were before that. However, below a certain temperature the woodstove in the basement cannot keep up. We have a furnace for 'supplemental' heat, and today we need that. When I woke up this morning, the warmest room was 60F/15C, and the room I was sleeping in was quite a bit below that. If I need to spend any amount of time sitting still in my room, I wrap a flat, hot rock up in denim and put it in front of my chair so I can keep my feet warm. Portable heat; just move it from the woodstove to the computer desk!

Hero and Nutmeg were NOT too enthusiastic about coming out of the barn this morning.

Friday my son and I moved about 4 pickup-loads of cut wood from small trees/large shrubs into a massive bonfire pile. He has worked several hours with the chainsaw down at Home Farm removing dead stuff or things that grew up where they shouldn't have. Today may be more of the same.

Bones

I'm trying to figure out a tactful, reasonable way to call my neighbor and ask him to give me the bones after he butchers the deer a family member got for him yesterday. Because his normal practice is to have someone (he is in a wheelchair) haul them up in the woods behind his house and dump them. Which is, ecologically, a sound thing to do. HOWEVER he really, really doesn't want my dogs crossing the boundary line into his woods. And that area is within a few yards of my barn. So it is next to impossible for the dogs, however good they have been trained to be about the boundary, to resist wonderful, delicious bones right there. If I could just dump them a little further uphill, the dogs could enjoy them without bothering him.

(and how does he know if Lady walks through the woods if he's housebound? He has game cameras up.)

Feels like an awkward thing to ask, though. Please, Sir, may I have some bones?

Midden

There was no residential trash pickup in rural areas early in the 1900s. When Madeline and Earl lived here, from 1940-something to 1963, they had very little to throw away (packaging was not like it is now) and probably anything that could be burned was just tossed in the furnace. Glass, though, they had aplenty. Madeline stashed a truly bizarre number of glass jars (she really liked Heinz catsup, for some reason) in the basement. Glass she didn't want got hauled up in the woods and dumped. I could show you where - because it's all still there.

It doesn't look like a dump anymore, does it!

I don't know what it was about those octagonal catsup bottles. They must have eaten catsup by the cupful.

Sometimes the glass becomes a tiny greenhouse!

And sometimes there is just. A little guy.

To continue the story, recently I was walking the dogs there right after a rainstorm, when things were shinier than usual. I picked up a piece that looked like the bottom of a heavier bottle, only to find that it was an intact vintage canning jar lid, one of the reusable ones. I brought it home.

The change

I decided to collect photos of the "Gap" (where the road and creek pass through a gap in the ridge at Home Farm.)

Spetember 30, 2023

[ID: A winding country road with a dry creekbed on the right and steep, forested banks on either side. It's green with a faint hint of fall color starting.]

   So. Saturday night a group of young adults will be camped out in this field having a bonfire. It’s a bit early for 4th of July nonsense, but that’s what worked for people’s schedules. I will have my fingers crossed for decent weather and no injuries. As a parent does, when young adults are being semi-independent.

A Year

   These follow more or less along with the months of the year, (but there are two Octobers, because I couldn’t choose!) All the images except the lightning-struck tree in September are from my farm or my neighbor’s. Oils on canvas or on wooden panels, various sizes.

Copyright

   Two of my earliest commissions, we’re talking over twenty years ago, taught me that art buyers know nothing about copyright law, and don’t even know that they don’t know.     One man told me openly that he’d taken my ink drawing to a local print shop and had copies made for family members. This was a piece that would ONLY be of interest to his family (his grandmother’s house), and he had given me a truly splendid ‘tip’ over and above the purchase price I asked for, so I said nothing about that. He just didn’t know, and the tip certainly made up for what I would have asked for if he’d actually bought the right to copy.

   The next lady had commissioned a large oil portrait of her 1770′s era mansion. She had all sorts of [legitimate] suggestions about what she wanted, including eliminating power lines/air conditioners, making the shrubs look more tidy (they hadn’t been pruned in a while) and emphasizing the flowers in the flower garden. All fair requests, and the finished work looked marvelous - just like the mansion but j-u-s-t a touch nicer and neater! The next year I saw that her brochures for wedding events were using my artwork instead of a photo of the place. That was - NOT cool; uncredited commercial use of my artwork. However, she was kind of a bigwig in our community (and notably quite mean and litigious) and I was a relatively unknown artist. I felt like pushing this issue would hurt me more than it helped, so I let it be and used it as a learning experience.

   In later commissions, I actually explained copyright to my clients. Where the piece would have value only to family members (and that happened quite a bit) I’d tell them that is was ok to copy for family, just not for commercial use. And, of course, adjust my price a bit. One lady who ran a museum/heritage center actually needed copyright to make posters, so I not only built full copyright into my pricing, but gave her a written statement to attach behind the painting so that her printer would know everything was fair and square with that. Also, I was credited on those printings, which meant a lot to me!

   One of the best, though, was a local man who has lived about two miles down the road for my his whole (80+ years!) life. He built his house himself, every bit, and he told me about the process in great detail when I went to get reference photos for the painting. As before, I told him that he could copy it for family or to make some greeting cards for himself (he is so proud of his house. So proud.)   Wouldn’t you know, some time after I delivered the painting, I got a holiday card from Frank. He’d had a printer make him cards from the painting. That was a delight to receive in the mail.

[ID: An oil painting of a two story stone house backed by early spring woods with redbud trees blooming. There is a scroll at the bottom that reads: Stonestack 1965]