Opal Whiteley

Over the winter one of the books I read was The Singing Creek Where The Willows Grow, The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whiteley by Benjamin Hoff. Opal was a naturalist, teacher, writer, lecturer and traveler born in 1897 in Washington, who grew up in Oregon. She kept a diary for a number of years starting as a child and, for reasons well explained in the introduction of the book, she was eventually discredited as a fraud and slowly descended into fantasy and mental illness, spending the last 44 years of her life in a psychiatric hospital in England. The author makes a very well presented and convincing case that the hoax Opal was accused of was created and relentlessly pushed by the press and her skeptics. The bulk of the book is a segment of one of her earliest diaries, in which Opal as a charming, observant little girl describes her life among the trees and animals, family and neighbors. She endures, shrugs off and even in a way embraces various hardships and sad episodes that she records in her diary. Her numerous pets have long, elaborate names. She attempts to assist her mother around the house in what she considers a logical, helpful way that usually ends in disaster. But the crux of the diary, what Opal returns to again and again, is her love of nature. It talks to her, guides her, is all encompassing; it loves her and she returns the love. This six year old child prodigy describes her surroundings in a magical way, drawing you into her world. Her last line in the diary section of the book: “The great pine tree is saying a poem, and there is a song in the tree-tops.” Get a copy and enjoy, and the next time you are in the woods listen for the poems and songs.

The Roundup

With a previous blog (you can check it out here) I ran a series called the Weekly Roundup, which would link to sites I thought were useful, interesting, or both. I enjoyed sharing what I found so I am going to revive the series on this blog, but not weekly for now. Welcome to The Roundup.

Check out Family Handyman for great how to tips, do it yourself projects, videos and much more. Make sure to subscribe to their free newsletters while you are there.

Project Gutenberg “offers over 58,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.”

The Senior List states “ Older adults and caregivers turn to our experts for objective guidance — from care alternatives to the best senior products.” Make sure to check out the Senior Discounts section. If like me you don’t qualify, share the site with parents or grandparents.

Theodore Dalrymple has been a regular read and a favorite of mine for several years now. You can read some of his essays and learn more about him here and here.

Have a good weekend!

Dreaming and Yearning

A few of the books we have collected over the years in anticipation of country living

Shelly comes from a country and small town beginning, and I am a born and bred city boy. When we bought our house in the city we settled in and raised our two kids, experiencing school events, sports, plays, scouts, friends and neighbors, family and work. Typical lives, with the same ups and downs as everyone else. Shelly was able to work from home for a few years and I worked for the same company downtown for over 18 years. The country dream came over us slowly. We gardened in our small plot under the large oak tree next to the garage, and canned and froze what we grew. We joined with some family and bought beef several times from a locker to store in our upright freezer. We built up and maintained a large pantry in the basement, including water. We cooked from scratch, and planted beautiful perennials around our yard. Over the years we amassed every kind of yard, garden and power tools we could use, and some we couldn’t, just in case. Every Sunday afternoon, weather permitting, we took the kids out to a park. Several times a year we would camp, and for a few years we would take a family vacation up north or head west. We would marvel at the wide open spaces, and the big sky at night. I kept collecting and reading homesteading, gardening, wildlife and how to books, and Shelly and I began to talk more and more about getting out of the city. Dreaming turned to yearning. Now that it has happened not everything is exactly what we expected (last winter especially) but we feel right at home here in the country.

Critters

The main critter on our acreage, our dog Marley, looking off the back porch

Maybe the most ubiquitous animals we have encountered on the acreage are mice. They nested in all of the soft camping equipment we stored in the back shed over the winter (tents, sleeping bags, blankets, pillows) and ruined some of it with their shredding, urine and feces. There seem to be two distinct types here based on their coats. One is gray and black and and the other tan and brown and larger in size. Mousetraps work well on both.

Recently I noticed a garter snake coiled between the side of the house and a downspout. I knocked it to the ground and our dog Marley picked it up in her mouth and shook it then began pawing at it. The snake stopped moving and soon Marley was walking unsteady and dripping saliva from her mouth. Shelly did what everyone does these days and whipped out her smart phone. What she found was that the dog was having an allergic reaction to either the snakes skin or its venom, or both. We forced a antihistamine down Marley’s throat and soon she was fine. When we looked for the snake it was gone.

Over the winter we had a pair of rabbits staying in the machine shed and foraging around the acreage. One day I walked up the driveway to the mailbox and there was one of them dead, with most of its insides now on the outside. Only a week later the surviving rabbit had been joined by another, and we had a pair again.

What got the rabbit probably was either the bald eagle or the chicken hawk we had seen perched on telephone poles or fence posts, or flying overhead. The chicken hawk comes and goes but I am guessing the bald eagle was only hunting in our area until the river thawed, because I have not seen it for a few months.

Marley alerted us one night to either a huge raccoon or a groundhog that she had chased up one of our light poles. By the time I had grabbed a rifle the dog had excitedly run off in another direction and the animal was gone from the pole.

One night in late autumn a thick fog had reduced visibility to around 30 feet. Two packs of coyotes, one to the south and the other southeast, began howling and yipping back and forth, getting louder as they both approached the house. I was standing on the back porch listening and soon they were close enough I thought they would appear through the fog. The tension I felt was enough that I had backed up to the door, ready to rush in, and I had already put Marley in the house. Curiosity kept me there, waiting for something to happen. It went silent, the fog drifting in the slight wind. Nothing, as if they had disappeared. Minutes went by, and not another sound from them. They were gone.

Spring

Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Sitting Bull

Spring is the time of plans and projects. Leo Tolstoy

I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older. Virginia Woolf

On the first day of spring I saw the first two robins of the year on our acreage. Even though the ground was still frozen in many places, they were patiently pecking around in the ground looking for worms and grubs. The snow drifts were still large, but shrinking daily. The roads were sloppy and rutted, but passable if one took it slow where it was not too bad and fast through the soft parts. We began to see flocks of geese flying over from the south. (A favorite joke of mine when the kids were little: Have you ever wondered why one end of the V is longer than the other? There are more birds on that side.) The bird feeders have more activity around them, mostly with sparrows and finches, but I have noticed some nuthatches, grackles and mourning doves around us. The miscellaneous trees and shrubs almost all have huge buds but have not quite opened yet. The white willow trees that surround the acreage were the last to loose their leaves in autumn but the first to leaf out this spring. The fly’s and bees are slow moving on the cooler days but speed up on the warmer ones, and a couple of days ago I saw my first butterfly this year.

For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours. Pam Brown

The Thaw

Lake Jacobi on the rise. The view from our driveway looking south west.

As March wore on little by little it began to warm. The ice on the rivers and streams began to break up, and slowly the snow was melting. A cold snap would stop the thaw, but only for a day or two. Even though the snow was gone from the roof of the machine shed it dripped inside for two weeks from the melting snow that the wind had packed into the rafters. As the thaw continued a pond began to form in the lowest part of our front yard and the adjacent field. In a few days it had almost reached the top of our mounded driveway, which was all that was keeping it from flooding our house. Here was yet another situation caused by the weather that we could do nothing about, only watch develop. Bare patches of soil were appearing in the fields in the immediate area around the pond, which was hopefully a sign the snow melt had peaked and maybe the ground was thawing enough to absorb some of it. Finally the water level of the pond (nicknamed Lake Jacobi by Shelly) began to recede and what had been a cause of concern became a place of joy as our dog retrieved thrown sticks from the shrinking pond. The buds on the trees were growing and the days were getting longer. After that seemingly never ending, very harsh winter spring was finally almost here.

Blizzard

We were already accustomed to keeping our eyes on the weather reports but this year they were checked several times daily. The John Deere 420 had been doing a great job of throwing snow, but there had been so much of it the thrower could barely heave it over the piles and drifts that now lined our driveway and surrounded our house and buildings. We kept two 5 gallon gas cans full and several more 1 gallon cans on hand just in case. By early March we were thinking there could not be too much more snow left to come when the National Weather Service website read “Blizzard”. In all the years I had used the site I could not recall ever seeing a blizzard warning, and if none of these previous storms were blizzard worthy I figured we had something coming at us to really worry about. Stocked up on gas and food, we could do nothing but wait for it to arrive. It hit with a fury of almost 50 mph winds that did not seem to weaken during the entire storm. The snow was a horizontal white blur that blocked the view of anything around us that was more than a few feet from the house. The sound was a constant whistling howl, and the gusts seemed to make the house shudder. Neither one of us slept well as it raged on through the night. The next day was relatively calm, and we began to dig out. Shelly was on the 420 while I worked in front using a shovel to knock the snow down down so that the thrower could reach it. The drifts in our driveway ranged from 1 to 5 feet high. I would dig in with the shovel, step out of the way so she could throw that with the tractor, then repeat. For 9 hours. And that is how we spent our 2019 wedding anniversary.

Winter

The snow drift in front of our house after yet another storm

My dad had given us his old John Deere 420 garden tractor with a snow thrower attached to the front. Dad had already replaced it with a newer tractor and the old 420 was just sitting around his acreage taking up space. I had somewhat reluctantly agreed to take it, wondering what I would do with it. The weather that was about to hit us made me very aware of what to do with it, and extremely grateful to dad for the gift. The snow storms that came were like nothing I had ever seen in person, only in the movies. The wind coming out of the west across miles of empty fields was so fierce and steady that we were constantly clearing the driveway and parking lot of drifts. It blew into every nook and cranny in the outbuildings, and through the tiny pinholes where the garage doors did not seal with the pavement. The wind blew so hard that several times I had to shovel foot high drifts that had grown inside the garage from those pinholes. We heard news about “polar vortex” and “cyclone bomb”, and almost every storm that blew in had a wind advisory. After one of the worst ones our farmer neighbor drove over to help clear our drive on his tractor mounted with a double auger thrower that shot the snow up over the power lines and the machine shed, and then he dug out our mailbox with the end loader. After that same storm four plows were clearing our gravel road and one got stuck in the 10 foot high drift in front of our house and had to be pulled free by one of the others. Unbelievable, but it really couldn’t get any worse. Then the blizzard hit.

More Moving

We had taken up 20 van loads by early October. The moving went on. We continued to have visitors at the acreage on the weekends while we were there, and enjoyed the short breaks from moving. Halloween came and went, and by Thanksgiving we had moved 32 van loads. Finally we had the old house ready and it went on the market just before Christmas. The next day we happily accepted an offer for our asking price. We enjoyed Christmas and New Years at the acreage and took a long break there, then traveled back to the old house in early January. The buyer’s financing failed but they were able to secure another loan, which pushed back the closing date. More moving occurred through January until finally the time had come and we were spending our last night at the old house. The next day was Groundhog Day, and we crammed the last of our stuff into both vans, did some cleaning in the house, left the keys on the counter and closed the door behind us for the last time. We had lived there for over 26 years. We began moving in late July of 2018 and finished in early February of 2019. Shelly and I ended up moving 44 van loads to our acreage. It was finally done, and we could relax and enjoy our first winter at our new home in the country. Or so we thought.

Moving

The first trip up to the acreage we removed all of the extra seats from both minivans so that they were now small cargo vans. And so began the trips back and forth between the old house and the acreage. We would stay at the old house and load the vans, while Shelly put in her two or three days at the office. We would then drive back up to the acreage where Shelly would finish the week working from our new home. The vans were unloaded and after spending the weekend we drove back to the old house on Sunday to repeat the process. Weeks went by. We enjoyed family and friends visiting to see our new place and managed to build and use a fire ring out of rocks. By mid-September the harvest had begun and the beans were gone from the fields. Finally the day of “the big move” arrived at the end of September. We hired a couple of guys and a truck (you might be able to guess the name of the company) to transport all of our large possessions to the acreage. They loaded the truck the first day and drove up the next day, finishing by early afternoon. We now had almost all of our furniture, which really made a difference in both houses. The old one was emptying out and becoming less familiar as the new one was filling up and becoming more of a home.