Seven Roads To Home

For Goodness Sake

2012-02-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

I've avoided certain topics in this still life biopic of my life in the country.

One, if it wasn't at least a bit entertaining, in the trash bin. Two, if it didn't keep to my theme of Seven Roads To Home*-trash bin.

*Seven Roads To Home has a double meaning. On the basic level, it is the journey that led me to Kickapoo Center after years of wandering. I can count seven roads that brought us here. Subtext-the Ojibwa believe that one's life is like a tree with many side branches. If after six or seven side trips, one should realize the the truth path/center road, to what the Anishnabe believe to be enlightenment " enhancing balance in this lifetime". The previous is poorly summarized. Blame it on a cancer addled constitution. I'm struggling to keep my balance.

Politics in all it's craziness (except for the grassroots level), nope. Avoid politics and cliches, like the plague. I never wanted to join the circus, but it sure is a hoot to watch all the clowns.

Three, if what I'd written turned out to be just another mundane description of one old man's mindless musings about a smart dog and a mixed up cat, a wife who's sole passion now is knitting socks, yet scored number 4 (in the nation) in the kick boxing finals in MNLPS in 1988 , I would take up wood carving instead. Maybe I will finish that santo I started six years ago.

I've experienced enough craziness for three lifetimes. It gets old. Craziness sometimes involved a bottle of Wild Turkey, a tall, willowy blond woman, a tiny two room apartment off Brady Street, gossiping school aides, a double helping of street violence on a daily level and enough warnings from a munificent God that even I could see the writing on the wall...The day after you can't remember where you left your truck. Perhaps NOW would be a good time to give up drinking expensive bourbon whiskey.

Yesterday I am am dismayed to read about One Million Moms anti-gay campaign. It targeted Ellen DeGeneres and JC Penny hiring her to be their spokesperson. I watch a video clip of an affable young man, the CEO of JCP, speak about their decision to employ DeGeneres. It never occurred to him that she being gay would be an issue. One Million Moms is an adjunct of an organization called American Family Association

Try the link if you need to find out more. Even more, do something to speak out loudly against bigotry in all forms.

To save us all from a mind numbing diatribe from me, I'd suggest that the AFA learn how to turn off a remote or how to depress the off button on the TV. I do it all the time. The most damning thing one could say about TV content in this era, is that the major networks have been supplanted by such YouTube upstarts like Ray William Johnson whose crass, profane, informative, funny video shows outshine any mind numbing episode of Two And A Half Men. The video clip of sheep circling a car and Ray's allusion to Ron Paul's supporters (does he really wear a supporter?) makes me guffaw.

Dig further and you, too, will be concerned about a group formerly headed by an evangelical minister from Tupelo, Mississippi ( birthplace of Elvis ) labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a"Hate Group" and compared by Bill O'Reilly to Wisconsin's infamous Joe McCarthy.

"With every mistake, we surely must be learning." George Harrison.

One Million Moms and The American Family Association and their so called conservative Christian family values are just another perversion of Christian values being foisted on us. A true Christian does not partake in violence of any form toward living things.There's no difference between them and the Orthodox Russian carpet layers who in addition to installing the carpet on our second floor hand me cassette tapes spewing fear, making snarky side comments about accepting Jesus as my true savior or the young kid getting out of the late model car in a three piece, Brooks Brothers suit asking me if I read the bible. Yes, I read the Bible. I also read the gnostic gospels, James Herriot and St.Augustine. Jesus along with Jack Kerouac, Denzel Washington, Babe Ruth, Gertie Sennett, Frank McCourt, Clint Eastwood, my real mother, Joe Graczyk, Ok Jimm is a short list of people I'll drink coffee with in this life or the next.

Learn to turn off the F---ing boob tube you idiots, tell your kids the truth about pornography as if they don't already know what's real, and what's not, turn up your lamp so it gives off less smoke and more light, assume people are smarter than you give them credit, advocate love and the notion as repeated weekly by Jeff Smith on the Red Green show,

"We're all in this together. Remember I'm pulling for ya." Thanks Red. I'm pulling for ya too. Hope your tour in Madison and Lacrosse is a success.

My Amish friends know it. They don't proselytize, yet their numbers in community keep increasing as well as their influence and immersion in our culture. They keep extremely conservative values within their community and have successfully defended their lives from being negatively changed by technology.

In the interest of balance, I'd suggest picking up a bottle of Lifeway Kefir. My friend at Wal-Mart-Bulldog- must have had something to do with stocking it in the yogurt section. There's a side panel description of Christy Turlington Burn's documentary , No Woman , No CryLifeway donates a portion of every sale of Probiotic Blueberry Kefir, supporting maternal and child health. Every Mother Counts .

Every human life counts.

Chin Music

2012-02-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

Mandy and I are singing a duo.She howls while I just piss and moan.

The weather outside is frightful,

while the fire inside is delightful...

Wind chills at -20. Getting the mail results in brain freeze. Horizontal driven snow flurries. I let Salvatore Pucci the cat outside and set the stove timer for 10 minutes. Any longer and he's a corpse. Toss another log on the fire and pray to the God of Fire and Thunder that I won't have to empty the ash pan again today.

It's that time of year I look back and fondly remember living in Arizona. Next to the computer tower on my work table is a pile of manuscripts.To keep in touch with friends back East, I'd dash off a tongue in cheek commentary of life in Arizona around the turn of the century (the year 2000) . The postage was nasty and generally the lazy shits never wrote back, but I continued writing because I loved the fun. Pictures were often stolen, but who cared? An example.

Chapter headings included Chin Music ( subtitled Run While You Can) ,Chortling and Loud Farting.

I chose to include some of my own scanned photography of curious places on the road between Phoenix and home. Sign over this stone cottage says ,

Health and wealth

learn how.

I wish I'd gone inside. I figured it was an Amway pitch.

I stitched in commentaries about the Phoenix nightly news reports of helicopter chases of stolen vehicles with this racy guy speeding along 77th street. Notice the foot ( not horse) power. I still wear that hat.

I waited all day at an auction to bid on this Howdy Doody marionette. It was worth the wait. Just don't ask me how it fit in the story.

Wait. I remember. Most of the stories I wrote were of the neighbor Gary at the end of the cul-de-sac who was dumber than dirt. He was from Illinois. My next door neighbor and I tortured the fellow constantly. Chuck, the next door neighbor, calls from New York. He's attending the New York marathon in support of a daughter in the race. He asks, "Can you run next door and get Wendy's attention". He needed to speak to her and she was on the phone. I ask, "I'm in my pajamas. Is it all right if I don't change?" "He warns me, "Don't do a Gary now, please." The reference is a now famous episode of Gary walking his dog down merry Go Round Road, barn door wide and gaping with an exposed member.

Being slow witted, I promised to check that all orifices are closed for the day.

Lineman Bob circa 2010

For Hansi

2012-02-09T07:58:00.000-08:00

I mentioned to a fellow blogger that the next time I drove through Coon Valley, I take some shots. As I am want to do, I don't think about the dirty car window. I am too lazy to get out of the vehicle because I've been given a a short time frame to get to Lacrosse. As they say, better than nuthin'.

Speed trap coming into Coon Valley.

Tiny home adjacent to farm in 1sy picture.

Main Street ( Silicoon Valley on right)

Fiord Bar thru dirty windows (ART SHOT)

Coon Creek Watershed (top right)

More Coon Creek

For You I Pine and Balsam

2012-02-07T14:15:00.000-08:00


Jonathon Pyne

I'd promised some folks that in lieu of a phone call, I'd keep in touch via this format. Push came to shove(and a loss of some feeling in my fingertips) I've gotten pretty rusty in wordsmithing. Oh yeah, every once an awhile I even astound myself with a three syllable word rolling out of cheek and jowl which sounds darn impressive, but, but...That same medication which causes a permanent loss of feeling can also cause hearing loss. What's left? Loss of vocabulary? Stunted phrases. Adjectives like good and nice? Writing for Reader's Digest: Ten tips for better sex in your garden?

I thought I'd get away with throwing in a picture of a beer on Superbowl Sunday. We're out in the country, yet I couldn't help the nagging feeling that ten of millions of people watching live in the city. What if they all flush at once? Was anybody watching the borders when the the Great Dane buried the cat collar and bribed his owner with Doritos?

The tree picture will hold Gary's interest for a while. With raised eyebrows he asks, "People really spend hours on the net reading each other's blogs?" In a late afternoon visit to the library, I find that the 80+ year old library angel has been out for a week with a bad back. Sleeping becomes a chore. Bad sign. One obvious tip of her absence is the immaculate front counter. Mandy my blue heeler goes directly to the carpeted reading area for a vicious bout of back itching complete with grunts, groans and animated ruffs. Ruff.

There's no spozed to be here in Kickapoo Center right now, but I'm thinking I might get away from having to toss firewood slabs down into the basement, if I find enough fodder here for procrastination. Jorge, shit that he is, decides to lay low. That means he calls 1/2 hour before I'm spozed to leave for a 3rd day of hydration and blood tests in LAX asking if I got coffee. I give three short "no" answers to his questions. I can hear him slinking away on the phone. When I call today I get his answer machine. Jorge and Houdini have things in common in that they both disappear quickly. Only Jorge will reappear across the state. I figure it's too much work to actually find out if he's a friend or just an acquaintance.

Just about used up my allowance of surplus-energy starting a fire in the wood furnace this morning in preparation for an intended line-dry wash never accomplished. The open dryer door was too much of an invitation.After the three no answers to Jorge's half-assed attempts to be personable the previous day, which I know from experience is a 70+ year old lonesome retired bachelor's attempt to order an otherwise lack luster day in which TV, nap, lunch and letting the dog's out are primary activities along with secondary affirmations of hoping for free coffee, a visit from one of the B's* in Richland Center which may also include some vicarious sex or maybe a short run to town for bananas at the Kwik Trip, I repeat Jorge's follies save for the TV and sex which lately drives me totally bonkers( TV that is).

I try to avoid dissing the medical establishment despite a wealth of topics. All that negative clank ends up littering my dreams, despoiling my mental landscape with empty pop cans of medicalese jargon, "I'm sorry I can't tell you that because if I'm wrong you might sue me" and a discarded candy wrapped cauchemar about a derelict woman pushing a baby carriage with a disguised doll whose head unscrews so she can pour another shot of whiskey.

A bright spot is the spunky, staff nutritionist who spends hours listening to me vent of ex-wives and rubber band-like excursions in my life, surgically inserting suggestions here n' there to keep myself hydrated and properly fed without thumbing a nose at Mayo Clinic's low residue diet which is so wrong yet technically correct because it absolves them of any litigious ambiguity. Our discussion asides take us to a deep space nine in the stratosphere where I'm pontificating about male machismo attitudes of objecting women at the same time I'm enjoying the company of an attractive middle aged woman. I tell her I wonder if she's just used to hearing males ramble on about themselves. "I wouldn't be here if I didn't care." Truly an angel

In the dark voided absence of any personal visit to my Amish friends, Wilma writes me an eight page letter of inspiring thoughts and life on the farm. If I could, I'd kiss her. Instead I give her an angel pin one of the nurses in LAX gifted me. I hope she's not taken aback by something strange to her culture. In the letter she describes making cheese(nothing to write home about), hoping for colder weather to make ice for the ice-house in summer, a snowball fight at the schoolhouse and a coyote hunt. In the background members of the family are enjoying a card game called rage.

The Meaning of Life

2012-02-04T16:59:00.000-08:00

After all the chemo, IV drips, trips back and forth to Lacrosse, endless consultations, anti-nausea medications and I discover one thing I needed all along.

Pearl Street Brewery from Lacrosse and pale ale.

Never, ever, underestimate the beauty of the simple joys of life. My dog, my wife ( not necessarily in order of importance), my friends especially my Amish friends who taught me in simplicity there is beauty, and last of all, write this somewhere where you can see it every day, every bitching day when the sun don't shine when you think all is lost or buried under a carpet of human indifference to the true meaning of life. never take anything for granted. Never.

Hey. yeah, phew, must've gone over the speed limit of human kindness and an appreciation of malt beverages. 'Scuse me.

Sunday Report

2012-01-29T13:55:00.000-08:00

Laid back, stretched out. Feelin' Better at Last. Been laying around a lot. My furry kids are getting into the slow, winter lifestyle of eat, sleep and repeat. The cat, while I write, is curled up on the cedar shavings dog bed sans faux fleece cover, while Dawn attempts to remove grease stains from multiple beef bone treats the blue-heeler likes to eat between meals. They taste better when consumed in bed. In terms of peeves, I think eating in bed rates up there with drinking coffee near the computer. One good spill could wipe out all this. Be nice now.

Think old schoolhouse. Second floor, large open space. Great place for kids to dream of running around outside on spacious lawn, walking down to the river to poke in mud banks or just go for a hike in the woods. Teachers wiped out any nonsensical mind wanderings by threatening to burn kid-stuff. "Glenda, stop day-dreaming and pay attention or I'll throw your dolly on the burn pile." Think I'm kidding?

First year we lived here, I'm curious about a burn pile on the south fence line. With a garden rake I probe the contents and find porcelain doll parts, you know the old fashioned dolls with cloth or leather bodies. Arms, legs, partial heads, hands. Sad. In tribute I create a grapevine wreath. I attach a few arms, legs and hands. I toss in a rusted, burnt out lock I found in the same pile, add some silk flowers. At the bottom I hang an old sheep bell salvaged from a junk box. I ain't bragging, but the over-all effect is what I wanted. "For whom the bell tolls..." My teachers could have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me. The actual title of the wreath construction was-After The Fire.

Are you listening? Large open space. Second floor. Seven years later, after building a new school, the old school is turned into a residence. Bedrooms in the large open space need closets. Yeah, adding closets will make the room smaller, but think cozy. The master bedroom on the south end has two closets. The east bedroom-one closet that abuts the bathroom. A bathroom literally turned into a throne because all the plumbing is laid on the floor. The ball and claw tub had to be raised on a pedestal. West bedroom, one closet that hangs over the stairwell, hence, a sloped ceiling that makes for little storage space, save for a narrow top shelf over a pipe rack for clothing. All have access doors consisting of a turnbuckle and a piece of paneling.

Still listening? The carpenters with farmer wisdom not only create a closet but put a narrow crawl space behind the closet. Clever vermin find it a nice place to chew insulation and hang out on long winter nights. Eating in bed in this house would be an invitation to a mice critter sharing your comforter. The lazy lump on the couch keeps 'em at bay. Before Salvatore Pucci arrived on our back step on a frozen February night, we'd hear snap traps go off in the middle of the night. We found out that bait traps caused the mice to horde piles of green pellets, saving them for a treat in front of their own version of Disney's Mouseketeers. Dead mouse in the wall is worse than snap traps going off in the middle of the night.

Grab a flashlight. Open the access door, find the trap and remove twitching body. . Since the Pooch took residence, he scouts 24/7 basement, back hall, first floor and every available nook and cranny upstairs. Good boy. Anybody raises an eyebrow about a pampered cat getting raw chicken liver for dinner with an occasional 90/10 raw ground beef snack thrown in gets my scorn. Outside, he find all sorts of mousie variations from field mice to shrews to moles to cute furry cartoon mice. Even I feel sorry for those guys .

For every one you see, there's a hundred more behind the door.

Sheep, Sheep

2012-01-27T09:49:00.000-08:00

I love music.Let me reword that. I love good music. Good is my opinion. Nuances in individual tastes toward food, wine, beer, film and art, are as wide-spread as cowboy hats in Texas or assholes wearing cowboy hats in Texas. Like Tommy at the monthly town meeting who unjustly accused the town board of favoritism and then held up his right paw and forestalled any further discourse with, "I ain't gonna argue," I will add ditto to Tommy's spurl ( my own word-a combination of spurt and hurl). I ain't gonna argue.

When I taught in the inner city, as a respite from stress, I'd retreat to a greenhouse I salvaged from demolition. A neighbor and I drove it from it's defunct business location in the inner city to my lower east side home along the Milarky River. We managed it without much damage to the glass windows. I replaced a few rotted frames and hand dug a narrow footing four foot below the ground level. Each window was a separately constructed piece which bolted to it's neighbor and was braced to a free standing roof. Total dimensions I think were less than 20 feet long and wide enough for two four foot benches with a three foot walkway. I'd stick a disc in my Walkman and tend to a variety of house plants, orchids and vegetable plants I raised for myself and for sale. It kept me sane. Surround yourself with a hundred plants and you'll know why.

Besieged by technical glitches in the writing of this post, I slip a music disc in the tower. It's an old friend, Music For The Spiritual Tourist compiled by Mick Brown. I never intended to write about sheep. One of the cuts, the same title as the post, sung by the Georgia Sea Island Singers is an accapella gospel song. In the liner notes Mick writes that gospel music is the first music "that truly moved me, a sanctified chorus..."

Dawn's painting of sheep sold at Amish auction for a ridiculously low price. Under ten dollars. Had I been there at the moment it went up for sale, I would have removed it from bidding in an illegal, but common way at Amish auctions which would have been to bid on the piece myself. Then if the price didn't rise or I wasn't satisfied with the price, I'd buy it and keep the painting, not before giving my Amish friends their meager commission. I sincerely hope the buyer of Dawn painting enjoys the bargain or the painting drops off the wall and damages their furniture or both.

The Camp Verde Sheep acrylic is my title. Dawn didn't add a title since it originally was planned as a inexpensive donation to help the Amish School fund. Cheap frame, quickly executed commission in which Dawn excels. My mind's eye sees that sheep in the field across from a friend's place in Camp Verde, Arizona on a dark night when Holly escorted me and Dawn to look at a piece of property up for sale. The house is pleasant enough, with some acreage. Holly takes her flashlight to scan the field in front of the house. Thirty glowing eyes shine back at us. Memorable.

The music in the background is wistful and melancholic. With a black and white landscape outside and the threat of more snow this afternoon, I'm comforted by the presence of Salvatore Pucci, the cat, on my desk and Mandy Mae lying behind my chair.

The week has been long and stressful. One reason for technical glitches here is that I tried to find web images for a man stuck in a doughnut. Use your imagination to see me up in Rochester having a biopsy of my pancreas while the Russian doctor tries to find the exact spot to insert a needle slide past bowel, liver, stomach with the aid of a CT scanner- a machine that looks like a four foot high plastic beige doughnut

Wednesday was a relatively innocuous electrocardiogram ( sonic imaging of my heart) to determine if my heart can withstand the chemotherapy. Thursday, we drove through dense fog, possible black ice just after dawn to arrive for outpatient surgery to install a port for the chemo, more tests, lots of down time, consultations, medicalese, and 4+ hours of chemotherapy. A Pakistani doctor wearing a skullcap with really bad breath reminds me to tell him when my fingers go numb or if I can't button my shirt because that's bad, really bad. It can't be reversed. More worst case scenario. I'd like to take all the worst case scenarios and...

We left home at 7:15 am and return 12 hours later. Thanks to Jorge, the animals were well kept.

I never mention kind, number and species when talking to the medical folks about my "animals" because they will immediately down play my abrasive reactions to their scheduling process, which seems to be for the benefit of the medical people. Let them assume I have 300 chickens, ten ducks, forty sheep and dairy cows because all I get anyway is sympathetic looks. Not much else. "I'm sorry but that's the procedure." The most they'll give is push back arrival time 30 minutes because I'm not 80 years old and don't need twenty minutes to untie my shoes.

The admitting nurse turns white when I tell her to get me a number for the scheduling person so I can inform them what it's like driving in dense fog for 70 minutes on possible glare ice.

I leave Skemp/Mayo with a portable pump attached to the newly inserted port.The pump serves to deliver chemo 24/7 for a week. The pump hangs on my belt in a fanny pack. On the drive home we have a laugh up the first hill to the ridge-tops surrounding Lacrosse when Dawn asks why there a flashing green light in the car. It is in the same area ( outside) she reported lightning ( strobe flashes on cell towers). "Oh come on. I'm wearing that pump."

If I sit, a line gets kinked and a red light starts flashing. After this happens twice, I make sure that all tubing is exposed for ready inspection.The sleeping dog starts whimpering. I immediately look down at the pump device to see what warning signal is going off. At night, it sleeps on the bookcase next to the bed. Nurses warning me of excessive thrashing in my sleep. Of course, they always give a worst case scenario in which a man ripped off the connection, chemo leaked all over the bed in his sleep. Then, one has to open a box labeled SPILL KIT. Yup you guessed it. Full scale haz-mat operation with mask, gown, rubber gloves. Oh jayzus.

Cut to the chase. I am better. Optimistic even. There are no more trips for at least a week. Maybe then I'll have more time to be able to comment on trolls, dieting, concrete dishware and singing in the shower ( see blog list).

Stay away from bridges 'cause that's where trolls wait for fat billy goats.

Dazed Doughnuts

2012-01-22T07:55:00.000-08:00

" If we cannot trust the cleanliness of the hand that offers rice, how can we eat?"

The Pearl Diver

Sujata Massey

It's why I stay away from comment on politics except for the grassroots level. Newt Gingrich?

Snakes have gotten a bad rap because of a few vipers in the nest.

I walked away from the computer. After ten minutes, it goes into a screen save feature and shows pictures at random from my files. When I go back, this shot is on the screen. It brings back memories.

I'm stacking firewood. The quality of the wood is getting worse as the price goes up. Leo wants cash in hand which is a minor inconvenience, but the real problem is that he doesn't question his sources. "Is it fresh cut wood?" I ask. Dunno, he answers.

When he finally unloads the dumpster, I find much of the so called firewood is slab wood-the outer edges of logs trimmed at the sawmill in preparation for cabin building. Too much bark, which in return creates more work. A frequent need to empty the ash pan.

This guy pictured above is savoring a cool spot as I removed a few outer levels at the top of the row. After I got over the "holy shit", I was fortunate enough to have enough time to grab the camera. The snake must have been Amish as it didn't want a picture of its face.

Writing in my blog is therapy for me. I need the distraction. I'm depressed to the point of trembling from the stress.

Pooch the cat is so bored he's taken to hiding behind furniture and leaping out at the dog in mock combat. He teases the dog to wrestle by stealing the dog's blankie.

In two days Dawn and I will travel, again, to Rochester for another test. After wrestling with the Mayo doctors in Lacrosse, it is agreed that I will have a needle biopsy to settle a question about the esophageal cancer and an area adjacent to my pancreas. The journey up and back is arduous. The weather unpredictable. Tuesday's 8 am test forces us to leave home no later than 5:30 am. We won't even bother feeding the dog, because it's way too early for her morning feeding. The cat will have to suffer being cooped up another day. Jorge who has been the zookeeper,of late, is across the state on another errand of mercy which somewhat overshadows our needs. His sister had a botched hernia operation in which the incision never healed properly. She needs treatment.

If I get the biopsy, the wheels start moving. Wednesday I'll have a echo cardiogram to determine if my heart is healthy enough to stand up to chemotherapy. On Thursday, a device will be attached to my chest for the chemo medication. Then, I can look forward to repeated chemo, nausea and weakness. I won't be writing here. Right now my appetite is waning because of pressure from the esophageal mass extending into my stomach. We'll borrow Jorge's juicer so I can maintain proper levels of nutrition. Dawn looked online for juicers and found a reasonable model from Waring that number one son swears by. If we like Jorge's, we'll buy our own.

I love the taste of organic carrot juice. Our favorite grocery store in Lacrosse has loads of quality vegetables. And it's on the fast way home via Interstate 90 through Cashton back down highway 14.

The doctor in charge of my chemo is a clone of Amy Fowler Farrah(sp?) Sheldon's girlfriend on Big Bang Theory. We have to stifle guffaws when she gruffly asks questions and bristles at pointed responses.

It's just one big sitcom without the canned laughter.

Photo montage below. I ran out of words.

Oh Lord won't ya buy me a Mercedes Benz.

Peace Out.

Green Bay Quacker from Seven Roads Gallery

Birds

2012-01-21T14:42:00.000-08:00

More bucolic shots to ease the pain of a -15 degree morning. In the days when I couldn't download a large photo, I took lots of 640X480 pixel pictures. This is one. The quality is minimal. At the top of the frame is a telephone pole at left. If I enlarge the shot, blogger will crop too much. Note the heavy cover across the highway.

Back in 2005, I rushed in the house to get this picture of a commemorative ride locals make every year. With home-made wagons and lots of riders they honor a journey pioneers made way back when. What I'm trying to point out is the area across the road behind the riders. With the first picture, it shows a dense wooded area along the winding river.

What's the point? This wooded spot affords a nice view of the river banks, a grassy strip along the highway and a pine woods off to the left. The habitat is prime for birds of prey and good cover for the rest of the gang. Today my wife, Dawn, spots three crows perched high atop the tallest tree in the top picture-the one next to the pole. Mid-way below in a smaller tree is a Great Horned Owl. In the lowest branch of the same tree as the owl, a puffed up hawk watches the white snow cover for mouse and rodent activity. Better than TV which I loathe say, I've been watching way too much. On the south end of energy from what Dawn says is stress catching up on me, I read a bit, fall asleep in my recliner and watch the free cable channels that will be cut off after our free month's trail.

Entertainment used to be watching a parade of birds at as many as six feeders around the place. Tube feeders, platform feeders, little houses, a Droll Yankee and two squirrel proof feeders as well as several store bought and homemade suet feeders which brought loads of species. Then seed prices at the local hardware store went sky high. I couldn't afford a decent seed blend without all the filler seeds common to cheaper varieties. It only encourages mice and rabbits. Even oil sunflower got expensive, so I stopped feeding the birds.

One feeder was located next to a lilac bush near the deck outside of a large picture window in the living room.. One day I looked out to see a falcon "spread-eagled" (no pun intended) on the top of the leafless bush. Inside under the cover of a dense thicket juncos and sparrows were safe from the hungry bird. Never have I been privy to such a sight.

The struggle I have with a decision to feed the birds is that once one begins feeding wild birds, you can't quit until there's sufficient food available or when the snow cover melts. Biologists claim that birds don't' need our help, but my feeling is that if I save one chickadee from starvation, I've done well. A friend who was an ornithologist claimed that chickadees have to eat their body weight daily to because of a high metabolism. Fifty per cent mortality is common over the winter. Besides, I like the friendly little critters.

Seeds for Thought

2012-01-19T08:22:00.000-08:00

I swivel my office chair around to glimpse at my blue heeler sprawled in front of the bookcase behind me. She raises her head briefly in anticipation, decides, "He ain't going anywhere," and flops back down on her side. Yeah. Sun's out. " If Hell is hot, what do we have outside right now?" I wonder. Early morning color has receded from that lovely golden hue that makes you want to photograph the dumbest things because everything looks wonderful, warm and glows in the early morning light. Truth be told, even psycho cat came in from the cold after a brief tour de grounds this morning. He's upstairs stretched out on the bed. Remember, he was raised outdoors, slept under a porch for the first nine months of his life until I rescued him trying to eat a frozen pan of leftovers in the dark of a 10 below zero February night.

See that leafy stuff behind Mandy Mae? Them's carrots. I'm eating Wal-Mart canned carrots right now because I screwed up on the garden plan. The carrots I did grow either went into my vegan friend Jorge's mouth or into home canned, pickled,dilled carrots n' veggies. Then there was the year I grew sweet, really sweet carrots so delicious I gave most of them away in a fit of , "You won't believe how good these carrots taste!" WTF is wrong with me? Yes, there's always next season.

California Dreaming

Shut-in by two days of frightful below zero temperatures, I only let the dog out long enough to poop and pee. She does a few practice runs along the east fence line and comes back to the house limping from the cold. Today I'll put on three layers and the warmest parka I have to fill the wood bin once the thermometer reaches 10 degrees. That and lunch are long range goals.

For every negative there is a positive. Something I hold to be a basic fact of life.

Quincley Tharpes, a therapist who helped me over my mental speed bumps of dreams of being in combat in a previous life as a inner city educator when the "free" counseling provided by an educational system now so defunct and bankrupt that it is unable to staff basic needs for students tells me my blue eyes match my shirt. I smile at the compliment but do not respond. Then she says, "You got one rubber band life style," cutting me to the quick. Whatchamean rubber band?

You live in the city, move to a farm, move back to the inner city, move lock stock and barrel into a tent for a year in the sticks across from a commune, then you move back to the city, bounce around the city and teaching jobs (52 different schools)- big fat red rubber band boy.

She pops another hard candy into her chubby little mouth and smiles. She has a Smurf statute on her desk.

Every trip I take, every plane ride across the country each and every foray outside the womb is a comparison, for the file folder that goes into a mental cabinet labeled " potential places to live". Some trips last for years. One learns that 103 degrees in the shade on your birthday in May, when the soil is so hot it burns your wrists pulling what tortuous few weeds grow in the red iron oxide sandstone in the lower yard isn't much different than trying to pull a frozen spade out of the compost pile in January. You worry for the red worms buried under all the shredded leaves.

Nine inches of rain in a three day period makes even the most sane person wonder about apocalyptic prophesies. Standing in water up to your ankles, I wash mud off potatoes leaves and hope the crop isn't destroyed. At the library yesterday I point out to the assistant director that in today's weather I don't go out with a net tucked under my straw hat so biting fleas don't fly up my nose and into my eyes. Look at the bright side.

I think I'll go read seed catalogs.

Rochester

2012-01-17T15:00:00.000-08:00

OK. Let's see where this goes. Has it driven you nuts yet? Don't ask me how it became animated. 'Praps it'll go poof, let out a une petite poot of white smoke and crap on your desk top. I hope not.

This morning ,wind driven light snow blows off the roof creating an illusion of a blizzard. It only makes me more depressed. The weather guys are off a bit, predicting light snow after midnight Monday night. Yesterday, I religiously check the radar and weather forecast for two states before another run to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester for a 1:00 pm appointment. Rochester. My derelict father's name was Chester. Mom referred to him as Chet. Can I turn it into a word play. Naw. I wouldn't do that to you.

Never have 51 miles(Lacrosse to Rochester exit) seemed so interminable. Flat, Minnesota farmland of indescribable sameness. You know I'd find a way to describe it accurately, if I could. Maybe it's the billboard-20 miles out from the Rochester turn off- highway 52. XITT 209. That's all it said. Black letters with no serifs against a snow white background. Not even an icon, or two, or three.

Yeah, I'm at the computer, terminally bored from fright and a feast of unpretentious repetition. I even went so far as to ingest some coffee laced with a healthy dose of local honey ( not her). Fooling with downloads, again.

I lay there for 90 minutes staring up at ceiling tiles. Remind myself to cancel any Mayo appointment when they call, mid-trip asking, "Can you get here by noon?" Obviously they have no idea how far away we live. "No, way, "I repeat.They shove me to the end of the line behind dog-bites, bed wetters and people with small fractures . Adding an additional bit of trauma, the consulting physician drags my wife back in recovery to report that the Dr.L__ couldn't perform the endoscopic ultrasound. "The stent was in the way." I'm still under the influence of an unknown narcotic used in anesthesia to cram a tube down my throat. A narcotic, the nurse says, when she tells me "Do not even attempt to drive after the procedure." Screwing with her mind, I make no promises. She tells me that if were stopped, it's a felony. I make note to let Dawn drive the whole way, knowing that Nurse Ratchitt will turn in our license plate to the state patrol. Remember this. Before being threatened with the police for driving under the influence, the!@#$'s ask me to make life threatening decisions about my care.

COME ON.

I look up at Dawn for a signal that, yes, she'll help me throttle the F-R when one choice is to stay overnight, have them remove the stent in my throat the next morning and repeat the procedure. Choice behind door number two, is to take a biopsy with a needle. "There's no guarantee that the biopsy procedure won't contaminate areas on it's exit.Number three is so onerous, I don't remember. Perhaps it was the narcotic that made me woozy. You don't need any more details.

On the way home, I don't say more than three words. "Stop slowing down," were the 3 words. We get back to frantically hungry critters, happy to see we're not dead. I make myself breakfast, the one I'd missed 12 hours before. What? Why didn't we stop? There aren't a whole lot of places where I can feast on a low residue diet. Even then, it grosses Dawn out when I throw up in a napkin at the table because I forgot to chew slowly. Sorry for that image, but somethings can't be tamed.

We watch a tribute to Betty White on the tube just to calm down with goodness.

I'm better now that I've vented.

It Is Winter

2012-01-15T16:20:00.000-08:00

There was a Canadian TV show on PBS I'd watch religiously,before I moved to Arizona. It was called the Red Green Show. Farcical, stupid, dumb and dumber-such as one featured segment that focused on 1001 uses for duct tape. The creator of the show and the star did a black and white segment demonizing the Canadian winter with humor. I remember one part where Red would sit out in a snowstorm playing guitar. Falling through holes in ice became a slapstick artform. I even found DVD's of the show on Netflix. To watch with enthuisam, one should be drunk or impaired. In all honesty, I may have been drinking.

Today, I played my own version of -It Is Winter. The dog wouldn't let me sleep in. Dawn kicked the cat outside at 7am for howling, but I worried that my cat buddy would freeze his business off in 10 degree temperatures. Coughing prodigiously from a virulent form of laryngitis, I amble downstairs to let the cat inside. He was super glad to see me. I made a couple of real vanilla flavored waffles, brewed some strong coffee and a cup of miso soup. I threw tofu cubes in the boiling soup water before I mixed in the measured amount of mellow yellow miso dissolved in water. Then I slathered the hot waffle with creamy peanut butter ( my low residue diet because of throat cancer doesn't allow crunchy peanut butter). For fun we went to Wal-Mart. The high point came when a parent escorted a howling kid out of the store. I avoided friends I knew when I worked there, because I didn't want to go through the C routine.

I stared at the white blanket outside through car windows and kitchen windows. I read some and fell asleep in my recliner for a few hours. Poor dog isn't getting any exercise. I dreamed of naked pirate girls. The above photo is 30 minutes of error messages in my attempts to load a pirate girl photo. If the net police are looking for me, I'll say the same thing my santero friend said with a twinkle in his eye as I passed him in the Village Crossing grocery store in Sedona.

"Pardon us, we're old."

Incongruous

2012-01-14T15:02:00.000-08:00


Duck

When I was a freshman in high school, this duck got me into trouble. Actually, not this particular one.

Duck.

This one.

See the crudely repaired head. My skills as an art restorer in 1960's were limited. It sat in the basement of the suburban home I'd just moved into after my grandfather died of a heart attack. Long story, short, is that my mother created this duck when she was a little tyke. My grandmother prized the art piece, but not enough to move it out of the basement laundry room. In the laundry room there was a wooden table, an old copper boiler, shelves under the east window, two cement tubs for the washer and hand washing of clothes and a clothes chute. I still have both washboards. Back then it was a half century old. Now, it's over 100 years old.

I wanted to examine it more closely, so I climbed on the creaky wooden wash table to grab it from the high shelf under the basement window. When I did, the beak fell off the aging wooden duck.Crap. Basically, I was an honest kid, so I showed it to Grandma. She went ballistic. Grandma, I would learn a few years later was in a pre-dementia stage. She was full blown by the time I became a senior in high school. She could curse like a sailor. Really foul mouthed. So bad, the neighbors would call the police. The summer of my senior year, I took a brief trip to northern Minnesota. While I'm in Minnesota, I get a visit from the Sheriff of St.Louis County saying, " Go home immediately." No explanation. I found out later Grandma was hanging on a tree in my old neighborhood across from my foster folks' home. My mother must have driven her there to assuage her fears that her grandson hadn't flown the coop. It was a eleven hour drive back in the days before the expressways.

Remember a recent post about irony? I created a copy of the duck for my granddaughter. The copy was pasted onto a blackboard I made. In 2007, it was a teaching tool for the kid. No mention was ever made of the history of the duck. I cringe every time I see the duck. It makes me think of times I was dumb enough to drive home with a girlfriend in my 1960 Ford Sunliner convertible, run inside the house to get condoms or whatever hugely important thing I'd forgotten only to find Grandma berating Susie or Bonnie, calling her a beaaach who should leave her grandson alone. Every time I see the effing thing I remember her shouting at the TV, or cursing Harry Truman because, "He had a foul mouth." Ha.

Poor soul. She was an incredible old-time German cook. As I grew older and had my own family, my children lived in fear of her because she had only one front tooth. When I was a kid and she accompanied my mother on weekly visits to the foster home, she always slipped me a half dollar. Later ,when she was still fairly under control of her faculties, she'd slip me a twenty. Inflationary times. It never scarred my psyche or turned me into a closet weirdo. Mostly, it made me sad about getting old. I should have been more tolerant, instead of holding beer parties in the basement rec room when I graduated from high school. Bringing home drunken friends from the beer bars outside of town sure didn't help.

Sorry Grandma.

Peace like a prayer.

2012-01-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

We are in winter's icy thrall. All the snow bunnies out there are ecstatic save for real rabbits who stand out against a white backdrop, like a whore in a church pew. Plowmen, snowmobilers and birds of prey, pleased as punch. I'll explain.. Hang on a moment. Please.

I'm getting lazy, I grab the snow shovel next to the breezeway entrance and shovel a path to the driveway apron. Then I can stand there in my cozy, warm slippers while watching the dog take a dump. This critter is worse than her owner. Looking out of the breezeway at four measly inches of snow, she hesitates. "I ain't walking in that stuff." In a fit of pique, she'll pee directly in front of the door. She's born to run, She loves to explore, but only if I'm along with her. If I say ,"Let's go for a walk," she'll fly off her chair and race to the back door. If I'm not getting my coat on, she turns her head to one side as if saying, wait just a moment, "You said "Let's go for a walk. I'm not going."

This is the same dog, who will knowingly walk into a flying shovelful of snow as I clear the garage apron. In her estimation, her face, ears and muzzle are delightfully covered in white. It's some kind of game, I dumbly reinforced from the puppy days. For this person, shoveling has become a onerous task. I split the short approach to the garage into two halves pretending I'm the equivalent of a human snowplow. I toss a full shovel of snow to the left. Mandy races left hoping to be buried under the flying snow drift. Alternate to the right, she races to the other side of the driveway. Finally, I lose patience. "Get back," I tell her. Then, as if considering the alternative, getting shut in the house, she'll run to the fence line and pretend chase cars and trucks on the highway.

As a pretense of going for a walk I slip on the cardigan Dawn knitted me. Satisfied that I'm not going to bail on a promised walk-a-thon, the dog waits for me by garage edge. I walk out to the end of the hedge lined sidewalk. She ambles out into the snow covered potato/corn patch.

Potato/corn patch at lower left.

One year in a anal-retentive fit , I marked all the front field gardens with a stick with a number in red latex paint. There are eight now. At one time the number was closer to thirteen. In winter I dump ashes on the plots. Under a snow cover, I can't tell where garden plot begins and ends. Although wood ashes don't harm the grass it creates a mess and complications. I have to remember where the potato plots are located because potatoes don't like wood ashes in the same year.

Mandy finally does her business. As she inspects the deposit, a bald eagle flies not more than ten feet over her head. Whoa. That's unusual. Leave my dog alone, please. With a new snow cover, hunting for mice and rodents is exceptional for owls and raptors. Quite often in the past, Mandy and I would discover furry remains of an owl dinner scattered over the berm or in the back yard. Hoot and Great Horned owls roost in the pine woods above the corn field across the road. Bald eagles sit on tree perches over the river. The river meanders across the highway, loops to the east, takes a hard right to the south creating an unusual geographical picture of twisted river-north, east and south within a short distance distance of our place. It's wonderful habitat for all birds as well as wildlife. In the top picture, beaver have currently created a swath six feet wide, where they have deftly chewed small willows off at the base and drug the trees to homes along the river bank.


The road to the outside.

Eye of the Storm

2012-01-12T08:23:00.000-08:00

I'm waiting for the eye of the snowstorm to pass over our area. Then I can go out and shovel the sidewalk so the cat doesn't have to walk belly deep in the stuff. The white cover of snow is a welcome change from drab brown of late. It will add moisture and protect the soil from extreme temperatures, I assume will follow. Thanks to my pal Jorge, the wood bin is full.

Over morning coffee Jorge relates a recent story of a state cop pulling him over while driving back home from the Symons Center in Richland Center where he works out daily. Jorge has a license plate holder on the rear plate of his new SUV.

On the front bumper the plate says, "If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch."

The rear plate renewal sticker is partially covered by the chrome dealer plate holder. One would have to be standing directly behind the vehicle approximately three feet away to see the sticker. After Jorge got his vehicle registration, he had a senior moment and stuck the registration and new sticker in the glove box. The state cop saw the RECALL WALKER stickers on the bumper and rear window. He pulled him over hoping to find a violation. Which he did.

I'm sure he was surprised when Jorge opened his wallet and saw Jorge's retired police officer badge. Jorge explained the mistake while the police officer explained that the front plate was also in violation. He said that any extraneous plate has to be affixed over the WIS plate on the front. Harassment? You betcha. Later, Jorge finds out from his racquetball partner that the state cop who lives in the local area has a reputation as a strong supporter of Skippy Walker. Walker's head of the state patrol is father of two Fitzgerald brothers.

Scott Fitzgerald: WI Senate Majority Leader-Jeff Fitzgerald: WI Assembly Leader. Both are cronies originally from Illinois in positions of power. A Madison paper says the appointment of the elder Fitzgerald smacks of cronyism.

A few days later three Recall Walker signs Jorge hung at the edge of his property along the highway are ripped down and tossed in the gully. Getting a little dicey here in the boonies.

Prayer

2012-01-09T08:45:00.000-08:00


Votive candles in the Guadalupe Shrine near Lacrosse

Salma Hayek prayed for big boobs as a prepubescent teenager. Look at her now. She's also married to a guy who's got a zillion bucks.

I injured my knee when I played high school football. One night, I put some analgesic on the knee to reduce swelling and pain. The analgesic contained something that made my knee even more painful with burning, searing heat. Forget about the painful, swelling knee. I prayed for the analgesic fire to go away.Eventually the burning went away as dawn's early light came through the window.

As an adult, I learned that you can bring about, i.e. manifest, material world things if you learned how to focus your thoughts. In the Bible it says, and I paraphrase that sentence-Had ye but faith, ye can move mountains. Forget about moving mountains. I worked on finding parking places. I noticed, too, that if something appealed to me, an offhand kind of..." hmm, I wonder what that is like" would sometimes bring results.

I think it worked once as I watched an attractive woman walking down the corridor of the elementary school I taught at. She showed up as a substitute teacher. I was unmarried, available and on the prowl. Hmm. I wonder what she's like ended up as, "Be careful; what you wish for!" No further comment.

A lifetime ago, after a tiring all-day journey, Dawn, myself and my oldest daughter arrived at our destination across Cancun Bay in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. My mother has just passed away. I needed a vacation. The hotel we booked via travel agent was, unknown to us, up for sale. The air conditioning didn't work. The drapes were so dilapidated, the vinyl pleats stuck together and wouldn't close. At 9:30 pm fast boats brought over tourists from Cancun to the beach next door. They did the limbo dance to loudspeaker laden rock n' roll for prizes of bottles of tequila obliterating any notion of sleep. Dawn spent of good portion of the evening drinking Hurricanes with some snow mobile freaks from Oregon. I got out of bed, put on my shorts and a T-shirt and went out on the beach to perform a dance I'd seen a Native American elder perform. I'm shimmying around in a circle chanting a traditional prayer hoping to bring the Thunder-beings down on this viper's nest. In my ineptitude, I forgot that my eldest is in an adjacent room. It starts to rain. Dawn comes out to the beach dressed in my clothes from the afternoon. I guess she was pretty wasted from all those Hurricanes. "What'ye doin'? she asks. Mumble, grumble, more mumble from me. " Go back to bed," she says. So much for Native American prayers. In a few days after I'd learned how to "chill" it was a delightful experience.

Gavrillo's version of Our Lady.

I have lived in and extensively visited the southwest U.S. I am enamored of Hispanic Catholic Saints-Santos as an art form. I apprenticed to a famous santero who is a saint unto himself. I learned how to carve and create traditional New Mexican Santos. I found it curious that in the early days of New Mexico, when it was a territory, the people were forced to create their own religious iconography. Without churches, when one didn't see a priest for six months, one was forced to rely upon their own devices. OK. This is a very simplistic explanation. Sue me. In semi-arid New Mexico a farmer might pray to San Ysidro, the patron saint of farmers, ranchers and crops.

San Ysidro with praying angel. Sometimes the angel would handle the plow.

If a native New Mexican appealed to a santo for help and nothing happened, punishment in the form of turning the saint to the wall or closing it up in a drawer could result.

Hopi Kachinas

The Hopi have a similar spiritual practice in their creations called kachinas. Like the santo, kachinas are made from cottonwood root. The kachina is a vital component of the Hopi cycle of life and spiritual tradition. One of the most moving experiences in my life was a Hopi corn dance. Fifty corn kachinas slowly revolving in a circle singing a low, guttural chant was more than a spectacle. I could feel the kachinas pulling energy from the earth.

I have a tendency sometimes toward flippancy. If what I have said previously seems to negate the power of prayer, I have led you astray. I'm not asking you to believe in or to ascribe to any thought process, religion or spiritual practice. I'm not asking anything, period. I'm trying to convince me. Moi. In a crisis such as I'm facing, I need strength and help from all corners. The power of positive vibration. The power of focus. Most of all, the power of humor in it's wonderfully deviant ways.

Irony

2012-01-08T07:47:00.000-08:00

Because I've been married three times, it means that I've been through two divorces. Both were traumatic. The second was the worst because I never saw it coming. One minute she's there, warm, affectionate, but a bit "off". She attributed the off to PMS. The next evening, when she didn't come home, I start the usual sequence-calling friends,"have you seen _________?" The hospital doesn't have an accident report. The police-nothing. Check her closet. Empty.

On the Monday after, a guy hands me a summons, i.e. divorce papers. Leaving out all the juicy interludes and you have Mr. Natural appearing at the courthouse. In the midst of a two acre downtown concrete plaza there's a stately columned building with three doors. Over each door is an inscription. This is back in the Middle Ages when terrorists and crazies weren't lurking behind very window and door, forcing authorities to install check points and metal detectors.

The inscriptions over the doors were truth, justice and the American Way . The last part is made up because I can't remember at the moment what the third moniker was. I stand there puzzled. Hmm. Truth. I tell the truth always, albeit, my own version, so that's a no brainer. I choose justice because that's what I'm aiming for. The American Way? Gawd no.

I enter the building and walk toward a bank of elevators. Pushing the up button for the appropriate floor for Room 21B- legal death and dismemberment, the small plastic square surrounded by chromed plastic lights up in a pale version of peach. A short wait. The door opens and I'm staring the ex to be square in the face. How can this happen? She's dressed in a shapeless, dowdy puke green dress like Edith Bunker would wear. My jaw hangs open. "I think I'll pass." We both heave a sigh of relief.

Irony. It's like a starving dog, nose pressed against your jeans snuffing the odors from breakfast lunch and dinner.

I read recently that some local school officials played Justin Bieber's song "Baby" over and over on the PA system until students donated enough money to a designated charity. I thought torture of young people went out with Sister Sixtus at St.Anthonys.

Forget water-boarding. Tie a yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree, Yummy Yummy Yummy, I got Love in my Tummy and Barry Manilow's song,Mandy played 24/7 would drive any hardened terrorist to pull and eat their hair.

I have a dog named Mandy. I had no choice. She was named after her mother. It was obvious from the get-go that she knew her name. She could even distinguish between her mother's name Mandy and her own- MANDY MAE. Every parent has resorted to using the full birth name of a child as an attention gatherer. "Stuart Arthur Smiley, you stop that this very moment." It wouldn't work for me because my real mother and adoptive parents both gave me names. The crazy mystic Slav foster mother gave me every saint's name. Mom couldn't decide between Roger and Robert, so she used both. Didn't help either when I was adopted as a informal member of a Western Great Lakes tribe which gave me both an English derivation and a real tribal name. I'm am not allowed to divulge the tribal version. Be assured that it's not, he who wafts farts under the blankets at midnight.

Many oh Mandy Oh Mandy. Cripes.

Valley of The Shadow...

2012-01-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

Hey there. Just a few brief overviews on the state of affairs of late.

My coffee intake in the last two months has been severely limited. There are simple pleasures in a cup of fresh brewed, whole bean coffee. It would alter my perspective on life and bring me up out of any doldrum. I had my first cup this morning, a left-over day-old bargain basement brand. I ain't complaining.

My second day out of the hospital, third if you include a one night stint at our local hospital where I went on an observational status to combat dehydration, I can report that I'm better. At the Mayo clinic in Rochester, they put a stent in my throat to aid in swallowing. After a week of not being able to eat or drink. I am slowly bringing myself back.

Those Hollywood moments where a starving person wolfs down a mountain of food are pure bunk. Shrunk to the size of a pea, the ol' gizzard can't handle much. Last night, it was two tablespoons of mashed potatoes and two chicken wing drummies. This morning it was a scrambled egg and two Wal-Mart pork sausage patties. Mr. Natural is on a low residue diet. No fiber, no seeds, nothing that would make swallowing difficult. Eating, anything, is a goal. For fun I eat hummus and a few saltines.

I really need a long hot shower.

I went to the dictionary of etymology and looked up maudlin, hoping to find a humorous derivation of the word, including the name Maude.

Maudlin is what I will avoid. It's earliest derivation is associated with the tears of Magdalene.

Each prayer, good word, thoughtful insight, each and every wonderful comment from friends-which includes my blog friends, is like a supportive hand under my arm guiding me me through a morass of krank that is being ill. I didn't know how many good people are out there. Or didn't look hard enough. You fool Gavrillo.

My writing skills are suffering. There is one last image I'd like to convey before I head into the kitchen for sustenance and then a short nap.

A few minutes after I got home from Rochester, I sat on the back stoop and put my left arm around Mandy's neck. She put her paws on my lap to snuggle closer. Occasionally she would look over at me and slurp my face-dog kiss. Gee, Dad I'm so glad you're home. Whoa, the power of unconditional love.You can't put a price on it.

Number one son drove from our place in SW Wisconsin 2 1/2 hours to the Mayo clinic to pick me up, drove me back home and then did the journey over again to get himself back to Minneapolis. What a kid. What a hero. No small feat.

Dawn's painting of number one son.

Bear with me.

Honey

2012-01-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

I called my sister today. It's not something I do willingly. She's the keeper of the family archives. What does that mean? If you want to know who has died, who is in the process of dying or who is really sick, talk to Honey. I had to keep her in the loop.

I called her when the doctor thought I had a stricture of the esophagus. I told her that the doctor was going to put a scope down my throat and with either a balloon or an expansion device in the scope itself, expand my schatzi ring so that I could swallow better. The scope had a camera in it. It also had a device to take tissue samples. The camera showed an esophageal mass. The tissue samples came back, as the next doctor said... "I'd be surprised if the results aren't cancerous."

I was a carcinoma.

Next I had a PET scan. That's were they injected me with radioactive fluoride to take pictures of my throat and upper GI. It showed an area which I, in layman's terms, call scarring from stomach acid backing up through my diaphragm into my throat. Couple of years ago, I had trouble with acid reflux late at night. Various over the counter medications would help, but finally I started taking Prilosec. My personal physician suggested in addition, that allergies to cat and dog fur caused an inordinate amount of fluid to be passing down my throat. That fluid told my stomach to send out more acid to digest what is essentially protein. She suggested regular use of an antihistamine to stop the drainage.

Now, I've got a diagnosis and tests that bluntly say throat cancer. If that isn't enough, I run into a man last week at the Amish farm who's had throat cancer . He speaks oddly because he's had most of his larynx and vocal chords removed. I find out late that he's been given 6 months to live. Freaks me out.

Honey, my sister tells me Uncle Bob had throat cancer and oh, yeah, Uncle John up in Eau Claire had his voice box removed. In a sidebar she says both lived years after that. Hard to remain upbeat after talking to my sister. She means well. Even when she goes into a small tirade about her son who is my namesake. He broke up with his girlfriend. She goes on to explain about the girl friend's thieving ways, her drug addicted son and the girlfriend's alleged affair with a neighbor. All this is edited for brevity. Now you can scrape me up off the sidewalk with a putty knife. If I were just depressed, I call that being a Happy Camper.

Since November 1st, eating and drinking are difficult. I have more tests scheduled at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. When on Christmas Day, I can neither eat or drink anything, I get worried, wait 24 hours because of the holiday and call the nurse in the gastro-enterologoy center in LAX. It takes her more than a day for her call back and say, " there's nothing we can do", i.e. get me in Mayo faster, prescribe medication, nada. She suggests going to emergency, if I have a problem swallowing. My personal physician says to by-pass LAX and go direct to emergency in Rochester if there is a problem.

On New Years Day the cycle starts over. I can't swallow fluid or eat anything Tomorrow, in Rochester, I have the first appointment which is considered a "consultation". The Mayo Clinic operates under the assumption that I'm wealthy beyond means. That means I have tons of money for staying at a motel for the the endoscopic ultra sound scheduled for the next day. I have people taking care of Mandy and the Pooch. By the grace of God, number one son scheduled a visit after the holidays. Little did we know then, that we'd need him to hold down the fort, so to speak.

As I write this, every so often I go to the kitchen for a drink of water or some juice. I get temporary custody of the water or juice and, now, know what a horror, Princess Diana's bulimia was. I gave up on food and avoid the cooking shows on TV. I've left off the comedic parts of the whole story. I'm 20 pounds slimmer, but don't recommend this as a diet.

Because I might start to get dehydrated if one of my guardian angels doesn't step in soon like he/she did toward the end of Christmas Day and allow me to swallow a bite of sauteed ground beef patty,drink some water, I'll demand that they start me on an IV in the emergency room after a two a a half hour drive to Rochester tomorrow. The rest is up to God. I don't have a laptop so, I'll be offline a bit. Say a prayer. Thanks. Love ya.

Chats by the Woodburning Furnace

2011-12-31T07:57:00.000-08:00

Dawn's new living room furniture.

Gavrillo here. "Above the grass" as they say in the local parlance. The Oxford English Etymology says the word is a relative of parole. Interesting. As if I haven't recently been hit by a string of shitful health issues, last Thursday I'm shivering so bad under three layers and a blanket, I call the doctor. Actually, she called me.

"Howyre doin'", she says.

I fill her in on my condition since I'd last seen her, two weeks ago. Reports have been filtering in from two Mayo facilities, one in La Crosse and the other in Rochester. Without actual details, they are clinical reports of tests that show an esophageal mass in my throat.

I leave out everything but my current shivering and an occasional inability to eat or drink anything. She solves the latter "worry" by telling me to go direct to emergency in Rochester if I'm unable to drink or eat anything for a protracted period. No ass kissing, no disclaimers, just get help. She's a sweetie. Smart too.

She squeezes me in 45 minutes later for a few tests. Chest X-Ray, white blood cell count and the usual cold hands, warm heart stuff. I've got pneumonia. She hands me a prescription for an antibiotic after scanning her computer for the best possible medication to treat my condition. The antibiotic works fast. "In 24 hours if you're not feeling better, call me."   In three hours I'm back in fightin' form. Well, almost. The antibiotic is a short course of five days. I sleep most of the afternoon in the leather recliner at the top right in the picture. Mandy sleeps in her chair across from me, protecting me from wolves, bears, lions and tigers.

When I saw this picture Dawn took of the living room ( front room if it were in a Milwaukee Bungalow), I was surprised at how comfortable it looks. It really is comfortable. The old couch was too low to the floor. After twenty five years the support gave way and one needed a small crane to lift yourself out. The new couch is higher off the floor and the armchair/recliner in the foreground replaces a leather recliner with a leather ottoman no one ever sat on, except for the cat. We moved that across the room for the Pooch. Now both animals have their own chairs. The cat likes to piss off the dog by stealing "her chair.' We intervene in these sibling rivalries.

We bought the furniture from a local, family owned company. I could go on and on on how their business changed over the years. The saleswoman tells us the furniture is US made. A real plus. They didn't charge for the forty mile delivery trip. We discuss a furniture giant with home offices not far from us whose product is mostly made in China. "Inexpensive crap."   I suggest to the saleswoman that good customer service can overcome the retail giants like Wal-Mart whose cheap bunk beds steal a major portion of their business. Not to mention the metal rungs on the ladders for the bunk beds fall apart, creating a safety hazard. I think of Jorge's recent purchase of a platform bed from Wal-Mart. His chief concern, low cost. Safety, reliability and durability are not in his mind. Who are you going to blame? Impoverished people (except for cheapskate Jorge) who can't afford better quality, manufacturers, or retail giants? It'd be a start if, one by one people started thinking about long term benefits versus short term pretty. I see it all the time. On the curb that nice new recliner sits between the sidewalk and the street with a free sign stuck to the back.

Crooked River Rambling

2011-12-28T07:42:00.000-08:00

A fistful of catnip

The dog won't go outside without me. In a pinch, she'll run outside, do her business and sit by the back door. The temperatures here in the sub-arctic have been mild-mid thirties, but the wind chill factor with gusts of wind to 26 mph make it nippy.I was upstairs yesterday when I heard- Thump, Thunk and Crash. I went downstairs to check it out and found that the metal chimney cap had blown off onto the deck. Cripes. Vertigo which my doctor claims is due to ear crystals gone awry, make me unsteady on a ladder. Never was comfortable about heights anyway.

A trip to the Amish farm to round up help will cure Mandy of her winter blues.She can nuzzle her Mom's snout and look for a chicken head to gnaw. It'll also give me perspective. The ridge top farm is busy with trucks pulling in the yard, corn shelling and horse trailers parked next to the workshop. I stop in the main house to ask for the "boss". "In the barn," is the Matriarch's reply. I cut through a portion of fence in the barn yard with a makeshift gate-a short piece of hog panel-and follow a worn path to the barn. A crumbling wall on the east side of the barn has been nicely repaired. The horses are standing at attention hitched to a manure wagon.

"Mandy, get otta there," I tell my dog. The Patriarch confuses the pup with the Mom. "Oh she's all right," he says.

The hooves of these workhorses are like small anvils. A blundering dog could quickly be dead and maimed with a swift quick. Happens all the time to farmers with a much smaller cow hoof. The Patriarch is shoveling manure in his shirtsleeves. "If you keep moving, you don't get cold," he says in response to my amazement. I keep a close eye on the dog because the other trick she pulls is to roll in fresh manure. It hides her scent, predator animal that she is, but makes for a long ride home.

Besides spreading manure, my friend has corn to shell and cobs to spread on the strawberry patch. I agree to come back in the afternoon. He says he'll screw the chimney cap back on. By way of trade which I insist, I'll drive him to another farm for horse shoe nails. As I'm standing there and the Patriarch is shooting two kinds of shit, the warm stuff and the other,verbal baloney, I remember I 'm supposed to take my car in for a tune-up. Cripes.

When Mandy was a pup, she was fantastic about walking on leash. We make the eight block run from my mechanic in town to the retirement home without incident. A few households had large, menacing dogs behind wooden fences missing boards. An occasional squirrel was part of the scenery. Grown up Mandy has to check each and every telephone pole, fence post, every scent marker left by a dog in the last century. "Come, come on, cripes, let's go, jeez, Mandy," I repeat block by block until we reach Dawn's car in the parking lot.

The actual cap attachment takes three minutes excluding preparation- hauling two ladders from the shed, getting the right socket tool, hauling the cap up to the peak. On the way back to the Amish farm, we take the county road over to Jimtown Road and stop by another Amish place. The house looks like a double wide dropped in place in a big hurry. Next to the house is a shed/carriage house/garage under construction. Three small Amish children stand in the picture window looking at me and Mandy in my truck. The Patriarch stands at the back door. A young Amish wife comes out coat-less and walks to the shed. The Patriarch comes back to the truck with a cardboard box in hand. "How much do you think these cost?" he asks me.

The box, which is the size of an 8 oz. cardboard milk carton would cost no more than $5.00, even at the expensive agri-center in town. "$17.95," he says. He pulls out a shiny nail. I assume it's stainless steel which accounts for part of the cost. It also appears to be a cut nail made from sheets of steel, rolled and flattened and cut into wedge shaped nails. Other than the color, they are the same shape as the nails I pulled out of the 100 year old church pew, I recently refurbished.

I pay my mechanic for the tune-up and give him a nine pound bag of Kennebec potatoes. He puts the potatoes under the counter as if someone might try and walk away with them.

Garlic

2011-12-26T15:00:00.000-08:00


chicken preparing to cross the road-dog wondering why

I read a news digest magazine that's funny, informative and scares the shit out of me. More on that to come.

Jorge drops by. Not an unusual occurrence, although he's been an infrequent visitor of late due to an overwhelming bad attitude on my part. He hands me his copy of my news magazine that I usually borrow from the library. Being a cheapskate, he signed on for the free trial subscription. A label on the front says Your Last Issue. The library has been shut since last Friday. I forgot to ask my library angel if they had the latest issue of The Week the last time I stopped in because the main topic of conversation is my recent illness and the loud mouth who works at the retirement home with my wife.

"I aint dying," I tell Janie, the 80 some year old library director.

Tressie, the loudmouth, overheard a conversation and tells all that I'm on my way out. But then again she's a Republican, married to an obnoxious alcoholic, won't divorce him because it aint proper in her religious views, won't tolerate any salacious stuff in print and is socially numb to the point of ridiculousness.She's also addled.

She worked for a while at a group home in the town closest to us- a distance of 2 miles-minimum. She was walking the highway that runs by our place on her way home, another 6 miles minimum. Eight mile walk. probably hummed Eminem's songs all the way. We have out-of-town guests. She rings the doorbell and asks if someone could give her a ride. The guests take pity on her and drive her home. If you want to imitate her voice, take your thumb and index finger and pinch your nose shut. Slowly say, "Can you give me a ride?" Don't ask where her car is-her husband took it to the bar or crashed it into a tree.

Case in point. The library director hides any baked goods brought to the library for the afternoon coffee break with volunteers and the assistant director because Tressie will show up regularly at break time. She'll consume more than her share. If she remunerates the break treat fund, it'll be in the form of store bought cookies gone stale.

Oh, yes, back to the news magazine.

There's a blurb about a Consumer reports test of 31 popular apple and grape juice brands under the byline of Health scare of the week, subheading -Toxins in apple juice. Ten are found to have high levels of arsenic and lead. Higher than FDA's limit for bottled water. Unsafe for children who drink more juice than adults.

We live near "Apple Valley"-the Gays Mills area-30-some miles away. It has some of the most scenic rolling hills and Grant Wood tree-lined hills I've ever seen. In fall it's breathtaking. Every September an apple festival brings people from surrounding states to purchase anything from juice to pies to apple butter. You can pick your own apples or fill a bag from huge wood bins that line the front of the apple stands.

Crowded apple barn during the fest.

The one, lone organic apple orchard, which the chicken photo was taken is struggling. It's not on the apple tour-state highway 71 which runs across the ridge tops from highway 61 ( Soldier's Grove) to Gay's Mills and beyond. Instead of spraying their trees, they have chickens who patrol the ground,eating insects. Hogs, sheep and various other free range critters run the place. If you don't mind a bug or two in the core of your apple, you can get fruit without arsenic, lead or gawd knows what. Nubies that we were in 2004, we picked our own half bushel for $10 from another orchard with the disclaimer to wash the fruit before eating. Then we found Turkey Ridge. For $10 we got a bushel of rejects, apples with a few imperfections that couldn't be used for organic apple juice.

the resident mouse catcher

A neighbor got fed up with their wandering sheep and sent the sheriff. The day we visited and took these pictures, a hawk swept down and tried to carry off one of the hens. We met Three Toes Tommy who survived the winter of '00 . He sacrificed the toes in order to keep his perch place on the front porch.

Even the sheep are laid back. I canned so much apple sauce that year, I haven't been back for more apples.

The big apple in Gays Mills.

To find Turkey Ridge, you turn right at the caboose on highway 71 which runs out the back side of Gay's Mills. Another right on the road to the ridge will get you close. If you go, avoid taking a ride with Jorge. Lately he's been into eating smashed potatoes(ours) with garlic and olive oil. Trouble is, he uses a whole bulb in his recipe. The odor is horrific. It was all I could do to keep from hurling on a short trip to town for juice and barley. My normally industrious Amish grocers were on holiday, this day after Christmas. I'm forced to run to town.


Got Wool?


Gift shop at an orchard on highway 61.

Apple valley scenic shot.

Hoar Frost

2011-12-24T08:57:00.000-08:00

Looking SE at the marsh at the edge of the cornfield.

Pooch the cat sits on the sidewalk opposite the kitchen window. He alternately raises one paw and then the other. "I'm cold," he meows. All I see is an open mouth and a burst of steamy breath. After a recent light dusting of snow, the temperatures dip into the single digits. High humidity in the form of fog in the late afternoon from temps reaching upwards in the 30's, covers tree branches with frost.

On the first official day of winter, we make a major change in life in Kickapoo Center.

The telephone company sends a techie to install high speed Internet. He arrives early in the morning before Jorge comes for his morning coffee. He leaves with apologies 5 hours later after drilling into one of the air ducts for the forced air furnace. In his defense, our basement is a maze of wires, beams and former structures that have nothing to do with life in the 21st century. What does that mean?

It means that in a past life as a one room school, someone decided that low voltage wiring was state of the art. Don't ask me about details. The last remnant of the low voltage wiring was a switch panel on a wall between kitchen and living room. There were 12 push buttons. Only one actually controlled lighting. And that one quit after four years. The result is that we have recessed lights in the ceiling that are always live. If I feel especially festive in this season of long, dark winter nights, I'll install energy saving lights in the fixtures. They give the living room a nice glow. The down side is that it keeps the cat awake. He prowls at night, reverting to a nocturnal ancestral urge. Usually the fixtures are empty and the lights non-existent.

The modem for the Internet is installed near an outlet in the basement. Basement outlets are scarce. There is not much choice. I ask the tech if plugging it in the furnace room will affect the unit because of the heat from the wood furnace. We decide on an outlet over the slate chalkboard for the basement classroom. The only draw back will be a decision to sell the real slate chalkboard. Then, the modem will have to be temporarily removed.

No longer will I moan and groan about downloading pictures or updates. Information I'm researching is fast and helpful. I can find the right recipe in less time than it takes to start water boiling. Dawn and I decided to
( wait for this) with the high speed Internet, to add basic TV channels. After 7 years without TV our life takes a major turn. One noon I note that I decided to watch a cooking show instead of reading the book by John Irving lying on the kitchen table. I reverse the decision, shut off the TV and go back to Prayer For Owen Meany. Over all in the ensuing the three days, we are much better informed. How's this?

We switch from the DVD of a defunct TV series late last evening to PBS. The program concerns Wisconsin wildlife. No, not the bar scene in the state capitol. We stay up much later than normal watching a segment about white ( albino) deer herds in the North and efforts of wildlife biologists to monitor wolf activity in the state. I didn't know that Wisconsin has a pine marten population that is declining.

Thanks to Governor Walker, I learned that budget cuts to education have affected the university system disproportionately. An official for UW-Lacrosse bluntly explains how cuts to their budget are in the thirty some per-cent range while other educational institutions (don't remember which segment) were de-funded to only 7%. Skippy Walker and wife's holiday cheer commercials on the tube provoke curses and verbal insults to the deaf TV monitor as a result. Like my grandmother who felt the TV was real with little people running around inside the box, we utter sneers," Yeah, you're concerned you hypocrite."

I push three RECALL WALKER signs into frozen soil which Jorge got with donations to the Democratic headquarters. In red and white letters they urge people to make a positive change for the good of the state.

Finis

2011-12-18T07:56:00.000-08:00

My mother's last name was Loie. Her ancestors came from the Alsace/Lorraine region of France. Loie is an Americanization of L'Oie. My wife's maiden name translates to Swan by the Lake. Strange that the two important women in my life are a swan and a goose.

Mom never changed her name after the brief encounter with the ne'er-do-well that was my father. In the present day that's not unusual. My daughter didn't change her maiden name after she married. The other daughter didn't have to change her name because the Hun she married had the same last name. Go figure. My son is in a serious relationship. If he marries, he'll probably be the one to change his last name...

...The customer who enters the store after the Albatross Man remarks,

"Didja know there's a dead seagull stuck beak first in a post in the parking lot next to your store."

I offer a disgruntled, "No, I didn't know."

I put those wooden posts there to mark our precious, four reserved parking spaces.

The Chinese say that the first transaction of the day mirrors the remaining portion of the day. There is no green space for a proper burial of the seagull. Pavement in the form of concrete or asphalt cover the parking lots on either side of the building, circa 1875, and every available inch of usable space. There's a one-way street in front of the store and an interstate highway spur on concrete pillars above the ground level. It makes for a lot of noise and no green space. Not a tree, not any grass, not even weeds. The old oak wine barrels I planted geraniums and petunias on a pleasant May morning outside the front door were unceremoniously dumped over, flowers discarded like weeds and stolen early one morning when pedestrian and car traffic was non-existent.

I ponder the alternatives, choosing the one that wouldn't have me closing the store and walking the mile to my parking space in order to bury the bird along the lakefront. The thought of the police stopping to question me about the dead bird in my hands is a deterrent. I toss the bird behind the eight foot high pile of snow the plows have pushed near the building. In the course of the winter, the bird moves with the help of front loaders and snow plows to new burial places each time there is a new snow.

The Chinese were right. the rest of the day becomes a saga of strange, odd and unbelievable. When Dawn arrives after work she removes the Albatross Man's discarded clothing. The energy in the store changes immediately.

Christmas Spirits

2011-12-17T08:39:00.000-08:00

Here's an amazing fact. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, written in the mid 1800's has never been out of print. My favorite version is the one with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. The story is an attitude arranger.

Three years ago on December 22nd Dawn and I drive to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. It's her birthday. Mis-communication, over zealous ass-covering on the part of my, then, primary care physician and just plain errors of fact create the unfortunate timing. We drive through a blizzard to La Crescent, MN and the rest of the way is a "white knuckler". I'm scheduled for MOHS surgery, for a benign version of skin cancer. One of two surgeons identifies six areas of sun damaged skin. "You want to do this all today or schedule several visits?" he asks. Considering the cost in time and money, I opt for "all". In the background is a local radio station reporting a weather alert. Ice storm due this evening. The duty nurse deflates our already slack sails when she says, "I can't believe people drive through this kinda weather for a non-life threatening operation."

Yesterday, Dawn and I repeat a similar adventure without some of the foibles. This time the drive is to Mayo in La Crosse. It wasn't in La Crosse in 2008. The procedure is a 15 minute insertion of a camera and scope down my esophagus to determine what the heck is causing a blockage. Total time is 3 hours. The doctor is competent, the nurses the same. A nervous RN who checks me in looks panicked when I answer questions like, "Do you have any problems with intravenous injections?" with "No, only when the nurse is incompetent." It turns out that I have an inflammation in the area of the schatzki ring instead of a stricture. Oh, wow. More tests. On the bright side, we'll do some Christmas shopping after Mondays Cat Scan. Pooch the Cat isn't gonna take the scanning lightly. It'll be punishment for knocking an egg off the island this morning. I purposely laid the whole, uncooked egg on a dish towel to keep it from rolling off the counter. The little turd.

If I slept with the digital camera, I'd post a shot of the two animals sitting at the doorway of the breezeway looking out at a two inch blanket of snow with a "What the hay?" expression. The cat blazes a trail around the house, keeping a sharp nose out for tunneling mice. Mandy the dog follows with her nose in each of the cat's tracks. "Yup, that's a cat track. Yup another cat. Yes, that is a cat track. And on and on."

I've been wrestling with the conclusion of The Albatross Man. I've made some changes since the original version in 1996. Tom Marks, a former neighbor in a closely knit block of us young marrieds back in the 70's remembers Christmas as the time when his Dad dragged him from tavern to tavern. Milwaukee had 5000 taverns back then. One on each corner wasn't unusual. As the kids grew up and moved away, we started doing what a number of folks did. The decorations became simpler, the get-to-gethers more difficult. Pagan tendencies( from paganus:rustic or peasant) sometimes took comfort in the return of the sun after December 21st. Close encounters with my own Catholic and Hispanic Catholic traditions taught me St.Nicholas saved children from death by tossing three bags of gold through the window of a place where children were known to be harmed in exchange for the children. The symbolism still exits in the form of a sign with three balls outside an old fashioned pawn broker. OK, Jim run with that one!

Some Christmas' were so hectic, especially after I got divorced withjoint custody of three kids, that it became tradition to honor Buddhists out there by eating Chinese food on Christmas Day evening. Working in the public sector, every year I'd get a little misty eyed when my cherubs-both students and kids performed on stage. Each ornament with variations on the theme of "favorite teacher" is still packed away in the barn. A career in retail created a distaste for the excessive commercialism of the season. I loved the money however. It enabled us to survive January's low sales.

There was no moral of the Albatross Man story in 1996. In the final installment, I''l consider one.

The Albatross Man At Christmas, Part Three

2011-12-16T07:55:00.000-08:00

Question of the ages. Why does my dog stretch both front and rear legs after eating a meal? The other question of the day; Will the today's sunshine be followed by more miserable weather.

In search of a can of diced tomatoes, I stop at my Amish friends' farm. The new bulk store building is complete except for one window on the far side. The building is typical Amish white steel with a green steel roof. They have beans, tomato paste and pumpkin pie filling , but no diced tomatoes. Wilma greets me outside the front door as I step down from the old building. "Nice weather we're having," she says, grinning. Their farm is on a ridge top. Frequently I'll forget that detail and wander over without a coat and regret my failing memory. Today the wind gusts to 25 MPH. The ambient temperature makes the real chill index of -20. I look at her bare legs. "I'm cold but you're wearing a dress." Sheesh.

In the dark closet that is my imagination, I realize that I have traded places, bi-located if you will. Parallel life. I'll explain this in a bit.

I pull up to Jorge's place hoping he'll have a can of diced tomatoes so I don't have to drive 25 miles to town. I see his shadow in the window. It's 2:30 pm. He's taking a nap. Perfect timing. The printed sheet that serves as a curtain is torn from the window. One of his dogs has made a flying leap over the couch at the window. He opens the back door and flying leap dog jumps up at my chest. I grab Chase and give him a hug. The other dog is barking viciously. Jorge puts him in a wire cage that takes up most of the living room. "Come in," he says. Sam's loud barking in the wire cage forces us to retreat to the kitchen to talk. Jorge notices that Chase, the flying dog is chewing on something. He takes the something from the dog's mouth. It's a push pin with the plastic top. He repeats the procedure several more times, muttering, vet bill, dumb dog, until all the pins are located. I have a brief enlightened moment when Mandy, my dog comes to mind. She's got a golden halo.Wings would be too weird.

Parallel lives. I have traded bizarre times in the city for more zany antics in the country. The atoms are all the same . They've just reversed polarity.

The Albatross Man makes his way slowly through the entire store. Too slowly. The cloud of dead seagull germs hovers over his head like the cartoon character in Peanuts. He steps up to the front counter. "All set?" I ask eagerly. He gives two grunts and a head shake-yes. Ringing up the $9.95 piece of buckskin, a few bells and assorted crafts items which escapes my memory because of the sight of dirty hands and filthy T-shirt, the total comes to around $37. Relief, satisfaction, guilt follow. Am I taking all this man's money? Will he be able to eat tonight? It's the first sale of the day. Christmas is two weeks away. Sales have been down. If we don't have a good holiday season, we may not last another year. When he hands me the money, all thoughts of remorse disappear.

While I'm packing his purchase, the Albatross Man begins the reverse procedure of getting dressed in the stairwell. The feathered cap I notice is actually the wings of the dead seagull attached to either side of the cap like a Mercury headdress. He leaves the store, forgetting one of his garments. I figure he'll be back for the vest, when he notices it's missing. Oh, no.

The Albatross Man At Christmas, Part Two

2011-12-15T08:49:00.000-08:00

Author's Note: This, above, is a fanciful critter. Closer to an Albatross in genus and specie, it's range is the subarctic. A telling sign is the blue face. If you're really sharp, the snow gives it away. When we parted ways yesterday, the Albatross Man was cheerfully removing the dead bird from his belt to place it outside.

Part Two-
I walked into my oval office with the one-way mirror which is adjacent to the walk-in safe, a leftover from the days our building was a high class fur coat emporium. The phone book in the shelf on a file cabinet would have the non-emergency number for the First District police station. It's always helpful to know what the cops will do before one instigates a course of action. Awhile ago, I had a customer who became irate when I wouldn't let him use our private bathroom in the rear of the store. In the summer months when the lakefront festival season hosts a different ethnic venue each week, drunks, sickos and people wanting to steal something have asked to use our rest room. In one case, a group of gypsies let their three year old pee in a corner to distract an employee showing jewelry. A quick call to the desk sarge was met with, "How soon do you want us there?" in response to the disorderly customer. The official rule was that we didn't serve food or drink. No bathroom access needed.

Memorizing the non-emergency number, I came out of the office to find the vagrant carrying a fist full of bills, like he had found them on the floor and grabbed as many as he could. It was a not too subtle way of reminding me, "I am a paying customer." I walked to the cash register and checked the locked the drawer, just in case. It wasn't our cash. He learned quickly that cash heals all doubts on the part of a store keep.

"Did you know there's a dead bird on your doorstep?" the next customer walking in the shop asks me. Wow, This is great for business, I ponder. I told the customer, "It belongs to that guy," pointing to the back of the store. I hoped that with additional back-up, I'd at least have a witness. The new customer understood in one look and didn't say much after that. I grimaced at each step he took. I cringed when he touched something. Dead seagull germs could have their own festival inside the store. When the Albatross Man asked a question, no words came out. He just pointed with his fist of money and grunted. We sold tanned buckskin for craft work. Grunt, point. "That there piece of leather is $9.95, sir," I said. The sir part is hard to get out.

This ain't Manhattan. It's downtown in the Midwest. I'm still slightly hesitant to hustle the guy out.

On a business trip to New York, my wife and I stop in a deli. An old guy is rolling a two wheel, wire cart down the aisle pushing customers lined up at display cases out of the way. There's not much room between small cafe tables, a line of people being served and the aisle. A guy behind the deli counter cusses and says, "Get that cart outahere," in a New York voice. The old guy swears back at him, ignoring the command. The T-shirted deli attendant comes from around the counter, grabs the guy by the elbow and hustles him out a side door. No one looks askance, except meek old Wisconsinite us.

Closer to home, actually on the lower downtown and south side of of Milarky where Jacques Vieau had a trading post, seagoing freighters through the St.Lawrence seaway would pull up to load and unload load at Jones island and Hispanic people found inexpensive housing, my wife and I are eating dinner at a Mexican dive famous for the shrimp soup and huachinango in a garlic sauce. A seedy looking man stands in the doorway to the restaurant, waiting for the bus out of the cold. The employees of the restaurant are familiar with the guy. A whole lot of posturing goes on as they escort him to the sidewalk. We can hear the cussing. He's wearing gloves. He swears at the waiter, rips off the glove from one hand, and gives the guy with the white apron, "the finger". In this case it's pretty startling because he has no fingers on that hand.

I have digressed. Fear does that to you. One goes through considerable mental gymnastics in a short period of time. The Albatross Man looks vaguely familiar. Could this be a chunky version of Pee Wee Herman?

The Albatross Man At Christmas

2011-12-14T12:05:00.000-08:00

Author's Disclaimer: This is an excerpt from "Dog Stories" by Roger Gavrllo copyrighted 1996.
The photo is not an Albatross. The bird in question is a seagull. The above is a fanciful chicken with extremely long legs. The store in question is two miles from the shore of a Great Lake. White men used the term "Great Lake". The Native Americans, called it Kitchi-gummi, sometimes Michi-gama and one source said "stinking water" was a third translation. An Anishnabe man (the real name for the Ojibwa) from the St.Mary's band "up Nort" told me it was called Bad Spirit because of the number of people the lake swallowed up each year. I used Albatross because the word had a ring to it and evokes many images from history and legend.

The crash at the front door fifteen minutes before opening time at first startled me. After I dusted myself off and stood up, my ire was peaking. "Gol durn these idiots. Don't they know we open at 10 AM." I went to the front window to identify the source of the noise. I could see the top of someones camouflage hat and what looked like feathers on either side of the brim. He was sitting on the front stoop. I hoped that in a few minutes he'd continue his itinerant , homeless ways and move on. I wouldn't be forced to yell at him for blocking the door or call the police.

At opening time I unlocked the door. To my dismay, he's still there. "Morning," he says. I tried not to pay attention. There are a half dozen things to do at opening time, like locking cases, drawing back the steel security gates in the display windows and turning on overhead lights. When I returned to the entrance-way, the Albatross Man is turning off his head phone set. It saved me an additional irritation of informing him of a ban on loud radios in the store. The music is so loud I can clearly hear the tune playing before he turned it off. Perhaps he read my mind, saw my defensive body posture or has drawn the same reaction from a dozen other downtown store keep. "Turn that darn music off."

I grimace when he undid his inner coat and zipped up his pants. Although not a large man, he sported an ample gut that hung out under his red T-shirt and poked through his partially open trousers. In my mind I rehearse the description for the beat cop after I call 911. "Small man, not more than 5'8" , partially bald, peanut head, large gut, camo clothing and a hat with feathers on it."

That's when I noticed a seagull under his belt. At first it appeared to be the comical rubber chicken from the Milton Berle show in my youth. The bird-actually a juvenile seagull because of the speckled body- was tucked, bright pink feet-first under his belt. The lifeless head knocked against his thigh when he moved. My non-reaction to the entire spectacle unfolding before me was the most intelligent thing any enlightened person like me could say. " Is that a dead bird you're wearing ?"

"Why yes," was his reply.

"Take that thing outahere," I say with a raised voice.

"Can I put it down on the steps here?" he asks.

"No you can't. Besides it's illegal to kill these birds," I tell him. I am beginning to get angry.

"I didn't kill it," he says.

"Well, it's still against the law to possess this bird," I said next. " Take it outside."

Which is what he promptly and politely did without further argument.

to be continued

The Christmas Report

2011-12-12T09:39:00.000-08:00

Droll. "Make fun of," says the dictionary. Winston Churchill said, A joke is a serious thing. It's the kind of day when the sum total of waggishness in Kickapoo Center is taking a stool sample to the vet. Not mine, the dog's. This snit-itus musta been the result of a night tossing and turning on the couch. No, Dawn didn't kick me outa bed. This throat condition is getting out of hand, hah! Out of hand, get it? Can't sleep, can't eat. What else is there?

My son, the perennial do-gooder sent his Christmas cards out early. He didn't grow up on 77th street like I did. One holiday I looked up the chimney flue above the cement logs that never burned down and noticed that the opening was nicely cemented shut. A recent news report tells of a Texas man who locked himself out and tried to get back in via the chimney. Musta been in East Texas where folks don't know that chimney's have dampers.

I'm taking a serious look at sending out Christmas cards. Most of the cards we get in the mail are from people we haven't seen in ten years. They're not people I regularly communicate with. But they send us pretty cards and letters with news about the kids. The really appreciated cards are from people like neighbors, Gordie and Carol, who wish us well and thank us for the sweet corn last summer. I have to decide between fun and serious.

In this card I combined fun and serious. Dawn made the Santa from a mutated birdhouse gourd. The kid riding a snowball and two skiing snowmen are ornaments handed down from my Grandmother. circa 1910.

One "year in review" we receive in the mail is still printed on an Underwood typewriter with O's and E's so dirty they get filled in with purple ink when the author finds an old mimeograph machine in the back room of PS #421. She sneaks in a coatroom to run off duplicates after a busy school day. She's a single woman, substitute teacher and dispatcher for a security service. She travels in summer visiting lighthouses around the world. The last time I heard from her, she was stuck in Wales. There is a Wales, Wisconsin, but this was across the big pond. Her visa, credit cards and purse were stolen. In the e-mail to myself and other correspondents, she asked that we send her money. Just to check if the e-mail was for real, I asked a security question, only she would know. I never got an answer. When she got back to the states, she reported that her computer also got hacked.

"Barney got promoted off the loading dock. Tricia and Sammy just completed residency at Lost Souls Hospital in Mittsburgh . Bubba had surgery on a webbed finger. The dog ate a whole bulb of garlic."

...And we made it through another sub-arctic winter, a raccoon took up residency in Mandy's doghouse, the unvarnished railing to the upstairs is finally completed and I can still make a killer omelet.

Looks like a cheese, mushroom, spinach omelet with a side of brown rice for the furry, black and white kid, only nine minutes till tender and nutty.

I gave the doghouse to Jorge. If he curls up, there's just enough room for him and his mutts.

Seeds For Change

2011-12-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

Sunday, December 11,2011

The seed catalog came in the mail. To a dirt wrangler like me this is similar to getting a combination Rolling Stone , Interview Magazine, The Week, The Bible and a long term subscription to Playboy in my mailbox. You, too, can get one by going to Fedco Seeds.

A guy named C.R.Lawn founded the co-operative. Google his name and you'll find that he's been a keynote speaker and highly regarded for his down to earth wisdom on topics near and dear to me. The black and white seed catalog is filled with curious drawings, information about seeds the company offers and a range of topics of note to people who work the land.

One such topic is global warming.In a half page section of the catalog is a no nonsense report of the climate changes in the northeast .

Lawn gives an update of Fedco's decision to join 82 plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Monsanto to halt "uncontrolled spread of transgenic seeds".

As I typed the last sentence, the power went out, our wireless doorbell went off and I assume this is a signal from God not to write anymore about this David versus Goliath issue. Read the catalog description. First hand is always best.

The last item of note in the catalog is a two page spread on FDR's Fireside Chats and their application to the present economic times. It'll drop your jaw.

Shelling beans in the living room, I slip in a DVD of the All In The Family series. Each episode begins with a song I thought was the Republican National Anthem. After I few episodes I skipped over Archie and Edith at the piano singing, "Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again," or "Didn't need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight," but the last line tipped me off that the song is a parody.

"Gee our old LaSalle ran great." Do you remember ever seeing a picture of a LaSalle? The writers of the song are saying in a tribute to the old days that the "old days" were indeed a bummer. Hoovervilles ( shantytowns) were prevalent. Car companies went under before ever becoming a brand name. And Hoover? His name will be remembered as it is now for someone who did nothing in a time when a real statesman is needed, like Sir Winston Churchill in WWW-2. The other Hoover? I see him portrayed more and more in current cinema as a control freak who liked to cross dress. What a legacy!

Order the catalog. If you can, join the co-op. They have a low income factor. Even if you don't garden, you'll help the rest of the people who provide your food.

Snits and Scoffing

2011-12-07T09:35:00.000-08:00

I am amazed. No, not because the sun is shining after 372 days of sullen, dirty-sheet gray weather, but because snit is not in either of my dictionaries. Snigger, sneer, snipe, snot and snob all figure prominently. I am not getting up from this chair to go to the bookshelf.

Snit-it's probably why Jorge hasn't called.

"Hey, ya got coffee?"

I'm in a short snit because I'm not feeling well. I'm used to playing while injured. I did a whole season of championship organic gardening with a hernia. In between, I suffered through bouts of gut wrenching arthritis with the pleasant name gout attached to it. Every time I hear that word, the image of a fat demented king gnawing on a turkey leg, dirty bandage wrapped around his toe, comes to mind. My former physician's solution for hypertension was a generic drug which elevates uric acid levels. Hence the swelling of joints and accompanying pain. Then, he prescribed a medication for arthritis which elevates my BP.

I have a new health provider, the same woman Dawn, my wife uses. I love her so much I brought her potatoes after a visit to the clinic recently. If I give you potatoes watch out. It means commitment.

Ailments which cause an undue amount of focus on a natural function like walking, breathing and eating disturb me. The stricture of my Schatzki ring makes eating an hour long event with copious amounts of water to help wash down food. This morning's first entree was oatmeal, brown sugar and organic apple sauce.

So that explains a bad attitude. Not because of the oatmeal. I know it's good for me, but I'd like to make some crepes, especially the ones Jeff Smith makes with beer.

Scoffing is something I do. It's accompanied by eating crow frequently. Crows are a protected species, by the way, under the Migratory Species Protection Act, so don't call up the DNR. It is a metaphorical statement.

My high school when it was brand new. Note the cars. It was the former German-English Academy.

From grade four through the end of high school, I was imprisoned in this building. At the extreme left, jutting out from the structure is the auditorium. It's where we had school wide assemblies, Thanksgiving and Christmas pageants. The main entrance is the center edifice with two sets of steps. Twenty minutes a day we were required to perform tasks for the school. It was called "work service." If I was lucky I got assigned office monitor because the principal and vice principal had a office on either side of the entrance. The administrative offices were located there. If I was real lucky, my second wife was assigned duty with me. She was a Norwegian blond, soon to be cheerleader. She'd do things like ask me a saucy question,

"Do you ever wonder what it's like?"

It being having sex-we were only eighth graders.

Then she'd get up. kiss me softly me on the cheek with a shy wink, and walk away as the bell rang. Whoa. Think about what the little snot did to me on purpose, an eighth grader with soaring hormones. It will figure prominently in my future life with her.

The far right attached building is the gymnasium.The first floor was reserved for elementary grades and the upper floors were secondary school. There was a third floor with the biology and chemistry labs. Two staircases led from the third to the second floor. One was reserved for seniors, only. You could get the crap beat out of you for unauthorized use of the senior stairs.

There were 54 people in my graduating class. The school was the only co-ed private school in the city, so my senior class was equally divided between girls and boys. 27 women were people I saw every day of my life from fourth grade on. Made it hard to find a date for the Prom. Especially if you weren't a jock, a lawyer, doctor or banker's son. Maybe that's why I hung out with the outcasts like the local Mafia boss's son and a crazy kid who lived across the street. Going outside the building was verboten during school time. I got solitary confinement and three days suspension for having lunch with Joe across the street.

I was pretty impressed with the new Pontiac my ma purchased when I turned 14 The bubble burst when everybody turned sixteen. Some classmates got their own Porsche's and TR-3's. My mother, bless her heart, was a high school teacher all her life.She had two degrees from UW-Madison. As an only child she knew the value of giving me a good education. I scoffed most of my life at the education I received. Mom. rest assured, you were right. I did get a good education.

I learned to despise the wealthy and privileged. I didn't learn some lessons very well when I married one wealthy snot-the cheerleader- but I scored high that year on envious, go-figure looks. Besides, I was a farmer, lived across the road from a commune, wore bib overalls. and wasn't bald or fat and bored with my life. I showed them. She left after three years to have an affair with a wealthy, fat advertising exec from Chicago. Like my son, it takes a couple of hits with the cosmic slap before sanity is restored.

Enter Dawn, my wife, not the time of day. She started this sweater before Christmas and finished it in July. I scoffed one hot July; squirming when she asked me to try it on. She grinned with that special feeling one gets after months of hard work. The humidity makes you break out in a sweat if you even think about work. A sweatband was required apparel.

This morning Mother Nature throws another cold one at us. I'm chilled. I don't have the energy to start a fire in the wood stove. With the sun out, it'd be 75 in the house by noon with even a small fire. I think about a rationalization Dawn and I made when we decided to move back to the frozen tundra.

You can always dress up for cold weather, but in hot weather there's a limit to how many clothes one can shed. There's a reason why the Arabs wear those flowing robe besides hiding an assault rifle. I cropped my head so not to show the feathers hanging out the sides of my mouth. Yeah Dawn. It's a great sweater.

Outlaws

2011-12-06T08:27:00.000-08:00

One of those annoying news snippets on the front page when I go online with this dinosaur computer which talks back and refuses to load my e-mail, stopping my muse in the middle of the river gets my boots wet and my bacon soggy was-wait for it,

"Men spend ten more minutes a day grooming than women."

"Oh so what who gives a shit,?"

I'll have to ask Jorge if that's true for African-Americans.

When we moved to the country, we inherited two sheds of junk. I have a ton of my own junk and don't need no more. Moving across the country, we loaded up everything we thought we'd need in sunny Arizona into two moving vans. Little did we know that one of the trucks was leaking transmission fluid. It refused to go forward in Grants, NM. I give Penske credit for customer service. They towed that broken down van all the rest of the way to Sedona. When we moved back, we needed two of the same size trucks. We'd accumulated more stuff in the five years in AZ, so we had to make a second trip with my pick-up hauling a trailer.

Coyote here is getting a Doo from the hairdryer I found in the barn. It also can be used for frontal lobotomy. The gen-u-wine chrome and Naugahyde chair adds a measure of comfort. Farmers don't throw anything away. Just look at their front yards. If you drive north on our state highway, the serene natural beauty of the countryside will suddenly shock your sensibilities when you come to a salvage yard right on the highway. Dawn says,

"I thought they had to put up fences around those eyesores,"

when we first passed by mountains of rusting junk. The worst thing about the junk yard is that it's adjacent to a wild-life waterway formed by lowlands adjacent to the river.

Two old stoves, dead birds who crawled inside the stoves to get warm, a rusty trailer, chicken wire, 4X8 sheets of rubber backed plywood, broken concrete, pine logs , 4,000 sheet metal screws in an old broiler pan, a usable straw broom are only the top of the heap. When we remodeled the upstairs bath, we had a local hauler deliver a huge, black dumpster to get rid of all the detritus. Since then, the town has a spring and fall clean-up where we donate scrap previous residents left behind. Thanks to Joe Childs we can tell a wonderful story of the Ford's brakes giving way on Freymiller's Hill as we began to carry a 500 gallon oil tank to the dump. I had intended to create a metal giraffe sculpture until I realized I didn't have a welding machine.

The sun's shining and Mandy hasn't been fed. The cat is inside for a warm-up. I've got big decisions on what to do today. Inside or out? The choices for inside are exciting. Take all those dry pieces of bread, toss 'em in the blender and make bread crumbs. Finish the drywall around the inside window in Dawn's studio or paint behind the wood sconce installed over the kitchen sink when the kitchen was remodeled two years ago.
Outside, I have to figure out how to bury the compost after a particularly chilling overnight. The white crust on the gardens is a telling sight of frozen soil, but-hey. Mark 12/5/2011 as a special day. I had oregano alive and well in the garden. I took it from under the cold frame and moved it to the summer kitchen. At night there's a purple glow from the garage window from the grow light I hung over the herb. A long term goal is to replant it in the greenhouse, once that's up. That's another story for a different day.

Oh, the title? A case in point for dementia. I originally intended to write about my formative years and the two schools I attended from kindergarten through high school. The main thought would have been; My teacher's could have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me. I didn't write that, the late poet Brautigan did. But it's true.

The View Near The Bridge

2011-12-03T15:34:00.000-08:00

Off to the right my dog stands expectantly with the yellow lid of of a kitty litter pail clamped between her jaws. It's the rural version of a Frisbee. "Stay," I command. On a rainy, foggy, misty day like today, it would be doubly stupid for both of us to be run over by a pick-up with a deer rack on the tail end.

Yeah, this is OK I ponder, but a middle of the road shot would be better.

Now that Herman Cain is out of the race, perhaps I could run for office on a middle of the road platform. I wouldn't be any worse than one of the Republican hopefuls who doesn't know that the U.S. doesn't have an embassy in Iran. I don't jog with a pistol. I don't jog period. I haven't been a ruthless businessman, don't have a drug problem or have skeletons in this office closet, save for a thwarted project back when Nixon was running for re-election. The idea was to take a picture of a penis and attach the slogan " Lick Dick in '72." I won't divulge details, just make up your own story. It would be ten times better than something a bunch of drunken hippies came up with after too many cold ones.

Ah so young and so clueless.


The Middle of the Road

This is what happens when it rains all day, the animal children have been following you around like lost souls, yet when you show them the door they stand there gazing at the weather, looking back to you with, "I'm not going out in that," eyes.

DDOD

2011-12-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

I am tempted to nominate Mandy, my dog, as dumbest dog of the day. DDOD. That is until I called Jorge to complain about today's weather-combination of rain, fog, sleet, snow and ice-through Sunday afternoon. It is after eleven in the morning and he's asleep on the couch. I can hear the TV news announcer in the background. I'd woken him up.

"Why are you asleep?" I ask. "Didn't you go to bed last night?"

"Naw, didn't get much sleep. Chase was barking at something outside most of last night," he tells me.

"So Mandy is the second dumbest dog of the day, " I tell him with the following explanation.

It's a dark and dreary rainy 7 am Saturday. Mandy climbs on the bed. Pooch the cat is comfortable at my feet, stretched out in a thin line. Mandy licks my hand, then decides there's more nutritional value in my whiskery face. Plus, she can clean her tongue of morning catarrh on two days growth of beard. I decide that since I am an old fart, I should look like one, but only a debonair old fart. I'll grow a goatee.

"Oh Daddy, I luff you so much," she tells me with wet kisses. Geez.

I ignore the dog, hoping that she'll fall asleep. No such luck. Lick, slurp, lick. Slurp some more. Then she turn her attention to the cat. Snip, snurfle, nip.

I get up and walk downstairs. Pooch the cat follows like the good dog he is. I let him out. Mandy doesn't follow. No click-click of toe-nails on the stairs. I open the door to the storage space under the stairs where we hang all keys: the house ( five doors-five keys), the garage, outbuildings, three cars and twenty-nine master locks. This is usually a signal, "He's going outside".

No Mandy. Next, I jingle her collar. The tinkle of rabies vac tags says, "We're going for a ride." Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more important than, "going for a ride." When I was a kid I remember pleading with my Dad to take me for a ride, anywhere. I taught her well.

No Mandy.

Finally, I walk up the stairs. push her off the bed and cajole her to go outside in my most pleading, pretty- please voice. I can see the cartoon balloon above her head, "Oh well I'll humor the dufus." She stands in the breezeway looking at the falling rain. I slip on my overcoat and don my muck boots. She follows while I put the log propping the door to my Chevy closed to one side. Once it's safe inside the garage, I can find out why the door handle sticks and so the car can drip water all over my workshop floor. I walk to the dog pen to check on the tire of the truck. I'd overloaded the truck with slab wood from the Amish and a back tire went flat.

"Crap." I forgot to close the driver's side window. The bench seat is soaked. The tire is OK, therefore I drive the truck to the front apron of the garage in case I have to get out the compressor to fill the tire. My sweatpants feel like I peed in them from the soaked seat. The truck bed fills a depression in front of the garage with rain water collected overnight. One more, "crap."

Ahah! I remember, Mercury went retrograde according to Dawn, the astrologer. Mechanical things will go awry. Communication will be difficult, legal issues and signing contracts are to be avoided.

Dawn and I spend a good deal of the morning trying to figure out how to get out of Dodge City with our hides intact and a reasonable amount of cash in our pocket. We want the positive things we moved to this area for like clean water and a pristine natural environment without a depressed economy ( we reached a low point when one of Dawn's framed paintings sells for $7 at the Amish auction and a wooden barrel with a quick sketch of a chicken is quickly snatched up for $20) , lack of amenities( forty-four miles for decent Chinese food) intellectual poverty of the residents ( Scooter, the local cop is still on suspension without pay-the town has no police force) and a climate without the bipolar lows of -22 degrees in January and near 100 degrees in the height of summer with cloying humidity.

Jorge Googles St.George, Utah. Oh boy. Road trip!

Dazed and Confused

2011-11-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

Apologies to Led Zeppelin.

My local bank looks pretty much like any bank in an old western movie or in It's A Wonderful Life. Tombstone, Dry Gulch and Cedar Rapids all had banks like this one designed by Fritz Schmaltz, architect and barber extraordinaire.It's a solid, narrow, two-story brick building. On one side there's a empty lot which enabled the bank owner to install a night depository chute.There's wooden platform in front of the chute so short people don't have to bring a step ladder to reach the handle of the pull out drawer. On the east side of connected to the bank is a seedy looking cement block building. The blocks are painted white. It has a homemade wooden door with hasp lock and one window. In the window is a sign that warns the premises are protected by C. H. and R. Security..

Last year the bank owner installed two plastic/glass security windows inside for the tellers.The word on the street was that he was getting tired of being robbed. Now, a serious thief has to stick the "gimme all yer cash" note in the window slot. Since the bank teller can't fit a bag of money through the slot, she'd have to go to the access door in the lobby, unlock it and hand over a cloth bag of bound bills. That's assuming the bank owner was too cheap to install bullet proof glass/plastic. There isn't enough business for two tellers to staff two windows. If it gets busy Lissa runs from one window to the other. It opens at 10 in the morning and closes at two. Fridays it's open from 11 until five.

When the Kwik-Stop changed over their ATM to one that charges a fee, I opened an account at the bank. Yesterday I had to make a deposit in my checking account to be able to pay the Amish workers who finally finished the barb wire fence on our south line. The local bank is a boon for the Amish because it's too far to drive their buggies to the big town. The Amish patriarch says it takes two hours to get to Viroqua which is twenty minutes away by automobile. Besides, the town council has been debating an ordinance which would require the Amish to scoop horse poop or attach a manure carry bag to the horses' rear end. The bag spooks the horses and stopping to scoop the poop has it's drawbacks. The Amish have threatened to take their business elsewhere.

The local bank faces the expansive central square of town. At one end is a playground with swings, a wooden castle to climb in and around and concrete block restrooms. The other end, closest to the main street has a gazebo and a Veterans Memorial with a concrete bench in front of marble markers to ponder the folly of war. Town workers have placed an assortment buck-ugly plastic Christmas figures which light up at night. The street around the square is double-wide. People angle park in front of the bank or library. On the opposite side of the square is a motley assortment of converted store front apartments, a firehouse turned into only God knows how many units and single family houses. One house is painted bright canary yellow after being remodeled. A few are so nondescript that I can't recall what they look like. I do remember the white house that used to be a butcher shop or dressmaker's store. The constable of police who's now on suspension for philandering with the thrift shop owner and I are talking on the steps of the library. He's telling me that the occupant of the white house with the false front is has a problem with drugs.

I angle park in front of the bank like everyone else. I have a blank re-call petition behind my car visor. Jorge does his banking here, too. He enjoys sharing local news and gossip with the bank teller. I leave the recall petition behind in case Jorge has already approached Lissa. After the prerequisite complaining about my Schatzki ring and Lissa's back trouble, I ask,

"Has Jorge been by asking you to sign a recall petition for the Wisconsin governor?" She says,

"No I haven't signed one. If I sign, it angers people on one side or the other."

Snut Farley Looking Dazed and Confused- copyright Seven Roads Gallery 2011

I guess the bank teller decided that it was easier to tick me off than one of the local nubs. Or even worse. She didn't want to let me know that she is a die-hard Republican. I take the blank petition to the library and ask the director why the assistant director didn't sign the petition.

"Oh, he's off in his own world somewhere," she says. I take that to be a mild reproach for someone who always has a snipe and gripe about the guy.

She rambles on about the heating bill, wait for it, $47 last month for the three room single story building which she tells me, "by law we keep it at 68 degrees". In between humming a non-descript tune she thumbs through a Newsweek which lists the top Republican and Democrats in Washington and how much they make. I get the idea that conservative leaning Newsweek wants to make the statement that most of the Pols are fat cats. I'm dismayed at the growing disparity of wealth.

La Nina

2011-11-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

November drought statistics in Southwestern Wisconsin.

According to the NWS our area has been abnormally dry. About a month ago, I cut a ragged piece from our 100 foot white fabric, row cover. It was more or less a square. After I sowed some leftover, high traffic grass seed I found lying on a shelf in the garage, I covered the bare patch of hillside lawn with the row cover. In the coldest part of November, we experienced some twenty degree nights, I was concerned that the freeze may have killed my newly sown grass. I pulled out a wire staple holding the cover in place. The grass had barely poked through the dark brown compost which I used to cover the grass seed. Oh well. I got lazy about checking the new grass. Until today, that is.

Joy of joys. The grass not only grew, it flourished. Right there in the center of the photo is my new grass.

So what? Big deal, huh? While it isn't earth shaking, front page news, I'll tell ya it will alter the course of events here on Black Crow Farm.

Recent weather has been mild-in the 40's to mid 50's. It didn't rain until Friday night, last. A few puddles. here and there. It wasn't enough to turn Pooch, the cat into Bill The Cat with spiky cat fur as he hunts along the south fence line. But my grass thrived and flourished under the row cover. Think about it. Most anything here just under the arctic circle hibernates as November approaches hard winter. I haven't cut the lawn since late October. That new grass, however, grew two inches or more.

The last major garden AHAH experience came at a dinner party at the neighbors. They are serious organic farmers, albeit with a renegade streak. The son of one of the party-goers was talking about the effects of red spectrum light on tomatoes. Back then this was far reaching stuff. In the Lee Valley garden catalog for 2011 you can buy red plastic mulch to encourage vigorous growth of tomatoes. It is now common knowledge to serious gardeners. It was a mixed blessing for me in that I usually sowed 75 tomato plants. We didn't lack a supply of tomatoes.

If indeed weather conditions continue and a predicted La Nina fizzles, white row cover could produce better spring and fall crops for this guy. In the same National Weather Service news directive there was a map of the U.S. showing severely affected parts of the South. Current weather patterns have caused a smaller soybean harvest, a minimal to non-existent peanut crop and will hit us in the pocket book at the grocery store.

Fools 'n Clowns

2011-11-26T08:08:00.000-08:00

Sunset in Kickapoo Center

Only a fool forces awkwardness upon himself.

Rahul Bhattacharya

from

The Sly Company of People Who Care

Before I awoke, I'd been struggling with fitting the town chairman's wife into an old fashioned, wood and tin steamer trunk. She was dead in my dream, but I guarantee you, she's alive in real life. The symbolism puzzles me. The town chairman told me in his perennially gruff voice, crusty from throat cancer to take out her extra clothes, "so ya ken get the lid down." I was packing her things for the long journey along with the body. Strange. What did I eat for dinner?

A young woman is dispensing orange juice / lemonade from inside a clear,round plastic ball which turns upon a couple of rollers, like a rock tumbling machine, sloshing the ingredients so they don't settle to the bottom. We're at an old-folks home. She offers me a slice off the tip of odd looking plant, actually, a long thin stem with a bulb like a rat's nose at the end. We cut the bulb end off and sniff the contents. Woo.Very strong. Very potent.

The smell's a combination of very old cinnamon you'd find crusted on inside of the lid of a spice jar and a whiff of the smoke stack from my American Flyer train which belched white puffs of smoke from a tablet I'd drop down the chimney. The steam engine smell, I learn, is powdered copal, the same thing priests used in their incenser. In my distant memory, a white bloused, black skirted kid who played hardball with us behind the church, carries the brass incenser hung from a chain following Father K moving the smoke to and fro.

Copal is the resin from a tree in central America, mesoAmerica as Google says. Most Colombian copal actually comes from the Andes in South America. Aged copal resin becomes amber, a color and a name. When I was a peddler, I sold copal in cloth bags from a company in Taos. People bought it for the sweet tang when one dropped a small boulder on a glowing charcoal ember. It was said that the smoke took prayers to the heavens. People would come into the store asking, "What's that smell?" The wag in me would tell them,

Musta been Leroy, the UPS driver. He eats too many beans.

The young thing offering the slice of heaven tells me it's an aphrodisiac. She wears a thin yellow sundress with spaghetti string straps. I hope she's telling the truth, because I'd love to...

Only a fool forces awkwardness upon himself.

In the novel Rahul goes to a medical office for a yellow fever shot. The receptionist he once trysted with is no longer there. He briefly considers looking her up, then reconsiders, thinking.

Only a fool forces awkwardness upon himself.

I've been telling myself to get off my ass and continue the story of Rainbow and Rosie. I grow weary of the hundreds of detective novels in an alphabet or number series. I cannot find anything but another stereotypical tale of Harry The Hammer, private eye, which take up whole shelves at my local libraries. The literary diarrhea enables the author to spend the winter in Tuscon, have three horses, five dogs, three chickens, and ten cats. Look at the slow progression of pictures of Stuart Woods on the dust jacket of his novels. He's one of my favorite authors(?) who includes a note at the end of his book telling readers basically- he doesn't need any more ideas from his adoring readers. Then I run across a novel like The Sly Company of Strangers Who Care. The imagery is exotic. The prose beautiful. The language, stunningly so foreign that you repeat the words out loud to be able to understand them , for example, bai is boy. Nuf said.

Only a fool forces awkwardness upon himself.

I'd like to describe Rosie's famous topless haircuts.The eye strain is excruciating as she tells you, " Keep you head still, brudda." Or make up more lies about Rainbow's carelessness sitting too close to a campfire when someone tossed a river rock into the fire which explodes sending out shrapnel. She was and is a gorgeous brunet. Then I'd have to tell the whole story.T he good , the bad and the smutty. No one would believe it, unless I'm rich, famous, a drunk, liar or politrickan or all. One is actually provable.

When one writes for public viewing, every Tom Dick and Harriet (Rosie's real name) has an opinion. Some I value for their insight, humor and honesty. You know who you are, so don't stop. Others are like the comments I read in a news blurb in which the Mexican government decided to kill 50,000 feral pigs who sleep in the U.S. and roam across the border to feed. When did the news media feel it important to include the vox populi in reporting the events of the day? Is it because it is no longer news?

Discounting the LOL's scribblers out there who cannot capitalize an I, substitute U for "you", C for "see" and lapse into a teenage electronic version of patois, because Mrs. Ladwig didn't stress grammar or usage in middle school. My grammar school English teacher was Ophelia Spargo, bless her 80 year old heart-may she rest in peace up there with the other English teachers in heaven along with my mother. The only thing I remember about Ms. Spargo is the coughing fits that forced her to leave the classroom. Sad.

What else is there to do on a rainy Saturday morning?

Cookup

2011-11-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

Salvatore Pucci

The cat shot is a quick download, small format that takes a few seconds. We need one more cat picture here.

I watched him scramble after a rodent yesterday. First, he digs furiously in the lawn. He found a hole which, I assume, belongs to a vole. Then he walks away "Ask me if I care?" The vole is tricked into coming back to the surface. Voles are like that, curious. In an instant The Pooch is back over tail to the hole in a one viscous leap at the vole. The vole escapes to brag to his buddies about fending off a monster tiger.

I found a dead vole by the back door the other day. Black to gray fur, sharp,pointy nose, stained brown incisors-not at all like the cute mice the cat finds out by the lawn shed with their rounded ears, brown fur and white under-body. This time of year, one of my favorite stories to read to the kids was The Church Mice At Christmas. Of course the mice are poor because they live in a rectory-whatever that is. The main cat in the tale is a benevolent cat who helps the church mice. Read it sometime. It'll restore your faith in mice as something other than assistants to Republican politicians who nibble away at our sanity.

Oh, but I have strayed.

Cookup. Guyanese expression for a bit of this, a little of that. It can be used for anything from food to a person's heritage, like mine.

So I'm on patrol of the grounds with the Perrito. I spell it wrong in a Spanish language dictionary because the spell checker underlines it in red, tricking me into thinking my command of Espanol is lacking Perito is a town in Argentina not a small puppy-my usage. The 50 foot white pines have littered the back yard/field with cones. I'm trying to decide if I should get out Fred and mow the lawn-the lazy man's way of cleaning up the cones-or if I should rake them into a pile. Mowing in November tells one's neighbors this guy is a bit off.three bricks shy of a load. Fred will disintegrate them into mulch, but I just replaced the blades, sprayed the undercarriage of the mower deck with penetrating oil for his long winter nap. I decide to rake after filling a kitty litter pail with cones for a fire starter or possible Christmas wreath decoration.

Disgruntled Wily Posing as Amish

At the far end of the 10 acre corn field is an Amish covered black buggy, a tethered ragged horse and an Amish guy with a dot of orange on his head. That would make a good picture, I tell myself. But the Amish don't like their picture taken. It's hunting season. It's not safe to walk in the woods without blaze orange. He's not in the woods, however. He's installing a gate between the field behind us and the far corn field, the one that Principal Felty owns. Dipstick Dan, the neighbor, installs the posts for the gate to open into a thicket of scrub trees instead of the far field. It figures.

While I'm downing a lunch of elbow macaroni and tuna fish, Mandy barks at an approaching stranger. It's the Amish man with orange wool cap over his straw boater. He needs to borrow a drill bit. "And while I'm at it, can I borrow a drill? I drill him with questions. "Is this a new Amish fashion statement?" This Amish man has never been exposed to sarcasm, "I don't understand what you mean." He doesn't laugh when I explain. He tells me he also wears an orange vest when he's hunting.

I've run out of ingredients for this cook-up because I'm thinking,

If that rifle fell while I took the picture of a stuffed coyote with a straw hat and knit cap, I'd have some esplainin' (Ricky Riccardo) when Dawn gets home.

The rifle is always loaded, 10 shots in the clip, nothing in the chamber with the safety on.

BUT, did you remember to flick the safety? Did you pull back the bolt and load the chamber?

My daughter-a city slicker-has no experience of rural life. She hasn't seen Mandy tree an obviously, addled raccoon in broad daylight. She needs to listen to the NPR segment of This American Life about a woman attacked by a rabid raccoon hysterically calling her husband from their rural driveway on her phone only to have him laugh at her spunky sense of humor. Or follow her story of trying to get a $3,000 rabies shot from a rural hospital or to have the doctor explain that the rabies shot should be given within twenty four hours of the bite while the hospital insists she bring the so-called rabid raccoon in for testing, which takes about a week.

I'm going outside with the rifle to reassure that I'm not Charlton Heston.

I'm Not Sam

2011-11-20T08:27:00.000-08:00

If it weren't for this hound, I'd be a Couch Potato.Make that-Recliner Recluse. Mandy is the queen of -The Look. She works it well. Sometimes I can tell when its an urgent, puleeze let me out look. The other day I mixed in some left-over soup in her dish. One half hour later she's pleading with me to let her out. Her frequent lip licking is the kicker. Outside she promptly barfed, ate some grass and barfed again.

By rough estimates, the front field is over an acre. It's not square.. Various landforms and obstacles like the frame for the onion drying shelter, an old stump, the compost pile, a 100 foot row of red dogwood bushes, a line fence, nine garden plots and the pole shed create a narrow dog run at the foot of the berm that leads to the highway.

Mandy loves to run. Seeing her stretched out in full stride keeping pace with a vehicle on the highway along the fence line gives me a certain pleasure of seeing a dog run free. She wouldn't be happy in a city lot, although she'd compensate. I'd take her on long walks in the nearest park. Our need to be outside coincides. At night, I'd be reading near a fireplace, if we had one. Dawn's studio has access to the chimney and the former owners used a wood stove there. Fear of fire made me give the studio wood stove away to the town chairperson. I've thought about getting it back, but after he died, that thought disappeared with him.

On our nightly excursion, I see things I'd otherwise miss from laziness or the warm comforts of a wood furnace in the basement. Last night, I watched a cattle truck loudly pass by on the highway. Yeah, big doins', huh? Think again. Over Freymiller's hill I hear the cattle truck approach from a distance. When it crests the hill, it's lit up like a tree in Macy's department store. Red and yellow strings of light outline various features of the cab and the trailer. It roars by and the kid and I watch as it, the noise and the light circus, subsides, then disappears around the broad 1/2 mile sweep of land to the north and east.On clear nights the first bright stars in the sky, the Milky Way, the full moon and occasional Northern Lights are a free spectacle not to be understated.

The night before last, I walk toward the corn field that was once the town of Kickapoo Center. Instead of hearing ghosts from the hotel operated by Robert Wilson, I can hear coyotes cavorting about a hundred yards away. They sound like teenagers with a six pack of beer parked by the river. We used to walk there frequently, until the dipstick new owner, Principal Felty, put up a plastic barrel with a No Doin' Nothing sign taped to it. He has big "Kontrol and Land Baron" issues. At first Mandy voiced her disapproval loudly and furiously barking at the white barrel which looks like a K K Klansman standing in the road without the pointy hood. Tonight she barks in a much, much different manner. It's a deep throaty, menacing bark. It surprises me because I've not previously heard this bark. When you hang with a dog 24/7 you become aware of her vocalizations. There's one for barking at birds, one for-someone's in the driveway. There's the pissed off yelp of being teased to distraction or the bark of annoyance when I pretend to step on her paws or put two fingers together to snap her on the rump. Tonight, it's stay down there or else. Jorge tells me a dog got eaten by coyotes somewhere south of our area. We conclude it must 've been a yipper, those tea cup puppies that don't know their miniature size. Mandy would be slightly outweighed, but she takes no guff.

Jorge has two mutts rescued from the pound or from starving while on the run. Sam barks all the time. He's not allowed to run outside on Jorge's 95 acres because he's a dumb mutt. Unlike Mandy who knows where the food bowl is and stays put on our five acres as if an invisible line is drawn at the perimeter, Sam would be off in a lark. When he realizes he's lost, he'd be unable to smell familiar landmarks because he has no experience in the local terrain. Besides his parents were low class mutts( my grandparents thought the same of my father). Intelligence comes from the mother, and like my first ex-wife, whom Dawn calls "the dumbest woman in the world", Sam's mother was mentally challenged. Jorge claims Sam barks at me because I'm afraid of him. Sam knows intuitively I'd brain him with a baseball bat if he tried to bite me again, like he did as I approached the white picket fence to enter Jorge's front yard. I should wearing a sign that says, "I'll beat you into next week if you bite me again.' But Sam, can't read. When I hear Jorge shouting at Sam to ,Be Quiet! inside the house," I know the dog must be deaf, also. The only way Jorge can get him calmed down is to cage him. Anyway.

Sam tries to bite Mandy. She's surprised by the attempted nip of her nose. She stuck her snout up through the fence for a whiff and got insulted. Mandy backs off three feet, barks for five seconds ( Don't ever do that again, she says) and turns around and tosses grass torn loose by her back feet. The dog's version of giving somebody the finger. Good for you , girl.

Woodhenge

2011-11-18T09:18:00.000-08:00

Strong, gusty winds from the south make the thirty degrees displayed on the north side house thermometer seem more like twenty degrees. I'm walking the dog in the event she rides shotgun on my afternoon trip to Lacrosse. Mandy lives for road trips. A short ride in the truck from the drive way to the woodpile is no exception. The cat, on the other hand, dislikes wind. It's either a reaction to the noise it makes blowing through numerous species of conifers or that he gets cold quicker.

"I thought I told you to leave him alone," I tell Mandy. The cat is stretched on the bed sphinx-like. His tail is pounding on the quilt. Mandy abandons her blankie for a romp in bed with Pooch, the cat. The two are like children, only with more fur. The first thing in the morning, the cat races downstairs ahead on Mandy. He lies in wait for her behind the island counter. Mandy is hip to his tricks and descends the steps more slowly. She stops midway on the stairs and waits for him to spring out at her. There are a dozen variations to the game. The Pooch's favorite is "counting coup". Like Native Americans who considered touching your enemy and walking away a show of valor more difficult than killing him. The cat will bounce off the dog's shoulder and bound away.

Wood-henge is my uncompleted greenhouse. Lack of money, bad weather and busy carpenters have slowed my spring plans for starting plants indoors. Yesterday in Wal-Mart I stopped to ask a friend who works in the garden center for a few tips on raising sweet potatoes. Seventy some year old Matt and his wife are competent and successful growers.

"Oh, I'd didn't raise any this year," he tells me. "Shoot," I mutter.

"Where do you get your stock?" I ask. He tells me most seed catalogs carry sweet potatoes, but I know for a fact the ones I deal with are sadly lacking. Like a lot of gardeners, he covets his sources. "Do you plant whole potatoes or shoots?" I'm thinking of the jar of sweet potato plants I got from the Amish Matriarch one year. My lack of knowledge and a weed filled plot gave me fingerlings. They were disappointing to look at and were ignored until I found a moldy box of them in the summer kitchen. I wondered if the stock was faulty or my growing methods in error.

If you examine this shot, behind the bush and adjacent to the woodpile is the first location of an early spring cold frame. It correctly faces south, however, I forgot about the silver maples when leafed out will shade the cold frame. That was garden lesson number 32. I rigged up a growth chamber in the summer kitchen which you can't see, save for the window that faces south above the wood pile. A jerry-rigged glass and plastic box with a grow light and a heating pad produced many plants, but damping off-a fungus disease caused by too much water-plagues my results. Growing vegetables indoors creates uniques circumstances. Amish greenhouse growers, once the plants are started, need to bring down the temperature for the vegetable plants to encourage stocky stems and hardy plants. Their hot houses filled with hanging baskets and flats of garden flowers have incompatible temperature variables with vegetable plants. More and more the Amish are switching to plants that produce more profit. Four packs of vegetables that sell for $1.00 or at the most $1.25 aren't as profitable as a hanging basket which can bring $12 to $20 each with a minimal investment in time and materials.

The same year I created a hot box indoors, I moved my young plants to a cold frame outdoors, repotted them and they did well in the garden. Too well. That year I couldn't toss out cabbage plants I'd started. I planted all the young cabbages and hedged my bets against early cold weather and tunneling moles by starting additional plants in the ground from seed. We ate a lot of saurkraut.

For me, this is a tough time of year. Used to being busy, it's too early to order seeds, too late or too cold to work outside. I am fortunate that warmer weather two days ago gave me a window of opportunity to turn over the corn garden. It's unlikely that I'll get the kale patch or the chard garden turned over. I look at my gardens as works of art. I stopped calling them "my pretty" after the wicked witch of the north dropped a silver maple twice right in the middle of my garden and a year later tossed in a flood for fun.

I'm twiddling my thumbs hoping for progress on the greenhouse.

The Afternoon Morning Report

2011-11-17T12:31:00.000-08:00

May 15,2005

I got waylaid.

For those snarky snipes out there it doesn't mean getting laid along the way. I wish.

I started some soup. Because I added barley, it will take a bit to simmer. "Gollee ( Jim Naybors style) look at the time," I'm thinking. It's almost two pm. I glance at the dog. She looks as if she's moping. A quick check of the spelling of moping takes me to the definition of moot ( of little substance) and away from the way I thought I'd spell moping, with 2 P's. That's something I need to do ( get Mandy outisde) before the day ends a little before 5 pm. along with adding firewood to the woodpile behind the garage. After the first snowstorm, my Husquvarna will have trouble getting from the woodshed to the backyard. Besides, the dog likes to carry sticks of firewood in her mouth. She likes to carry her weight.

I want to describe the morning in succinct ( brief) terms. Earlier in the day, I wander around the yard, noting little details and checking the condition of the few remaining garden vegetables. I moved the oregano cold frame to the sand pit where the onion drying tent stands most of the summer. My experiment to to keep an herb alive through the coldest part of the fall/winter has become an obsession. In the shed where I keep lawn tools, I stored overhead garage door panels which we replaced previously. The garage door had 1/2 inch Styrofoam insulation that will fit over the glass of the oregano cold frame. To get the insulation out I have to destroy the door. I need a hammer and a wunderbar. This occupies most of Wednesday afternoon.

The panels nicely cover the oregano cold frame glass and are held in place by two, 100 year old glass church windows which will eventually part of the new green house.As Mandy races cars along the berm by the barb wire fence, I remove one side of the panels. The oregano looks well. Everything else is lying flat, forlorn and frozen after a 19 degree morning. The kale-drooping. Chard-sad. Even the deeply mulched sage which I hope to over-winter is sagging badly. The corn plot which I slow tilled yesterday to bury cornstalks and vegetative debris is frozen solid. The Pooch has to hunt for a soft spot to poop. Celery in it's own glass enclosed box looks like a weeping willow. I hope it will stand tall when the sun warms the frosty panels of glass.

In my wandering and musing I notice grapevine wreaths hanging in the pole shed. It's almost Thanksgiving. I need to check out the lights on the wreath. I toss the grapevine wreaths on a piece of plywood used as a table in the garage. Extension cords hang at the four corners. I plug in both wreaths. Nothing. I decide to write a piece about the need to learn to speak mandarin after the Chinese elect one of their own as President after they buy the Constitution, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, The White House and most of the United States that isn't already Chinese, shipping it all across the ocean to erect a Plasticville version of America from my Lionel Train set.

Scratch that. I'll do a bah-humbug piece. Scratch that, people don't want their holiday ruined just because yours was terminally weird. I'll search for my copy of the Albatross Man At Christmas and do an annual recitation of a classic I wrote while still a peddler in downtown Milarky. Nah, scratch that. Why ruin it for kids still into It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, Charlie Brown, The Christmas Carol and Frosty The Snow Man. Besides I kinda like the version with the original Scrooge instead of Jim Bacchus doing Mr. Magoo.

Hey, my soup's ready.

Amish Humor

2011-11-16T08:58:00.000-08:00

I need a dose of humor. It's certainly scarce around here.

I'm standing at the front counter of my local liberry prefacing my remarks to my 85 year old library angel. "I don't want to sound old," I say.

Helen, the library director, was severely injured in an automobile accident years ago. It's caused her pain and misery. She has to rely on a cane when walking. She walks with a permanent stoop. I'm whining about a few maladies. She looks at me and gives me a knowing smile when I say,

"I'm going to sound like a geezer complaining about my lumbago."

She replies, "Yeah, I'm in pain almost all the time." I forget what she said after that which I should remember because it would enlighten me in ways to cope. But I don't. Too much rolling around in my brain.

I'm going to a gastro-enterologist in Lacrosse for a consultation. My favorite occupation-cooking and a second favorite-eating- is now a chore. My medical provider says that severe allergies have caused my esophageal sphincter to tighten causing food to get caught in my craw. To keep from choking, I keep a glass of water nearby. Everything seems to compound the problem. Bread-forget it. Broccoli, a nightmare. Brown rice and tofu are regulars on my plate.

If I don't get in an argument with the doctor from Franciscan Skemp/Mayo, I'll be scheduling an outpatient appointment to have my throat stretched. Apparently it's not uncommon, the throat stretching, that is. The arguments-endless. Like crazy girlfriends, I seem to attract quacks. My last encounter, for example.

Dawn calls the surgeon's office the day after my hernia surgery. In the conversation with the nurse, she explains some side effects of the surgery. Nurse Rachitt says, "That's really odd. I've never heard of that. You'd better bring him in." Sitting is an experience in pain, notwithstanding a 25 mile trip to the clinic located in the hospital. Dawn drives with both feet, mind you. Left on the brake and right foot on the gas. I wince when she gets above 25 mph over bumpy country roads. In the consultation with Dr. No, he says my reaction is quite common. "But your nurse said..." Dawn mutters. Dr. No says, ""She doesn't know anything."

This is the guy who charged $330 for a 5 minute appointment in which he hands me a comic book magazine YOUR HERNIA AND YOU, takes a ball point pen and points to a diagram explaining why I have a hernia. "Any questions?" he says. The same surgeon's son treated Jorge for a life threatening heart condition.After a cursory examination, he tells Jorge that he has to admit him and take some tests. Jorge asks a few questions, the most pressing is, "What about the cost and my insurance?" The doctor says "screw the insurance." Jorge signs himself out.

It's been weeks since I've visited my Amish friends. They took a trip to Minnesota to see the Patriarch's brother. In the kitchen the Patriarch tells me he bought some land while they were visiting in Minnesota. "Oh no, you can't leave," I moan. A daughter comes from around the corner with a glass Ball jar in her hand. I don't pay attention because they're pressure canning chicken while I sit at the table. She says, "Here it is."

The ball jar is full to the rim with brown loam. The Patriarch chuckles. I groan.

Miner Indiscretions

2011-11-15T07:12:00.000-08:00

The image suggested by the following words from a novel I'm reading underscores a theory that a good writer is similar to a painter. The author wrote in part,

"He searches for indiscretions like a miner panning for gold."

I haven't heard from Rollo in years. The last I'd talked to him is on the front lawn at my Amish friends farm. He's picking up chicken's he ordered from the Amish. The conversation is polite. It goes nowhere. I'm appalled when he previously mentioned flirting with one of the Patriarch's daughters as he sat in their kitchen enjoying conversation and coffee. I apologize to the Patriarch for introducing Rollo to the Amish. Ever one to be networking, I introduce him to the Patriarch. Rollo is looking for a source for organic meat. He considers himself to be a gourmet chef.

Actually, Rollo is a musician. He plays gigs with his wife in small town bars and local dives. He drinks too much, has an inflated view of himself and is often lonely and depressed. When you talk to him , you notice his head visibly trembles either from excessive drinking or an early onset of Parkinson's disease. He's not that old.

Always one to latch on to oddball people, I accompany him on a journey to a forgotten destination. As we pass by a farm on County Highway P, he points out a sign in the front yard. The owner of the farm has copied the ten commandments on a signboard, hoping to impress passers-by with her piety. Rollo recounts stopping at the farm. He walks up to the woman who owns the place. She's raking leaves. He goes on a diatribe hollering at her,

"If you really believed in the ten commandments you'd be better off putting up a sign to end the war in Iraq."

The sign remains. No sign to end the war in Iraq or Afghanistan follows. Rollo succeeded in impressing someone, like myself, of his terminal craziness.

Mountain Man Johann used to live in a cabin on the property adjacent to Rollo. MMJ tells me Rollo came over on the weekend instructing him,

"It is Sunday. I want it quiet. Do not play loud music, entertain noisy friends or disturb my peace."

Rollo told me that when he saw a carload of Jehovah's Witnesses drive down his road, he forced them to turn around and hurriedly exit when he ran toward them cursing and shouting in a loud voice. Opinionated, loud, brash and egotistical are his better qualities.

As I write this I wonder who's the miner, myself or Rollo?

Madison Briefs

2011-11-13T18:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, we drove down highway 14 to the state capitol. The hour and a half trip winds through a number of small towns like Spring Green , near Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home called Taliesin, a Welsh word for shining brow. FLW is best known for his Prairie style of architecture. If you live in a ranch style home, thank or curse FLW . Arena, Black Earth, Mazomanie and Cross Plains are the other whistle stop towns with two stop lights, a cheese factory or bait and liquor stores, car dealerships and farm implement dealers.My youngest came for a visit from Phoenix and brought her husband. It's been years since I've seen them. We lunched at the Great Dane on Fish Hatchery Road and went to my favorite Asian grocery store. It's called Yue-Wah. They specialize in food from the Middle East, all over Asia and Mexico. Five pounds of Jasmine brown rice sells for $2.69, for example. It's the only place I can find Thai coffee. This morning, I doubled the amount of water so that the coffee laced with sugar( I use honey) didn't pour like molasses. My daughter's husband stuck a pound can of Arabic coffee in my paw as we stood outside the grocery store rummaging around in our bags like kids with Halloween candy.

That's my son reflected in the window of a store on State street. He's the one who had heart surgery three, maybe four weeks ago. It's something I'm trying to forget, but great to see him with his new main squeeze, a terrific woman and friend of my daughter. She's a night duty nurse in a Phoenix hospital working brutal 12-14 hour shifts. They seem well suited for each other and as a Dad, I'm hoping she doesn't break his heart ( no humor in that statement).

State Street is partially closed to vehicular traffic and runs from the capitol rotunda to Bascom Hill on the opposite end. The street is packed with pedestrians. The woman staffing the information booth tells me this is normal when the Saturday football game is out of town. If you put a dime in a meter off State Street, it buys your four minutes. Across from our parking space on a side street, there's a restaurant called Fugu. My daughter's husband who's Hispanic says, "We won't be eating there if the place is true to it's name." I don't ask how he knows that Fugu is the art of preparing and cooking a poisonous blow fish.

Traveling to Madison reminds me how culturally deprived I am living in this area. I live for the peace, serenity and natural beauty, but sometimes I dearly miss being able to eat breakfast upstairs at the Sunroom where I first was introduced to a Depth Charge (coffee with a shot of espresso). It's mid-November in Wisconsin, mind you, and the outdoor seating area of the UW Brat house is packed. It's a relatively mild day but the wind chill factor forces us'n to put on jean jackets over sweatshirts and in my case, an L.L. Bean chamois shirt I bought myself for Christmas last year.

Brat-Boy's on the sidewalk drumming up business for the Brat Haus. Behind him people are checking out his buns. The woman is asking him if he's hot. He's giving her the "two thumbs up" . I didn't stop to ask him what he meant. I am in search of colorful pictures, of which there are plenty.

My banana bread is due to come out of the oven. Dawn wants to go to town to find a shoe caddy. Me, I already got a Chevy and just need to get out of Dodge. I already hauled some wood from the woodshed to the basement, ran over mole tunnels on the front lawn just to piss them off, took out the garbage from my garage workshop because the dead mice I dropped in the white plastic trash can were starting to smell and uncovered the oregano cold frame. That was today's excitement. It's almost four pm and it'll be dark soon. Happy Sunday to y'all. Hope the sun is shining in your neck of the woods. Oh gosh. I left off the briefs.

I couldn't convince Dawn to show her support for Bucky Badger by buying the red pair.Who couldn't love a store that has a book called, I Love Bacon and another dedicated to the art of kissing. I'm going back soon. Too bad the farmer's market around the state capitol is over for the season.

Paco

2011-11-10T07:30:00.000-08:00

Paco and Julie at the MIA

I'm really fond of this blurred picture of Paco and his friend Julie.It was taken in an elevator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The MIA is an amazing place with a variety of exhibits ranging from Chihuly glass sculpture in the main lobby to an antique automobile. I'd show you the auto, however, every attempt to download pictures from my file is met with an error message. Frustration looms large when this computer balks.It affects what and how I write. Outside, it's snowing again. More of the same and it's only November. Last night's full moon will remain unseen as it, too, was blocked by a faulty phone line or some other glitch. It cannot be the size of the file because I tried a variety of pictures. No matter. Screw the effing computer, there's always glue, paper and pencil. Send me a dollar and I'll give you a copy. Reminds me of the bumper sticker I spot on a passing pick up truck years ago. Left side- I NEED MONEY BAD. Right side- SHOW ME YOUR BOOBS. The driver was of the 100 hits school of thought. It goes like this. If you walk down a long, white sand beach, or any beach for that matter, asking women to go out with you, an imperfect stranger, 99 will tell you to take a hike. One per cent will say, "Oh, sure. Why not?" You can just show me the money, Thank you.

When we crossed a Minneapolis street on our way to a crowded liquor store, a man slumped against the wall of a storefront does a double take as Julie walks by in designer jeans. A cartoon double-take. Look once, Jerk your head to the left, and again, slowly gawk with open mouth. In England they'd call her a stunner. It is Saturday and Minneapolis bans the sale of liquor on Sunday. Like an all-you-can-eat buffet people overindulge. They purchase more liquor on Saturday perceiving a shortage of booze the next day. The city fathers encourage hording with a ridiculous law. Inside the store, reps from wine makers are giving out smaples. The correct spelling is samples but I rather prefer smaples. The festive atmosphere and a dry Sunday work wonders for their sales.

Alas, Paco and Julie are no more.

Paco works nights. Julie works the day shift at a chicken processing facility. Julie wants Paco to quit his job as night auditor. They argue. Next door to their second floor flat on the artsy-fartsy side of town not far from Eat Street, a guy is renovating a single family house. Julie, lonely at night, turns to the neighbor for aid and comfort. Paco moves out. The next time he hears from Julie, she's calling because she was arrested for DWI. The relationship is finalized when Paco learns she's caught herpes from her lover next door. Sad. It doesn't end there. Julie gets what she wanted all along. She marries.

I amazed at how well Paco takes the news. He's neither resentful, angry or upset. At last word he's avoiding his favorite pub because of a woman he dated tends bar at the same. He breaks it off for reasons he doesn't explain. The bartender begins stalking him at work and at home.

This could have been a full moon shot between the Norway pines on the east fence line. I would have written about the full moon antics of seniors at the retirement home or Dawn's recipe for Chipolte Chex Mix with dark chocolate. She left some for me to sample during my day. Sneaky Pete knows I can't resist semi-sweet dark chocolate. It's the only chocolate with some health benefits according to Jorge. Remember ladies, the way to a man's heart... I'm being sarcastic and telling you this because tonal inflections are notoriously absent from e-mail and short blog pieces. Besides, I'd never use the word "lady" since it comes from Old English Lede which means loaf kneader. The expression is so ingrained in our culture that it's similar to a well known landmark in Phoenix called Squaw Peak. Both are slurs. The biker guy who calls his wife, "The old lady" is referring to her as his loaf kneader. Is it the same when a speaker addresses his audience as ladies and gentlemen?

Before , After and Now

2011-11-09T10:05:00.000-08:00

At the front end of the grocery store the bubbly cashier asks, "Did you find everything." I know better than to ask where they keep thus and such because she'll never know. I'll get the blank stare. If she asks for help from one of the front end supervisors, it will be Phyllis, a middle aged woman who walks with stoop and shuffling gait. Phyllis does nothing but shuffle-back and forth between the cashiers. That and a saunter to the break room is the sum total of her experience of the store. Ask for phyllo dough and the response is, " Fee-Lo dough? What's that?"

I didn't see Marion in any of the lanes.My first encounter with Marion, a former schoolteacher and 16 year veteran of retail groceries is her comment about the out-of-season tomatoes I am purchasing. "Two thirty four a pound is pretty steep for cardboard tomatoes," she proclaims. I'm astonished at her frankness. Marion and I banter, a lot. "Howyre doin' ?" I ask. "Well, OK, I guess," she says. "OK is better than the alternate," I declare. "At least you're not dead." Hardly stimulating conversation but better than bubbly. I hate bubbly.

Her face has a reddish tinge.The color of her nose would qualify her to lead Santa's sleigh It's an unusual medical condition, but not roseacea.She dyes her hair a shade below blond with a tinge of auburn. She's anywhere between 50 and 75 years old. Marion is a pip.I like pips. In a store I'll always choose the cashier in the lane immediately to the right of the prettiest cashier. It's my proven system to get out of the store quickly, except if I choose a pip lane. Then, I'll forget to take all my groceries because of the banter.

On this day, Dawn is behind me, which tempers Marion's wit, somewhat. Dawn doesn't understand Marion's reference to getting laundry done in Lacrosse. From previous conversations, I know that Marion drives to the big city to clean her grandson's place and wash his clothes. Later when I explain to Dawn she asks, "Where's his mother?" I answer with two statements. "He's twenty years old. He may be paralyzed and in a wheelchair?" I know the next question from Dawn. "You didn't ask?" she wonders. I do not like to pry into people's lives. Most of the time I just don't care.

The above photo is the start of today's weather. White flashes appearing on the right are thick, heavy snowflakes. The kind that down power lines and break off tree limbs.

The preceding picture was taken after breakfast. I know I was going somewhere with this train of thought, but a phone call from Mountain Man Johann interrupts my creative genius, derailing the train. The road from Johann's cabin to the main road is a muddy half mile, two track path, deep with ruts, like roads at the turn of the century. A friend's grandfather once explained that tires on the old model T wore out quicker on the sides than on the tread bottom. Johann's road lies on the edge of a cornfield, unpaved, without any gravel. He likes it that way. Says, it keeps the Riff-Raff away. He's not going anywhere today, except by phone call. I'm first on his list.

Presently cars on the highway pass by very slowly because of the wet slush. A single county truck spreads something on the highway. I can't tell if it's salt or liquid calcium carbonate. The phone rings again. Jorge wants to know the weather conditions in our area. He's going to drive to Door County from Milwaukee. I tell him about the snow and slush,warning him to drive carefully. I don't envy his drive across the upper half of the state. His information about upcoming weather is that we may see sixty degrees in a few days.

I call a friend in Arizona. His birthday is today. I want to tease him about joining the "Over The Hill Gang." His wife answers the phone. She drives daily between Sedona and Flagstaff. Yesterday she didn't have to work because interstate highway 17 between Sedona and Flag is closed. Snow. Harvey isn't home. He's in Colorado. He doesn't own a cell phone, she tells me. When he retired, he tossed the cell phone. He's not a recluse, however,a cell phone to him is like wearing a watch in my opinion.. I don't want a time monkey on my arm. I'd ditch the cell phone monkey in my pocket, but then I'd not be able to call Dawn for free and tell her to bring home bananas. Most people I know will run to answer a phone. It's Pavlovian. Not me. When I was single and carefree looking for trouble in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, a local mon demonstrated another truism. "Watch this," he says. He curls his index finger in a waggling motion. There's a young woman in the near distance. She see the gesture and begins to saunter over. "It happens 100% of the time, here," he proclaims. I decide that the next time I'm in Wal-Mart I'll try the gesture on various strange women. I don't mean weird women, just ones who are unknown to me. I'll give you a full report. Later. I may need bail money. With Wisconsin 's new concealed carry law and a recent amendment that decreases the length of instruction and training in use of a weapon, I could be looking down the barrel of a Glock. These mid-western ladies have lots of room for hiding a pistol.

Kangaroo Skin Drums

2011-11-06T06:44:00.000-08:00

The Makah tribe of Native Americans live as far west and north as one can travel in the United States. I travel across the country to Neah Bay, the main settlement of the Makah. I'm looking for a drum maker named Greg Colfax. My ex-wife and I are staying at the only motel in town. The floor sags. Walking across the room is like walking on a piece of plywood too thin for my weight. It's like walking on water. Given the proximity to the ocean and the Northwest Coast rain forest climate where moss hangs in huge conifers lining the road, I am most likely walking on water under the floor. After a warning from a tribal elder to avoid so and so, because he wasn't honest, I thank this person for the advice. I've been given directions to Greg's home. Colfax is carving something in his living room.He's well known as a carver, drum maker and canoe maker There are wood shavings strewn over the carpet. He's trying to light a fire in the wood stove with a propane torch. I make a note of this trick the next time I need to start a fire in a wood stove.

There's a large biker type man sitting in an easy chair adjacent to the wood stove. He's wearing a leather brimmed hat like the ones that golfers wear. Colfax introduces him as, my "friend Tiny". I note the size disparity and wonder after previous warnings about avoiding certain tribal members. Greg mentions that he has a source for kangaroo skins. I commission him to make and paint drums sell at my trading post. He makes two sets of drums. The paintings are executed in traditional Northwest Coast style colors.

The nature of kangaroo skin is that it's light weight and extremely durable. The hand drums I make from deer, elk and cowhide are laced together with 8 laces across the frame connected to a perimeter lace woven through the edge of the rawhide stretched across a 9 or 12 ply laminate wood frame. Colfax uses only two laces.

The rule of rawhide drums is the thinner the skin the higher the pitch. Goatskin bohrans(Irish drums) have the highest pitch save for some odd thing out of Africa made from squirrel or muskrat-some strange critter. Playing bodhrans in a group produces overtones that sound like angels singing with the drummers. It is a stunning effect. When I played my own Lightning Bolt painted elk hide drum from Thunder Studio from California at a memorial service for Aids victims, people were moved to tears because of the resonant deep throaty sound bouncing off the walls and ceiling of the church where the service was held. The kangaroo skin drums are the exception to the rule. Light weight, thin skin and deep resonant voice.

The story of the painting on the three drums is as follows.

Colfax is in Colorado. I have forgotten the nature of his visit. He is performing in front of an audience. A man comes out of the audience after the show and relates a story I have named "The Hiker".

The hiker is walking through a national forest. On his sojourn he spots a wolf. The first drum pictures that the wolves spotted him long before he noticed he was being followed. The hiker attempts to follow the wolf. Both hiker and wolf have pained expressions ( my interpretation) regarding the encounter. After a considerable walk the man finds himself in a large open clearing. He notices wolves encircle him at all points of the compass. In relating this story to Colfax, the man who experienced the encounter with the wolves says that for the period of time he was surrounded-he doesn't detail the exact amount of time-he experienced a trove of emotions from abject fear to extreme elation. Then without a visible signal, the wolves trot off. The hiker man is deeply humbled from the experience.

Boomtown Follies

2011-11-03T07:34:00.000-07:00

Mandy, my dog, props a leg on the back pillow of the couch.No, not that. She's lying on the couch. She looks up at me with flattened ears. "Oh, no. He's gonna do something weird." When one is bored there's no end to weird. I cannot explain nor illustrate because my wife reads this blog. Imagination is a good thing.

All that's left of the 2011 garden is oregano, kale and celery. I should dump the oregano out of the pots, shake off the dirt from their roots and hang them to dry in the summer kitchen. I can't harvest the rest of the celery because 1). We'd have no fresh celery and 2). I'm researching the cold tolerance of celery. The kale just won't quit. After a recent slush storm it's fairly obvious that really cold weather is hiding around the corner. When that happens, the row cover will freeze to the ground. I have to decide. To uncover or not. Harvest all or lose it to winter's icy grip. There's always dry beans to shell..

I ask Mandy, "What do ya wanna do today?" Her ears perk. Visions of riding shotgun loom large. If we head to Dent and Bent, Mandy gets to watch their viscous miniature chihuahua barking at my car. It's not big enough to pee on the tires. At the Amish lumber yard, the black, brown and white mutt there is minuscule. I back away from the yard carefully because I can't see the little rat.

To illustrate that I once had a life, I bring you an excerpt from Clever Words Bring Forth No Buttered Turnips. There's no date on the cover. Just a picture of a stuffed rattlesnake. A clue about the time frame is that Roger Gavrillo ( pen name) is doing the writing. Bert Bubnick is narrating. Bert ( a fictional character) is part of the Witness Protection Program. One last note.

The photograph is second generation taken from a scanned shot. The old Epson printer was dying, hence the yellow lines across the document. I found it in one of my late mother's books. Back in the thirties it was apropos. It still is. An ass and an fat thing with big ears who can only agree on a single thing- an antacid. I have no idea why it is included in Boomtown Follies.

Since I began this tale, I have lost my desire to recreate the past. Suffice to say that living in Arizona had one benefit. Compared to the rest of the population in my small town, I was young. Just a kid by comparison. Here, I'm old. Besides, there are no nightclubs, just farmer bars. One either has to hire Mountain Man Johann as a bodyguard or prepare for the Elton John's song, "Saturday Night is All Right For Fightin'.

In Boomtown Follies I recount the story of a night out with my neighbors, Tuck Bartlett and his wife Windy. We drove into town to hear a band called Grateful Fred. Fred is the drummer for the band and lives with a woman I call Cinderella. She worked for the art gallery/co-op with me. Cinderella eventually gets fired for theft. Fred eventually dies from alcohol related causes and cancer. The lead guitarist is the manager for the furniture store on the main drag. He and his wife fight nightly over his many indiscretions. It's plenty entertaining for us'n.Here's short snort from my description of the action.

Don plays keyboards and sax. He drives in weekly from Vegas. Paul plays sax with a wireless pick-up so that he can wander through the club. Billy and Nancy are bumping and grinding on the dance floor. Lenny walks into the men's room and tries to pick a fight with Marty- a friend of the band who sits behind us.

Lenny snarls at Marty, "I don't like your T-shirt."

Marty replies, "Sorry. It's all I had to wear tonight."

Lenny says to Marty, "Let's step outside. You bumped into me and didn't say 'scuse me."

Marty isn't drunk enough to rise to the bait. Lenny waits until Marty goes outside for some "snoose", whatever that is. I know it isn't snuff.   Lenny grabs Marty around the throat. I watch the action through the front window. With all the hair and beards, it appears that two bear cubs are wrestling in the parking lot. Lenny and Marty room together along with a guy named Shmitty. In their absence Shmitty slides next to Durla. She's married to the bass player in the band. She used to be married to someone else but he was killed in a drug bust. Durla used to be friends with Debbie who tends bar at the Laughing Coyote.   66 year old Shmitty wants Durla to put in a good word for him with Debbie. He doesn't know that Durla is furious with Debbie for a one night stand with her husband. It's not pretty.

Lest We Forget

2011-11-02T16:07:00.000-07:00

Mandy in deep snow 12/12/2010

I'm in the basement throwing a log or two in the wood furnace when the phone rings. That is an amazing feat in itself, since the basement could double as a fallout shelter. The walls are deep and made of poured concrete. Earlier when the Santero called from AZ, I was sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch. The phone never rang. Several minutes after he called, my phone does it's voicemail alert.

Jorge is on the line asking, "Have you looked outside?" I told him I'd just returned from the liberry. "It's snowing," he says. I took my wet windbreaker off the clothesline for the second time and trudged to the woodpile in the backyard. Looks like I'll need more heat tonight. I'm kinda tired of three layers inside the house. When I'm not moving around, it seems chilly watching TV.

The Week magazine says coffee is a cure for depression. It's too late in the day for coffee, although caffeine has no effect on my wife. It's also too late to take a photo of the greenhouse. Before the rain/slush/snow started Jorge and I put four, fourteen foot 4'X 4's in the ground. They serve as end beams supporting the roof. It only took a half hour to drop the beams into the holes, add concrete and level the posts. Elmo previously dug the four foot holes. The really hard part is trying to ignore the constant stream of whistling, humming and grunting noises that come out of Jorge's mouth.

I have no experience with post and beam construction. I'm at the mercy of Elmo and his Amish crew to get back here. My phone call to his message taker and a quick trip to his house( " Is Elmo here? I ask a kid in the yard. No. " Is he working?" No. "Will he be back soon?" No.) is unsuccessful. Dawn says she noticed the darker beams ( green treated lumber immediately as she drove down our road.If'n I'm lucky this greenhouse will be up and running by spring. I hope. In the meantime, all you people who live up here near the arctic circle, brace yourself. I'ts only a matter of time. Put on yer snowshoes.

Santiago

2011-10-31T07:43:00.000-07:00


Santiago ( The Apostle St.James the Greater , patron saint of horsemen) <©> Seven Roads Gallery 2011

Let's put things into context.

Today is All Saints Day. In some cultures, I'd be sitting in a graveyard with picnic fare. There is a graveyard for the poor Barre family who lived in dipstick's house(the fence guy) in the cornfield behind us. I am not planning on a picnic today. I started a fire in the wood furnace to be able to hang clothes in the basement. We reached a new low in darkness when I complained to Dawn that at 7:19 this morning, it was still dark. It might rain.

I dusted off St.James this morning, admiring the santero's work. The horse "in pose", the metal miniature stirrups, braided reins and attention to detail are the mark of a fine craftsman.

I'll be remembering a few personal saints on All Saints Day. They include my mother, Violet, my stepfather Joseph and Gertie Sennett.

Post Script:
OK, so I'm a day early and a dollar short. Blame it on not having to punch a time clock and Jorge's reports from the cities. Friends were calling to asking him to a movie, brunch , whatever, so they wouldn't have to answer the door on Sunday-Trick or Treat day. To me that sounds like Scrooge, but, we don't have trick or treaters out here. When I lived on the cusp of the inner city, kids were imported in bus loads to our neighborhood. The reason, better treats and a safer Halloween for the kids.

When Jorge pointed out my mistake, I remembered my early morning stop in bloggerland. Next time, more coffee..

All Hallowed's Eve

2011-10-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

Seven Roads Gallery 2011

Sex Behind The Henhouse

2011-10-28T08:32:00.000-07:00

Patience.Some sage called it a virtue.

I'm under a major allergy attack.

After a pre-breakfast of an oatmeal cookie and coffee, I preheat the oven to 450. I 'm itching for punkin pie, despite a recipe which calls for three eggs, a cup of sugar and a cup of evaporated milk. I understand why the label on the pre-made pie crusts called them "traditional" because I get two punkin pies from a recipe for one deep-dish pie.

Yes, I got lazy and asked Dawn to pick up pie crusts on her way home. We don't have regular milk in the frig because I have switched to soymilk. I'm on a semi-vegetarian diet thanks to Jorge's influence. I watch and wait for him to screw up. The net results are that I have refined my bad habits and cut my meat intake.
I'm concentrating on eating more vegetables and as always doing things organically.

For example, Jorge gives me a pint container of white miso he purchased weeks ago. He tells me he likes miso soup, especially the way I prepare it with bits of tofu, scallions and fresh parsley. His diet is so routine, it would make me scream loudly for a Big Boy Hamburger. He's a lazy cook.Meals are repetitive. Boring. He'd never think to add saffron to rice. He does like garlic. However,subtle is not in his vocabulary. A few days ago he chopped an entire bulb of garlic and added that to his lunch-time fare. I asked if it caused any gastric distress. "Not a bit," is his reply. I think about an aphorism of his-You Don't Have To Think To Lie. A few days later, he admits to an afternoon of flatulence.

The allergic reaction? To get me out of bed, Salvatore Pucci crawls next to my face purring loudly. He licks my fingers . To show how much he cares and a subtle hint that he's hungry, he gnaws my knuckle. Cat spit. It makes my eyes itch. It makes me wheeze.

This is not me. It is Paul The Ball. It could be me. I'm itching to get out of Dodge. Ladies and gentlemen, let me explain.

I'm kinda in between things at the moment. I'm no longer a teacher, or a peddler. The Indian Trader/drum maker retired to the country. The traveler got tired of the hassles at the airport. Ask Dawn about a pair of shoes she wore in Sky Harbor Airport which had a metal rod in the soles. I don't need no more stuff. I got a barn full of stuff. Enough stuff to open up another trading post, except I don't wanna live in or near a major urban area. I've always been a farmer, so that doesn't count. My past shows that I've moved every seven years, give or take for divorce, kids and restlessness. What to do. What to do.

Not A Monk

I'd try being a monk, because I like to make wine, garden, chant loudly in a big open church, have meals at a twenty seven foot long plank table. I got a couple of nice plank tables in the barn if y'all need one. Forget the vow of silence. I'm a double Gemini . But sex with a buncha guys? A scene from Jorge's past, explains my attitude.

He's still a cop. He has a downtown beat. He pops into the Rialto Theater to take a leak. The Rialto showed X-rated stuff. A guy walks in and goes to the urinal adjacent to this cop. Kinda ballsy if you asks me. Jorge looks at him. The guy is peeking over into his stall. "Can I have a look?" he asks. Jorge replies, " No,You got one of your own."

I love women. Women of all shapes, sizes and colors. It's the way I feel. I'd describe my attitude toward life as similar to that of Fritz Perls. I am me and you are you. If we agree, it's wonderful. If not, it can't be helped.

Our Lady of Indiscretion-Seven Roads Gallery 2011

Again, I have strayed. It takes awhile to get back on track after summer of pawing in the dirt.

Dawn called the care facility for her father. She spoke with the director, identifying herself and giving her credentials. The ugly sister lied about a number of things. The director of the facility told Dawn that visiting hours are 9-6. He said there is no need for registering as a family member to be able to visit. Dad is faring well.. Their definition of "comfort care" is different. In our neck of the woods, it means care for a terminal resident. To them it just means making the resident feel comfortable. So he's not dying. Sister has large control issues as well as a fondness for paranoid hysteria.

Tough Crow

2011-10-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

Folk Art Crow-Seven Roads Gallery, 2011

So many piles of dog poop, so little room in the scooper.

My neighbor in AZ used a plastic bag from his Wall St. Journal to pick up Who-Do Wunderdawg's dookie. Yow. The thought of grabbing a warm pile of poop with my hand bothers me. Mandy has acres and acres of room to crap. The cat regularly uses the sand pile in the old house foundation. I don't have to watch where I step because he goes... and it disappears. The cat is good at covering his mess. The next door neighbors to Harvey Bartlett, the AZ prankster, had two little yippers. They had no yard, except a walled in patio. You could smell bleach fumes over our cul-de-sac when it was patio cleaning day. I'm glad I don't have a Great Dane, Malamute or St.Bernard.

I have cleverly introduced the topic. Yesterday was one crappy day.

I don't prepare this stuff in another program and import it to blogger. I proofread, edit and re-edit on the spot. I should learn to be brief. It causes technical problems for which I do not have the patience. I use my own images. Yesterday importing images from a free site caused me time and a loss of what little patience I possess. Then I got the bright idea to begin a post as a draft, spending more time as the ideas unfolded. In the end, the post got stuck. I saw a red blurb on the bottom of the screen that said something like "error in saving" If I left the program, I'd lose any unsaved changes. I tried that and , aha, I lost half of what I'd written.Crap.

Even images I'd imported from my pictures file disappeared. Like this one of Scratchy. The stray I found and gave away to a migrant family who lived behind us across the river.

Scratchy

This is their house. It wasn't habitable when they lived there. It's worse now.

For Sale.40 acres and a mule

This is the flag I've been restoring. While I have been paid handsomely in haircuts and offers of sexual favors for my work as a art restoration specialist, I do not take on new work. Don't ask. It, too, was a PIA, dripping glue when I turned the piece over to install a hanger.

Antique Flag-Seven Roads Gallery,2011

At the end of the afternoon, I possessed a real sense of accomplishment after downloading multiple images, such as this one of my tiny cold frame of fresh oregano here at the cusp of the arctic circle.

When Dawn returned home from her job at the old folks home, she told me her sister had left a voice mail message in response to multiple calls to check on Dad who lives with the sister. Against the advice of a certified health care professional with over ten years of experience (Dawn), her sister decides to care for their elderly father at home after Mom died.

As dementia approached on its silent paws, Dad became more dependent upon specialized care. When the sister had a personal emergency, she asked Dawn, with little advance notice, to drop everything and drive the 4 hours to the Southeast part of the state to care for Dad. Dawn refused, without doing an "I told you so," retort. Sisty Ugler had to hire a caregiver to come in for Dad. It was expensive. Sister was pissed.

In the voice mail message, Sisty tells Dawn that Dad was moved to a care facility over a month ago. He's in the last stages of Alzheimer's and doesn't have much time left. In a phone conversation with her brother, Dawn relates the details. Brother dryly says, "It was nice of her to let us know." It'd be easy to import an image of the sister since we're so close to Halloween.

I wake up in the middle of the night with the Anxiteers pounding at the bedroom door. They're ecstatic.

You have no friends. You are wasting you time on building a greenhouse. It's going to snow and won't stop until March. You find a hit man for Sisty Ugler and are sentenced to life in prison. The library will run out of new books and the new director will concentrate on Amish romance books and detective novels. People only love you for your potatoes. Your cat allergy is terminal. You will become a house husband reserving Mondays for laundry, Wednesday for scrubbing floors and Thursday for washing walls like your stepmother. In a recall election Wisconsin Governor Skippy Walker reports a landslide victory after the State Supreme court clears him for election fraud. Prohibition becomes the rule of law, again. The local Republican boss wants you to give him protection money. The gravel haulers clog the highway spewing diesel fumes. Mandy runs away.

Sigh.

Dribbling Over the Edge

2011-10-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

When the price of my favorite type of french roast coffee dropped to $6 a can, I purchased three cans. I mentioned to Dawn that we should stock up. She bought four cans. We stored the hoard(hey, that rhymes) on a high shelf in the summer kitchen next to Dawn's ceremonial deer antlers. The antlers are seldom used because Dawn hasn't done a deer dance in years. The coffee is gone.

Dawn's driver's license needs to be renewed. Since they closed the DMV station in Viroqua, we need to go to Richland Center. Road trip. Dawn leaves work early because the DMV closes at 5 pm. I agonized about inviting Jorge along because of the back seat driving. If we make him sit in the back seat with Mandy, there are snarky comments.Much of it from Mandy having to sit next to Jorge.

Jorge looking for change in his recliner.

The trip to RC is fraught with peril. Just before the left turn past KFC, a trailer loaded with snowmobiles side swipes a passenger van. The van is stuck in the center turn lane missing a bumper. I barely had time to swerve out of the left turn lane. I didn't see the putz driving on my bumper and sent him careening.

The DMV is cleverly disguised as a strip mall. Driving past a long row of white vinyl, single story buildings with no designation other then Executive Drive Suites, we spot a sign with a long black arrow pointing to a glass door. Of course there's the DUH moment when we cry out in unison , "That must be it." "Driver Licensing" it says. Dawn gets out of the car. I decide to let Mandy out for a walk. Jorge gets out of the car. I 'd pulled up to the edge of the parking lot next to other cars. As I walk around the front of the car , I glance at the hill below toward a pastoral setting of open fields, dairy cows and hardwood trees still clinging with autumn leaves. Yipes. The hill is a sheer drop of a hundred ( hunnert if you're from Wisconsin) feet. "Mandy. Get away from the edge ," I shout at her. She walks over to a plastic corrugated culvert set in the asphalt as a deep drain to the field below. Oh no, I can see the fire trucks pulling up now to extricate my dog from the culvert.

Mandy canters past office workers waving at her in boredom. Behind the DMV is the DNR. Plain white pick-up trucks with red license plates indicate this is the forestry division similar to the one behind the Great Wall in Viroqua. Hey, it's funny they put the forest service behind a Chinese buffet. Wow, these guys have two gas grills, a covered picnic area and a water hydrant. Mandy heads for the farm off in the distance, but the leash is only twenty feet and cuts her off before she gets to the cattle wallow.

Jorge wanders the parking area. I worry that the police will show up ( Jorge was the police) wanting to know why a black man is stalking the parking lot. A couple of years back Jorge accompanies me on a trip to Lacrosse. It's hot and he's tired. He lies down on a bench in the entrance to Woodman's grocery store. A clerk comes out. She asks politely, "Are you all right sir?" Jorge tells me later that all the while she was sniffing the air for whiskey fumes 'cuz there's black man passed out on a bench in front of the store. Jorge doesn't drink, by the way.

Dawn comes out ecstatic that it didn't take two hours to her the license renewed. No one threatened anyone. No guns were drawn and other than her face has a red tinge to it, the photo didn't look like a mug shot. She did add that the "nice" man at the counter had to retake the photo when her glasses slipped down her nose at the last moment. "Broke the camera," Jorge quips.

Next stop Wal-Mart. The RC Wal-Mart craft's area is, according to Dawn, well stocked with a variety of items she needs for her senior activities like making turkeys with a hand trace and pine cone door knob hangers.Of course there's the required bashing of Wal Mart and the Republican dominated state legislature when Dawn mentions a recent bill to deny state workers a salary increase or merit pay.

I wander down the men's aisle looking for the clearance rack when I see children's clothes marked down to $1. Unbelievable. Maybe I'll get lucky. Jorge follows like a puppy, complaining that I'm wandering on purpose. "You need the exercise," I tell him. I grab an unused cart because the grocery division has chicken leg quarters ( dog food) on sale. When I get to the the meat section, Jorge says, " Did you see all those peg hooks in the cart?" "NO," I reply. We laugh at the misfortune of some worker who will probably get fired for losing his/her peg hooks. Yes, we're callous. Target recently fired a worker for helping customers during a break. When I worked for Wal-Mart, I was amazed at the sheer paranoia on a fellow worker's face when I asked him a question as he was walking out the door for home. Wal-Mart has strict rules about working off the clock.

Looking for peanut butter ( The Week magazine says peanut butter prices will increase because of a poor harvest) I notice coffee is selling for $8 and $ 9 a can. Even my local Dent and Bent can't keep coffee in stock.I call Dawn on my cell telling her Jorge and I are checking out. It'll be a few hours before she's done shopping. Jorge and I will sit in the car oogling midwest gals. "Piglets in a gunny sack" is one of Jorge's favorite descriptions of farm girl derrieres.

I began this epistle thinking of writing about feral cats and Mountain Man Johann. Look where I went. I'm happy I didn't get to the feral cats, because that would elicit lots of controversial remarks like gun control and hunting. You don't want to know about Mountain Man's latest exploits. I'll get to that later.

Pooch and Mandy Live and in Color

2011-10-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

Nobody warned me.

On the TV show The Big Bang Theory, the one created by Chuck Lorre without Charlie Sheen, when geeky Sheldon gets really upset-can't sleep, he asks Penny across the hall to sing a lullaby. I guffaw every time she croons , "Soft kitty..." to Sheldon.

I don't know what time it is. It's dark. I've flopped around in my sleep several times postponing getting up to pee. The Pooch jumps on the bed without sharpening his claws on the fabric of the bed platform. He doesn't walk over me three times looking for a warm, soft place to curl up. Grateful that he's just there to sleep, I pet him. "Soft kitty...sleepy kitty. Wait. What the hay?

There's a lump in the spot between his shoulders where I apply Frontline. For a week I avoid petting him on that area because I sometimes chew my fingernails without thinking where and what my paws have been dipped in My doctor told me to get a tetanus shot (it's been over 10 years since the last) because I handle horse manure. I didn't tell her about nail biting. She's pretty sharp about getting people like me to get a tetanus shot. Lockjaw from handling horse hockey is more of an impetus than stepping on a rusty nail.

Back to the lump. There's only one thing to do. In the early morning dark, the overhead light is the closest thing to a laser in the house. Dawn runs screaming from the room, "I'm blind, I'm blind." I dig into El Gatto's shoulder. Yes, it's a tick. So much for the $37 tick and flea prevention. Luckily, it's one of those gray, flat ticks that looks like a sunflower kernel. Or is it?

The full tick treatment involves running downstairs naked, getting the special tweezers, finding a stick match, some rubbing alcohol(we're out of peroxide since I quit gargling with it) and a cotton swab. Dr. G here gives the cat a .22 caliber long rifle cartridge to bite down on and a swig of catnip tea.I yank. The thing comes out intact including the jaws which bore into the skin. The Pooch is hardly disturbed, stretched out in a sphinx like posture. Whatta guy.

If I hadn't consigned Mandy to the breezeway overnight, we'd have the whole episode of the Pooch and Mandy show.

Every night it's the same routine. Mandy sleeps on her chair until the movie is over. Bruce Willis is the mobster boss, Bigg, complaining that reading the paper over a bowl of cereal and checking out the box scores calms him. It's a small pleasure in a day filled with violence. "Mandy, time to go out." I grab a flashlight, a hooded sweatshirt and the dog scoots out the back door. We walk up the road and down. She checks out a few smells, scans the perimeters and when she's sure there is nothing lurking in the shadows does her business. But tonight there's no business. "I am not getting up at 12:30 when you do your monkey grunt, Unh, Unh." It's not like I didn't feed her right on schedule. After throwing up her special diet " Taste of the Wild" -no grain- dog food five times in a row, I've switched her to brown rice, chicken and vegetables. She gets measured amounts of bulk.

The routine after a successful tour of the outside lavatory is that Mandy grabs here fleece blankie and goes upstairs to "her" bedroom to pretend suckle the mother substitute. Not tonight.

The woeful look she gives me when it appears that she'll be sleeping on a faux-fleece, wool blanket covered specially made dog bed from log cabin siding leftovers would melt the heart of a death row inmate. I get her blankie and my old sheepskin fur coat, spreading the coat flat over the wool blanket and faux sheep fleece, turn off the light and lock the door to the breezeway. The back door of the enclosure has no lock. I prop it open with a door-stop so Mandy can use the backyard pen at 12:38 am without waking me. Then I go to sleep, toss and turn, worried that the overnight temps will dip precipitously.

In the morning I unlock the breezeway door and both animals streak out into the wet dawn. Mandy races back in the house while the Pooch checks the over-night activity. He'll be standing on the patio outside the kitchen window in 10 minutes, giving me a longing look while I fix breakfast. Mandy curls up on her chair next to the TV. When I glance over at her, she's shivering. Oh gee. Now I did it. Poor thing spent a cold night, all alone, friendless wondering what she did wrong. I sit down next to her and wrap an arm around her. I'd like to think that she enjoys the comfort, but I know this hound is really just smelling my breath. "Is that bean sprouts on your breath? For breakfast? Eeyew. I smell hash browns, jalapenos, tofu and cubed left over roast pork. I want some."

Nobody warned me.

Short Snorts

2011-10-24T07:08:00.000-07:00

I skipped breakfast this morning. Instead I poured the dregs of the Shurfine honey bottle into 3/4ths cup of coffee and cut off a hunk of zucchini bread. I wanted to catch up on a few blog friends. Nice dog Jimm.

Last night's rain turned into this morning's fog. The sidewalk around the north end of the house is dry at the edges. I had Dawn check out the NWS site for the low temps forecast overnight. The weather guys said it'd get down to 39 Sunday night and 40 on Monday. I didn't cover the kale because the semi-permeable row cover will stunt the growth of the stuff, if kept covered for long periods. Besides, a rain will do it good. It's been so dry of late that the farmers harvesting soybeans churn up billowing clouds of dust. Great for us asthma sufferers.

Scattered showers for our area Sunday afternoon give us a break from chores. "Wanna go for a ride?" causes Mandy to race to the property line in excitement. She hears cars coming down the highway and races them along a weed covered fence line at the highway edge. Not to worry, since she's never gone into the weeds. When she was little she had an encounter with a hot wire on the neighbor's property and has a healthy respect for all wire. You never heard such caterwauling.

Dawn needs new shoes. To entice me, she promises lunch at Fiesta Mexicana in south Lacrosse. She'll also pay for the gas. It's a sorry situation when we have to travel 130 round trip miles to buy shoes. The local store has two locations-one 20 minutes south and one, the same distance north. On a trip to the Chinese take-out restaurant in Richland Center, Dawn wants to check their prices on shoes. While she stalks the shoe aisle, I walk over to work boots.

I can't find a pair of Red Wings similar to the ones I got a year ago May. A staffer asks my name. They see a potential sale coming. She enters it into the sales computer and tells me I have Red Wing boots-model #656. On the shelf there's a boot with a higher back. Another staffer saunters over. I ask, "Are you the owner?" He says, " No , but I oughta be. I been here 37 years." Then he tells me ,"They no longer make your shoe." I look at the price tag on the new model. It's ( the price tag) orange with a yellow inside. The price written with a pen (mistake no.1) is crossed off twice. The latest price is $113.He says that it's not unusual for the prices to increase twice in the course of a year.

Yow! I'm pretty sure my boots cost $89. Then again, I don't remember what I had for breakfast. My boots are in terrific shape, but the heels are getting worn. I ask the salesman if there is a shoe repair person locally. He answers in the affirmative and tells me that the store is a drop off place for repairs to Ernie's Shoes and Booze.

A trip to Lacrosse is at least a half day journey. Highway 27 from Westby and 20 minutes later ,a short jaunt down I-94 gets you to Onalaska-the north side of Lacrosse. Forty years ago when I lived in Trempeleau County, Onalaska was a little burg on the north side of the city. Now, it's a maze of strip malls and a North Country Buffet.

If you take highway 14 from Viroqua, 35 minutes of annoying travel behind someone from Ioway driving below the speed limit gawking at the scenery, gets you to the south side of Lacrosse. From the south side all the way to Onalska there's bumper to bumper traffic 25 minutes through Lacrosse proper, anytime except early Sunday morning. Fiesta Mexicana is at the furthest point south right before Mt.Lacrosse, this city's version of Vail, CO.

I am forever indebted to the Mexican bistro when Dawn and I dropped off a truck rental across the street late one Sunday night. We'd just moved onto the farm. I was close to near starvation. All the waitstaff was having a family meal in the bar area. As I usually do in a Mexican joint, I order Chile Rellenos ( spell check suggests "repellants"). If the restaurant is worth its salt, the rellenos will be a proper poblano ( really good restaurants will serve it whole stuffed with Mexican cheese). Oh, how I wish I could eat at Casa Cardena outside of Prescott, AZ again.

The poblano is lightly fried in a an egg batter. Although they cut it flat so that it can be pre-made and quickly cooked, it is tasty enough for me to order it again. The nachos are homemade and the salsa is spicy hot. The waitperson recognizes us with a "long time no see" comment. I don't launch into a diatribe about the north side route around Lacrosse, eating at North Country Buffet, smelly, fat old gummers and Jorge's vegan diet.

Dawn is ecstatic. She finds a pair of gray running shoes. I rummage through discount pants. For $19.95 I can buy a pair of jeans that look purposely worn, worse than the paint smeared pair I'm wearing at the moment. I try on a pair of uniform type gray cargo pants. So what if I look like the Sears repairman. They'll only get covered in manure.

Pride Goeth In The Fall

2011-10-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

On a lark, I look up goeth in my dictionary. No such word.

At the end of yesterday I went to see my library angel. I wanted to get the take of the head librarian and her assistant about the errant cop in town. I took Mandy inside the building ,but kept her on the leash so she wouldn't bother kids fooling around after school on 7 computers in three rooms. The main topic of conversation covered the gardens. I explained my efforts at extending the season in a half-assed way.


Kale Under a Row Cover

Kale is the fashionable vegetable for 2011. High in vitamins, the Joy of Cooking on the kitchen counter includes a recipe for lentil soup with kale. In the photograph above there's an indication of kale's hardy properties in late season farmering. If you look closely, you may discern a piece of ice leaning against the wire hoop in the foreground. The ice came from the dog's water dish after a frigid night. Without the row cover, my twenty foot row of Dwarf Siberian Kale survived a covering of heavy white frost. With the row cover, I'll be eating fresh greens when other folks are buying greens at the co-op.

I promised to take my barber out to lunch as payment for a buzz-cut haircut this morning. I'm afraid to take off my hat. She may only get bread and water. To conclude what began earlier as a description of a typical morning here on Blackbird Farm will continue in pictures.


Long shot of kale in a garden plot.

While I'm at the computer, the cat is hunting and Mandy conserves her strength.

What?

I'm busy.

The Space Between

2011-10-21T07:38:00.000-07:00

Whooee! Yowzah. Yesterday I was living on the third shelf behind the jar of Greek olives next to tofu in water. Today I moved uptown to the deep freeze. The good news is that I double insulated the cold frame for the oregano, added an old cloth quilt cover over the kale(which probably didn't need it) and picked all the decent size tomatoes before covering the exposed vine. Twenty-six degrees in the 6:56 am darkness. The sun's out, but I'll wait until ten before exposing the tender stuff to frigid air.

The heavy white frost didn't trash the horseradish leaves, but the most important part of that plant is underground. I won't harvest horseradish root until next year. Sometime I'll tell you the edge-of-your-seat horse radish story. You'll be on pins and noodles until then. The same is true for a small bit of carrots at the far end of the field, except for the thrill ride. I'm not sure if the Swiss Chard made it through the night.

Close to five yesterday afternoon, I went to the garage workshop for my mason's line and measuring tape to verify the exact location of the barb wire fence on our south line, I see see a woman Yoo Hooing as she enters the back door of our house."What the hay?" She wouldn't enter the garage proper because the paint fumes were so strong. I'm restoring a four by five foot, wooden flag replica that originally hung on the signpost to the entrance of our road. We replaced it with...

Old shot with a defunct camera, sorry.

The flag will hang on the front of the garage face.

At the end of the day it makes me feel god to put nine dollars in my pocket for a potato sale to a regular customer who'd jump over a dozen hurdles to get some Kennebecs. She picked out 12 pounds. I said I'd only charge her for 10 but she wouldn't hear it. In the end we compromised and I gave her a 60 cent discount. High finance in Kickapoo Center.

Jorge's coming over with his old truck and 8 foot trailer to toss tree branches to haul to the burn pile. I've got a few minutes to kill since he has to take one of his dogs, Chase, to doggy-day care. Both Chase and Sam are strays he's rescued including Spunky, his three legged cat.

Since he gets most of his news from magazines and TV, he's not heard the latest buzz going around the community. I dropped by the Amish to give the Matriarch some Tiger Eye bean seeds for next year. Watching the Patriarch run some cabinet door panels through his industrial size router, I wander around the workshop. I've never seen the engine that runs the whole set-up in the small room adjacent to the main work room which is filled with drill presses, joiners, belt sanders and a table saw the size of a rural airfield. I'm amazed when I peek in the room and read the label on the gas engine with an exhaust pipe extending out the wall. It's a Subaru. He also has a Ford six cylinder truck engine to run his farm equipment. I'm sure there's a Honda out there, too.

When we walk to the house and enter the warm kictchen, I give Mom the seeds and an empty egg carton. The Patrirach jabs a finger at the front page of the local newspaper. Scoop Daly, the local constable of police is on suspension for misconduct. I scan the article looking for the juicy bits. Nada.

"What'd he do?"I ask. If you want to know the deep down dirt in the community, just ask an Amish person. I wonder if Wilma saw me pick an apple from the tree next to the gravel road near their cow pasture. The Patriarch says," He was messing with the wife of the grocery store owner." Then he adds, " On duty."

This makes me think about the space between the good guys and the bad guys. Out here there's plenty of good guys and a share of bad apples. In between there's a space for the rest of us. I always thought that Scoop was a decent enough person. Now, I wonder about his judgment. On duty?

By the way Dawn, you left your credit card next to the computer. I'm going shopping.

Living in A Refrigerator

2011-10-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Latin root for refrigerator is frigus or frigor which means cold-the dictionary didn't say which word was which. While I'm waiting for the computer to boot up this program, I wonder why the prefix re. Cold again. Last week it was delightful. Now, the weather is brutal. There is no cold again. Just cold. As I watch ominous charcoal gray clouds on the horizon, I get the feeling that except for an expanse of trees, hills and crows gathering in the pine trees across the highway, I might as well be living on the third shelf behind the jar of olives. It'd be warmer in the Frigidaire.

The thermometer reads 46 degrees. Not really that cold if you're used to living here a couple of degrees of latitude below the arctic circle. I'm hip to the old witch who cranks up the dial on the chill factor producing 20 mph winds. I'm wearing a long sleeve T-shirt, a Carhardt flannel shirt, a fleece hooded sweatshirt and my lined L.L.Bean canvas shirt. The Best Fertilizer baseball cap completes the farmer look. Waiting for Jorge to haul six loads of steaming composted horse manure from the pile outside my neighbor's horse corral to my mountain of compost in the front field, I mulch leaves with Ted the riding lawn mower.. I have an excuse to wear ear protection and keep my ears warm.

For bragging rights, I've got portable cold frames protecting the oregano and celery. At night I cover the celery frame with a thick, quilted moving pad and the triangular cold frame made from two double hung windows screwed together I cover with cardboard and old rugs. The English thyme gets covered with cardboard egg boxes which blow across the town road because the board I used to weigh them down is in use on the row cover over the kale. A black plastic garbage can lid and two kitty litter pails cover other herbs. The top to an old patio umbrella(sans wood frame) keeps the last tomato plant from freezing. In addition to be able to brag that I still am gardening as fall turns to winter, there's merit to being able to pull spinach out of the garden and steam it with kale for lunch.

When Dawn wins the lottery, we'll be putting up a hoop hothouse to grow cool weather crops like cabbage, broccoli, peas, greens and such.

Two nights ago I left the kale uncovered taking a large chance that frost would kill the dwarf Siberian Kale. True to it's name, it survived a white coat of frost, looking green and perky today as I clipped leaves for our 1:00 lunch break.

Moles are tearing up the lawn looking for food in the dry weather.

Washing dishes I see the Pooch skittering across the lawn when a burst of wind makes him kitty crazy about blowing leaves and tumbling cardboard boxes. He moves very quickly despite the low rider look from eating too much when I see him a few minutes later scouting the leaf pile around the silver maples.He takes his afternoon nap on the moving pad I toss into the pole shed, safe from the terrors of wild northern breezes. Mandy takes advantage of the cold wind to chase leaves.After a steamy summer she's ready to play, sneaking up behind me and nipping my glove. When I laugh at her impertinence, she bites at my heels. I pretend to be scared and drop to the ground to wrassle, if you call slobbering my gloved hands and gumming the thumbs. It's a holdover to an old glove I left in the truck which she delighted in tearing to pieces. The wrassle ends with a wet kiss forcing me to go inside and clean my glasses.

The end of the road.

Amateur

2011-10-18T07:41:00.000-07:00

My dictionary of English etymology says amateur is formed from the past participle of the Latin word amare or lover.

I'm an amateur at most things, dumbfounded about others. I have no idea why a large format picture, like the picture of cedar waxwings in yesterday's post at first allows me to click into a larger image and then, an image large enough to see lice on the bird's wings. Minutes later, when I click on the image while editing my spelling, I get a black screen with a mid-size image not much larger than the original image. If you know don't tell me, because I love wallowing in ignorance. But that's not what I came here for this morning.

Jack of all trades, master of none, that's me. As an amateur artist, I've created works of art like an acrylic painting I gave my mother when she was still alive. Titled "Jaws of Death", she quickly hid the picture of gaping jaws dripping with acrylic blood in the basement rec-room of her home outside of Milwaukee. A few years ago, I found a complete rabbit tail leftover from an owl's late winter night feast . That bunny behind coupled with a weathered old board, a label that fell off a serviceable straw broom left in our pole shed by Crazy Angie (a Chief Sunbird #365 broom so the label said) and a momentary burst of inspired poetry is wrapped in plastic in the pole shed. I ran across Haiku Bunny yesterday while sweeping out box elder beetle carcasses.

Artists like me are insecure about showing people their creations. When the santero says, "You done good." after I showed him a copy of one of his Virgin Mary bultos I carved from cottonwood root he gifted me, I feel perhaps I may be an artist. When a woman who lives both in Belgium and Sedona, AZ (she works as a translator) purchases a plank table I made and asks me to sign the table, I think I may be a craftsman. The momentary giddiness helps to dispel my fear of being alone with this attractive, single, cosmopolitan woman in her expensive home in the new age capital of the world.

There's a creative high after a work of art is completed and goes on display. One could bask in the glory of
the moment, however, my Anishnabe mentor and friend cautioned me to be careful about carving off too much of myself. The thinking here is akin to an artist in old age unable to create something new, relying on repetitive copies like the mystery writer who takes the same characters, a thin plot line and writes another New York Times bestseller in the alphabet series A is for...B is for...you know what I mean.

When a Michigan tribe member and the chief counsel for the tribe drive ten hours to pick up a ceremonial drum that took me three years to make, I was thrilled that I'd made myself a niche as a white man making drums for Native Americans. I still list drum maker as my official occupation when I want to be flip. I will always be a drum maker. By the way, I haven't made a drum in years, not counting the piece of elk hide with a hole I wanted to recycle. That drum, although playable, is now a decorative work of art after the real artist in the family, Dawn, painted a hawk on the surface disguising the hole as the hawk's eye. You can see it at Seven Roads Gallery after I figure out where it is. It has been misplaced In the meantime here's the drum.

When it comes to the written word, I'm also an amateur. I spend way too much time searching for the right word, agonizing about content, insecure that nobody but me gives a hoot for my thoughts. When I remember the old aphorism, in simplicity there is beauty, I'm vindicated for drinking too much coffee in the early morning.

My neighbor walks over to where I'm tossing limbs into the back of my truck on the south fence line. He's bringing water to a feisty stallion penned in a shed. He offers condolences. In sympathy, he tells me about a recent encounter with the doodad neighbor who wants to fence the cornfield behind us( my neighbor's horse farm also abuts the field). The neighbor(I'll name him Bryce) tells Rick( the owner of the horse farm) that his electric fence is crooked. He wants to install a new, barb wire fence the length of the Rick's south fence line. Rick says, "you're kidding me," several times. The last time he repeats, "You're shittin' me." Then he says, "I'll send you the vet bill when one of my horses is injured by the barb wire fence.

We trade stories about Bryce and as Rick walks off he says, "I may have to throw his ass in the river." I don't feel so bad about all the curses directed toward Bryce for his anal retentiveness. A crooked fence indeed.

Bogey

2011-10-17T08:32:00.000-07:00


Cedar Waxwings in the backyard. Click for larger image.

Wouldja look at the color of the sky.Check out the waning moon.

Jeez. As a reformed cursor ( curser?) I try to use words that sound like cussin' but aren't. Shoot, fudge, sunken ditch, jeez, cripes, durn, darn, dipstick is my George Carlin list. In a never ending quest for knowledge, I consult my concise dictionary of English Etymology for the derivation of bogeyman. Don't ask me why that name came to mind. Probably the same reason Carole King's song, So Far Away keeps running through the empty corridor of my cerebellum. Bogey, by the way isn't capitalized, unless it's used as a golf term. Both entries in the dictionary refer to a person or thing much dreaded. (Devil) . Next to Bogey(golf) it says it's the number of strokes a good player should need for each hole. The Bogey is an imaginary partner ? ? I thought a Bogey was one over par. Then again, I haven't played golf since Joe Garry and I got kicked off the Brown Deer golf course for arguing. Ever since, I've subscribed to Mark Twain's theory that "golf is a good walk spoiled."

I'm turning over a new leaf. It's not avoiding cliches or puns in my blog. It's adding content more frequently without whining about how much work is out there waiting for me. The work load has diminished dramatically but I'm depressed that the growing season is over. Shelling dry beans listening to NPR is my fun of late. In the fall the bogeyman follows me around like the dog. The loss of fall color, impending cold weather, filling the iron jawed monster in the basement to keep the heating bill from increasing the national debt, gunshots echoing off the hills in yet another Great American Manhood Spectacle of slaughter makes me want to get out of Dodge on the next train..

Thanks to open season on pheasant, it's been four years since I've seen ring-neck pheasants walk underneath the fence on the east property line. The sound of a cock pheasant skrawking ( my own made up word) in the tangle of woods down by the river is just a memory. The summer we lived in an apartment on the outskirts of Madison we'd see 17 turkeys walk the field below our patio. That's because one cannot hunt in the Madison city limits. Here, the turkeys are smart enough to stay well off in the distance away from the bogeyman's pea shooters. When I do see one fly over Moore Road going over the ridge to my Amish friends, it's startling and impressive that such a large bird can fly. Yes, I'm pontificating. No I'm not opposed to deer hunting, just the bullfeathers that accompanies the season.

Dawn's camera fits nicely in my L.L.Bean lined shirt-jacket. I can take it with me to catch Kodak moments that arise without warning. Mandy and I walk the corn field perimeter behind our house. When we near the neighbor's farm, the horses in the corral near the highway all walk over and line up by the electric fence. Standing side by side to gawk at us, I can almost see a cartoon balloon over their heads as they gossip about these intruders. I'm not clever enough to figure out what they're saying.

I wish I had taken a shot of the coyote lying dead on the highway in front of our place. A coyote getting slammed by a vehicle is strange enough, but I shudder to think it may have been one of those nights Mandy was sleeping out in the breezeway with the door open to her backyard pen.

Squanto

2011-10-16T07:02:00.000-07:00

Thanksgiving is coming. That means Dawn will have to work at the old folks home. Jorge will snivel his way out of celebrating any holiday including one that's absent of religious overtones, save being The Feast of Gluttony. Besides, he's gone vegan. That means spending hours roasting a tofu turkey.

I started out wanting to title this post SQUANDERED. Then Squanto popped into my mind. I kinda like the way the name rolls off my tongue. So I changed the title to accommodate some tongue rolling. It's what Republicans do these days. The fact is I squandered my time this morning. I went to the computer before breakfast with a half cup o' coffee laced with clover honey. Screw the extra calories. It's Sunday. Let's celebrate.Yahoo. Can I say that without copyright infringement?

The cat came up after seven to announce the day. He's running a bit slow of late. Then, he jumps in bed. That wakes up the dog, who yodels her , "I want to go out." (I swear when she yawns in the morning it sounds just like the word "out"). She jumps in bed. Sneezed seven times getting enough dog snot over the flannel sheets that I decide it'd be best getting her outside before she pees on something. Of course I give her a hug first because I'm glad she back to normal ( yodeling, snorting, jumping in bed, harassing the cat...) It's been over a month she's been under a doctor's care for Lyme disease.

Yeah, so I wander over the net checking favorite blogs wanting to be able to write like those people like I useta be able to write years ago when I drove a '60 Pontiac between Sheboygan and Milwaukee, driving with my knee, jotting down quips in a notebook in between wrasslin' with nine year olds in the ghetto.Pretending I'm Kerouac. Squandered. Squat. Both are similar. So here's what you get.

That black line isn't in the original shot. No idea why it's there. Must be some reaction to downloading a picture larger than the closest town. I'll do better soon. I promise.

Waiting For The First Load of Wash

2011-10-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

Are we going, yet?

panther

In the beginning. You should see it now.

If I wrote, "In my day..." I'd be typecasting myself as an old fart who spends his days ruminating on the past.

Let me rephrase that. "In a galaxy far, far away." Heh, heh. No, strike that. Let's try again. Third time's the charm. A long time ago there was a comedian named Henny Youngman. While I'm waiting for the picture to download, I go to the bathroom, trim my nose hairs, check to see if Mandy's still in her dog bed, look for the cat, turn the keyboard upside down to see what gunk falls out and wonder, What is a Henny? Who'd call himself Henny?

Henny Youngman's is most famous for beginning his monlogue with, "Take my wife..." You're thinking he's going to launch into a description of wifely things. Instead, he follows with, "Please."

The uninterrupted line is, "Take my wife... please." Bear with me while I explain.

Dawn ( my wife) shoots pictures with her new camera. She has no idea what the icons means and little experience with digital photography. In my fervor to go back to blogging this morning, I download all 61 images she's taken since December,2010. The image of the garden is so large, I had time to revise my last will and testament. If you double click on the image you may be able to enter the picture ala a Harry Potter movie. You may understand now, how I dug a half tons of potatoes from this garden.

Originally, I intended for this to be a short travelogue. Then, Mandy and I would hit the road while I'm waiting for the washer to complete its cycles. We'd go to Dent and Bent just down the road a piece for discounted juice. I'm hoping that in the load of unsorted boxes full of dented and discarded items, some beyond expiration date, that they acquired new stock of Mexican espresso. They sell packages of the fine ground coffee for $2. In the regular store it's $3.50 and up.

The nice thing about a discount grocery store run by the Amish is that they are unfamiliar with exotic cooking items.. Special marinades, hot sauces, nori rice wrappers, garbanzo beans, Raspberry Chipolte sauce, sell for ridiculously low prices (5/$2.00). One of the elders put up a sign that said buy one get one. A daughter minding the store had no idea what that meant. At the old teacher's desk near the door, I watch her charge me full price for both cans of beans. She obviously never heard of the expression, buy one get one free. I had a difficult time explaining to her the expression. She thought I was pulling a scam.

The washer has completed it's cycle. I'm still here. The dog is still sleeping. The sun is going away along with my dream of painting trim frame around a newly installed window on the rear addition.

Hoops& Dolts

2011-10-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

This isn't one of those attention grabbing techniques, you know, where someone says, Oh, please look at me. I'm so ...( insert proper adjective for terminal dumbness) Puleeze, won't you tell me I'm not so incompetent . I want you to make me feel better by telling me I'm not a dolt. Throw in a few compliments by the way because I've thrown in a long thin 6 lb test line to fish for consoling words. Really. I'm not doing that. This is merely a description of events, since I've been away so long. I need this.It's a form of therapy for me.

I'm fending off Salvatore Pucci, the cat who wants to make a flying leap from floor to desk top and then to my monitor where he can gaze al-Qaddafi-like on the world below. Pushing him off my lap for unnecessary squirming, he curls up like a dog at my feet. Then he squirrels his way to the left of the keyboard. It is essential that he alert me to several important things. 1. I am your best buddy. 2. I am really photogenic lying there on the butcher board desk top. and 3. By touching my left hand with his paw , I want you to acknowledge my grunt, nuzzle and long groan and allow me to perch on the computer. If this doesn't work, I'll make it really difficult for you to write with your left hand.

He's made the rounds outside. He's mooched additional food besides his usual fare of raw chicken liver
( 1/2 portion-he's a on a diet) and crunchy dry cat food. He's supplemented his diet with a fresh caught deer mouse which he either imported into the house or discovered in the back of the pet food cabinet in the kitchen. After perfunctory growls and hisses, he's relieved of the mouse which is in that semi-limp, comatose posture all captured mice assume as a life saving technique. Knowing full well that said mouse will suddenly spring to life and run into the deep reaches of the Christmas wrap remnants/paper towel cubby hole under the stairs, I risk a scratched hand and take the mouse to the garage. In the garage I take the smallest ball peen hammer and render the mouse really done-dead but not smushed all over my work bench. Then I can deposit the critter in the lined waste basket to ripen until dump day.

Prior to El Gatto's escapades, I decide enough is enough. My seven year old dinosaur of a digital camera I'll toss on a growing pile of ink-jet printers and a 20 year old DVD player strewn on the office floor. I'll install the software from Dawn's new digital camera and add some of the fifty odd pictures she's taken since Christmas last. To accomplish this I must first add a cable to connect camera and computer via the tower USB port. I have an existing cable from my dysfunctional Canon digital. I assume that nothing is ever standard, therefore I must disconnect old cable and reconnect new cable. It's dark at the rear of the computer tower resting on my butcher block desk top. In the entryway I keep a flash light for my evening walk with the dog.

Short pause here to move a flicking cat tail from keyboard and to push a furry paw further away from the CAPS LOCK key.

I undo the twist tie around the new cable, unravel it, unplug old cable, lay new cable next to old cable and disconnect several plugs at the rear of the tower to access the same port. God help me if I connect the camera to a port designed solely as "video out" and fry Dawn's camera innards. This is child's play to even Mountain Man Johann whose sole form of entertainment during his youth was gazing up at a light bulb on the ceiling after the REA came through and electrified farmhouses. Not so for me. I have bi-focals.

To see clearly with bi-focals one must tilt one's head back so that anyone standing next to you can see your nose hairs. A passer-by would assume there is something wrong by the sneer like expression on your face. I by pass the nose hairs and sneer and remove my glasses to press my face in the maze of wires. Making sure that the plug is inserted correctly with the flat plastic inside part of the plug matching the rectangular slot, I connect the cable. Wow. I did it.

I insert installation software software in the tower. It whirls and hums. I'm half way to Nirvana with fright, fear and fulfillment. I look at the cable I've installed. It's not possible that my hands were that dirty to smudge the white wire cable. Ah, shucks. I installed the cable that was originally there by mistake, leaving the new bright white new cable lying on the desk top. Crap.

Comparing old cable end and new cable end, I discover they are exactly the same. I twist tie the new cable carefully to disguise the fact that I've taken it out of the box. I'll return the software . Dawn will never know I've been tinkering with her camera or software.

Now for the big one.

I bypass the new Yahoo front page and go directly to blogger. Since the last time I've added a post to my blog, there have been changes to the blogger network. It will not let me access my account. I don't remember my password. Seven hoops later and a lucky guess and I'm back home. Seven roads to home is more than a co-incidental name to the blog.

I luxuriate in the minutes and hours. The past few weeks have been a frenzy of catch up and clean up. Days and weeks of dry, warm, fall weather allow me to complete most of the painting, some of the farm work and even a few hours in clearing my south property line for the dolt who's fencing the cornfield behind us. Mid-afternoon it begins to rain. Hard rain. River flooding rain. The water that gushes down Kickapoo Center Lane is stained with leaf tannin. I've mulched most of the fallen leaves into fine particles that I spread around the compost pile to keep my red worms from freezing in below zero weather. Shirofumi organic edible podded soybeans are dry in their cardboard boxes on a table in the garage. I shell one box, of pods which yields over a pound of soybeans. At $18.50/lb. of seed I'm hearing cash register bells when I look at the harvest.

I shell beans while listening to NPR. I learn that before Columbus, there were no earthworms in America.I listen to the guest speaker tell that white laborers imported from Europe died of yellow fever or malaria. One third of the population of Philadelphia in Benjamin Franklin's day died from yellow fever. African blacks had an immunity to the diseases. I listen to a man describe the process of naming a product. Swifter, Google, Kleenex are a few clever examples.Oh I am getting smarter by the minute.

Mandy, the dog pictured above, with what appears to be a banana in her mouth is sleeping on her chair in the living room. I've become an expert in baking exquisite dog treats which I smear Amoxicillin to ward off the effects of lyme disease. With a face like that how can I resist a slurp across the face as she jumps on the bed at dawn to show me I number one in her book.

Darn. the sun is peeking out from this morning's fog and haze. Back to work.

2011-10-09T07:01:00.000-07:00

Fall colors have peaked in Kickapoo Center. It's downhill from here. I cringe at the thought of four months of black and white.

The Amish patriarch, Jorge and I travel to Hillsboro to find parts for a manure spreader and greenhouse polycarbonate panels(clear plastic 4X8 insulated panels that will make the roof and sidewalls of my future greenhouse). The colors along highway 82 from Lafarge to highway 33 which runs through Hillsboro are incredible and different than our hillside display. Seems the farmers in that area decided that a mixed deciduous woods was an important ecological diversity worth preserving. Even now, locals in the area are harvesting hardwood trees. The logging trucks ply highway 131 which runs past our house with all too frequent diesel engine brakes and fumes. Our hillsides are a mix of muted yellows and an occasional stand alone hardwood of red or brown. The dairy farmer down county highway U mentioned that in the 70's the hillsides were almost denuded. The Kickapoo wreaked havoc with spring floods and the "gummit" stepped in and decided to build a dam north of Larfarge. 400 families were bought-out and evicted. One old grandmother refused to sell and stopped the Army Corps of Engineers dead in their tracks. There's a park dedicated to Grandma. Now the area is called the Kickapoo Reserve and is a scenic, unspoiled area save for one large concrete tower that was to be part of the dam preserved for the future in memory stupid government and ignorant people who value the greenbuck above nature.

If I didn't have enough to do in the race before winter's icy grasp relegates me to pissing and moaning in front of the computer with nothing to do but dream about getting my hands dirty in sandy loam, the dipstick neighbor decides to purchase the ten acre corn field behind us.It was a small part of a bankruptcy sale. Being a poster child for Anal Retentives Anonymous and a huge fan of Ron Paul, he decides to erect a fence around the huge ten acre parcel. I'm picking beans in the front field. I hear a commotion in the corn field and decide to investigate.

"Wisconsin law requires that I construct a fence on my property," he tells me. "What law?" I reply. "After the corn is harvested I'm going to run cattle in this field," Mr. Dufus replies. He speaks of bulldozers, chain saws and hiring itinerant workers to clear the fence line between our property and his. I retain an attorney and become an instant expert on section 90 of Wisconsin Law which requires that "good fences, makes good neighbors." It also says that I'm responsible for 1/2 the fence:material costs and labor.

Cut to the chase.

Dawn has to work on Saturday because the retirement home is hosting a quilt show and benefit. I work on the western portion of our south fence line hauling out tree limbs and removing brush that will interfere with a four wire barb wire fence. I'll haul all the detritus to a burn pile in our front field. My @#$ F-150 pick-up which I'd filled to the brim with large limbs clicks and will not turn over.Click. Click. Crap. What's that quote about the best laid plans of mice and men?

I gaze wistfully at all the fallen leaves. My newly repaired Cub Cadet riding mower I affectionately call Ted does a wonderful job of mulching leaves to fine particle. With the lawn cart in tow I carefully line perennial herb gardens and start to cover the compost pile. Two years ago my son-in-law gave me a box of red worms. Ah shucks, red worms. You shouldn't have. I exclaim. They are eating machines, turning vegetable waste to compost in weeks. BUT, they won't survive in a compost pile that freezes in minus twenty five degrees. Hence the leaf mulch.

I'll wait until the wind dies down to mulch and take my trusty Stihl weed-wacker with the nylon blades and clear the other half of the south fence line.I quit after the blades jam up five times when I hit weeds the size of small trees, when red nylon rope winds the reel and I have to disassemble the head to unwind the mess and finally when smoke starts to rise out of the cutting head. I'm dirty and smelly. The sun block I use on my beardless face is covered with bits of weed and grass. I shave my beard in the fall when I no longer worry about 12 hour days in the sun forcing me to spend six hours at the Mayo Clinic undergoing mohs surgery.

It's time for a beer, I tell the kids.

Which Indian Gave Us This Summer?

2011-10-03T07:19:00.000-07:00

It looks like it going to be a week of Indian Summer warm days. I'll be trying to remember the words to "October's bright blue weather" a poem that Lucy Ladwig made us memorize in 5th grade. Fall colors are peaking with a few stand-out-alone Maples shouting, " look at me, look at me." I never thought I'd be describing a tree as drop-dead gorgeous.

Work days are slowing down. That means after a short lunch, I snooze is a lawn chair in the garage for 15 minutes with the cat on my lap. With dusk just after 6:30 pm, I can't claim 12 hour days as an excuse for not blogging. The nap is necessary. One, I'm low-energy and need a recharge to be able to dig up the last 10 feet of spuds. The other, like yesterday, I anticipate a customer will pull up in the middle of things-I've got a paint brush full of "pineapple citrus" halfway through the front face of the garage- Armin drives up wanting onions and somebody to listen to his spiel about the chiseling local hardware store. Then another guy drives up in an 88 Oldsmobile and wants to talk about his potato harvest. He also wants 100 pounds of Kennebecs. Turns out he's been dumping wood ashes in the garden over winter and it reduced his harvest. Not good for potatoes.

My word processing skills are diminished. Typos abound. Thank God for spell checks.Ten days ago my 30 year old son went to emergency with a fever and other associated symptoms. At the hospital it was determined he has a aneurysm of the aortic valve and an enlarged heart. Mid-week last he underwent open heart surgery. From 7 am until 3 pm the doctors replaced the valve and did repairs in three incisions. I spoke with him briefly on Saturday. His voice was till hoarse from all the tubes down his throat. He's at his mother's house recuperating.

He might as well be light years away in distance, because he's been overwhelmed with phone calls, pre-operative visits and now wants to just be able to heal. It's a helpless feeling on my part.

2011-09-26T07:53:00.000-07:00

The party's over.

The Horse and Colt Show rolls up a soggy carpet on Sunday after a three day, steady stream of cars, trucks, horse trailers and open semi-trailers pulling antique tractors, muscle cars and an old gypsy wagon. Apple-Fest in Gays Mills and orchards across the ridge on highway 71 ended up another successful weekend of pies, puppies and ghost figures on wooden stakes. I went to Wal-Mart on Sunday to buy a new pair of Wrangler jeans with some of the proceeds of potato sales off the highway.

Pooch, the cat, treads his feet Momma-style on crocheted blankets on an easy chair. I tossed the blankets there after a short stint in Mandy's bed in the breezeway. The dog curls up and buries her nose in the blankets to ward off 40 degree chilly temperatures. Saturday morning I bring the blankets to Martha and Marion who are stationed at the entrance to our road under a canopy, selling pies, cake. cookies and bread. It's cold sitting there watching cars speed down the hill gathering steam in the only straight stretch between two towns to the east and west.

The day before five of us-three Amish women, a visiting cousin and me-carefully walk the eight legged 20 foot long canopy down the road to the entrance of Kickapoo Center Lane. After setting up two banquet tables, putting out Bake Sale signs, decorating the booth with pumpkins and a brightly painted birdhouse gourd and piling a bushel basket high with potatoes, baskets fulls of yellow onions, a tub full of tomatillos, we're ready for the rush of customers.

I'm busy digging potatoes while the two Amish "girls" ( it's what they call themselves) read and write a letter. The sun briefly peeks out from the cumulus clouds . The girls wave at each passing car while I marvel at the fall colors in the woods above the cornfield across the road. Mandy takes a turn sitting under the table and curling up on my lap. You couldn't ask for more country goodness. The pecan pie, red and black raspberry pies, whole wheat bread, and fresh baked molasses cookies shout at me. I want to buy them all.

Dawn joins Marion and Martha bringing her knitting along to pass the time. I drive the lawn tractor out to the road to check on sales and find that Dawn sold 14 pounds of new Kennebec potatoes to some savvy customer. I previously set my prices to be a bit higher than industrial, chemically produced spuds but lower than the expensive "co-op". In the several weeks that pass, potato prices jump dramatically. Now Wal-Mart Idaho potatoes are equal in price to my organically grown-you can eat the peel-taters. The Amish Patriarch proclaims that seed potatoes will be in demand next year at a higher cost. He's seldom wrong. Martha and Lydia spend two hours digging potatoes the week before in a "shares" agreement. They take home 69 pounds of Kennebecs for next year's seed potatoes plus a huge sack of Russets. My back muscles thank them profusely.

So, on a rainy Monday morning, I stand at the kitchen window looking at the driving rain with a cat in my arms who is rumbling with warmth and joy after a cool Sunday night. He's made his rounds quickly, deciding that sitting under an overhang in the rain isn't much fun. Mandy retires to her chair after a quick run out in the yard. The garage is full of drying beans. Some lie in cardboard trays on a four by eight sheet of OSB. Others hang from a line stretched between hooks on the ceiling. On wire racks in the summer kitchen racks of rattlesnake pole beans are drying for next year's seed and barbecue beans with baked chicken for a Sunday dinner. Fresh sage hangs in bundles from an old extension cord over the chest freezer. It's been a good year.

If You Like,I Can Give Good Price

2011-09-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

An early Saturday morning thunderstorm routs me from dreamland. The noise and light show and Psycho Kitty's kneading my bare chest with his paws tells me I won't sleep any more. Licking my fingers and slightly gnawing a knuckle is Salvatore Pucci's way of letting me know it's morning in Catville. I walk carefully into bedroom number two in case the dog's sleeping on the floor. Mandy Mae's totally out, sleeping on one end of the futon. She startles when I touch her head.

I walk downstairs with cat in the lead and dog to follow. Turning on the light because it's five a.m. and still dark, we all discover it's drizzling. Dumbly, we stand there gazing at the side yard, the rain and a dimly illuminated garage apron where I've parked my truck and Prism.It won't do to stand there naked in the energy saving light of the breezeway. For one, the light will attract sadistic bugs who can fly between raindrops.

I wipe my feet on entryway carpet and trudge upstairs for shorts and a t-shirt. I take each step one-at-a-time because my meniscus addled left knee is swollen and gimpy. I slip on a rain slicker, open the side door to the garage and hit the up button on the garage door opener. When the door gets halfway up, I hit the button again, stopping it and keeping wind driven rain out of the garage workshop and sales barn for potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini.

In bare feet I walk out into the area between both cars. Mandy dislikes water of all kinds. If she's drinking out of a bowl, she'll hold her right leg back like a baseball batter with a power stance to keep splash from her slurpy tongue off her leg. She ventures out just far enough to pee under the cover of the pine next to the garage apron. I walk back into the garage and she heads for cover under the truck. With a little coaxing, she figures it's drier on her camo bed in the breezeway and follows me.

Pooch the cat leaps at a few low flying insects and tries to eat a round worm wriggling on the sidewalk. I discourage eating the worm, knowing full well that I'll be cleaning up cat barf off a carpet or floor. I prop the back door open hoping that flies are grounded by the FAA due to inclement weather. Last night I put a stainless steel pan on the stove top to soak. Jorge's gift of two shopping bags of wild apples leaves me with a black crust of burnt apple sauce on the bottom. Boldly forging ahead at a higher than normal heat setting because wild, tart apples are lower in sugar content, I unknowingly scorch the pan because these wild apples are larger and higher in sugar than the last batch I converted to apple butter.

On the way back from Madison Jorge scores some Dwarf Siberian Kale seeds. I'll plant these along with spinach and marjoram which will go under a row cover as summer turns to late autumn. He meets with a social worker girlfriend there, exchanges custody of bark-crazy Sam the dog and loads organic vegetables from Black Crow farm into her trunk. In the days to follow, she'll distribute the excess from our farm to her clients in the inner city. I show Jorge the proceeds from an afternoon of cooking tart wild apples and baking over ten hours in the oven. Two pint jars and three half pints of apple butter. I know it was over ten hours in the oven because Dawn comes out on the deck late in the afternoon wildly waving her arms. Thinking something has blown up, a circuit breaker went off or my cell phone on the kitchen table is buzzing and ringing, she tells me the stove shut itself off. On the LED screen it says END. I tell her I didn't set a timer. Besides, the timer doesn't shut the damn stove off. We consult the manual and find that after 10 hours and 59 minutes the stove will shut itself off. Probably a safety feature for old farts like me.

Jorge and I are jostling for position in the kitchen to scrape apple butter scraps off the side of the Pyrex baking dish. I have inadvertently created apple fruit leather when the apple sauce/butter bakes down. I peel a long strip that runs around the perimeter of the glass dish.

Jorge returns home after his routine cup o' coffee to pull weeds in the asparagus patch. I've lost control of my garden patches, saving a few crops before they are overgrown with foxglove and pigweed . It's all I can do to kep up with the tomato harvest, picking tubs of orange furit every other day. The current strategy is to leave the mature vegetables in the field for next year's seed. This works for all but the tomatatoes which have to be fermented in plastic deli containers to remove a natural gelatinous coating on the seeds which keeps the seeds from sprouting inside the fruit.

Late yesterday afternoon I work until my knee forces me to quit, saving the celery I've so carefully mulched, wrapped and tied with white butcher paper and faithfully watered on dog-day August mornings that force the kids to lie in the shade of the truck or car and watch a dumb bunny slaving in the sun. The oregano and other herbs planted in bare soil in the early days of the summer are completely hidden by tall weeds. I pull some English thyme by mistake because I didn't leave them in their original plastic sour cream containers with the bottom cut out like the oregano. The smell alerts me to my folly. I marvel at how dense I am, thinking of planting onions in a row between herbs and celery, then harvesting scallions, leaving a fantastic,organic fertile space for weeds of four varieties to flourish.

Complete gray overcast skies may give me a day off. Five a.m. windows need to be closed before the heat of a Labor Day weekend sets in. The highway will be busy with tourists heading up to Wildcat Mountain, the Kickapoo Reserve, canoe trips along the limestone lined banks of the river near Ontario or horseback rides on the dude ranch off County highway P. I should put my signs up and sell some spuds, if the weather girl allows. The title you ask? A double-entendre.

My buttermilk pancake breakfast this morning is interspersed with reading bursts from Waiting For An Ordinary Day by Farnaz Fassihi (www.publicaffairsbooks.com) a Wall Street Journal reporter who covered Iraq from 2002 to 2006. She's an American born Iranian with a fascinating story of the unraveling of life in Iraq in the days preceding the invasion by American forces.I read about a woman who turns the family home into a cultural center that fosters folk art from villagers and local artists around Iraq. Faced with imminent destruction in yet another invasion of foreign troops, she's tearful and defiant. I think about a friend in Milwaukee who owns a gift shop called the Village Bazaar. Originally from Baghdad he tells me of his days in the city and his parents drying dates on rooftops. When ever we can visit, we find unusual art and jewelry imported from the Middle East. After we remodeled the breezeway entrance, I took down the hand hammered bells I purchased at the Village Bazaar which to my delight hummed and gently clanged in the wind.

A good customer comes by yesterday to buy Kennebecs for french fries. He buys the extra large variety which when cut with a julienne machine turn out long, slender fries. First he buys three pounds. Then looking at the potatoes spread out on a 4X8 sheet of plywood in the garage, he says, "Aw, just give me them all." I weigh the spuds. Nine pounds. The market value is $7.20 but I give him "good price". Six bucks. He hands me two fives. I dig in my wallet for change. I don't have four singles. "I only got two singles," I tell him. The customer looks at the bag of ten pounds of spuds next to his purchase. He says, I'll just take a few more. "Load up the bag," I say. "They can hold up to 25 lbs." He pops about four more in and I'm wondering who's gotten the better deal. At market value, he should have gotten over 12 pounds for his ten dollars. I don't care if he gets more since I have three fields of spuds waiting for harvest.

Edamame

2011-08-29T06:36:00.000-07:00

Instead of hitting the floor running, I decide to sit for thirty minutes after breakfast. There are hash browns that litter the floor when my fork missed my mouth and a ketchup smear on my right leg when I bounced a fresh made french fry off my calf at lunch yesterday. I'd like to think I'm not entering senior la-la land, just distracted.

I walked in the garage and opened the upright freezer to take a picture of yesterday. Seventeen quart freezer bags jammed full of blanched soybeans. That's a 14 gallon ( 53 liters) Tupperware tub of washed, sorted edamame-the Japanese word for soybean. It's an unknown out here in the sticks. When one hasn't been any farther than Lacrosse and fresh sushi comes in plastic containers at Festival Foods or frozen at Wal-Mart, sushi is the equivalent of eating fat white maggots with a little sea salt to locals whose idea of a delicacy is cod made gelatinous with lye.

Mandy takes advantage of an open back door to sneak back to bed upstairs. Her camo bed in the breezeway is a bit too cool at 7 am and 58 degrees. Poochie the cat ambles in, brushing against my ankles for a fast snort of a raw chicken liver breakfast. Then, it's back outside to prowl. What a guy.

Jorge, Dawn and I harvest half of the half of the soybean patch while listening to a rebroadcast Prairie Home Companion and another program on WPR called To The Best of Our Knowledge. The programer interviews a woman who's an authority on trees. She's planted over a hundred varieties of trees on her property and enlightens us of the healing properties of trees. I was out in the soybean patch hauling new stalks which we hold by the root and strip the pods from the plant so I didn't catch much more than Dawn's excited exclamations about Black Walnut Trees and the worth of a full grown walnut tree at harvest-$60K.

The other half of the Shirofumi organic soybeans out there will be saved for seed next year. I'll blanch as many as I have time to pick for shelled beans. In December steamed edible podded soybeans coated with some coarse kosher salt or sea salt and a beer will top off a cold winter night.

Markers

2011-08-27T06:42:00.000-07:00


Lookout Platform on Notre Dame of Paris-1977

It seems like a hundred years since I've been at the keyboard.

The cat comes up in the middle of the night to meow some cat concern. The dog jumps off her futon, does her yadda-yadda shake I associate with a "yes" to anything in dog-speak. This time it means "yes" I gotta pee. I stumble down the stairs hoping not to misjudge that last step before the carpet and open four doors so Mandy Mae can go out and pee. I hear her upstairs groaning, yawning and grunting as she does when she first awakens. Then, she races outside while I, too, take a leak. I let her back in, turn off the light hoping streak the cat didn't get out to be mauled by lions, tigers and raccoons in the foggy mist of 2:44 am. Mandy grabs her blankie for a bit o' nuzzle and I nestle under a single sheet.

Don Stenson, a teaching associate, once mentioned that alcohol disturbs your sleep patterns. I'm wide awake creating a check list of chores for the morning, afternoon, and evening. I hold off the anxieteers, a classic cartoon depiction from Pearls Before Swine of the nighttime frights, obsessive-compulsive over achievers like me suffer from, by making a long to-do list.

The neighbor who bought a ten acre corn field behind us and decides to erect a fence that will run through a wood lot on our south property line and threatens to demolish,destroy and remove valuable black walnut trees that the squirrels and I carelessly planted, I leave to lawyers and the wrath of Gitchee-Manitou who has favored me with his/her presence when I first realized that I'd parked on a railroad grade sleeping off a drunk with my first wife in my 1960 Ford Sunliner convertible.

I grab a new book Dawn brings home-Blood, Bones and Butter written by New York chef/restaurant owner Gabrielle Hamilton who chronicles an astonishing childhood(I've only read two chapters). Reading works wonders for me as I turn off the reading lamp above the bed promising myself to cut back on the wine after dinner. Her youth rivals mine.

I awake with a start.

It's been 45 years. What? August 26.1966 a 170 pound stick man, similar to the figures T.Roger Thomas draws in his excellent blog cleansheetsanddirtygirls marries the girl he slept with in his Ford on the railroad track.First light breaks through the still thick fog. I have to take a dump.

Oh shit. I ate too much steamed kale last night. A gigantic red Burpee Delicious tomato which split open in sweet juiciness when I brought it in from the front field, got sliced to accompany a memorable Yukon Gold baked potato and beer battered cod. Life is good.

The cat comes in the bathroom to lick my toes and gnaw on the big toe, while I ponder the mysteries of life. He props his paws on the seat to watch the mysteries of life swirl down to the septic tank with cat eyed wonder and I fix a cup of espresso. It's treat for me since I cut back on being caffeine-crazy in the morning a month ago. Believe or not, but I get more work done without it.

August 26th, 2011 passes without a single thought of the reception at the Shorewood Women's Club on the Milarky River and the guy I compared to a used car salesman who married us at The Roundy Memorial Baptist church.

Jorge and I hustle to Lacrosse to buy lumber pulling a 16 foot trailer in tow behind his luxury SUV. We make numerous stops for supplies. Farm Fleet has canning jars on sale. Woodman's Market carries a full line of organic and vegetarian groceries. I pick and choose between the two categories depending upon cost and function. Five pounds of organic carrots are ridiculously expensive, but the taste of organic carrots is far superior in my homemade carrot juice. Better even than my own home grown. I buy cheap hamburger for the dog's breakfast, chicken livers for the cat and since I'm on a vegetarian kick-two kinds of soy and almond milk. The Amish have been out of "farmer eggs" so I break down and buy Sparboe farm ( family owned since 1954) jumbo eggs.

Jorge is rich enough to buy a forty-four thousand dollar Kubota tractor in a pissed off whim involving a neighbor. He drives 6 miles over the ridge to our place to scoop compost in the neighbor's corral in order to put enough hours on the machine to get it serviced at the 50 hour mark before the depths of Wisconsin winter. He wants to stop at Goodwill to buy a shirt. I don't remind him about the stop when in a senior moment he forgets to turn off the interstate. He forgets to remind me to go back to the grocery store liquor department to buy Carlo Rossi Merlot in five liter boxes at a 4 quantity discount. We stop at Sam's Club to buy sugar because it's 35 cents cheaper than Woodmans. Both of us qualify for the "senior" lunch discount at the Country Buffet at $5.49. We decline purchasing a drink out of miserliness and dietary concerns about the sugar/chemical combos of diet soft drinks. Watching a slow shuffle of elderly and lower economic, poor rural America parade by the buffet tables, I decide the convenience of a large selection of vegetables and salty prepared dishes isn't worth the pain of watching the obese person in the booth next to us.

Forty five years ago,.the event is uneventful. When it's over, we have a burger in The Big Boy restaurant on the south side of town. Sixteen years later, when it's truly over, I feel like I got out of jail. The kids are all grown now. The oldest keeps choosing to be involved with low rent men. I get blamed for being the bad guy although I bail her out of car wrecks and a drug addled boyfriend who breaks down her door. The youngest never sees the sacrifices I made when she was a tot to keep her life usual and orderly in spite of a putz for a mother who couldn't provide her with clean clothes and basic life skills. Number two son calls me once a month out of obligation. Then he has little to say and I monopolize the conversation with rural tales. Number one son is too busy brewing beer to share his life. All are far enough away to have excuses.

By the way. The trip to Paris? A gift from my late mother. What you don't see in the picture is a crabby woman who doesn't want her picture taken. She's wearing a suede jacket and the wind on the observation deck at mid-level of the Notre Dame de Paris is fierce. She's cold. I'm more than amazed. The worn limestone steps leading to the observation point have been hollowed out by a million historic footsteps. The gargoyles are gruesome and curious. The view-ecstatic. It's all Greek to a woman who'd never been to a french restaurant and now has to rely on her husband to translate everything. She's freaked by being goosed in the ass by cheeky french men in the Marche Aux Puces (sp?). The trans-Atlantic flight, train ride from Luxembourg to the Gard Du Nord, a stop at Shannon Ireland airport on the way back are inconvenient. It's obvious now since she still lives in the same house I bought for a song in 1975 and paid for with an Opera and a pound of flesh in 1984.

No I'm not pissed. Gabrielle Hamilton told me not to be upset when I read her book last night. It's just the way life goes. Never a straight path. In case you're wondering it's why I call this blog Seven Roads To Home. The Ojibway believe that you have seven alternate journeys off the main stem of life. I realized that it took seven highways to get us here.

Country Commerce

2011-08-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

Weather, crops, critters, the wildlife parade and retail commerce are part of recent events that keep me off the net. I side stepped e-mail, avoided the headlines on Yahoo and checked out one of my favorite bloggers who writes about dog sitting.

On any "normal" morning the task is to get outside before searing heat and dripping humidity make work in the front field hellish. This is not easy. Yesterday, a brief thunderstorm at first light turns air saturated with 85% moisture up three notches. Relief comes later in the afternoon. Today's 66 degree temperature at 7am gives me a respite from the treadmill.

Mandy barks at something in the silver maple behind the house. I walk over to check it out, calling Pooch the cat to help me out. The two animals are great hunters. "It's probably only a squirrel", I muse peering up into the branches of the tree. Since the Pooch is a cat with dignity, he takes his time ambling over not wanting to be as overtly doggish as Mandy. With a thump and thud, a raccoon falls from the upper reaches of the tree. I'm dumbfounded. Mandy wants at it in a large way and the Pooch shows signs of curiosity. The raccoon does the cartoon yadda-yadda head shake, as if to say "What the hell?" I walk to the house for my .22. Raccoons in the day time are a bad sign.Rabies.

My Amish friends kill 4 skunks who have been eating their chickens. 96 birds in all. Tales of rabies abound.

Walking back from the house, rifle in hand, I slide the clip in the slot and load a shell into the chamber. It's been a awhile since I shot the .22 . I don't remember if the safety shows red when it's on or the reverse. Rocky is still sitting where he fell. I'm worried about Mandy trying to get at it because a cornered raccoon could bite. The raccoon doesn't try to get away. Aim, fire-nothing. The safety is on you dolt. Red means danger and safety is off. Fire again. Nada. The shell in the chamber does not fire. "Make a note to yourself to clean this rifle." I walk back to the garage to pry out the malfunctioning shell and reload. Raccoon still squats in the same place he fell. "It must be really sick."

Calling Mandy away and ordering the cat to go back, so neither is hurt by an amateur marksman, I finally get a shell in the chamber, aim and shoot. Dead raccoon. I take the rifle back to the garage and place it next to my cleaning kit. No excuses this time. Keeping Mandy at a safe distance, I grab the carcass by the feet with gloved hands and toss it over the east fence into high weeds in a swampy area where for the next week I savor the smell of ripe raccoon every pass I make in mowing the front yard.

Signs at the front entrance to our lane announce the days fare. People driving down the lane ask for vegetables we don't have or have sold out. Two weeks after the season for beets, people are clamouring for the things. If I over-plant next year, Dawn and I will be using them as baseballs. Finally I make a sign. A simple sign.

BEETS-NO

SPUDS-LOTS

ONIONS-TONS

BEANS-SOME

TOMATOES-SOON

SWEET CORN-NO

I have wonderful customers who tell me how much they appreciate the quality and the prices. One elderly couple, who remind me of a mentor and his wife in Sedona, tell me that at the Amish produce auction near Cashton, they're selling corn at fifty cents a dozen. I assume there's a gut on the market. I'm thankful that I could gather enough sweet corn off our ground thrashed stalks to eat corn until I never want to see a yellow ear (until next year). I freeze 14.75 pounds of shelled sweet corn late one afternoon.

A couple drives down the lane in a sporty black convertible. Usually Mandy will greet newcomers with her Batman Frisbee in her mouth, wanting to play keep-away. She barks menacingly at the pair. Hmm. They are nice enough people who ask about the area having some knowledge of Kickapoo Center from years past. They select potatoes and I go into my spiel about pesticide, chemical free potatoes. "You can eat the peel," I tell the woman. "Oh, I always eat the peel," she says. Then she gives me that universal excuse, that Jorge associates with cigarette smokers.

"You know, you have to die of something."

Spooky Froggy Morning

2011-07-29T04:45:00.000-07:00

Psycho cat is lying on his back under the bench by the north upstairs window. I pry open the mini blind to check on my anti-'coon system by the corn patch. Two clip lights with yellow bug bulbs illuminate the west side of the patch. Yesterday's jungle humidity and early morning thunder boomers transform the morning landscape into an ethereal fogginess.Everything appears as if you're seeing it through cheap muslin. I walk into the futon bedroom and the dog is still asleep. She stretches, yawns and snorts three times.
I awaken after dreaming about pounding the ground, cussing and shouting about stupid f-ing politicians, especially the Republicans. What really gets me out of bed is a quasi nightmare about being lonely. I am driving across country, by myself. It's a Kerouac dream without the notebook, wine or companions.Hitting the road watching strip malls, car dealerships and fast food places endlessly wind past like one of those crayon drawings you wound on a roll and cranked through a cardboard box theater screen when you were a kid. (I'm old enough to remember nickle Popsicles.)

Extremes in the weather plague us at Black Crow Farm. I feel like the guy at Cooking For Assholes out in Portland, I believe. If you want to read his last post to get an idea, follow the link. http://cookingforassholes.blogspot.com/

Over two inches of rain relieve the pressure of a previous drought. The problem is that the rain comes in the form of micro-bursts late at night and early the next morning. The result:

This is a shot after the late night thunderstorm. Early in the morning after Dawn leaves for work, sheets of rain flood lowland areas and knock the rest of my corn to the ground. The good news? Now, a day later, the corn is making a vailant effort to resurrect itself. It'll never be straight and tall, but the stalks are bending skyward and many who weren't smothered by neighbors are off the ground. We may not ne able to sell the corn, but I'm hoping for some in the freezer.

I'm selling new potatoes at a brisk pace. Noontime, I use my julienne machine to cut spuds into shoestrings. I'll deep fry a mountain of the crispy taters. The far patch of potatoes is an overflow for leftover seed potatoes and every meal of potatoes is a surprise when I grab a spud out of the bin and it turns out to be a delicious Yukon Gold. When the muddy field dries a bit, I'll be digging red potatoes. I've got a Chicago order for new potatoes.

Last evening Dawn and I put up 17 jars of dill pickles. Except for the garlic (California) and spices, the ingredients are homegrown. Future pickles will be brined the old way in a crock from recipes in an outstanding book called The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich.

Cat's outside waiting to be fed. Dog went back to bed and will appreciate breakfast. I'm thinking hash browns would be a good start for the day. I've got some tofu in the meat bin. Fresh cilantro chopped fine and cooked with tofu and eggs should stretch me into lunch and some steamed kale, perhapsa juicy hamburger.