Acair Fearann

Thirteen degrees Fahrenheit (16 by another, north end vs south end porches) with a howling wind last night?  It is noon, and the quarter inch of snow, in full sun, on a dark gravel drive-way has yet to melt!

Apparently, we need to stop thinking about fall, and start thinking about winter….I probably ought to get the carrots, rutabagas, and parsnips under a bit of cover…which reminds me of some beets I put in the basement….

Comments Off on Was that necessary?

Southern New England has an odd culture.  Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire have solidly claimed what people think of as ‘New England’ culture (stone walls, maple syrup, white churches, village greens, etc, though actually those are or were more common in Southern New England originally).  And then there is Boston and New York….  We aren’t that either, even if they are the only things we mean when we say that we are going to the city.

Just what is it?  Music is often a short-hand for recognizing a location.  In this day of the Mp3 and Youtube, it is less about where the artists reside and more about the style and mood.  If I had to pick something that fits though, I’d go with that thing sometimes labelled as Urban Folk, which ends up with a range of artists stretching from Peter Ostroushko, to Lucy Kaplansky, to John Gorka, to Bill Staines, and so on. The difficulty is creating a weird balance between the original rust belt cities of the northeast* and the classic white church on the hilltop green, between the Irish, Italian, Jewish, Slavic immigrants, coastal Portugese/Gaelic, and the original WASP’s, between the glittering promise of the cities or open land somewhere else and the conviction that this is the center of the universe despite all contrary evidence. A good starting point, is any anthology compiled by the Red House label.   The label isn’t exclusive to the Northeast (it actually is from Minnesota) but it certainly has a tendency to collect artists who have some sort of connection to that odd concept of Urban Folk.

*I grew up assuming that all towns had massive abandoned brick factories in their center…

2 Responses »

I have too many transcription projects that I want to play with….at the moment I have four different ones ranging from the 1840’s to 1918, from New England farmers, to genealogy, to travel, to World War I.

Attention span of a gnat!

Comments Off on Fiddling

Well, only a few little flakes here and there on cold surfaces, so it doesn’t exactly count….

I am beginning to think that the UPS men have a running game going on; this time a package arrived in the mid-morning (it usually is late afternoon) and was placed on the Telephone Hall porch.  Not a completely new one to find a package on.  But definitely not the most common one.  The perils of multiple doors, porches, and no clear ‘main/front’ door.  It actually is a fairly reasonable place, I suppose, if someone has walked in from the barnyard.  And I certainly don’t mind that they prefer that entrance, the UPS truck doesn’t really, quite Fit in the front entrance.  Well it does, but it doesn’t look like it does!

Comments Off on It Snowed!

We have so many large, old trees here that we tend to pay attention to loud noises in the night.*  Sometimes, they mean something (as it might be a chunk of dying Norway Maple falling and nearly but Not Quite smashing a brand new laurel, silverbell, and cornelian cherry the other day).With unfortunate frequency it also means someone losing control of their car at something over 60 on the road and its deceptive curve.

So I paid attention last night to the crunch, especially since it had an ominous metal/wood sound. When I heard a car accelerating past a minute or so later, I decided it wasn’t on the road; so it was probably a tree, and if it had hit something….well nothing to be done about it at midnight!

I went looking for the culprit this morning, but found nothing.  Until I went to work, that is.  At which point I saw the state troopers and my neighbor contemplating his mailbox.  Or I should say the remains of the mailbox and the odd tire tracks.  The car I heard accelerating off must have skidded off and flattened the mailbox.  Lucky for him, a few feet farther on is a telephone pole and a few feet beyond that are two massive white pines, I don’t think the car would have won against those…

*why is it always at night?

2 Responses »

They are doing the second cutting of hay.  My horse is annoyed though, his routine has been disrupted! First his afternoon nap is disturbed two days in a row because the shed floor was getting regarded (which meant he couldn’t be in that paddock) and now he is locked into the shed paddock while the field is being cut! Horrible. I tried to placate him with an apple, but somehow it didn’t work.  If I could just tell him that in a few days he will have nearly ten acres instead of a bit over one…

The difficulties of an older, retired horse who has an exact daily pattern.

Comments Off on Definitely Fall