Landscapes and Modern Photos gardening, photography 07:56
The fence line is a little distracting. But I like the mullein, asters, goldenrod, and blueberry bush. Something to be said for not getting around to cleaning up in the fall! The plants don’t seem to mind anyway.
And, yes that really was the color of the sky. Robin’s egg blue. I’ve noticed that late winter/early spring storms often seem to break that way: a very hard trailing edge to the front. Maybe others do as well, but that seems to be when it is most noticeable.
Uncategorized 08:25
Very pretty, especially amongst the white birch and hemlocks. Hemlocks always look so lovely in the snow, something about the contrast of the dark fan of the branch and the white lace snow. They look like what we imagine snow on evergreens to look like, if that makes sense.
Not a picture of hemlocks, but of roads.
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Uncategorized 08:34
I was going to get my new ladder out (a very nice, very light, pointed wood orchard ladder by Baldwin of Maine via OESCO) and start in on my out of control apple trees yesterday after work. But the flock of umpteen robins invaded at the same time, and they were having at the remaining apples with great gusto. So they won. I took the trash out instead. Not sure about the trade there, come to think of it?
Still robins are remarkably pretty, we take them so for granted that we forget sometimes.
Ladders: (lighter and far less expensive than the equivalent 16 ft aluminum)
Also: OESCO http://www.oescoinc.com/
Esperanza 19:09
The sun has burned the bars of the clouds and the sky has opened in the west.
These hills, in their humble old age, are down to their last verse. In the next geologic age they will be sand in the water and the wind. When I turned into them, following the water and the sun, and no man’s map today on the back roads, there were no soaring vistas, no great edifices of man, but the oak and rock. No tourist guidebook will ever mark these hills for they are nothing special….nothing but life itself.
And perhaps this house has come to that long last verse: that point when the singer knows one song ends rising higher and the breathless pause before another begins. Perhaps within the times of those living this house will become something else than what it is in this present moment. And the only prayer for the future is that it may be as loved.
But the beauty of the life that is here in this evening will remain in God’s hand if nowhere else, the sparrow’s wings are no less glorious than the eagle’s.
Uncategorized 20:06
a sign of a blogger who is too busy to blog…. they start writing about music they like.
Anyway, while I’d never share it with them, the Lord knows they wouldn’t appreciate it*: this is for some old-style union** guys I know. Ralph, Frankie, Jimmie, Gus, and everyone else, may you find some diamonds.***
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZqhLmhxWlA&index=1&list=PLPoADF3p3RWuRGYfX2Ajps_hjlTwEcs1N
*both coming from someone in my position and ‘weak and defenseless’ they most assuredly are Not
** old-style union, we aren’t talking government union here; though possibly teamster. Slightly crazy, not going to work if you can’t give them a good reason why. And the why better both be the actual reason and a suggested ability to, how shall we say, impel the action physically…. Though that being said, the first reason alone will work if your track record is good, the second alone won’t work; they aren’t stupid. They’re probably smarter than the management.
***
My diamonds today: the ice was a low, continuous snarl against an otherwise silent shore.
Uncategorized 13:46
Really, honest!
The giveaway? Corners, some stacked rocks, a center line of rocks (you can see them), overall dimensions (approx 24 x 24) and the flat land. Thank goodness the old farmers weren’t wannabe Frank Gehry’s!
The trees we have found also tend to colonize the outside of the foundation first. You can see the birch and the maple have done exactly that (growing on the outside) here. Inside this one there is some striped maple, one of the early re-colonizers of the interior along with dogwoods, barberry, rose, ilex, and such. Ash, cherry, and birch are generally the first trees to start up inside the foundation, especially if it is wet, and usually seem to go for the chimney base. Following those, beech, hemlock, and maple will eventually start up in the inside, but are always younger than the ones that have started outside the wall. Of over one hundred sites, we have found exactly one that was located in a laurel grove, despite the laurel often being nearby.
Pine will colonize on top of the foundation, but generally not in it. Oak and hickory are always outside the wall and in the surrounding fill. They are not in or on the foundation.
In general!
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Uncategorized 20:45
“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest’s ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:–
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
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Modern Photos trees 22:33
There is, sadly no scale in this image, but suffice it that a man a bit over six feet can easily stand beneath this tree which has a diameter of about 8 inches where the ‘trunk’ actually starts.
It might be better to ask what this is? This is a perfectly well formed black birch actually, much healthier than its compatriots of the same age growing around it. It has a nice full and balanced crown. It just started in a slightly unusual location. Namely at the top of a pine snag about eight feet tall.
This second picture shows its growth clearly. You can see through the old snag, which provides no structural support at all.
One can see where the legends of walking trees come from. Fancy meeting this in woods (once the snag falls out) on a moonlight night?
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Acair Fearann 