No Kings... And Way Fewer Monarchs

We in America, for the most part, honor our history of separating from a king who wanted to rule us from across a wide ocean. Our ancestors came here to be free of such kinds of governance. Just because your dad was a king didn't make you qualified to be one yourself. We all recognize that our children are not carbon copies of their parents in every other way, but somehow there are still places where who your parents were determines your right - or not - to tell others what to do. For the most part, we elect the people we most wish to write our laws and lead our country. Millions of us were out demonstrating all over this country last Saturday, showing our displeasure over somebody who would do their best to declare himself King - or autocrat - of this country. With the backing of a very narrow segment of the population, he is doing his worst to change how this country runs, and who it does it for. 

 

 There is another change in monarchs in this country, and it is becoming just as worrysome, a visible symptom of a much larger problem we have caused. Latest counts show the population of monarch butterflies is down over 22% in the last few years. All kinds of reasons are looked at. Pesticides get part of the blame. Extending agriculture over wide swaths of the country to eliminate habitat and food sources is another problem. Perhaps the most telling is climate change. 

In the last few years, I've seen plenty of milkweed blooming. We have deliberately planted, or allowed self-planted milkweed plants to grow where they would in the yard in small-town Minnnesota. They infested the gardens, the grassy patches which then protected them from being mowed for the full season... and the next... and next.  Butterfly bushes (asclepias) mostly left the formal garden areas and sprung up in the lawn, so mowing detoured around them, allowing their growth and spread. Neighbors may have complained, but while grass height lowered, individual plants remained. We have been trying to provide for the ones that do finally reach here.

The problem these days is the timing. The above photo shows the ideal. Milkweed blossoms are in full bloom, each filled with nectar for the curled up proboscis to extend into and drink from. Unfortunately, this photo is nearly a dozen years old. These days the flowers are done blooming, and seed pods forming, before the first monarch appears.

Sure, the plant has been pollinated by other insects, its seeds will develop and be fertile. Grandchildren will be invited over to POOF! them into the winds to be carried wherever then can go in hopes of finding the right spot of soil. But no monarchs will have been fed here.

With luck they might have found another plant to sustain them for a bit, like this liatris.

Or they may have landed on a late season balloon flower, long past offering anything but a perch.

 They might have even laid eggs which hatched.... though this picture is several years old. These lucky monarch caterpillars found plenty of tender leaves to munch on while they grew.

Some find food but which comes with competitors for the supply.

 I haven't seen a caterpillar for about ten years now. They are hard to miss! Even the smallest of us can usually spot them even hiding in a bunch of similar colors.

The last time I watched a green chrysallis turn clear, split, and allow a new butterfly to spread its wings was so long ago I didn't even have a digital camera yet, nevermind being on #4 in my series of them. Somehow cameras just don't work at capturing what is no longer around to find. And while I do oppose having any kings over us in this country, I do hope we don't soon loose sight of our spectacular flying monarchs.

How To Earn $50 Grand In A Few Easy Steps

1: Live in the right location. This is very difficult to plan for of course, because it depends on other people's actions. One significant part of that is that somebody puts up a cell tower providing good service to your home.

2: Set up trail cams around your property and get in the habit of watching them to see what's going on in your vicinity. While this may only bring you wealth in the rarest of circumstances, it can still reward you with hours of entertainment and information.

3: Keep your phone handy and with a full charge.

4: Practice calming breathing exercises so when you get that "money shot" you can take the appropriate steps. All this preparation will be for nothing if you pass out or start jumping up and down, loudly yelling "I've got him! I'm gonna be rich!" or some other such nonsense loudly enough that your whole county can hear you.

5: Keep abreast of the important news which may affect you and others in your area. Every so often, mentally practice your "'what ifs" about what kinds of actions you would take if certain events unfolded where you could observe them. Consider the possible need of a wide range of actions in response to an even wider range of events.

6: Learn to know and recognize your neighbors, know where they live, learn their names.

7: This is the most difficult part of your preparation: have a neighbor become a whack-job killer who goes around killing and/or trying to kill famous people and making national headlines.This must be somebody who doesn't immediately get themselves killed in a police confrontation, but who successfully flees and becomes the object of a widespread hunt. Note that a large reward has been offered, and what the details of earning such reward entail.

8: Have said person hiding out on or near your property, in the process of which they pass in front of one of more of your trail cams, and do so at a time when you can see them do so and recognize that they are the object of a huge manhunt.

9: Once all those pieces fall into place, call in the sighting of said fugitive ASAP to the authorities who are hunting that person., giving all the relevant details that are necessary to their capture or death, depending on the specifics of the reward offer, of course.

10: Lock your doors and wait. If no capture is announced, keep an eye on those trail cams, especially those nearest your house. Once capture is announced, claim your reward.

Clockwork Rage

 By now you all know I use these pages to vent about things that annoy me. I'm at it again, though this time I'm going to mellow it at the end with some flower photos.

The replica antique Coca Cola wall clock that has been following our travels around the country for years now is beginning to have some interesting glitches. It's nothing we can't deal with if we give it a few tweaks over the first couple days after we put the new battery in. For some reason the hands seem to snag on something in the vicinity of 7 or 8, and the time needs to be reset. We also have noticed that when setting the time we have to come at it from behind. In other words, we can't set the time to before where it was sitting, we have to go around the dial  until our last crank comes from behind, making the hands move ahead. None of these are a big deal, but it can get tiresome. We decided to look for a new one to replace it. It had been sentimental for Steve, but he also was willing to leave it behind via one of our garage sales before we moved. That didn't happen.

Rather than hunt for clock stores we went online to hunt. Steve started with the idea of looking for a pendulum clock. Not a huge Grandfather affair, being way beyond what we wanted to spend. But the ones we did find had chimes, and much as we like the Big Ben chimes which are now in our front doorbell, we were sure they'd be going off right when there was something on the TV which sits right next to where it would hang, with something we'd want to hear obliterated by the chimes going off.  In short, no chiming clock.

We did find a nice enough looking one (in it's picture), with a reasonable price, and ordered it. It arrived on time.

That's the last thing that went right.

The pendulum is shipped as a separate piece, which makes perfect sense, since a jolt during transit could give it enough leverage to bend something. We did try to put the pendulum on when we unwrapped it, but there was nothing we could find for it to cling to. There were a lot of things the right location, size and shape, but....

I'd recently bought batteries since we were siphoning so many through the old Coke clock. I dug one out and put it where it went... except it didn't go there. Or the other spot that looked perfect. Or even the third one which really did fit it snugly. Maybe it was upside down? I always make sure when I'm changing either AA or AAA batteries to be sure to note the orientation of the ones I remove and lay the dead ones out in that position as a template for their replacements. This didn't have any old ones of course. Nothing I tried, or that Steve tried, worked. We looked at each other and nearly simultaneously, said, "Call Paul."

He'd be off work soon, was usually willing to come over after and fix or install whatever we needed to make this place livable. (We joke that he does it to keep us from moving back in with him! I like to think it's a joke, anyway.)

When he arrived, he immediately found where the pendulum went... after three other tries. Buy hey, who's counting? I brought him a new battery and he figured out where it went, even if not sure after trying both possibilities which was correct. When he got no results from a second hand that resembled any kind of motion, he pulled the still functioning battery from the Coke clock, and... still nothing in the new clock. He replaced it in the Coke clock and it's still going strong. 

In the process of working with the battery he discovered that the pendulum swings freely - so freely that nothing in the clock mechanism is set up to move it. The damn things moves only when somebody swings the clock! It stops whenever gravity and friction win, usually about 3 swings.

Since we all came to the same conclusion that this was a total piece of cheap-shit crap, I started looking around for the box to put it back into for a return. Considering how things were going so far, it likely won't surprise anybody that the shipping box had already been torn up, de-taped and de-stapled, its pieces ready for the recycling bin. At least one thing worked! If I don't mind being called a thing in this context, that is. Yes, I did that. : (

Today came the email I've been waiting for, a chance to give a review on the clock. I wasn't going to get a refund, but I could give out a warning to the next rube. and boy, did I!

Meanwhile the Coke clock is still keeping perfect time up on the mantle. There is a large supply of  AA batteries left, and I'm just not in a hurry to buy a replacement. The next purchase clock-wise will be one of those kits like the one in the back of the current clock, where a central post/spindle/whatever goes through a hole, batteries on one side and hands and numbers on the other so it can be turned into a clock. I have just the thing. It will be its second life as a wall clock.

 Long ago, in a state far far away, friends of my parents used a kit to turn a piece of petrified wood into a clock. It's grey and white and red and tan-ish yellow. (The bright white at about 6:30 o'clock in the photo is from the flash.) The hole is well placed, and somebody worked a long time in lapidary to turn it into a smooth- faced pretty thing. It worked as a clock for a very long time. Unfortunately, rather than finish it off the way I learned to do for a polish, they simply poured lacquer over it all, stone, numbers, everything. Decades later the color was old brownish yellow. I mean everything was brownish yellow, except the black numerals were still black. I liked the stone, remembered its former glory, and went about finding out how to restore it. About three bottles of acetone later, in which it sat in a flat pan of, face down for several days (outside), the numerals were scraped off, the mechanism removed, nearly all the lacquer now gone, and color mostly restored. One more bottle for a last soak and scrape, then on to the machines in the club. This time however it got a wax-type polishing with a cloth wheel for a couple hours. The back side is rough but who cares? Someday if somebody wishes to reverse the clock and use new numbers and motor, they can repeat what I've done on the other side. I refused to find it necessary for my own use. Perhaps as a present? For me it was just restoring old beauty in a nod to its original maker and it's being gifted to my parents. Petrified wood is one of the hardest stones to work, and one side sufficed. The ugly yellow is gone. Now it's just a matter of style and size of what goes on the face.

Meanwhile I bought another houseplant:

This one is a calla lily, with lavender-purple blooms, bluer than shown. But purple is always hard for cameras to figure out: Red? blue? I had a decades long best friend who died a couple years back. Calla lilies were special to her, but at that time the only ones on the market were white. Where my plants sit for light is already white enough, so I go for color there when I can. When this came home there was a single bloom. Today there are 7, one hiding from the camera. A ponytail palm intrudes from the right, and a begonia maculata is trying to photobomb from the left.

Heading outside, this is the first of these greeting me in full bloom this morning,

They have a story to tell as well. Decades ago at the last MN house I lived in, a humongous rock was delivered to my front yard, granite with large seams of feldspar, and big enough to sit on - for two people. All because I stopped at city hall and asked the clerk if they city had a plan for it or it needed a home. It wasn't my choice of location, but no way could I budge it! When I got some sky blue iris needing a new home, they were planted next to it. They thrived. It became impossible to mow the lawn near it. Last year when I needed iris for my new raised circle bed, they got dug out and transplanted. Or at least we thought they all had. This spring Paul showed me three which escaped the shovel and which will be moved in a month or two. This is the first to bloom in the new home of all the iris or daylilies planted.

Meanwhile over by the rhubarb bed, my newly planted fancy columbines are thriving.

Yellow were the first in, followed by the rose/white ones.

Because Steve is from Colorado, one very important color combination was missing:

Have I stopped planting for the year? Do pigs fly? There are some late sprouting lily bulbs just showing life now, and a pair of potted early blooming ones on sale at a discount because they were already dropping petals. No more pictures for now, however. The weeds after 4 1/2" in recent rains are thriving all too well  and are calling for attention.

Those Damned Yahoos!

Yahoo used to be an exclamation of celebration.  On the other hand, yahoos were pretty clueless folks, provincial, ignorant, not terribly well educated. It was with a smidgen of wonderment that I first noted an email network with the name Yahoo: which did they mean?

Yahoo is not part of my email address. I have a much older name on my address, so old that it's been prevented from going through on form replies at times as being likely made up... or something. Eventually the company originating it "sold" those email addresses to Yahoo.com. It didn't change much. The address is the same, format was the same, the boxes in the same locations, using the same commands, in the same colors, shapes, and sizes. I particularly like the wide box for writing the body of any given email. I knew exactly where the new ones were, which were archived and how to send stuff there, how to designate spam and even rescue stuff from span.

Yesterday, with no fanfare or warning, everything changed but the name. I dread trying to read or send my email now. There's a space called folders but .... it's empty and no clue what goes where or how to organize. I can't find my old archived stuff. Things might or might not be going to spam, with or without my approval, but there's nothing named spam to go through to check. Somehow the system has decided what's important to me to read (yeah, sure....) and I had to search to find an "all" to click on to see what I was missing, but still with no indication of what might be spam. If you happen to send me stuff and know I want to hear from you but haven't replied, this may be why. If it's about that gadget you're selling or wonderful new financial plan,well......

When I want to send something out, especially in reply to what it's attached to, I'm used to the new, composed-with-proofing-required message going on the bottom. It was the widest part of the email, getting about 2/3 of the page, horizontally. Now it's squished between stuff at the top of the message  - I finally found it! - and squeezed into a vertical column about an inch and a half wide. I can use a single word that takes up more space!  And it limits just how many people I can send the same message to. Or at least I think that's what happens. 

It's more complicated than that, starting with garbling up what I should just be able to click on among possible options to finish the first two characters into a choice of people to send to. There are a lot of people in that address book it's no longer communicating well with, and once it chooses the wrong one I have to fully delete after multiple tries, try typing it again, and hope this time some stupid algorithm picks a different one or just stays the hell out of the process! For some stupid incomprehensible reason it won't accept a backspace erase of characters on bad addresses. It will accept a full delete of everything, which is my frustration's last resort.  (Well. tossing the laptop across the room is a bit too expensive for my budget, so it's not part of my last resort list. However, if I could locate the one the software Yahoos put their new program on...  That might be worth worsening the pain in my bad shoulder for, right? )

How did I find this out? The first thing I needed to do with the new piece of crap software was type and send a birthday invitation to bunch of people. I finally made a single one successfully, sent it to my husband, and had him forward it in one group-send to all the recipients. He doesn't have Yahoo anymore, switching to Gmail months ago. (Did I need to mention that?)

Meanwhile I had to deal with disappearing messages whenever I hit a shift key to capitalize a new sentence, or addresses that weren't but just put the first letter followed by an X inside parentheses and couldn't be deleted, and about every other thing I could imagine somebody pulling on any given April 1st.

After fighting my way through that, Yahoo had the audacity - or hubris - to ask me for my feedback on their new system. After a couple thoroughly rude but honest paragraphs, including asking them to quit "improving" their system because they weren't, I asked for my old system back.

They've been a bit slow in acknowledging that.

Hey, I wonder of those DOGE boys were fooling around with some new project after Elon was done with them. Or is he actually done.....???????

ADDENDUM:

Having cooled down a bit after venting, I went back to my email out of desperation to explore some more and see what else I could figure out.  Let's just say the results were mixed. I did manage to find my Spam folder. In it was one thing of interest. It said I needed to reactivate my account in the new system, or words to that effect, "click here" (which yielded no noticeable result,) and it had to be done by May 31st. I didn't even get the new stuff until yesterday.  But as soon as I read it I went back to the main page to see if the opportunity for feedback was still up. It was. I used the opportunity:

Are you insane????? You tell me to click to update/activate my account in the new version or face deactivation, and then HIDE IT IN SPAM WITH WARNINGS ?????????

I did, of course, include a link to this.  : )

About Long Covid Anosmia

Steve and I met friends in St. Paul for dinner last night. It was raining very lightly, so little that I didn't bother with the umbrellas I'd put in the car. Walking past some evergreen plantings in the restaurant's  landscaping, he commented on how wonderful they smelled in the light rain, and all the great memories they brought back. Like me, much of his childhood was in or near pine forests.

I told him I know what he meant since I have those memories of that scent. But since covid I no longer smell what I used to enjoy. (Of course I no longer smell what I hate either.) Very rarely does some kind of scent get my attention, like the first grass cutting of the season this month. Subsequent ones in the neighborhood were simply mower noise. I have been with him in the car when he mentions how strong a skunk stink we just passed, and I take a deep breath to see what I might be able to detect. If there is anything, it will be faint and bears no resemblance to the weapon of that adorable black and white fuzzy creature that, when alive, waddles so cutely past. There is the tiniest bit of something, but bears no relation to any skunk, living or dead. Or anything else I can recognize or name. That's on a good day. Otherwise, nothing. If I had a farting dog I wouldn't have a clue, and unless you're noisy, none about you either.

This morning we were again discussing last night, and his reminiscence of the evergreens in the rain. I love that he can still have that as part of his life, and hope mine can someday finally return. He sympathized with me while I rejoiced for him. But I added I might be just a bit selective in my wish for myself, not being over-eager to smell my own stink again!

Probably best to just assume it's still there though, eh?

Columbines In the Garden

 I've been doing a bit of shopping lately, mostly for the garden. The fantasy is that once things are planted this time the critters won't come in and dig them out or chop them off or whatever their personal version of Nuclear War is this time around. "This time", of course, is defined as anything between my seeing something in the garden, or a store, or in a photo calling out for a new home here, and the end of the next century. Those critters mean business, by gum, and train their future generations in all versions of their particular vendettas and successful warfare techniques. Well, I can wage war too!

It's notable that the expensive stuff is always the first to go. These vegetarians' idea of steak, oysters, champagne and caviar had been everything coming from my bulbs that is wanted to grow here. If that wasn't enough, (since who's patient?) they've gone after the bulbs themselves as kind of a hardship buffet. It does seem like I finally have a modest win on my hands now that I'm spreading rhubarb bits amongst their smorgasbord. And here I've been doing everything I can to get rid of those plants since they've been crowding out really good planting space. It should have occurred to me that there was a good reason rhubarb was doing so well. Or at least noted that this end of the garden had more survivors. Good thing I am a failure at getting rid of it (though I'm still happy to let any and everybody pick it so long as they leave something. I'm going to need it by fall and for next spring during those hungry times for the critters: pick, chop, freeze some, scatter more. Then come snowmelt, thaw and scatter more and more till it's back growing all over the place again so I can take it directly from live plants. Hey, sounds like a plan anyway.

The south garden starts with rhubarb. In the middle is still-active bleeding heart, something else I inherited and which is unbothered by critters. It's large enough to hide the far end of the bed in this shot, so it's been around for a while. I guess I should have known what's still around is not on the critters' high-buck menu. Whether I think it's lovely or plug-ugly, they won't touch it. On both sides of the Bleeding heart is what IS on their menu: lily bulbs. And of course, lily tops.You may look at this and wonder what the complaint is. There's obviously a lot of lilies there, and even a hint of a bloom. That's a whole second planting to replace the first.

 The bloom was short-lived, but that was not the doing of any critters. After several days petals dropped. This was just an early bloomer. A generous assortment of rhubarb leaf pieces and stalk chunks decorated the ground with the second planting, and the "good stuff" was left alone. Well, except for the wind, but I'm not doing that battle. We all know who'd lose. 

There is one way only to fight the wind, and then only up to a point. That's with wire  cages, well seated in the ground. Once I was sure my tall balloon flower (remember that one?) was going to thrive, I visited the hardware store on its behalf.

You can see how much it's grown in a week or so. This was taken before we had several days in a row of rain and cold here. I set out a bucket and it shows rain of 2 inches! Not an official rain gauge, but upon that realization, a search online was made, and one should be delivered by month end. Meanwhile, these look like tender shoots, but they've not been bothered by anything's teeth, are growing quickly, and are tucked in behind one of the 4 wires keeping their cage properly shaped. If the rain ever stops and temperatures rise again, I'll take more progress shots. This was before the system moved through (s-l-o-w-w-w-l-y) knocking the temperature from high 80s to mid 30s.

I did say this was about columbines, didn't I? I've had the wild small red and yellow natives blooming in my previous garden since its first or second year, meaning early '90s. They are reliable, hardy, and spread seeds in any empty space to grow more. 

 Fine, but it's time for VARIETY !!!  Big and fancy! And by gum, already potted since the packaged ones I bought were apparently thoroughly deceased and determined to remain so. (Glad my nose still doesn't recognize rot - nor skunk either, but 'nother story.)

Last week on the way home from a grocery run, I stopped at a local garden center. I had one thing on my mind: fancy columbines. They have a huge area to browse, so I asked directions. 

"Hey, (fellow employee), do we carry columbines?... Where?" She looked terrible at giving coherent directions, but luckily just invited me to follow her ziz-zag through tables. I noted she slowed and was looking around for them just before I noticed I was already standing next to them! They had 3 varieties, so I picked out two. One pot of solid yellow, one of red/pink. The third was red/white, but they weren't quite as healthy looking. I looked around, but no blue ones. 

Sigh.

The pots went in a box for support for the trip home, and were immediately planted once the groceries were put away. Where did I pick to plant them? Next to the rhubarb, of course! We'd let enough be dug out the fall before that there was some open dirt space waiting. I don't know that they need the protection, but it was there and why not?

 

 

 

The yellow had fully open blossoms which dropped in a couple days. The red was showing color, but even now hasn't opened to show off, likely from the cold. 

There was one problem, however. The garden needs a blue columbine. Not only are they beautiful, but Steve's from Colorado, and grew up with those, its state flower. Time for more research online. I started with metro garden centers, the really huge ones for the best chance of finding a blue columbine. The first website didn't show plants, just gave hours and address plus listed major categories of merchandise and plants. I needed specifics!

I remembered I still had a gift card for one from Christmas. They had a fantastic website, the kind you show when you actually want customers instead of relying on decades of reputation alone to haul them in. This one had blue and white columbines! The photos were exquisite, easily found by selecting for perennials and spring blooming. I made a quick call to be sure they were still in stock, since a one way trip was about 60 miles. In rush hour. In the rain. Past construction!

After a quick conversation with Steve, confirming he'd like them in the garden enough to not mind me taking the trip (despite his worrying about all those previously mentioned conditions of the trip), and confirming he wasn't about to bounce around in the car that long despite having had his back surgery but was staying home, off I headed.

Once there, of course there was something else on my list, so I got directions to where to find those, which incidentally passed an irresistible succulent that would fill a gap in a planter where another had died about a year earlier. Those in my cart, it was time to head outdoors into the cold windy rain. Once I located all the columbines, about a block from the end of the building, helpfully organized under "Perrennials - A" for asclepius, I located two different blue/white varieties, a purple/white, a pink/cream, and a couple more empty spaces where varieties had sold out. I did a very speedy check since I was already chilled and the car's warmth was still about 15 minutes away. Comparing the two blue, my original choice stood out. The purple was tempting, but instead I went with two pots of the blue! Back inside, check out, wheel the cart down to where I parked, unload into the car, properly dispose of the cart which belonged back next to the building.... Yep. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr! Fortunately  the car still held its warmth and shortly everything was cozy.

Once home the pots were set on the porch till the rain ended. (two days?)  I wasn't going to ask Steve to leave his cozy spot to come out and have a look, but one of the blossoms was perfect! I plucked it, showed him inside, and then made a white background to get a photo.

The browns are not the flower, but the shadow. My camera insists of an overall light amount for grey, so even with flash and brightening it to the limit of my software, the background remains grey. But the blue is that deep! The black "tails" of the flower are also that deep blue. The tiny green stub was the stem.

I figure tomorrow they'll go in the ground. The rain has got to stop sometime, right?

Early Memories On The Farm

I told somebody yesterday I grew up on a farm. My family remembers it as a resort on the Crow Wing chain of lakes.  Of course I remember that part of it too. But it was also a farm, however modest. We moved in when I was maybe 3 or 4, then moved into town in a different school system when I was already in third grade, so my tender age is my excuse for many gaps in my memories. What I write here is not all I recall, but is indelible, however, for what it is.

Looking back it seems kind of weird that those years split into two sets of memories when it was all one home on one chunk of land. The private parts were the family home except for the store it was built over, and the bits up the hill and behind the cabins that were farm, nothing much like the full farms our neighbors lived on, with fields and barns, cows to milk and pigs. The public part was the resort, with 8 fairly rustic cabins, separate plumbing for them in a shower building our Dad put in. This was the way my parents made their living for about 4 months of the year, their public identity. Our dad had a winter job at a tree nursery, which barely made ends meet but kept us going for a few years. Few people care to vacation in uninsulated wooden cabins in what back then were very cold winters, reaching -40 often enough to think of that as common, so the resort season was understandably very short.

Up on the hill behind the cabins was a corn crib. I can still envision it both full and empty. I still am not completely sure what ate the corn. We didn't even grow corn, so it's likely a neighbor who did rented the space, though those kinds of details were not part of my awareness. A fenced area which also enclosed the corn crib held sheep. I have great memories of shearing time, watching neighborhood experts run clippers over the sheep and neatly separating fleece from suddenly sleek skin. The sheep were released to go wander within the fence, just like we kids were when watching got boring enough. I was short enough to hide in the tall grass, and occasionally one of my parents remembered I was... somewhere, and called me in to prove I was still safe. In hindsight it's weird that the grass was so tall at sheering time, as that is done in early summer so the fleece can grow out enough to keep them warm for winter. But sheep eat the grass so short that nothing is left for cows, and ranchers tend to hate them. This of course is me looking back more than 70 years, not something that made any kind of impression on my carefree mind, not like hiding in the grass, or looking for butterflies or whatever other bugs that might have been hiding next to me in the grass, or even picking a stalk to see what it could do or how it came apart.

I wasn't allowed back there by myself, being so young, so sheering time took on a unique importance. Other things made much less impact. I'm sure there must have been a barn of some sort, as I kind of mentally place it as a backdrop to the sheering activity. But having a mental picture of it? I can picture the inside of a barn, without being able to swear whether it was ours or one belonging to the neighbors we kids visited with fairly often. It may well be overlaid with TV and movie images with the inside of barns as sets. There was hay up on the overhead platform, and a wooden ladder nailed to a hefty post. I could climb it easily, but transferring to the hayloft itself meant letting go of the ladder, a new thing at a young age.  I had to do it just to show that I could be just as brave and able as my older brother. He would tease me unmercifully if I didn't. So of course Mom decided it was too dangerous and I should stop climbing it. Somehow that made what I had been doing because everybody else did it into something scary, and made me doubt myself and whether I could safely do it. Still, I never did fall, and the views from up high and the games we could invent filled some otherwise boring days.

By the time I was five, my attention was drawn to the windmill tower on the property, down lower in the trees. It was just there and always had been in my existence, but once I really looked at it, I saw all the triangles it was made out of and figured out how safe it would be to climb. All I had to do was move and refasten one limb at a time and I'd be perfectly safe. One foot, the other foot, one arm, the other arm. The triangles got smaller and smaller as I rose, but the principle was the same. It was a fantastic adventure, written about here way back on July 28, 2011. It had been printed elsewhere while I was still getting comfortable with writing things to be read - actually read!!! - and finally brought over to my own blog to keep. It's title is "Reclaimed 3: Two Towers, Part 1. "

I bring it back as a different view of that day because I was a bit different when I wrote it, and did so then in large part because it contrasted with "Two Towers, Part 2." Today the climb contrasts with the hayloft ladder. Once again Mom freaked out, just much more so since I got much higher this time to the point where she couldn't even find me up above the tree line. After debating whether I could stay up there until my parents quit calling and went away, never knowing just where I'd been, I reluctantly decided that would never happen but only make what trouble I was in worse. Announcing myself, I climbed back down, one limb moving at a time, nothing else letting go until the previous piece of me was secure. I never was scared, never regretted doing it, and Mom never succeeded in making me feel scared for what I'd done. She was doing that adequately by and for herself. I gloried in that cllimb! I still do. What she did succeed in was getting me to promise never to climb it ever again! I never did break that promise.... Darn it! She made me unsure about hayloft ladders, but never the windmill tower.

Perhaps she should have left well enough alone, and me able to climb, since my next self-taught skill was learning how striker matches worked... in singles and multiples... right behind the house... in a pile of dry leaves. I scared myself just fine that time, but got the fire out before any real damage was done. I smuggled the box of matches back to where they were supposed to be without getting caught. I also had the presence of mind to bury the black leaves under brown ones to hide the rest of the evidence. I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations has worn out by now anyway, so you have my full confession written down for the very first time.

In addition to the sheep, we had a chicken coop. It wasn't back up on the hill, but down on the level with the cabins, just back a bit behind them. I remember most clearly the part where it was time to eat one. Whichever parent was to dispatch one pulled it out by the feet, held it down with its head extended, and brought down the hatchet. Then the fun began, this headless feather-shedding thing flopping all around, this way and that, taking what felt like a full minute to die. My parents kept telling us it was dead the second its head came off, that all this wild activity was "just its nerves". I'm not sure whether we believed that then, but we tried to take comfort that it wasn't in pain. The rest of food prep details are fuzzy, but I recall dunking the bird in (hot?) water to help get the feathers off. I also recall spending what seemed like hours anyway removing them. We must not have had chickens long, because I also recall visiting a neighbor a few miles away and waiting while she "candled" eggs so Mom could buy them. I couldn't tell how she did it, perhaps because I had a bad angle for watching, but when the eggs got home none of them had the blob of blood that said they were fertilized and ready to become a chick instead of breakfast.

There were two more things involving animals, though not necessarily farm animals. There was a fairly long hike from the house up the hill to where the school bus picked us up. Something drew my attention to a pile of brush in the woods next to the road a bit more than halfway there. I wasn't in a hurry, nor was my brother along, so it must have been just an errand up to get the mail, also at the entrance to the property. There was a litter of new kittens in a pile under the brush, eyes still closed, happy to stay put rather than run away from those two small hands reaching in, gently petting them, picking them up for a cuddle and putting them back. Mom was nowhere around, likely hunting so she had milk to feed them. Eventually I went on my way, keeping the secret of what was under the brush pile. As always, had I told anybody, I would have been forbidden from doing at again. They were there the next day, and the next, so it was a total shock when they'd been moved. I never saw them again, not as kittens, not as wild cats doing rodent cleanup. But for years afterwards, any time I saw a brush pile, I'd wonder about what kittens might be hiding under it, sure that there must be some somewhere.

The other animal was memorable both for it's size and for the tragedy almost breaking my heart. A pine snake came visiting. A huge one, possibly 6 feet long and as thick as the 4x4 my dad used to kill it. They are harmless, except to rats or perhaps your pet cat, but we didn't have a pet cat back then. What we did have were customers on the resort part of the property, and they noticed the snake. How could they not? Just because many people fear them, and that's bad for business, the snake had to go away, and in a way that reassured everybody it would never return.  It could so easily been put in a gunnysack, into the car, and driven a few miles away to go about its business of rodent control. I didn't fear it, for two reasons: there are no poisonous snakes in that part of Minnesota, and my brother and I were well acquainted with chasing and occasionally catching garter snakes. We'd never been told to fear snakes. Our parents didn't seem afraid of it, but while they were intent on my Dad doing his grim job of pounding it over and over,  a crowd had gathered to watch, with nobody telling them to stay back for safety. Eventually it quit moving, and once the curious had examined it, the body was disposed of. I'm not sure I ever forgave that unneeded brutality. 

The last memory involves no animals. I got to drive a tractor! If memory serves, I was way too small to have had any sane person put me up in the seat by myself, tell me where to put my feet (I assume there was a clutch as well as the gas pedal) and how to move them. Yet there I was, getting it moving, steering it to avoid knocking over the swing set, and all too quickly asking how did I stop this very intimidating piece of machinery. Once again I did it to show big brother I was just as good as he was since he'd just driven it, but this time I also knew it was sheer luck that I did as well as I had and didn't do any damage. I never drove anything again until high school driver's ed, and after than not until I was married and had my first kid. Oddly enough I love driving now, and just in my working career as an IC courier over 29 years clocked over 2 million miles. (I kept track for tax purposes.)