March 29, 2014

Among the sorted memorabilia, box upon box, I’ve found hundreds of greetings cards, one for every occasion imaginable. 

Cards for the occasions of a birth, a death, a wedding, an anniversary, a graduation, a birthday, to say congratulations or Thank You and blank notes too.

Many of the cards were torn or stuck to their envelopes or showed signs of the years of storage, tucked away in an old brown envelope or between other assorted papers.

I found one the other day, buried under a pile of old mail on the dining room table. Many of them I’ve just set aside or thrown away (because of their obvious age) but this one beckoned me to read it.

“The Oak Tree” A message of encouragement, it began…

A mighty wind blew night and day.

It stole the oak tree’s leaves away,

Then snapped its boughs and pulled its bark

Until the oak was tired and stark.

But still the oak tree held its ground

While other trees fell all around

The weary wind gave up and spoke,

“How can you still be standing, Oak?”

The oak tree said, “I know that you

Can break each branch of mine in two,

Carry every leaf away,

Shake my limbs, and make me sway.

But I have roots stretched in the earth,

Growing stronger since my birth.

You’ll never touch them, for you see,

They are the deepest part of me.

Until today, I wasn’t sure

Of just how much I could endure.

But now I’ve found, with thanks to you,

I’m stronger than I ever knew.”

And then the card’s message:

"Especially now, try to remember that you’re stronger than any problem you encounter or any disappointment life will bring."

As I read, my eyes teared a little and then, well… I just plain cried.

I’m sending the card to my brother.  He’s going through some tough times and he, like me, could use a message of encouragement.

We’ll all sign it. 

And send our love along.

Hallmark card, "The Oak Tree."

I’ve always loved sending cards to friends and family.  I am a big fan of a good old-fashioned stationery store. I have quite a stock of stationery, note cards, Thank You notes, and all occasion cards myself…in storage.

Emails and texts are fine, of course.  In fact, I’ve never “spoken” so often with my brother as those things have allowed, but there is still a place where a handwritten note or letter makes an impact. An electronic message would just fall way short.

I’ve always been quite a prolific correspondent, actually.  I’ve found letters (looooooong letters) that I wrote home from college. There was always a sentence at the end begging someone else to write me back! 

My mother and my sister saved all the post cards that I sent to them while traveling the world on assignment as a photographer, earlier in my career. My sister has them collected in an album, that she shared with me some weeks ago.

I always, always sent a postcard from every single trip I took, from every destination…even if it was an airport layover on the way to another place, and there were plenty of those.

It’s fun to read those now, to stir memories of things for which I have just faint recollection or really no recollection at all. 

All these things…everything that we have ever experienced...are hidden, somewhere, in our brains.  It’s just really hard to find them.

There was a feature on television, on one of the morning shows that Mom watches, most likely Sunday Morning on CBS?

Anyway, they referred to trying to remember something as “sifting.” Sifting through millions of thoughts, memories, facts stored in our brains.

Like trying to find the word “ambiguous.” Knowing that the word you are searching for starts with an “a” but not being able to find the rest of the word among the creases and crevices of the most amazing organ, the brain. Until, at last, late at night, just drifting off to sleep, all of a sudden you want to shout to the heavens: AMBIGUOUS! 

You’ve found it…after 6 hours of searching, some consciously, some unconsciously. You find the word that you were trying so desperately to remember.

The term sifting, well...it’s supposed to help those of us “of a certain age” feel better about not being able to remember anything…when we just want to remember something!

It was a beautiful day, so Harry and I went on a scavenger hunt. 

Our list:

• Pinecone
• Moss
• Corn husk
• Stick
• Birch tree bark
• Stone
• Walnut shell
• Hydrangea bloom
• Oak leaf
• Branches from two different pine trees
• Acorn
• Pampas grass fuzz
• Wasp nest  (happily discovered, while not on our original list)

Grandma has a magnifying glass that we used to take a closer look at our assorted treasures once we returned indoors…well, for about 30 seconds, Harry’s attention span diverted quickly back to being a train and running around the house, chug, chug, chugging.

We did get a good bit of fresh air, oxygenating our brains, as we walked around the yard searching for the items on our list.

So all in all, it was a good activity for exercise, of both body and brain.

Scavenger hunt.

We also managed to find a pair of pliers that were dropped in the snow when we helped Grandma decorate the split rail fence posts in the front yard with green pine garland and red velvet bows before Christmas. 

And, most unbelievably, we found my glasses that I lost from a chain around my neck when Harry and I were walking in the barnyard last December. They weren’t in too bad of shape considering they had weathered the polar vortex under 3 feet of snow.

Lucky day!

Pliers.

March 30, 2014

Bath day.  

A short walk across the road and through the woods to Auntie Laura’s for Harry’s bath.

Pre-bath, there was a snack of a dinosaur pancake, my sister’s creation for Harry’s cousin Zoyee who was spending the morning with her grandparents. Zoyee had no interest in devouring the dino treat, so Harry gladly gobbled it up. Along with another, simply round pancake, after sitting in a pine tree for some time with his cousin, both pretending to be Woodpeckers.

My sister's handiwork.

And then…another day of outdoor activity, that is…more raking.

It seems that I grossly over estimated my progress on the yard the other day. I would now more accurately state that my progress was in raking just an eighth of the yard, not ¼ as I had deliriously described. 

I managed to get the front yard raked and a little into the side yard (the other side yard). There were 7 trips to the woods to dump the leaves and sticks and dead grass, but the leaves were a little drier and thus a little lighter this time around.

The 7 wagonloads didn’t include the three piles of leaves that I just raked and scattered into the woods once I managed to get them close to the point where the end of the lawn meets the start of the woods.

I know Mom would have preferred that I take those three piles and add them to the animal habitats (which have grown exponentially with all this leaf removal) but well…the woods are right there and it seemed silly…you get the point.

I had an epic battle with a green vine-like plant that surrounds the base of the big oak tree on the edge of the front yard.  The big oak tree was enormous when we were kids. It is now bigger and seemingly more enormous, its trunk, about 5 feet wide (maybe even 6 feet at the base.) It’s lost a few limbs over time having given them away to the straight-line winds of summer storms, but just like the oak in the Hallmark card, it stands strong, anchored to the ground by roots grown over a lifetime.

The old, enormous Oak.

Mom told me, more than once, that it wasn’t necessary for me to rake the WHOLE yard (which I quietly accepted as good news). She said that once the mowers (both riding and push) returned from their spring check-up (they were picked up last week), it will only take her a full two days to grind up and collect the leaves from the entire yard using the riding mower.

I told her that I would just rake the front yard and the flower beds. Then leave the chopping and leaf collection of the rest of the yard to her, perched atop her riding lawnmower.

My theory stands though, that the most persistent grass that is trying to grow would greatly benefit from a good raking.  The result: removing all of the leaves, sticks and the dead and dying grass that is sucking the moisture and the nutrients of the soil prohibiting the new growth.  I’m no horticulturist, but it’s basic growth cycle thinking.

Unfortunately Mom’s lawn is more dirt than grass at the moment. And it could benefit from a sprinkling of grass seed. It had a hard, hard year, tortured by moles tunneling almost every square inch of yard. I remember when Harry and I visited in May.  You couldn’t step anywhere in the yard without sinking 3 inches into the dirt and mud. The moles, voles or shrews (not sure what they are) had created elaborate connecting tunnels zigzagging and crisscrossing across the entire yard, front and back.

The front lawn (despite its dirt to grass ratio) looks pretty good right now. Well…relatively speaking.

While working outside, I listened to the chirping and the tweeting of the regular birds now accompanied by the call of the Sandhill Cranes and by something my sister called a Tee Hee. Sounds just like that: Tee Hee. Tee Hee.  (The Cornell Lab of Ornithology calls it a Black Phoebe.)

Harry and I saw two Sandhill Cranes crossing the road as we left Miss Margie’s one day last week.  By the time we drove down the road to get a closer look, they had walked into the woods and were barely visible, camouflaged among the leaves and trees. They stroll rather regally. Their heads moving slowly forward and then back again, seeming to propel them. I would guess they were 3 or 4 feet tall. 

From the Reader's Digest North American Wildlife guide.

Those wonderful, peaceful sounds of nature were interrupted from time to time by the pop…pop…pop, pop, pop of gunfire.  Yes, gunfire.

Harry and I are no strangers to the sounds of the city. When we lived in Boston, there were regular intervals of blaring sirens, police and fire. But I have to admit; I was puzzled for just a moment when I heard the first volley of shots. 

Then, I remembered they we are living in the country, at least for now, and the country is full of hunters.

It seems that it’s turkey season. Turkey hunting season, that is.  And there are hundreds of them around the woods.

We see them almost daily. They travel in large groups. I suppose there’s a specific name for a flock of turkeys. I’ll have to Google it. They are especially fond of the newly manure-covered cornfields.

Mom, working in the backyard and undeterred by any of the sounds around us, cleared the leaves off of a large flowerbed where some of her spring flowers are just breaking the surface of the soil: Daffodils, Crocus, Lilies, Grape Hyacinths and Tulips among them.

Once she had removed the leaves, she needed a break. Her back was bothering her.  “I used to be able to go all day,” she bragged slightly, “Not anymore.” 

Truth be told, she’s a pretty tough gal and not doing so badly at 76.

I got the cedar mulch (that Mom had bought in the fall, “when it’s cheaper” and stored over the winter) from the garage and spread it over the newly uncovered area with a pitchfork (a really old one that Mom explained was an antique and instructed me to be careful with because she was afraid that “the wood was fragile from age”). The mulch will hold the moisture where it belongs and give all the spouting flowers a fighting chance against whatever Mother Nature has in store.

Oh, actually…snow is predicted two days this week.

It’s the winter that won’t let go!

At least we have a head start on the spring yard work…if spring ever actually arrives.

Blooming Snow Drops.

By the way, a group of wild turkeys is referred to as a flock, whereas a group of domesticated turkeys is referred to as a rafter. 

Google...is a wonderful thing.