Good News, Bad News

Gasoline is down, yes, but those corn dogs sure have gone up!

Winter White

Homing pigeons in the winter sky are lovely indeed.

A Tower of Animals

We backed up for a picture of this. You can see why we had to.

Where They Grow The Good Stuff

We went down to Columbia over the holidays. They grow the good stuff in that area and they have piles and piles of it waiting shipment.

The Very Holiday Front Door

It's a bit late, but now that the laptop is back, I can catch up on some things. The kids went for a walk and moved some blocks of packed snow from the street to just outside the door. It made me smile when I opened the door. I figured it was one of the local pranksters and only later found out it was my own kids. Nevertheless, I converted it to a snowman and there it sat for many days, as people stepped around it to come and go as we left, and there it stood sentinel while we were visiting the 'ota states.

Winter Interests

When it is cold and snowy and blowy outside, one can turn to indoor hobbies.

The Winter Angst of the Seasonal Worker

The landscape design season won't begin until March or April. The gallery is closed until May. Some of us are feeling rather aimless and useless this time of year and looking forward already to spring.

Love/Hate Horses

I am not really a horse person. Well, I love to look at them from a distance. So much prettier than cattle, though I do have a fondness for those Swiss Browns. And more dignified then those little woolly balls of sheep. The hills with horses grazing are just lovely along the roads of Wisconsin. There is one place near the lake where there must be 30 or more horses all together - they must board them for others. These horses appear in various places around the area in and out of harvested fields and different pastures so there is always an element of being watchful for them that I suppose keeps me interested. But with that many pastured together, at any given moment, at least a few are bound to be in a playful mood and trotting about or galloping along with each other or playfully sparring with each other. In the sun, when light catches their manes they are just so beautiful and graceful.
But up close they are big and stinky and slobbery and snotty and it freaks me out the one tiny misstep of their giant hooves or shift of their massive weight or toss of their giant heads could crush your foot or hand or probably skull. So I am definitely a horse-at-a-distance-and-not-up-close person. But of course the minute you say you love horses some fanatic wants you to be at their gate or barn up CLOSE to the huge snorting shifting drooling head-flailing smelly fly-covered things and ewwww who needs that. So mostly I claim to hate them so I can secretly admire them from a good safe clean distance.

Photo courtesy Ken Schmierer due to mine being all unavailable until the ailing laptop returns from occupational therapy with the PC Medic. Thanks.

Imperfection

The Judeo-Christian-Islam creation myth has at its core the idea that people were created perfect and then somehow through their own fault, strayed into making choices and thus became imperfect, bad. This puts people in the position of being in need of the saving by God or the following of rules or Jesus or some such form of redemption. What a bunch of hogwash this sort of negative self-denigrating trashtalk is! People are not flawed. To the contrary, we have been fine tuned to be perfectly functional and perfectly adaptable and perfectly creative. To survive in so many varied ecosystems and climates and to have spread around the world, adapting and thriving in each, we MUST be perfect in these ways.
The apparent "imperfection" that seems to exist is merely a product of the fact that we are formed by conflicting needs, conflicting pressures.
One such conflict lies in our daily work, how we spend our time and how much we accumulate resources for later use. We must gather, earn, make and trade for resources in abundance beyond our current needs in order to have some to see us through the lean times. That is ambition and achievement and success.
We must also use sparingly and conserve so that we do not waste time or energy or things or wear ourselves out. That is thrift and conservation and efficiency.
However, the real best answer lies somewhere in the middle. It is called moderation. One should accumulate enough to meet the needs of self and family and some extra to buffer hard times and lean times. But one should not work so much that one is over-stressed or worn out or spending too many hours away from the family or accumulating more than can be used or accumulating in such abundance of limited resources that others are left short.
But this set of conflicting pressures and corresponding seemingly conflicting behaviors means that those that achieve less can call the accumulation of others negative things like greed, hoarding, excess. And those that are jealous of free time one carves out can label that conservation of energy and failure to secure more resources with negatives like lazy or slothful.
Survival of the species depends on the flexibility to adapt to current conditions and on there being enough who get it not just right but within a range that allows survival, and when conditions change in one way or another, on there being some on the edges of the range to fit the extreme conditions.
You can call those who stray from the middle 'imperfect' but in the right situation they might be suddenly the 'perfect' answer to save your very ass.
So leave me be when I choose to lie about all day reading a novel or lounge in the back yard in the warm sun next summer. I am just conserving energy, recharging myself to work later, relaxing to keep from overworking. I am not lazy then; I am efficient.
And leave me be again when I add to my collection of 300-plus silver-tone leaf-shaped pieces of costume jewelry or accumulate yet another piece of art pottery or another basket. I am just practicing the skills to gather resources that I can exercise later for the acquisition of food and shelter. I am not being greedy or materialistic; I am gather resources to keep my skills honed.

Going Home

I 'went home' for the holidays with my family. But what is 'home'. In that context, it typically means the residence of ones childhood. For me, that is a ranch style house built in 1961 on a former corn farm in rural North Dakota. There is the house with its deck that my dad built surrounded by shelter belts we cultivated against our will as children and grain storage bins that hold the grain raised by renters now. Specific familiar things. Last year, my mother was in a nursing home after a surgery but we based ourselves out of the house at the farm anyway. It was technically 'home' but without any parents there, it did not feel much like home. It was a house, a convenience, a shelter from the weather with a refrigerator for keeping the Mountain Dews cold and beds for keeping our bodies warm while sleeping between visits to the people that matter. In January, when I went to visit my mother in the nursing home, I based myself out of her condo where she spends winters. Because I was only a few minutes from her room at the nursing home, that place at that time felt more like 'home' than the farmhouse had a month earlier. Even though it has no history to me as a childhood home, her things were there and I knew she would return to that place soon. This visit, when the farmhouse, the actual residence of my childhood, was closed up, we based ourselves out of my mother-in-law's house, and again, though I have no history actually living there, it felt more homelike than the empty farmhouse. All this leads me to believe that is it so much less about the place than it is about the people. 'Home' can be anywhere, as long as you are with people who you love and with people who love you back.

Black Cat on White Snow

A Past New Year's Eve in Lidgerwood

May your coming year be full of hopes fulfilled and dreams realized.

Winter Details

Pears

While we lived as though we were poor people when I was a kid, there were a few things we never were without and fresh fruit was one of them. Oranges and grapefruit all winter long and apples in spring and fall and strawberries and watermelon and grapes all summer and other delicacies like pears and peaches and cherries when they were in season. Waiting for the store bought pears to ripen is a sweet suspense to see if they will turn out creamy and sweet or gritty and bland. But during the wait, they are a visual and tactile delight.

My Dad's Trees

He had them moved in with a tree spade and watered them in and fertilized them and pruned them and weeded them and watered them some more. It wasn't that long ago, yet it was.

Happy holidays. May yours be filled with joy and the company of fine people and good memories.

Scenes from a Winter Walk

We gripe and moan about the cold and the inconvenience of the snow but we don't mean it. Well, okay, we mean it, but we wouldn't give it up. Okay, we would sure give it up if we had the chance, but sometimes, we do see a good to it. This trail along the river is beautiful in spring when there are buds on the trees and frogs peeping and wildflowers under the trees. It is pretty in the summer with trees in full leaf and birds flitting about and lush ferns in the woods. It is gorgeous in the fall when the leaves are yellow and orange and the air is rich with organic scents and the grasses turn various shades of tan and brown. But in winter, layers of beauty add dimensions that cannot be imagined in warmer seasons. Depending on the temperature and the wind conditions and the snow cover and the humidity in the air, there can be frost or hoarfrost or snow clinging to branches or ice frozen in crystal droplets from branch tips. The river itself can be solid and covered in snow or glaze ice that reflects the blue sky or icy chunks piled up along edges of a flowing center. Tracks of animals and birds tell us there is still life out there and berries glow red against the duller colors of the bare branches and seed pods show bare and sculptural from stems along path. The trail in winter varies from day to day in subtle ways that only those with the spirit and attitude to get out there anyway will enjoy. Be one of them and bundle up and get outside today!

Asleep At The Wheel

I drove the route again a while ago and tried to find the place. I had no luck in my search because it had snowed another many inches and the big trucks with their long armed blades that plow the snow well past the shoulders of the road had been out. My tracks had been snowed over and plowed away, but I did see many mail boxes and sign posts that I could have smashed into. I saw utility poles and trees that I could have wrapped the van around. I saw stone walls and metal guard rails that I could have sideswiped and careened off into oncoming traffic. I saw ditches deep enough to roll a van into and others so steep that I would have ended up far from the road in the valley below after how many flips and tumbles? When I awoke at the wheel, steering myself back onto the roadway as ice and snow flew past my windshield and across my side window, and as I was thrown into the opposite lane by wheels apparently turned too sharply to the left, with traffic far enough down the road to allow me time to adjust back into my lane, I was lucky indeed to have been on one of the few stretches of the road where such a correction was possible. Driving the route again, seeing the obstacles and conditions of the shoulders of the winding and hilly Wisconsin roads, I was impressed more deeply than ever with the truth of what one friend said, which was "You are lucky to be alive" and with the even graver truth of what another friend said, "You could have killed someone!"

The Best Food Ever

Cottonwood Leaf on Snow

Hundreds of Tiny Rubber Chickens

Actually, for the purposes of absolute truthfulness, they are plastic.

Over and Over and Over and Over and OFF!

I am a sad blogger. My laptop is broken. It froze. Like a deer in headlights. Like a Dew left in the car in winter. Like the nozzle of the Super Glue the next time you try to use it. So I restarted it in some special mode and ran some recovery stuff. And some more recovery stuff. My son tried to feed it some CDs. I reset some stuff and cleared some stuff. Now when I try to power it up, it pops up this crude looking window that says something about a password not matching and starts the start up process over until it gets to that window and starts the start up process over until it gets to that window and starts the start up process over until it gets to that window and starts the start up process over until it gets to that window and starts the start up process over . . .
So I have few posts scheduled and I might log in from the laptops of others, but don't count on any comments getting approved quickly or any clever or biting emails from me or any regular posts or any brilliant new Power Point presentations on natural landscaping or the aesthetic principles of art. I am down for a while, a blogger without a laptop, one whose social like depends on email, and whose news comes from online news magazines and various blogs that point me to interesting stories. It is different world, unwired. Not better, not worse, just . . . different. I miss it. But I will maybe read some books? You know, paper books, maybe some of the good kind with hard covers and those annoying dust jackets that slip off. Maybe I will get the artwork for the compass rose for the slate tile done. Maybe I will clean the accumulated piles of riffraff around the house. Maybe I will catch up on napping. Maybe I will solve the remaining questions of physics. Maybe I will call my "PC Medic" again and get the damn thing fixed.
"Thank you for your patience and understanding."

The Light from Candles

Season's Greetings

What do we celebrate at Christmas when the religious message has lost its meaning?
We can still celebrate family and how you can always count on people called family to love you and support you and protect you and care for you even as they make gentle fun of you for your flaws and weaknesses. The gatherings we remember, the gatherings we share this season, and the gatherings we look forward to in future years are a celebration of that family support and a visible sign that it is and will be.
We can exchange gifts and get together for luncheons or parties with friends who are almost as supportive and necessary to our lives as our own families. We can tell such people how much they mean to us under the guise of holiday greetings in words that would make them blush in a less emotional season.
We can celebrate the beauty of the nature of the season, the snow, the drops of water frozen into icicles, the evergreen greens, the branches of the bare trees, and the seeds and berries and pods that represent the potential for life that spans the cold and only-apparently barren winter.
We can celebrate the bounty that is ours that allows us to be safe and warm on such cold and blustery days of winter.
Even when religion has been sifted out for us, there is still plenty to celebrate and enjoy. May the holiday season bring you blessings of nature and of family and of friends.

Wisconsin Prairie in December

Garfield Conservatory in January

Lake Lida in Late Afternoon on New Year's Eve

Ludden Jail Break Out

He didn't do any of the things they charged him with. But he had no alibi. It isn't his fault he likes to sleep under the stars in his pickup truck box in whatever back road shelter belt or corn field he happens to be near. And yeah, the guns all have reasons for being in there. You'd find hunting licenses in his wallet that explain every kind of weapon he had and anyway, there's nothing wrong with having a few extra as a hobby. And he hadn't been drinking either, no matter how many cans and bottles were on the floor of his pickup. He does feel a moral obligation to pick those things up off the roadside, and no matter how many times we tell him to put them in a garbage bag in the back, he still just tosses them on the passenger seat floor. And no, he was not speaking incoherently. When he left us, he was talking about some new article on some physics project in Australia about bubbles and how they expand and how that relates possibly to the expansion of the universe and that may have seemed incoherent to the sheriff's deputy, but it was not. Just because the local law enforcement does not follow physics is no reason to charge our friend with all the open cases in the county. Well, we realized there was no way he was going to beat all those charges they had stacked up against him and and he couldn't afford the kind of lawyer it would take to even try and anyway, he was ready to move on to a different state, so we had to bust him out. It is surprising how secure those little town jails can be. We left a couple hundred dollars on the desk under a rock to cover any damages to the door frames and locks, and I hope it was enough. We gave him the rest of our cash for gas money and some of the holiday goodies we had in bags and boxes and tins and let him take any warm clothes we had in our cars and sent him on his way. One of us gets a postcard from him now and then. I think he was in Utah, last anyone heard.

December Afternoon

Trees cast long purple shadows across the flat snow.
Cats pounce on voles in the waving sunlit yellow grass.
Red barns share hillsides with white farmhouses.
Flocks of birds surge and swerve against the blue sky.
Rust prairie patchworks with lines of dark corn stubble.
White layers cap the almost black branches of evergreens in rows.
Horses stomp and breathe out bright white steam.
Ginger leaves cling to oak trees at the edges of woods.
At dusk, clouds of amber and apricot and smokey blue grey slide in.
These are the colors of Wisconsin in winter.