Snow Panic!
By Eydie Wight
Last weekend all the weathermen, both national and local, seemed to agree that we were in for a major snowstorm. Maybe 6-10 inches. At least for our part of the world that seldom sees snow before January it was a major storm prediction. Whether (weather?) from global warming, cyclical temperature shifts, or just plain old quirky Mother Nature, our winters have, in recent years, been mild. I know this, but still I seem compelled to prepare like it’s the coming of the next ice age. I know there are all those jokes about people running to the grocery store before a storm to buy milk, bread, and eggs. Never mind that they don’t eat milk or eggs often, it just seems to be the magical combination for snow. It snows, the whole county has French toast for breakfast the next morning using their fresh eggs, bread, and milk. Me being me, I already had all the groceries we would need. (I keep enough food stuff on hand to pretty much survive a season, even if the milk would be powdered, the bread homemade (and darn yummy too!) and the eggs bartered from the chicken lady who lives down the road.
Now, I’m the first person to laugh at myself. I know how somewhat obsessive my essential nature is. So, I could sort of understand the reaction Sammy got when he arrived at his work (the snow hadn’t started there yet) carrying, what one nurse fondly termed, “a barrel” of food. In my mind, we might have gotten a blizzard, and he might have had to stay at work to cover extra shifts if the roads were bad, and his co-workers might not have been as prepared as he with extra food, and they might not have brought money to buy food, or the hospital might have run out of food and I wouldn’t want anyone to have to resort to cannibalism…
For his twelve hour shift I packed: a gallon Ziploc half full of cereal, a package of pop-tarts, a sixteen ounce bottle of milk, a small can of pineapples, a small can of mandarin oranges, two wedges of soft Swiss cheese, a half bag of butter flavored pretzels, six pieces of fudge (peanut butter and chocolate), two cokes, a ginger ale, a Fanta orange, a turkey breast sandwich, a small salad with bleu cheese dressing, two steak rolls, 14 homemade meatballs with red sauce, two Snack Pak puddings (butterscotch and lemon), an orange cut into sections, and a granola bar (in case of emergency starvation.)
Needless to say, Sammy‘s hospital got absolutely no snow before he left the next morning. My hospital got maybe an inch of snow. At home we had three inches of lightweight, fluffy snow. We got home safely and without having to dig our way out of any shoulder high drifts and then we slept for a few hours. Then we ventured out to “shovel,” or in this case sweep off the cars.
After checking on the shed cats in their warm and cozy space heater heated shed where they recline on old comforters folded over old pillows, and bringing a few wheelbarrow loads of wood from the wood shed to fill up the wood box inside the house, Sammy and I decided to take the dogs and walk up the ridge to enjoy the snow. It was light and powdery enough to blow from our hands as we scooped it up. Making a snowball was pretty much out of the question. Felon kept sticking his nose into the snow and eating big mouthfuls of it. Jasper romped and rolled and ran ahead. Both dogs followed the tracks of deer that crossed the access road. The footing was a bit treacherous due to the many small springs that come out of the ground and then freeze. With the snow cover it would be crunch step, crunch step, crunch step, whoa slip windmill arms clutch each other slip again, crunch step.
Up at the top of the ridge we stopped by the tree stand. There are sight lines cut along the top of the ridge and in lines down the front and back slopes of the ridge. Since the snow several deer and a small flock of turkey had passed by the stand and our old turkey feeder. There were still remnants of the ice storm from a couple of days past clinging to branches of trees and they clacked in the slight wind. We heard the scree of a red tailed hawk in the sky above somewhere, and saw evidence that a woodpecker had been interested in a couple of the standing dead trees. We didn’t go far along the top of the ridge, we’d slept most of the day and at 4:00 it was already beginning to “gloom.” But, we got to watch the dogs wrestle with each other in the snow, we got to hold hands as we walked along the top of the ridge, and we had some lovely views of the ridges next to us.
Once home, I quickly changed into my pajamas and made us cups of hot cocoa. We pretended we were snowed in and I watched TV through the backs of my eyelids while Sammy surfed the Internet in search of political outrages to rant against. It was a good day.
The Weekend (Part #1)
By Eydie Wight
It’s been awhile since I sat down to ramble (why does that feel like I should be saying, “Forgive me Blog Master, it’s been a over a week since my last blog session…”
Absolution
“The Adventures of Eydie and Sammy Wight”,
through sweat, labor, and eye for detail,
has reconciled all things blog worthy unto Himself,
and sends you forgiveness for posts delayed.
He forgives your acts of procrastination,
and through HTML and supreme coding, applies his technicality.
In the name of future posts joyfully awaited,
You are now absolved from guilt and shame.
In the name of Blog Masters who seek timely content.
Amen.
So many things, as always, have been going on. This time of year is when we “put the property to bed” for the dormant season, prepare to crank up the wood stove, and, in my case, take the time for the luxury of fall leaf rides.
Our last weekend off had been, until Sunday, very busy. Pleasantly so. Friday afternoon I had finally found time to take a long proposed hike with my friend Gary. I arrived at his house about 2:00 and we set off. Gary lives on the edge (literally) of a creek that comes down from the mountain. His bridge over the creek washed away in a flash flood that came a couple years back. His new bridge is actually the frame of a mobile home that was dropped over the creek. He has the creek edge lined with water shaped stones and the bordering trees make music with bamboo wind chimes he makes. It’s a lovely spot.
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We set off for our hike, across the creek, and started up an old logging road. We went up, and up, and then a fairly flat switchback, and then more up, another switchback, up again, switchback, up. I had to stop several times, making no pretense of stopping to look at the beautiful fall scenery (although I DID look at the beautiful fall scenery as I was panting and sweating) and then finally the road started to level out at the top. I was content with the conversation we were having about religion, spiritualism, and nature, and the different plants Gary was pointing out. Imagine my delight when the top of the mountain opened up to a large, grassy, cleared space that offered a vista of the Juniata River way down below. It was incredible. We sat on a couple of benches the owner had strategically placed and took in the view. Two hawks circled below us. A train, looking for all the world like a child’s toy, made its way down the tracks. We were above the world of the Friday rush hour traffic we could see on Rte. 322. We sat there, took some pictures of the view and of a flowering plant neither of us could identify, and started to make our way back down to civilization. I noticed a tree that I thought at first was a hickory, but when I examined one of the nuts I found an easily opened shell containing a multitude of whispery seeds. We took a picture and Gary later identified it as a “nuisance” import, a Royal Paulownia. Interesting.
Saturday we finally finished getting the wood stove ready for it’s first fire. We haven’t had that first fire yet, but we’re ready. I took the stove pipe off, scraped the creosote from the inside, and blacked the pipe with a rub on, buff off stove polish. Last year our insurance company had sent out a survey with the very casual question, among fifty others, of did we have a wood stove, fireplace, or pellet stove. I answered yes. It was TWO DAYS later that I got a call saying a representative had to come to our house to assess the safety of our stove. I managed to put that little visit off for about a month and then was informed that my homeowners insurance might be canceled without the visit.
Hardball. The little gal arrived an hour earlier than she had arranged and I was (you guessed it) running around in my pajamas cleaning so that she would know I was conscientious and diligent. She had a little clipboard and she informed me that my stove was not allowed to set atop a potentially unstable platform of bricks, that it must have a firewall drywall behind it for a certain number of feet, and was I aware that I had no smoke alarm in place. Now, the smoke alarm point I agreed with and I was pleased to show her my TWO battery-less smoke alarms that were sitting on the work table. The stove had sat where it was for fifteen years and had never jumped from the bricks. Sigh. Establishment doing it’s job for the betterment and safety of us all. Last year, after her visit, we had bought the firewall. We just hadn’t installed it. So, Sammy did that, and went to the local hardware store and bought several wide flat concrete blocks to set the stove on. I started blacking the stove, but then son Roger came home and I sent him up on the roof with the chimney sweep (the device, not a soot blackened small boy we keep on hand) to clean out the chimney. I’m not so good with heights, so I stood on the lower rungs of the ladder so that the strength of my prayers that he wouldn’t slip and fall off the roof would wash over him in waves of maternal concern. At one point the chimney cap began to slide down the roof and even though my eyes were seeing a chimney cap, my heart was seeing a blond young man in shorts, tennis shoes, and a Zeiderelli’s pizza shirt skittering past me to certain death.
Let me just interject here that if Roger had eaten a salad before going up on the roof, I would have had no worries. We used to call our mother “the salad pusher”. She used to worry. A lot. She still does but modern medicine is a wonderful thing and she is more laid back in her worrying these days. She used to worry herself through a series of events that would always end in a death scenario. For example: “If you aren’t careful reading that book you’ll get a paper cut and then you’ll go out to play in the dirt and it will get infected and then you’ll become septic and you’ll die.” But, salad was the ultimate health food. Brother John and I can both remember not even wanting a salad, saying no when it was offered, and then somehow finding ourselves with a huge half eaten salad in front of us, fork in hand, and NO RECOLLECTION OF THE EVENT. To this day I respect the supernatural healing powers of my mother’s salad.
I also had Rog help me empty the large ash can from last year. We should have emptied it after the last fire last year when I should have also cleaned out the stove. (Conscientious and diligent, remember?) During the winter we empty the ash can onto the shady part of the driveway to help melt the ice that always accumulates there. Now we were ready for fire. Warm, toasty fire. Unfortunately the temperature was a balmy seventy degrees that weekend.
I’m fairly sure I was a dog in a past life. (I’m also fairly sure I was a Native American medicine woman, the housekeeper of a large Scottish manor, the girlfriend of a traveling troubadour in the Middle Ages, and a fiddle playing Irish immigrant stonemason.) Stories for another time. (Brother John here… Most of my past lives ended in tragedy, but I know I was a majestic flying Eagle on at least one of them). But, as I said, I was a dog. Or maybe several dogs. I love to ride in the car. (And roll on the ground and have my head petted and probably some other stuff that dogs do that we don’t need to go into here.) One of my favorite things to do is to have a day when Sammy and I can take the cameras, a couple beers for me and a Coke or ginger ale for Sammy, some homemade Chex mix or pistachios, some tootsie roll pops, and my topographical map of Pennsylvania, and go for a ride. Often we go for a short ride in the evening and chase the sunset, or wind our way around back roads on the way to or from town for errands, but every once in a while we take an entire day and travel someplace we’ve never been before. I’m convinced that we could travel Pennsylvania roads for the rest of our lives and never see them all. We don’t have a destination other than “someplace we’ve never been before” or, in the case of our last Sunday off, “north and up”. The map is for when when it begins to get dark and we have no idea where we are but would like to head home. As of last Sunday, our local leaves had still not turned their glorious fall colors. Actually we may not have a glorious fall here. The weather has been unseasonably warm and dry and a great many leaves seem to be skipping color and going straight to brown.
Our goal was to head north where the weather has been a bit colder, and head up into some of the higher ridges. One nifty feature of our car is that it has a compass. We started out on back roads, trying to keep to a generally northern direction. Most of the roads we had been on, but we enjoyed seeing big red barns full of hay, soybean fields sun dried and ready for harvesting, Amish traveling in buggies on their way to church. We took an inviting side road that bordered Penns Creek and it was as if we had traveled back in time. Old stone houses with hand pumps still in the front yard, tobacco barns weathered to pink, a young horse rolling in the pasture to scratch his back, and a young Amish boy with a fishing pole leaning over a bridge. Then, as the afternoon started to wane, we reached the foothills of the Bald Eagle State forest. The leaves were so bright Sammy said it looked as if they were glowing. Reds, oranges, yellows. The yellows had outdone the others this year in my opinion. We traveled some one lane roads and some dirt roads and each ridge line was more spectacular. At one point we stopped at the intersection of a dirt road and a road that ran along the base of a huge ridge. I said, “GOD’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” We started home, now heading south and west to follow the sun. I love “ridge skipping” as we drive. Pennsylvania has long ridges in many places instead of individual mountains. The only way to cross most of these is at “passes” which are natural breaks or dips in the ridge line. Early settlers and Native Americans would have crossed the ridges in the same way, knowing a “pass” would save time and energy. I’ll look along the ridge as we drive and say, “Head west toward that break, probably a road goes through there.” And it usually does.
Spiders, Snakes, Aphids, and Bees!
By Eydie Wight
Today was another of those days when the place for morning coffee was on the deck. I opened the door, let Emy cat out and fended off the boisterous good morning activity of the dogs. I wasn’t out for more than a minute before I went inside to grab a jacket to throw over my pajamas, and slide my new moccasin birthday slippers on my feet. The temperature had dipped down into the 40’s over night. I am surprised that the home hummingbirds are still present, active, and seemingly in no hurry to leave. They continue to dive bomb each other, hover in front of my face, and perch on top of my wind chimes. Emy discovered a few days ago that she can jump on top of the deck rail and walk along it, tantalizingly out of reach of the dogs. They whine, they entreat me to get her down so they can chase her, they finally pretend indifference until she casually strolls over to where I am now leaning against the rail and rubs her face against mine. That does it, the dogs explode in a frenzy of jealous barking, making so much noise I have to trick them away from the house with a stick I throw far out into the yard so that Sammy has a slight chance of continuing his sleep.
Today is the last day of vacation! I love the changing of the guard of the seasonal flowers. Right now there are asters of all kinds in the un-mown areas of the yard. New England Asters willingly cluster around the mailbox, their light blue flowers seeming to glow in the morning light. Small white asters (I’ll have to look those up in the flower book) grow in abundance, creating bushy clumps. Fortunately none of us are allergic to goldenrod, because it is everywhere. My thoughts this morning, besides a song that is stuck in my head, are on wine. (The song, by the way, is “By the light of the silvery moon.” I don’t where all these obscure tunes come from, but this one must be one of my mother’s old barbershop quartet tunes, because it’s not only in my head, it’s in my head in four part harmony.)
Wine, we plan to bottle the blackberry wine today if all goes well. The wine has “cleared” and is a gorgeous color. I keep telling myself what the wine book says, that the wine must “mature” but the little voice inside my head (I think it’s the same voice that’s singing baritone) says, “Drink it. Drink it. Drinkitdrinkitdrinkitallnow.” But don’t worry, the last time I listened to that voice it was telling me that “no, of course not, bell bottoms will NEVER go out of style.” As I wandered around the yard I took notice of several fat rose hips on the Jacob’s Coat of Color Rose. My old wine book mentions that one of the truly exceptional elites of the homemade wines is rose hip wine. The author of the book only made a few bottles a year and prized them above all other. I don’t have nearly enough rose hips of my own, but I know a place where the multi flora rose (wild rose) grows thick. I went there a few years ago to pick some hips for rose hip tea. Like the blackberry session, each fat rose hip pulled me further into the brier warren until I suddenly found myself surrounded on all sides by impenetrable thorns. Thorns grabbing my shirt, pants, gloves, hair, holding me fast until some handsome prince came to magically free me and kiss my waiting lips…Right in the middle of THAT pleasant daydream a deer leaped out of the briers, not more than three feet from me. Well, by the time I tore my way out of the warren, yelping all the way,with the deer gracefully leaping unscathed in the other direction, I was pretty sure I would need plastic surgery and a pint or two of blood.
It’s not unheard of to have September frost, and I’d been planning all week to take the house plants inside for the cold season, so we decided to make that one of our last vacation projects. We really only have one southern exposure window downstairs in the spare bedroom, and each year all of the “big” plants get crowded around this one window until the room looks like something out of Jumanji. When I met Sammy and we began our courtship, he had one fairly big avocado tree that he had grown from a seed. At the time we met this tree was decorated with colored lights and red bows and was Sammy’s Christmas tree. I promptly named her “Iris” and would blow big Co2 laden kisses on her whenever I saw her. (Plants like that, you know. They don’t even care if you’ve had garlic, or Kosher pickles, or never brush your teeth-not that I know about that one, but I know someone who does!!!) Anyway, now, some four years later, Iris brushes her head on the ceiling and throws her arms out in a six foot span. Her “little sisters” (also grown from seed) number four, and we’ve even given some away to loving homes! We also have a beautiful “walking” iris we got as a start from my dad, a robust calla lily, some elderly Dieffenbachia, and a Mimosa pudica (“sensitive” plant). This plant curls it’s leaves up whenever they are touched, then slowly unfolds them again. All in all there were nine plants to bring in. Before they left the great outdoors each plant was trimmed of wind tattered or bug eaten leaves, re-potted if needed, had a scoop or two of potting soil added to “top off” the pots, and was sprayed with a soap solution to kill off aphids.
While I was re-potting and puttering and rearranging, our cats were having an adventure. Sammy called me downstairs from the kitchen where I had been stuffing a pickled egg into my mouth (and yes, Brother John, you DO have to chew them at least once!)
NOTE: Brother John here… you may be interested in knowing that I do NOT like pickled eggs! Probably comes as a surprise to my family. See? You learn something new every day!
Sammy had that mildly interested, not distressed at all, manly tone to his voice so I suspected immediately that the kittens had “found” a new toy in the basement, one that Sammy wasn’t real comfortable with. The toy turned out to be a little ring necked snake. These little guys are hardly bigger than a good sized earthworm and are pretty laid back. Not, of course, when they’re being batted across a concrete floor like an air hockey puck while being chewed on from the backside up by two brave kittens honing their hunting skills. (I guess snakes have a backside…) Sammy wondered aloud two or nineteen times if there were probably more snakes in the basement. We did have a nice sized garter snake in the basement beside the soda tub on our wedding day. Sammy’s not overly fond of snakes. Or the multiple ladybug infestations we get inside the house each winter after the stove is fired up, or the rather large (actually very, very large) hairy wolf spiders that take up residence also in the basement come winter. I actually had a spider one year, before I met Sammy, named Tawanda. She was very curious and liked noise and vibration. Often she would “come out” to check out company. My sister-in-law and her husband were visiting one late fall and we were sitting around downstairs enjoying the wood stove and drinking beer. Enough beer that when all of a sudden my brother-in-law’s eyes bugged out of his head and he said, “Ohmygod, what IS that?”, Tawanda looked much bigger to him than she really was. Tawanda had come over to investigate and was nearly on his foot. Tawanda’s body was about the size of a somewhat flattened walnut. I had difficulty preventing George from flattening her more. Finally, they took pictures and went home claiming I had a pet tarantula.
Today was the kind of day that called for a woods walk and hot soup. I’ve been hungry for a thick, full bodied, stick to your ribs soup or stew. I bought the ingredients to make potato soup but then as the vacation days went by the ingredients disappeared. The milk went into cereal, the sausage went into pizza, the onion went into spaghetti sauce. The potatoes are still there, waiting patiently as potatoes do. I’m like my Scottish friend who, when I asked him what his favorite food was, said “Stovies”. I said, “What’s that?” He replied, “Any thing that’s made from potatoes and cooked on the stove.”
I did get a little bit of a walk in. Just as I was finishing re-potting my plants, Sammy came down the ridge with the camera in hand and said, “You have to come see this. This is incredible.” I said, “What’s that Sweetie?” He said, “Bees.” Well, I was pretty sweaty despite the cool day so I broke off some of the lemon balm that grows by the basement door and rubbed it on my arms. I walked up the hill toward the “orchard” where we have our six fruit trees. To the right of the orchard is the ‘upper pond”. This is an eight by eight round pond, about five feet deep, that is fed by a spring that runs all year long. Sounds lovely but two years ago some tree roots in combination with winter burrowing bull frogs resulted in a series of leaks. Now there is only about two feet of water in the pond, but it is nice, clear water. Between the orchard and the pond is a large patch of yard we decided to let fallow this year. It is covered at the moment with the bushy asters I need to identify. It was also covered with Italian honeybees. Not covered by a swarm, these little girls were busy gathering nectar and pollen from the asters. It was so covered I heard the busy hum of hundreds of bees before I even got close. I watched them for the longest time. I wonder, who has hives near here? I know all the neighbors, in fact, should we take to this beekeeping life, I plan to ask them to let us hive the protected niches of their fields. Could these fine little Italians be a wild hive? If so, will they be okay for the winter? They had such delicate little flights from tiny flower to tiny flower. They were happy bees that day and I wished them a safe trip home and safe winter.
Jasper had, of course, followed me up the hill. He patiently waited for me to interview the bees, and then, when I started back down toward the house, ran a little way up the hill and gave me a look that said, :”Come on. Up this way.” So I followed him up. Jasper is my hiking buddy. He loves the winter, and likes nothing better than the woods in snow. One year he and I set out after a storm had given us several inches of white powdery snow. It was so cold and dry the snow kicked up in plumes as we made our way up the ridge. I lost sight of Jasper, not difficult since he’s white, so I called him. All of a sudden he was there above me, on an outcropping just exposed enough to catch eddies of wind that swirled the snow around me. I had a sudden image of myself in buckskin and furs, my long black hair plaited as I searched beneath the snow for wintergreen berries to take back to add to venison jerky for trail mix to feed the tribe. Jasper and I shared one of those moments when the world is is suffused with joy and all of heaven stops to approve. Today we just walked up to the top of the ridge and then raced back down. Actually, Jasper was the only one racing, but I let him think he won.
The Adventures of Eydie and Sammy Wight 