Look on Back

In this International Year of Astronomy, it is said orbital telescopes and with new cameras will let us look so far into space we may see the origins of the universe. We can see the past now.

These are Galileo's watercolor renderings of earth's moon as he saw it in 1610.

Naturally, I have a little trouble with this concept. No matter how hard I look, I have never been able to see past my memory, and sometimes even that does not serve as well as it might. It’s an intriguing notion, though.

How I would like a window looking onto the past of our farm.

The other day, the tax assessor came by. We are making a bit of a ruckus here, what with ripping the landscape apart and building a house. So we have the attention of the bureaucracy which, it turns out, is not always up-to-date on improvements.

The assessor had a sheaf of papers in hand showing what our farm ought to look like. For instance, he noted there was no demolition permit in the file for the barn. The barn? We look down the slope to our pole barn, which is standing and serving. Oh, the barn. You mean, perhaps, that rotting deck out there that supports beehives? That was once a barn. It wasn’t anymore when we came here. Even the pile of boards from its collapse had been cleared away, gone, perhaps, into someone’s upscale restaurant interior. Barn wood is much in demand for interiors.

He looked around some more and pointed out that, in 1937, there was a house in what is now our pasture. We shrug. What else can you do?  There is no house there now, and hasn’t been in recent times. 1937: Was that the last date an assessor came out? There is no humor in this man. He wants to know, what’s that shed down there?

They give the impression of a desperate quest for tax dollars around here. That loafing shed, in what might once have been the fore-yard of the old, gone barn, may have come from the 1930s. It’s been patched with later plywood on one end, and has a plastic gutter hanging off the front, and it teeters toward the promise of a collapse someday soon. It was teetering when we came here, propped up with plumbing pipe where its roof drooped toward the dirt floor. “Take a look at it,” we say, confident this shed will not add greatly to the value of our holdings.

But it puts a person in a wondering mind, to focus on 1937 for a moment. Who were they, and what they were doing, back then? We find traces, here and there, of those other folk. Walk in our pasture any day and you will find evidence coming up with the grass.

Why china and glass emerge from our pasture is open to speculation. Were they like Maggie and Jiggs, hurling dinnerware? Were they such slobs they tossed it out the window when it chipped or broke, or needed doing up? Or is the present pasture the site of an old dump still living somewhere underground?

Stuff gets left around on a farm, and vanishes for a time, and emerges again later on. I pick the small bits up and put them in jars. The archeologist in me (I was one once, and once thought I might be one, more) is less interested in the things they had than in what the people did with them. Some are obvious…

Some are mysterious…

Some are small things:

Some are large:

They give us clues to who those people were, but they don’t put faces on them.

Let me think: 1937.

Franklin D. Roosevelt began his second term as President. The first issue of Detective Comics hit the stands (Batman was still a little way down the road). In May the Hindenburg exploded. By July of 1937, Japan and China were at war in events that are now thought to have been the first acts of WWII in Asia. Amelia Earhart disappeared in July. Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Martha Gellhorn were covering the Spanish Civil War. In December, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated movie, opened at theaters in the United States.

And down on the farm? The Great Depression was still underway. I wonder if those people on our farm, had the money for tickets to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I wonder, even, how they might have gotten to town to see it. Some folks had cars, certainly. But this little farm could not have given back much. In 1937,  horse power was still common for transportation in rural areas. It was a long way to town, a whole day or more to go and come back.

Maybe they had a radio; and I imagine them gathered around it in the evening, tired from a day of hard work,  listening, perhaps, to Bing Crosby sing The Moon Got in My Eyes.

Bing Crosby in the 1930s

What was the farm wife wearing in 1937? Maybe this, the pattern available for a hard-won 15¢ from Simplicity:

Just because she lived on a farm, it doesn’t mean she didn’t want to look pretty. There was church to go to, and The Grange, and the County Fair in August. Maybe she took her preserves, or her knitting, as exhibits (I still dream of the day I complete a pair of socks with no errors, suitable for entry in the Fair!). Or maybe it was her best rooster.

This photo of Miss Dorrie Livingston with her prize-winner is from the Chicago History Museum. Its Library of Congress Digital ID number is n082119.

You can be sure there was a flock of chickens on the place. It’s hard to imagine a country household in the Depression without chickens muttering around the yard.

Maybe they kept some bees, like I do.

Find this image of a beekeeper in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Or it might be they raised pigs…

Nothing much about raising animals will have changed since 1937:

This photo of a farmer feeding his pigs is in the the Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration collection.

Because of the photo record we have, we forget the 1930s did take place in color.

In fact, it might be that not much has changed at all on a small farm. The weather is still unpredicatable, the return from your efforts is still uncertain, the rains fall, the garden grows, and the sun is hot in summer. Folks at the end of the day sit out in the evening this time of year, and look across the hills at the trees putting out their new set of growing ends. At the pace a tree grows, our little buzzing around from one year to another must seem trivial.

To the hog in the pen, what’s the difference from one decade to another? He’s here today. Maybe not next year. Some seasons are fat, some are slim.

Lib. of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Change? What are you people talking about?

When Good Cats Reach Their Limit

Welcome to Yellowcat, Yarnell, and Nielsen.

I’m Yellowcat, and I have opinions.

Because my name comes first, my opinions count. One of them is that house construction is only to be put up with for a very short time.

This project has gone on way too long.

For the most part, I have been very patient. When they tore down the porch where I used to leave them gall bladders and tails of rodents from the field,

I was philosophical about it, and moved my trophy display to the door of their new studio workshop.

When strangers arrived with heavy boots and hammers,

I retired graciously to the jungle and let them go about their work. Yellowcat can cope.

Evenings and weekends, when they leave the site unattended,

I’ve been diligent in policing the grounds, making sure everything is as it should be. I take my work seriously, and carry on even when circumstances are difficult.  I am, after all, Yellowcat.

The sound of my name should be enough to bring order to the household: Yellowcat.

There comes a time, however, when even Yellowcat reaches a limit of tolerance. Day after day, these construction crews tramp through my domain without so much as a by-your-leave, excuse me, or thank you.

I can’t stand this one more minute.

This morning I discovered an unattended vehicle. As always, they leave their equipment around, expecting it to be there when they come back.

Well, they may have another think coming. Just let me get this thing figured out…

Yellowcat.

Here I go.

It’s May!

Tra la! It’s May!
The lusty month of May!
That lovely month when ev’ryone goes
Blissfully astray.

Tra la! It’s here!
That shocking time of year
When tons of wicked little thoughts
Merrily appear!

(Thanks to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe)

Competition in Housing

The other day when I was out on a mushroom walk (and not finding much of any, by the way) I happened upon this:

Immediately I thought, What vandal has been chopping trees here? How indignant I was. This is public riverbank, along the shore of an old quarry behind an island in the Clackamas River. Cottonwoods grow here, and a fair amount of brush, and sometimes, in the fall or spring, edible mushrooms. Taking mushrooms is one thing. Chopping trees is another. Hmpf!

But then I noticed the unmistakable marks of chisel-teeth on the stump.

Ah-ha! Rodent at work! These are the marks of beaver teeth.

Contemplate for a moment, this young tree of 8 inches in diameter. Consider cutting it down with your teeth. It makes you think.

I met a couple of beavers once, long ago when I worked for the city zoo in Portland, Oregon. I was a college kid. You take the jobs you can get when you’re working your way through school. My mother pretended I was a research assistant. That sounded much better than the truth, that I was there to clean cages and feed the animals in the quarantine area on the hill above the gardens.

It was interesting, though. A cage-cleaner gets to meet animals she would never encounter in ordinary life. Animals coming into the zoo had to pass through qurantine before they could enter the general population, so we few, we lucky few, got to see them all. I served as hand-maiden to a juvenile lion, a pair of siamangs, 6 opossums (another time I may tell about the opossums), a couple of romping young cougars, a heron, a Hamadryous Baboon (blue face!), 3 gibbons, a Sun Bear, several owls, a Capuchin monkey, a Ring-tailed Lemur, a Ring-tailed Cat, and: 2 beavers.

The beavers were not glad to be there. They were not glad to see me each day. They were not glad to have their cages cleaned. They might have been OK about the feeding, but if so they didn’t betray much. They hissed at me. They showed their xanthodontous grins and chattered meanly. I was there to serve them. Did they appreciate it? I do not believe they did.

You see them in children’s books and they’re cute. Think of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What could be more appealing?

It is my opinion that, close-up, beavers are nasty big rodents.

But, anyway, I was out strolling that day, and came upon such skillful beaver-work on the banks of the old quarry. A person does have to be impressed. There were trees down everywhere. Some had been skinned for the tasty bits under the bark:

Some had been chopped and chiseled and left to lie. I can only wonder what the author of such industry had in mind. It’s as if the beaver simply has to cut down trees, even if only to leave them littering the shore.

I looked about for sign of the beaver’s house. Everyone knows beavers build lodges. Given the old quarry hasn’t any current or any stream to dam, I thought maybe the beaver lodge would be built into the bank somewhere near the cuttings. But there were so many trees were down all along the bank, so haphazardly and without plan, I couldn’t make head or tail of the architect’s intent. If it were me, I would cut trees near where I intended to use them. Obviously I do not have the mind of a beaver.

I’m rather glad about that, really.

At last I gave up the quest.  You can only spend so much time looking for the front door to a rodent house, and odds are when you find it you will not be invited in. These local beavers do not have the manners of the Narnian ones.

On my way back to the road, however, I spotted this in the brush and felt a little sorry for my superior attitude.

How was I to have known?

A Modest Proposal

No matter how small or, I think, how large your flock might be, lambing season is excitement. Especially with some of the lesser breeds of sheep, where you get colors and horns and personalities, you look forward to the result of the grab into the genetic bag. The first question answered is always, Ram or Ewe? (You root for the girls because an excess of boys in the flock can be a management problem.) You like them to be biggish, of course.  With Jacob Sheep, you assess their pattern of spotting.  You feel around for the first hints of horns: two or four? You like to see that their mothers have groomed them after birth, and taken over the matter of mothering from the first moment. No shepherd welcomes the arrival of a “bottle lamb.” Cute as it is to have a lamb in the kitchen suckling from a baby bottle of warm formula, it’s exhausting (every two hours for the first couple of weeks), expensive, and in the end results in a sheep that is never quite part of the flock.

So it was not with glad hearts that we saw what was going on in the lambing pen on Wednesday evening. I came home from a meeting in town to find Richard sitting at the table with a lamb in his lap. It was a tiny ram lamb, beautifully marked, trembling with cold and hunger. He was clean and dry, meaning someone in the flock had dressed the goop of birth from him. One of our ewes had begun the process of mothering.

There is a mysterious wisdom in a flock of sheep. They know things right off that it might take us a day or two to understand. Of course we mixed a bottle of lamb milk replacer and fed the little fella. Then we headed down to the sheepfold with him. I figured to assert myself regarding his mother’s role in this matter.

It wasn’t too difficult to work out which ewe had just lambed. You lift tails and take a look for evidence. We penned the guilty party with her lamb. The battle that followed was impressive. That ewe was not letting that lamb next to her. She would let me express milk from her udder (not very happily, but nevertheless), but she would not have the little ram approach her. She butted. She trampled. She bellowed her displeasure. All the rest of the flock stood by and watched with… what? Interest? At last I gave up and took him back to the kitchen. She was going to kill him if we insisted.

She knew, which I did not on that evening, that it was a poor investment to give energy to the rearing of a lamb who was going to die sooner or later.

We set him up in a box of towels in front of the woodstove. I wiped some crust from his eyes (that should have been a clue to me), and prepared to start the endless round of baby feedings. I set the alarm clocks for 2-hour intervals. Quite honestly, I wanted to weep at the prospect. But if you have a heartbeat, you want that lamb to live.

During the night he got out of his box a couple of times and tumbled into the pile of firewood. He clattered into the kitchen and knocked over some bottles. We moved him into the bathroom with a small heater and put a jacket over the box to keep him inside overnight.

We started calling him Soupҫon because he was such a little bit, barely four pounds.

What we began to notice (dumb humans) was that Soupҫon was running into a lot of things. He wobbled around on his little lamby legs in a strange, jerky way (maybe he was expecting something to clobber him with each step). He spent long periods in front of the white tile wall, simply looking at it.

He was pretty much blind. Though he was obviously drawn to the white wall, so apparently had some notion of light and dark, he didn’t detect motion at all. If we picked him up he opened his mouth for the bottle, but he didn’t see it coming and couldn’t find it unless we steered it to his lips.

So today we put little Soupҫon out of his discomfort. We cleaned off his eyes one more time,  and let him stand in the sun for a few minutes before dispatching him.

Notice how he holds his head? He holds it a little too high. Unsighted humans often do the same thing. I’ve often wondered if it was to put their hearing in a prime position to pick up clues. Compare him to this lamb, Switch,

who has been successfully suckling off two ewes in the flock, weird as that might seem.

Here is a closer look at one of the problems Soupҫon came with.

It’s called Split Upper Eyelid Defect, and can occur in polycerate breeds: sheep with more than two horns. This is a fairly severe example, and accounts for the continuing mattering of his eyes. It must have been uncomfortable, and I’m sorry I let him go three days before we made it better. On the other hand, it was three days in which he was warm and fed. The fate of a rejected lamb, if left in the flock, isn’t pleasant. If it tries to force itself on its mother, it is met with violent tossing. It might try to suckle off other ewes, but that’s usually not successful, either. The lamb goes hungry and cold until it collapses.

It’s a particularly unhappy outcome, to have to kill a newborn lamb. But, you know, it’s a fact of life on a farm, that death is part of the deal. Small though he was, we turned the tiny carcass into soup stock this afternoon. It would have seemed a greater bad thing to waste him for no good reason. Usually we do not eat the children, but in this case it seemed prudent to make use of that Soupҫon of lamb.

Spring Sprang

Last weekend, on a day just as it should be this time of year, we had some rain, some wind, some sun… and the Spring Fiber Sale at Abernethy Grange. It was market day for vendors and buyers of all things for spinners, knitters, crocheters and weavers.  Last year at this time, I shared how it puts me in mind of market days of the past. The scents and sights; the background hum of sellers chatting with shoppers; the reunions with folks from small farms in the hills; it’s all a ritual of time-worn regularity. We come together with the hope of exchange of goods and news, just as our forebears did. It’s pleasing to know these market days still take place, though they are surely less common than they once were.

Right on time for the Spring Equinox, the lettuce in my milk jugs awoke. There it is! Look close.

See the previous post for the run-up to that.

And best of all, when I came home from the Fiber Sale, I found a new stranger in the sheep shed.

This is the first lamb of 2009, a ewe lamb, grabbing her breakfast. You will notice the look of warning I’m getting from her mother, Paige. Paige does not take any messing around with her lambs. She is the alpha ewe in our flock, and you can perhaps see why. She is in command from the first moment.

It seems to us that primacy in the flock is passed on from mother to child. It is always the aplha ewe who breeds and delivers first. As a result, her lamb has a head start over the others who will arrive shortly after. That first lamb is a few days older, has her feet on the ground, is boss from the get-go and ready to tell any rivals just what they are made of before they have a first thought. So, naturally, the Main Sheep’s lamb is the Main Lamb: the Crown Princess in this case.

We asked our friend Ava to give a name to this year’s first lamb. Therefore, I give you: Ava the Lamb.

Ava, you might notice, is a palindrome.

She’s the same both ways.

Small Gratification

How silly is this?

For… what? six weeks I reckon, I have been dying to plant things. I’m sure it’s partly the harsher than normal winter we’ve had, and the looking out at a devastated landscape where the new house is rising but any semblance of a garden is gone. And part of it might be the usual thing that happens more or less every February when the seed catalogues start appearing in the mailbox, the lengthening of the days becomes evident, and the gardener in a woman just wants to bust out into the dirt. All that. But this year we have no place to start seedlings, and no herb garden to clip and tend on a dry weekend in winter, nor any unexpected blooms peeking from garden corners.

I did come around the wall and spot these happy souls this afternoon.

But it’s not the same as having a real garden. It’s even too early to plan much because I can’t yet see the shape of the land around the house.  And though we will have something wonderful in the way of a greenhouse when it’s done, it isn’t there yet.

So Skepweaver was shuffling through old seed packets, sighing disconsolately, and wondering what to do about it, when her eyes fell upon: empty milk jugs waiting to go out to the recycle bin. And for some reason, she thought of greenhouses just then, little greenhouses. And she took out her scissors, punched holes, cut the jugs in half, filled them with potting soil left over from last summer, and pushed in a lettuce seed, one for each jug. Then she taped the tops back on, leaving the lids off for ventilation, and set them out in the feeble March sun.

Somehow, this lacks something.

That was last weekend. During the week we had days of sun. Cold sun, but sun, and I imagined my jug garden to be nurturing potential captive in the chill.

I peeked inside this morning.

It doesn’t seem like much is happening. Huh.

Well. It’s a start.

Winter’s End?

They say it’s nearly spring. After all, we’re in Lent. It’s the time hints of winter’s end are lurking in corners. Cross through the orchard, and discover first buds tightly wrapped.

Come around the end of the studio, and see pussy willows in fur:

The hens seem to know it’s almost Easter…

Except for the matter of this morning’s dawn snow…

we’d think we were on our way to a new season.

I’m ready to reconsider the joys of wool and woodfires. Really. ‘Nuff winter.

Construction Update: Buttresses Take Flight, Settle in

Every now and then we see a dramatic change in the appearance of the house.  Long periods pass when little shows on the outside, and than, Whammo! something big happens.

Last week the buttresses that will support the greenhouse wall ( or roof, maybe?  I’m not sure how you know where a slanted wall becomes a roof…) came in. This was a very big day! Here is the first one getting a lift from the crane.

The steel buttresses weigh 2400 pounds, are 12 inches in depth, and nearly 48 feet long.  It’s dangerous work, this matter of placing big pieces of steel exactly where they need to go. The general contractor moved his crew out of the way and left the job to the steel workers. It’s amazing how these men can take an enormous machine and perform delicate little adjustments with it.

Here, below, the buttresses are settled into place.

This is what they rest on:

The bolts are 1 inch in diameter. Note the adjustable bracket to create the proper angle with the roof (the real roof above the greenhouse), seen here:

Here is the view from the southwest, showing the four big buttresses in place:

It gives the house its final line — we can see the shape it will actually take. We knew this from the model we made, but it’s different to see it in actual stone and steel. It changes the proportion of things altogether. Shrinks the house to normal size, I think.

Meanwhile, around the north side, we can take a look at the back door.

This is kind of a ratty picture because of the work going on and the angle of the sun this time of year, but it will give you an idea of what we’re trying to do. The wooden forms are for the switch-back ramp that will provide no-stairs access to the attic. The bulky space beneath the ramp will be earth-filled, extending the earth-sheltering of the north side to include the second floor. Meanwhile, we’ve echoed the arch of the studio workshop in the arch of the attic entry. Trying to decide what to call this, I just looked up “portico” to see whether that word can apply to an entry without the colonnade I associate with Greek architecture. And I came up with this delightful noun, courtesy of Merrian-Webster:  ambulatory: a sheltered place (as in a cloister or church) for walking. This is surely the ambulatory to the attic. It will have a little bench where a person can sit and take off the muddy boots, set the trash about to go into the recycle bin, or rest the load of provisions coming in. The door under the arch will be sheltered from wind and rain. It is, in all, a lovely ambulatory. And, yes, I think a portico can do without the colonnade.

The Experiment Station

We are nothing if not empirical around here. If you want to know whether or how well something is going to work before you invest largely in it, an experiment is the way to go. Back in March of last year we had a very good time setting up the experimental hydronic floor grid in the craft workshop, and came up with a good plan for even heating. Now we’re trying to decide what kind of glazing will go on the south-side solarium/greenhouse wall of the new house.

We thought glass. Glass is clear. Glass is strong. Glass, given various modern treatments in the way of coatings, has good transmission of the light spectrum we want to the heat-sink masses within the house, and for horticulture inside the greenhouse. Coatings can control the passage of heat into the greenhouse as well as the escape of heat on the way out. And glass, y’know, it has the appeal of  literary references: “He that lives in a glass house must not throw stones.” Also,“glasshouse” to the British means a greenhouse and, our greenhouse was meant to be glass.

Green has become a difficult word these days. How is one to know what a person means when they say, “We have a Green House?” Is it a glasshouse?

(This one is at  Wisley Garden in Surrey)

Or is it a green house?

(The arctic green house at Summit)

Or is it, as we expect ours to be, a Green House?

with a greenhouse.

Try not to think too hard about it.

But I wander.

Monty, our fondly held builder, wants to use polycarbonate plastic. He says it’s safer (it’s half an inch thick, so I suppose he has a point there; if you’re going to throw those stones,  that’s a consideration). We say it’s electrostatically active (We might actually have said “cling,” but just think how much stuff sticks to statically charged surfaces). He says it can be done with larger panels and less framing (OK, another point).  We say, but, it turns yellow. He says, not for years. We say, not enough years! Who wants to replace all the glazing in the greenhouse in 10 years? He says it transmits light and heat just as well as glass. We say: LET’S DO AN EXPERIMENT!

We can’t, obviously, test the yellowing over time before we’d like to move in. Besides, manufacturers provide that kind of information. Here are the labels off samples of glass with different coatings. Almost all you could want to  know about light transmission

except how it performs in the field.

So, let’s build little boxes!

These little plywood houses covered in insulation and duct-taped over the seams each contain a concrete block for a heat sink and are glazed with [Sta. A] Makrolon® “High-tech plastic from Bayer;” and [Sta. B] glass. It’s more complicated than that, but it’s glass. It’s been several different kinds of glass over several periods of observation, all in comparison with the polycarbonate. The idea is to see how much heat goes in, and how much heat stays in when the outside air cools. We could have built a half dozen little boxes to run simultaneous tests, but we didn’t. Chief Scientist and Mechanic Richard changes out the glazing  in the glass box, leaving the poly box unchanged, and even tries masking the glazing altogether to establish a control condition.

And we make notes. Lots of notes on a little yellow pad

kept beneath the thermometers mounted on the boxes.

Science is happening live, daily, at local stations.