I love April. In fact, yesterday was the perfect date…”April 25th. Because it’s not too hot, not too cold, all you need is a light jacket.” That’s from Miss Congeniality…one of the funniest movies ever. Of course, I would laugh at anything that has Sandra Bullock. I have a secret crush on her. Anyhow, the end of April is perfect I think. Temperatures are nice but really, the colors that pop are what make it especially excellent for me. I took some pictures that don’t even begin to capture how beautiful and vivid the colors are right now (and especially the last week or so).
There is such diversity of life here and the mountains, as they green, are just alive with colors. Dogwoods and redbuds seem to burst out everywhere. While nondescript during the summer, redbuds and dogwoods are the princes of spring! Maples come alive first and give the first reddish tint to the mountains but the real power comes later with the purple and white buds that follow.
I guess the lower humidity and temperature make it so, but even the green backdrop of the leaves and grass are just more vivid than any other time of year too. I suppose I sort of come alive again after the (for me) depressing winter browns. I come to really appreciate the color in the mountains every spring and it just wouldn’t feel right without seeing the change and being in the change. Its in the birds’ songs and the frogs peeps and most definitely in the color of the trees!
Something occurred to me this weekend. In a way, I am a story teller, telling the day-to-day nonsense that goes on in our lives here on this blog. I know that’s pretty much what blogging is all about and it’s pretty cool how I get involved in other people’s lives and how (I suppose) some of you, dear friends, become involved in our lives. I enjoy telling our stories, for, like sands through an hourglass, these are the days of our lives.
Anyhow, this realization came to me while at an actual concert put on by a real, professional story teller, Lorna MacDonald Czarnota. My friend Granny Sue held a house concert where both she and Ms. Czarnota told several diverse stories and sang ballads. I don’t know if you have ever heard a professional story teller, but if you ever get a chance, go and listen.
Lorna MacDonald Czarnota
Granny Sue is our neighbor so I knew her house. She has a fantastic house in the woods surrounded by trees and birds and flowers. Her home is incredible, filled with antiques and mountain heritage and beautiful glassware and books. She invited us to walk about her house and drink sassafras tea and enjoy a variety of snacks. It was a beautiful arrangement and truly an awesome experience. It’s what story telling was at its beginning…friends and neighbors getting together to tell stories and enjoy each other’s company.
Abigail and I had a great time and she re-told the stories we heard the whole way home. I am not sure I am really much of a story teller, but I am delighted that Abigail had so much fun listening and re-telling stories. I hope she will learn some mountain stories and make up some of her own. However she wants to communicate, the wonderful imagination that will be fed from these mountains makes me happy!
Last weekend I went to an auction that benefits the FFA in Ravenswood, WV. I heard about it sort of accidentally so I didn’t really have any sort of a plan together but I heard that there were several different qualities of junk available.
I have heard people say that at flea markets and auctions, you can only get junk…you can find your plain old, run of the mill junk up through first class junk. As I wandered around the Jackson County Fairgrounds, I was surprised. To be sure, there was a lot of junk available for a few dollars per ton. There was some really great stuff too, and since I really like stuff like this, I spent a few hours perusing the piles.
I think what I enjoyed more than anything was the sound of the auctioneers. Most everyone knows the general sound of the auctioneer’s call and most people wonder how anyone knows what price they are paying for something. If you have never heard a real auctioneer calling, take a listen to a recording I made of my favorite guy.
From the recording, it is hard to tell what is going on I suppose, but I have to tell you, in person, I was never really in doubt about what he was selling (even if he just named it a big box of junk) or what the current bid was when he was calling. If you have never been, go to an auction some time!
I think next year I will go again to this auction and this time, I will have a plan!
We used to have a neighbor who was somewhat less than “whole”. She had a real passion for animals…well, for collecting animals; not so much for taking care of them. Fast forward a few years and she has moved away, and, in fact, her house was torn down. The animals remain and we have grown somewhat attached to some of them. Just so you get a picture of what I mean, we have had as many as 13 cats on our side porch…none of which was ours.
There are fewer now and we have captured the ones that are tame and had them fixed. I guess we should have taken them all to the pound but there are a few that are good cats and nice to pet when we are out in the yard. They stay outside and keep the varmints at bay. There are a number of cats that are feral, and as it is now spring, pregnant. We do not need a dozen more cats around here so we plan to trap the feral ones and take them to the pound. I have a few box traps so this seemed like an easy task. I baited two traps with canned cat food and walked away.
I checked the traps periodically through the day and only succeeded in catching one of the tame/fixed cats…three times. I can’t tell if he is smart or dumb. Dumb to keep getting caught or smart because he filled his belly with good food, knowing that we would just release him. Anyhow, I set them again and forgot about it until morning. I checked the trap Sunday and sure enough, I caught another cat…a real wild one!
(hint: that’s not really a cat)
I took this one out to the woods and let him go. He didn’t stick around for pleasantries which suited me just fine!
So over the weekend, Emily and I went on a road trip to Pleasureville, KY. Thumper told Bambi what his Mom had pounded into his head, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”. In regard to Pleasureville, KY, I will follow the Thumperian Principle and let you visit sometime to make up your own mind.
Chattanooga #14 cane mill
Anyhow, back to my main purpose…let me give you some back story… Sorghum is a plant native to Africa that was first raised in the United States in 1853 or so. Much like sugar cane, sorghum cane has a sweet core that can be pressed and boiled to make sorghum syrup (some people call it molasses or sorghum molasses. Molasses is technically made from sugar cane only).
It’s huge…rated as a 2 heavy horse mill. It weighs 1158 pounds
It was commonly grown on farms in the south where sugar cane wouldn’t thrive (i.e. the mid-south) so families could have access to sweetener. Anyhow, as family farms declined in number and as artificial sweeteners grew in popularity and cheap labor (I read this as large farm families) became less accessible, sorghum fell by the wayside.
Here it is getting gas in KY
There really isn’t anyone making sorghum presses, at least not in the old style, so the only ones left are 100 or more years old. There are a few old cane mills left but they are becoming more and more scarce as old-timers pass away and old farms rot back to the land. There are a few people still willing to turn loose of an old cane press they have laying around, but it is hard and expensive to find them. That brings us to our trip to KY. We bought an old sorghum cane mill made by the Chattanooga Plow Company from a guy who had one there.
Can you tell how huge this thing is?!
I have another bit of info you didn’t ask for but I am going to tell anyhow…Chattanooga Plow Company made plows and basic cast iron farm equipment and was a very large producer in the mid to late 1800s. They were bought by International Harvester when it appeared John Deere was going to get into the harvester business. JD had been absent in that market while focusing on plows and similar implements. When IH got word that JD might be getting into harvesters, IH decided to get into plows. (Read a really interesting history here). So, ultimately, my cane mill is in the International Harvester family.
I also have bees, as you may know, so you could say I have a thing for sweets. What really made me think about raising sorghum though, is a recent article in Mother Earth News (here’s the article). Basically, as folks long to understand old ways and to eat natural food or produce their own “stuff”, sorghum has enjoyed a bit of a revival. I read the story in Mother Earth News and read a bunch more online and was hooked on the idea. Getting started in any new endeavor can be a problem if you do not have folks around who understand how to do things, like, say, grow and process sorghum.
I just can’t get over how big it is!
I am very fortunate that Granny Sue, my neighbor, used to process sorghum on her farm and the man who originally owned both her land and mine, also ran sorghum. I think this new project was meant to be! I have a few months to restore this old cane mill while our sorghum grows, and I will be sure to keep you up to date on that process. I hope some other folks in the area will plant sorghum so we can have a regular old fashioned sorghum cook-off. I think that’s a big part of the old ways too…doing thing as a community.
I have been remiss in writing about a significant event that took place last weekend. Isaac plays in his school’s jazz band and they had a regional band competition and rating. I had a certain expectation of how the middle school band would sound. I mean, I have heard Isaac play a lot at the house, but getting an entire band to play together is another thing…and middle school kids…well, they aren’t always known for their attentiveness to detail.
We headed to Huntington to one of the high-schools where school bands had been playing all day. Band kids are super cool and mostly a lot of fun to hang around, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend my day sitting in an auditorium listening to a bunch of hormone fueled kids screeching out jazz tunes.
I couldn’t believe how wrong I was about pretty much all of my assumptions. I still think band kids are really cool, but I had no idea how awesome they could play a huge variety of jazz tunes. Most of these kids had only been playing 1-2 years but to hear them, you would think that they had been playing since way before puberty. Anyhow, their music speaks for itself so without further adieu:
Extra points to anyone who can identify the names of the songs! I am so proud of all of these kids. They did one heck of a good job and all of their hard work definitely paid off. They were given a superior rating, the highest rating possible!
Winter is not my friend. I generally do not like a single thing about it. This week, we are supposed to get colder than average temperatures with the lowest on Tuesday…single digit stuff. We have a little tradition in our house that started by accident…whenever it’s cold outside, we sing (repeatedly) that Christmas-ish song, Baby it’s cold outside. The kids sing it. We sing it. It’s usually loud and bad and we rarely get past the first verse. And it’s bad. We love it though!
Anyhow, my blogging and real-life friend Granny Sue put up a great poem she wrote about the cold…check it out. My poems on cold would be a study in four letter words so I will spare you that.
So, instead, I thought I would post a few pics I have taken as I stand with Isaac at the bus stop…in the cold…and dark.
I do like one thing about winter and cold I guess. I like turning the heat up, piling on a big stack of blankets (which in my case, means one blanket on especially cold days), drinking hot tea non-stop and laughing at the wind with my sweetie. I know we need the cold to reset Mother Nature and all so I guess I will make the most of the crisp cool mornings at sunrise when I get to see the beauty around me and take a few special minutes to talk to Isaac in the dark. His guard is down in the dark (or maybe it’s the onset of hypothermia?) and we get to talk about a little bit of everything.
Bring on the Arctic blast…I am ready and so is my hot tea!
Friends, these are dark times. No really…it is still dark at my house. No power for 5-7 days or so is what I heard somewhere. It is really strange as usually we can see lights somewhere around us since we live on top of a hill. This time, there are no lights anywhere. Everyone is without power.
In the summer, that isn’t too big a deal. It’s hot but the generator will run a few fans and lights so we are fine. In the winter, however, the cold gets to be a pretty big drag. Remember a few weeks ago I got a kerosene heater at the junk sale? Well I am pleased to report that it works great! Our house was still 57 degrees last night but that’s warmer than it was when we started! We had ventilation and 2 carbon monoxide detectors so we were being safe. All of our appliances are electric so it was an all around uncomfortable evening. Luckily, since we had snow, we took everything from the ice box and put it out in the snow banks.
Kerosene heater – what a pretty glow!
It was weird to look out of the area where there are normally hundreds of lights. Last night, there were only a few that coincided with the roar of the generators stationed nearby. Even with those running, it was so much more quiet than normal. Kind of weird.
I guess the other weird thing is that Emily and I decided to replace one shower head last night in the dark…I guess we finally had nothing else to do but a little light house work. Our house was so odd to listen to without the normal buzz of electrical things as well. I could hear the kids talking and the cats walking across the floors. I heard a few creaks and groans too…she was cold too I suppose.
I guess that, even as much as some aspects of this outtage suck, there are some neat things that happen around home that I normally wouldn’t take the time to notice. Maybe dark times are good every now and then…
Hurricane Sandy brought snow to our neck of the woods. Sometime over night it started snowing and really blowing and this morning, there was a bunch of that white garbage on the ground and hanging in the trees, many of which still had leaves. Add wet, heavy snow to trees with leaves and you have a winter power-outtage mess!
I shoveled the driveway this morning. We have a bad driveway. Of course, in WV, most driveways are bad. Anyhow, ours is on a hill and has a slight curve at the bottom. It connects to a single lane road with an 8 or so foot drop to the houses below us. So, I slid down the driveway in spite of its being shoveled and onto the single lane road. As I tried to navigate to the main road, I slid sideways across said road and had my tires at the edge of the drop-off. Ugh. I shoveled a bunch of the road and was able to slide sideways (no exaggeration) down onto the main road. So my driveway is a hill and my access to the main road is a hill. I nearly bit it on both roads…
Since I couldn’t get back home, I decided to go on to the office…which had no power. Ugh. It’s still snowing and blowing and we still have no power at the house. Obviously the power came back at the office (where this website resides on a server in my office) so I guess it could be worse…except my poor family is stranded at home without power. Poor them.
Well, it sort of sucks here but everyone is ok and we are nowhere near as bad off as many other folks so I count my blessings. Stay thirsty safe my friends…
My job isn’t as stressful as some folks but there is a good deal of pressure involved with writing computer software. That’s what I do for a living and I mostly like it. Writing software is like working a gigantic logic problem like you get in those puzzle books on the magazine rack…except it is all day long, every day. It takes a good bit of concentration and the ability to block out everything else. Of course, deadlines are always too near and bugs happen in software. Just think of how often you get to install windows updates! Behind the scenes somewhere, there was a programmer retracing logic and trying to find the hole in (probably) someone else’s thought processes when they were coding it…and they were under a deadline…and they were fueled by Mountain Dew!
Don’t get me wrong, most days I really enjoy that but it is hard work. I have to tell you though, I really enjoy my therapy:
Driving out my country road is so beautiful and although there are plenty of bumps on that old dirt road, it still seems to smooth things out for me. I know I am fortunate to be able to get away and for that, I am truly thankful!
