The Dance of the Cranes

"High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun in the crane marsh. . .

. . .Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. the quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words. . .

. . .The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their having once harbored cranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history."

Aldo Leopold, Wisconsin - A Sand County Almanac

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In mid-April, when the ice was just leaving, we were out walking our road and heard strange noises coming from the marshy place around the bend.

Through the bare branches, we saw two sandhill cranes--a rare sight around here.


For once, I had my camera with me and as I started to take pictures, the male of the pair began doing a mating dance. (The pictures are grainy because I was carrying my smaller, less weighty camera with the shorter lens, but I was afraid to get too close and scare them away.)



There is something so primitive about these birds--still so wild and not yet dependent on humans, as the Canada Geese have become. They're rare enough not to be nuisances yet--though in an earlier blog, I posted pictures of hundreds of them in a farmer's field.


That was two years ago, and we haven't seen anything like that again. Now and then we hear their incredibly loud calls and see them flying overhead during the spring fly-0ver, but we are just a stop along the way to a more permanent summer home.

I think I like it that way. I want to be able to be surprised by their calls and to be astonished at their size. I want their numbers to be small enough here so that we humans don't feel the need to try and feed them to keep them around, so that, ultimately, hunters won't feel the need to treat them as nuisances and have an excuse to kill them.

There are elements of wildness that have nothing to do with us--that can survive very well, often better, without us--but that we crave, possibly because something in our primal, primordial past cries out to us. I think it's why so many of us choose to either live in or keep places that are inconvenient at best and crudely inadequate at worst. We crave the quiet and the tranquility of the boondocks, the wildness of nature surrounding us, and we take it where we're able to find it.

Times are desperate here in my sad, beautiful Michigan. State unemployment rates are in the double digits, and I heard a report just this morning that jobless numbers in Detroit are over 24%. Even from this distance--350 miles away and on a separate peninsula--my heart is with those people.


The fear is palpable in the city. Foreclosure notices, red flags on those unfortunate doors, dot every working-class neighborhood and there isn't a person who isn't touched in some way by the current mushrooming joblessness. In Michigan, auto-workers and other blue-collars have always headed north out of the cities to their own little patches of land. You don't have to go far in Michigan to get to where the wild things are, and finding your own quiet breathing space is not a luxury for a factory worker, it's a necessity.

For every lonely hermit who goes quietly mad, a thousand city dwellers--not just in our cities here, but in every city--rage loudly, fiercely, dangerously into insanity. The wilderness, the quiet places, are there to quell that rage, to soothe their fears, to give them respite, even for a few hours or days.

There are people in power who don't understand this need, and I might feel sorry for them if not for the fact that their being clueless often means a surrender of our wild places to corporate interests. Any of us who value these quiet places of inordinate beauty, these sanctuaries for the human soul, cannot let that happen.

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste."
— Wallace Stegner, The Wilderness Letter, written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, 1962 and subsequently in The Sound of Mountain Water (1969)

When the North reminds you it's NORTH

This has been some spring! Oh, wait. . .it's summer now. Let me just peek outside to make sure. Be right back. . . . .



. . . .okay, I'm kidding. I took these pictures the week after Easter. The eagle landed on the ice, sat there for a few minutes--long enough for me to fiddle with my camera--and then took off.

The ice didn't move out until April 23. We had a ridiculously cold winter up here this year, so looking forward to spring became a full-time occupation. Except spring never arrived. Not in March, anyway. Not in April, either. May looked promising for a couple of days but turns out they were just teasers. Back to endless weeks of cold and wind and fog.

Now it's the end of June (How could that be?), and we've had maybe ten warm days at the most since we got back on the island in mid-April. Week before last we had two HOT days. Into the 80s. But now it feels like April again.

I shouldn't complain, I know. I've looked at those oranges and reds on the Weather Channel's maps and I guess I should be happy the heat waves are missing us. But wind and cold and fog at the end of June doesn't seem at all like summer. I can't believe we're less than a week away from the Fourth of July.

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We went to the Lower Tahquamenon Falls near the end of April . Plenty of snow in the deep woods and along the shaded boardwalk, but the lookout deck was sunny and clear. Huge runoff this year, making for spectacular rapids. Pictures just can't do justice to the fury of all that water!



Okay, just ignore my grumbling here. There isn't a place on earth I would rather be. The spring bird migration was wonderful. This oriole hung around for almost a week--really unusual. They usually show up one day and are gone the next. They'll hang around hummingbird feeders as long as there is a perch for them. They love oranges, so we hang a half from a nail in a tree. I hear they love grape jelly, too. Maybe I'll try that next year.


The morel mushrooms tried to hide on us, but we found them. Fried them up in a little butter and olive oil and oh, did we go looking for more!


I have a lot of catching up to do after such a long time away. I'll be back!

Mona

Cabin Longings - Never satisfied

I've been away from our cabin for less than a month, which means that I have more than two months to go before I see it again. In December, when I was packing up to leave, I couldn't wait to start out for new places. We were heading downstate to spend Christmas with the people we care most about, so saying goodbye to our little cabin didn't seem all that hard.

Then, after Christmas, we left our bunch and took off over the Ohio flatlands, beyond the Kentucky hills and into the Smoky Mountains and out the other side to the South Carolina Piedmont, out final destination being the Atlantic coast. It was exciting enough to forget, for a while, about our little cabin in the woods.

Tunnel through the North Carolina mountains

The views are beautiful here, too, though as different as day and night. Instead of pines, we see palms, and instead of Cisco fishermen, we see shrimpers and crabbers pulling their traps into their small boats. The seagulls follow behind, the same as they do on the lakes, but here we see pelicans and the occasional group of dolphins competing for any little morsels left behind or thrown overboard.

Today there were horses on the beach and I rushed out to take pictures of them. Pretty interesting stuff, so why do I keep thinking about home?

I'm having Cabin Longing at the moment, but I've had Cabin Fever often enough to know it's no fun being cooped up inside a small hut for days on end as Mother Nature unleashes her own nasty brand of Northern fury.

Oh, those furies. . . But that's not what I'm thinking about now. Now all I can think about is a cozy fire in the stove. . .the soup pot simmering on the back burner. . .snowflakes drifting softly, forming luscious pillows outside my window. . .forest creatures stopping by to spend a little quality time with us. . .

. . .Ah, the stuff of dreams. But, oddly, when I shared some of this with the folks near home, they had more than a few choice words, too. Most of which I wouldn't want to repeat here.

Another Moon, another place

Tonight I'm watching the "largest moon of 2009", which might not mean much, considering it's only January 10th, but Nasa says it's a Perigee moon, and I really like the sound of it. This from the Nasa website, where you can read all about it:

Johannes Kepler explained the phenomenon 400 years ago. The Moon's orbit around Earth is not a circle; it is an ellipse, with one side 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other. Astronomers call the point of closest approach "perigee," and that is where the Moon will be this weekend.

Perigee full Moons come along once or twice a year. 2008 ended with one and now 2009 is beginning with another. It's the best kind of déjà vu for people who love the magic of a moonlit landscape.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/08jan_bigmoon2009.htm

When I'm up north, much of the time any sky phenomenon is hidden by the ever-present cloud cover, but here at the ocean we've been watching it for over an hour now.

They say it should look largest nearer the horizon, and maybe it did. (See above) But I loved this view, when it was peeking through the clouds.

Did anyone else see it? I'm curious to know whether it looked different in other parts of the country. (Just talked to my daughter in Southeastern Michigan. They got eight inches of snow today, so I'm guessing they weren't watching a full moon!)

2009. . .Already??

Whew, I feel as though I've been caught up in a whirlwind and I've just now come back down to earth. The Holidays were wonderful, but enough is enough, already!

We closed up our cabin the week before Christmas and headed downstate to the city. (Which would have been a sorry trek but for the fact that nearly our entire family is there.) Packing for three months takes miles and miles of lists, two large suitcases, five plastic bins, and a couple of those vacuum bags you put your stuff in and suck all the air out of and they flatten like lumpy pancakes. They look great when you first do them, and they'll last for a few days, but by the time we get to our destination, they've puffed up into very large pillows. We've tried everything to get them to work. We've bought different brands. I've arranged and re-arranged the clothes inside many times to get lumps, bumps and air out of them, but they turn on us every time.

Closing up the cabin for the winter has gotten easier over the years, but it's still a job that takes days of planning and doing. My husband keeps a list that he checks off every year so he doesn't forget anything, and he's good at it. So far no major disasters. I keep lists, too, and my job, besides packing, is to contact the Post Office, DirecTV, the utilities, etc. I did good for the most part, but half way downstate I remembered that I forgot to open the refrigerator doors after I pulled the plug. I'm waiting for our nephew to go back up to his cabin nearby, but his father is sick and he's staying downstate for a while. It's been cold enough so far that it's not a problem, but if things warm up, I may have to call someone up there and get them to go in and do it. I don't know how much snow is on the ground now, so that could be trouble.
Oh, well, the sun is shining here and it's going to be in the 70s, so tomorrow is another day. . .

As I was packing, I spotted this little squirrel trying to make away with an apple half almost as big as he was. It was out there for the deer, but I didn't put a sign on it so I suppose it looked like squirrel food, too. In the second picture, he has actually grabbed onto it somehow and he's pushing it along. Maybe it's the same squirrel that was so good at stealing food out of the trap without triggering it!


My son must have gotten tired of my complaints about my clunky camera, which I dearly love but which is about the size of a pot roast. For Christmas, he bought me a nifty little Canon Powershot that--glory be--actually fits in my pocket! And if I wear it around my neck, it doesn't feel like some sort of penance. It's taking a while to get used to it, and it doesn't have the telephoto range that my other camera has, but I think I'm going to like it a lot. It has a great macro setting, which I'll use a lot for my Etsy store, but I'll probably still hang onto my Konica Minolta for some of my nature shots. My old camera had a tiny, tiny LCD screen, but this one is large enough to actually recognize things. I still use the view finder for most shots. It just seems more comfortable and camera-like.


We left Michigan on December 29 and arrived in South Carolina on New Year's Eve. We were so exhausted, we missed the midnight New Year arrival by about three hours. We caught up with it the next day, though.
I miss our cabin already, even though nobody forced me to leave it for the winter. I wish I wasn't such a baby about the cold and the too-short days. I used to have visions of me on skis or skates or on a sled or a toboggan, just whooshing along, enjoying all that fluffy white stuff, regarding that often cruel weather as a challenge I was up to.

No more, I'm sorry to say. I was born in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, purportedly the snowiest place in the continental U.S, so I should be out there wallowing in that stuff. (Check out the Keweenaw Snow Thermometer here. Their record snowfall was 390.4 inches in the winter of 1978-79)

Half of me is Finnish, so any number of hardy Finns are probably ashamed of that half of me, but the other half is Italian and I must have inherited that Mediterranean blood, because I don't like to be COLD!

I'll be posting pictures of our cabin and other Michigan locations throughout the winter, but I'm planning on doing some posts on other people's cabins, too. I have a couple I'm working on already, and I'm hoping I'll be able to do a few more. I would love to do a piece on cabins in the south, too. I'll be on the lookout for some interesting ones while I'm here.

A wish for the best of the best in this new year. Make the most of it. It won't return again.

Mona

Seven Things about Me

I've been tagged by Cedar at Adirondack View to come up with seven "weird or random" things about me, so here goes:

1. I've watched ever single Academy Awards show since they were first televised in the 1950s. Never, ever missed one.

2. I have three grandchildren and the first and second one are 24 years apart.

3. I wanted to be a singer but I was too homely and too shy. That was before Barbra Striesand. If I had been born after her I might have actually tried it. I could sing pretty well, but not nearly as well as Barbra.

4. I hate Jazz. I don't just hate it, I despise it. I can't watch the weather Channel's "Weather on the Eights" because they insist on playing Jazz. I could never listen to NPR all day long, because there is altogether too much Jazz. When they play Jazz as the "On Hold" music, I have to hang up, no matter how important the call.

5. I've wanted to live on an island ever since I was a little kid, and so far I've lived on two.

6. My left arm is almost a full hand length longer than my right arm.

7. I am half Italian and half Finnish. I love being both, though they couldn't be farther apart in looks, temperament, religion and geography.

So I've fulfilled my part here. I'll be tagging some others and when I do, I'll post them here.
(That was fun! I had no idea what I would come up with when I started.)

Many moons--and now this

Yesterday we woke and opened the curtains just in time to see the December full moon slowly sinking behind the low trees on the west side of the bay. The tilt of the earth in winter gives us a view of the setting moon that we don’t have any other time of the year. In summer it rises behind the cabin, above the tall trees, stays for a brief glimpse, and then eases out of view while it’s still high in the sky.

It’s rare in winter to have a clear morning sky, so I think I can safely say that until yesterday I’ve never seen the setting moon over these waters.

Which is why, even though no number registered on the thermometer—it read zero—I threw my jacket on over my nightgown (the nightgown that goes to my kneesies), jammed my bare feet into my Crocs, grabbed my camera, and raced out onto the deck in order to catch the last of that moon sinking behind the trees. Just so you could see it along with me.

That was yesterday. Today the temps went up to 36 degrees and everything began to melt. Which was fine with me—love the fluffy white stuff, but that gray, soupy junk not so much—but then we heard that by tomorrow the digits were dipping to singles again. That meant that the ton of snow on our roof would likely compact and freeze into two tons of ice.

So out came the greatest invention known to Northern Man—or Woman. The snow rake. The snow rake has no moving parts, no fancy screen, no chips, no pixels, no memory, no earthly way to program it—but all by itself, it does the best job anyone has ever seen of pulling tons of heavy snow off of snow-clad roofs.

Well, wait—it doesn’t do it all by itself. It takes some manual labor to get it to do its thing. Sometimes a whole LOT of manual labor. But the point is, it does it without balking, without stalling, without coaxing or coercing. It’s simply a slightly curved metal rectangle attached to a v-e-r-y long pole. You position that rectangle at the top of the roof and drag it down until the snow falls off the edge and onto the ground. That’s it.

When the snow from the roof falls to the ground, it’s where it should be. But when it falls onto the deck, it’s only the first step in the snow removal process. That’s where I come in.

Step number 2 requires that someone take that heavy mound of snow and somehow shove it off the edge of the deck and onto the aforesaid ground. Because Northern Man is busy with the roof rake, Northern Woman (me) must take up the snow shovel and figure out a way to get the now cement-like mound of snow off of the deck without killing her knees or breaking her back.

I’m here to tell you, it can be done. Here’s how: A little at a time. I grab a little at the edge and push. Grab a little at the edge again and push. I do this until I get to where the mound gains height and then I have to rethink this thing. I chop a chunk, grab a little and push. Then I repeat until the mound is gone.

All the while I’m working, I hear that damned snow rake scraping across the roof on the other side. The snow feels and sounds like an avalanche hitting the deck, and I think to myself that this whole process might be absolutely fascinating if I wasn’t the one who had to go over there and start shoving again.

NEWS FLASH: We heard tonight that there’s been a change in the weather. The predicted arctic blast is taking its time getting here. High temps will be 33 degrees tomorrow. That means most of that snow on the roof would probably have melted on its own by the time the REAL cold got here.

Oh, that Mother Nature. She's a piece of work, isn't she?

What a difference a day makes

Yesterday morning I took this picture of the ice forming across our bay. The temps have been in the single digits for several days now, so I guess I knew I was looking at the last of the open water.

This morning we woke up to a totally covered bay.

I'm not ready for this! It's way too early for the open water to disappear. Winter is still two weeks away. I'm hoping a huge north wind will come along and shove the ice toward shore again, but the odds are that the ice cover will be there until spring.

Every year soon after the bay freezes over we watch the deer gingerly work their way out there. How they know it's frozen enough for them to walk on, I can't even fathom. But we've never seen them fall through.



They're like little kids exploring this new territory--they wander aimlessly around, checking it out, and then when they've had enough fun, they amble back to the trees. There is no food out there, so it's not as if they have to go there. There is no protection out there, so it's a bit of a gamble for them. But, like little kids, they throw caution to the winds and just wanna have fun.
I love that about them.



Yesterday, we watched this little squirrel wander into the trap to eat the bait on the spring-loaded lever that slams the doors shut when and if he sets it off. This little bugger ate it all and then calmly wandered out again. If the doors had slammed shut on him, my husband would have put the cage in the trunk and then would have driven the little guy to a lovely squirrel resort area far enough away from habitation that he won't make a pest of himself. He would be joining a vast immigrant population that have been transported over the years in this same cage by this same human. We don't harm animals here, but neither do we want to open our doors to them.



We used to buy bushels of corn to feed the deer before we realized how easily disease spread through their population when they congregated too closely or fed from the same trough. Now we throw out a few apple peelings for them and let them dig through the compost pile for leavings, but they know we're not a reliable source of food. We need to keep it that way, even though there's a real chance that some of them won't make it through the winter.

I've long ago given up trying to figure out the hows and whys of Mother Nature. Can't live with her, can't live without her. . .

Ice and Snow

When I started this website I hadn't planned on it being so "photocentric" (Is that a word?). But the more I take pictures, and the more I look for the right light, the right angles, the right moment, the more I realize I'm totally hooked. I can't go anywhere without my camera anymore and, while I don't necessarily take award-winning pictures, I'm almost always pleasantly struck by what comes out of that camera.

I complain almost non-stop anymore about winter, but when I look at the pictures I take (or "Photo-Ops", as I like to call them) I have to admit that there's something really special about how winter looks around here. Even the little things can be pretty spectacular:

A most remarkable web!

An icy chandelier

This is what I saw when I woke up this morning.

And this is what it looked like in daylight.

The wind came out of the north-northwest and plastered this window with ice, even though this window is sheltered under the deck roof, while the window to the east of it is much more exposed. That window was almost clear of ice. Then, just around the corner from the easterly window, there is a small window that is COMPLETELY covered in ice. I have to wonder how it was that the icy wind didn't catch all three windows equally, though I probably won't ponder the why of it for too long. But it does seem counter to the laws of nature, even considering the easterly positioning of the clear window. (Not to belabor this, but the ice-covered window around the corner is even more easterly, and totally hidden from the north-northwest winds.)

Of course, much of what happens in winter seems counter to the laws of nature. Especially MY laws of nature.



Even on the dimmest, darkest days of winter there is beauty to be found. The sun is pathetic in winter--a mere shell of its former, summer self. More days than not, it hides behind a hazy veil. But when it does come out in all its frigid glory, it's as if we've been given a gift:

Winter has come

For days now a big old hairy Alberta Clipper has been working its way down from the plains of Canada, heading for the relatively warm Great Lakes where it's known to pull moisture up into the clouds, travel to the Midwest snow belts, and unceremoniously dump it in the form of snow on the poor helpless folks who, every winter, still choose to live there.


We watched the news of the Clipper with a sort of bemused but detached interest, because, historically speaking, those Lake Effect snows coming across the lakes never, NEVER affect us over here. For us to get that kind of snow, it would take a big wind sweeping up from the South, pulling warm moisture from Lake Huron, creating snow in a cloud, and then dumping it on us.

So last night we weren't worried at all about the prospect of a lot of snow for us. It just doesn't happen that often, and especially not this early in the season. But this morning the winds shifted to the Southwest and by mid-day, to our surprise, billions and billions of great lacy flakes were floating out of the sky and sticking wherever they landed. We couldn't shovel it away fast enough. By nightfall we had a good eight inches on the ground and more in the drifts.



The first snow is always exciting. It's a Photo-Op I can never resist, even though snowfall pictures, now numbering in the many hundreds, all look pretty much the same from year to year.



Yesterday the winds were kind and it was actually pretty pleasant shoveling and pushing that snow around, even in 28 degree temps. I had to stop and stick out my tongue to collect snow flakes, of course. All kids do that when it snows.

Places I'll show you if you'll promise not to go there

There are some places we happen upon that are so pristine and so special, we hope no one else ever finds them. Selfish, I know, but that's what makes them so special. . .not many people have discovered them. No campfires, no beer cans, no human-borne flotsam to spoil their incredible beauty.



I call this "Mossy Glade". It is a place here on our island, not far from a park trail, but you have to be looking for it in order to find it. I like to pretend that I discovered it, but of course I didn't.



This is a scene not unlike any you might have seen somewhere else, but from this vantage point it's a one-of-a-kind. This is a place where we can watch Northern Lights. So far, I haven't been able to figure out how to photograph them, so for now I'll just treasure every fleeting moment of them.




This is a swimming hole on a river that flows into Lake Superior. It is one of those places that generations of people know about and come back to, but its location is guarded against outsiders. If you were truly observant you would see that the side of the road has been carved into a pull-off, and that every now and then a car is parked there, but nothing about it would make you curious enough to stop and check it out. Nothing to see here. Move along.


This is a boardwalk and beach at the mouth of the St. Mary's River. It is early spring and there are still ice floes on the water. Nobody else was there. Guess who was happy about that?



This is what is left of an old cemetery in the Keweenaw Peninsula. It is near what was once a thriving turn-of-the-century mining community. The ground is almost totally covered with myrtle and thimbleberry bushes, and the narrow, winding path seems eons old. The few headstones still visible are for people who came to this place from western Europe and the British Isles to start a new life during the copper mining boom. There is a small sign at the edge of the road, but most people drive right by. That suits those of us who make the pilgrimage nearly every year. It appears untouched and mystical and if we talk at all, we talk in whispers.

Last Splash of Color

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Here it is Election Day (Yay!) and we’re still seeing color in the woods, thanks to the tamaracks. The birches turn golden after the hardwoods drop their leaves, and then when the birches are nearly gone the tamaracks take over, delighting us with a last splash of color.

Tamaracks (also called “larch”, as in Monty Python’s “The LARCH”) are the only conifers to actually shed their needles in winter. The first time I saw all those bare branches I thought some terrible disease had suddenly decimated entire stands of trees. But in late fall they’re gorgeous—as if, like the hardwoods, they feel the need to give a grand, final performance before shutting down for the season.

I don’t remember seeing tamaracks before we moved up here to the eastern UP (and, in fact, 40% of the state’s tamaracks are in the eastern half of the Upper Peninsula), but now I’m seeing them downstate as far as Saginaw. Is that normal or is it a sign of global warming? I don’t know.

(We just got back from voting. The township hall is our polling place and there was no one ahead of us, and only a few people signing in when we left. Our poll worker said I was #198 at 10:30 AM, but there were absentee ballots to be counted, so hopefully the numbers go over the top like they are everywhere else. Can’t wait until tomorrow, when this crazy two-year run up is over. I hope, I hope, I HOPE my guy wins!)

Autumn Days

It’s raining right now and fog is nearly covering the bay, so I decided to look away, cozy up, and search out some of the pictures I’ve taken that show the glory of the Autumnal north woods. What an unbelievable color season this was. It came late this year, but when it did come those trees seemed to fancy up almost overnight.

Every year we try to take a color tour, timing it when the colors are peak. We’re not famous for riotously colorful hardwoods here in our area. We’re nearly surrounded with wetlands, which means cedar swamp and a few lovely, welcome birches. So usually we wander off for a night or two, heading for the hardwood forests to the west. This year we couldn’t do it, but it didn’t matter in the least. We found plenty of it right close by. Then, when we headed downstate out of necessity (we NEVER head toward the cities unless we absolutely have to), we found the most gorgeous color in a roadside REST AREA.

Michigan is a beautiful state, but largely unsung for some reason. So I challenge anyone to come here in the fall and still maintain they’ve seen better color elsewhere. NOT SO!

After waiting for quite a while, our winter stash of firewood finally arrived. We ordered six cords, and it’s always a crap shoot whether we get what we paid for. I don’t mean to say those woodsmen deliberately cheat us. . .no, I would never say that. . . but how is it that they always under-measure and never over-measure? This year, after some minor “adjusting”, we think we’re as close as we’re going to get to an honest six cords. But it’s all hard wood, which is a pleasant surprise for a change. Usually we pay for all hardwood and get at least a cord or more of birch, which is pulp wood at best and burns like paper. Our stove doesn’t like it, either. It creates soot and creosote and doesn’t maintain a steady heat like good old hardwoods do.

Most wood sellers claim to sell “seasoned” hardwood. That’s a laugh, too. My idea of “seasoned” and theirs are two different things. Yes, the wood is lovely looking, and a whole lot of it is Beech, which is just the very best for long, smooth burning—but when it’s green and when it’s heavy it’s NOT seasoned! Seasoned means it’s had a chance to dry for a season or so. Seasoned is DRY wood. Dry. That means dry. That means light in weight, with lateral cracks. Not green, not oozing. Our fussy stove doesn’t like that, either.

Now, six cords won’t heat our cabin for the entire winter. Not even close. But it will keep us going with as little help as possible from our propane-eating behemoth of a furnace. We close off the back half of our cabin in winter and it becomes an unheated storage room. We keep potatoes and apples and extra water close to the inside door, where it gets some heat, and they do just fine there.

Just before Christmas, we’ll close up our beloved cabin—shut it down entirely, draining water and removing all the canned goods and perishables—and head south for the winter. Then we’ll be back in early April, in time for the spring migration and the break-up of the bay ice. There will still be plenty of snow on the ground, but we’ll be excited to shovel away the snow and open up again. And hopefully we’ll have enough wood left for some needed cozy fires.

(Yep, we’re migratory, too!) Mona

One free, slightly used birthday

While most people celebrate their birthdays, this year I barely even noticed mine. In fact, if I'd had my way, I would have postponed it for a while. Maybe a good long while.

It's not just that this particular birthday happened to fall on the same day my husband had shock paddles applied to his chest in order to get his heart rhythm back on track. No, after three days in the hospital, that scary episode took a miraculous turn for the better and he's just fine now.

That's not it. It's just that I've had so many birthdays over the years, I'm getting a little worried that they might not go on forever. I used to look forward to each birthday. At certain points in our lives, everyone feels that way, I know. But now. . .now I approach each new birthday first with surprise and then with dread. I CAN'T be that old! Can I be??

I have such mixed feelings about my birthday. I don't want a new one every year (which is why I'm offering this one for free), but I do absolutely LOVE my birth date:

September 17. (Say it out loud. Luscious, isn't it?)

September 17 may just be the best month and day combination of the entire year. I'm always a little sorry for people who weren't born on September 17. Which is why it just KILLS me that I can't really claim it legally. I WAS born on September 17--I was, I WAS--but my birth certificate says otherwise. It says I was born on September 18. Can you imagine? September 18 is UGLY. (Sorry, 9/18ers)

I can't help it that some time shortly after my birth, a clerk, obviously wildly drunk while typing up my certificate, besides spelling my first name wrong, and then spelling my middle name wrong, went on to type September 18 instead of the sensually sibilant September 17.

And all my life, it hasn't seemed to matter. Not any of it. My social security card has my name spelled right. My driver's license has my name spelled right. My marriage license has my name spelled right. For years and years and YEARS I got away with it. Nearly all of my life I blatantly used September 17 as my birth date--mainly because it IS my birth date.

Then, somewhere in the late 80s, after I had used my actual, truly beloved DOB for more years than the DMV clerk had lived on this earth, I made the mistake of chit-chatting while I waited for my license. (Never do that. Don’t even look them in the eye.) I thought she’d get a kick out of my story about the drunken clerk and the wrong date. She even smiled a little. But then she put 9/18/ on my license. She was sorry, she said, but that was--didn’t I agree?--my LEGAL birth date.

She was heartless and I was heartbroken. Every time I look at my driver's license I feel a little sick. It's wrong. . .so wrong. But the damage is done. Every official document now lists an untruth about me.

But enough about that sorry incident. Who is willing to take this birthday off my hands? I'll go back to having them sooner or later. I'll have to, I guess, or face the consequences.

But please don't ask me for my REAL birth date. September 17 is taken.