Cabin & Camp

Snow in June -- It happens every year

2010-06-14T22:06:00.004-04:00

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Every year around this time the trees we commonly refer to as Cottonwoods (but are, in fact, their close cousin Balm of Gilead, according to my "Trees of Michigan" book) send warnings of a cotton storm a'brewing by wafting tiny cotton flakes into the air.

For days we see the cotton building up on the upper branches, knowing that one day when the sun warms the branches enough and the Gods are in their places the "snow" will begin to fly.

This year it started three days ago but then the rains came, stalling the cotton storm for at least a little while. I would say that's a good thing, but it really just prolongs the inevitable. Those cotton bombs are growing bigger and bigger up there and either tomorrow or the next day our side yard is once again going to look like this:

This is a close-up of the cotton ball once it has "exploded":

Early in the spring the "cotton" seeds form and start to fall. They're covered with an incredibly sticky resin and manage to stick to everything, especially the bottoms of our shoes. They end up inside the house, where we have to literally scrape them up off the floor. What a nuisance!

But I've been doing a little research, and it turns out those sticky little buggers are good for something. They can be made into a salve. A balm. A Balm of Gilead. The people who are onto this balm claim it has magical, out-of-this-world qualities. It is a pain reliever, an antibiotic, an anti-itch, anti-inflammatory miracle worker, and, if some others are to be believed, a sure-fire cure for cancer called "black salve".

I found this recipe and this one online, and I can't wait to try making it when it gets cold again and I can gather up those little sticky slivers. Olive oil and beeswax are the main ingredients, and it looks simple enough for even me.

The tree is also called "balsam poplar". They talk about the pleasant aroma, but I can't say I've actually noticed. I'll have to pay attention.

(Oh, by the way, I started this blog yesterday, and today was the day. Our yard looks just like the picture above. I almost took another picture, but you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. One snowy yard in June looks like any other.)

When the local pests are still cute

2010-06-07T08:52:00.003-04:00

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So here's the thing: We don't want Geese and Ducks using our beach as a latrine, which they seem to want to do, so we have to come up with ways to discourage them. Bottle rockets may seem extreme to you, but consider this: Our neighbor wants us to shoot the buggers. And if we don't do it, she will. So I have reluctantly agreed to the Bottle Rocket method in order to protect them from Pistol Packin' Grandma, but this time of year I reserve the right to declare a moratorium. (PPG knows about this, too.)

This time of year there are babies out there, and there are enough scary things without us adding to their fears.

This year we've only seen two geese pairs with two babies each. That's unusual and I have to wonder what environmental changes might be taking place now. We're used to seeing eight to ten goslings following behind--at least at first. Over time, either through predation or disease, the numbers dwindle, and I watch sadly as the families grow smaller and smaller.

I'm no expert on geese, but I've been watching these nurseries over the years and I've seen several families swimming together as groups. I have to assume it's for mutual protection. Sometimes the goslings paddle from one family to another and I know it's only a matter of time until one of the parents chases them back to where they belong. There's a bit of a ruckus for a while, with both sets of parents getting their feathers ruffled before they calm down and get back to whatever they were doing. But they are a community--no doubt about it.

Last year I saw this family of Goldeneyes. I had never seen their babies before and this was a thrill:

I'm still waiting to see a mama loon carrying her babies on her back. They don't ordinarily come close to shore, so I may never get the chance. But there's always hope. I keep my camera close, just in case.

When all the barns are finally gone

2009-11-15T14:28:00.007-05:00

For years now I've been watching the barns disappear.

Barn Red became faded pink and then weathered gray.

The side boards rotted and fell away.

Roof shingles blew off. Moss carpeted what was left.

Open spaces appeared where doors and windows had once been.

Swaybacks marked the countryside.

As the barns went, so went the homesteads.

Rusted relics where life had flourished.

And at the end of the day, nobody cared.

But me.

A Controversy over Clotheslines - Really!

2009-10-22T20:40:00.003-04:00

I imagine my grandmother has been turning in her grave a lot lately, but this latest travesty must have her positively spinning. She was a true believer in hanging laundry out of doors, even on winter days when they came back inside stiff as boards and steaming from the cold. Even after her daughters decided she was too old to be out there hanging clothes, she refused to use the dryer they installed in the basement. Her one rule was that the last load had to be out on the lines before 10 AM. It was a lazy woman who was still doing her wash in what was practically the middle of the day.

Her reasons for hanging laundry outdoors had more to do with tradition and enjoyment than with saving money or helping the environment. She genuinely looked forward to Mondays, when the washables were scrubbed clean and dried miraculously by nothing but the very air we breathe.

So, while I miss her terribly, I'm glad she isn't here to see this. She simply would not be able to comprehend that there are actually people out there who see clean laundry drying on clotheslines as nothing more than the kind of neighborhood blight that threatens to turn communities into rotting ghettos.

Homeowner's Associations across the country are warning residents that clotheslines and all the attendant paraphernalia, like clothespins and clothespin bags and laundry baskets and actual laundry will not be tolerated in plain sight of other humans.

The debate is getting hot and heavy, even to the point of bringing the blasted gov'mint into it. You can go here to sign a petition stating it is the inalienable right of every man, woman and child to line dry. They're asking for a one day photo-op of the First family airing out their (clean) laundry.

Some states are already working toward rescuing the line dryers from the tyranny of the energymongers. Vermont, for instance, passed the "Right to Dry" for all Vermonters, as described here by Lyman Orton, proprietor of the Vermont Country Store. Lyman has been "raisin' the dickens" about it for the past few years and. . . .but I'll let him tell you:

Colorado, Hawaii, Main, Florida and Utah already have such bills in place, and Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and Oregon aren't far behind. They're working on it.

Even the New York Times got into it. This from their article: “The issue has brought together younger folks who are more pro-environment and very older folks who remember a time before clotheslines became synonymous with being too poor to afford a dryer,” said a Democratic lawmaker from Virginia, State Senator Linda T. Puller, who introduced a bill last session that would prohibit community associations in the state from restricting the use of “wind energy drying devices” — i.e., clotheslines.

A film crew in the UK is producing a film called, "Drying for Freedom", due in theaters not necessarily near you in 2010. Click here for the trailer.

This is big, folks. But, wouldn't you know? Certain people don't like the idea of anybody telling you you CAN hang out your laundry. They much prefer those who tell you you CAN'T. Tammy Bruce's take on it is this: "You can have my dryer…and washer…and refrigerator when you wring them from my warm, smooth hands." She sees going back to hanging out the laundry as drudgery, and maybe she's right. but what if you just want to?

I have a dryer now, but for the first three years in our cabin, it was air dry or nothing. In the summer I hung laundry outside and in winter I hung them on drying racks, thereby adding needed moisture to the dry heat of a closed-up house.

I still love hanging out when the weather is good. When it's heading toward bad, I often hang out for a while and then throw them into the dryer to finish up. I like the way clothes feel when they've been wind-dried and I like the way they smell. I like the idea of saving a few bucks on electricity, too. And I really like standing out there, clothespins in my mouth (the way my Mom always did), arranging those pieces just so, until they're not only set for optimal drying but are aesthetically pleasing, too. All of the white tee shirts are hung side by side, shoulder to shoulder. The socks match up, heels all facing the same direction. Sometime I even color-code. You can get much more creative with line-drying than you can by throwing things into a dryer. That's a definite plus. (And nobody around here would ever dream of telling me I couldn't.)

But what I especially love about this whole argument is that it's like feathers flying instead of poison-tipped arrows. I haven't laughed so much over a cause I might actually care about in a really long time.

http://www.laundrylist.org/

A Thing of Beauty

2009-09-22T09:36:00.006-04:00

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Henry David Thoreau

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This week we were walking along a nearby hiking trail and it might have been the fall light (the air is clearer, the greens are fading, and the vegetation takes on shades of brown and gold), but it seemed like even the simplest bits of nature took on a beauty that just cried out "photo-op".

Stump flowers

A study in Contrasts

Birch Bark

As I was adding those photos to my files, I realized I had taken a lot of pictures lately that might fit into the "walk on by" category. Natural "vignettes" that don't jump out at you, don't leave you breathless, but on closer inspection, have a kind of fascinating beauty.

Tree fungus

A Fungus Bouquet

Lake Superior "seashells"

Caterpillar Chic

Goat's-beard "Puff ball"

The goat's beard, I admit, didn't grow on our dock. The light was better there, and so was the background, so I sort of stuck it in between the dock boards. Artistic license or "fudging". Call it what you will, but I like it!

Mona

A squirrel-and raven-proof suet feeder. . .so far!

2009-08-25T15:43:00.008-04:00

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We were buying suet by the wagon-load for a while there, what with the constant stream of uninvited, selfish, messy diners. We had the usual cage suet feeders that attached flat against the trees, and every day they were emptied and needed filling. The squirrels, the black birds, and the pileated woodpeckers made sure there was nothing left for the smaller suet-loving birds, who were hovering nearby licking their chops.

Then I saw something ingenious, either in a catalog or on one of the many blogs I hop to. It showed a suet feeder with the suet cage on the underside. Brilliant! (I would give credit where credit is due, but I honestly don't remember where I saw it.)

I showed it to the fix-it guy around here and he came up with this:

It's just a regular suet cage mounted upside down on a board. The rounded cover made from a soda bottle makes any potential bandit slide right off. It's attached to the tree with an old shelf bracket he had lying around, so the whole thing didn't cost a penny. (Well, maybe a dime, since he had to use a deposit bottle.)

The metal clamp holds the feeder shut and is easy to open when it comes time to fill it again--which isn't nearly as often any more.

The small birds love it and the big, aggressive birds--and squirrels--hate it. That's an added bonus, don't you think?

Mona

The Dance of the Cranes

2009-07-02T09:14:00.013-04:00

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"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

2009-06-28T19:39:00.012-04:00

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

2009-01-18T17:14:00.010-05:00

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

2009-01-10T19:01:00.010-05:00

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??

2009-01-06T09:03:00.009-05:00

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

2008-12-21T11:48:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-14T23:04:00.007-05:00

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

2008-12-08T11:09:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-01T10:16:00.017-05:00

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

2008-11-19T19:52:00.010-05:00

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

2008-11-07T23:28:00.020-05:00

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

2008-11-04T09:23:00.004-05:00

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

2008-10-25T14:09:00.007-04:00

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

2008-09-20T19:03:00.013-04:00

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.

In Pursuit of Beauty

2008-08-21T13:18:00.012-04:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to write in here. It’s summer at the lake and it’s beautiful, but we’re in the midst of a family crisis and all of my energy has been directed there. The worst of it seems to be over, at least for the short haul, but there is still much work ahead.

It’s early morning and I’m sitting on my deck looking out at water so placid it could be a painting. Farther out, past the point that sculpts our bay, the wind is churning up the waves and I see two sailboats heading west toward the shipping channel. I hear a mourning dove calling, and now a string of Canada Geese are working their way along the shore. A while ago a kingfisher landed on our dock post and sat still for just a moment before taking off again.

It’s quiet this morning and even in August there is a Fall chill in the air. The dew is heavy on the grass, and even though I’m bundled up in sweats and shivering under an afghan, I’m overwhelmed and suddenly grateful for these beautiful moments.

I come from a long line of depressives and have had to fight it many times in my life. My own cure comes, I’m convinced, from aggressively seeking out beauty. But I’m not the first one to grasp the profound healing properties of beautiful things.

Since early man we humans have purposely sought out anything that even hints of feel-good properties. We adorn ourselves with objects that have no necessary function other than to please us. We pierce our ears (and other body parts) in order to hang shiny doodads from them. From the earliest times we’ve woven fabrics and intricately etched leathers into colorful clothing. We’ve scratched and stained our skin, creating fabulous tattoos. We’ve worried our hair and plastered it with glop in order to create a whole new us. The history of adornment tells us much about what separates us from the animals. I believe its roots are in our almost desperate need for beauty.

Beyond our own self-images, we’ve created beauty by gathering seeds and planting flowers in otherwise barren places. We’ve painted gloriously vibrant scenes on cave walls. We’ve built structures of staggering proportions under seemingly impossible conditions for no other reason than to protect and admire the gorgeous treasures we’ve created.

And throughout all time we’ve lavished attention and affection on those few mortals who stun us with their own creative visions. From artists to musicians to writers to sports idols to moviemakers, we love them for their ability to transcend the ordinary and bring us outside of ourselves to a beautiful ecstasy we can never stop craving.

The kind of beauty that calms us to our very souls can be found almost anywhere. I remember seeing a photograph of an old woman standing proudly in a tiny, filthy room strewn with trash. She herself was dressed in rags, but she was smiling and pointing to her one, lone window. She had found an old calendar somewhere and had torn out the pages and taped them to her window. Whatever dismal view she once had was now replaced with visions of the Taj Mahal, the pyramids at Giza; with mountaintop sunrises and Chinese junks on a lovely, winding river.

Beauty is a gift we can all give ourselves; a treasure free for the taking and available everywhere, if we only open our eyes to the wonders of it.

A Solitary Life

2008-07-17T13:05:00.010-04:00

In Thoreau’s Walden, he says, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

It’s probably the most famous quote from Thoreau’s journals, written in the mid-1840s right after he built a small 10x15 cabin on his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s woodlot. Millions of people since then have taken it as the clarion call for a stab at their own mystical wilderness experiences, and a fine set of words they are. But the truth is, as deliberate a life as he might have lived, as solitary as he may have been, secluded he was not.

His rude cabin on the shores of Walden Pond was a mere mile and a half from Concord, and within calling distance of a spot where two active roads converged. Emerson allowed him to build his cabin in exchange for some work around the 14-acre property—namely clearing away brush and replanting trees--and Thoreau used his time there to write.

He was not a hermit, even though he called himself one fairly often in his writings. Turns out it was tongue-in-cheek, even though, again, the legend lives on. He was a mere 23 years old when he moved to Walden Pond, and he lived there for only two years before moving into Emerson’s house in town.

When I was younger and locked away in the city, I read Walden (and later, Civil Disobedience, when "disobedience" against the ruling factions was still seen as our patriotic right, if not our duty).

In the midst of the chaos of my young life, the thought of living so simply in a small cabin in the woods was heartbreakingly seductive. Thoreau did it when he was broke and without a job, and it worked for him—yes it did. So why not? And during a fair number of fleeting moments, I worked at devising an escape plan that would take me away and plunk me down in a Walden Pond of my own.

Apparently I wasn’t alone. I swear, it’s what kept multitudes of us city-dwellers going. So imagine my surprise when I discovered just how close to town Walden Pond really was? How unlike any kind of wilderness Thoreau’s setting really was? Instantly, I thumbed my nose at him—lousy dilettante!—and dropped him from my then nearly-stagnant list of role models.

I looked on his writings then as silly (Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet) and puffy (I stand in awe of my body)—an ode to his unworthy self. Who did he think he was, anyway? Well, it turns out he was a writer, and a pretty good one. That’s why the longevity. (Consider this: Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business. And this: Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.)

He was a blogger of his time, and I can’t help but imagine a 23-year-old Henry writing about his simple life today:

“Pulled up some weeds this AM, and got a couple rows of beans planted. Jeez, what a job! How’d I get into this, anyway? Oh, yeah, now I remember. Waldo’s fault. He says, “Want to build you a house on my property over there? You can blog yourself to death, and all I want is some of that brush cleared and a few trees going in.”

So I said, Cool! It’s quiet there. Nobody to bother me while I’m thinking thoughts. I said, throw in WiFi and you got yourself a deal!”

Look here for more on Henry David Thoreau.

Boats and Ships, Lakers and Salties

2008-07-14T12:11:00.014-04:00

One day I was sitting on my Sittin’ Rock looking out on the bay, and it suddenly came to me that if I had a boat big enough, I could shove off from our dock, go around the bend to the shipping channel, follow it into Lake Huron and then head down through the St. Clair River, across Lake St. Clair, down the Detroit River to Lake Erie, onward east into Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River and finally float into the Atlantic Ocean. From there I could sail the world’s seas to parts so exotic even the National Geographic would marvel at the stories I would have to tell.

I could do that—though, sincerely? I never really would. Still, it’s pretty thrilling to think that the seemingly placid waters in front of our cabin could, in fact, carry us to the far reaches of the entire planet.

From our island ferry dock and all along the St. Mary’s River system we see Salties from all over the world passing upbound to go through the Soo Locks into Lake Superior or heading downbound, following that winding route to the ocean again. (Proof that my plan is workable.) Some of them are incredibly beautiful, while others look like hard times and rough seas have just about done them in.

They ply these waters alongside our own Lakers and sometimes it’s a toss-up over which of them is more wondrous. Our Great Lakes boats can reach lengths of 1000 feet or better—the length of three football fields and then some. Their size is just amazing--a sight we never get used to.

(I’ll stop here for a bit of trivia: 1. Ocean-going vessels (Salties) are called “ships”, while Great Lakes vessels (Lakers) are always called “boats”. 2. The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system runs 2038 nautical miles, from the Atlantic Ocean to Duluth, Minnesota, and encompasses all of the Great Lakes. More facts here.)

We can’t see the channel from our cabin, so we can’t watch the boats from here, but sometimes in the fog we hear their urgent horns. The first time I heard them, I felt a little heart-tug, remembering the huge fog horn on the Coast Guard Station at Five Mile Point on Lake Superior, near the cabin owned by my Aunt and Uncle. It was a two-note horn, OooAaa, OooAaa; over and over, far into the night, lulling us to sleep, with us not giving a single thought to boats possibly being in danger, steering clear of the direction of those horns. There was a kind of eerie romance about them and when the fog horns were gone from the lakes, having given way to a quieter technology, it took us years to stop listening for them in the fog.

The boats have a language of their own—a series of boat whistles that is a form of talking to each other. We landlubbers love hearing them, and we keep a horn blast glossary so that we know what’s going on. One long and two short means they’re greeting (or saluting) one another. One long at two minute intervals or less means they’re moving in fog or snow. One short, one long, one short means they’ve anchored in reduced visibility, and five or more quick short blasts means the threat of imminent danger.

For the past couple of years, there has been a lottery to win a trip on one of the Lakers, and twice now I’ve bought tickets hoping to get my husband on one of those boats. That’s his dream—to ride along with those crews and experience the wonder of those massive carriers. But he’s not alone there. How can anybody watch those beautiful boats silently glide by and not want to be on board?

Independence Day

2008-07-04T10:24:00.012-04:00

Today is Independence Day--better known these days as “The Fourth of July”. In 1776 it was the day the 13 British Colonies officially became independent states, and it was unequivocally a Big Day for America. So why do we call it “The Fourth of July” and not “Independence Day”? It’s become the day for picnics, parades and fireworks, and any thought of our Founding Fathers and what they accomplished is pretty much left in the celebratory dust. That’s pretty sad. But I get a little giddy and my heart beats a little faster at the thought of the hundreds of millions of American flags—from the tiniest to the most outrageously ostentatious--flying freely, wildly, proudly today.

It’s the one thing I love about our modern-day Independence Day celebrations—all that flag-flying. Our flag is the most stunningly beautiful in the entire world, without question (at least to me and most Americans). It’s a brilliant concept, in that the original 13 colonies and all 50 states are represented. The colors couldn’t be better. The overall pattern—stars and stripes—is a purely original, radically clever design. It’s perfect.

We’re from the old school here when it comes to flag etiquette. The flag never touches the ground, and when it’s worn, it’s replaced and the old one is either burned or given to the American Legion, where it’s disposed of properly. (One thing we don’t do is keep a light on our flags at night—a Big No-No according to our grandson, who is definitely from the young school but still knows all about it.)

We go through flags pretty quickly here, what with the howling north winds doing a constant number on them, but I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that the majority of the flags sold today are made in the USA. Hooray for that!

If I have one gripe, it’s that too many times our flag is used strictly commercially as a come-on. That’s sacrilege to me. I hate seeing huge, building-sized American flags flying over businesses. Our flag is a national treasure and very nearly a sacred symbol to a whole lot of us, and to see it relegated to the role of advertising gimmick gives me chills--and not in a good way.

I don't want our flag diminished in any way by using it for purposes never intended. But it’s one of those things I’ll have to get over, because I see it’s done more and more. And I don’t want to be a curmudgeon about it—especially on this day.

Happy Independence Day and have a great Fourth of July.

Sunrise, sunset, silhouettes

2008-07-02T11:42:00.003-04:00

I love sunsets, I love sunrises, and I absolutely love silhouettes. But I have to admit I never gave much thought before to how all three of my loves are intertwined. I think the revelation came when I started to get serious about photography. I’ve always had a camera with me, and I’ve always taken pictures, but since I've gotten both a digital camera and a Photo-enhancer computer program, I’m paying more attention to how lighting and composition can make art out of a snapshot. (No, I’m not an artist. I think of my “art” as a kindergartner thinks of finger painting. Hey, look what I did! I like it! Woohoo!)

Anyone who knows me can tell you that I’m a nut for sunrise and sunset pictures. I’ve taken hundreds of them, and I’ll bore people with them every chance I get. I have so many, I often can't even remember where they were taken. (This one I know…it’s off of my deck looking west northwest.) Sometimes I don’t even know if the picture I’m looking at is a sunrise or a sunset. But I can see now that those older pictures are sterile and actually pretty uninteresting. That’s because there is no framing. And that’s where those wonderful silhouettes come in.

In the early days when I took sunrise/sunset pictures, I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the beauty before me. I zeroed in on the spectacle and took snap after snap as the sun either rose or set. I, in effect, genericized the bloody things. Now I look to see how I can frame it, and since it’s usually either still dark or getting dark, everything I see is a silhouette.

In fact, with the right backlighting, silhouettes can appear anywhere. I love the idea that I can make out what something is, even if it’s totally black, simply by its shape. And I have to believe my appreciation comes directly from watching sunrises and sunsets all of my life.

So why didn’t I see this before? I’ve always been crazy for silhouettes, ever since the teacher stood me against a wall, shined a light on me, and drew my profile on black construction paper. (My mom framed it. It’s around here somewhere, so don't be surprised if it suddenly appears here one day. It looks just like me. Uncanny.)

The Suicidal Frog

2008-06-28T11:43:00.000-04:00

My grandson, the famous frog hunter, is up for a visit and after a week and a half, the frogs have finally gotten smart and found Jonathan-proof hiding places. To the east about 70 feet is "Frog Kingdom" and to the west about a full city block is "Frog Heaven". Armed with a butterfly net and a minnow bucket, the mighty hunter goes forth, choosing his direction by the wind, the weather, and just good old 7-year-old instinct. Frogs and toads, from old and huge to young and tiny, huddle in the grass at the bottom of the bucket as he trudges back to show everybody his catch. He watches them intently, and the rest of us hope the old ones don't take a notion to eat the tasty, young ones in front of his innocent little eyes.

After an hour or so, he knows he has to let them go, and his idea of real adventure is to let the Eastern "Frog Kingdom" frogs loose in the Western "Frog Heaven" and vice versa. Do they find their way back home? Of course they do. It's the nature of things, according to the book of Jon.

It got me to thinking about the suicidal frog I ran into at the clotheslines one day, and I wondered whether that particular frog eventually came to its senses and is now responsible for some of the progeny ending up in the minnow bucket and beyond.

It was a warm, sunny, early spring day with a breeze off the lake that cried out for sheets to be drying on the line. I had just set my basket down when I sensed something in the grass to my left. It was a big, green frog and I don't know how I knew it was there, because it could have been a frog statue, still as a stone. It sat there with it's head turned away from me the entire time I was hanging the sheets, and that seemed mighty odd, considering I could be the enemy for all it knew.

But then I saw what it was watching, and I just have to assume that I was more horrified than that frog was. It was a snake in the grass. A REAL snake in the grass. And it was poised, head up, looking ready to strike. But the frog just sat there, waiting. "Go!" I whispered to that frog, but if it heard me, it didn't acknowledge it. "Get out of here!" I said out loud, but it never twitched a muscle. I stomped my foot, and again--nothing.

Finally I turned my attention to the snake. I was not going to be a witness to this. No frog on my watch was going to commit suicide-by-snake. I had a long clothesline-prop nearby, and I reached for it, but then thought better of it. What if that snake crawled up the prop and got me before I could send it flying?

What to do, what to do? "Get out of here!" I yelled to the snake. But once again I might as well have been a thousand miles away. Neither of them were paying any attention to me. I was afraid to move, because I had it in my head that my presence was the only thing keeping that frog alive. If I moved in any direction--toward the frog, away from the frog--the snake would strike for sure. There were no rocks within reach, nothing to throw, so I yelled louder : "Come on you guys, stop this!"

Finally, my husband came around the corner to see what all the fuss was about, and he calmly kicked the snake away from the grass and onto the beach, where it slithered into the water and went out of sight.

So what did the frog do? It looked at me as if to say, Fool!", and hopped down to the beach in hot pursuit of it's executioner.

The moral of this story is, when a frog wants to die, it’s going to die no matter what kind of intervention you desperately attempt. Saving the world is a sorry, unappreciated business. Take your victories where you find them, and forget about the ingrates, amphibians included.

Summer Solstice

2008-06-21T11:40:00.000-04:00

Today marks the Summer Solstice, the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. Up North, where I live, the sky will still be light close to midnight. I love this time of year, and I especially love this day, but it’s always tempered with a mix of sadness, because tomorrow the cycle reverses and the days will begin to grow shorter.

Solstice celebrations started with the Pagans, and then the Christians got into the act with St. John’s Day. In Finland it’s called Juhannus and it’s one of their major holidays. There they make huge bonfires out of any cast-off wood, including old boats, and the flames reach incredible heights.

In my earliest memories, I can see huge Juhannus bonfires (kokko) up and down a Lake Superior beach where the Finns, including my aunt and uncle, had summer camps. Singing and drinking went on far into the night, and we kids opened the windows to our room on the upper floor and fell asleep to the sounds of three-part harmonizing as our parents and their camp friends pulled out their entire repertoire and sang, slowly, sweetly, a capella.

They’re all gone now, all those people so full of life and promise, but the memories live on. Will there be bonfires on that beach on this night, and people gathered around singing and celebrating the longest day, the start of summer, the hope of new life springing from the earth? Oh, I hope so. . .

When the bears came

2008-06-08T11:37:00.000-04:00

Saw a big black bear yesterday right on the side of the road a few miles from our house. It was about to cross, but saw us and ran up a driveway and into the woods. I didn't have my camera (a rare thing these days), but even if I'd had it, I couldn't have set it up fast enough.

Not getting a bear picture is the story of my life. Even when I have the camera out and ready, with seemingly all the time in the world, something always happens that keeps me from getting the picture. It's as if the bears have some kind of power over my camera, because I can point and shoot and point and shoot and set and reset and STILL no keepers. I could post a picture that I took through my double-paned window one night when a bear was within three feet of me on our deck ravaging a bird feeder, but all you would see is black on black.

Our first bear sighting was late at night, when a mama bear and her three cubs found the galvanized garbage can full of sunflower seeds we always left on the deck. The lid was secured with bungie cords to keep out the raccoons, but we really weren't thinking "bear". Every now and then we heard from a distant neighbor that one had been rooting around, but we had never seen signs of any around our house.

Until that night. We heard them first; the terrible clatter of that trash can as mama rolled it down the deck steps and then began attacking it to get inside. I turned on the porch lights and she didn't even look up. I took the screen off the bathroom window, the closest spot to where she was now, and took picture after picture of her inside the can, her rump in the air; of her coming out for a breather with seeds all over her face; of her cubs lurking just behind her, watching and waiting . I was just simply giddy. . .I saw myself showing off those pictures to everybody I knew -- maybe even posting them on the town bulletin board. Our first bear!

But, of course, it wasn't to be. That particular camera just didn't get it. It couldn't or wouldn't adjust to such low light automatically and it had NEVER let me in on how to adjust it myself. So again with the black on black. I tell people they'll just have to take our word for it when we tell our bear stories. They WERE there. Honest.

(Remind me to tell you about the time a bear trapped my husband in the garage. I know HE'S not going to tell you!)

Will this hummingbird live another day?

2008-05-31T11:24:00.001-04:00

For a couple of days now, we've had hummingbirds at our feeders. Or maybe we've just had one hummer that comes around a lot. I don't know, they all look alike to me. But this is what's been happening: The hummer I've been watching for a couple of days now doesn't even go near the feeders reserved for hummingbirds. That is, the ones with bright red nectar in them. This one, instead, goes to the lighthouse-shaped feeder filled with sunflower seeds. The lighthouse is red and white-striped and doesn't look the least bit like a flower, so what draws it, I can't even imagine.

I worry for it, though. What kind of survival instinct is this tiny, little bird lacking? I've heard that hummers have to spend most of their waking hours looking for food in order to sustain an ultra-high metabolism. Their little wings whir like helicopter blades constantly, and it's a rare thing to see them still. You can count their inactivity in seconds.

There are days when I wish I could be a hummingbird just for an hour. Think of the things I could accomplish! But how do they use all that energy? They use it looking for food! (What a waste. . .but I know the feeling.)

I was thinking about drenching that lighthouse feeder with sugar water, but really, what would I be teaching that little dummy?

I thought about just taking the lighthouse feeder down, but how would the finches and chickadees feel about that?

No, I just have to ignore that silly hummer. If it can't find food that's only a few feet away while it's hammering away at that red wooden stripe, there's not much I can do to save it from itself. It's a tough world out there. The little guys have to learn that fast, or else.

I'm going out now to change the nectar in the feeder. Maybe some new stuff will finally draw it. It's all I can do.

Canada Geese babies

2008-05-27T11:23:00.001-04:00

Don't let anybody kid you--website building is not all that easy. I'm still tweaking, but had to let it go over Memorial Day weekend. Something happened on my host site and I wasn't able to edit anything. It was just as well, because we had company all weekend and I was happy to spend all my time with them. It was a gorgeous weekend. A real miracle, considering it was cold before they all got here on Thursday night and turned cold and ugly again after they left on Monday morning. They brought the good weather with them, and then took it back. Not fair!

The Canada geese babies were on our shore the other day. Fuzzy and yellow and scampering everywhere. They grow so fast, within a week they'll look like teenagers.

The parents looked frazzled, and why not? They spend all their time looking out for enemies and trying to herd those little chicks back to their sides.

We'll let them stay for a while, but once those chicks have grown a little, we'll be shooing them away. They think "beach" means "latrine" and we can't have that.

Welcome to Cabin & Camp

2008-05-17T10:32:00.005-04:00

Saturday, May 17, 2008

This is what I laughingly call my "Blog", and as soon as I figure out how a blog is different from just any old musings page, I'll probably put it to better use. Right now, I'll just use it to try and justify my need to start this website for cabin owners and dwellers. It's something I've been thinking about for years now but didn't have the ability or the energy to try until now. People kept telling me that building my own website was easy. . .that anyone could do it, and to prove it they pointed me toward MySpace and YouTube and Blogger and WordPress, and any number of other places where people who thought they had something to say could now say it round the world with dizzying ease.

Well, I'm not 16 anymore so it wasn't easy--that's why it took so long. Sadly, the kinks aren't out yet, but I'm not getting any younger and if I want to enjoy the benefits of this Cabin Community I realize I'm going to have to hustle it along.

When I was growing up, we still had dial phones and party lines. I was into puberty before we had our first TV. I've had a computer since soon after Windows came on the scene, but I used it like I use my car. I don't need to know what's under the hood in order to get where I'm going. So convincing this computer that it should change its ways and do what I want now, even though I don't know what I want, has been the kind of thing nightmares are made of. Computers are inherently mean. You have to constantly be figuring out ways to get around that. It takes time.

I was a writer with no particular fame or fortune until we retired and moved from the city to a small cabin in God's Country--Michigan's Upper Peninsula. It's been almost 15 years now, and the honeymoon still isn't over. I love living where I live and I love my cozy little cabin. (The emphasis on little.) But I'm not alone--everyone who is lucky enough to own (or even use) a cabin, camp or cottage feels privileged in some way to be able to be a part of that cabin experience.

Some of us live in our cabins full-time, while others of us feel lucky if we get to use them two or three weeks out of the year. What we have in common is that all of us cherish these places, even though eventually the dawn breaks--along with everything else--and cold reality sets in: Our cabin is a moody, flighty building and nothing more. On its good days, it makes us supremely happy, but on its bad days--look out.

Our idea of "one-upping" is to see who's had it worse this year. We don't try and pretend that all's hunky-dory in the cabin world. Everyone who's ever had one knows that's not so. Things happen, usually in threes, each catastrophe worse than the first.
But here we are--oddly attached to our little places, living under conditions we might call "quaint", but others would call "primitive" (or even "grim").

To us, shabby is in, pristine is out. Flaking paint, a little rust, a grimy patina. . .it fits exactly right with our surroundings.

Most of what gets done in our cabins gets done by us. We cook, we clean, we fix, and we do it happily (most of the time) because we're laboring in a setting some people can only dream about.

Our dish drainers stay on the drainboards and most of the time we just keep recycling the dishes we've stacked there. Our sheets and towels snap in the wind, fastened to taut clotheslines with clever spring-loaded wooden clothespins. When it rains, wet clothes hang inside from every hook and rafter and nobody cares. (Did you know you can dry underwear quickly by hanging it over a lampshade and turning on the light? It's a fact. But most people only try it with CLEAN underwear.)

Whether we're pulling weeds or scrubbing decks or stacking wood, we can't help but feel like vacationers having another fun day. Let's face it. . . we're not like everyone else. And everyone else is not like us. I don't know about you, but I think that's a good thing.