I recall one delightful autumn evening last year at Ravenna,
sitting by the creek side with a beer and my pipe, weary from a day of clearing
brush in the sun with my scythe and playing with my brand new broad axe. If you
could do anything right now, be anywhere, be anyone, what would you choose? The water, framed on both sides by steeply
forested hills, trickled by, bearing yellow and orange leaves south towards the
Potomac. The air was slightly crisp with an occasional gentle breeze. The only other sound besides
the creek was the distant yips of a coyote pack. This,
I felt. This.
So Google Reader is dead.
In looking for alternative ways to read my subscriptions of personal
blogs, I’d forgotten I had one myself. Then
I asked myself what the purpose of a blog is for someone who is not inclined to
be the focus of attention. Then I
remembered.
A running chronicle helps the author remember and take stock
of how much has been learned through trial, error and experience.
With my food production exploits in the garden, every year
my “agricultural laboratory” has yielded more and more crops and required less
toil. Though, for the life of me, I
still can’t get peas to thrive.
The Ravenna orchard has expanded. The two apple trees have miraculously never
been mauled by the deer, which are everywhere here until muzzleloader season
starts in October. Then, to the
frustration of my friends who hunt, they disappear. Completely.
Even from the neighboring state forest.
Amazing adaptive quality, like the cicadas which stay in the earth for a
specific prime number of years in order to confuse their predators. So this year, I planted a sour cherry, sweet
cherry and a pear tree in the same area.
I have also been bringing up raspberry plants as they expand from the
original shrub I bought for $20 something like seven years ago.
But there are new lessons to be learned, construction being
the most immediate. My current shelter,
a rusting old trailer, is impossible to heat up in the dead of winter. I’ve spent too many mornings unwilling to do
anything because it required exiting the sleeping bag and all the blankets I could
get my hands on in the dark. I need a
place where I can use a wood burning stove, with room for a bed and a table.
The plan is already in my head. Like gardening, this will be a prolonged
class taught by those two exacting professors: Nature and experience.
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