An inventory of the environment
Going strictly by a calendar's measure, this isn't Spring yet. But I can drive with the windows down, and I'm wearing an undershirt while doing some writing on the front lawn, and to me that counts as the first day of Spring. I went into the barn and dragged out the best lawn chair we own, so I could write while the sun came down. Not too long ago, two of our neighbors, Joy and Paul, passed by on their late-afternoon walk, and not long after the neighbor across the road, Sandra, passed by as well. All the walkers are out and enjoying the warmth so I cannot call this Winter, even if there remains some small traces of snow on the ground, and the trees and flowers haven't quite started to begin their bloom.
On the lawn in front of me, our dog Ellie, able to spend quality time outside at last without the ritual of a daily walk to structure this time. She doesn't play. A hound dog by nature, she spends her time in stillness, carefully observing her surroundings, at times gently sniffing the dry beaten grass beneath her. Past Ellie is the big tree between our house and the road. There was a storm this Winter, and I can still see were one branch remains bent from heavy snow. There's a hole in the branch and I can see the sky and powerlines through it and I wonder if that branch will come back, and grow leaves. I do regret not having shaken some of the snow off to take some load off, as I did with the bushes which adjoin our driveway, but I try not to be too hard on myself; I'm still learning. The three main boughs themselves reach out to the sky beautifully: one left, one dead center, one right. Like tines of a fork, but with far less symmetry.
Past the tree, the low, low, stone wall that seperates our property from the main road, and another stone wall past that. These aren't the neat, knee-high stone walls one imagines from a Frost poem. Rather, they're far more basic, crude, and perfunctory. Just enough stones to mark a boundary, to do that one job and nothing else. One stone sticks out like a blunted shark's tooth, far taller than the others. Past the road and the two stone wall's is our neighbor Sandra's land and house. A simple building, one of those lovely New England homes that looks as though it may have been a repurposed barn. I look out at her land, and when I look to the right, I can see where her land ends, and a big broad field begins. This field is still owned by a member of the family from which we purchased the house, and her mother was buried there. Between the field and our neighbor's plot runs a dirt path, a path lined with stones itself. Sandra told us that once that road was used by the whole area, as it led to the old mill, gone now.
When I look to my left I can first see the old well which sits in front of our house, capped off crudely and rather dangerously by a large piece of wood with a rock on it. I haven't taken the wood off to look down the well, and to be honest the thought doesn't fill me with excitement. Still, it is beautiful, despite the danger of someone falling down it. It's an old Yankee well, a plain and straightforward circle of stones, and someday we hope to use it as a water source for our gardening ambitions. Past the well is our car and our yard and our barn, and then the forest past that. I have plans to manage the forest within our lands for both aesthetic and practical purposes, but for now it grows wild and unmanaged. The barn itself is of two natures. The front section, further toward the road, is the original barn, with a big sliding door and pens which may have once been used for cows or horses, but now store old furniture and our bins. Built onto its back is a newer addition, with better lighting, a place that Christina will no doubt be able to use for her woodworking projects.
Behind me is our house itself, and the small woodshed we have adjacent to it. It's a strange piece of architecture: a house with edges and joints as though it were once two houses, then joined together to make one. Right now it has a rather dated seventies brown color, but it won't stay that way. The roof needs replacing, and where the chimneys go through the roof there are some leaks. I went up on the roof a week or two ago to ring the chimneys with a tarp, to keep the rain off, and it was from the roof that the eccentric nature of the house really seemed most evident. Different angles of roof on different sides, odd intersections with gables, all of it outside of the realm of conventional, modern-day house building. Theres a little enclosed porch that I can see when I turn to the right, our own patchwork on the wooden-screen door plainly visible. A job to fix one of the most glaring problems of the house that we bought, a quick job to solve the problem temporarily while we plan a better, more permanent solution. Past the porch are our compost, our ashcan, and our trash barrel, and then past them that same field I mentioned earlier.
The sun is starting to really come down now, at 5:30. From here, what really draws my attention are the trees which line the field, about a football field's length distance from me. As the sun goes down they become more and more like sillhouettes upon the backdrop of an alternately light blue and softly yellow field. They're still in this, a relatively windless day.
And that is, as best as I can put it for now, an inventory of my environment, my surroundings. Christina has piled up a few bins and things which need to get stowed away in the barn, and I want to move them before it gets too dark, so I'll set aside my observations for the moment.
On the lawn in front of me, our dog Ellie, able to spend quality time outside at last without the ritual of a daily walk to structure this time. She doesn't play. A hound dog by nature, she spends her time in stillness, carefully observing her surroundings, at times gently sniffing the dry beaten grass beneath her. Past Ellie is the big tree between our house and the road. There was a storm this Winter, and I can still see were one branch remains bent from heavy snow. There's a hole in the branch and I can see the sky and powerlines through it and I wonder if that branch will come back, and grow leaves. I do regret not having shaken some of the snow off to take some load off, as I did with the bushes which adjoin our driveway, but I try not to be too hard on myself; I'm still learning. The three main boughs themselves reach out to the sky beautifully: one left, one dead center, one right. Like tines of a fork, but with far less symmetry.
Past the tree, the low, low, stone wall that seperates our property from the main road, and another stone wall past that. These aren't the neat, knee-high stone walls one imagines from a Frost poem. Rather, they're far more basic, crude, and perfunctory. Just enough stones to mark a boundary, to do that one job and nothing else. One stone sticks out like a blunted shark's tooth, far taller than the others. Past the road and the two stone wall's is our neighbor Sandra's land and house. A simple building, one of those lovely New England homes that looks as though it may have been a repurposed barn. I look out at her land, and when I look to the right, I can see where her land ends, and a big broad field begins. This field is still owned by a member of the family from which we purchased the house, and her mother was buried there. Between the field and our neighbor's plot runs a dirt path, a path lined with stones itself. Sandra told us that once that road was used by the whole area, as it led to the old mill, gone now.
When I look to my left I can first see the old well which sits in front of our house, capped off crudely and rather dangerously by a large piece of wood with a rock on it. I haven't taken the wood off to look down the well, and to be honest the thought doesn't fill me with excitement. Still, it is beautiful, despite the danger of someone falling down it. It's an old Yankee well, a plain and straightforward circle of stones, and someday we hope to use it as a water source for our gardening ambitions. Past the well is our car and our yard and our barn, and then the forest past that. I have plans to manage the forest within our lands for both aesthetic and practical purposes, but for now it grows wild and unmanaged. The barn itself is of two natures. The front section, further toward the road, is the original barn, with a big sliding door and pens which may have once been used for cows or horses, but now store old furniture and our bins. Built onto its back is a newer addition, with better lighting, a place that Christina will no doubt be able to use for her woodworking projects.
Behind me is our house itself, and the small woodshed we have adjacent to it. It's a strange piece of architecture: a house with edges and joints as though it were once two houses, then joined together to make one. Right now it has a rather dated seventies brown color, but it won't stay that way. The roof needs replacing, and where the chimneys go through the roof there are some leaks. I went up on the roof a week or two ago to ring the chimneys with a tarp, to keep the rain off, and it was from the roof that the eccentric nature of the house really seemed most evident. Different angles of roof on different sides, odd intersections with gables, all of it outside of the realm of conventional, modern-day house building. Theres a little enclosed porch that I can see when I turn to the right, our own patchwork on the wooden-screen door plainly visible. A job to fix one of the most glaring problems of the house that we bought, a quick job to solve the problem temporarily while we plan a better, more permanent solution. Past the porch are our compost, our ashcan, and our trash barrel, and then past them that same field I mentioned earlier.
The sun is starting to really come down now, at 5:30. From here, what really draws my attention are the trees which line the field, about a football field's length distance from me. As the sun goes down they become more and more like sillhouettes upon the backdrop of an alternately light blue and softly yellow field. They're still in this, a relatively windless day.
And that is, as best as I can put it for now, an inventory of my environment, my surroundings. Christina has piled up a few bins and things which need to get stowed away in the barn, and I want to move them before it gets too dark, so I'll set aside my observations for the moment.