Our surroundings, our habitat if you will, has an enormous effect on our lives, so that seems a good place to look for values that will sustain us and our children to the seventh generation.
You may have noticed if you drilled down (only two posts) that I essentially repeated the same post with one of the same photos. Can you believe, only a few days apart, that I forgot the first when I wrote the second? YIKES!! I need to get out of the house. So here’s what I’m looking forward to in the same area.
This is a Girlie-on-the-Edge six sentence blog challenge post. The prompt word is journey.
Afflicted with cabin fever, I drove north into the Sandhills—wind chill -30o with a foot of snow. All photos road kills—too cold to walk far, wheelbase too low to drive off-road. Lonely tree skeletons rode the choppy waves of Nebraska’s grass frozen sand sea. The ranch road north of Whitman curled up and down hill contours. My wide 285-mile loop ended at Martin Bay next to acres and miles of frozen Lake McConaughy. Driving the tall dam with little in the way of markers induced adrenaline in the frozen dusk, sunset a band of fire on ice.
A day late. this is my contribution to the GitlieOnTheEdge blog challenge: six sentences, no more no less, about noise.
I haven’t worked for a while. A little depressed maybe; bored with my own company due to self isolation. Writing time, you know. I hope I’m back with new energy. time will tell. Anyway, here’s my contribution to this week’s Carrot Ranch 99-word challenge.
When my grandparents put in the septic tank back in 1951 when we got REA, they found the hewed rafters of Billy Arnold’s original soddy, wood that lay rotting in a jumble beneath generations of dirt and prairie on the level north of the house. When Grandma told me, I closed my eyes and pictured the blocks of root-frozen dirt and the roof, a growing prairie of grass and wildflowers. If I were the rabbit on the roof, would I vary my diet with some tough purple coneflower, or daisy fleabane? Perhaps I’d just stick to the succulent grasses.
Frogs. We didn’t see many on our farm. The ponds were just too muddy, so I can’t personally attest to the precarious existence of frogs, or amphibians in general.
Though we rarely saw a frog on our farm, my sister and I captured many tadpoles (with a rusty old flour sifter our mom gave us). We watched them develop legs and eventually released them. If we let them go too near the house, our dog would try to eat them. The attack never resulted in a toad sandwich, but rather in a dog spitting and frothing at the mouth. I always thought that the toad peed in the dog’s mouth, but I’ve learned that those little bumps behind its ears secrete a nasty poison.
I’ve rarely thought of toads as predators, but they like cutworms and all manner of insects. Unfortunately for them, snakes (in the case of my photo) particularly bull snakes like toads.
According to the conservation Website, Save the Frogs, one third of amphibian species world-wide are endangered. Now maybe you don’t care about those slimy little creatures. I ran across a photo and a paragraph about frog-spotting in Costa Rica, though, and that reminded me of the bright-colored little guy I got to photograph there. Take a look at the little guy below. Don’t you think he deserves a fighting chance?
I remember Crystal Lake as a summer destination for our Girl Scout troop’s adventures.
By then, it had silted in and about all we could see there were frogs, toads, tadpoles, water striders and maybe a bird or two.
In my Dad’s high school days, however, it had a dance pavilion with bands like Lawrence Welk, ice skating on the pond, as well as picnics, fishing, and boating in summer.
That was after mechanical refrigeration ended the lake’s ice business that filled a large ice house in Hastings and hundreds of train cars with twenty-two by twenty-two-inch blocks.
Today, the lake has been dredged and turned over to the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and provides picnic and camping facilities next to the site of the Little Blue River dam.
I sort of miss the muddy old place I visited, as well as the bygone gathering place I never saw.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, trees walk and talk and take part in a war between good and evil. In the book, they constitute a separate race of sentient beings called Ents. Little did Tolkien know, from his perspective in the middle of a great world-wide depression, how close he was to the reality of trees.
Now we know that trees communicate and take part in skirmishes. Although individual trees don’t walk, as species they move. Right now they are migrating northward.
As to the skirmishes, imagine this cooperation in a battle to the death. Your gigantic American elm tree comes under attack by leaf-eating caterpillars. How does it defend itself? It releases pheromones to attract parasitic wasps. What about the pine tree next door? It detects the elm’s pheromones and produces some of its own—and here come the wasps.
You go into the shelterbelt, find a convenient ash or elm where you can settle your back against the trunk. Does that feeling of euphoria come from the sound of leaves rustling in the breeze, from your cool escape from the sun, or maybe from the tree’s pheromones?
A woman in Australia, Monica Gagliano, has evidence that some plants emit a “crackling noise” in the roots at 220 hertz. We can’t hear it, but maybe trees can. What are they talking about underground? I’ve written before about trees communicating and cooperating underground where they share water and nutrients over a complex network of interconnected roots and micro-fungi. It appears to be a supportive system that nurtures all its members over acres and acres of trees, especially the young ones.
While individual trees planted in isolation may not get lonely, their chances of survival diminish with solitude. And how about us? As we clear-cut stand after stand of trees to feed our hunger for everything from new houses to paper, where will we go to lean against a tree trunk and contemplate nirvana?
I live in the Central Flyway, that magnificent migration route from the northern reaches of the Canadian wilderness to Central and South America.
At the turn of the 20th Century, Sandy Griswold, sports reporter for the Omaha World Herald wrote of the 1890s crane migration, “. . . they came down like gray and snowy avalanches from the far north in the blustery days of March.
In my grandmother’s childhood, the ducks and geese came in clouds that dimmed the sun, flapping and gabbling, lighting in meadows and cornfields, snapping up grubs and grain to fatten and prepare themselves for the serious business of breeding and producing a new generation of waterfowl to darken the sky.
In the Sandhills up north, the shorebirds came to the wet meadows, lakes formed when the water table extended above the surface of the sand; striding on stilted legs, they joined the ducks and geese in stirring up the water and consuming water bugs, water plants, and seeds.
Farther east, in the Mississippi Flyway, came the passenger pigeons that used to flow through the Great Lakes region at sixty miles per hour darkening the skies morning to night for several days running, their flocks seeming to expand and contract like living lungs breathing.
Now they come in lonely skeins, their cries nearly unheard in the empty skies, and the pigeons don’t come at all.
Here’s to the opposable thumb! I sliced my left one along with the apples. Amazing isn’t it how much you need both of them?
The apples in question came off my very own baby tree. I’m still not sure if it (the tree) will make it in the long run, but I want to give it e very chance. I planted it three years ago and the leader broke almost immediately. (We’ve been having some unbelievable wind storms.) I’ve been coaxing the next limb into a more upright position. We’ll see how that goes.
But I digress. I got a couple dozen apples, some of them very nice. I only found two worms, but the skins and the outer layers sustained a lot of bug damage. So apparently spraying in blossom stage is good for worms, but I’ll have to learn more about managing for other pests. I’ve heard that spraying with ordinary dish soap works. Research required.
I’ve also got some problems with fungi. Only one of the three trees I’ve planted in recent years is cedar/apple rust resistant. I did spray for that early in the season and the trees did quite well until recently. Again, more research on timing and organic alternatives.
So anyway, I have two pies in the oven. Wish you could all come and have a slice.
