9 Women I Love

Fire, fire





Last night I was finished with supper dishes and decided to take advantage of the long evening and work outside.  It is a bit cooler too, although 82 degrees might not seem cool to some.  In fact it was so pleasant that I'm considering putting lights outside so I can always work in the dark too.  There are a lot of places that need attention in the oneacrewoods and I don't have enough daylight time to get to them when I am working my job away.  I

I picked seven pineapples of good size.  They are not completely ripe but sweet enough to eat and I need to get them before the fruit rats do. The rascals got two of them already and that's all they'll get. In one particularly fertile spot the pineapple plants not only fruited but also produced baby plants from the main stalk, sometimes three or four of them.  At this rate, if I planted them all, I could go into business in a year or so. 

After pulling weeds and propping up frangipani trees it was still not completely dark so I decided to burn my brush pile.  It had been growing and "curing" by the firepit for months and was getting intrusive on the lawn.  I love to make fire.  I burned it all.  It was dark enough by that time that the reflection of the fire on the lanai window made it look like the husband's favorite chair inside the house was burning up.  Odd - I had to take the picture.



Chair on fire - she loves to burn things



 

Eye Treasure

I love to see what early morning light does to the oneacrewoods. It's like getting a gift of beauty that calms me the whole rest of the day. (BTW,  I tried for half an hour (!) to arrange these photos on the page but what I do evidently has no impact on what the blog actually looks like. I need a class).



it was a fern glistening with dew





bright spot in middle caught my eye











  

Bacon

You hear a lot about bacon these days. Bacon ice cream, chocolate covered bacon... I'd go on but I'm already a little sick thinking about it. I don't eat what people consider real bacon in any form. So today I had to cook thick slab pork bacon for my employer and she said it was perfect.  Not sure how to feel about that.

You can even find a recipe for marijuana bacon, although it has a disclaimer that it is not designed to encourage illegal activity but for medicinal use. It is billed as "two of your favorite things together" and the video is made by a charming lady named Watermelon. (???) Chances are I won't be asked to cook that since one of the main ingredients is still illegal in Florida.

Oh, the things you can find on the internet.  

"those who live quietly in the land"

A phrase from a book I'm reading, "those who live quietly in the land", and I'm wondering if that is me.  I have my own brand of adventure and I do challenge my limits from time to time just to see if they're still there, but overall I am kind of quiet.  I abhorr politics, arguing with people, or even watching other people argue with each other.  There is something about the tone of voice people take on in those instances which makes me want to run away and be quiet. I would rather just listen to the silliest person on earth than try to argue them out of their position. 

There are those who "live loudly in the land" and probably influence the opinions of millions of listeners.  Most of my opinions are formed in the garden while pulling weeds or by myself, reading, or one on one with someone who has the time to speak into my problems.  I love listening to quiet.  It has a wonderful calming effect.  I am not Oprah, or Hillary or Beth Moore or Dana or Condi or...  and that is probably not going to change anytime soon. I am asked to be content with who I am.  I'm just saying there are times when I wonder why I am not a stronger voice for the things I hold precious.

Cat Takeover

I think cats are trying to take over the world. They are making headway, mostly in places where they are not viewed as food.  I personally know of several bands of feral cats in my own hometown. My haircut lady is a champion of feral cats, a cat rescuer. Every time I go for a cut we talk about how many cats she was able to bring to the spay/neuter clinic that month. However, there is another place where cat rescuing is in higher gear than here and that is Jacksonville, Florida. 

This haven for feral cats is where Julia Dietz, D.V.M., one of my daughters, has chosen to live. As she was searching for a home there, her first mention of the place she now lives went kind of like this. "It's at the end of a mile long, unpaved drive and is flanked on two sides by a nature preserve. The landlord lives next door and she has a cat rescue operation. She feeds about 70 cats at her back door each evening. They live in the woods." "You won't be living there", I thought to myself. Wrong.

Last week as we were helping her move in I snapped a few pictures of cats as they sat about, ran in and out of the house, and lurked in the shrubbery. We have since found out that there probably aren't as many as 70 cats, all but one have been fixed, and that the landlord is indeed serious about the problem of feral cats and is politically active and persuing legislation that will benefit the poor creatures.  She feeds them on a picnic table in Julie's yard. Her name is Jennifer but I like to call her "cat lady" because it sounds crazy fun and a little demented (like Spider Man or Ninja Turtle...). And to add to the craziness we have also met a family a few miles away - the wife also feeds a whole bunch of feral cats.  I think it's a favorite pastime of Jacksonville animal lovers.  Maybe it is wise to make friends with cats... before the takeover.



although they look right at home, neither of them are Julie's




spooky cat, one of many




the daily cat picnic




nearly invisible yellowcat jumping in bushes



Round Lake

A road winds past my childhood home, around a small pond and climbs a wooded hill. I spent a lot of time looking at that hill from the front yard and from my second story bedroom window.  At some early point I must have seen some people on horseback riding up the hill at a gallop because I recollect a romantic notion of there being a castle up there waiting for knights to arrive on their steeds.  My family later became friends with the people on the hill since they had children close to our ages.  The hill became Kendall's Hill and we also came to know their cousins who did indeed visit them on horseback.

For some reason today I started thinking about that hill and the nearby geography and wondered why I had never thought of it in the bigger picture before.  The centerpiece of it, to me, is a beautiful, deep, spring fed lake with a very unimaginative name - Round Lake.  Parts of it might be kind of round, but I would never have named it that.  In many places it has a very rugged, high and steep coastline. People owning those pieces of lakeshore have their log cabins that we can see through the pine trees and long stairs zig zagging down the bank to their boatdocks. There is another outstanding feature of the lake and that is a peninsula of high ground that circles out into the lake and back toward the shore.  It had to have been connected at one time because there is a sand bar across the narrow space where it doesn't connect. It has to be dredged for boats to safely cross into Hinton Bay. Hinton Bay, by the way, is almost perfectly round and maybe that's the part someone was looking at when they named the lake. 

I would love to know what kind of geologic activity has gone on to form this lake, and its surrounding hills.  I know there was a lot of glacial activity that gouged out some pretty crazy river beds and valleys and  left a lot of rocks of various sizes. Once I found a fairly large Lake Superior red agate in the lake so I'm suspecting a relationship with the Great Lakes chain.  But there are also some fairly flat lands where people have attempted to farm, as my family did.  The pond between my house and the hill had a couple of springs that were probably fed from the same underground reservoir that feeds the lake. We children who skated on the pond in the winter were always afraid to go too near those places we could tell had frozen over last.

The pond has gradually become more marshy and filled in with sediment - it may disappear someday but I probably won't be alive to see it.  Last month I visited the hill and took another one of many pictures, looking out over the pond to my old home. I'm always hit with nostalgia at the view. What a privilege it was to grow up in such a beautiful place. I spent many years drinking that clear, cold well water and eating food grown in that soil so it's pretty safe to say it is in my bones. I will always be "from" Round Lake and Hayward, Wisconsin. 

my old home from the castle on the hill