Like The Queen

Just lovely! So full of the pleasure of being in that place. (Quite unlike the asphalt and cement route I take.) And so much love for the history and ambience. Thank you for taking me along.

Come take a walk with me

Yesterday was a gloriously blue sky day - with temperatures that felt more like mid spring than late December. It was too pretty to stay inside so off I went with two of the pups.

The walk down the lane starts in the front yard but it is flanked on the left by forest

and on the right by open fields and the vast dome of the sky.

Interesting deadfalls litter the understorey

which is mostly made up of holly, crisply green and highlighted with bright red berries.

Just after the first bend in the road, that takes you away from the woods is my Praying Place. Here is where I bring my troubles - where I ask in my whiny frustrated voice "Why?" and almost always, here is where I hear the answer, in my heart. This much big open space always puts things into perspective for me.

The road will turn left before it hits those far off trees and take you out to Jacobs Gut, a little stream that marks the boundary of the farm. Here is where the dogs cool of on hot days and here you can see my feet, dangling over the edge of the road. I love it that you can see the sky reflected in the water.

From Jacobs Gut you can drive straight out to a tar road or turn right and walk along one of the pine plantings we have here on the farm. I think this blue, white, green and grey color scheme would make the prettiest Nordic looking sweater, don't you?

All forests smell good, but the pine forest has the most delicious scent in winter. Not every tree in our pine plantations is a pine, though, and these hardwoods sometimes get the most interesting fungal growths on them. I have never seen black ones, though - usually they are grey or white. I like to think of them as little open air theaters for fairies.

This small grove along the edge of the old farm road is what we call The West Woods. BD and LD made paths all through here and named them for cities: The Philadelphia Path and The New York Path. For the most part, the pine tag floor gives off a heady fragrance but there are always hardwoods popping up to remind us that all things flow - even forests.

Here is a view looking homeward from The West Woods. The bright green is winter wheat basking in the unexpectedly warm weather.

This is what Jack thinks of winter wheat.

This is the house, nestled in the woods, viewed from the north west corner of the farm. I was sitting right here way back in October 1975 when a little voice inside me whispered to my heart "I am a boy". That was LD telling me to get ready for Tonka Trucks and cub scouts.

We live alone down here on the farm now, but once this place was much more populated. This house is on Robert's but I like to make up stories about a girl who lived here and on hot summer nights waited for her beau to come by in a buggy to take her out riding under a full moon.

This place is on our farm at the sight of the first and all subsequent houses built on the place - till we built our house overlooking Occupacia Bay. John Dyon lived here and Muscoe Garnett and countless tenant farmers. Not in this house of course, which was built in the late 19th century. But this is the highest place on the farm and it's just a step away from a freshwater spring. We did an archaeological dig here in the 1980's and found all sorts of 17th century artifacts.

When we moved down here we looked this place over very hard to see if it could be salvaged ... it was not anywhere near as far gone as it is now, for I was able, then, to walk around upstairs. It was another house full of other people's happy ghosts. But BD said it was too far gone to rescue.

Truth is, though, I think he wanted to live in a yurt and not in a tenant farmhouse. So now it is merely picturesque.

Here is Priss at the mile point - a convenient place to turn around. You can go on to Robert's Landing or turn left to John Allen's.

Retracing our steps we don't cover any new territory till we get back to Jacob's Gut - where we go up to the tar road to get the Sunday paper. And what is this in the old black gum tree? Yes! Mistletoe!

Heavy clouds roll in as this walk progresses but that doesn't deter the curiosity of dogs. Wonder what Jack smells? This is the view from the mailbox. There used to be a lot more pine trees on the right, down there by the treeline, but they came down in Hurricane Isobel. I know. I had to help cut them up so we could drive off the property. Sticky pine sap was all over us and we didn't have any power so there was no water running into the house. Instead, we took soap and towels and went to the swimming beach to wash off. Brrrr.