Red Efts

I have been looking for Red Efts this summer.  Two years ago I had never seen one or even knew what they were.  One evening about this time of year we were walking and saw one on the road.  We saw several that year.  Red Efts are immature Newts and remain in this stage for two or three years.  They are the neatest little creatures.  Perhaps an inch and a half long, red with dark spots they wander about with a seeming lack of fear.  They are so alert often with one or two feet lifted off the ground, motionless.   I have never seen one actually move.  We saw them on occasion last summer.  But I hadn’t seen one yet this year.

Yesterday we saw one on our Sunday morning walk.  He was a little darker red than others we have seen.  Glad to see the little guy…

Music!

We went over to friends’ for a house concert Sunday evening.  The weather was temperate; a gentle rain was falling on the lake.  Good food, good fellowship, and good music made by good friends.

An altogether pleasant evening…one full of gifts.

More pictures….. here

Peru

Last evening there was a violent earthquake off the coast of Peru.  Within minutes hundreds of people were killed, thousands were injured, many, many were left homeless.  Nine minutes and 20 seconds later the first tiny vibrations arrived through the earth in northeastern Ohio, gently, imperceptibly shaking my basement floor…shaking that would reverberate in the earth for hours.

The natural world is at once both violent and subtle.

Digging

It was the beginning of one of those projects you start when you are young.  I was digging a hole up by the woods in the corner of an old cornfield west of town.

Digging. 

What was it about that last thrust of the shovel?  Was it the feel of it?  Maybe the sound.

I set the shovel aside and knelt down.  I pushed the moist dark soil back away from the side of the hole with my hand.  There, fifteen inches below the surface, in the smooth straight wall of that hole, was the unmistakable cross-section of an old arrowhead.  Flint is no match for steel.

It was a hunting point, perfectly formed and still quite sharp.  Why was it here, in this place?  Who made it?  How long ago?  At least 130 years, most likely more than that.  One hundred thirty autumns of falling leaves.  One hundred thirty winters of freezing and thawing.  One hundred thirty years of spring rains and summer sun.  One hundred thirty years of earthworms and moles digging around it.  And a few years of plowing and corn stubble thrown in for good measure.  Buried safely in the earth for all of those years, now broken, but returned again to human hands.

It was the beginning of one of those projects you start when you are young.
And never finish…

December 30, 2005
 

Hearing and listening

We visited friends on Monday evening.  Eight Amish men sitting in the front yard after supper.  Talking.  It is hot and dry.  We need rain.

We all hear a distant rumble.  And again.  There is a look of hope all around, but the sky is clear.  “Is that thunder?”, Matt asks, his voice tinged with a combination of hope and bewilderment.  Daniel smiles and says, “I hear the children laughing.”

The tube slide.

We all laugh.

Kernels of corn

String theorists suggest that we live in a world of multiple dimensions.  I agree but in a different sense.  We obviously live in three spatial dimensions.  Physicists think of time as a dimension.  Tooling engineers sometimes think of rotations as dimensions separate from the three, what they call translational, spatial dimensions.  I don’t dismiss those descriptions but I have something else in mind.  And I am skeptical about string theory…coming in a later post.

The multiple dimensions I think about are more philosophical.  We live in our everyday dimension.  That’s the one we eat in, work in, sleep in, etc. and it’s the one that almost everyone is preoccupied with.  There are other dimensions that coexist with that one.  I’m not talking about the one that UFOs or Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster come from.  The other dimensions that I’m thinking of are clearly visible to those who are open to them and they provide a rich addition to our everyday dimension.  I have already alluded to the gifts I receive from the natural world, one of those other dimensions.  We are surrounded by artifacts of our cultural history, too.  Old buildings, the names of our towns and cities, rivers and lakes, our roads, and old pictures all tell us something about our past.  Every so often somebody, usually an old-timer, will tell a story of something he remembers from many years ago.  That is part of it too.  Those things taken together form a vivid description of who we are and how we got here and are a joy to think about.

In the eastern part of the county where I live, many of the Amish families live on farms that have been handed down from father to son for many generations going back to the time when the land was “settled”.  Many of the houses on those farms are very old and are built using a relic building method called half-timber that can be traced back through Pennsylvania to Germany and Switzerland.  I noticed these buildings in the early 1970’s after taking a cultural geography class in college and ended up co-authoring a paper about them with my professor in the Journal of the Pioneer America Society.  I spent many enjoyable hours driving the back roads of the county, looking for old half-timber houses and barns and talking to people about them. 

Half-timber construction consists of a heavy hewn timber frame, fitted and pinned together, the interstices filled with wattle and daub, bricks, stone, mud, etc.  The wall is then usually plastered or whitewashed to protect the mud from the rain.  Most are now covered with siding.  Many of the houses I found had wooden members wrapped in a mud and straw mixture fitted between the heavy timbers.  I found kernels of corn mixed in with the mud.  An older gentleman told me that the corn was left over from the process used to mix the mud and straw.   A little corn was thrown on top of the mud and straw and a few pigs performed the mixing process as they rooted around for the corn.  That makes history come alive when you are standing in front of the evidence.