Gimmicks online--wow

I sent this to one of my movie buddies. I feel like I'm on the edge of techno-greatness.

Humor column published on blog

I write a 500-word humor column once in a while. One publication calls it Hallelujahs and Demurs.

Humor is touchy. As often as not someone who can cancel a paper subscription is not amused. Online it's free and they can just click it off.

Today EMU's Prof. Benner published a recent piece which I think is pretty funny. It is the first time I've gotten on a blog. Here's the link if you want to see it.

www.bennerblog.com

Final curtain for lambs

The lambs graduated Monday. Here Moe tries to climb the Smokehouse apple tree in the orchard. Is he telling me he's ready to move on? They boarded a shiney aluminum cattle trailer behind a new Mack truck.
Now I have to muck out the shed, put away the fence extension, give away the sheep feed that was left, and spread out the hay.
As much as I anthropomorphized Meeney, Miney, and Moe, I should examine what I was projecting.
I notice that often I attributed to them negative motives--getting a cheap break on feed, looking for an easy escape, etc. It occurs to me that I was just using them for an easy laugh.
The exact opposite could have been the case. Baaing might be telling me not to feed them, that I gave them too much already and gave them a tummy ache. Constant pushing at the fence might have been hints to tighten up security.
Anyway, they were good guys. I got a lot from them. Apologies to anyone who was disturbed by their baaing. They deserve a new, happy chapter in their lives.

Rotten apple new pate de foie gras

Try to keep your lunch down. But on their excursions to the pasture extension, the sheep go straight for the rotten apples.

They don't eat the rot. They eat beside the rot and thus get the ripest part of the apple. The best is right before it goes bad. Don't try to apply that to any metaphysical situations.

If you haven't ordered any pate de foie gras recently, it's goose liver butter in the same way that we use butter in apple butter. The French, who make snails into flights of culinary ecstasy, also make goose liver into a very pricey dip.

I can't remember if I ever had it.

Cousins are for funerals

What are cousins for, I asked just a few days ago?

I found out one reason sooner than anyone expected. My cousin Ernie Stoltzfus died this week. His funeral was today in York, Pa. I went with Milton. Those are Milton's hands. To the right is Richard Sensenig, the oldest of the 45 Lehman cousins. He is 74 and Ernie, not quite the youngest, was to be 47 in less than a year.

Cousins are for funerals, was the implied answer to the question. Just one of the reasons. But they do pull together.

Ernie just died because of a heart defect no one had ever known. It was touching to see the grief of a wife and son and other close family so rudely shocked.

Greener grass

Is grass really greener on the other side of the fence. O all creatures, I think sheep are the most gullible for this ploy. Their salivary glands don't seem to work unless they are pressing against one limit or another.
"The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence" implies that it's not, that it just seems that way, and we ought to learn to be content with what we have.

But the orchard extension to the pasture last week was really greener. And, full of dropped apples. So the new feeding pattern for Meeny, Miney and Moe is a twenty minute trip to the extension pasture where the grass is greener, the apples more lush.
But as soon as they get to the other side of the fence what are they interested in? Right, getting to the other side of the next fence.
I'm not going to go moral here, but there's something pathetic about their behavior. Is their goal to find refreshing, green, healthy grass? Or to cross another boundary. Or to get farther away from their shed?

Dawn's early light

The dawn's early light at Monterey. Meeny, Miney and Moe are still sleeping in their sheep shed, barely visible, center right. I know because they did not baa when my footsteps made noise on the driveway.

Our national poem's "dawn's early light" requires glare and rockets. Let me have it without the noise and artificial light. Just soft and pastel and shifting almost erotically.

There's plenty of time then for the noise, the baa-ing, the hustle, the grazing and the glancing. People pay $400,000 for a property but only see it from 7:10 to 7:15 in the morning and from 6:15 to 8:05, let's say, in the evening.

Some people never see their little place on earth.

Way beyond Charlotte

We're way beyond Charlotte Web, the early spider who evoked literary vibes with me. We're now down to hard core agression and capture with this specimen hiding behind the barn.

This does not make me think of sweet stories for children about little piggies on idyllic farms in New England being rescured by clever arachnoid brains.

I don't see a brain here. I see a pin point dedicated circuit hard wired for conquest. I see empire. I see Hollywood terror. I see fools in an oil rich desert, not knowing the climate will change in a few weeks and all that armor will fall and be kicked aside by the natives.

Well, I also see yellow design on an abdomen. Is there a similar creature within webbing distance whose heart will melt upon seeing this fine belly?

Hey, I was just trimming back a few grape vines. What made me think war? Is it time I move to Canada and see this as art?

Spider picks barn

Charlotte Web, the spider outside our door, has a friend or relative spinning a web every evening at the barn. And here's the picture.

I think they are both right-handed, because they build in the right corner of the openings, looking at the spider from their backbone.

These two spiders are just the tip of the iceburg of the spider population at our Monterey home. Walk anywhere after dark and you're sure to hit some web. I can guarentee it under the grape arbor or around the dogwood tree.

I have no idea how web strands appear out of nowhere, in the middle of the lawn, far from any vertical. I guess it's a bungee cord instinct in all creatures: let's drop this rope down, hang onto it and see where it goes, especially in this nice breeze.

Profounder than the fear of walking into a web in the dark, is the angst that spiders could possibly take over the world in a few short summers. Haven't I read that New York City, totally evacuated by humans, would revert to wilderness in a few years. I can picture the evolution of spiders in Manhattan: twenty-five pounders pulling skyscrapers into each other, helpless ensnared rats screeching like baby mice for help.

What's bringing the Halloween out of me already?

Cousins for counting

What are cousins for? For playing with when you are a child. Now, for counting at funerals of uncles and aunts. At the funeral of Uncle Irvin thirteen attended. Here they are, including the four children of the uncle (back row, right) and Aunts Gladys and Jane (front row left, and middle with laced collar).

Cousins are for knowing who you are, for knowing where you started out in the great maze of life. You can't fool your cousins. In a good family they won't fool you. What a great bunch!

Touch-Me-Nots

After Dorcas's birthday cake at Mascot, she discovered a stand of touch-me-nots just twenty feet left of where she was seated, by the stream.

With the camera set on sports, here one of the pods is caught as it begins to explode. The theory of evolution generally makes sense to me as I think of dandelions in our lawn flowering at lower and lower heights to beat the mower blade.

Yet, with these flowers I have to wonder how that first pod got the idea to explode and throw its seeds farther and farther to promote the species.

Dorcas loves the date of her birthday--September 5--and associates it with going back to school (a real big whoop for her in the early days), the end of the smoothering heat of summer, and the exploding touch-me-nots, for which she traipsed through the Maple Shade woods in carefree autumn.

Objets d'birthday

When I look at this picture, I think of the French "objet d'art," which means an art object.

Dorcas is the perfect objet d'art here. The location is the Mascot "park," along the Mill Stream. We went there along with Joel for desert after her birthday supper on September 5.

I'm handing her a piece of her birthday cake, a work of culinary art so complex and multi-layered I'm at a loss to describe it. Did it have a hint of peanut butter in the lowest layer? we asked. Or was that a hint of something else? Family heirloon fanatics will notice the plate is pure Miller, second set. The bottle on the picnic table is Italian Pergalozzi--fizzy water, not wine. Beside it is the red chunks of watermellon, ripe to perfection.

In the beer can holder to Dorcas's left is some decaf in her favorite bone china rose cup. On the bench are three gifts--two books, one of the history of Mennonites in New York City, where we met. One gift is our wedding service of 28-plus years ago transferred from the original cassette of the PA system of Maple Glen church to brand new compact disc--professionally enhanced as it was transferred.

Music at Uncle Irvin funeral

My Uncle Irvin died last week. I went to the funeral at Park View Mennonite Church, Harrisonburg, Va. last Saturday. I was asked to lead the singing and to sing "The Holy City," a solo popular in mid-century. Both hymns were by Isaac Watts, first published about 1719--When I Survey, and Jesus Shall Reign.

Click here to listen to about eight minutes of exerpts. I found the words online, but I was playing the piano by memory and ear.

http://www.box.net/shared/d3elrzbqit

A good dozen of my cousins, one coming as far as from Wisconsin, came to the funeral.

Charlotte outside the door

If you leave our house at nightfall, walk straight ahead, don't turn to the left.

Charlotte has been spinning her web each evening. I could get the broom from the kitchen and wipe her out.

This morning a slightly smaller spider had entered my car by the window I had left open. In the close space, my pacifistic feelings were overcome by my survival instincts--it's either you or me.

Off came both my shoes and the splot of protoplasm disappeared in mid-air. I feel no guilt.

Deadly Mascot wreck

It is so much fun to ride the bumper cars at a fair. But in real life, a pick up broadsiding a two-door at over 50 mph, killing the driver beside an idyllic tourist spot, seriously catapulting the passenger out the back window, such banging of one metal shell against another upends and sometimes ends a whole life.

Such was the case in Mascot, a little twin town of Monterey. Hundreds of tourists stop at Mascot every year to see the water-powered grist mill. Mascot is at the intersection of Stumptown and Newport Roads, about 1 mile southwest of Monterey.

The Mill Stream runs through the town of about 8 houses. See the falls in the background of photo. On the other side of the stream runs a narrow sanctuary enjoyed by egrets and kingfishers. When I was a boy tramps camped in the woods there.

The intersection is dangerous. A tourist was killed here only about 4 years ago. This evening I saw the cross with flowers in memory of a Lisa. How many persons died natural deaths in Mascot? Did an original American, centuries ago, take an arrow in the sternum here?

Monterey this summer is bracketed by fatal accidents, the last day of July and about the last day of August, both on Newport Road.

Manger working for sheep

How quickly the fate of things can change.

A manger was installed, hay bought, and here are Meeny, Miney, and Moe feasting on the mixed greens--timothy and alfalfa.

One day they were just one loud bellow away from the cattle truck, and the next day they are back in the good graces of the shepherd.

Actually, we've been through two bales and here you see them munching on the third.

The learning--presentation of the food. I've tried hay previous years, by spreading it on top of the straw on the floor, or just scattered in the pasture. Finally, put it up in the air and they're hooked. What can that say about humans and our eating habits?