Chicory

Chicory

As the summer winds towards a close the landscape begins to change a bit. The first hints of drying of the leaves of the corn and soybeans begin to show, and the chicory begins to bloom along the roadsides. The picture here was taken a few miles from home on one of my Sunday rides.

Many years ago, when I first started driving through the countryside to commute to work, I became fascinated with learning what the variety of things I was seeing growing in the ditches were. In this quest I came across the UofI Weed Identification Site - which is honestly the sort of thing that one wouldn't even consider would possibly exist unless one were looking specifically for it.

I've learned a lot about what is around us by using that reference, but discovering that the multitudinous pretty blue flowers coloring the roadsides in the late summer were, in fact, chicory, was one of the most surprising. In most cases my searches would simply involve looking through the pictures and seeing that the items I was pulling had a name - "Oh - so you are lambsquarter. Nice to meet you - now get the hell out of my garden..."

But chicory is different. Here was a discovery that a thing I'd heard the name of for years was actually a thing right nearby, indeed, perhaps under foot. Anyone who is a fan of westerns, or civil war-era fiction, will have heard of chicory. Soldiers or traveling cowboys will be found to be brewing and sharing it while they camp by the roadside. It's one of those tiny references to historical fiction that gives the era being described a different feel and helps put one in the place of the story.

In those stories chicory is being brewed like, and in the place of, coffee. The implication, often, is that the characters in the story are living rough, and so chicory is what they have to work with. This has apparently been a common usage, as the Wikipedia entry illustrates, using chicory in place of coffee, or at least blending it in with coffee to make it go further, in times of scarcity. The Wikipedia entry on the plant illustrates this quite nicely.

That practice of mixing it into coffee still stands, though now by choice and for flavor, something we learned when friends from Louisiana shared coffee with us a few years ago.

Café Du Monde

The can, sadly, is empty now, but it made for a delightful change of pace, and felt a little like drinking history with each cup.

Critter Patrol

When one gets a dog, one anticipates many of the features that accompany such an animal. They offer affection and companionship. They provide warning of new arrivals and intruders (albeit at their discretion). One thing I didn't expect, even with a lifetime of dog experience, was the level of vermin management that our canine team offers - indeed, seems to revel in.

We've detailed some of our issues with the Trash Pandas here, including the roles the dogs have played (and frankly, which we wish they would not play) in rounding them up. But the pest management goes much further than that - our furry exterminators offer more comprehensive services.

It is not at all uncommon for us to find, typically in the grass by the patio and back step, one or more recently dispatched members of the family rodentia, as well as the odd North American marsupial and periodic avian remains. To date, the list of gifts we have been left include:

  • House mice
  • Deer mice
  • Opossums
  • Shrews (I originally had moles on the list, but Wikipedia now has me convinced that what the dogs have caught were actually shrews)
  • Rats
  • Raccoons
  • Various and sundry birds

We have rabbits at the edges of the property - relatively recent additions. Thus far the dogs don't appear to have caught any of them, though it's not for lack of trying. There are no squirrels in our vicinity, but I'm sure they would be a target as well.

For the first few years at the Homestead we had a contingent of outdoor cats, brought in with the explicit intention of pest management. They were a fine batch of felines, as far as it goes, but at this point it's fairly clear that our canine crew is far more effective - perhaps because the cats didn't always see the need to quickly finish their prey off. The dogs are, however, perhaps less discriminating about what they eliminate - the birds are not pests, and possums are not problematic.

All of which brings me to the event that made me think of sitting and writing this post. Almost every morning, when I get up to make my coffee, Calamity comes to the back step to greet me through the window. And when she came to see me this morning this is the view that greeted me:

Calamity Back step

Because of the color of her fur you have to look closely to see it, but sure enough, she has a bird in her mouth.

Calamity the bird hunter

Bird Circled

And one might think: "okay, but she probably found that dead somewhere - a dog can't catch a bird". And that might be true for this particular bird - I can't say. But I can say that I've watched both Rosie and Calamity run into flocks of birds on the ground and scoop up individual birds as they start to take flight. And to be clear, I'm not looking to encourage this - we don't see the birds as pests to manage - but it is both surprising and impressive to see.

When I was very young we had a dog - a male rat terrier named Gladys (thanks Mom) who would routinely bring captured mice to the back step. This sort of thing is common for terriers, as I understand it, but our dogs are not terriers - they are herding dogs.

And they apparently like to herd a variety of critters right off this mortal coil...

Peaches

A couple of years back we made the first foray towards planting what we hope will become a small orchard. This first group of three included a pear, cherry, and cold-hardy peach tree.

I was, I will admit, somewhat skeptical at the prospect of planting the peach tree. I think of peaches as being a southern fruit - Georgia Peaches, anyone? - and so the idea of them working out here, weathering through a winter on the open prairie, seemed dubious. Still, it's been two years, and not only has the tree survived, its faring far better in the war against Japanese Beetles than my cherry tree.

I check the trees periodically for the beginnings of fruit throughout the spring. This year, for most of the spring I saw almost nothing. The cherry tree seemed uninterested in offering anything at all, and the pear tree made an early attempt at a couple of fruits, which then later simply vanished (though I'm sure our local wildlife had something to do with the vanishing...). And in all of this the peach tree, for the second year in a row, turned its woody nose up and refused to display even the beginnings of anything fruit-like, as near as I could tell.

As near as I could tell indeed, because I was walking towards the tree on my way to the shed last Sunday afternoon and I saw something... Honestly I wasn't sure what I was looking at from a distance, because I really had no expectation of finding that the tree was bearing anything.

But sure enough, it was:

Peach One

Peach Two

a pair of peaches

There are only just the two of them on the tree - it's still very young - but they are absolutely there and look very healthy. I can't imagine they were quite ripe yet, but I'll be checking them periodically. And I've gone from skeptical to cautiously optimistic. Given that it does look like the tree will yield fruit, even here on the periodically frozen northern prairie, it may be worth it to plant another of the same variety to allow for better pollination.

And - of course - the real bonus is that, in the near future, I'm gonna get to eat a peach!


Update: Somehow, when I was discovering the two peaches on our peach tree, I missed a third. It was apparently hiding, lower in the tree.

Hidden Peach

I've looked over the rest of the tree pretty closely, and I don't believe there are any others - three appears to be the limit. Of course, I thought I had looked over the entire tree before, and it's really not that big...

Things Can Stop Breaking Now...

I spent a little time in the last entry talking about the seasoned technology that is the clothesline. In part, this was inspired by necessity in the form of a dead electric dryer.

And here's the thing - it wasn't alone in its ailments. Over the past couple of months we've experienced the dysfunction and then death of the dryer, an air conditioning system failure, and have needed the repair guy to come out to look at our washing machine. Add in the imminent demise of one of our floor fans ("I'm running, I'm oscillating, and... I'm not running, not running... oh yes! Running again!"), a furnace repair in late winter, and a dripping kitchen faucet and it can feel like the very universe is crumbling around us.

We've been out here at the Homestead for a little over eight years and, I suppose, some of these items are reaching the stage of their planned obsolescence... err - normal lifespan. Still, it would work a lot better for us if, perhaps, the universe could stagger these things out a bit.

Universe... hello?

In the longer term part of our idealized goal for the Homestead is to restore and move it towards more sustainable technology, preferably in a fashion that does not make that sustainability readily apparent from the outside (and altering the vintage appearance of the home). In some ways this echoes the events of our ancestors, one of whom, I understand, installed a wind generator and battery for electricity and because he did not trust rural electrification (gotta love that paranoia... err - independence).

These types of shift take time, however - time and, perhaps more importantly, resources. When everyday things break and/or die it slows the pace towards those goals.

Ugh.

Clothesline Tech

A clothesline is a handy, and almost deceptively simple technology. On a warm and sunny summer day, particularly out here in the wind farm, clothes hung on the line will often dry more quickly than they do in the electric dryer.

Our clothesline is something special, as clotheslines go. Often when one sees a clothesline it's 10 or 15 feet of cotton line stretched from the side of the house to a mounting point. A trip to Amazon will find you a rotary clothesline perfect for a small backyard area. But our ancestors, given ample yard space and an apparent sense of industry, left this for us:

Big-ass clothesline

The posts are solid steel, a good three inches in diameter and about six foot tall. The cross-bars are also steel and, given how well they hold and how long they've been there (I remember them from my childhood, and I'm sure they are older still than that), the posts are almost certainly set in concrete. If the distance between them seems vast, thats only because it is - they are set a good 70 feet apart. No cotton clothesline here - plastic-wrapped wire line is the rule of the day.

Given the length of the span, the line will tend to sag as clothing is added to it. I've followed family tradition on this front, and built a very fancy support pole to be placed somewhere in the middle of the line (it's a hunk of old door frame with a couple of notches cut into it. But it works). LB recently made a second pole for the second line, using the trunk of a weed-tree they recently cut down, continuing the long family tradition of, shall we say, repurposing existing material...

Probably the most challenging part is getting and maintaining a taught line across the space. It's difficult to pull the line tightly enough when putting it up, even with a significant amount of elbow grease. Even if one does get it pulled to a state tightly enough that one is content, the line stretches over time. However, MLW discovered these nifty clothesline tighteners and ordered them from Amazon.

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I'm sure these aren't a new idea. The mounting points on the clothesline poles themselves have eye bolts on them, undoubtedly installed with the idea of doing much the same thing. However, due to age and rust and paint these are well past the point of being useful. But I put the line tighteners into place, and was able to pull both lines taught enough that Nik Wallenda might find them attractive were he to wander through our back yard.

What I especially like about them is that they promise the possibility of addressing future sag with just a turn of the handle rather than needing to pull the line off and try again.

Having the clothesline in place and available was especially a boon over the last few months, when our dryer started to signal it's intent to retire by requiring three or more cycles through before getting things completely dry. It was a greater benefit still when, a week or two ago, that self-same dryer decided to call it quits entirely (here I had been hoping it was just feeling a little tired, and would recover after a bit of rest. Sadly for the bank account this turned out not to be the case).

Japanese Beetles

Bastards!

Gardners are well aware of the difficulties these unwelcome intruders offer. Out on the homestead they appear to relish in stripping down a very select crop of cherished plants.

On the property we have wild roses that were purportedly brought from the east by the ancestors, and have grown here ever since. I picture them hauling rose seedlings in burlap sacks in the back of a Conestoga wagon. I also picture John Foulk periodically swearing in German as he attempts to pick them up, or even brushes against them on the trip - the thorns on these things are so wicked they'll pierce leather work gloves.

We've been aware for some time that the wild roses are on the interloper's list of preferred delicacies. It's not uncommon to look at the roses around this time of year and find them nothing but a lacework remnant of their former selves:

Lacework Roses

What we discovered this year is that, in addition to the roses, these little bastards have also taken to our cherry tree:

Sad Cherries

And the thing is, it's just the cherry tree, at least at the moment. There are a handful of beetles on the peach tree next to it, and on the pear tree a little further on, but the cherry tree has been completely laced - not a single leaf was spared.

Sad Cherries close-up

And the thing is, we have a yard full of other dining options. It seems to me that what is really needed here is a Japanese Beetle palate re-education project. Instead of wasting their time on the relatively limited supply of roses and peach trees, for example, such a project could introduce them to the abundant wonders of White Mulberry trees, the unbelievably resilient Woody Nightshade, and the supposedly many and varied uses of Burdock.

Once complete, that project would open up a world of opportunity to the beetles. Not only would they have access to a plethora of new dining adventures, but they'd be on the "must have" list for every farmer and gardener in the Midwest.

Clearly this is one of my finer ideas. Now where can I get a set of teeny-tiny school desks and chairs...?

Thunderstorms and Rainbows

Yesterday evening offered a rare visual opportunity:

Double-Rainbow

Rainbows themselves are not all that unusual out here, particularly in the spring - we have more than a sufficient supply of rain showers followed by sunshine to present that opportunity. Still, a double-rainbow with a thunderstorm as a backdrop is a sight I don't believe I've seen before.

MLW first noticed it out the picture window in the dining room. I grabbed up the phone and went out to get a couple of pictures. And, with the lightening flashing in the clouds behind it, I decided to take a little video as well:

It's a quiet scene, all told. LB and I had driven home through part of that storm a little earlier in the evening, with rain so heavy that, for a short while, it was virtually impossible to see even with the wipers on high. That part is not pleasant (and seems to be a more regular occurrence over the past few years). Still, scenes like this remind me that Mother Nature Giveth as well...

Battling the Summer...

As we roll into mid-June the temperatures are starting to rise. This old house has an abundance of windows and can offer some considerable airflow (aided, no doubt, by our location in the wind farm). We deploy a series of fans - both ceiling fans and floor models - as well as blocking out light to prevent solar heat gain, as we've discussed here before.

All of this works well until temperatures rise up into the 90° territory with its accompanying humidity (at no point in the Midwest is it ever a dry heat...). Then the central air needs to come on.

However, like so many things, the age of the house and the intermittent nature of its improvements have an impact on what is needed to cool things down. My grandparents lived their lives in the downstairs of the home, and as such the ductwork upon which the central air relies to distribute its cooling goodness feeds only the downstairs and a couple of select spaces upstairs. Since heat rises, this gives the upstairs region of the home the potential to be very warm indeed by the end of the day.

As such, we continue (for the short term, at least) to be plagued by these:

window air conditioning

Window AC units are noisy, and of course block off a chunk of the window in which they are placed. Still, at the moment it's either that or enjoy the sweltering heat and humidity of a 90+ degree day.

And as I write it, it seems more than a little extreme to use the term "plagued" to describe an implement that, while not perfect, functionally keeps the house comfortable to live in through the summer heat. It makes me think of stories my Grandma Marie would tell about summers in which, at times, everyone slept outside because that was the only way to get comfortable.

I suppose the downsides to the window units are slightly more tolerable than having to bed down in the back yard...

All-Too Invisible Fence

I do not usually mow the lawn - often this is a task that others either enjoy (MLW) or have inflicted upon them (LB), but I decided to give it a go today. One of the things I decided I was going to do with my mowing adventure was really cut in close to the edge of the property and trim back some of the tall stuff that tends to grow along the field.

Back in October of 2015 I relayed a situation in which my cousin had inadvertently cut our invisible fence line. After this event I had put in several steel fence posts as markers to provide reference points for him, and for myself, indicating where the fence wire was. I thought myself pretty clever for doing so and, in fact, my cousin hasn't encountered the fence since.

What I didn't anticipate is that I might later be a victim of my own cleverness and drive over one of those fence posts in my effort to trim close to the edge of the property. I was fortunate, however, to only roll over it with a tire as opposed to the more serious problem of hitting it with the blades (did I mention that I do not usually mow...?).

I chalked this up to life experience and largely forgot about it until LB fed the dogs and said "the alarm on the invisible fence is going off".

I'm not sure the swearing was out loud, but the volume of it in my head was considerable.

It could be worse, though. I had a rough idea of where I thought it was (around the aforementioned fence post), and I had purchased a kit to help find breaks in the fencing during the adventure in October of '15.

So I gathered up the items from the basement shelves and got to work. As I started the process of searching I became aware of a couple of things:

  • All of those teachers in elementary school who accused me of not reading all the way through the directions before starting a task were a pain in my ass. And, incidentally, they may have been right; and
  • I get very crabby when I think I'm winding things up for the day and a new problem pops up.

That second item isn't really a revelation, per se, as much as it is a periodic reminder.

At any rate, I gathered up my cheapie radio and telescoping handle and walked out to the area I thought the damage was, only to find it was doing nothing but bringing in local radio stations. I messed around with this for a little bit before finally admitting that it was at least remotely possible that I'd forgotten how the procedure all works since my single experience with it 20 months ago.

Turns out there are several additional pieces of paraphernalia, and some additional setup, that is required before you can detect your break in the fence. It also turns out, oddly enough, that all of those additional pieces were sitting on the shelf right next to where I'd retrieved the first couple of pieces. Who would have guessed?

As I noted back when, the repairs are fairly simple once the break is located and uncovered. Today's repairs, though, were somewhat complicated by the extensive colony of ants that had apparently made their home somewhere in the vicinity of my damaged wire. They were not shy about making their objections known:

unhappy ants

For the record, they were not just crawling, but also biting. As it all went on I'm sure I appeared the monster, since many of them would end up returning home on their shields...

It's all better now, though, assuming there is not some giant ant overlord coming for revenge...

Simple Pleasures

The final day of a long weekend out here on the prairie, particularly when the weather cooperates as it has been, offers some opportunity to appreciate the simpler things.

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The sun and the wind of the open prairie present an option that we don't take advantage of often enough. It's a little more work to haul the clothes out to the line than it is to simply toss them in the dryer, I suppose, but it requires 100% less electricity as well. Besides, there is something nostalgic about seeing the clothes on the line, and something rather therapeutic about hanging them there. This is an activity I watched, and helped, both my mother and my grandmother with many times as a child. Something feels right about it.

Working around the yard yesterday I was greeted multiple times by the peonies in bloom:

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While all of this is happening, we also have sun tea brewing in a gallon jar on the sidewalk.

tea a-brewin'

This will provide many delightful glasses over the next week or so. I add a few orange tea bags to the mix for mine - just a hint of extra flavor. No sugar or sweetener here tho - those seeking "sweet tea" will have to take that up with the McDonalds in town.

Drive Through Country

There is a lot to be said for country life - much of what I have to say about it is chronicled here. The open spaces, the room between one's self and one's neighbors offers a sense of separation, of privacy that cannot be easily found in the city. The connection with nature is enhanced by this solitude.

As wonderful as this is, that sense of solitude clearly can mean something else to people who are passing through it rather than living in it. For some it presents an emptiness that must be endured in order to move from one actual destination to another - drive through country, if you will. For others it reflects an area where one can do things unobserved, undetected.

Infamously, the empty areas of the Midwest can hide meth houses and similar objectionable sites. But while the media presents this sort of thing as if it's rampant, actual sightings of these are relatively rare. What is more common is the use of our countryside as a dumping ground for things one is, apparently, unsure of how to otherwise throw away.

This isn't a new phenomenon - I can recall variations on this theme going back to childhood. But the thing I see more recently, and which is a bit more striking than a bag of beer cans, for example, is this:

TV in the Ditch

Another TV in the Ditch

These pictures reflect two different, large CRT televisions sitting in the ditch, just a couple of miles apart:

TV's on Henkel Road

This road isn't unpopulated - there are several houses within relatively close proximity of both of them. But it has the distinction of being just off of a fairly major thoroughfare - US RT 52 - which one suspects offers just enough access, and just enough privacy, that one feels one can dump them without being noticed.

And dump is the operative term here. Anyone who has ever had to pick up and move a large CRT television knows these now-outdated devices are anything but light. This is a factor, as much as anything else, in why they've been replaced flat screen TV's. All of which is to say: these didn't just fall off of someone's truck. They aren't sitting, smashed, at the side of the road. They are out in the ditch. One of the two - in the second picture - is so far into the ditch that it's nearly to the field. It is also accompanied by a second, unwanted item that appears to be a microwave.

I'd like to say that this was striking enough to take a picture of because I've never seen such a thing before. Unfortunately, that's not the case - I've seen this same sight multiple times over the time that we've been out here - large, tube televisions tossed in the ditch. I suspect this occurs in part because disposal of old TV's is becoming more and more challenging. It also comes to mind because we have our own departed TV to dispose of.

The state of Illinois does maintain a list of electronic devices and materials that must be recycled rather than sent to a landfill, as well as a list of organizations and business that will recycle electronic devices and materials. This looks pretty hopeful when you see that Wal-Mart is at the top of the list - after all, they are everywhere. However, the big-box giant's website indicates that they only accept smartphones and tablets, along with a short list of other devices, none of which are televisions.

Staples offers a laudably longer list, but limits its program to items that could be considered office equipment, such as monitors and printers. Goodwill will accept a number of electronic items, but any mention of televisions is carefully absent from their site. The Salvation Army is listed as a recycler as well, but specifics about this are either not listed, or well hidden, on their site. A regional site - Stockpiled Electronics Recycling appears on a search with a Facebook page as their business site (folks, Facebook should never be your primary business site... but I digress), but it was posted in 2013, and the number to call is a scam line to sell you a Caribbean cruise.

So it's extremely challenging to find a home for that old TV. With all of those negatives, I did find this positive:

Best Buy will recycle a lot of electronics for free, and will recycle your television for a $25 fee. Best Buy is not a company I particularly love, and stores are few and far between in this region, with the nearest examples requiring an hour or so in the car or truck. Still, the company deserves kudos for stepping up here where others will not, and driving a bit to allow for proper disposal is far better than being a waste of human biomass who dumps his TV in the ditch.

Lilacs in Bloom

Lilac Up Close

The beginning of this second week of May finds the lilacs in bloom. One can see the lovely purple or white flowers swaying in the breeze, and can smell the sweet aroma wafting by. For myself, and for many of us, these bushes in bloom bring out happy childhood memories of time outside in the warming weather of spring - a harbinger of the end of the truly cold season.

These bushes are, and have been, very popular throughout our region. One can find them - and often in profusion - in many, if not most, of the yards of the older farmhouses in the region. A smaller house down the road from us actually has hedgerow covering its fence line consisting entirely of lilac bushes. While the lilac is not native to North America, it's apparently been here nearly as long as European settlers have been coming to stay in earnest.

Our old house has three lilac bushes - one white, two purple. They have been here as long as I can remember, and based on their size, likely considerably longer still. They bloom every year, reliably, about this time. And they offer this gift despite the apparent neglect I've been engaging in towards them, as one should purportedly prune them every year. Next month will mark the beginning of our eighth year in the homestead, and it will also mark the eight straight year in which exactly zero pruning of the sort described in the link has occured.

White Lilac

My Grandma Marie spent a considerable time working on things in the yard - in her garden and otherwise. It is certainly possible - tho I don't recall it - that she diligently pruned these bushes each year. But in more recent seasons benign neglect has been the law of the land.

Back yard purple lilac

Which isn't to say they've had no attention at all, despite the rough condition of the bush above. The nature of how they grow allows for things to take seed and root inside the bushes, and we do spend time each season removing those interlopers. And given the age of our lilacs, each season I do spend time extracting dead material. Lilacs can apparently live a couple of hundred years, depending on the variety, so it's possible that these have been here nearly as long as the house itself. I say nearly because, in the case of at least one of the bushes...:

No lilacs yet...

Whether it was John Foulk and his immediate family who planted them sometime after taking that picture, or a later generation, it's clear that these bushes have been here for many decades at least, and each year blooming to herald the coming of the warm season.

The... What? Is Leaking?

Around 8:30 last night LB comes up to me and says: "that thing over the stove is leaking".

Me: ”The thing... what?"

LB: "That thing over the stove - you know - the thing."

Me: "The vent hood?"

LB: "... sure".

I followed LB into the kitchen to find, sure enough, it was.

Drip

This would seem somewhat perplexing, given that there is no water run anywhere in the house higher than the kitchen and bathroom sinks, both on the first floor, both lower than the stove vent hood.

But: It started raining at about 11:30 or so yesterday morning, and continued until some time into the wee hours of this morning. There was occasional thunder and lightening, but the real player in yesterday's weather was the wind and rain. The continuous rain paired itself with an unusual East by Northeasterly wind that gusted more or less constantly throughout the day and night, striking the backside of the house where the kitchen sits.

The kitchen itself, as it stands, is not original to the house. Rather, it is relatively modern, a late 1940's remodel initiated by my grandparents, with some updating of appliances since. That 1940's work has held up remarkably well, all things considered, over the last 70 years or so. Still, events like this make one realize that one does not know what one does not know.

The vent hood feeds into a galvanized duct that goes up into the soffit above the cabinets. I believe that it then travels across, thru the soffit, over to the chimney in the wall. And when I investigated the bit of ductwork I can see in the cabinet above the hood, I found that to be the location of the leak.

Galvanized Pipe

The chimney that it goes into is one of four in the house - three original and one added later - and is the only original chimney that still rises above the roof, coming out from the fireplace in the basement (which I suspect was originally used for cooking) and traveling up the back wall of the house. In short, it faced the brunt of last night's wind and rain.

My best guess is that the volume of rain, and gusting of wind, was such that it created an unusual bit of air movement in the chimney, moving some rain back down the chimney and throwing it down the vent. I say best guess because in eight years of living here, and a lifetime of being in and around the house semi-regularly, I have never seen this before.

It's all subsided now. It's still windy this morning, but the rain appears to have mostly let up. Our as-yet still unnamed vernal ponds have returned at greater than usual size, and the wind blew over the garbage can. The dogs discovered this first and thoughtfully addressed it by distributing the contents of the can all over the driveway (there may have been the occasional utterance of foul language as I cleaned that up). But it is another of the periodic reminders that, although we are certainly not pioneers out here, with our electricity and running water and such, the weather continues to have surprises to throw at us.

Time to Mow

grass out of control

Spring has fully sprung, and the rainy season has been out in full force. These April showers do, of course, bring...

Well, I don't know, there are already flowers blooming here - they don't wait for May, so I'm not sure that saying was coined by someone living in the upper Midwest. But what it does bring is the dawn of mowing season.

To be clear, MLW does the bulk of the mowing and seems to enjoy it. What's more, LB is primed to be learning this task as well. This is not about to become a screed about how annoying it is to care for the lawn.

The other thing that Spring brings is the annual realization that I need to get a battery charger, though this would negatively affect what has now become the traditional harbinger of mowing season: the announcement that the mower will not start.

Of course the challenge is that the only time I ever need a battery charger is at the start of mowing season. This means that the only time I ever think about getting a battery charger is at the start of mowing season. And, since we typically need it now, to get the lawn mowed, I've borrowed devices to get the job done in the moment.

And then, of course, forgotten until the following spring.

I am not ahead of the game this year. The mower has already failed to start. But I think, this time, that perhaps I will risk that tradition and actually get a damn battery charger.

Derilects

One of the more striking things about rural Illinois is the number of abandoned buildings. This includes buildings on properties that are otherwise clearly in active use - the old, empty barns tumbling down alongside newer, occupied machine sheds and similar types of buildings, to be sure. But also included in that list of unoccupied and unloved structures in the scenery are more personal places, like old schoolhouses and homes.

In some cases a place may just be clearly empty, but otherwise in good repair. It may be a home that you drive by regularly, across multiple times of day and night, and simply never see a vehicle in the drive, never a light on in the window, perhaps the care of the grounds isn't routinely attended to. These places seem to simply be waiting, hoping for new occupants to arrive and reinvigorate them.

In other cases, you will find former homes in various stages of tumbledown, sometimes at its earliest stage, where an enterprising homeowner might have the opportunity to pull it back from the abyss. Other times it's clear the building is beyond all hope.

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In many ways these abandoned places simply reflect changes in the way people live, and in the way we move about. Fewer people live in rural areas now than they used to, and our small towns used to be part of the major thoroughfares for travel. Highways used to wend their way through rural towns, often directly through the downtown business district. The interstates have usurped that role, and often now people from other places recognize a small town by name only if it appears on a highway exit sign. Even then, what they know of the town itself may be limited to the gas stations, restaurants, and hotels that appear around the exit.

But while these decaying structures often just sit and embrace entropy, there are cases where property owners reclaim the space for other things. It might be hard to believe, but this lot, not terribly far from home, used to hold a small house and a couple of outbuildings:

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I remember the house well from growing up out here - the bus went past it every day. It was nothing special - painted white, a story and a half, and perhaps 1000 square feet of floorplan. It was no architectural treasure, and likely no one will mourn its loss, myself included. Since taking the picture the piles of earth have been smoothed out, and the space is indistinguishable from the farmland that used to surround it. It will likely soon host a crop of corn or beans.

Ultimately, it seems likely that this is what will continue to occur out in these parts - this very rural area will become much more so, with homes themselves ever further and fewer between.

Spring Rain

Spring appears to be well and truly sprung here on the prairie, and that in multiple ways. The birds have returned, of course, and temperatures are coming up to a reliable level that precludes the need for much more than a sweatshirt or light jacket. And it's raining.

Oh yes, it's been raining.

Yesterday we had temperatures in the mid 50's with clear skies and sunshine, and I broke out my bike for a 14-ish mile ride. When the spring weather presents with a day that is:

A) Warm enough for a comfortable ride; 
2) Still enough to make the ride a workout without being torture; and 
iii) Not raining

...You have to jump on the opportunity.

Contrary to what people sometimes picture, the prairie isn't truly flat - this isn't Nebraska, after all - there are real contours to the land that can be seen from any vantage point, and can absolutely be felt when one is on a bicycle. But while this is true, it's flat enough that periods of heavy rain do result in opportunistic ponds and lakes forming in the fields, and one comes to realize why the ditches alongside the road are so deep out here.

Vernal Pools

Something I did not realize, however, is that these ponds, which are called Vernal Pools (tip of the hat to Midwestern Plant Girl at midwesternplants.org) also serve as homes for some species of frogs. But I realized as I was doing a late-night dog outing last night that I was hearing frogs out in the middle distance. We are a good mile and a half from the nearest creek (or "crick"), and while we can sometimes hear the bullfrogs on a still night, that seems more a late spring or summer phenomenon.

It's a nice reminder of the variety of wildlife around us out here. Because we are surrounded with agriculture, it can become easy to feel that there isn't any truly wild space around us (hence my fascination with the area in and around Melugin Grove). But there are periodic reminders beyond the raccoons that we are surrounded in wildlife, some of it of a much more pleasant variety.

Emergency Repairs

Earlier this week we had a pretty severe thunderstorm. Rain, thunder, and lightening, yes, but mostly lots of wind. At times, the blowing was hard enough that we could feel the house tremble even while laying in bed.

Somewhere in there we heard a slam that we assumed was the door in the old barn slamming open (it has a tendency to do that). But when I got up in the morning it was clear that something else had occurred. Out the window of the laundry room I saw the eve vent laying in the yard.

well crap...

What this means, aside from the fact that the wind managed to rip a fairly tightly secured piece of siding material off the side of the house, is that we now had a gaping hole in the north side of the house.

Big Ass Hole

I've had to learn over the years to leave alone - not start - things that I don't have the time to finish around the house. It's key to not letting myself get extremely frustrated about unfinished projects. Still, we had a hole in the side of our home, and spring is approaching. While the landlocked critters probably can't get up that high - it's a tall house - spring approacheth, and the birds have already begun to return.

I had no choice but to leave it for the first day - there was simply no open time in my schedule. This meant that, when I finally did get the stepladder lined up with the scuttle hole and climb my way up into the attic, it was with some trepidation.

In a lot of big, old, Victorian era homes the attic is functionally a third floor. In our homestead there is room to stand up in the attic, and one gets the impression that there may have been a thought, in the original design, that one could have made a small room up there if it was ever needed. In my grandparent's time there was a wooden ladder built-in against the wall and up to the scuttle hole. I don't know who put it there - whether it was part of the original construction, with that thought of using the extra space as an additional worker's bedroom (the scuttle hole is in the back, worker's stairwell), or whether it was just a later addition by someone who was just tired of hauling a stepladder up and down the back stairs. Having done that very task myself multiple times, I can see how one might get to that point.

Scuttle Hole

While it one can see how it could have been a small living space, at the moment it's just a home for insulation and duct work. And, fortunately, it did not appear to become an inopportune home for anything else.

As usual, all my tools are in the basement, so any repair or work in the attic inevitably involves multiple trips up and down two flights of stairs, one stepladder, and pulling oneself up or down through a scuttle hole. I was fortunate to start my repair trip with a bit of daylight outside, but it was still dark enough to require a flashlight. Improbably, the opening in the wall seems to look smaller up close than it does from the ground.

Old Attic

I thought I'd have to patch the hole with a bit of plywood (I don't have a ladder that goes high enough to work from the outside and, besides, the outside is really, you know, high), but I was fortunate enough to be able to fish the old vent out thru the hole from the inside...

...and of course, promptly dropped it.

Out the scuttle hole, down the stepladder, down the steps, out the back door, pick up the vent, back in the door, back up the steps, up the stepladder, through the scuttle hole...

Oh - but I did stop along the way and pick up some string so I could secure the damn thing and refrain from multiple trips. Forty-six years of dropping things can ultimately teach you a thing or two.

A little bit of work with the drill and some wood screws, some careful application of silicon sealant to prevent leaks around the edges, and we have a decent, if temporary, repair.

It all serves as an additional reminder that the wind out here isn't just playing, as well as a testament to the house for continuing to stand against it 150+ years on.

Doorways...

One of the joys and delights of living in a 155-year old house is being able to routinely delight in the craftsmanship of a bygone era.

Of course, one of the struggles is that the very craftsmanship you are delighting in is, in fact, 155 years old and, as such, is prone to breaking.

This can be true on many fronts, of course, but of particular focus over the past couple of weeks has been doorknobs, and one door in particular - the one to LB's bedroom.

Most of the doors in the house have similar hardware - a mortise lock with white porcelain doorknobs and escutcheons). This style of lock means that every door on the main two floors has a door with both a sash lock and a deadbolt in it, the deadbolt operated by an old fashioned skeleton key. Every door - including the closets, the bathroom door, the laundry room door, etc.

Every door has a deadbolt in it, but only a handful of them actually work. In most cases this appears to be due to seizure secondary to age, the overactive paintbrush work of prior generations, or perhaps a combination of both.

LB has one of the two front bedroooms in the house. During my grandparents' occupation of the house, and likely for quite some time before, these rooms were not occupied by people. Rather, they held a vast array of generational cast-off stuff - things that, apparently, were unwanted but considered too nice to be thrown away. By my childhood they were not frequently opened and entered, except by occasional exploring waifs.

One might have expected this relative lack of use to result in the door hardware being less harshly used and, as such, perhaps better suited to withstanding a few years of exposure to the exuberance of youth. Alas, this does not seem to have been the a case. LB's doorknob had worked loose to the point that the jiggling of the handle would prevent the sash lock from catching reliably. I made one attempt, early on, to address this by retightening all of the various and sundry screws and attachments related to the handle (not all of whom seemed to be present and accounted for), but the success of this was short lived. Ultimately it was clear I was going to have to take things apart and effect a more complete repair.

Taking things apart is often a frightening proposition in a house of this age - it has a tendency to open a can of worms well beyond expectation.

In the case of LB's door, disassembling the doorknob revealed a harsher life for this door than I'd originally predicted.

Rough life for the old door

The number of gouges and striations in the area of the iron handle plates suggested that the door handle had been adjusted, and readjusted, multiple times over the past century and a half. It also made it clear why it was so hard to tighten it back down - there was virtually no wood left in which a screw could take purchase.

This wouldn't be a problem with a cylinder latch set - in that case, the two sides of the latching and handle mechanism screw to each other through the door. But the mortise lock is a large rectangular block of metal directly in the door - there's no going through it without potentially destroying the latching mechanism.

My solution, for now, was to head off to the hardware store (they say I "saved big money", but I'm never sure if I should actually believe them) and get dowel and wood filler, as well as additional screws. I used the dowel to fill the deeper, still intact holes, and the wood filler to bring everything back to more or less even with the door surface. Then I let the material dry and cure.

door with filler

The guidelines on the product said to give it at least two hours to properly cure, so to be safe, I gave it a week. Plus, you know, there's nothing more entertaining than listening to your teenager struggle with trying to open and close a door without a handle for several days. Also - it's remotely possible that I got a little busy...

In putting the handle back together, I discovered a couple of additional interesting features about the handle itself. Most of the handles in the house use a system in which backing plates go against the door, are covered by a porcelain escutcheon, which is held on by a threaded brass cylinder that screws into the backing plate. The handle on LB's door looks like this too, but it was hiding a secret. The backing plate on the inside was different - it wasn't threaded like the others, with a smaller inside lip, and the brass cylinder had been cut down so that it would fit into the new opening.

Hidden Differences

The cutting down of the brass cylinder could not be accidental, and one suspects that this is the result of a previous generation needing to replace the backing plate, and being unable to find a part that matched exactly. And, given that the room was virtually never entered, exactly was probably felt to be unimportant.

For our situation, exactly was the thing that was needed. I scavenged the backing plates off of the closet in my office - the door to that is never shut, as it is a pass-thru for electronics cables, and a previous tenant had already scavenged the mortise lock from it anyway. This seemed to do the trick, mostly. However, I found that the porcelain escutcheon would no longer fit on the inside with the scavenged backing plate. I have multiple escutcheons, and tried them all, but to no avail. In deference to the teenager's week of suffering, I deferred painting the wood filler for later, went ahead and put it together without the escutcheon, which is functional, albeit less attractive.

No Escutcheon

It don't fit no more

Shortly after making this decision I noticed that one of my ancestors had made the same decision previously, just across the hall.

it wasn't just me

This makes me feel a bit better, though I'd like it all to go together correctly. Still, at least the offspring now has a functioning door behind which one can pretend there is no one else in the house...

These aren't the first door problems we have had, and they aren't the only door issues that my ancestors have faced. We have doors where the screws in the hinges have worked loose - sometimes to a significant degree (the downside to pine as a building material), and a couple of doorknobs have been replaced by completely different handle sets. The door into the basement was clearly a struggle for someone:

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The set on the inside is loose, as you can see, and will not tighten (I would not be surprised to find a very similar situation inside there as with LB's door). And on the basement side of the door:

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The repairs required an additional wood plate, and it appears that a decision was made to caulk or epoxy the escutcheon against the wood, likely because it would not screw tight.

I haven't gotten to the epoxy point yet, but I can see how one might get there...

Climate Zones

One of the interesting, if not endearing, aspects of living in a 155 year old house is the array of climates one can experience moving across the building. The progression of climate change has caused considerable temperature variations this winter, with temperatures ranging from well below freezing (typical for this time of year) up to the 60's. That variability has been good for our LP Gas bill, but the variability makes the temperature differences in the house more apparent when it gets cold, as was the case this past week. For most of the week we would bask in tropical temperatures in the kitchen and dining room, and periodically make forays into the chilly, autumn climes of the living room. Any time spent there typically involves sweatshirts and blankets, and a lot of entertainment was sought via iPads, since the TV resides in the living room (thanks Steve Jobs!).

This all flipped on its head Friday morning, when I walked downstairs into the kitchen to make coffee, only to be embraced by normal winter house temps (we keep the thermostat set at 63). To be honest, having not donned a sweatshirt prior to this journey I would have sworn it was colder than that, but a check of the thermometer in the kitchen said otherwise.

This may seem like over-dramatization, but I assure you it's not. At times we can see a nearly 30-point difference in temperature from one side of the house to the other - temperatures in the high 50's in the living room, and hovering around 80° in the kitchen and dining room. A day later the entire situation can change.

Mostly this has to do with two separate factors. The largest component to this feature of our 1800's house is the direction of the wind. The living room - where the thermostat resides - is on the northwest corner of the house. When it is being struck by a strong, persistent, prevailing, northwest winter wind, the temperature in the room drops below the thermostat setting, and it's often the case that, while these conditions continue, it is not possible for the furnace to catch up and heat the room to the shut-off point. As a result, the furnace runs the entire time, and rooms that aren't being pelted by nature's malevolent majesty see a dramatic rise in temperature.

The second component is that the dining room and kitchen are on the south side of the house, in the direct sunlight. In this house of windows that can make a significant difference in daytime temperature on its own, without the wind as a factor. The dining room in particular has a large picture window (which replaced the original bay window on the home). That window offers unfiltered access to sunlight for three-quarters of each day, and offers a lot of heat gain. On such days the dining room is almost certainly the warmest room in the house.

An older picture of the dining room window

None of this is to complain - this is a reality of living in a 150~ish year old home. My Grandma Marie spent a lot of her time in the kitchen, as I recall, and I suspect this was in part because the prevailing west wind made that eastern room more comfortable the other areas of the house. In our own old country house across the field a search for my mother in winter would often find her sitting atop the furnace registers, reading a book. I learned to emulate this myself, though often with comic books rather than novels. It's a pleasant enough activity right up to the point that you realize it is indeed possible for your buttocks to fall asleep...

And - to be clear - we don't simply allow this phenomenon to persist. When it becomes clear that the furnace is unable to catch up in the living room I will turn the thermostat down so that it will stop super-heating the rest of the house. Then we relocate to other rooms - one of the lovely things to a big, drafty old house is that there is always another pleasant space, away from that draft, to curl up and relax.

Going to School

As I am sure I've mentioned here before, the time that I've spent living in this house, and in researching family history, often finds me living in the mid-late 1800's in my head. While things are changing around us, there remain cues to help accentuate that. In addition to the homes and barns that continue to stand, if one looks closely one can still find the remnants of the old one-room schoolhouses.

Shaw Road Schoolhouse Schoolhouse on Shaw Road, West of West Brooklyn

These are harder to find than the old homes and barns, and one suspects this is largely because their period of use ended longer ago. Many, though not all, of the old homes (like ours) continue to serve as residences, modernized to the degree felt necessary by the occupants. And while many of the old barns are now tumbling down, this is a more recent phenomenon, brought on, one suspects, by more recent changes in the types of agriculture and volume of machinery used in modern farming. When I was young there were still small livestock operations in the area - one of them literally next door to the Homestead - but these are rare now, many pastures plowed to make more cropland. And when I was young much of the farm machinery would fit into an old barn, though this was already changing then. Morton "Machine" sheds, offering large open spaces for massive equipment had already begun to pop up, often built right next to the aging barns.

Unless someone found a new or different use for an old schoolhouse - as a shed, perhaps or, in the case of the old schoolhouse down the road from us, as a home - it seems they were more likely to be abandoned earlier.

This makes me sad People lived here when I was little, albeit without all of the vehicles in the yard


Shaws Schoolhouse 3/4 View Shaws Schoolhouse from the front These two shots are from the schoolhouse at Shaws, near the intersection with Inlet Road

These relics are not only rare, but are increasingly so. When I was little - perhaps 10 or 11 years of age - I remember coming across an old schoolhouse in a tumble-down state about three miles away from our home then, and about four from our current house. This was one of a series of ever-widening bicycle rides, and when I came across the building I did not know what it was at first. Until, with all the wisdom of a pre-adolescent, I went inside.

The floor had fallen through in many places, the earth beneath clearly visible. The walls were still standing, if at something less than right angles, but none of the windows had an unbroken pane of glass in them. All of this was, of course, fascinating to the younger me, but I knew what type of building I was in when I saw the large, broken chalkboard on the back wall.

It was probably in this discovery that I first really realized that the things around us in the countryside were old, and that people really had come before us, lived here in ways that weren't the same as we did now. I'd been aware that the buildings around me were older than I was, to be certain, but everything was older than I was. Living in homes with limestone or brick basements and what we'd now think of as antique furniture (but was then simply a remnant of previous inhabitants) was simply par for the course. It wasn't perhaps until this moment that I had a sense of the history of the place, a sense that history itself was something that actually happened around us rather than in a book to other people and in other places.

I went back to that old schoolhouse multiple times, taking a friend with me at least once. It was less of a play location - the missing sections of floor making that challenging - than a spot for mediation and reflection. When we moved back to the Homestead the location was one of the first destinations for my biking forays.

The building is gone now. It's difficult to sort out where in the landscape it ever was, so complete is its erasure. This is not surprising - in addition to being an attractive nuisance, it's state of disrepair would have made it otherwise useless, and it was occupying space that could have been otherwise cultivated. What is more surprising, I suppose, is that the other examples here still remain.


I suppose I should qualify - I have no records, no historical documentation to support my contention that these are old schoolhouses. For the building down the road, I have oral history. For the others, it's a architectural recognition. I could be mistaken, but the buildings certainly look the part.