The view from my driveway this morning, some hours after the rains stopped and some hours before the wind cleared out the sky.

~

I’m going to write a new story. A short story, an essay, a novel, a poem, or maybe a definition, an etymology, or a map or itinerary, a history, a geography. I don’t know yet. I have some inklings. It will be “American”  in that it will be concerned with situating me – someone – in a landscape. “Situating” is perhaps not the word: letting her be, get lost, find her way. And it will be “American” as in “natural”, nature-bound: about the freedom and potential and the rule of nature, and mourning it. No matter what will be the point of writing it, I need write it, on pen and paper, scratch it as much as write it: ETCH it and so it is alive.

Even if you despair about the future, you still need to take care of the present. It is in the present that your urge, you life, soul, animus exists, lives. It may aim towards and work for tomorrow, next year, “retirement”, but it aims and works now.

~

They’re connected: writing, the story and the now. I’m still doing that, four years later, asserting a story (my imagination, my freedom), in the present (the way things are), to be able to face an uncertain future.  I guess that’s  my way of coping, living.

In the meantime my neighbor’s pine tree has interposed itself between the sun and my office window and I can feel its shadow on my back. In Winter in an unheated house one is so close to the edge, the margin between warm enough and cold is so narrow a tree makes all the difference.

Pod Meadow is an amazing conservation area in my town that is a hidden gem, “a sleeper,” the town naturalist calls it. It is 25 acres. You park the car on a busy road – no less than the old Native American Great Trail, which became a major highway in the colonial era and is now Old Connecticut Path, or Route 126. You walk through someone’s yard, and then, suddenly, this:

Amazing, the sudden dip toward the Pond and the lack of tangled shrubs under the stately trees – mostly beeches, oaks and some pines and spruce – which allows you to see right through. It gives the open and clear feel of a maintained forest, much like, I presume, the forests in the time of the Native Americans, who used to set fire to the underbrush to make hunting and travel easier.

In this forest the maintenance is done by the beavers. I don’t have the skinny on the beavers yet, but there seem to be many of them and, some worry, too many. They have dammed the Pond so that now the water reaches higher, inundating old trails and making what used to be a vernal pool (first water body in the picture above) into a part of the “full-time” pond.

The beavers clear the forest by doing this:

Amie couldn’t believe it. Imagine chewing through a whole tree with your teeth! There is more beaver handy toothsome work behind her: the beavers apparently like beeches the most and in this spot most of them were stripped of their bark at beaver height. It is amazing to run your finger over the scrapings. To me it is like touching the wild. Here’s an even bigger tree (an oak) being worked on:

And some more beeches:

We speculated that there must be some system or plan in their activities. Perhaps they are working up to a moment when they will tip one tree and it will take down all the others, like dominoes, in one great bang! Then they’ll have a party, say “our work is done here,” and move on.

For the moment they’re at home. This is their lodge. No sign of the inhabitants.

Seeing all this is so awesome to me, and I am eager to learn more about these animals. I’m also fascinated by the geology of the place, which is, like so much of New England, dominated by the 50,000-year-old glacier that started to retreat 15,000 to 16,000 years ago. I sometimes dream about that glacier.

Today was about Amie. At first she didn’t want to come but the moment we arrived she started running and jumping, suddenly free and wild herself. She had climbed onto this great downed oak before we knew it and DH had to scramble after her.

She also really wanted to walk on water:

She was upset at the end and I didn’t know why. She said she had “wanted to have more adventures and all we did was walk around and chat!” I will take her back after school some day and she can show me what it is that she wants to do. We can also take our journals and draw or write.

We are reading the Finn Family Moomintroll which another friend gave her and perhaps she has that landscape in mind and the adventures of Moomin and his curious friends. I can certainly understand her. When I was a kid I was always pottering around in the overgrown area (now a nature reservation) across from my parents’ house, pretending to be the last kid left on Earth, losing my boots in the bog, coming home with leaves and mud in my hair.

I would have gone on that tree too! I may still.

So they were still flush with green leaves, which had only just started turning. The snow stuck to them and that’s what weighed them down. This was the view out my living room window the morning after the storm.

Gorgeous, but dangerous. None of those trunks or branches are usually that diagonal. Several tops snapped off after the picture was taken.

The night before this picture was taken, the night of the storm, I lay awake in bed listening to the creaking and straining of the trees, the tearing of wood fibers, then the crack, then whoosh and finally thump of limbs and branches crashing to the ground. After a couple of hours of this, you just fall asleep from exhaustion, your brain telling you: que sera, sera.

None hit the house, the cars, the roof with the panels. But the hoop house was hit, and two of our fences (metal) are beyond repair. The veg garden is a mess.

There are still a lot of snapped limbs – some the size of small trees – hanging in the canopy, waiting for a good gust of wind to tear them loose. It’s the reason why Halloween is canceled!

Well, to be precise: the town is leaving it up to the discretion of the parents but advises to do an “alternative Halloween”. DH and I know what swords are hanging above our heads, so we’re not letting Amie venture outside.

Another reason for canceling Halloween is that, after over 50 hours, 25% of the town’s population still doesn’t have power back. School was canceled today too, and Amie’s elementary school might still be out of power tomorrow. 56% of people in my town were without power.

We were among them. The evening of the stormwe heard a loud thump and then the power was out.  Our solar is entirely grid-tied. The grid goes down, all our solar harvest gets diverted into the ground.

But we were prepared with one head lamp each with batteries that are always charged.

We also had our trusted stove – the best investment we ever made – and lots of wood! It provided heat, crucial because the temperature dropped to 25 F the following night. The town opened an emergency shelter in one of the schools.

The stove also allowed hot water for washing dishes and even for a bucket shower with shampoo, and for tea. I also made a wonderful stew on it of garden vegetables and sausage.

Our power was restored after 40 hours. Not too bad, compared to last time (after Irene), which was a little over two months ago. That time we were without electricity for 6 days. So we knew the drill (it was warmer then and I cooked outside on the camping stove).

With the way the economy is going I don’t see all those wires and cables going underground, as they are in most of Europe. So we’re looking into battery backup for our solar.

{UPDATE} When I told Amie we couldn’t go trick or treating she burst into tears, so we went along the safe side of the street, just 10 or so houses. She also opened the door and doled out a lot of candy. So she was happy. Not our usual Halloween, but some of it, anyway. Many people from the North of our town, which is still without electricity, came to our neighborhoods.

The first time  I noticed this dark, crumbly soil, I thought there was something wrong with it. Did some sort of cement get into it? What insect does this? Is it good? Then I realized. A few days later I told a friend who used to be a farmer and she said: “You’ve arrived!”

Yes. It’s worm poop! A half inch deep layer over the entire 4×8′ bed! Here’s a closer look:

M-mm!

Then I started digging up the potatoes – all the Keuka Golds I had left in because they were unaffected by the brown spot. I had high hopes because the plants were healthy and the only of my potatoes that actually flowered.  Well, plant after plant came out but I found hardly any potatoes! It was only when I reached the other side of the bed that I discovered what had happened. I plunged in my potato fork and eek! I had speared a fat, loudly squeaking vole! Startled, I shook it off my fork over the fence. Later I came across two more voles and took a picture of them.

Funny creatures. Unfortunately for me and for that one very unlucky one, we both like potatoes!

Under threat of thunder and hail, a bear and a tornado.

Schematic overview (green = planted)

out of our living room window

Considering…

1. that the house does not benefit a whole lot from being shaded by the trees to the south in Summer,
2. that we could grow a more successful garden where it already is and expand it even more
3. that we would make room for fruit, nut and coppice trees,
4. that if we removed those trees we can put solar hot water and perhaps a small PV on our solar south facing and perfectly pitched roof,
5. and that we would get wood to fire up the stove for a decade,

… we are now leaning towards removing some big trees on our property. These are two beeches – one of them quite huge – two big red oaks and one big white oak, one double-trunked pine tree (might be on neighbor’s property), a couple of smaller oaks and pines, and possibly two more  large red oaks on the west side of the veg garden (not in photo). All the roots will also have to be removed if we want to plant new trees.

We’ve not decided yet because we need a couple of quotes, an equivalent amount of savings, and a lot more thought about the alternatives and, if we go ahead, the replacements. I’m just saying we’re leaning.

I was very adverse to such drastic measures. The wooded feel of this place  and neighborhood is what we fell in love with, and that strong, majestic beech in particular is such a joy. But we won’t be cutting them down for a lawn, and there are a great many more trees on the property. Still, it  is the thought of making solar hot water possible that brings me this far. What with the stove and solar hot water we would need to rely very little, if at all, on the oil burner.