Another picture from the weekend. Younger son takes a break from wrestling sheep to the shearing stand.

A scene from the annual Memorial Day Sheep Shearing Marathon.

Someone has to be on top of things

Baby, it's cold outside

Things I Have Been Doing Other Than Blogging

Farming (see the picture) The lamb count is up to twenty-four with more expected daily. The weather service is making noise about snow and sub-zero wind chills coming up, so I'm sure the remaining pregnant ewes are already making plans.

Family Like almost every parent in modern America Susan and I seem to spend half our life in a car with a child going or coming from somewhere. Whatever happened to letting kids run wild through the neighborhood until dinnertime? Well, our neighbors are mostly four footed, so I can't blame the guys for wanting to engage in off the farm activities with other humans of equivalent ages.

Reading New in the mail: Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church by Metropolitan John Zizioulas and Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews by Marshall McLuhan.

I have also been enjoying a novel in manuscript (or the pdf equivalent thereof) by Steve "Methodius" Hayes, a blogger, writer, teacher, activist and Orthodox deacon in South Africa. He bravely offered his work to all would-be critics for evaluation and I have been dipping into it as I have spare time in front of the computer. The book is a sort of Charles Williams style supernatural thriller set in apartheid era South Africa and is worth your time if that sort of thing appeals to you. I will be forwarding comments after I finish, but will refrain from posting any here if any one else is interested in becoming a reader-critic.

Dancing Susan and I were back on the floor Monday night for the next lesson. I seem to be improving, but that has more to do with my partner and the instruction than any innate talent. Nonetheless, they may make a Rhumba man out of me yet.

 

The View from Home

Part-time farmer, lamb and llama on a Saturday afternoon

 

Our first snow of the year.

If you look back at Wednesday's post, I remarked on our flocks' ability to sync reproduction with the worst available weather. Well, the baby boom suddenly came to a halt for the past two evenings. I wondered why, and then saw these graphics for Sunday's forecast at the National Weather Service page for our area:

I will be getting the pens ready tomorrow.

I met Mark Khaisman while he was designing stained glass windows for a studio near Front Royal. Trained as an architect, Mark has worked in a variety of mediums; glass, paint, animation, classic Russian iconography and now these wonderful evocative works made of brown packing tape layered over a light box. His web site is still under construction, but check out Galleries Two and Three for his revisioning of film noir, telling single scene stories in a medium so impossible that you can only shake your head and smile at his achievement. More images and information are available here.

The lamb count tonight is fourteen. Traditionally our ewes choose the worst possible weather to give birth, ice storms a speciality. This winter has been unseasonably mild, so they have had to be satisfied with our recent cold snap with near zero wind chills. At feeding time the lambs hang back while the ewes press in towards the feed troughs. With fourteen to choose from, it takes a while to sort out who belongs to whom. They sort first by ear, the ewes and lambs engaging in a kind of call and response, high pitched lamb cries answering back to the lower voiced ewes. The real test though is smell. The ewe sniffs the lamb, sometimes from head to tail, before being satisfied that she has found the right one.

Susan decided that we should celebrate her getting back on her feet from the summer of surgery by signing us up for ballroom dance lessons. Parks and Rec over in Winchester was offering a six week session on Rumba and Salsa, so off we went. Susan studied dance in college before graduating as a P.E. major, so she was prepared by talent, temperament and training. I, by contrast, have so little rhythm and such a total lack of physical elegance that I might be the anti-Astaire, a veritable black hole of terpsichorean ineptness. It was not always pretty (at least on my side of the proceedings), but I did enjoy it. And I discovered that the basic steps were strangely reminiscent of much of the rest of my life. Quick quick slow, quick quick slow, step away, circle back, you hold each other, side step, side step, walk forward, walk backward, quick quick slow. Hold tight, look at your partner and with a little grace and charity it all comes together. Well, if I can live it, maybe I can learn to dance it.

In farm news, the lamb count was up to twelve at evening feeding.

While loading up the now fully functional farm truck with the household trash to go off to the dump along with a variety of boxes and my mother-in-law's Christmas tree, I heard our local flock of crows making a major fuss. I looked up and saw them getting up the nerve to mob a large bird flapping over the upper pasture. From the size, I assumed it was a vulture, but the set of its wings and the way they moved was somehow wrong for either a black or a turkey vulture. The bird turned, flew closer, and I saw the unmistakable white head and tail of a Bald Eagle.

It has been my experience that we never have problems with just one car. Like children, they suffer injury and illness either in tandem or work as a tag team, going down one after another. On Saturday, older and younger son reported that the farm truck sounded funny and there seemed to be something wrapped around the drive shaft. I drove it out of the barnyard mud onto the grass and crawled underneath. Sure enough, somehow about four feet of heavy gauge wire had gotten tangled around the drive shaft. Since the drive shaft's sole purpose in life is to spin, the wire had accompanied the shaft on its revolutionary mission, tightening with each turn until it was tangled and twisted around like a poison ivy vine on an oak tree. I got a pair of pliers and some wire cutters and set to work. And promptly discovered that I needed much bigger wire cutters. Fortunately I had bought a set some while back for work on the fence. Unfortunately I wasn't sure where they were. The curse of the part-time farmer is that everything is done at odd times wedged into the rest of the schedule. This results in tools being used and stashed in places that seemed logical at the time but deeply confusing to your older self some weeks or months later. After a lengthy search they turned up in a rack with the branch loppers and hedge trimmers. I guess that day I was sorting and storing by form rather than function. With the proper tool in hand I was back upside down under the truck out in the pasture. After an hour or so of clipping and twisting, we had a sack of grease covered wire snippets and a drive shaft free to follow its destiny.

New lambs

The car window from yesterday's post is fixed. I learned in the process that 1.) The phrase "roll up your window" is now forever obsolete since all car makers have discontinued hand cranked windows. 2.) The former scissor style of window regulator, rugged and easily repairable, has been replaced with a cable system that is failure prone and must be replaced as an entire unit (a rather expensive unit) when it fails. Ain't progress wonderful.

Turning to farm news, three new lambs have arrived in the past two days. If the rain holds off I will try for pictures tomorrow.

This morning we woke up to a world in the teens, frost covered and colder than it's been since last winter. I scraped off the windshield of the Ford while older and younger son gathered their bookbags and headed out to join me. Younger son got to the front seat first and decided that, since you could clear dew off the window by lowering and raising it, it should work on frost as well. About halfway down you could hear the grinding of something going wrong with the works inside. No matter how he pressed the button, all he could do was drive the window lower and lower until it was irretrievably down, with no signs of rising again under it's own power. We were running late to the bus stop, so there was no slacking on the speed. The outside temperature was 18 degrees. Inside the car this was reduced by a thirty five to fifty mile per hour wind chill. Older son in the back was huddled down in his seat, hood up, hands in pockets, lips turning blue while muttering dire threats directed at his brother. I dropped them off, returned home and parked the car in the sun, hoping that the problem was cold related and it would thaw out before my first Court case later that morning. No such luck. I drove back to town, the temperature only risen to the 2o's, hair still damp from my morning shower with the heater on full blast to compensate, unsuccessfully, for the swirling frigid wind from the open window. As I stopped at the first light on the main drag through town, windblown and near frostbit, I turned on the cd player, forgetting that missing window provided a free concert for all passersby. I had also forgotten that the disc in the player was soprano Dawn Upshaw's recording of Broadway show tunes by Bernstein, Blitzstein, Sondheim, and Weill (which would have been a great law firm name if they had ever tired of the music racket). So picture this; a middle-aged man sits shivering in a Ford Explorer, mind on his upcoming misdemeanor trial when, at full volume, a piercing female voice suddenly proclaims to all within earshot that:

I feel pretty,
Oh so pretty,
I feel pretty and witty and bright,
And I pity
Any girl who isn't me tonight.

I feel charming,
Oh so charming--
Its alarming how charming I feel,
And so pretty
That I hardly can believe I'm real.

I will not describe the looks I got, except to say with the late Rodney Dangerfield that "Sometimes it ain't easy bein' me."

While browsing in a bookstore yesterday I noticed that the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction had a new story by Alexander Jablokov. I loved his first novel, Carve the Sky, and read anything else he published through the 90's. Sometime at the turn of the century, he dropped off the radar. There was a webpage, but it hadn't been updated in the years since the last novel was published. Intrigued, I bought the magazine, which is now waiting on the bedside table. I also turned to Google and found the old webpage updated here with the following explanation:

Disappearances

I never intended to disappear.

In the early to mid-nineties of the last century, I had a decent writing career, with five novels and one collection of short fiction published. A small but discerning group of people enjoyed my work. After my last novel, Deepdrive, I published a few more stories, and then…nothing.

I was not dead. I was not confined in a secure location for my own safety. I had not decided that text was obsolete as a means of communication or entertainment.

I hadn’t even stopped writing. I was writing less, because I now had a family, which required a demanding day job, but I wasn’t happy with anything I was producing. I even dropped out of my writing workshop for a few years.

But here I am again. I’ve written a number of stories in recent years, just sold one, am close to finishing a novel, have rejoined my workshop, and will be visible here and there in the world of science fiction. Wish me luck!

I look forward to reading the new work, and, as a family man with little enough time even for blogging, I sympathise and, as requested, wish him luck.

Owen over at The Ochlophobist has a long post on the decline of the "common man" that covers sex, professional sports, manual labor, class distinctions, mass media, the ipod, the cell phone, Dostoevsky, stereotypes, rampant consumerism, metal work, male-female roles, the "service" economy, law, drug dealing, G. K. Chesterton, body piercing, Belloc, C. S. Lewis, capitalism, human dignity and, at the end of it all, sanctity. It is uneven, even a bit over the top in spots, but worth your time nonetheless. In the years I have been presenting cases in front of local juries I have been noting a steady decline in common sense as the number of older farmers, craftsmen and small shopkeepers in the jury pool has declined and the number of people who push paper for a living has increased. While some of the first group may not have had much formal education and their experience of popular culture did not extend much past Flatt and Scruggs, their experience of living was far richer than most of the younger folks who only know what they have seen on tv. I miss them. I do not know if Owen is correct in his analysis, but I agree that we will not soon again see their like.

I chaired my first meeting as President of the Browntown Community Center Association tonight. The building in the picture was a country school until it was closed in 1970. My wife taught an aerobics class there a few years back, following in the footsteps of her grandmother and mother, who were both teachers when it was still the Browntown school house. Today it hosts a monthly Bluegrass jam, flea markets, Halloween parties, Christmas caroling, and best little Fourth of July celebration you will find anywhere. The parade through town may only take a few hundred yards, but a good time is had by all. Go to the link over on the right for pictures of past events. The schedule for 2007 will be up in a couple of weeks.

It is a quiet Sunday evening; steady rain outside, a late supper and old movies on DVD inside. Yesterday, by contrast, was a beautiful day, sunny and unseasonably warm. I needed the break today after taking a tumble off the farm truck at the dump yesterday, followed later by an incident involving a broken feed sack, and a mob attack by hungry sheep. The end result of the day's adventures were a few scrapes, some bruises and a reminder that I'm really not as young as I used to be.

Friday afternoon, sunset, looking south

When we drove up this evening, we had a sheep on the deck waiting for us. Dorie was a bottle lamb and occasionally gets the urge to go hang with the humans.

Mother and Daughter. This is the first picture taken of the lamb born just before Christmas. When I found her, she was only hours old, but was up and sucking on her own, quite competent at the job of being a young sheep. Over the past few years, we have been moving away from our finicky, high maintenance purebreds towards a hardier, more self-sufficient cross better suited to our hillside farm and its part time shepherds. And if they happen to have really neat spots and patterns in their wool, well that is just fine as well.

A new set of twins today. No pictures; we went out to feed just as the sun was setting. Most of the flock was clustered by the barnyard after seeing younger son with the feed sack. I looked across the little marshy area below the barnyard spring and saw a ewe hanging back. On one side of her was a black lamb. On the other was a second lamb, black in the front, white in the back, with black spots on the white half and white spots on the black, like a small fuzzy Holstein.

As you can tell, if you are still checking after the long silence, the new year has brought a return to blogging. You may consider it a resolution, if you wish. Some time off after Christmas has given me a chance to catch my breath and get back to a few things that fell by the wayside this Fall. 2006 was a year that was perhaps a little too full of, shall we say, "interesting challenges" for the family. Coming out the other side of a few of them, it is strange to find, in an odd an unexpected way, it was all blessing.

Last Saturday I was down at the barnyard drilling a hole with too small a drill with too small a bit into too large a post, making a hole for a pin to anchor the hinge on a farm gate. We replaced the old rusted out gate this summer but tried to fit the new gate on the old hardware. Like new wine in old skins, the pieces never meshed properly, but I didn't have the time, patience or tools to fix it. The result was that, by December, we did not have a gate so much as an unwieldy piece of metal waiting to be knocked down by persistent sheep whenever they wished to go walkabout in the upper field. I discovered Saturday that even with inadequate tools, the job could be done when approached with a little grace and a little patience. That, oddly enough is the lesson learned throughout much of the rest of the year. After more than a half century of working at this business of living I have begun to realize that if I wait for the perfect tool, the perfect circumstances, or for myself to finally become that perfect person, I will wait past most of the best opportunities for living. As G. K. Chesterton once put it, "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." Chesterton of all people was not interested in encouraging bad work. He knew though that the worst work is that which is not done at all and any work, done with heart, soul and prayer has the potential to be good work. This coming year I intend to hang a few more gates.

A few days before Christmas, I headed home early to head back out for some last minute shopping. When I walked through the door, older son told me we had the first lamb of the season. With camera in hand, I tracked down mother and daughter out in the field near the house. The ewe tolerated a brief photo session before heading out with her lamb to graze in pastures free from annoying paparazzi.

From Washington D.C. to Ancient China and back

My friend Jonathan Chaves will be presenting a reading from his new translation of the poetry of Zhang Ji, Cloud Gate Song at Chapters Bookstore in D.C. this Saturday.  The translation is an experiment which attempts to convey the original Chinese rhyme schemes to the English reader.  I would post a sample, but I have not yet received my copy from Amazon, which swears that it will ship it any day now.  Besides being a scholar and poet, Jonathan is a great reader and I would highly recommend the event to anyone in the area.

 

Until then, here is a sample from an earlier volume, Pilgrim of the Clouds; Poems and Essays from Ming China.  It seems particularly appropriate with the changes wrought by the recent election.  As each defeated incumbent slinks home, in his wake go dozens of aides, functionaries and officials all now jobless.  This is a story that would have been more than familiar to the scholar bureaucrats of ancient China.  Some elements of politics transcend time, place and culture.  However, I do not know if our own modern functionaries will have quite the same perspective in defeat:

 

ON RECEIVING News of My Termination

The time has come to devote myself to my hiker's stick;

I must have been a Buddhist monk in a former life!

Sick, I see returning home a kind of pardon.

A stranger here--being fired is like being promoted.

In my cup, thick wine; I get crazy-drunk,

eat my fill, then stagger up the green mountain.

The southern sect, the northern sect, I've tried them all;

this hermit has his own school of Zen philosophy.

Rainy Tuesday morning. Where did the mountain go?

About a week ago I had a visit to the blog from Sue Bell (no relation that I know). She is an aspiring jazz singer from Seattle who, in addition to saying nice things about the blog, provided a link to her own web page where one can listen to samples from her album. I listened, liked what I heard and followed the link to CD Baby and ordered the CD. Is she the next great voice in jazz or pop? No, but I like her. Why? It's hard to explain, but let me try.

Picture this: You are in a little jazz club. The band is great, all old pros who are tearing it up while trying to keep the music accessible to the casual drinker off the street. The club is almost empty. At the table with you is a talented friend who has sat in with the guys before. They invite her up on stage to do a few songs. Not show tunes or jazz standards, but some of those tunes from the seventies that you secretly liked but were too cool to admit to while putting your Clash or Elvis Costello lps on the turn table. She sounds great. Not a perfect voice, but she sings the hell out of those sappy old songs, stripping out the schmaltz and leaving the honest sentiment behind. And the band sounds like they are having the time of their lives. It's over, and as you walk out, you leave smiling.

While down with the flu this weekend I had the rare treat of being awakened out of a feverish sleep by phone call after phone call only to discover that it was not my wife checking in from her business trip, or my in-laws calling with an emergency or any of our neighbors reporting errant livestock. Instead, it was some damnable recorded voice droning on (and on and on) in behalf of one or the other of the rival candidates in the particularly nasty race for the Senate here in Virginia. It does you no good to scream at a robot, but I tried anyhow, croaking from my sickbed as I slammed the receiver down. And don't even get me started on the omnipresent t.v. ads. The professionals who run these campaigns must truly believe the voting populace consists of idiots who can be swayed by nothing more than a breathless voiceover magnifying the real or imagined sins of the rival candidate. I actually began this election cycle with a certain measure of respect for both George Allen and James Webb, which has declined steadily as their staff and supporters have done what they think is necessary to win my vote. Their thinking is, to say the least, flawed. While it may be unjust to judge the man by his minions, if their campaign staffs are a measure of the candidates' character, I no longer trust either of them to be my Senator. In fact, I am not sure I would trust either of them to be the guy who pushes my trash down with a pole at our local dump station before pushing the big red button on the compactor. Nonetheless, at some point tomorrow I will stand up in a polling place and be faced with the choice between one of the two. This leads me to introduce my own idea for election reform; Vote None of the Above.

I propose a law that would require that in any race there be an additional option to vote for "None of the Above" positioned immediately after the candidates' names. If "None of the Above" leads by a plurality of the vote at the conclusion of the election, then a new election would be held within a reasonable time to allow the parties to reconsider their choices. The parties could, if they were so inclined, re-nominate the same candidates and independents would be allowed to run again. If however "None of the Above" wins an absolute majority, none of the previous candidates would be allowed on the new ballot.

It could be argued that this crackpot proposal would potentially delay the filling of public office and throw our system of government in disarray. Well, as they say in the computer world, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Vote None of the Above!

The view from home this morning.

Many thanks to all the folks who stopped by the blog and particularly those who left comments. For those in search of a real phone of your own, try eBay, or if you do not mind paying a premium for a guarantee that everything works, Vintage Swank on Main Street in Front Royal, a few blocks away from my office, carries a fine selection.

Now that the Instalanche is subsiding, regular blogging will resume with usual selection of farm pictures, literary references, rural anecdotes and the occasional odd thought about my odd life.

It's an Instalanche!

October sunset

Yes, it is a telephone. More particularly, it is a vintage Western Electric telephone, the kind you used to lease from Ma Bell back in the old monopoly days. It is nearly indestructible, the sound quality is great and it rings. It does not beep, buzz, squeak, play hip hop or chatter at you like a mini smoke alarm. There is an actual bell inside and it rings. Some days a small thing is all it takes to make me happy.

By all evidence, the change of the season is here. Top coats are starting to come out of closets around the house. I put on a battered old farm coat yesterday to go track down a ewe who seemed to have some hoof problems and found a pocket full of twine and scraps from feed sacks, left there since early spring. The sheep seem to be noticing the change in light and temperature. Susan looked out the door Monday evening to find half the flock looking back at her, plainly expecting something. It is heading towards that time when we put them in the barn at night and supplement the sparse winter grass with grain and hay, but we are not there yet. We told them so, and eventually they gave up and went back to grazing, casting reproachful glances in our direction as they left.

Here is Twitch, the kitten in question, in focus this time. I had propped an old mattress against the wall in the living room until we could bring the farm truck around to load it up and carry it away. It was climbed, conquered and claimed by the latest addition to the household, lord, as you see, of all he surveys.

No, I have not become a modernist painter. This little bit of "found art" from my picture files illustrates what happens when a small kitten, tricky lighting, and a photographer who (a) did not check the camera settings and (b) did not put on his glasses all join together.

Morning Fog 

A New Year?

The Labor Day weekend just sailed by and I wake up to find myself well into September, the kids back at school and our late summer drought broken by heavy rains.  I'm glad to see the rain for the sake of our parched pastures, but now regret the chores I've put off which will be that much harder in a muddy barnyard.

The beginning of September has seemed like the beginning of the new year ever since I started school circa 1960, much more so than any short, cold day in January.  The old Roman/Byzantine Empire started the New Year on September 1st, and the Eastern Orthodox Churches still use that date to measure the start of the Ecclesiastical year.  There is no special celebration that I am aware of, but it is customary for Hierarchs to note the date with a message to the flock.  Here is meditation on time and new beginnings from Metropolitan Herman of the Orthodox Church in America.  Since we spin around the Sun in a sort of ellipse, Nature does not provide any absolute beginning for the year.  Even the seasons vary depending on your hemisphere.  The carousel keeps moving so fixing any one "start" will always be arbitrary.  It can't hurt though to have as many opportunities for a new beginning as possible.  So, for those of you who could use an excuse for a new start, a re-start, or just a chance to take stock and try again, Happy New Year!

Outfoxed

Really, I had the pictures right there on the card.  I clicked the telephoto lens onto the camera, stepped stealthily out on the deck and caught the red fox prowling through the field next to the house.  Seventeen pictures downloaded to the computer, then deleted from the compact flash card.  When I went to open them up, gone, every last one of them, just like the fox himself when he caught sight of me.

Seraphims on-line

There are a number of "Seraphims" in the Orthodox blogging world.  One is a retired missionary bishop, author and saintly eccentric, currently visiting Moscow for the encouragement of small group of open minded Orthodox believers involved in service and evangelism.  Another is a fellow attorney who practices and prays at the southern end of the Appalachians a few states down from me.  I read both daily, but have a special affection for the second Seraphim whose life experience overlaps with mine in interesting ways.  I read this post last Thursday after a Wednesday I would not care to live over.  I had spent the previous afternoon fighting a doomed battle in a Court-appointed case where I was representing a mother whose child had been taken away for mostly justifiable reasons.  It was a hard case, which I believed I argued well, but ultimately unsuccessfully.  My client was broken hearted, I was depressed, and when my assistant found out that Virginia's Court appointment fee wouldn't cover even an hour of my time billed at our standard rate, she got depressed too.  I do these cases because somebody needs to, but they do exact a cost, emotionally, spiritually and financially.  It did my morale good to hear that sometimes it all works out:

I walked into the courtroom and gestured to my client to meet me in the back. He and his wife came back, still holding hands. He was almost distraught from worry and fear. “They’re coming home,” I said. My guy dissolved in tears and grabbed me in a bear hug, and for several minutes we stood there, me slapping his back, him sobbing, and — to be honest - me not completely dry eyed. Finally we broke, and I told him the plan. Visitation in his home starts on Saturday, and if all goes well, they will move in full time with him when Christmas break starts. He said he understood. I shook his hand, and he grabbed me again. “God bless you, man. God bless you,” he said. I stopped him. “I want to thank you for your prayers over these years,” I told him. “But your prayers have gotten you this: God has blessed you.”

Try to remember . . .

I had intended to link to this when I read it on Monday, but forgot in the press of business, until my assistant printed out the New York Times review of the same show for me today.  Why should I care what Terry Teachout or the Times think of a revival of The Fantasticks?  Teachout's lovely and wistful account of his connection with the play and the changes it made in his life brought to mind the very great changes it made in my own life. 

It was my first, and probably last, appearance on stage as an adult.  I have no ambitions to hit the boards again, but on some mornings, if you put your ear to the door and listen closely over the sound of the shower, you may still hear a somewhat worse for the wear baritone telling you about September, grass, grain and the innocence of youth.

The view from home; morning sun and a little mist. 

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

If you have any literary pretensions at all, somewhere in the back of your mind is that vision of the perfect little coffee-house; a place to come in from the cold and find books, good company and a cup of something to take the chill away.  It appears that someone in Colorado Springs has been rummaging around in the back of my mind and brought a piece of that vision to life.  Anyone interested in setting up a Shenandoah Valley franchise?

Dormition of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church held it's Annual Greek Festival this past weekend. Family obligations kept me from helping the way I would have liked, but I did stop by for some pastries, some pictures and a little roast lamb. To read a little about the hard work that goes on behind the scenes in the kitchen, go here. (Registration may be required)

Small Pleasures

This past weekend I made a stop by Central Coffee Roasters after picking up some tools and placing an order for sheep mineral supplement at the nearby Co-op store.  While I realize that no sane person needs Certified Shade Grown Panama Finca Hartman or Yeman Mocca Matari or Sumatra Swiss Water Decaf dripping through the filter paper in the morning, there is just something about the smell of a fresh ground, properly roasted coffee ending it's journey from some exotic location at my breakfast table that drives me to fork over outlandish amounts of cash at least a few times a year for the experience. 

I am not sure whether this amounts to a guilty pleasure or not.  It perhaps goes into the same category as the Avengers Emma Peel mega-set DVD collection; not necessary, but probably not dangerous to your salvation in the long run.  In any event, I will continue to enjoy the scent from the grinder and coffee-maker in the morning and accept it as a kind of earthy incense blessing the beginning of the day.

Only in America . . .

New Software and Some Audio links

I have been trying out the Beta of Windows Live Writer, a free Microsoft produced blogging tool. So far I am quite pleased with it. The only oddity I have noticed is that, in the course of downloading your blog settings, it creates a temporary blog post. It is erased from the main blog page on completion of the download, but not before it propagates via RSS and ends up preserved in the archives. If any of you out there are trying to figure out why I have blogged a "Temporary Post Used For Style Detection," blame the Beta.

Every year St. Vladimir's Seminary holds a Summer Institute dedicated to an in depth examination of one particular topic in theology, liturgy or Church life. This year the topic was death. The Seminary has made available audio files in mp3 format of ten lectures through the Seminary Press website. Downloading via their system is, shall we say, a non-intuitive process. Go to this page and click "Buy Now" for the lectures you want and then proceed through the normal checkout process. Since the price is $0.00, you will not be charged, but at the end of the procedure will be given a download link for the selected files. I was lured to the site to listen to my favorite contemporary Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, but have been impressed with all of the speakers I have listened to thus far.

Signs of the times

We are still in August, but the first signs of the changing season are here. This afternoon at lunch, the sycamore by the barn was filled with birds, calling and rattling wings, preparing to move south in a swirling black cloud. I have had to brake for a wider variety of creatures on our two lane road lately. This past week it has been raccoons. A few weeks ago it was box turtles. I do not know what inspires the great box turtle migration, but they are especially challenged by asphalt and passing cars. Retreating into one's shell just shy of the double yellow line is not the best way to insure survival of the species. Box turtles are singularly inoffensive and quite attractive in a modest way. I worry about them in a way that would never occur to me to worry about some of their larger cousins. Perhaps I identify with them as they plod along in a world grown too large and confusing, pulling one's head in from time to time when it all become a little too much to bear.

One of my favorite poets, Scott Cairns, has a new collection due out shortly, with excerpts now available on the Paraclete Press website. This one concerns our slow shelled friends, some of whom may actually walk on two legs, or in my own case, wait for me each morning in the shaving mirror.

On Slow Learning

If you have ever owned
a tortoise, you already know
how terribly difficult
paper training can be
for some pets.

Even if you get so far
as to instill in your tortoise
the value of achieving the paper,
there remains one obstacle—
your tortoise’s intrinsic sloth.

Even a well-intentioned tortoise
may find himself, in his journeys,
to be painfully far from the mark.

Failing, your tortoise may shy away
for weeks within his shell, utterly
ashamed, or looking up with tiny,
wet eyes might offer an honest shrug.
Forgive him.

Scott Cairns, from Compass of Affection - New and Selected Poems

It was hot today. The National Weather Service reports that the heat index, that measure of discomfort which stirs together heat and humidity to explain why sweat is rolling off your brow from a stroll across the parking lot, got up to 109 degrees. After work I walked down to the little run that cuts across the pasture with camera in hand, to find it reduced to a trickle. Still, sitting there by water under the shade of trees made the day's end a little more bearable. Here is a poem from Wendell Berry's volume, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 that finds hints of redemption in "the water flowing under the shadow of the trees":

After the slavery of the body, dumbfoundment
of the living flesh in the order of spending
and wasting, then comes the enslavement
of consciousness, the incarnation of mind
in machines. Once the mind is reduced
to the brain, then it falls within the grasp
of the machine. It is the mind incarnate
in the body, in community, and in the earth
that they cannot confine. The difference
is in love; the difference is in grief and joy.
Remember the body's pleasure and its sorrow.
Remember its grief at the loss of all it knew.
Remember its redemption in suffering
and in love. Remember its resurrection
on the last day, when all made things
that have not refused this passage
will return, clarified, each fully being
in the being of all. Remember the small
secret creases of the earth - the grassy,
the wooded, and the rocky - that the water
has made, finding its way. Remember
the voices of the water flowing. Remember
the water flowing under the shadows
of the trees, of the tall grasses, of the stones.
Remember the water striders walking over
the surface of the water as it flowed.
Remember the great sphere of the small
wren's song, through which the water flowed.
and the light fell. Remember, and come to rest
in light's ordinary miracle.

"Sabbath's - 1990"

Yes, it has been a long time since anything new was posted here. Between work, farm, and Susan's recovery from her four surgeries (six if you count the biopsy and installation of the iv line) blogging has not seemed a high priority. I usually blog at the end of the day or first thing in the morning, either relaxing before sleep or easing myself into the day. For a long time this summer sleep came too late and morning came too early. Much has happened, most of it not of interest to anyone except a few family and friends. By and large we have kept close to home, except for a quick trip to St. Augustine Florida last weekend where I took the picture above at the chapel of the St. Photius Shrine, a little oasis in the old section of town, just steps away from throngs of shoppers and tourists. The trip itself might be the subject of another post on another day. Let us just say that my experience with United Express was very, very unlike my experience with the peace and tranquility of the Shrine.

In the meantime, those of you interested in the realities of the practice of law in these United States at the beginning of the 21st Century should go to Ancient Church, the weblog of a fellow attorney and Orthodox Christian and read his stories of text messages, saran wrap, machetes and advice for the lovelorn, courtesy of a series of domestic relations court cases. 

It was a busy weekend and a hectic week on the way. In the meantime, here is a link to a story in our local paper about a visit to the plane pictured in the previous post; "Airport's 'Howdy' gets a special visitor." The restoration of the plane is only partial. You can look straight through from tail to nose past the missing engine and see the surrounding mountains. A family of sparrows has sheltered in the fuselage. Listen closely and you hear chirping through the gun ports.

On Memorial Day I had picked up younger son from visiting with a friend. The route home took us past our small local airport so I pulled over to look at the vintage 1950's Sabre Jet on display out front. I had read about it in the local paper, seen it as I drove by, but had never stopped for a closer look:

Sunday afternoon I stopped by the flea market:







The market here is one of the larger in the area, with sellers who make a living at it, as well as folks simply flogging their junk on tarps in hopes of earning a few dollars. Walking the rows at a flea market is like beachcombing the ocean of our consumer culture. Here a pile of tools, there a box of eight-track tapes. Old vinyl lp's next to new Chinese plastic novelties. The odd rabbit or chicken. Fishing tackle, commemorative plates, a hand-cranked Victorola, t-shirts, a mobile tattoo parlour. If you want it, and have cash, it's here. I came to browse, not buy, but could not resist three cd's by jazz singer Karrin Allyson for fifty cents a piece. I don't know how they ended up next to the lots of used clothing and cheap sneakers from Singapore, but one man's trash, as they say, becomes another's treasure.

Morning sky, a chance of thunderstorms today.

WARNING: The rare Orthodox Agrarian virus seems to be spreading. James at Paradosis has caught the bug. Fortunately it is in the early stages and may still be curable. Scroll down through the comments for this gem from Paige:

As a side note, I vividly remember being eight, watching a special on the news about a program to bring inner-city kids (I guess from Louisville) to my area to see cows and mountains and stuff. I kept thinking that was great, and wondering when the busses were going to come and take me and my friends to Louisville to see a real live mall, or a movie theater. Didn't happen.

This past Saturday older and younger son and I, with the aid of a family friend, caught up on a number of farm chores that had been accumulating over the past few weeks. The rounding up of the flock went well with a single exception. When I got back from a quick run into town for supplies, friend and sons informed me that one particularly energetic lamb had split from the flock, jumped the cattleguard and headed down Browntown Road. The question put to me was whether we should chase the prodigal or just wait for his return while we worked with the rest of the flock. With visions of squealing brakes and crunching bumpers in my head, I led the crew out to search. We found the escapee about a quarter mile away, standing behind an old church which is now "The Freedom Club," an AA meeting house. The lamb had apparently taken the name to heart, because as soon as he saw us, he dashed into the woods behind the building, down a stream embankment and waded across Gooney Creek. We followed, splashing and sliding over slick stones. Two of us went left, two right and tried to surround him. The lamb, faced with imminent capture, surprised us all by bolting straight up the side of Buck Mountain and disappearing into the heavy underbrush.

At that point, tired, wet and with the day slipping away we returned to the rest of the flock. The next day, after hearing a report that the fugitive was back down by the creek, we headed out again. After the previous day's adventure I was ready to leave him be and let him grow into a local legend, "The Wild Sheep of Buck Mountain," but it was Sunday and the words of Matthew 18:12 were murmuring in the back of my mind: "What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?" We set out , trying to track him by hoof prints and deposits thoughtfully left on the lawn of the vacation lodge on the other side of the creek. Again to no avail. We trudged back in defeat, ready to plan the next campaign when my mother-in-law came up and told us that, while we were trudging around, the lamb had come back across the creek and a neighbor had chased it back into our pasture. I decided then that I was not a Good Shepherd by any biblical standard, because at that moment I truly, truly could not "rejoice over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray."

The view from home this morning.

Over at Moonmeadow Farm they are digging garden beds and working with temporary fencing. We have used temporary electric fences with various degrees of success. Some sheep respond well, others never get it. We had one lamb who was the sort that give sheep their reputation for minimal gray matter. She never did comprehend that sticking her head through the plastic mesh would (a)get her head stuck and (b)shock her repeatedly until we could shut off the charger and get her out. Morning by morning we would step outside and hear "baah . . . baah . . . baah . . ." and know that Sue was at it again.

I occasionally read Washington Post columnist Jeanne Marie Laskas, another urban to rural transplant. She recounted her odyssey in her book Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm . I had missed her piece in last Sunday's post until a friend printed it out and passed it on. Since our last few lambs are making their appearance, I thought I would link to it: Sweet Pea Had a Little Lamb.

Mother and twins

Just when you thought the culture couldn't get any stranger, rock star Bono edits a special edition of the English paper the Independent and gets Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to name her ten favorite songs. Who knew that the diplomat, a classically trained pianist, rocks out to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" when not brushing up on her Brahms concertos. I'm not even going to comment on Elton John's "Rocket Man" making her list.

My last post in April noted the wrap up of the "Crunchy Con" book blog. Author Rod Dreher has taken his title and favorite issues over to beliefnet.com where the discussion continues.

Artist Makoto Fujimura, who was also mentioned below, has an exhibit opening at American University's new museum space this Saturday in the flatlands east of us.

I leave you this evening with a picture of twin lambs, also recent arrivals.