Lingering Summer

It seems strange to walk through the woods on the hill behind the house and have the ground cover so bare and the forest floor (as well as the treetops) so clearly undressed for winter when its sunny and nearing eighty degrees.  A strange and lovely day in the midst of the rain and gray and chill.  The chickens, the two flocks, old and young, having joined together recently, are romping and playing in the sun.  Turkey spent the morning standing at our open back door and gobbling at my cat Opie through the screen.  Opie isn’t exactly sure how to take these rather loud words of love.  Nor what to think of Turkey, looking for all the world like he is about to vomit on the cat, spasmodically pushing out his neck to full length like a drunk who has had three too many, then letting out a stream of throaty gobbles.  Turkey looks as surprised as Opie does when it happens.

I need to find that poor bird a girl.

The annual ground cover being gone, I can get a good look at my plan for next spring.  I want to cut down the deciduous trees  that make a path up the hill between the old pines and replace them with berry plants.  I am looking into a few more exotic things, gooseberries and elderberries and such, as I have raspberries and blueberries along the fence line already.  I would love to take some of the old pines down someday and run a small vineyard up the hill as well.  There are a few pines that I could never take, though.  Lovely and contorted, growing out instead of up, looking stark now without the oak leaves crowding them.  They take on patterns of scrolled ink paintings, reaching for the peach tree below it instead of reaching for the sky, all curves and twists, wrapping the hill in shag bark horizontals.

Down the hill the last of the chamomile-like flowers are blooming.  Their bushes were a whole star field of white a month ago.  Now they push out singly, last touches of white in a gilded brown field, a point of memory, a prick of life as winter comes in.

And The Rains Came

It feels like winter.  The cold and the dreary and the wind, the quiet and the brown, the land is preparing itself and it’s coming early.  The tops of the yellowing trees are twisting above our sheltered clearing.  The chickens and Turkey wander the forest and the grass puffed and drenched by the constant mist off the ocean.  It feels early for this and my body feels like there will be a warming yet.  I’m not ready for the long cold and I don’t think that the land is quite, either.

I find the my songs are getting more rural.  I suppose it comes from writing looking out the window at this desk, staring out as the seasons creep in and over our grasses.  I have always searched for a more solid base for the lyrics, fighting my early fascination with letting myself get a little “up in the clouds,” something ungrounded and more cerebral.  A response to being young, I suppose.  Searching for experience but unable to ground it in anything other than myself and my own mental responses to it.  The cities tended to creep in with intersections, street names, neon and yellowed street lamps, late trains and blue light buses, working grinds and beers and diners.  Now, with no light save for those in the windows of the croft and the sun and the moon, with the browning grasses, the yellowing trees, the stripping winds, the seasons are a little more immediate.  More solid.

And should I ever manage to finish recording the new tunes, that will, I hope, be plainly heard.

I am playing with different recording techniques.  I would like to record standing up, but it makes my one stereo mic recording impractical (I move too much).  As does the noise of the chickens and such that likes to filter in.  I may record with my live rig, the mic up against the amps, but my low E string is a little hotter and prone to over-resonances that way, so I don’t know how well that would work.  I could go direct in with the pickup, but I would miss the woody-ness of the acoustic.  I’ll keep playing around and hopefully find something soon…

A Bad Week for Chickens

Last week was a bad week for chickens.  A bloody and rather macabre week.  We lost one older girl to cannibalism and lost one of our babies to a hawk.  The hawk got another of the babies (the Cuckoo Maran, otherwise known affectionately at “The Moron”) on the neck but, despite a rather large wound through which I could see her glands when she swallowed, she seems to be going fine now.

So we now have a scarecrow.  Or a scarehawk, maybe.  It’s made from my wife’s old clothes and, thus, about her height.  I find myself thinking “when did she get home?” every time I catch it in the corner of my eye.  If it works on me, well, hopefully it will work on the hawk, too.  And it has so far.  It also seems to have worked on Turkey.  He spent most of the first day the scarecrow was up trying to seduce it with his lovely displays.  Must have worked, because he slept next to it for the next three days.  Then he cast it aside and came back to sleep on the back deck.

To give you a bit more of the macabre tonight, here is what is on the window in front of my desk:

Pretty girl, this.  Has black and orange striped legs.  Very appropriate to the season.  If I didn’t know better, I would think it one of my wife’s (MANY) Halloween decorations.

I will most likely be “premiering” two new tunes at The Wounded Bookshop tonight.  It’s my favorite venue to see how much of a fool of myself I can make by playing new songs I don’t really know yet.  A good time is always had by all.

Season’s End

Odd that, for the first time, I can feel the sense in September holding the official end of summer.  I understand solstices and equinoxes and all that stuff, but it’s just never quite felt right.  September in the north is the beginning of the cool.  When it comes, harvest is starting and the word edges into colors and into browns and into grays soon after.

It is, of course, my favorite season.  By far.  Spring is a relief, she comes and everything greens and the world begins to move again under my cold feet.  But Autumn, there is nothing like her.  I have a passion for the quiet fading.  For the shortening, the tightening, the quieting of life.

Maybe it’s why I don’t worry much about getting older, or having done so little outwardly productive with my youth.  I love Autumn too much to care.

So the last wildflowers bend above our paths, sulphur yellows and tiny whites.  Here, in September of the south, some of my fruit trees are still trying to put out some leaves, testing the cool, trying to stretch a little more despite the thinning of the season, hoping they have enough time left to tighten, become woody, to set and to weather the coming winter.  I suspect that they are right, that they do have the time yet and, if the deer are kind, they will have managed just a little more with their year.

Which is good.  It’s not been a year of high produce.  The trees were eaten by about everything I could possibly imagine – caterpillars, deer, insects and a strange mold all roughed them up a bit.  I just hope that they did well enough in the ground to establish and that, root solid, the next year will give me a little more growth.  The grapes and berries had a rough time getting established and were hard pressed to live out the nearly two months of hot drought that was midsummer.  But they seem set and next year I have some hopes for berries (should the chickens be nice, that is).  Other than that, our rough ground gave a few small potatoes, some dwarf (shall I say bonsai?) and inedible melons, a few tomatoes and, ripening right now, a load of yellow peppers.

So now the cool slips in, moist and clinging, and the colors of the grasses cool to rich browns, the flowers fade and the first leaves start to find yellows and reds creeping deeper and deeper along their veins.  And there’s nothing much lovelier…

Lack of Recording (or How To Manicure Your Roo)

I just can’t quite get myself to do it right now.  To sit down (or, really, stand up) and sing into a mic and then stare at waves on a screen and edit.  I have a good number of new songs.  Heck, enough that I seem to find recent songs I have already forgotten I wrote (probably not a good sign about the memorability of those tunes, but who knows, maybe they’ll grow on me).  I keep meaning to get around to roughing them out and putting them up on the various sites, but it just doesn’t seem so very interesting to me right now.  That and with our loud ass and very angry with me rooster always crowing I would have to shut up the house.

Here, by the way, is why the rooster is angry with me:

Roo here has been a little rough on the girls during his noisy lovemakin’ due to his ever so pretty (everything on roo is so pretty) toenails.  So he got a manicure.  Now he’s noisy and grumpy.  Lovely.

Anyway, I will be out at The Griffin tonight and taking one of the new tunes there with me.  Check in at the Chris Jones Open Mic where I will be getting my stage legs back after too much time off and probably ending with “Grab My Heart.”  You can take bets on whether or not I can remember the words…

New Chicks

Well, we have eight new girls.  At least, we hope they are all girls.  Right now they are little fluff balls.  I took them to Hyperion so they could get some attention.  Very funny.  They handled the lots of little kids with lots of little fingers thing pretty well, all in all.  And now they are out in the small coop.  One is crazy, happily jumping from place to place, leaping from two by four to two by four, diving into the fresh straw…  Three are Buff Orpingtons, Three are Cucoo Marans and two are, well, a mystery.  The hatchery filled in what breeds they couldn’t supply with something else.  I suppose we will find out what with soon.  One is a tiny mystery chicken.  I think she’s my favorite.

A few of our new girls.

A few more of our new girls.

My favorite mystery chick.

Rain and Chickens

The skies are overcast, a heavy gray without layers.  It doesn’t feel threatening, just hopeful.  But, as they apparently cease to move and apparently cease to rain, the hope seems, as always, misplaced.  I am now considering buying twenty ton of sand and dumping it on our hill and starting a desert based theme park.  I think I could get some lovely cacti going up here.  The old west of the East, that’s us.  Everything green is shut down and waiting, but the year is getting on and the new shoots will be going to bark soon.  The few grapes that faced the dry and the heat are ripe, but it taxed the vine even more.  I probably shouldn’t have let them produce, but it was only one plant that managed to fruit, so there isn’t much harm, I don’t think.  Considering the lack of the rain, most of the other vines look equally stunted now, fruit or no.

We lost a chicken on Monday.  Our first adult to go.  Guido, our deformed, half blind, crooked beak and toed boy who survived the slaughter by never maturing into male characteristics had such a deformed beak that he finally couldn’t get enough to eat.  Add the starvation to the heat of the past few days and his poor, crooked body finally gave in.  He was an amusing boy but in nature he never would have made it much past getting out of his shell.  It’s a reminder that, ever so often, nature knows best, really.

In a strange commercial version of the circle of life we have, hopefully, eight day old chicks coming in today.  Turkey, my Heritage Bronze Tom, had to be evicted from his little coop to make room for the new girls.  He has, despite his best efforts, taken up home with the chickens.  He would rather come inside the house, as we are his flock as far as he is concerned and he can’t quite understand why we get to roost in the house and he doesn’t, but that isn’t going to happen.  Once the heat of the day goes, he stands in front of the sliding door and waits for me to come out and play.  Poor boy needs a girl.  My wife put up a personal add for a drug and disease free female Bronze for him, but, so far, to no avail.

The Battle of Fredericksburg Festivals

The Homegrown Festival scheduled for October has been canceled.  It’s sad for me as it sounded like such a good time and a chance to hear many of the great musicians in this town (the festival was set up in part by a great player and writer for several national music magazines, possibly headlined by a Grammy winner and involved one of the greatest fingerstylists I have ever heard).  Fredericksburg has an amazing music community for it’s size.  The town knows it but, as familiarity breeds indifference, we tend to forget or ignore.  There is a lot of great work going on here, but very little of the independent media structure that a larger town would support.  So the word seldom gets out.  You hear of shows and goings on by word of mouth.  To make it worse, you often hear of it after the event.  The Front Porch paper does it’s best, but it’s monthly format tends to limit how effective it can be as a gig guide.  The local “professional” paper couldn’t care less.  It wonders why it’s circulation is going down when it has the most pathetic world and national news I think I’ve ever run into and it’s local coverage tends to ignore the town unless a dog is lost or a tree is felled by lightening.

Now our local museum has stepped up to the big platter of ignore.  A new director decided that they didn’t want to support the festival to the level that had been agreed and worked out.  There were already hopes and plans to get the word out about the festival to other communities, pulling in some fresh ears for a constricted music community, some fresh eyes to a pretty town and art community and some fresh dollars for all.  But it seems that the museum decided that the  community isn’t their mandate.  It has the old cultural stuff and the new cultural stuff isn’t worth there involvement. In an era when every museum had decided that outreach is their best bet for relevance, they want to stay behind their doors and reach for themselves.

It’s particularly sad for me since I take so much inspiration from the town and it’s environs, it’s history and it’s stories.  In an era of depression (erp, um, recession), the middle class that could, a few years ago, manage to hit the quaint European towns and villages of, say, England, are too strapped for cash to consider that trip this year.  And here we are.  A town with a large historic district that is, really, as old as most of what survives in those quaint English towns.  But Fredericksburg doesn’t involve a plane ticket.  But we, the town’s leading old men and the institutions, have missed the boat.  It’s a town that, like the stronger and quainter communities in England, has a thriving local art and music scene.  And that boat is heading out, too.  So the word stays here.  The downtown promotion is aimed at the town (very usefull that), the cultural reputation sold to the community instead of out of the larger world.  All the inspiration that I draw for this area could be just as easily be drawn from any visitor.  They just need to be coaxed.

We need some stronger ties between the supported and the underground (them artists, musicians and craftsmen and women, us unruly bunch, us).  Fredericksburg isn’t big enough to keep both running smooth.  There needs to be integration.  We need some support for the larger town to filter down to we, the underprivileged producers (we’ve a lot of old Regan repubs running this little city, so if figure I’ll take up their language a bit there).  We need some stronger ties but they just fray on ego and some small town notion of a big reputation.  Maybe we need a East by SouthEast festival.  Maybe we need to take back the town (I’ve my pellet gun oiled and ready).  The ‘Burg has plenty to show, we just need some powers that be that are actually interested in showing it.  Less personal reputation and more local respect, perhaps…

Lulls and Turkeys

My life has been taken up by a very needy turkey. It was mentioned that “needy” is not necessarily the expected word to describe a turkey, but they don’t know my turkey. We went up to Michigan a month ago and came back with four full grown hens and a very noisy baby turkey. He, the baby, was lonely, so I took him under my wing (so to speak), playing with him and walking with him and letting him ride on my shoulder and such. He now is a little confused. He tries to live with the chickens, but he knows they aren’t exactly family. Because we, the humans, are family. So he will spend the day with the chickens if he has to, but would prefer to be with his humans. Since he saw me do it, he tries to weed the vegetable beds. He has some problems telling the difference between crabgrass and young squash, however. He gets very upset when I move him out of the beds when he starts pulling the wrong plants (particularly since the squash is far easier to pull up). He helps me hunt the troglodyte crickets that live in the great tunnels in our yard when I force them out into the open with the hose. And he follows us. Everywhere. He stands on the deck and stares in the glass door. He sleeps outside the door waiting for me to come out and play.

I don’t think we will be eating him.

On the music front:

There may be some new recordings up soon. The task I set myself of learning to play standing up seems to be going well (though it involves the strap being a little too high to be cool, I wanna be Jimmy Page but look a little more like Joe Pass). Standing gives me a much better control of my voice, however, so it seems to be worth it. I am in the process of moving several of the songs up a step or so now that I have some vocal support. There are a half dozen of so new songs written, but nothing recorded yet. They may be coming soon…

Farms and Fourth

Over twenty years ago I rode through the west, coming back from California through the plains. On the fourth of July we cut through the levelands of Kansas and, at night fall, the world went from gray dusk to color. Every little town and every little hamlet, surrounded by the level fields, sent up their fireworks in hot, colored blooms above the land. Miles and miles of sky filled with miles and miles of sudden color. It was a moment I have never forgotten and managed, at long last, to relive here on a Michigan farm. Last night I climbed to the top of the high dirt pile from the beginnings of a root cellar my father in law is building and watched over the corn fields as every town started their finale. The horizon burst to light. The fireworks up close followed one another and out beyond, along the ring of vision, the color blended to bursts of white light.

I have spent the days wandering, guitar strapped to me, through the fields. A good way to learn to play standing up, that. So, hopefully, when we head back south, I will be out playing and soon…