A Sunny Saturday

I can't sleep in when I'm at the schoolhouse and this morning I awoke with the birdsong, which is cacophanous especially in the spring when there are lots of birds passing up the Mississippi fly-way.

Out on the step in the early sunshine, the Mississippi sparkled down below and I was surprised by the amount of what my Grandpa T. used to call "mustard" in the alfalfa field. Later, when I looked up the plant, I found it was really called Winter Cress and is a member of the mustard family whose spicy seeds were often used in olden times to replace pepper when it was in short supply.

Moby and I quietly left the house and walked down the road toward Mac & Shirley Heiller's farm. We walked down to the little hut that a fellow from Indiana built on a half acre of land that he bought from Mac. It is under the radio antenna and under the big powerline that comes up the side of the bluff, but it has a wonderful view of the river because of the power line clearance.

We have never seen these folks and we may never, but we walk down to check out their little estate now and then. It is becoming clear that the fellow's plan to create an tiny arboretum is going to run into space problems soon, as all of the trees are too close to one another.

Next we headed through the fence onto state land and walked through the edge of the oak plantings into the bigger trees. The ephemeral spring flowers are all in bloom and the woods was bursting with the kind of juicy energy that you only sense in spring. Everything was budding and blooming, buzzing, mating and growing like, well, a weed!

I never remember, on these morning walks, to bring a camera when I first exit the schoolhouse and then I am reluctant to go back in to get it for fear of waking someone unnecessarily. What a dope.

Moby was having a great time following deer trails and rolling in the green grass and just plain running loose. I sometimes try to catch his joy on camera, but it never translates to film. He is such a happy runner and such a graceful jumper; it is a pleasure to watch him in the wild.

We traversed the trees and headed down to the edge of the gulley below the oaks and came upon circle after circle of May Apples. None of them were blooming yet, but their umbrellas were huge and obscured large buds. Closer to the ravine we came upon our first Jack-in-the-Pulpits and some wild Columbine. There were Lobed Hepatica, too.

We turned back uphill and popped out on top just at the corner of the schoolhouse fence. There is a nice open spot in the middle of the oaks just before this rise that I always think we should have a picnic in, but then when it comes time to eat, sitting in the schoolhouse with the six windows and the door open is sort of like having a picnic anyway!

I walked around the south side of the schoolhouse to peek in the window just as Thành was sitting up in bed and wondering where he was. When he turned to look out the window and saw me outside, a huge smile crossed his face and he cried, "Morning Mama!" What a joy this little boy is.

The rest of the day was dedicated to the early spring jobs. Ted split the new pile of oak that Bugman (Larry Bauer, who got his nickname by eating a bug in a bar one night) had delivered for us. I sat in the sandbox, cool from the previous night's rain, and pulled out all of the grass that seeds itself in the fall. It is fun to follow the rhizomes with your fingers, sometimes all the way across the sandbox! Easy weeding.

When I finished with that, and while Ted fed the boys some lunch, I moved on to a small stand of Stinging Nettle that was next to the sandbox. It grows in a place where there was once a burning pile; amidst the broken pieces of concrete and burned cans. One day I will excavate this spot, as it is the only garbage on the property.

Louis announced that he had learned at The Land School that stinging nettle was edible and just as good as spinach, but after gathering a big bunch and getting a pot of water boiling I still had not located anything about eating nettles in my Herter's Guide, and so we bailed out of the plan, lest someone have an adverse reaction to it.

(Subsequent research has shown that stinging nettle is ENTIRELY EDIBLE and is, in fact, a Romanian Easter treat and considered a spring tonic in many cultures. Some people consider them a "super food", so packed with vitamins are they!

After lunch I started on the woody vine that has grown up every summer next to the foundation of the schoolhouse. I can't find it in any guide, though it may be woodbine. I dug and dug and dug. The nasty stuff passes under the foundation of the schoolhouse, through the crawlspace and out the other side! In the end, I managed to finish one long side of the school, which included picking out all of the glass from one broken window that was buried in the dirt.

Louis dug himself a hole to lay in and took a little nap. Ted finished splitting the wood and made a tidy new woodpile north of the schoolhouse. The kids played in the sandbox and swung on the swing, climbed in the Jack Pine and hung out. What a great place this is.

In the evening we cleaned up and headed over to Freeburg to Little Miami for dinner. We haven't been there in a blue moon and on the way we were terribly saddened to see that the old rectory of the Universalist Church in Freeburg Valley had burned to the ground.

This building was much like the schoolhouse in design, though a bit larger and it had a large vestibule that had been added on. The entire place had burned and collapsed into the basement. Someone had pulled the metal roofing out of the hole, but everything else was down in the pit. Louis, of course, wanted to scavange for junk after immediately finding a couple of cool things. We told him that we were clean and going to dinner, but that we'd come back the next day.

My heart is sick over the loss of this little building.

We ate and then hung out near Crooked Creek for a while and let Louis scamper around on the rocks. The creek is high, but not too high, and the night was lovely. The Swallows were skimming the grass and the water picking bugs out of the air and a Kingfisher flew in and sat in a Cottonwood tree to watch for frogs. We took the long way home following a road that we had never taken before. The valley here is so beautiful and wide, it's just too bad about the junk guy that has his farm right in the middle of town.