abiotic – Page 20

Today at Kingsford – The gap between the seasons

Well, autumn was nice, but fleeting, as it always is. Here we are, November, on the cusp of winter already. Autumn and spring seem like the shortest seasons to me, those transitional periods where everything is always changing and nothing lasts for long. Winter endures, from November through March, a long five months of cold and snow bookended by marginally less cold and snow.

Virtually all of the trees have lost the last of their leaves now, and their thin, bare branches form a stark background in the landscape. The only colour remaining exists in the yellows of the stubborn beech leaves, the greens of the few scattered conifers, and the golden browns of the dead grasses. On a bleak, overcast day, the sort of day that I tend to associate with November, everything looks very washed out and monotone. November is a slightly depressing month, that empty gap between the beauty of the fall colours and the beauty of the crisp winter snows.

The days are cooling down, but the nights have become cold, with frost gilding the edges of the grass blades and fallen leaves when we rise in the morning. The afternoon sun takes the edge off the chill, and one can forget, temporarily, that a long winter is on the way. Evenings are spent beside the fireplace, listening to the cozy rumble of burning wood, curled up, perhaps, with the pets and a good book.

I don’t like to rush the seasons, preferring to enjoy each one while it’s here, knowing the next will arrive in due time and I’ll regret not having taken greater advantage of the previous. November, however, is the sole exception to this. I tend to look through November, to the snow and ice beyond, anticipating the crunch of fresh snow underfoot, the soft, pristine white expanses, the fat, fluffy snowflakes drifting lazily down from the sky, the skating rink Dan plans to clear on the lake.

Infatuation

I’ve become more familiar with our immediate surroundings now that I’ve started going for regular walks with Raven. Although I’ve only walked about a kilometer to the south, I’ve gone about two and a half to the north along our road, and the same distance along a side road that branches off from it. I know where all the houses are along these stretches, which ones have year-round residents, which properties don’t have buildings at all. As I was walking Raven with my mom last week, we passed this one, which she commented on. It’s a simple gated driveway, but the driveway itself is all grown over with knee-high weeds to the point where it more resembles a linear clearing than a driveway, and its connection to the road and the gate going across it are all that identify its past purpose.

Mom asked if I’d wandered around down there, and I said no, of course not, it’s not my property. But after a few more pass-bys, my curiosity got the better of me. Okay, I admit it – I trespassed onto someone else’s land. But it was vacant, and obviously hadn’t seen vehicular traffic in ages, so I wasn’t worried about the owners finding me there and getting upset. And I was curious. I knew the property must stretch back onto the lake, and I wanted to see what some of the surrounding landscape was like. Aside from the park immediately across from us, though, and one small 2 acre parcel that’s vacant and for sale, we haven’t wandered through any of the forest that neighbours us.

So yesterday I stepped around the gate and headed down the lane. The driveway beyond was in the same state as that before the gate, overgrown by goldenrod and raspberry canes, and with downed branches that gave me the impression that it hadn’t been used in at least a year, perhaps two. Not far down I found a patch of evergreens. Coniferous trees are conspicuously lacking just half a kilometer down the road in the area around our house, but here they were reasonably abundant. Mostly white pine, it seemed, but there were some cedar in an area of wet ground that the driveway passed, and a few hemlock scattered in. I love coniferous trees, and miss having them around the house here (there are a handful of little saplings that seem to have been planted in the yard a few years ago, but they hardly count). Just that discovery alone made me like the place.

Generally speaking, by this time of the year I tend not to use the word “beautiful” to describe forests, but the property was beautiful, and held so much potential for the return of leaves in the spring. A small creek cut across the property, and though the water level was low, it was still running. Hemlocks and cedars lined portions of it, and mossy stones made the water trickle lightly in others. The landscape of the surrounding property was rolling, and many of the beech trees still held their bright yellow leaves, lending colour to the now mostly gray forest.

As I neared the end of the driveway, I could see a building hiding behind some trees. At first its darkened sides looked like it had perhaps suffered a fire, and was now abandoned. That would explain the disuse of the driveway. Right near the house a couple of large trees had come down across the driveway, and were old enough to be starting to decay, but hadn’t been removed. Underneath one, protected from the clutter of falling leaves by the large trunk, I could see gravel, suggesting that the driveway had actually been surfaced at one point.

The house hadn’t been in a fire, it turned out, it was just weather-worn. It looked like the owners had begun building it, got as far as getting the frame completed and a roof on top, and then ran out of money. There were cement pilings with rebar set into the ground around the front that looked like they were intended to support a deck. All the windows were boarded up, but you could see where they were intended to go; the front of the house was designed like a Viceroy home, with big windows opening into a vaulted living space, perfect for looking out over a vista such as a lake. Inside it was a bungalow design, with a big, open living space and a couple of bedrooms framed in in the back. The washroom and kitchen hadn’t yet been laid in, so I wasn’t sure where they were intended to go.

They had put siding up to protect it, but it had been so long since anything had been done that some of the boards had come off, or been broken. The top boards from the front windows were missing (or had never been put in place), and when I peered inside, I could see whitewash across the floor; evidently crows or some other large birds had been perching in the windows.

To say I was enamoured with the place is an understatement. The land was beautiful. And there was so much of it. When I returned home after I looked up a map of our district that included property lines. Based on this, I figure the house includes about 15 acres. It faced out onto a quiet lake – although there was no provincial park on the other side, neither were there any houses, and the same district map indicated the far shore consisted of just three properties. And the house has so much potential. (Nina of Nature Remains recently coincidentally mentioned that that was the word they kept repeating upon discovering their own home in the woods.) It reminds me of buying the puppy – someone else has gone through the planning and first early stages, but you take over it young enough to shape it and make it completely your own. I can envision that great room finished, with bright, wide windows overlooking the lake, a fire roaring in the woodstove in the corner. I’ve totally fallen head over heels in love with the idea of this place.

Unfortunately, there is no “For Sale” sign out front. Not that this is necessarily a roadblock to owning the home, but it does complicate things. I suppose talking it over with Dan and getting him on board would also be important. We’re getting a bit tired of doing the renting thing, for various reasons, and it would be good to invest in the real estate market, the most secure investment one can make over the long-term. We’re locked into our lease till next summer anyway, so wouldn’t be looking to move anytime soon, but that would give us time to complete the house…

Okay, so it’s all pretty much in the realm of fantasy and daydream right now, but boy, how I would love to own that place and finish it up.

There were lots of birds about there. Mostly chickadees, which seem to be ubiquitous even after most other birds have cleared out (this one seems to have dropped a couple of tail feathers and is in the middle of growing in replacements). With them I found a number of other species. Red-breasted and White-breasted Nuthatches were usually in the flocks, often several together. One flock had a couple of Golden-crowned Kinglets traveling with them. Kinglets are later migrants, but I was still surprised to see them there. Some do actually stick around southern Ontario in the winter, where there’s enough food. They tend to favour conifers, and I found this group in a patch of hemlock along the creek edge. Still, they’re such tiny, delicate little birds, it’s amazing they can weather the cold so well.

Also a few Brown Creepers, I think I counted four total. Creepers, like kinglets, are small birds that I tend to think of wintering further south but that do stay in Ontario in small numbers over the winter. They get their name from their habit of creeping up the trunks of trees, peering into crevices, looking for food. It’s an interesting evolutionary process, complementing that of nuthatches, which crawl downwards on trunks, head first. Nuthatches find all the prey in the cracks as they go down, and the creepers find all the prey on the other side, going up, that the nuthatches miss. This one’s checking out some Shelving Tooth fungi.

I saw a few woodpeckers, too, mostly Hairys. Lots of old and downed wood in the forest gave them ample foraging substrate for food. I saw evidence of Pileateds having worked some trees in the area, too, though no sign of the birds themselves. Along the driveway I flushed a Ruffed Grouse that was wandering underneath the pines, there were Canada Geese on the lake near the shore, and a group of Blue Jays calling from the trees near the house. I was surprised by the amount of bird activity I encountered, outside of the presence of any feeders.

Infatuation with the property aside, it was a lovely walk, and a whole lot nicer than hiking along the road. I’m toying with the idea of contacting the land registry office for this region to see if I can find out who owns it, to ask for permission to hike there regularly.

And to know who to talk to about eventually buying it…

Today at Kingsford – First snow

We got our first snow of the winter this afternoon. A large storm system rolled through much of the northeast, with portions of eastern Ontario, western Quebec, New York and surrounding areas bearing the brunt of it. If it had been the middle of winter we may have ended up with a few inches of accumulation on the ground in some areas. As it was, being the tail-end of fall, the ground was still warm enough to melt most of the snow before it accumulated. As of now (midnight) the ambient temperature has finally dropped to freezing, and some surfaces are cold enough to collect a light dusting, including the deck railing and my car, though it still melts on the ground. It creates a funny pattern, like someone deliberately dusted these surfaces in preparation for some fancy Christmas party.

At some points this afternoon it was falling so thickly that it obscured the park on the far shore of the lake, except for the white birches that shone through. It’s about the right time of year for our first snowfall – not too early that we’re cursing, not too late that we’re wondering where it is. I recall a few Hallowe’ens growing up where we went trick-or-treating with a light cover of snow on the ground. There may be a little of the snow left over tomorrow morning, but I suspect it won’t last very long. It looks like the last of the system has nearly moved out of our area, so we’re unlikely to accumulate much more.

I enjoy these early snows. The novelty is still fresh, and I can look out and be excited to see snowflakes falling. I enjoy watching them drift in waves across distant landscapes, such as the lake’s far shore, the wind billowing them and pushing them around like it would a field of grass. Dan tossed a couple of snowballs at the window when he went out with the dog this evening, catching me by surprise. Chances are we’ll be feeling much less enamoured with the white stuff come February…

Life after death

Near the foot of our road, just before where the old gray pavement turns to rutted, packed dirt, there is a small white church. It’s an old church, one of the one-room sorts, seating perhaps thirty or forty people at full capacity. It dates back to the mid-1800s, and is typical of the structures of the time, with a small belfry and a mudroom off the front where churchgoers would enter.

I’m sure there was probably a plaque on the side of the building, or a stone set into the foundation, that would tell me the exact age of the church, but I didn’t think to look. I was distracted by the stones that were set, in rows, in the carefully groomed area surrounding the church. I find cemeteries fascinating, particularly the old ones. Looking at the stones and contemplating the lives of those people who came before us, who may have been gone for a hundred years or more.

This was the oldest stone I noticed there. These days headstones are often granite, a sturdy rock that stands up to time well, but old stones of the 1800s were virtually all carved into marble or limestone, because they’re soft rocks and easy to manipulate, but also easy to obtain. There are some marble deposits along the shore of Birch Lake, one lake south of us, noted on the map for Frontenac Provincial Park (which points out interesting sights and sites of historical interest within the park). Over the years the marble slowly erodes and the text, which presumably was crisp and easily legible when it was first carved, gradually becomes softened and hard to discern.

Given the age of this stone, I’m impressed that it still retains such a clear engraving; I attribute it in part to the fact that the stone had started to lean forward, sheltering the carved side from the direct effects of the weather. The name is hard to make out now – does it say Terrey Berley? Tellen Burle? – but the date is clear: Christmas eve, 1856. Aged 41 years. Even just reading this information makes you pause and wonder about their life. Did he (or she) die of natural causes? Perhaps they were ill, pneumonia wouldn’t’ve been uncommon, particularly in winter. What would they have been doing that Christmas eve if they weren’t ill? They died quite young, just 41 years.

Grown over, scattered with fallen pine needles and covered in lichen, this stone was the second-oldest I came across. The date on the left side reads 1889, though I can’t make out the month. At the top of the left it reads “In Memory of Mary Timmerman, wife of”, but her husband’s name is obscured. Under the date it gives her age at death. I only noticed this additional line once I got home, but I think it says aged 35 years. On the right are two of her children, Elizabeth, aged 5 yrs, and Catherine, aged 8 months. Child mortality during the 1800s was about 20%, due to various diseases and infections, so seeing the two daughters listed isn’t a surprise. Given her age, 35, she herself may have died during childbirth, also not unusual during that time period. In modern North America the rate of mortality of the mothers is only about 9 in 100,000 births, while in developing worlds, and in times pre-dating modern medicine, it can be as high as 900 in 100,000 births or more. That’s nearly 1 in every 100 births. One of the primary reasons was hemorrhaging or other injury due to a large baby and small pelvis, or improper delivery position of the baby.

Alarmingly, while it still remains exceptionally rare, the rate of women dying during childbirth is beginning to creep upwards again. A report (as summarized in this article) indicates that the death rate of mothers has increased by about 40% in the last 20 years, and the reason is because in the relatively rich cultures of developed nations more mothers are overweight or obese, which can lead to serious complications. Of nearly 300 mothers who died in childbirth between 2003 and 2005, half were overweight or obese, and 15% were considered extremely obese. The primary cause of death in these cases is heart disease, and the complications in care as a result of it.

This is another woman who died young. The stone says, “In memory of Jenny Fyfe, wife of Oliver Orser. Died May 13, 1902, aged 35 years.” Perhaps she died in childbirth, perhaps she fell ill, the stone doesn’t say. On the right is her husband’s engraving, on the same stone: “In memory of Oliver Orser. Died June 6, 1936, aged 66 years.” He outlived his wife by quite a few years. It’s interesting that on these stones the women’s all say, if they were married, who their husband was, while the men’s make no mention of a spouse. Most women didn’t have their own identity back then, they were either associated with their father or their husband.

There were two families that made up the majority of the stones in the old section of the cemetery. The Orsers were one of them, with half a dozen stones all from about the same date range. The men, perhaps brothers, and their wives and children. The Orsers seemed to prefer these tall, obelisk-ish stones, with multiple family members engraved on each, one per side.

The other family were the Snooks, who preferred this shorter, but more imposing, style of stone. This stone belongs to Oliver Snook (Oliver seemed to be a common name then) and his daughter Maggie. Maggie died at 7 years old, and under her dates of birth and death it says “At rest.” I didn’t notice such a statement on any of the other stones, so does that mean that she was violently ill during her last days, and now she’s finally at rest? Or is it just one of those generic statements that goes on headstones, but has no particular circumstantial meaning. Oliver died 14 years after his daughter, aged 64 years. That means he was 50 when Maggie was born. Perhaps Maggie wasn’t his daughter after all, but then what relation would she have been, to share a headstone with Oliver? On the other hand, men are capable of having children when they’re older, and if he had a younger wife or a large family, having a new child at age 50 wouldn’t be too surprising.

Visiting cemeteries and reading the headstones, wondering about the people whose names are engraved into the monument and what their life must have been like, it always makes me feel very contemplative. It also makes me keenly aware of my own mortality, and that of all the people I know and love, and inevitably I end up feeling sad at our inevitable demise. Perhaps not so much my own, but of those near to me. We don’t know when death will come to take any of us, but knowing that our time with our loved ones is unavoidably limited, we should make sure we spend time with them now, while they’re here with us (or we’re here with them), while they’re (or we’re) in good health, while there’s still lots of time to enjoy life and being alive. I think all of us, in today’s busy, fast-paced culture, concentrating on working out our own lives, we’re all guilty of not doing this nearly enough.

Today at Kingsford

While Raven and I waited on the shore for Blackburnian to come and find us the other day, we were treated to a quiet sunset. I haven’t been out on the water at dusk much lately, so have missed the sunsets. It’s also been fairly rainy recently, so there hasn’t been much colour in the sky. That evening the wind had picked up, and I sat perched on a rock at the edge of the shore, where I could be easily seen, but where I was also glad that Raven was still small enough to fit on my lap to keep it warm. The clouds on the horizon heralded more rain; it had been drizzly most of the day, and drizzled again overnight, but that evening period, at least, was clear.

This evening as I sat on the couch wondering what I should post for Today at Kingsford today, Blackburnian came around on the deck and tapped on the window. He had something in his hand, and I looked at it and thought, “Perfect!” I grabbed my camera and took a series of photos, but when I got back to the computer I couldn’t decide which one I liked best and wanted to use. So now it’s tomorrow’s full-length blog post, instead of today’s Today at Kingsford. Which means you’ll have to wait.