Category Archives: Nature

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Borrowed Beauty

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Today I have been impressed by the beauty and grace of others.   I sometimes think that is intimidating, but more and more I am learning to appreciate and celebrate what I notice without turning in judgment upon myself.  I admire the woman who gave me a “Thank You” gift for taking her shift at work.  This gift was hand-crafted, creative, personal, AND included chocolate!  Plus, it was totally unexpected, as she had already thanked me in a note the day I agreed to work for her.  This woman took the day off to go to her granddaughter’s school for Grandparents’ Day.  She is also an expert woodchopper, using the twitter and froe like a man half her age.  I told her that I struggle with that chore and frequently get stuck on the knot holes.  This is what she tucked into the little bag of chocolates for me:


I admire my next door neighbor’s garden and appreciate that she shares that beauty with the entire village.   I love the look of her irises, like bridesmaids dancing in the wind.

So, today I just wanted to take these graceful, thoughtful, beautiful gifts and pass them on.  I appreciate all the other bloggers out there who share their best on a regular basis.  Perhaps we can be a more graceful species after all.  

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It’s a Mystery

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Geoffrey Rush’s voice must read the title of this post. 

And here are the photo mysteries of the day: why are these posts sticking out of the ground?  What are they for?  Who put them there?  When?  I would love to get some sample conjectures.  I am fascinated, as a historic interpreter, at the way we take clues and put them into the context of a story.  So tell me the story of these…

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Oh, You Kid!

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I spent a lovely afternoon with my daughter yesterday.  Despite being in grad school and already a real adult, she still has a wonderfully childlike nature.  I was waiting for her in the park on the square, and she managed to park her car and sneak from tree to tree without me noticing her, in order to come up from behind and grab me in an ambush hug.  Needless to say, she makes me smile and feel like a kid myself.  We wandered over to Aztalan State Park, where the wide open spaces were calling to me.  When I was a child, my dad used to take me to the Morton Arboretum.  I’d see fields of dandelions and expanses of grass that made me break out into a run, or a gallop, or a skip.  I just had to propel myself into the middle of that lush landscape, wishing I were a wild bird so that I could skim over the entire scene.  What happened to that energy, that joyous surge?  I still feel it in my brain, although the rest of me is greatly slowed down.  I invite you to step into this place as if you were 7 years old again….how does it feel to you?

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Sun Spangled Afternoon

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My daughter treated me to a belated lunch today in honor of Mother’s Day.  We met at a bistro about halfway between Milwaukee and Madison, then walked around the nearby state park for a while, visited the Farmer’s Market on the square and stopped by the beach of Rock Lake.  The late afternoon sun sparkling on the water made me think of so many summer visits to my grandmother’s cottage on Lake Michigan.  Young kids were playing about in the sand, and my daughter and I rolled up our pants and waded in the cool water.  Ah, to be young, blonde and carefree again!

Summer’s almost here!

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Mid-day Napping

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The windows are open; a warm breeze floats through the screen and caresses my cheeks.  Sunshine brightens patches of my orange bedsheets and makes a heating pad for my aching back.  I feel old today.  Probably because I am allowing myself to.  Today I do not need to greet visitors with a smile and pleasant conversation.  I can curl inward and feel the aches I have acquired in living.  I have a living history, too.  It involves struggle and fortitude and being foreign… like those German immigrants I talk about at work…though it is very different in its particulars. 

The art of self-comforting.  Breathing.  Slowing down.  Searching for health in the interior of being.  Acknowledging tender spots.  Bathing them in warmth.  And perhaps in tears.  I feel the love of my children, my husband, and of summer, wafting around me like a vapor of dreams in dappled green light.  I hang on by my toes to a branch of substance, and rock myself to sleep.

Death Valley, CA, last April. Photographed on the trail to Darwin Falls.

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A Day is a Miracle

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Because today was our day off from working at Old World Wisconsin, Steve & I decided to take a walk at Vernon State Wildlife Refuge.  This marshy wetland is a favorite place to visit in all the seasons to see the changes in flora and fauna.  I think the last time I posted pictures, it was November.  Today, it was sunny, 78 degrees and very breezy.   The Canada geese had goslings following them everywhere.  The Sandhill cranes were nesting.  We saw a group of 3 flying in formation.  Why three?  No idea.  We saw lots of red-winged blackbirds pairing up, swallows, American gold finches, a snowy egret and two new ones to me that I had to look up: the yellow-headed blackbird and the rose-breasted grosbeak.

Sitting on the bank of the river looking at the puffy cumulus clouds streaming sunlight through their crisp edges brought me to tears.  It seems to me that the world is an absolute miracle, every day, every moment, but usually, the miracle that strikes us is that we finally slowed down long enough to see it.  I wonder about how to arrange my life to put more of this experience in.  Perhaps the trick is simply to arrange it so that I’m not shutting most of it out. 

Scumscape

Enjoy the miracle of life!

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Interiors

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I’m back in the 21st century today, having breakfast with Steve’s mother, doing laundry at the laundromat, that kind of thing.  My heart is still somewhere in the world of 150 years ago.  The deep connection with the land is something that I miss in this century.  I learned about the process of making linen from flax.  It is a very complex  procedure, actually.  The fibers of the flax plant are like the phloem and xylem in a maple tree.  They run from root to branch tips, and they are beneath the green outer husk and outside of the hard woody core.  That corresponds to the sapwood in a tree that lies under the bark and around the heartwood.  The flax is pulled up from the roots so as not to shorten those fibers.  Then, it’s placed in running water or on dewy ground to rot away the green outer husk.  This can take a month.  Next, you take it to the threshing floor of the barn to break up the woody chaff.  There are a few different machines that aid in that step.  Combing the strands through a nail board leaves long hanks of golden fibers and short curly bits that are stuck in the spikes, which is called tow.  That’s where we get expressions about flaxen hair and towheads.   The fibers are wound on a distaff for spinning; tow can be spun like wool.  I’d never tried spinning before.  It’s a lot more difficult than it looks at first!

Thatched roof barn

Linen making is extremely labor intensive.  The retting process where microorganisms dissolve the outer husk is the prohibitive part for Old World Wisconsin, apparently, so they buy their flax at about $40 pound ready to break and spin.  Which finally gets you around to having skeins of linen.  But then, just setting up the loom seems like it would take forever!  Imagine setting up a loom for a 400-count cotton sheet…that’s 400 threads per inch.  Of course, that’s all done on industrial machines now.  Factory-made cotton cloth was available and cheaper by the mid-19th century, but linen was sometimes useful as a back-up during the Civil War.  Factory made shoes were available as well.

We’re off to have breakfast with Steve’s mom.  I’m imagining eating in the ladies’ parlor at 4-Mile Inn….

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Exteriors

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Another day at the living history museum under my belt.  The new thing I did today was make rhubarb sauce from the gigantic rhubarb plants in the garden.  Not that I actually ate any, I just boiled it in water on the wood stove for a few hours so that the smell would permeate the summer kitchen.  I didn’t have any sugar at first, so my initial taste was very sour!  It reminded me of my mom making rhubarb and custard from the rhubarb in our garden.  My mother didn’t garden a lot, so this was impressive to me.   I know she helped her parents with a “Victory Garden” during WWII, but she was pretty young.   She shops at farmer’s markets and does delicious things with fresh produce, but she doesn’t grow it herself.  I’m looking forward to more garden-to-table assignments. 

I love that this job allows me to be outside so much.  We had thunderclouds overhead for much of the day, but no rain.  The humidity was high, but there was a breeze kicking up from the storm front miles away.  And I noticed a fishy smell first thing today…I guess with storm conditions you can smell Lake Michigan from 50 miles away?!  Unless there’s another explanation.  Anyway, I thought I’d share some photos I took of outbuildings and such. 

The blacksmith shop with St. Peter’s in the background.

When “nature calls”, you can head for the woods…

…or use the 3-holer out by the garden. Good idea planting the fragrant lilacs right beside it!

As you can tell, I’ve got a fabulous work environment!  I’m loving this job.  🙂

 

 

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Back to Wehr

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Steve is working at Old World Wisconsin today, but I’m not.  This morning, I had another volunteer stint at the Wehr Nature Center instead.  I led three groups of preschoolers on a nature hunt.  Each child got a colored pipe cleaner wrapped around his/her wrist, and they kept their eyes peeled for that color on our walk.   There were plenty of purple, yellow, white and pink flowers to find. 

The little guy with light blue was a bit sad faced until I told him there was lots of that color to be found, but he’d have to look way up high.  The clouds had dispersed after a night of thunderstorms, and the sky was a beautiful blue, just like the boy’s eyes.   Orange was the most surprising color of all.  The first group saw a pair of Baltimore orioles chasing each other.  I had seen their teardrop-shaped nest on an earlier walk.  The second group saw a butterfly with orange and black wings, probably not a monarch or a viceroy yet, more likely a Red Admiral.  With the third group, I wasn’t able to spot either of those things, but then a discarded orange peel caught my eye.  Maybe not as exciting, but it was orange.  Red came in dark maroon, the prairie trillium and red maple buds.  I heard a cardinal but didn’t see him.  Black and brown was the mud beneath our feet, the tree trunks and black walnuts. Also the logs in the middle of the lake. 

Some of those dark bumps are actually painted turtles.  They wear many colors, but they were too far away to see.  And of course, green…green….green in every shade, every where, overhead, underfoot, and even under water.

It’s so much fun to get down on a three-year old’s level and go exploring.  The world is a wonderful place!  Enjoy it today!

 

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Opening Day

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May Day!  The first day of the season for Old World Wisconsin.  We were open to the public as well as conducting school tours.  In the German area, there was only one school of 68 students that came through.  In the Crossroads Village, they had 3 tours with students from 4 schools, one of which was a group of 8th graders from France.  I also had a single adult visitor, an adult couple, and a family with 3 children from Arizona come by.   In other words….PEOPLE.   Real, live people with stories and questions and backgrounds making connections.  This is living history, after all.  And I love it!  I had so much fun with the 3 kids from Arizona who shaped dough and pounded the froe to chop kindling, and smiled and talked the whole time.  They were enjoying themselves, and their parents were snapping pictures and asking questions.  They were learning and engaging in a very comfortable way…they were homeschooling.  I really like the small group interaction involved:  3 adults, 3 kids.  Very nice.  Somehow, when it’s a group of 21 kids and 3 chaperones, there’s almost more crowd control going on than learning.   Or so it appears.  I hope they learned something; I hope they were listening and paying attention to more than just their classmates and the instructions the chaperones were giving. 

So all of that went on in about an hour…and I had several more to kill.  The great thing is that I don’t feel any pressure to be super productive the whole time.  I chopped wood and carried water and washed dishes and tended the fire and sewed on my pin cushion and all of that good stuff, but then I sat down on the porch and watched a thirteen-striped ground squirrel scurry around the yard near the woodpile snarfing up dandelion seeds.  Just quietly, listening to the birds.  Minutes went by.  I felt the land around me and thought about the sense of time and energy that a tree feels when it’s “busy” growing.  The woods, the fields, the garden…they are living under the sky at a pace that is so different from us movers and shakers.  They feel the air, the light changes, rain falls, things happen and they respond, but they don’t “react”.  I want to learn more about that way of life.  How long can you “not react”?  It’s like practicing meditation.  Breathe and be.  Light changes, form changes.  Breathe and be.  Everything changes.  Breathe and be.  I think that’s what I’m learning from nature.  I am very happy to be spending more time outdoors.