Snow Thank you

Looks like all those years of Oklahomans praying for a white Christmas finally paid off.  We ended up with over 14 inches, according to the Official Report, but it had to be real hard to count because the dadgum wind blew so hard that we really got everything from bare spots to six foot drifts. Not us personally, but throughout the state. The official count came from the airport, which is about eight miles east of us. Out here at the True Light Carrot Patch I'd say that between the bare spots and the drifts, we probably averaged two to four inches.

I know a snow like this is common enough in the upper regions, y'all, but it is an all time record breaker for Oklahoma. Hot potatoes!

BTW, WeatherBoy (or WeatherGirl) is the name I give, individually and collectively, to our television meteorologists because they always look young, fresh-scrubbed and  Sunday-best. Children grown tall, telling the weather.

We got the porch cleaned off, and the sunny part of the sidewalk at the barn. The shady parts are too icy to clear yet. I think it's supposed to get about 35 degrees today, so maybe....

We traditionally have a Big Family Doin' at my parents on Christmas Eve. This tradition within my family started when I was a child. My mother and aunt's families liked to meet on Christmas day as so many do, and Grandmother liked to have everyone together, so the sensible solution was to have a big dinner on Christmas Eve. We'd all eat and open presents. The grown-ups would always reserve a few for Christmas morning as well, and of course there's always a few packages from Santa Clause.

When Grandmother passed on my own mother picked up the Christmas Hostess baton, because she really likes to have everyone together, too. Unfortunately, this blizzard kept people in. I did not even go outside on the 24th.

We cleared the porch and sidewalk on Christmas Day, and just before dark decided to brave the elements to see if we could find anyplace open where we might sit down to hot food that someone else cooked. We ended up over at the Flying J truckstop restaurant and had whatever we wanted from their buffet. They had one, count 'em one, waitress, who had probably been there for a very long time, but she was still friendly and got us all fixed up. We got home without incident, although there are certainly a few patches of pretty scary road out there.

Steve gave me the gift today of taking our laundry in to wash today and found our local Mustang laundry closed. There was a sign on the door saying, "Closed Christmas Day," but this is the 26th now, so I hope she's okay. She comes over from El Reno (about ten miles west of us) to open the place up every day, and they had some pretty dramatic multi-car pileups out that way, so  I suspect she may be unable to get through. I hope she's okay. Having found the Mustang laundry closed, he ventured up into Yukon to our second choice in laundromats.

Grandmother always said, "If you're going to say anything, say something nice," so I'll have to think of something nice to say about that laundromat - oh, yeah, here's one - their washers and dryers were in good working order the last time I was there. Anyway, it took him over an hour to make a twelve minute drive because it's still pretty awful out there everywhere except right out on the Interstate highways. He got stuck in the slush somewhere along the way but a Good Samaritan helped get him unstuck.

This all reminds me that another thing to appreciate from our time in Cooperstown is  experiential reality in the Importance of Clearing Snow Accumulation. I catch myself thinking they'd have this cleared by now in Otsego County, and then I remind myself that I'm certainly free to go back there if I wish. I think I'll stay put, though. Hopefully this weather event will be enough to satisfy most of those Snow Pray-ers for a good long time!

A Beautiful Asset to the Community

Steve found the bell the other day and I hung it in the Sweetgum tree in front of the house. That bell is made of sheet metal, iron, I think. The clapper is a wooden disk, and the triangle you see hanging below is the handle of the clapper.  

   

A three-sided bell, the wind catches the clapper and makes it ring lovely sounds in three tones.

Steve picked it up at the Festival of the Arts way back in the seventies when tthat event was still held in front of what was then known as the Civic Center in Oklahoma City.

Steve said Sid and Michi would be excited to see and hear this bell because it hung in the back yard of the house of their youth. When we lived here before we hung it from a Pecan tree out where the barn now stands. It went to Cooperstown with us, where we hung it from a Maple tree behind that house, and now it's back here at the True Light Carrot Patch, hanging in the Sweetgum tree.

Perhaps interesting only to me, the Sweetgum from which the bell hangs came forth as a volunteer seedling. It was a skinny little four or five inch diameter tree the first time we moved here in 1995. The Maple tree from which it hung in Cooperstown I suspect also started out as a vounteer seedling and was also about four or five inches in diameter when we first moved there. When we left Cooperstown to return here that Maple had grown to twelve or thirteen inches in diameter and this Sweetgum, now a good fourteen inches in diameter.

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I went out to haul the trash dumpsters to the curb this morning, this being trash day at my address. Neither of them were quite full, so I spent about forty five minutes out at the edge of our woods pulling trash out of the sticks and leaves to fill the dumpsters. I swear, it looks like several successive families, rather than pack and move, simply hauled their stuff out to the woods and dumped it. Either that, or they abandoned their stuff and the people who came in after them hauled it to the woods. I am still just blown away that people would do such a thing.

There now stands a Mulberry tree out in the yard that, when we first moved here in 1995, was a volunteer in the fence row. We cleaned and cleared and cleared and cleaned, put in a garden and a garlic patch and a chicken house and cleaned and cleared some  more. We kept the field on this five acres mowed, along with the yard and the right of way along 59th street. Had the place looking pretty nice! Then we moved away...

When we returned after the seven years in Cooperstown, much of what we had cleared had been reclaimed by nature and overrun with human debris. We've been cleaning and clearing as we go, but our first priority is to get the house finished, and then we can focus even more on the landscaping. It already looks a hundred times better now than when when we first returned, and will only get better as we work on it.

Everyone raves about what we have done and are doing here! The week doesn't go by that someone doesn't stop by to admire our progress and express their gratitude that we're cleaning up, renovating, and making it better.

Everyone is most supportive and happy we're here except one particular city official from Mustang.  This is a surprise to me. I should think the City of Mustang would be as happy as our neighbors are to see what we are doing here in cleaning up, making improvements and restoring the property as a beautiful asset to the community. I would certainly think that the City of Mustang would be pleased to think that the owner of this land might be interested in developing a portion of it into another nice residential neighborhood here in Mustang. Unfortunately, in spite of all the kudos, encouragement and support we get from everyone else, the actions and attitudes of this one city official indicate to me that the City of Mustang is not interested in seeing this thirty-plus acre corner developed after all.

On the bright side, this particular city official seems to be fairly ambitious. Who knows, maybe we'll all get lucky and she'll get a better job somewhere else. Hopefully whoever gets her job after she's gone will easier to work with. In the meantime, this land is perfectly happy to keep on being the farmland it's been for as long as men have owned it, and that's okay with me, too.