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.