Frosty morning

We've been busy here at the manor. Work in the woodyard is progressing, albeit slowly. I cut and split a lot of the smaller logs on my own, and now the cousin needs to take care of the bigger logs. Usually, we work together, but our schedules haven't meshed the last two weeks.  

We had our first frost back on November 2. It wasn't a hard frost, though. The only plants I lost were the begonias, but they're pretty tender. The herbs in the Greenstalk are still green. 

The garden area is empty. The five-gallon buckets are empty. The grow bags are empty. It would seem a sad end to the season, but it's not. It's a readying for renewal. I've already got some seeds for next year and I'm planning what I want to concentrate on. This year I grew a little of a lot of different veggies. Next year I want to have one large crop with only a few smaller items. 

The mercury has dipped down into the low thirties at night and I've been firing-up the woodstove. Himself is happy because the living room gets toasty in the evening. I close the doors to the back of the house to keep the heat out. I like my bedroom to be cool so I sleep better. Opening the door about half an hour before I turn in warms the room up just enough. 

On the writing front, I finished Sumner's Garden and it's live at the vendors I use. Finishing that story was bittersweet. I've been writing for over twenty years and with the advent of artificial intelligence, I don't know if I want to continue to read, much less write. I was happy to see Amazon asking if the book I was offering for sale used AI in the writing. That's a NO. I don't like the idea of AI at all. I think its hidden dangers will be revealed too late to those who embrace it. 

It's time I got busy with freeze-drying again. I let it go over the summer in favor of canning, but I've laid out a plan to keep that unit working. 

The trees have shed almost all of their leaves so it's time to clean the gutters. Tomorrow looks to be the day with afternoon temps forecasted to be in the low sixties. After that, it'll be time to hop on a mower and chop some leaves. And if there's time, I'll bring over a tractor bucket of firewood and drop it outside the basement door. 

A frost isn't a bad thing. It simply signals it's time for different things to happen. It is a portent of the changes ahead, of the slide into winter sleep. The manor is ready for it. 

The Lady of the Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, country living, rural living, changing seasons, frost, firewood, woodstove, home food preservation, freeze drying, Greenstalk, trees

Simple things

As I begin this blog entry, it's about five-thirty in the morning. Deuce and I have been outside so he could sneak off into the dark woods and do whatever he needed to do.  I could hear the leaves crunching under his paws as he searched for his spot. It was that quiet. Orion hung above me to the south, an early morning companion to warn me of the approaching winter. In the coming months, he'll be with me overhead late at night, telling me that spring is coming. He has always attracted my attention. 

Deuce doesn't linger in the early morning. He likes his creature comforts in much the same way his puppy parents do. He rejoined the lord of the manor in the bedroom while I brewed a cup of coffee and landed at my computer. 

I think there are many things that can be said of these still moments before daybreak. I appreciate my place in creation as I look into the moonlit woods. I am the tender of this place in this time. What it will become after I'm dust, I don't know. I ponder such things just before daybreak. 

Standing at the window in my office, I watched as the driveway lights popped on, one after another in sequence as something approached, finally coming near enough for me to see the young buck. He's headed for the other side of the hill, into the thickets, to rest for a while. We know he and his harem hide out there and so we have no plans to go into that section of the manor and clean out the underbrush. He may rest there undisturbed for as long as he's with us in this life. 

Daybreak is slow, and yet it happens almost in the blink of an eye. One moment the trees are a blackness against the stars, and the next the stars are gone and the trees have individual silhouettes. Shades of gray give way to silver, which in turn gives way to blue hues and eventually, for today, rays of sunshine. 

Watching the woods wake is one of the many simple country pleasures in my life. I wouldn't trade it for love or money.

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, simple country pleasures, daybreak, country living, rural lifestyle, Orion, changing seasons, quiet, black Labrador Retriever

Rainy autumn days

I should be writing or making split pea soup. I should be in the laundry room pairing up socks so I can toss them in the appropriate drawers (his and hers). I should be doing any number of things that need doing, but instead, I've been wasting time. 

It's a rainy, dreary, windy autumn day. The wind is showing me just how far along the trees are in changing color, so I guess it's not all bad. 

The view outside my window is different. With the poplar tree gone, a woodpile has taken its place. Loki has already discovered the squirrels that have taken to sitting on top of the woodpile. He's stalking them, but not having any success, I'm happy to report. 

Yesterday was the complete opposite of today. The sun was bright and the sky was clear and blue. The last blooms of the season, those the deer didn't find, are showing their colors. The deer are more interested in the acorn crop than blooms right now. 

Dreary days like today will become more frequent as the season turns toward winter. I must learn to change with them. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, autumn, winter, changing seasons, woodpile, squirrels, country lifestyle, rural living, simple country pleasures, a writer's life, rain, fall color

Decorating for Christmas

When I was a younger woman freshly moved into my first real home, decorating for Christmas was something I anticipated with great joy. My first home was decorated with a lot of hand-me-downs from my grandmother and mother, as well as a few things I purchased on sale. I needed to be frugal - very frugal- in those days. And just like my foremothers, I do not discard Christmas decorations. I hoard them (for really no good reason). 

Decorating was fun! My friends collected Santas and elves which made for easy Christmas gifts. I liked reindeer, and when they found out, my collection of reindeer grew rapidly. It got to the point my husband and I joked about the yearly migration. 

Then came the year we had a young, exuberant puppy, Jett. We decorated. We chose poorly. I'm sure every person who's had a Labrador Retriever or dog of a similar size is well aware of the damage a rapidly wagging tail can cause. For Jett's second Christmas, we scaled back, and the scale down has continued until we've reached the point of setting out my grandmother's ceramic tree and a centerpiece on the dining room table.  Even at that, the little heirloom tree isn't placed where I'd prefer. Loki, my current cat, likes to sleep in the bow window, so the tree is on a side table. And Deuce is a bit larger, and more curious, than Jett was. 

It's been in my thoughts that I have one last big blowout Christmas decorating left in me. When the time comes, it will serve a dual purpose. Yes, I'll be decorated for Christmas, but it will also be the time to do what my mother and grandmother never could - discard a lot of things I'll never use again. Getting those boxes and bins back upstairs to the attic has become too difficult for me to do on my own and my husband is now unable to help with the task.

I'll ask the kids in Gen 4 to come and see if there are any of the older pieces their great-grandmother once owned that they may want, although the ceramic tree isn't up for grabs just yet. It may never be while I live and breathe. It pleased my grandmother so much she tended to leave it out until the first day of spring. Maybe she loved us teasing her about it. Whatever it was, that little tree holds a lot of memories. 

Will they really want much, or any, of the stuff? I doubt it. A lot of it is very dated and they don't have the memories of the hands that touched those things, which makes a difference. Nevertheless, I will offer. 

In the end, I will have done what I can to pass on those things and lift a burden from my shoulders. Most of the Christmas *stuff* stored in the attic will not go back up there. It's a bit sad, but that's the way of life. In the end, they're only things, and I've learned that things do not make a person happy forever. Once you no longer enjoy them, those things can weigh you down. 

And maybe once the dust settles and I've shed the things that no longer please me, and Deuce and Loki are old enough to be less rambunctious, the joy and charm of decorating for Christmas will fill me again. As with most things, we'll have to wait and see.

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

 

Drop back two and punt?

Life at the manor has taken a few twists and turns over the years. Sometimes we've been reacting more than proacting. When a loved one has health issues, you're often at the mercy of disease progression or disease treatment and that's simply the way it is. Other times, you can lay out a good plan and see it through to fruition. Sometimes your plans are thwarted by forces beyond your control. 

And sometimes, and this is the hard one, you come to realize that what you planned, what was your dream, is no longer feasible. You realize there isn't time to invest into working the plan or you come to the crossroads of where you've been versus the fact you've gone as far as you think you can with it. So it is with me and my writing career. 

Becoming a writer was a fluke. I was bored one day and I sat down in front of an old HP desktop that had a whopping big 256MB hard drive and a One Note program, and I started to tell a story. The damn thing snowballed on me and here I am, decades later, with a publishing history, blogs, social media, and book sales. Unreal. 

It became my plan to retire so I could write full-time. I lived for the moment! Now that I'm in the transition into total retirement, I'm wondering if that's what I really want to do. With so much that I love to do - walking, gardening, canning, quilting - do I want to sit at the computer for several hours a day? 

The publishing industry is one of constant change. Established writers get pushed back by new voices fueling different markets. Amazon only rewards megastars. Many, many, many good, solid writers get lost in the algorithms because that's the way Amazon makes more money. My own work is buried by the algorithms at Amazon. My sales are predominately at iTunes, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and a few other subscription services overseas.  

Even Facebook has begun to punish promotion. I belong to a lot of Facebook groups, and as I started to promo the release of July Heat, my posts went "into review" because I included buy links. 

Should I spend the time, months in fact, creating a good story only to have nothing become of it? Or should I spend my time, daily, enjoying Holly Tree Manor? As I transition into retirement, would my time be better spent rebuilding old friendships now that we all have more time to spend together without the constraints of jobs? 

I can't see my way to striking a workable balance. Maybe it will be clearer when I'm not "employed" even on a part-time, work-from-home basis. And maybe I'll have to drop back two and punt my way into something I've yet to imagine. 

Some days I'm just along for the ride, not steering the boat. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor

Autumnal equinox

The word equinox comes from two Latin words  - "aequus" which is "equal," and "nox" which is "night." Obviously, equal hours of night and day, light and dark, occur at the autumnal equinox. But it's more than that. 

The autumnal equinox is not an all day event. It occurs at the specific time the sun crosses the celestial equator. In the year 2020, that occurred at 9:31 AM, Eastern Daylight Time. The fall equinox brings the promise of the new season at the end of summer, the loss of humidity (thank heavens!), and cool evenings spent on the porch watching the leaves fall. 

Being it is the year 2020, I've heard plenty of quips that this fall is actually the fall of civilization, but no. It's autumn - the best time of the year. 

Did you know the actual date of the fall equinox can vary? It's usually on September 22, but due to the earth's orbit and the Gregorian calendar, it can change. It actually takes the earth 365.25 days to orbit, so the equinox is generally six hours later than the prior year. Then leap year happens and sets it back a day. A September 21 equinox hasn't occurred for several millennia, but it will happen in the year 2092. I think a lot of us will miss that one. A September 24 equinox hasn't happened since 1931, and won't happen again until 2303. So we're stuck with bouncing back and forth from September 22 and 23. 

This year on the manor, the maple leaves are turning right on time. Yesterday, I was walking out the lane and looked up to find the top leaves in one of the big maples had turned yellow and orange. Small beginnings herald what will become a storm of leaves. 

Already the evenings are too short. I got busy and did a last minute task, that being painting the ramp to the front porch. The sun had dipped when I started and it was actually chilly working without it. Thankfully, it was a quick job and I'm glad it's finished. I never run out of things to paint.

Even chilly, it was good to be outside in the fresh autumn air. It allowed me to bend over and dip the brush in the paint without sweating into the open paint can. Some things are simple pleasures even as they're annoying chores. 

It's a downward slide to winter from here, but it's a journey we'll savor. Autumn truly is a blessed season. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor