A Nice Fall Day

I awoke yesterday morning at my usual time. Everyone has his internal clock, and an hour before sunrise mine goes off. Always has. Checking the temperature, I saw that we had dropped for the first time this fall into the low 40s. The wind was up, blowing the wind chimes as I made coffee. The cold front continued to move into our valley and blew hard all day.

I compulsively checked email and wrote a few letters before waking Cindy up. A lot of small to medium tasks on our to-do list: working on hog fencing, washing clothes, baking bread, checking the bees, doing the usual chores, putting up siding on the new hay barn, laying down fresh bedding for the sheep.Early October on the farm 021

By 8:30 Caleb had shown up from his home down the hill. He and I gathered our tools and headed to the hog paddock. The paddock is a wooded area of about two acres. It runs at a 25 degree slope from east to west. Over the years, the hogs have rooted away the eastern edge along the fenceline, leaving gaps in some places of as much as 12 inches at the bottom of the fence. Our task was to lower each hog panel to ground level and reset the electric wire to about six inches above the ground. It was a straightforward task that Caleb and I were able to complete by noon.

The whole time we were working, with the cold wind seeping into the valley, I kept thinking about catfish. As a kid I lived for those moments to run my trotlines, getting up every two hours throughout the night, checking the lines, removing the fish and rebaiting hooks. ‘Long about sunup, I’d spend an hour or two cleaning the catfish hung on the old oak tree in the backyard. Having dumped the heads and entrails back into the pond, I’d head into the house to breakfast. With those thoughts in mind, I headed in for lunch of a couple of lamb chops and winter squash soup from the night before, leaving Caleb to put away the tools.

Cindy, meanwhile, had been busy through the morning with washing and hanging clothes out to dry, baking bread, prepping winter squash for freezing and checking the bees. After lunch, our friend Susan showed up bearing homemade preserves: pear butter, fresh cider vinegar and candied jalapenos. She was also picking up a quarter-beef. After she departed, I went for a nice walk and smoked a cigar. A cool fall afternoon is the perfect time for a smoke and reflective walk. An hour later, I was back at the house, where Cindy and I enjoyed coffee and fresh baked bread with some of Susan’s pear butter.

After coffee, we headed back outside and spent a couple of hours putting siding up on the barn, milled from our new sawmill. Cindy has been doing most of the work putting it up, but now I have done my bit and can rightfully claim that it was a mutual project. Right?

Back inside for a rare co-produced dinner, a rooster simmered with herbs and onions from the garden for a few hours by me, then further seasoned by Cindy and the stock topped with her homemade dumplings. Chicken and dumplings as the mercury dips to 35 degrees—now that is the way to complete a great day.

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Reading this weekend: Galahad at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse. Hard to be disgruntled with the state of the world when Wodehouse is at hand.

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9 thoughts on “A Nice Fall Day

  1. So I have to ask:
    The hog lot (ok, paddock – but don’t tell anyone I know that I said that)… the hog lot runs down or up 25 degrees from E to W?? [e.g., are the piggies digging at the uphill or the downhill end of the lot?]

    And I’ll not question whether trot lines are (or were) legal in Louisiana… I just want to know what you used for catfish bait 🙂

    Warm regards,
    Clem

    • The slope runs down from east to west. So, that up slope, which borders a pasture, gets more traffic because of that early morning sun. It also borders a lane and the initial slope is quite steep. If we had it to do over again (which we just did) the initial fence line should have been placed downslope a bit to prevent that rooting. But pigs will be pigs.
      Our trotlines were often baited with by-catch from our shrimping runs. We had a small boat that we used to net home use shrimp each season. With luck we could put away 100-200 pounds in one day. The inevitable by-catch was saved and used as bait either on trotlines or saltwater fishing.

  2. Sounds like a beautiful day — productive but unhurried, and sparked with good food! We are enjoying that first fall weather here in N. Georgia, too. Canning and baking are so much more pleasant when the house has lost most of its summer heat.

    When I was a kid in Oklahoma, pulling in the trot lines brought snapping turtles along with the catfish. -Amy

    • Sounds like a similar childhood. We used to get plenty of turtles as well. Of course a nice snapping turtle sauce piquant is always a welcome dish.

  3. Need a little help here…

    So you’ve seen me rail on in some venues advocating for silver lining searches and otherwise optimistic reads in the face of doom and gloom. And in such a vein I was struck by your comment on P.G. Wodehouse:

    “Hard to be disgruntled with the state of the world when Wodehouse is at hand.”

    And I have to confess I’d never heard of Ol’ P.G. before (blame a misspent youth??). Anyway, I click the link on PG to see what else you may have said regarding him and I find myself reading about your pair of Berks being moved from one pasture to another and their getting familiar with each other in a family sort of way. [the post from 2012 occurred before I found this blog – and one nicely constructed with an excellent final sentence… but I digress]

    So, the names of the two pigs – the boar obviously named for a Wodehouse lead; but the sow Lady C… named for Lord Emsworth’s sister?? Tell me I’m wrong! 🙂

    • Dear Clem,
      Sigh, a grown man who has never wallowed in the delights of Wodehouse? How do you maintain your upbeat outlook on life? Yes, the names of the berks were for Lady Constance and Lord Emsworth, a brother and sister in the “Blandings” novels. A recurring character in the novels is The Empress of Blandings, a very fat Berkshire sow. She is a perennial winner at the local ag show in the category of “Fat Pig.” Lord Emsworth is usually to be found at the pigsty gazing fondly at his pig.
      For another Wodehouse reference on the blog see this link.
      I thank you for bringing this to my attention, because, I had to go back to 2012 to reread the original piece. And there, in the same month, I found that I had already reposted the “junk drawer” piece. I knew it would happen someday. So, I’ve removed the most recent reposting.
      Brian
      PS I’ll be happy to advise on Wodehouse if you decide to take the plunge with old Plum. He wrote for about eighty years. So there is a lot to choose from.

      • OMGoodness… I was hoping against hope that my favorite Tennessee hill farmer hadn’t named a breeding pair for a brother and sister. The incest angle won’t play well at the local box office (though perhaps Jon Stewart can make some hay with it).

        As for Wodehouse – as so little of my reading time ever includes fiction at this point in my life I’ll be on the lookout for an anthology of short stories. I’m of the impression he penned several and that he was quite good in the format.

        As for maintaining an upbeat attitude? Transgressive segregation does it for me. I know, sounds like it could be an inside joke (maybe it really is), but having a front row seat for one of Nature’s most awesome displays of her ability to reinvent and renew is enough to keep me hugging the silver lining.

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