We had quite a bit of snow this week. "I'm going for the mail!" I yelled to Mike, sitting in the other room, in his recliner, watching TV. Then, in my mind's eye, a memory from a week ago sparks to life. I'd gone for the mail, took my camera, and didn't tell Mike I was going for pictures. Ten minutes later, when I hadn't returned, he worried.
"I tried to call your cell phone," Mike told me when I got back, "But it just rang in the kitchen. So I got dressed and went out to look for you. I thought you might have fallen on the ice or something. I even yelled. Didn't you hear me?"
I hadn't heard him. And I didn't want him to worry again. So this time I remembered to tell him. "And I'm taking my camera and going up on the hill for pictures!"
Looks can be deceiving and under all this pretty, unmarked snow was a sheet of ice. I was careful, for a while, as I made my way to the mailbox but when I didn't slip I became a little less mindful and slipped. Thankfully I didn't fall.
There wasn't any mail but I may have been too early. It was Monday and only 10:30 in the morning. A lot of times on Monday it's early afternoon before our mail arrives. But I wanted to go take pictures so I decided to check anyway.
As I head back up the driveway I see Spitfire. He's no dummy, he's following in my footsteps.
"How's the roof look?" I hear Mike ask in my head. It's something he often asks me since I go out more than he does.
My usual reply? "I don't know, I didn't look." But today I looked. And I took pictures so Mike could see too.
Spitfire thought I was headed back inside and he's way ahead of me, almost to the fence. See him? But I wasn't. From here I cut around by the generator to see how much snow was on the roof overtop it.
The snow tends to blow and drift on the backside of the mill, but it didn't look too bad to me today. I snapped a picture and moved on.
A mouse, killed by the cats, uneaten and frozen, laying on a board against the fence, captures my attention — don't worry. I know you don't want to see it.
Or do you!
"OH PEG! Must you!"
No. I don't have to..... but life isn't all sunshine and roses you know.
My feet crunch on the freshly fallen snow, past the generator, and I'm heading for the hill when Spitfire bounds past me. He realized I wasn't behind him and he came to look for me. I watch as he scoots down into a drainpipe the cats often use as a hidey-hole.
"You silly cat," I told him.
I walk past the Bergamot with its snowy cap and almost don't take his picture. They've seen it a hundred times before. And I take a picture anyway.
The barn on the upper hill. I don't even see any critter tracks.
The air is crisp and cold. My fingers, inside my gloves, are cold and so is my face. But I press on. Past the barn I go and look down at my country home, snug and warm beneath a blanket of freshly fallen snow.
"You can tell where the heat is escaping because it'll melt the snow," Mike told me.
Judging by that, we don't have any heat escaping through the roof.
Now I'm at the Bittersweet. There're still a few berries stubbornly hanging on.
"Peg, we've seen your Bittersweet lots of time too," you inform me.
I know, right! And I know you've seen the Winterberries lots of times before too. Here they are today, or at least, here's what left of them.
I walk on.
I see an indentation in the snow like I've never seen before, but I instantly knew what it was.
"What is it?" you ask.
It's where a deer had bedded down. Whether to wait out the storm or the night, I don't know. Maybe it was a combination of both.
"What are those drag marks?" you wonder.
Those, my dear, are from the deer. They don't pick their feet up very far and their hooves leave drag marks in the snow.
A soft rush — have you seen these before?
Now I'm at the pond. Deer tracks, I think. Then I wonder, were they looking for water?
On around the pond I go.
I see the cedar-apple rust.
Cedar-apple rust needs two things to complete its lifecycle, cedars and apples. It can live on either host and affects each differently. On the cedars they get these dimpled almost round balls and I've shown you what they look like after a warm spring rain, but I'm sure you'll see them in my letter blog again this year.
Around to the other side of the pond, Spitfire in the lead, and I see more places where the deer have been.
I get closer and it looks to me like they had pawed the ground looking for food. Was I wrong about the deer having slept or waited out the storm here? I looked closer and I see the edges of the divots are smooth as if their body heat had melted the snow. Does that mean that once they got up they turned around and foraged?
I head back to the house and as I get close, Mike sticks his head out the front door as if he was waiting for me. "I'm going around to the kitchen door so I can take my boots off," I called as I kept walking.
"Call Ginger!" Mike yells at me as I get around the corner of the mill.
I turned around and took a few steps back until I could see the patio. "GINGER!" I called. "GINGER! COME HERE!"
Ginger followed a cat path as far as she could then she had to blaze her own trail. I hadn't taken Ginger with me because she doesn't like it when the snow is up to undercarriage, as Mike calls it.
Winter is passing, the days are getting longer. I've started to take my camera with me when I go out at night for my ladies exercise class. I got this deer silhouetted against the last vestiges of a setting sun.
Now, even if you don't know what the word vestige means, you can figure out from the way I've used it, that it means a little bit of something. There's only a little bit of light left.
And that reminds me. I've found an online editor program. It's called Grammarly. It's supposed to help with spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation. This program will sometimes find when I miss a word or use the wrong form of a word. It even tries to help with things I don't care about, like tenses. Sometimes I use the wrong tense because that's the way I would say it if I was talking. So in those cases, I ignore it. My top three mistakes are all about the commas. Sigh. Oh well, that's another thing I don't care so very much about. But what surprised me is my 'unique word' scoring. I've used more unique words than 96% of Grammarly users. I'm not even that smart! The only thing I have going for me is I've read a lot of books in my life and sometimes when I'm writing, a word will just come to me like vestige did. So if you notice I'm making fewer mistakes, then Grammarly is the reason why. The comma thing probably won't change because I'm not writing for publication, I'm writing for you and I don't always like their suggestions.
The birds found my suet feeder on Wednesday. Yay! I stood at my kitchen window and took pictures of pretty birds. Here's a Jay and a Cardinal waiting for the feeder.
The bird feeders are probably 70 feet from my kitchen window. To put it in perspective, here's a picture of near and far. Near are the pictures on the windowsill and far is the bird feeders. In the middle, a cat watching the birds.
Here's a little Downy Woodpecker.
After I stood and watched for a while I decided to move my seed feeder out from under my kitchen awning and put it in the tree beside the suet feeder.
The next day it snowed and snowed and snowed. I bet you I spent hours at my kitchen window watching the birds with my binoculars. Then I'd see a picture and switch the binoculars for my camera.
A Jay and a Junco wait for the Red-Bellied Woodpecker to leave. There is a definite pecking order in the bird world!
It pleased me to see all the birds at the feeders. Then I thought of the feeder I have outside the feral cat room. I can't see it there, I thought, I could move it. And that's what I did. Then I filled another feeder and hung it out there too! Now I have three seed feeders and one suet feeder hanging out.
I was so excited to see three Blue Jays at my feeders!
P.S. the blurry thing in front of the feeder is a fence post. I hadn't thought about feeder placement in relationship to my view from the kitchen window!
Now, if you think I was excited about three jays in one shot, imagine how excited I was to see four!
"They're a pretty bird," I told Lamar. "But they're mean!" I'd seen a Blue Jay kill another little bird— a sparrow maybe— at a feeder once.
"They're even mean to other jays," Lamar remarked.
Here a Junco is waiting for his turn. I had a single Starling on my suet feeder. The next day I had two Starlings! He came back and brought a buddy with him. If you've ever looked at a Starling with binoculars, you'd see how beautiful their white-spotted iridescent feathers really are.
"I didn't know they had white spots," you say.
I know, right! As it turns out it's just a winter thing. In the summer they're dark and glossy.
"Sure they're pretty!" Lamar exclaimed. "That's why they brought them over here in the first place!"
Starlings are not native to America and are invasive. They crowd out our native cavity nesters like the bluebirds, owls, and woodpeckers. Not to mention they're loud, annoying, aggressive, and everywhere!
A bright red Cardinal peeking around a branch.
I even saw a finch out there the other day but I didn't get his picture before he took off. Finches, in the wintertime, are not bright yellow like in the summer but there is enough yellow that you know it's a finch.
Needless to say, I'm not the only one who's been enjoying bird watching this past week. Rascal decided to get a closer look.
But bird watching isn't the only thing I've done.
Mike and I went shopping. Here are some road pictures for you.
We're on the overpass heading into town. These are the covered hoppers parked on the tracks waiting to be unloaded into trucks that'll haul the fracking sand to the well sites.
The Wyalusing Creek. I usually show you the other side of the road because it has a train bridge across it. But this is the side where the mill used to sit. Two branches come together here and one branch is frozen over.
Chickens!
We bought a few too many things for the freezer. "It's times like this that I wish I had a freezer," I told Mike as I juggled things around trying to fit it all in.
"We've got the refrigerator in the apartment. What if I brought that over here and put it beside this one? Then you'd have two freezers," he asked.
"Okay," I agreed. It's making good use of something we already own. We are on a fixed income so we really look for ways to save money.
Once that was done I was able to take care of the overcrowding in my freezer. Then the next day Mike says to me, "Peg, you know that space between the refrigerator and the bathroom door?"
"Yeah?"
"What if I made you some shelves for there? I'd use 2X10's for the sides and for the shelves I'd use 2X12's on the bottom and 2X10's the rest of the way up."
I could tell he'd given this a lot of thought.
"We have like four more Baker's Racks in the way-back. Why don't we just use a couple of them there? We already own those!" says me trying to save us money.
Mike thought about it. "I guess we could," he capitulated. Then he got the tape measure and measured the space and the racks. Two wouldn't fit and one left a lot of usable space. "Let's just make a shelf for there. It'll be custom made for that spot and it'll be a forever thing."
This time I gave up, gave in. This time I capitulated and we made a trip to the lumberyard. The shelves didn't take long to put together and would give me lots more room to put stuff.
"Let's go down to the barn and get some of your kitchen stuff," Mike suggested.
"No! Not today. It's snowing like crazy out there."
"I'll get the snowblower and make a path then we can just wheel a bunch of boxes up at one time."
"Okay," I reluctantly agreed. Unpacking boxes wasn't the way I had planned on spending my day. "But I'm not coming out until you have the path cleared."
"Where's one of those beanie hats?" Mike asked after he had his boots and jacket on.
I was in the middle of something else and I couldn't go get him one. "They're in the bottom of the hall tree. Just look. You can wear any one you find."
"How about this one?" he asked dropping the seat back into place and straightening up.
"It's pink," I observed. Yeah, like he couldn't see that for himself.
"I don't care," he remarked and pulled it on his head.
"Well okay then. It's wool so it should keep you pretty warm." I didn't tell him it made my head itch so I don't wear it.
Once Mike had a path cleared I went with him down to the lower barn and we sorted out boxes looking exclusively for kitchen stuff.
Unpacking, I found tons and tons of glassware. "Kandyce won't ever have to buy another wine glass," I told Mike.
Wine glasses, ice cream float glasses, sundae glasses, all organized into one place and I turned to pick up the pile of castoff newspapers.
"Smudge! What are you doing in there! You silly cat!"
The next few boxes I unloaded were packed with clothes and I made a pile in the middle of the floor.
"I kinda feel sorry for Kandyce," I told Mike.
"Just get rid of the stuff," Mike suggested.
"No. Kandyce might want some of it and what she doesn't want she can sell or give away or... or... just throw away! I don't care. I just wish they would come and visit and bring the truck...."
"And load'em up," Mike finished.
"Some of the things she could be using right now," I mused thinking of the ice cream parties the kids and I've had. The fun and excitement of getting out the 'special' glasses, making a treat, sitting around the table, eating and laughing.
Some of the stuff I washed before putting on the shelf then I thought better of it. I'm never gonna use this stuff. If I do, I'll wash it then. If Kandyce takes it she'll want to wash it before putting it in her cupboard. I'll tell you what. Skipping that step sure cut down on the amount of time it took me to put stuff away!
The next day, going down to get the mail, I took my camera. The birds at the feeder all took off before I could get anywhere close to them. Then I see a bird sitting on a weed. I hurried to get his picture. Then I got closer and wondered why he didn't take flight. Then I got closer, the angle shifted, and I could see it wasn't a bird after all.
I did a little photoshopping on it to show you what I saw and maybe you could understand how I was fooled.
From the kitchen window I watched little Miss Feisty sneak up on the birds.
She didn't try to get any; she just sat and watched them for a while.
Scrolling through FaceBook one day, this recipe comes up: THE BEST HOMEMADE CHEESECAKE EVER! Okay, okay, maybe it didn't say it quite that way. I may have added the EVER! part on my own, but it did say all the rest of it. I read through the recipe and directions and it was pretty simple and straightforward.
"Rosie, if I make a cheesecake can I bring it down and share it with you?" I asked.
Rosie's eyes sparkled. "I like cheesecake."
I followed the directions making the crust first and pressing it into my cheesecake pan.
"Peg, I know what a Springform pan is. What's a cheesecake pan?"
The Springform pans have removable sides, a cheesecake pan is just a two-piece pan with a bottom that lifts out.
Once the graham cracker crust was made and in the pan, I set to work making the filling. Cream together the cream cheese, sugar, lemon juice, vanilla, and egg yolks, it said. And that meant I'd have to separate the eggs. I got out a bowl for the whites and got busy separating eggs the way my mother used to do it. Carefully crack an egg and carefully dump the yolk back and forth between the two halves of the shell until all of the white was separated out, then dumping the yolk in with the cream cheese. The first three separations were successful but on the fourth one the yolk broke and I got a little yolk in the egg whites.
Dagnabbit! It was not good and I knew it wasn't good but I'll be darned if I'm going to throw it away and start over. Not four eggs worth! No-way-Jose! I thought as I mixed the yolks, cream cheese, sugar, lemon juice, and vanilla together.
"Peg, you should always separate the eggs one at a time over a small bowl before adding it to the rest of the separated eggs," you say.
I know, right! But I always think it's a waste to dirty the extra bowl — since I can do it perfectly.
Beat the four egg whites until stiff and creamy then fold into cream cheese mixture, the directions said. I got busy whipping it with my hand mixer but if memory serves me right, egg whites won't get stiff if it has any yolk in it all. But I tried. I mixed and mixed and mixed until I was tired of mixing. If it's never gonna get stiff and creamy then there isn't any use trying to carry off this charade, I thought, shut the mixer off and folded the foamy egg whites into the cream cheese mixture. It wasn't folding in very well. Well, I've goofed up this far, I might just as well use the mixer. I stuck the mixer in, turned it on and mixed the egg whites in. I used the low speed and I didn't use it any longer than I had to to get it mixed. I know the purpose of folding is so you get the air pockets in whatever you're making. It's probably gonna be flat, I thought but I was hoping for the best. I poured as much filling into my prepared crust as would fit and there was still quite a bit left over, so I reached down an oven-safe Anchor Hocking bowl, put the rest of the filing in it and baked it beside the cheesecake. Bake for 35 minutes, then turn the oven off and leave the cheesecake sit for an additional one hour with the door closed. In other words — DON'T OPEN THE OVEN DOOR!
At the end of the hour I took the cheesecake and extra bowl out of the oven. I got a fork and tasted the pudding. It was sweet and good but it had a funky texture. "Here try this," I told Mike.
He obediently took a bite, made a face, and handed it back to me. "I don't want any of that."
"Let's hope a night in the refrigerator improves its texture," I told him.
The next morning I called the Kipps. "How about a piece of cheesecake around ten-ish?" I asked Lamar and it was all set.
I apologized for my coconut cream pie the last time I was there and this time I apologized for the cheesecake. "One side is a little brown and I have no idea what the texture's gonna be like."
I pushed the bottom up, freeing the cake from the pan, and graham cracker crumbs sprinkled the countertop and flour. "I'm sorry," I said.
The Kipps took it in stride. "It's alright," Rosie said.
"Maggie'll get it," Lamar added.
Lamar got plates and set about slicing the pie. "Just a little piece for me," Rosie said.
"Me too," Mike chimed in. "In fact, I don't know if I want any at all." The memory of last nights taste, warm out of the oven, was still fresh in his mind.
We all sat at the table. "Wait! Let's get a picture first," I said.
I got up to take it when Lamar spoke up. "Let's get one with you in it this time."
"Okay," I agreed and took a place between two of my loves.
Then came the first bite and I could tell Mike wasn't looking forward to it. I watched as he chewed.
"How is it?" I asked before taking a bite myself.
"Not too bad," he said.
A few bites later his opinion changed. "As a matter of fact, it's pretty good!"
Chilling did improve the texture and as we ate, I confessed all my goofs.
"I'd have done the same thing," Rosie said of the egg white fiasco.
"Next time I make it I'm going to try to make it right," I told Rosie.
Later, at home, I was thinking about the cheesecake and realized I'd used the toasted sugar, the sugar I'd used to blind bake my coconut cream pie crust with the week before. Do you think that would make a perceptible difference in the way the cheesecake tastes?
Sitting here at my desk in the early evening hours of Friday night, I hear crunch, crunch, crunch, over my head. What in the world? I stopped what I was doing and looked up, looking for a mouse in the ceiling. The sound stopped. I was getting ready to return to the computer when it starts again. Crunch, crunch, crunch, pause, crunch, crunch. Then the sound got fainter as it moved away from me. Crunch, crunch, crunch, and it got louder as it moved closer to me.
"Mike, there's a cat on the roof," I said.
"I bet it's Rascal."
I wasn't going to get up and go look but then I decided to see if Mike was right. He was.
One last picture. Itsy asked to go out. I saw that Mr. Mister was out there and wondered what he'd do. I opened the door and Itsy went out never paying a bit of attention to the cat. The cat, however, had his eyes glued to Itsy. It was then that I wondered if he'd hurt her. I know, I know! I'm a slow thinker. If I'd have thought of that first I'd never have let her go out until I shooed him away. But Itsy just assumed it was one of our cats, went out, did her business and as she headed back in, Mr. Mister took off, and this girl breathed a sigh of relief.
Let's call this one done!
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