Walked home through the fields. For those of you who have been following this blog for years, most of this will look familiar although "my kindgom" is much smaller now.
We never actually owned much of what I loosely called mine. We have 5 acres. There are 20 between me and the cemetery. There are 10 on the other side, then the Lutheran Church property, and the Co-op propety beside that.
I was free to walk on all 6 of those properties, and I mowed a path on 4 of them (not the cemetery or the Co-op)
The Co-op is what I jokingly refer to as the "space station."
I used to be able to walk all the way over there without intruding on their operations. But they bought the back half of the church property and bulldozed a "wall" around it (probably for noise containment), and so I don't walk there any more.
But the grain elevator is very active. This is still an agricultural area.
Coming back across my own property, some of you may remember the "nature alphabets." Here is the letter B- turn it to the right to make it stand up. The trees are very much larger, but you can still "get" the shape of it. As a reminder, I personally planted those trees about 35 years ago.
Now, looking west toward the hill that is a little higher than our house, we do NOT own this. It's for sale again, and I'm concerned. This is the acreage that I was not allowed to even walk on for the past 10 years, but I don't want a business that close. I THINK we are safe because there is a big contaminated area in the back from an oil tank. No one wants to clean it up. But if someone does buy it and cuts down those pines I'll be very sad. We also don't own that little copse in the foreground. Sigh.
Well, there is lots more Big Bluestem grass than there used to be. I guess I'd rather see the field revert to native grasses than more autumn olive, but it makes such dense clumps I really can't walk through it either!
If I could keep a trail mowed again, it would be great. But the current mower is pretty wimpy. And it's not fixed yet, and may be expensive. I think I'll have to get one that is heavier duty.
Of course, I also can't help but think about how many more years we can keep up with this house and property. Well, we've never actually been able to "keep up" with it by many people's standards. But I may be slipping even behind my own lax expectations.
Maybe tomorrow I can talk myself into weed-whacking some bits of trail out there. Meanwhile, I edited, I did a little autumn olive detail, had a zoom meeting, worked on pictures, and wrote Chapter 31 in Vacation from DMS, 1062 words. Yeah, me!
 | See My Trail Out Back |
There have been some questions about the Alphabet series, so I thought I'd make a few comments today. A couple of people asked which letter was the hardest to find. Well, it wasn't G. I thought that would be one of the difficult ones, but on the hike with 
I have to say that the letter X was very difficult because I was determined to not just use any old two crossed sticks. I kept hoping for two crossed jet trails in the sky, but that never happened. The first time I saw this vine twining around a tree, the pictures I took weren't in focus. So this was the very last letter I got.
This V was just dumb luck... well, and a lot of looking at the sky. I wanted to find SOME letter up there! I took a lot of lousy Js and Cs and even an F. But they were all displaced by the better choices you've seen.
The most frustrating one was the R. There was an R that I could see in the 
The one that I feel is the biggest cheat is the S. The trail makes a nice S shape, but is a mowed trail really a feature of nature? I really wanted to use the stream. Did you notice the S when I blogged 
But I used the creek for the C and the Z, so I didn't want to use it for the S too.