Another Year Older

Sunrise on Wednesday.

Today is my birthday. It hardly seems possible. Didn’t we just do this a few weeks ago? As I approached this day and as it usually happens now at my birthday each year, I had a rather pensive week. I spent a lot of time contemplating the past – the world’s in general, and mine in particular. My reflective state of mind was fortified by a recent request from Josiah for a history of my early life. While he was here at Christmas, he told me that he didn’t know enough about Stacey’s or my early childhood and asked us each to write a short history. I began keeping a journal when I was seventeen, but I didn’t have anything written down for the first sixteen years of my life. So I wrote a brief account and in writing it, I dredged up memories of people and places that I hadn’t thought about for a while.

Sunrise on Thursday.

From 1958 to 1978, my family lived in five homes – Camp Hill and New Cumberland in Pennsylvania, Tallmadge and Ravenna in Ohio, and Naperville in Illinois. While writing my little biography, I went on Google Earth and looked at images of those places and those homes. I found most of them to be almost unrecognizable. The world has changed so much since I lived there all those years ago. Some of the changes were sad as once nice homes are now run down.

The house in Camp Hill, then and now.

New Cumberland, then and now.

Tallmadge, then and now.

Ravenna, then and now.

Naperville, then and now.

Seeing those places got me wondering what became of the friends I had in each of them. I am in contact online with some of my childhood friends, especially the ones from my later teenage years, but some I had no idea about. So I spent some time looking online for old friends. It’s amazing what you can find on the internet. I found a few of them. Some I found in various directories, some I was surprised to find in cemeteries.

For one year, from August of 1971 to September of 1972, we lived in a house in the country on Campbellsport Road in Ravenna, Ohio. Although our address was Ravenna, we went to school in Rootstown where I attended the Mabel Schnee Middle School for my eighth grade year. I only had a few friends that year and my best friend was a boy named Mike Hovance. He was a smart, skinny kid with glasses and freckles. He had a sharp wit and his sarcasm jibed perfectly with mine. We were both oddballs and social outcasts and that made us immediate friends. Together we invented our own school newspaper, The Schnee-Storm, where we wrote satirical articles about our classes, our classmates, the faculty, and the cafeteria food. He wrote most of the articles, I provided the artwork. We published one illustrated handwritten copy each week that we shared between us, chuckling at how clever we were. In gym class we were the worst at the games and always the last two to be picked for teams. In shop class we were both wary of the machines, but good at drafting. The only detention I’ve ever received, I got from a grumpy substitute teacher who had imposed absolute silence in a study hall and I asked Mike, who was sitting across the aisle from me, if I could borrow his protractor to do math homework and the teacher wrote me up. Mike was a great storyteller. He told me that his family originally came from Russia and he had many amusing stories about what Russians said and did, complete with an accent. We both loved science. One day he brought me a gift, one of his geological specimens – a very heavy rock that he said was radioactive. I know that seems dangerous, but thirteen year old boys don’t think about that sort of thing. I still have that rock. I had my father take it to work later to have it tested to see if it really was radioactive and it isn’t. It turned out to be a very pure piece of iron ore. My family moved away after that year and I never saw or heard from Mike again. So in my fit of nostalgia last week, I went looking for him online. And I found him. He died in 1977 at the age of nineteen. I couldn’t find out why, just that he is buried in a cemetery in Ravenna. I also found a 1973 high school yearbook photo of him, taken the year after I last saw him. Since that discovery, I have been a little haunted by him. Enough so that I felt a need to write about him.

The rock Mike gave me. It weighs twelve pounds.

My friend Mike.

I have other friends that I know have passed away. As I get older it is inevitable that there will be more. That’s how life goes. I’m in the grandparent generation now. Only two members of the great-grandparent generation in my family remain, my mother and my Aunt Dolly. I guess I’m getting old.

While I wasn’t contemplating my mortality, I managed to get some important work done last week. I pruned the orchard. At the beginning of the week, while it was still too cold to prune, I drew a map of the orchard as my preliminary step. I have thirty apple trees, three crab apple trees, three peach trees, two pear trees, one plum tree, and one cherry tree. Mapping them helps me remember which varieties are which and where new trees will be planted this spring. The weather warmed midweek. It was in the 50s. Most of the snow melted. It smelled like spring. So Miriam and I went out on Wednesday and pruned. Not all the trees needed pruning. Some are still too small. It’s hard work requiring the use of a chainsaw, hedge trimmer, handsaw, pruning hook, loppers, and a ladder. We spent several hours working on the trees. We ended up pruning twenty-three trees. The trees look good. They have lots of plump buds. Now if we can just avoid the late spring frosts that have wiped out my apples for two years in a row, it looks like we could have a bumper crop this year.

My orchard map.

Pruning.

We had a chicken coop tragedy on Wednesday. When I went down to do the chores, I found one of my Black Cochin hens in a sorry state. She wasn’t injured. She just sat there, listless. I brought her up to the house and tried to doctor her. I wrapped her in a towel and put her in a box. I tried to get her to drink, but she wouldn’t. I thought she might be egg-bound and considered giving her an Epsom salt bath, but she seemed so weak, I thought the shock would finish her off. I didn’t have to worry for long. She entered her death throes shortly after that and after a few moments she died. I’m pretty sure she was egg-bound. I was sad about that. She was a pretty hen. In a flock of forty chickens, one death may seem rather insignificant, but she was a special hen. My plan for my flock is that my Black Cochin hens will be the mothers of home grown chicks from now on. I started out with eight of them as chicks last year. I gave two to Rachel and two to Sarah. That left me with four, one of which turned out to be a rooster. Now two of my three hens have died, one last fall, and now this one. I only have one Black Cochin hen left. I wanted to have at least three breeding hens. Now I’ll have to recruit two of my other hens to fill the gap.

In happier barn news, Posey, our peacock, has regrown most of his train feathers (he sheds them every fall and regrows more each year) and has begun displaying again. That’s a nice sign that spring is coming. He is a beautiful bird.

Posey putting on a show.

On Wednesday evening we ceased making valentines at last. We watched Sense and Sensibility, probably my favorite of the Jane Austen movies, while we made the final cards. Then the cards went into envelopes, the envelopes were addressed and stamped, and we were done. On Thursday, sixty-five envelopes went out in the mail. Some of them contained more than one card, so there were about a hundred valentines in all. It was a record number for us.

Valentines ready to mail.

We continued pruning on Thursday. We finished pruning the fruit trees in our orchard and in the Shillig’s yard and then moved on to the biggest job of all. I planted a row of hazels along the edge of the orchard twenty years ago. When I planted it, it was just a row of twigs, but over the years it has grown into a hedge thirty feet long, twelve feet high, and eight feet wide. It acts as a windbreak and also gives us hazelnuts. While we were in France last year, I saw the hedges that border the roadsides and fields in the beautiful countryside there and I decided that I want my hedge to look like those hedges. That meant reducing the height to eight feet and the width to five feet, and that meant a lot of pruning. We managed to do it. The hedge looks a little rough now, but it will recover in the spring when it leafs out.

What I want my hedge to look like.

The hedge before.

The hedge after.

Friday was about as nice a day as we ever get in February. It was 55° and mostly sunny. When I got home from school, I did the chores right away and then went to work in the garden. I focused on the long border. I cut down all the tall dead stalks from last year’s garden – the ornamental grass, the phlox and coneflower stems, and other things. Then I forked them out of the bed and piled them in a patch at the back of the small vegetable garden where I let wild flowers grow and I burned the pile. I didn’t want to put all that in compost. It was too woody and would take too long to break down. So I reduced it to ashes. The ashes are a great source of potassium for the soil there. It felt great to be doing garden work in February.

Burning last year's garden.

After a few days of teasing springlike weather, yesterday we headed back toward more normal February weather. It cooled off and it rained a heavy cold rain part of the day. I tried to console myself by saying that at least it was rain and not snow, but it was hollow consolation because snow is coming. Tomorrow we are under a winter storm watch and are expected to get seven inches and then more on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

So today I turned sixty-six years old. When I was a teenager, I remember marveling with my friends at the fact that in the year 2000 we would all be forty-two years old. That seemed unbelievable then – so old when the new century began (yes, I know now it really began in 2001). Now here I am, twenty-four years past that. I never imagined myself as a sexagenarian Baby Boomer living in a world gone crazy. Reflecting last week on how the world has changed during my lifetime, and how I’ve changed as I’ve grown older has been sobering. There is so much – the experiences, good and bad, happy and sad, the disappointments and the triumphs, the many, many blessings – my family, my wife, my children, my grandchildren, this home, my gardens, and an orchard that might bear fruit this year – and it all comes together into what I am right now, and that is happy, blessed, and another year older.

That's a big, heavy box!

We are home from church. I always feel a little relieved when I write that. My responsibilities for the day are done. Lunch prep is underway. Later we will celebrate. I already received a gift. When I got home from school on Friday, there was a big box on the front porch. I couldn’t help but notice what it was, the picture was on the outside of the box, so the intended surprise was ruined, but not my excitement. My children pitched in together and bought me a high tunnel for my garden! I won’t be able to put it up until later in the spring, but my mind is reeling with the possibilities it presents. What a great gift! Who knows what other treats the day will hold for me. And then on I go, another year older, and maybe a little bit wiser.