[This is the Journal entry I wrote for the week ending 10/20/24.]
This week’s Journal will be a bit of a meander. We’ve come to that time in the year when I have less to occupy my hands and that results in my mind wandering down some sometimes tortuous paths. I think when I’m done here, you’ll see that it all makes sense in a convoluted way. Bear with me.
If you’ve been reading the Potter County Journal for very long, you know that I love birds. My fascination with them began at the age of ten when I found an Audubon’s Guide to the Birds of North America among my father’s books in the bookcase in our house on Bridge Street. I don’t know how long it had been there and why I hadn’t noticed it before then. I don’t know why my father had it. I never knew him to be much interested in birds. But finding it had a great impact on me. I pored through it over and over again. I quickly became an avid bird enthusiast. I accidentally destroyed that book a few years later after we’d moved to Ohio. I left it in the woods when I was bird watching. It got rained on and after I recovered it, it fell apart. But my zeal for birds did not end then. I own many books about birds now. I keep a life list of the birds I’ve seen. One of the joys of my life, especially during the winter when things get bleak, is watching birds at my bird feeders. I’ve watched a lot of birds over the years and read about them and watched numerous shows about them. They make me happy.
If you were to ask me what my favorite bird is, I would tell you without hesitation it is the raven. They don’t have beautiful brightly colored plumage, although I think their glossy black feathers are handsome. I like them because they are unbelievably smart. Ravens are members of the bird family Corvidae that also includes crows, magpies, and jays here in North America and other birds like rooks, jackdaws, and choughs in other parts of the world. All of those birds are remarkably intelligent. We have ravens here, but they are rather shy and I don’t see them very often. But we do have lots of crows and that’s almost as good because they are my second most favorite birds.
There is an old rhyme, a bit of superstition traceable back to the sixteenth century in England, about counting magpies that says:
One is for sorrow,
Two is for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five is for silver,
Six is for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.
Sighting magpies was considered an omen of good or bad luck depending on how many you saw. In the United States where magpies aren’t as common, crows became the birds to count. That’s how I know the rhyme, counting crows. We have a book, a gift to my children from their Tante Kathy back in 1987 called Crows: An Old Rhyme, by Heidi Holder. It has beautiful illustrations and was one of their favorites. You can tell that by how worn out it is. The version of the rhyme in that book is a little different from the older version.
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| Pages from the book. |
Several years ago, I think it was in the summer of 2014, for several weeks, just after dawn, there were crows in the big maples in our front yard. Six crows every morning calling noisily to each other. Maybe they were a family, two parents and four of their juvenile offspring, I don’t know. But I liked hearing them and watching them. Crows don’t make beautiful music like some birds, but their wide range of caws, coos, rattles, and clicks, more than twenty sounds all together, constitute a sophisticated language. Listening to them, I imagine they’re having a raucous discussion full of gossip and off color jokes. That summer, seeing them every morning, the old rhyme came to me – Six is for Gold. There they were, six of them, and we live in Gold. I took that as a sign.
Back then I had ambitions of making this place into a little farmstead with gardens and an orchard large enough to sell vegetables, apples, cider, and eggs. I didn’t pursue that plan for long, but while I was considering it, I decided that I needed a name for our “farm.” Lots of farms have clever names. So I came up with a clever name of my own – Six Crows Farm, because “six is for Gold.” I was painting signs back then, so I painted a sign and attached it to the front of the barn. That’s as far as Six Crows Farm ever got. I decided to keep my farmstead smaller, more manageable, and mostly aimed at feeding just my family. Last week when I was cleaning things up down at the barn, getting it ready for winter, I considered removing that sign. What was the point of having it? But I decided to keep it there. And that was what inspired this long meander.
Tuesday Emma, Brittany, Hannah, and Hailey left. We were so glad they came to visit and happy for all the work they did. They want to come back next year and work some more, maybe in the summer where there is so much garden work to do. That would be great.
Most of our migratory birds left weeks and weeks ago. On Tuesday suddenly we had robins again. I think these are robins from further north on their way south and just stopping to eat some of my crab apples and hawthorn berries on their way. I was glad and sad to see them. We won’t see them again until spring.
Tuesday night we got to see the comet. We had a beautiful sky full of stars. The comet was plain to see in the western sky just after sundown.
On Wednesday there were even more robins and a flock of red-winged blackbirds in the yard. The robins were in the hawthorn tree feasting. The red-winged blackbirds were mobbing the bird feeders. I spent that morning canning more cider and watching the birds from the kitchen window. The weather turned colder that day and later in the afternoon we had rain mixed with snow. It didn’t amount to anything, but it was snow and I was not glad to see it.
Thursday morning I awoke to frost and a hard freeze. It was 26 degrees. Any tender plant that had survived until then finally succumbed. After the frost was gone, I mowed leaves. The grass isn’t growing anymore and I don’t like leaves on the lawn, so I mow them up. After that I did a bit of trimming in the orchard. That afternoon when I went down to do the chores I noticed that most of the chickens are molting now. There were a few before, but now it’s pretty much all of them. There are feathers everywhere and they are a motley looking bunch. They will be very pretty after their new feathers come in, but until then, they look pathetic. We saw the comet again that night.
We were going down to the Thayn’s house for the weekend, so most of Friday was spent preparing for the trip. Somehow we always manage to fill the car with things to take down. We left home at 4:00 and arrived there at 8:00. We noticed on the drive down that the autumn leaves are still beautiful south of us. Ours are almost completely gone. The Fosters arrived shortly after us. Our niece Katie, my brother Steve’s oldest daughter, was also there with her husband Michael and their two youngest children, Owen and Julia. So the Thayns had a full house for the weekend and it was great.
Saturday was a busy day. There is always constant activity at the Thayn’s house – children playing, people working. A group went in the afternoon to an escape room, Hannah’s birthday present to Hazel. I didn’t go, but the group that went reported that they had a fun time. After that, it was time for Trunk-or-Treating at the church. Rachel had spider decorations for their car. The children all had cute costumes. They went from car to car and gathered a lot of candy. Then there was a chili cook-off and lots of candy consumption.
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| The escape room crew. |
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| Trunk-or-treating. |
Sunday we went to church in the Thayn’s ward. After church they had a munch and mingle. Then we went back to the house and gathered our things and came home again. It was a short weekend. The time seemed to pass in a flash. We will be together again soon. We’re already planning for Thanksgiving when everyone will be coming here. It doesn’t seem possible that we’ve come to that time of the year already, but we have.
