Uncategorized – Our technological infirmity

The First Frost

Raymond’s Gut with a few inches of ice during a previous winter

When we living on the North Carolina coast, we always considered the first cold day to be the one when we had to give up wearing shorts. Only the first two weeks of February were reliably cold. The picture of the frozen body of water (Raymond’s Gut) was taken during a Febraury cold snap in Carteret County. The trouble with packing your shorts away was that warmth could descend on the coastal area almost at any time. The result was that I rarely gave up my shorts while living at the coast. When I lived on the farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, the first cold day was when I had to start wearing mittens. That was actually a whole lot colder than you might think. I rarely used mittens until it got below zero Fahrenheit.
Growing up in North Carolina, cold is not something you think about very much. To me it was cold when the red dirt banks sparkled with frost crystals. As I got older and went winter camping with our Boy Scout Troop 752 at Camp Raven Knob, I got to know real cold. There is nothing like rain and chilly weather to make you appreciate a nice warm home. Still it was not serious cold.
The first serious cold that I remember was on a trip freshman year (1967) from Cambridge to Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. I cannot remember why we went, but I do remember it being minus twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit the Saturday morning we left. Fortunately, serious cold does bother you very long if you are in a car with a functioning heater. Still it left an impression. While temperatures in Cambridge got down into single digits, they could not come close to the Hanover freeze.
Sometime in my college years I caught a snow-loving virus. That and a obsession with having some land of my own led me to head off to Maritime Canada after graduation. In the early seventies land was cheap in Nova Scotia and life seemed like a throwback to life in the fifties in the United States.
The old house that I bought on the shore of the Bay of Fundy was not exactly the warmest house around. In spite of lots of efforts and a newly built fireplace, it could still be cold especially since the wind often howled in St. Croix Cove where the house was. That part of Nova Scotia was famous for storms that went from rain to snow to sleet to freezing rain back to snow accompanied by bitter cold.
Fortunately, for the snow loving part of me, the lousy Nova Scotia weather was also bad for running cattle outside so my wife and I decided to move to New Brunswick. Without much thought other than falling in love with the farm, we ended up in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the middle of New Brunswick’s snow belt. Our first winter we had over twenty feet of snow. We also got to endure minus twenty-eight Fahrenheit that first year. In January of 1982, when our youngest daughter was born one January, the thermometer dipped to minus forty with an accompanying blizzard and high winds.
Most years in New Brunswick the first real cold came in the first week or so December just about the time busy mothers needed to finish up their Christmas shopping. You could tell the real cold weather had arrived when on successive days the previous day’s low would become the next day’s high temperature. Things would continue that way as we started plugging our cars in until the temperature bottomed out at something seriously below zero Fahrenheit.
I endured some bitter cold on our New Brunswick farm but I doubt that I ever felt colder than when I went fishing in a skiff on the rainy, wind morning of October 25, 2005 with the temperature in the forties. When we finished fishing that morning and I was dropped off at the dock, it only took me about a block of walking before I realized that I could not feel my extremities. There is nothing like being completely soaked in the wind to make cold penetrate to your bones. I had to spend some serious time in a very hot tub bath before I recovered. It is no surprise that I did not feel cold while I was catching all the fish. That fishing trip remains one of my coldest memories next to sitting on a brick hard seat in my pickup at minus forty.
Since we have moved back to North Carolina’s Piedmont, cold weather has become a little more dependable. Most years we see a little snow. In 2024, our first frost was October 20th. ‘We have already beaten that. It looks like that in 2025, the first chance for frost will be no earlier than Wednesday, October 23 when our low temperature is forecasted to reach 36F.
This potential frost got me to thinking about the tales that my mother used to tell. She was born in 1910 and told us of stories of her father taking teams of horses out on their frozen mill pond to cut ice and store it for the summer in a deep hole insulated with saw dust. That would not be too much of a surprise had she not lived in the foothills of North Carolina, just west of Winston-Salem. The mill pond which was part of so many of her stories was near Yadkinville, North Carolina which is not exactly known as one the earth’s cold spots.
A little climate research indicates western North Carolina the earlier 1910s was cooler than our current weather. Since then the trend has been steadily warmer with a noticeable peak in the 1950s.
I cannot remember anyone telling me about people skating on ponds in central North Carolina during the fifties when I grew up. There certainly was no report of driving teams of horses onto the frozen ponds. I cannot even remember a pond freezing over.
My son pulled our tomatoes out yesterday but that was more from being tired of looking after tomatoes than the danger of frost. Needless to say, I will still be wearing shorts when I go out to the front porch to read the next few days. When I change to blue jeans, it is going to have to be a whole lot colder. The weather might be sweatshirt worthy.

Paths Not Taken

The backfield at our Tay Creek farm where I am homesteading and splitting wood in my dreams

In every life there are decisions which determine what direction your life will take. I have been fortunate to be in positions where I had enough flexibiity to guide our life in certain directions. Even now fifty years after some of those decisions, it is hard to say that what we did was the right decision for us. Our decisions worked out for us but it is impossible to tell if another path might have given us an even more rewarding (and not in monetary terms) life.
I graduated Harvard and instead of going to law school, I went back to the land in Nova Scotia. Whether the neighbors ever called us hippies or not is still an open question, but my bet is that they didn’t because we had a John Deere tractor and were trying to farm the land. We were friends with hippies living in a Dome in the woods, but I worked hard to wire our house so we could have electricity and the modern coveniences that came with it
We did grow a huge garden and put up prodigous amounts of produce both canned and frozen. We butchered our own steer and hogs. We collected wild Chantrelle mushrooms from the woods. We even tended a gill net for a while.
The old house I bought and fixed up had 140 acres. Of that well over 25 acres was a cleared hayfield with a small pond. Though the woodland with it was mostly spruce, I did eventually get another piece that had some hardwood. It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that we could have kept a few cows, had a huge garden, and lived a very simple life. Looking at recent aerial photos of the property which I sold in 1976, the property appears to now have lots of gardens, more trees and little pasture though I am sure goats would be happy with what is there now. I might well have done something similar had my partner in the enterprise not been such a jerk. He married the local school teacher in our small community and devoted far too much time to telling our neighbors what a terrible person I was. While my new bride stayed with me there for a year, we were determined to move a friendlier place.
We found the better place in the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Instead of people being petty and mean, the residents of Tay Creek were welcoming, helpful, and supportive. I can think of no better place to raise a family. The community when we moved there had two country stores, three churches, a town hall, and a lot of opened minded people.
We stayed in Tay Creek for over a decade. Our three children were born while we were on the farm. Our two Labrador retrievers are buried there a long with a good chunk of my soul. This would have been an even better place to have a few cows, lots of gardens, and even fill the freezer with trout to supplement our beef.
We did not take that path, I wanted to work the soil and to raise high quality cattle, selling bulls to improve the local herds. We accomplished that goal, along with continuing to grow much of our own food. We had chickens, a Guernsey milk cow and a beautiful farm.
We eventually had to give up farming because interest rates soared to over 20% during the early eighties when our herd had grown to two hundred head. We couldn’t handle the high interest rates on our $100,000 operating loan, so we had a very successful dispersal sale. . After selling the cattle we could have hunkered down on the farm which was paid for, sold off some of the machinery, and continued to work the land, but we had three children, and we wanted them to go to college. Like many others I went to work in town after taking a few months off. My job was in an early computer store and led to a twenty year career at Apple. After Apple I worked as a vice president of a network construction and consulting firm for over a decadsa.
It has been a good life. All three children who were born while we were living on the farm have gone to college and done well. Yet as I have been watching some of the Alaska homesteading YouTube videos, I can only wonder how would things be different if we had stuck with working the land instead of keyboards. After all, I made the trip to Alaska before I moved to Nova Scotia and I even considered homesteading in Newfoundland.
Instead of that I ended up walking the halls of government as Apple’s director of federal sales. I know the people that I would have gotten to know working the land would have made much better friends than the politicians that I have met.
Still in my dreams I am splitting hunks of birch, milking the cow, collecting eggs and filling the freezer with brook trout, beef, pork and the cupboards and root cellar with homegrown veggies. We still garden in a token fashion and I still make sourdough bread but we buy more from local small farmers thsn we grown. At my age the amount of wood, even birch, that I could split would be limited.

My wife in the large hayfield behind the house at our first farm in Nova Scotia

The Evolution of a Fisherman

**Puppy Drum, a Red Drum small enough that most fisherman throw them back**

The society of fishermen (and women who fish) is far more open minded thanyour average members of the population.

In politics, the mobility between conservative and liberal groups is almost non-existent. It would be fair to say that without some extraordinary circumstance once you are born a conservative, the chances of becoming a liberal are very slim unless you get whacked on the head with a police billy club. Likewise most liberals would only become conservatives if they won the lottery and caught a bad case of greed.

Fisherman really do not care about your history unless it is fishing history, they care about what you are catching today and how you are doing it. Everything beyond that is pretty much irrelevant unless you are trapped inside a house in a blizzard and have no entertainment beyond the stories you can spin.

Actually you can be a worm dunker one day, and a dry fly fisherman the next day. No one will care except the worms. Fortunately, I was born into a Presbyterian family which if you have seen the movie, A River Runs Through It, means I should be a dry fly fisherman. For many years, that was most of fishing.

Actually, I fished with a fly rod before I was even a teenager, but I have avoided the purity of only one type of angling. I came from a long line of worm dunkers on my mother’s side. No only did they dunk worms, they also dunked shrimp and fished along the North Carolina coast for whatever was biting. They caught a lot of fish every fall that they took home to fill their freezers.

When it comes to fishing, I have tried almost any method though I now lean away from the dark side of using live bait . There is a certain point in your fishing life when catching fish is not nearly as important as catching certain fish by a particular means. While most sports seek out ways to be more productive, fishermen often seek out ways which are more difficult and which result in fewer fish being caught. Often it doesn’t even matter if you catch something or not. It is the time on or by the water and the comradeship of your fishing buddy.

I was blessed to live for sixteen years on the NC coast in what was close to fishing heaven at the time. I did catch fish to be proud of just a couple of minutes from the dock behind our home. One quest was to catch a bluefish from the surf on a light spinning rod using an artificial lure. It is not an impossible task, I had actually done it before butnfar more often from a boat than from the surf. If you get a shiny lure in front of feeding bluefish, you will usually catch something. So catching one is not a huge challenge. However, if you give yourself a short time window and a long beach to read, then the challenge becomes a little more fun.

One evenng we left our home on the banks of the White Oak for a 15-20 minute drive to one of my favorite beaches. I like it because there are rarely people there for much of the year, and I have caught fish there before. That evening we got there a little after seven PM and stayed for around thirty minutes. That was all the time I had allotted myself to catch a bluefish.

It was a great evening to be on the beach. In fact when we headed home around eight PM, the temperature was still 80F. Anyway, I started my fishing with a Gotcha plug. I probably fished with it for the first fifteen minutes with no luck. Then I switched to a gold spoon. The sun was starting to drop quickly, and I had been watching a number of jumping fish just out of the range of my casts.

I was hoping the light from the dropping sun might make my lure more attractive.It was the third cast with the gold spoon when I got a solid hit. My next cast there was nothing, but on the following cast I hooked a bluefish but it quickly threw the hook. One more throw, and I had another hit and was solidly onto a nice bluefish. It did not take long to bring him to shore. He was about sixteen inches long. I quickly heaved him back into the surf and told my wife that I was done. She could not believe that I did not want to fish more, but I had accomplished what I wanted to do and the feeling was good. I was actually using a very light, long spinning rod which was purchased more with the soft mouths of trout in mind than bluefish. Of course that added a little to the challenge.

There are always more challenges for a fisherman. One of the most exciting is catching North Carolina’s state fish, the Red Drum, on an artificial lure.

On Saturday, November 5, 2016, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful out on the water. I managed to catch and release a sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.

On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks near our home in my kayak. I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In ten days, I landed with artificial lures, ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I only kept one red drum but I kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.

That is only a sample of my fishing tales. Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory. I caught some memorable fish.

The Wonder Of It All

Goose, our tabby cat with a permanet sense of wonder

One of the reasons that I love our big tabby cat, Goose, is that he always has a look of wonder. We could learn a few things from Goose. A few times over the years I have forgotten to be pleasantly surprised at whatever has happened, but not often.

After I went away to military high school in Tennessee in 1963, I figured out within the first three months that I could either be unhappy with what was happening in my life or I could be wonderously surprised at whatever happens next because it is often an unknown piece of the puzzle that turns out to be my life.

When I got in my car to go office to college in the fall of 1967, I left with a sense of adventure which included a promise to myself to try new things especially if they forced me to step out of my box. The Vietnam war was raging during my college years and for a while it looked like I might become a foot soldier in it. Instead once I graduated and figured out that I wasn’t going to be drafted, I immigrated to Canada.

That as you might expect was a huge decision but like many decisions in the days before the Internet, not a lot of research went into it. I was in love with Nova Scotia. The beauty and wonder of the place wrapped itself around my mind. Before I got married, I came to know loneliness even in a place as scenic as Nova Scotia. Marriage to a NC girl was another moment that surprised me and left me thinking that I was living under a special star that helped me find such a wonderful wife.

There were plenty other moments of wonder. After dispersing our cattle herd, somehow I made the transitiion to working with Apple Computer. From shoveling manure to selling Macintoshes has to be an epic career switch. Twenty years later when Apple pushed me away from the company, several people encouraged me to think about my next career as finding something that would excite me for the next fifteen years. It took a while, but I ended up helping communitieis build fiber networks. Along the way, I learned how to take a skiff out into the Atlantic and how to kayak a two-mile wide river. I spent a few years rescuing an HOA.

I always welcomed the next challenge never doubting my ability to do a good job and always approaching a new challenge with a sense of wonder. That doesn’t mean I did not have any worries. There were many sleepness nights during my HOA time. I would always wake early when I was taking someone new in our skiff out into the Atlantic. It was a big responsibility.

I recently got a new heart valve by way of a TAVR procedure. While I was afraid, I never waivered. I am still facing some medical issues but I face them with a sense of wonder that something so complex can be done without cutting me open.

I have been surprised by people all my life from the British doctor and his wife who became great friends to some of the very interesting people that I met Harvard.

I continue to be amazed by people that I meet from the young farm family working on the same farm that has been in their family for over one hundred years to the New Brunswick farm couple in their sixties still haying and keeping work horses. I also amazed by the young adults finding their way through this increasingly complex world. That they can keep moving forward when most of the cards are stacked against them renews my sense of wonder. Then there is my adult son who rose up to start doing many of the things that I was doing before my heart valve problem. I am back to driving and hope to be gardening in a few weeks but I definitely have a feeling of wonder seeing my son plant flowers. If that can happen, I think we will be able to push back on the anti-democracy forces trying to destroy our country. That of course would lead me to an immense feeling of relief.

Running Into One Of Life’s Walls

Our backyard in early spring. I feel blessed to see it again

Goose and I have been quiet but it has been for a good reason. Last Friday after my annual physical at 10 AM, I was pretty happy. My blood sugar was at its best level since we moved here from the coast in February 2021. My blood pressure was 112/68 and I had lost a couple of pounds. I came back by the house and picked my wife, Glenda, for a trip to Winston-Salem. I neglected to have something to drink while home. Since I had been fasting that was a mistake. We decided on Culver’s for our meal because I want some good french fries since it is something we rarely have. I got my smashburger, order of extra crispy fries, and a Coke Zero which is also something I rarely have. After an enjoyable lunch we went across the street to Lidl to pick up a chicken to grill and a few other things. I had paid for the groceries, got Glenda in the car and was taking the cart back to the cart corral when I started feeling not so good. I stopped for a moment and rested by sitting on one of the concrete posts. Then I went back to the car put Glenda’s rolling walker in the back of the card and started sweating. It was a hot day, well into the eighties. I sat down in the driver seat and that is the last thing I remember until I woke up with Glenda pounding on me. I had passed out.

EMS was there shortly after I awoke. I was loaded into an ambulance and transported the short distance down Silas Creek Parkway to Novant’s Forsyth County Hospital. The only discomfort during the ride was them trying to start an IV on the bumpy road. They finally gave up.

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We spent the next six on seven hours in the Emergency Area while they ran tests. I was finally told that I didn’t have a heart attack but the enzyemes that show up prior to a heart attack were elevated. They suspect dehydration played a significant role in the event.

Wednesday afternoon, I was finally discharged after a battery of tests including a heart catherization and a transesophageal electrocardiogram (TEE). My heart rhythm came back on its own. “Heart catherization is a procedure where a thin, flexible tube (a catheter) is inserted into a blood vessel and guided to the heart to diagnose and/or treat heart conditions. The TEE is a type of echocardiogram (ultrasound of the heart) where a probe with a transducer is inserted through the mouth and down the esophagus to get clearer images of the heart structures, especially those at the back of the heart.” While both procedures sound scary, they are short and painless. They take probably 35 minutes for the two of the them if you ignore the 4:30 AM bath in some sort of special prep the night before each one. The nurse was careful to use warm water the first night. The next night it cold water which was no fun. I was also on Heparin drip with IV pole for three days. Getting on the drip is also no fun since they have test your blood ever six hours until they get it right. My hands look like purple pin cushions They eventually decided I didn’t need the Heparin.

What I do need is a new aortic heart valve since mine is calcified. They are proposing a “Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) which is a minimally invasive procedure that replaces a narrowed aortic valve with an artificial valve.” It’s an alternative to open-heart surgery. We have several doctor’s appointments in the next few weeks and the hope is that sometime late this month a TAVR procedure will happen. I will go in on a Tuesday morning (TAVR Tuesdays I am told) have the hour long procedure then spend a day being observed before being discharged.

I have been told that within a month, I will regain much of the energy and strenght that seems to have faded from my aging (76 year-old) body. In the spring of 2018, my total mileage for the previous 12 months 1,530 miles. The next three years, I averaged 1,100 miles. The last three years, I have only average 600 miles. On July 3, 2017, I walked 10.5 miles in one day. I managed only a few quarter miles of swimming last summer, compared to several the year before.

There are more than enough excuses, more deskwork and less time but also a problem with a sciatic nerve. I have a goal to lose thirty pounds this summer. I already have lost six pounds which I credit to hospital food.

All this makes you look at life a little differently. I was able to finish up an office project with my 10,000 cell spreadsheet and the nice GIS maps that I do this afternoon. By Sunday night I hope to finish my taxes or as I say tie up an important loose end.

I have walked well over five times what I did any day in the hospital. I cooked my own breakfast and cooked the salmon cakes for dinner – I did not partake of the gravy. Strangely the high blood sugar that I have been battling seems to relatively stable right now. I haven’t had Metaformin in a week so that is also a good sign. I think being in a hospital long term can really suck the life out of you. I feel blessed to be home with my wife and tabby cats.

I am very grateful for my wife who cared enough to pound on me and for a lady named Judy Hill, a stranger, who was there to give her support when no one else would. I am impressed with Novant’s heart team and have no concerns about letting them try to fix me. The good news is that my arteries had no plaque so with a new valve, I might get back to some serious walking. My son, Michael, and been a champ in stepping up to do whatever needed doing including retrieving our car after an Uber ride and bringing me clean clothes at the hospital.

My primary care physician and I had agreed on having my life long heart murmur examined this summer. I think that might be one thing that I can take off the summer’s list. A few residents at the hospital even got to hear it. I can consider myself lucky to have been where care was not far away.

I did meet a trump supporter technician in the hospital. My conclusion is that evenyone who works in the hospital works such long hours (12 hour shifts) that they have no time to dive deep into the news. It took me two days to find someone who had watched the NCAA basketball final.

My last thought is what if we took all the people doing billing and collections and retrained them to work in hospitals? What a wonderful start that would be on better healthcare with universal covervage. I was once told there are more billing people at Duke’s Medical Center than there are doctors. That seems wrong and from how stretched the nurses were during my hospital stay, I know they could use some help.

A final word, I have a high dedcutible Blue Cross Health supplement. It has worked well because I haven’t been sick. Any paid subscriptions that I get will be going right into a saving account to cover what I think will be a substantial deductible. It is no fun getting sick and living on a fixed income.

I can assure everyone that I will continue writing and perhaps providing some real insight into what it is like being a heart patient. With some luck, I can convince my younger daughter to plant three or four tomatoes for me. It would be a wonderful gift to be able to look after them this summer.

Fun fact, I have had two overnight stays in a hospital, this most recent one of five days and another one night stay for a liver biopsy. It was the same hospital fifty-six years apart. I still remember waking up from my liver biopsy and a cute candy-striper told me that I had mail. It was a letter from the draft board ordering me to report for pre-induction physical. The hospital was in the middle of a field then.

Goose by the way says that I should nap through it all.

Growing Not Controlling People

Love can make a difference

My Mother in backyard of our Mt. Airy House.

My mother who grew up as Susie Blanche Styers was part of family that had lived in and around the hills north and west of Winston-Salem since the Revolutionary War. Our first ancestor in the area is recorded on the 1790 census and is buried with his wife forty-five minutes away from our current home.
Mother’s grandfather Abe Styers ran Styers ferry which crossed the Yadkin River from Yadkin County to Forsyth County. Forsyth County, the home of Winston-Salem, was destined to be a county that pulled itself into the manufacturing boom of the second half of the twentieth century. Yadkin County would remain solidly agricultural.
Mother was born on a mill pond in the heart of Yadkin County in 1910. It was a time before electricity and when horse drawn buggies were more likely to be found on the dirt roads than those new Model T Fords. Her mother, Sallie Shore Styers, died in the 1919 flu epidemic. By the time my mother was nine years old she was cooking for the family of eight.
That presented some challenges since she was too small to lift the heavy cast iron pan used to bake biscuits each morning from the flour mixed up weekly by one her older female relatives. Fortunately, her older brother Henry would help her with the pan after he had taken care of bringing the wood inside and starting a fire in the stove.
While life around a millpond in the early part of the twentieth century might sound idyllic, it was actually a lot of hard work, and a life that didn’t leave a lot of time for play. While Walter, mother’s father, was a miller, most of the rest of the food for the large family with six children had to be grown and preserved on the spot.
There was no yard to mow, just some bare ground to sweep around the house with homemade brooms made from the readily available broom straw. Preserving food for winter was a skill mother and her sisters never lost.
The stories of watching men cut blocks of ice from the pond during the winter and haul the loads of ice with teams of horses to their sawdust insulated ice house in the ground seem hard to believe in our warming world. Yet life was very different then. They kept their milk and butter cooled in a spring house which was little more that a small building with a roof set on top of a spring flowing out of the ground.
Mother had places to go and things to do in her life so it didn’t take much time with her new stepmother before she left home as a teenager for the big city of Mount Airy, NC. Eventually she got a license as a beautician and had her own shop on Main Street. She even claimed to have spanked Andy Griffith when he was misbehaving in her shop while she did his mother’s hair.
When she was in her nineties, she used to joke that she had walked by Snappy Lunch for most of her long life and never tasted one of their pork chop sandwiches. We bought her one, and she declared that she had not missed much.
While mother made it out of Yadkin County, her sisters never did. With the determination that only a true southern matriarch demonstrates, she was determined that her nieces and nephews would have a taste of life beyond the red dirt fields of Yadkin County. She was the only one of the sisters to learn how to drive as a teenager.
I’ve been told many times by cousins that they never would have enjoyed much of a Christmas without my mother. She was famous for braving the muddy roads to get back to her sister Mollie’s house. I remember her stories of getting stuck and having to knock on the door of a farmer’s house to be pulled out.

Goose and I just sent out a new newsletter, Goose Speaks: Memories of Love, Black Friday 2024. It has more about my mother. You don’t have to subscribe to read it, and there is a free subscription that will get most of the posts.

Goose Speaks Launches

Goose, the biggest of our tabby cats from the marshes

Goose has enjoyed some popularity on social media sites, including Facebook but also on Bluesky where one of his pictures got over 5,000 likes. Goose’s no nonsense attitude kept him from being quiet during the summer. His most famous quote has driven some of his popularity.

I have little tolerance for fools.

Goose follows a rigorous schedule that includes breakfast, bird watching, patrolling for squirrels, naps, dinner, and more naps. Then he gets his before bed treats. Goose isn’t so full of himself that having some fun dialogues is out of the question. He can get very passionate to the point of being hilarious when discussing the amount cat food in his bowl.

The following is an excerpt from Goose’s Newsletter this Sunday, November 24, 2024. Goose is talking about his first memories as a kitten.

Goose, “I remember how dark, cold and wet it was under the shed where we were born. What I remember best was how I would play with my sisters, Merlin, Jester, and Maverick in the sunlight at the back of the shed. Our mother, Elsie, told us to be careful and not to get far from the safety of the shed. She told us that there were all sorts of things that would eat us from hawks to alligators. Still when the sun was bright, we had lots of fun. We never saw any alligators but the marsh grass was so tall that even I couldn’t see over it.

We were sort of in a routine, nursing mom, playing, and then piling up together for naps. We were growing and it seemed that we were always hungry. After we were a few weeks old, mom carried us one by one up up over the bulkhead to the back of another building. It was a garage. There were bowls near it and they were full of what we were to learn is cat food. It was tough crunching for a while, but we learned it was a good way to not feel hungry. Sometimes we would hide until the people filled the bowls.

Then came the night mother left us in the garage. What happened next changed our lives.

The rest of the story is behind a paywall.

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Memories to hold close

I wrote this back in the fall of 2016. It was one of the nicest falls that we enjoyed in our fifteen years on the North Carolina coast. I wrote more than one post arguing that fall was even nicer on the coast than in the mountains.

Here is a brief description of the memorable month of November 2016, as seen from the water and the beaches of Carteret County.

The good fishing and nearly perfect weather, continues but I can already feel the best of fall sliding away.

On Saturday, November 5, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful as you can see from the marsh grass picture. I also managed to catch and release another sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.

On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks in my kayak and I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In the last ten days, I have landed ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I have only kept one red drum but I have kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.

Last year, 2015, we did not have a fishing season like this one. I blamed it all on the early October rain we got. It is hard to miss a fishing season when fall fishing on the coast is such a tradition. This year we have been lucky. Since Mathew dropped three inches of rain on us October 8, we have only had two-tenths of an inch on October 22, and another two-tenths of an inch on November 4.

Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory.

Life Sneaks Up On You

The Royal Road, Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

Just after I graduated college in the summer of 1971, instead of going to Law School, I headed off to Nova Scotia. I was part of the generation that felt strongly about getting back to the land and understanding a lot of things that modern society was hiding from us.

A decision like that is possible when you are young, I believe that as age and life will sneak up on you, it gets much harder to go off on your own in a wild adventure as you age. How older people have done it, remains a mystery to me.

Eventually, I got married and my wife and I moved to what I considered a real farm or at least one that I believed that I could make into a modern farm. We never really gave up all modern conveniences like many back-to-the-landers. One of the first things that I installed in our Nova Scotia farmhouse was a dishwasher. I also put one in our home in New Brunswick. I plowed my garden with a John Deere tractor not a horse.

The road in the picture ran 20 miles back to Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick. We were lucky to have schools, churches, a couple of general stores and medical services in our little community of Tay Creek. Forty years after we left, the churches and general stores are gone. If you want to buy gasoline or a nail, you have to go to Fredericton.

Taking on building a home for your family in an isolated spot which at the time was subject to amazing snow storms is something you only do when you are young and your body can take on almost any challenge. In my twenties and thirties, I never doubted that I could do everything for my family aside from medical care and schooling. Plumbing, electrical wiring, installing appliances, those were expected of the folks who lived beyond the city. There was no one to hire to mow a yard or even change faucet. While we had an oil furnace, most of our heat came from a wood stove. The furnace would come on during the early morning hours as the house cooled. Our water came from a spring. Our food came from our garden, our milk cow, chickens and cattle herd.

As nice as the life on your own in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick was, it was non-stop work. It was ten years before we went on a real vacation. After we left the farm, we mostly lived in suburbs. Seven years after leaving the farm we were in subdivision on the side of a mountain in SW Virginia. For many years I kept the steep slope behind the house clear of brush and small trees. It meant working with a chainsaw on a hill where I could barely stand. Fortunately, I never got injured. It was another activity reserved for youth.

By the time we got to our next house twenty-four years after leaving the farm, the strenuous work was down to mowing the yard, keeping our skiff running, and hurricane preparation. Good preparation for a hurricane often meant the cleanup afterwards was relatively easy. A storm like Hurricane Florence meant extra cleanup for everyone in the area no matter how much you prepared. The older you get, the harder all that is. Polywood outdoor furniture is nice until you have to haul it all into the garage.

When we moved from the coast in 2021, my wife and I were both over seventy. We were far from our children and family. Our house had too many steps and we were both tired of the hurricane routine in spite of never having any real damage to our house.

My wife had almost five acres of raw farmland which was a hayfield in Surry County. We briefly considered building a home there, but quickly decided that we were too old for all the work needed to build a home so we found a great subdivision with public sewer, water, and fiber Internet. Moving to North Carolina Piedmont close to where I grew up has turned out to be a wise decision.

We are glad that we moved when we did. We have friends our age that would like to move from the coast but have decided that they are too old to try. I can relate to their feelings. Getting our coastal home ready to sell and moving with our four kittens was not the easiest thing that I have ever done. I am pretty sure that three years later, I would be reluctant to move again unless I just had to move.

You don’t think about these things when you are young and can handle anything. Life can sneak up on you. It is good to plan a little for the time when you can no longer take on the world with one arm tied behind your back.

Old Age Is Not For Sissies

Long ago I remember hearing my mother say, “Old age is not for sissies.” She was 84 and I was 45. When you are forty-five, you think you handle just about anything. In the twenty-four years after college, I moved to Canada where we farmed for ten years, and we moved back to the US. By the time we got to Roanoke, Virginia had already been selling Apples for nearly a decade. While I was a very successful sales person at Apple, my mother who knew nothing about computers knew a lot more about life than me.

She understood that families can get complicated, hard work does not always result in success, and most importantly she knew the value of continuing to work even when it was not easy. She could accomplish amazing things, but she did it not through a flurry of activity but through methodically getting things done as she was able. When she was in her nineties, she was proud of still being able to dress herself even though it took her over an hour. Her mother died during the 1918-19 flu pandemic. At the age of nine she became the lady of the house. She had to cook for her five siblings. Many times she told me the story of making biscuits in the morning for the family but having one of the boys put the heavy cast iron pan in the wood stove because she could not lift it. She left home in her teens because the new stepmother and my mother did not see eye to eye.

If I remember the story correctly, as mother was leaving leaving home, she told the stepmother that if it ever got to her that the stepmother had laid a finger on one of her sisters, she and her favorite cast iron frying pan would be back to deal with it. Mother had grown into being very proficient with a cast iron pan. Blanche, after putting herself through cosmetology school, became a successful beautician running her own shop on Main Street in Mount Airy and later after I was born, she had one in the back of our house in Lewisville, North Carolina. It was the way she supported us. As a single mom in the fifties, she managed to raise me and become a very popular Boy Scout mom who was considered a better driver than most of the men.

I never lacked for love. I also learned the value of education and hard work. Like all of us, mother had things in her life that challenged her, but she always rose to the challenge even if it involved a lot of false starts. She was someone you could count on when help was needed. We had a cattle field day at our farm in the late seventies. My mother who was in her late sixties got on an airplane and flew from North Carolina to New Brunswick which included switching terminals by herself in Boston to help feed the 300 people who showed up. Mother was in her mid-eighties before she gave up her driver’s license. When she did it, she told me not to worry, if there was an emergency, she could still drive. A few years after giving up driving, she had to give up working in her flowers. It was the stairs in and out of her house that put an end to the flowers. It was then that we realized the house was holding her prisoner.

When our good friend RJ who was living upstairs in the house died suddenly, mother had to move. RJ had been her legs, getting groceries and things that they needed. She had continued to cook for them as he continued to work for the local newspaper. Mother moved in with us and we offered her our main floor bedroom. She wouldn’t hear of it. Every night, she would go up the stairs on her rear, one step at a time to one of our other bedrooms. It is appropriate to mention at this time that one of our daughters likes to say she comes from a long line of stubborn. It is pretty easy to see the source. Eventually we built mother her own room and bathroom but it was only a matter of time, before mother reluctantly had to move into an assisted living facility. In spite of declaring she could never make new friends, she made some of the best friends of her life in those last three years. It was only in the last few days of her life that she had to have help getting dressed. Only after all her new friends passed away was she was ready to let go. Her mind was still clear but her body had worn out long ago. She was ninety-three years and six months old. She is still missed every day by those of us she touched and nurtured. I have cousins who say that they would have never had Christmas if it wasn’t for their Aunt Blanche, my mother. Another who is now ninety himself claims that he would have gone down a bad road and likely be dead if my mother hadn’t forced him to go to military school. She was a force of nature.

While I still miss her, I am proud of the values that she instilled in me, and the help that she provided our family when our children were growing up. I hope she is pleases at the kind of family we have become.