Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

Gotta make this morning last...

When we last left Zick and Baker, they were playing shadow games on their favorite barn. Well, it's hard to pick a favorite among barns. Let's just say this one is our favorite for shadowplay. You'll notice I have a leash on The Bacon. It's necessary now, because he's got some new behaviors since he went deaf. For instance, while we are still on our road, before we turn out onto the main road, he will sometimes turn around and very quietly try to sneak home when I am distracted, which is most of the time.  It's not safe for him to do that, because he can't hear the cars coming any more, and it's a pain in the neck to have to keep an eye on him all the time.  So I keep him leashed on the first part of the outbound loop. 

Why does he do this? Well, it's not because he doesn't enjoy our runs--he loves them. But Daddeh gets up later than I do, and Chet knows that Daddeh starts the day by giving him a bikket. So if we leave before Daddeh is up, Chet will do everything he can to sneak home so he won't miss that morning bikket. Bikkets are inordinately important to Chet Baker. Bill slipped a bikket into my pocket as I was heading out on my last run (after giving Chet one), and that Bacon stuck to me like glue for the whole run! We may be onto something. But I didn't like having him beg from me. I like to watch him doing his thing without distraction.

For most of his 11 years, I've been able to softly speak to Chet, ask him to stay, to stick around, and he's been happy to comply. He'll just sit or lie down next to me until I'm done examining the tracks or photographing the bindweed. Now that he no longer gets that auditory input, he decides what he wants to do, and just up and does it. So if he feels like heading home, he heads home. And since he doesn't hear me call him back, he figures that's just fine. Yep, heading home, bum ba bum ba bum, nope, she's not calling me, must be OK to head home...

Time for a leash.

He leads me to interesting stuff. And because he's leashed, I have to linger for anything he wants to check out. New territory for both of us. He found a stain that I knew went with a car-killed raccoon (here's its last deposit, too, how sad!)

And then he found where the vultures had dragged it and reduced it to a stain and a felt of hair

and he still found something or other to scarf down, eccch!! No kisses for you!

I noticed then that there were snow-white down feathers sprinkled all over the grass around the vultures' picnic site, and one body feather. Clearly, they'd taken their ease after eating, and preened for quite awhile.

So if you didn't know that turkey vultures, sooty-brown as they are, have snow-white down and feather bases, now you do. I picked this one up and sniffed it. Yep. Vulture. Strong pungent odor, unmistakeable. 

Just love what Mother Nature did with this little old gaily painted John Deere tractor tire planter. The russet seedheads of dock, paired with foxtail. A bit sparse, but pretty nonetheless, seasonally appropriate.

We forged onward.

When we get well away from home and we turn onto a little dirt road, I hurry to let Chet off the leash. By then he's fully engaged and enjoying himself thoroughly. He leads me, and that's how I love it best. I like to watch those little haunches clicking away. He moves so beautifully, not a hint of stiffness in his joints. I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for my fluid joints, too. 

And just like that, MonkeyBall season has begun! The first MonkeyBall* has been thrown out onto the great court of Autumn!

*Osage orange

and just like that, my photo got bombed.

We fetched up on the porch for a spell

and I scritched his lil' ole back, including the pleasantly itchy new divot on his withers where he proinked hisself crawling under the compost pit wire. When I got back from South Africa, he had a weird scaly hard lump on his back. Nobody knew how it had gotten there, but all agreed it had been there for a couple of weeks. Off to the vet we went the very next day, and Dr. Lutz looked at it, peeled it off in one smooth fearless vetlike motion, and decreed it naught but a scab! Whew! 

 I got up and took a look around the old farmstead and was pleasantly surprised to find a sofa where there had been no sofa before. Not one I would sit on, ick, but one that's clearly destined for burning at the stake. Note the fuel piled up nearby...doesn't look good for Joan D'Barcolounger. There was a little toy caterpillar and the cookie crumbs of the ages down under the cushions. 

The sofa made a pleasant, homey contrast with the autumn sky and the weathered old house, and Chet did a thorough inspection. If he'd have found a 50-year-old cookie in those creases, he'd have eaten it, for sure. The couch lends an air of surreality to this scene, as if someone was interrupted while preparing a photoshoot. It makes the old farmyard a living room, an inviting one at that.

We turned homeward. I loved watching that Bacon become a dot in the distance on this carless road. Of course I love him best when he's free to do whatever he wants. So I try to make sure he is when it's safe for him.

He's a little Black Beauty, smelling the barn, picking up the pace. 

And the last of the ironweed drains its color into the rapidly warming morning air. 

We find a curious relic by Fergus' farm pond. We're still looking for Waldo, but we know he was here. 

Coming down the hill, at exactly the spot where I found a northern red salamander this spring, I found the sad dessicated mummy of a garter snake. It had doubtless been bluish in life, but death had burnished that blue to an ethereal aqua. Whoa. What a thing to see. 

And you don't see these things--raccoon stains, vulture down, tractor tire planters, Waldo socks, snake mummies or monkeyballs--all within a two-mile stretch--when you're whizzing along at 50 mph. You have to take it slowly to see the good stuff. You have to look at the things that are there, and their shadows, too. Just another reason to be grateful for Chet Baker, slowing me down.

Crepuscular

When climatic conditions are tough, creatures like Chet and I adapt. We've got a thing going on here in southeast Ohio...day after day of blazing blue cloudless skies, temperatures hitting 90 degrees every day--in late September!

The only way you can tell it's September is that it cools off to the upper 50's at night. That, and the fact that a lot of trees are going yellow and dropping their leaves from sheer drought exhaustion.

We haven't had a break in the heat yet. I can't remember a September like it. A 32-degree temperature swing from dawn to 2 pm! It's like living in the desert.

So Chet Baker and I go out before sunrise to get our exercise. And we see things. 

The Heavenly Blue morning glories, which have made three tremendous towers (we're talking 15' high) of lush dark green heart-shaped leaves, are only just starting to bloom. Never seen anything like that, either, but then I've never given them a couple of shovels of aged cow manure before. Why bloom when you can make leaves? Duh, Zick. Duh. Starve them if you want flowers.

Still, it's going to be uberfabulous for the bare month that they're in bloom, before frost cuts them off in their full glory. I foresee some sheet and blanket draping in my future, trying to protect them in late October. They're just too beautiful, and there are going to be hundreds of them! I can't wait!!! My Instagram feed is going to be solid blue. 

So off we went on a fine September morning, finding a surprise display as we reached the end of the driveway, one we couldn't see from the yard. Much as I wish our neighbors wouldn't wrap their bales in all that plastic, they do a nice job of catching the skylight.

You're going to have to click on this panorama, to fully appreciate the land's contours, the glorious dawn cloudage, and the way the pond catches the sky in its eye. And don't miss the little house, set aglow by the rising sun on the far right.

I took a little slice of the beauty.

As we headed for the Shadow Barn, I noticed three turkey vultures roosting on its roof--a first for me!

Then a fourth came to land on the telephone pole. Whoot!!

I told them they had nothing to fear, but they eventually lumbered off into the cool air, having to flap their dignity away. This one is already facing right, ready to go. 

Chet and I headed out into the monarch field, but there were no monarch caterpillars on the yellowing plants. It wasn't such a good monarch year here, but then I wasn't around to check very much, so some might have slipped through. The important thing is that Farmer Bob left most of the milkweed standing after the May cut, to let the caterpillars grow up.  

The light was incredible. And a big female kestrel was pondering on a wire, her shape so burly I thought she was a merlin for a moment. She took wing and in the deep shadows she looked bluish-brown above. Broke out into sunlight and it was clear I'd been deceived.

Rising sun, caught in foxtails. I like this photo because it somehow captured the intensity of the sun. I almost can't look at the brilliant spot, even though I know it's just white. It seems to glow as intensely as the sun!  I've been programmed my whole life to look away from it. So I do.

If there's sun, then there are shadows. I looked over and found myself high up on the Shadow Barn's roof! 

I wanted to be in the red, so I gathered Chetty and walked down the hill. This time of year is Shadow Barn time!

Shadow Tree time, too. I never tried the Shadow Tree before. Think I'll do it again soon. 

There is so much to discover in this one morning, I can't put it all in one post. More anon.

Shadowplay

Shadows are so profound on a blue and gold September day that sometimes they're all I see. 

I cast these incredibly long shadows in the morning, and I love to watch me and Chet run across the landscape, all stretched out.  Here, I'm overlaid on dew-wet dogbane, and it looks like I have a terrific idea.

I mess around with some of my photos, trying to bring shapes out of darkness. It's fun.

Chet stands before our favorite rubble pile, now decked out in goldenrod. Mmmm. This would make a cool jigsaw puzzle, no?

The pines etch ink-black silhouettes on the sky.

And always the little auxiliary inkblot to look for, trotting ahead.

The neighbors' Bartlett pear yields honey-sweet fruit, cold from wet September grass. Yes. Thank you. I'll have that for breakfast, beat the deer to it, and feed the cores to the cattle. 

The sun is so low and brilliant in the sky I'm blinded and can't even tell what I'm shooting, but I have a feeling it'll be cool.

And I get an alert sundog and his crazy, inexplicably short-legged Chihuahua shadow. Go figure! 

Always worth pointing the camera toward the sun now and then. You never know what you'll get.

We push on, and I watch our shadows. They make me laugh. I'm glad there's no one around at 7:30 on a Sunday morning to hear me laughing as I clump along with Chet, his toenails clicking and scraping on the asphalt. I would make a lot better time if I had legs like these.

We reach the Shadow barn. Presenting...

The amazing Chet Baker!!

Bill saw this and said, "Don't shoot! It's Bacon!!"

Off we go. I marvel that I got the roofline perfectly lined up in this shot as I ran along. Most of the shots I take on the run are all cockeyed. That's OK. I like them all. 

 Most of my favorite shots are complete accidents anyway. Well, planned accidents. 

Chet's shadow looks like some kind of space bug to me. 

In this one, his form vanishes into the turf edge shadow, and the space bug seems to slide along the asphalt unexplained, unaccompanied. 

At the farm, I find the Concord grapes hanging in the old barn perfectly ripe, waiting for me. I've had my eye on them for several months. Breakfast, Part II. These are so beautiful that I fill myself up on ones I find outside this composition. Chet begs and begs, so I give him one. Grapes aren't good for dogs, but he doesn't know that. 

 Concord grapes perfectly capture the taste, the nostalgia, the wine-sweet loveliness of a September morning.