Author Archives: Mark P

94

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Today, January 12, 2017, would have been my mother’s 94th birthday. She died almost four years ago shortly after her 90th birthday and pretty close to 13 years after my father died. I posted a picture in 2013 of her, Leah, my brother and some of his family at a Japanese restaurant we took her to for her birthday celebration.

Over the years since my parents died they have become younger. Not young, but at a younger old age, after they retired and before they became too infirm to travel. The saddest part of their old age was their declining health. Sometimes when I think of them and wish they were still here, I realize that long before today neither one of them would be healthy and strong enough to even want to be here. It’s like they were given a few extra years and then robbed of the value of those years.

So the best thing for them and for me is to hold them in my memory. That way they are safe from any further insults the world might want to throw their way, at least for as long as I am alive and can think clearly. Once my brother and I are gone, they will be pretty much gone, too. I doubt that either of their grandchildren (my nephews) think much about them or, for that matter, even remember that much about them. So much the worse for them.

First snow

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The forecasts of snow were fairly accurate for once. We got about an inch starting late Friday night.

Along with the snow came the cold. We measured 16F this morning, and the temperature never exceeded freezing during the day. Now, as I write this on Saturday night, it’s 19F and headed down.

We didn’t have any place to go during the day, but we did have an errand to run later. By the time we left at around 7 pm, the sun had cleared most of the snow and ice from the roads. We made it to our destination (the mall) with no problem, but it was closed. Around here, a rumor of snow results in widespread closings, especially since 2014 when Atlanta turned into a frozen parking lot after a little snow fell.

We have not used our wood-burning stove much this season, but we’re using it now. It’s taking some getting used to. In our old house, we had a big stove in the basement. It took large pieces of wood and lots of them. The new stove has a very small firebox, so it takes short pieces of wood split much smaller than I am used to, and it needs to be fed more often.

But the stove is keeping the living room comfortable, and the forced-air duct I installed is helping to keep the bedroom warm, too.

Here’s the stove in action.

The two sheets of metal at the sides and the sheet of metal below the stove are my additions to help keep the walls and floor cooler. I hope to make them a little more finished at some point.

I had originally intended to paint the metal black, but I’m considering not doing it now because of a reason that I find really interesting but probably no one else would. As we all know, we see in visible light. The heat that we feel coming from a wood-burning stove is just like visible light, but it has a longer wavelength and we can’t actually see it. We call that infrared radiation. We also know that dark objects absorb visible light and light objects reflect it. It turns out, however, that most objects, whether they look dark or light to us, are “dark” in the longer wavelengths of heat. Even white paint that reflects visible light still absorbs long-wavelength radiation. If you could see in the infrared, white paint would look dark gray.

One of the few common materials that reflects heat is shiny metal. Those plates are made from shiny metal. They don’t absorb heat, they reflect it. So even when the stove is putting out lots of heat, the metal plates right next to it are barely warm. It’s contrary to our intuition, but that’s physics. I find that cool, too.

Winter Storm Warning

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Parts of the Southeast have a winter storm warning in effect for late Friday night and early Saturday morning. The various TV weathermen have been showing snow cover forecasts for north and central Georgia that sometimes include us and sometimes don’t.

This is what it looked like Thursday morning from our bedroom window.

I don’t know whether this is what an impending snowstorm looks like; I suspect not.

We had almost two inches of rain over the last week. It fell as a slow, soaking rain, which was what we needed. The days were foggy and dreary, which I kind of like, at least for short periods.

It was not enough. When we aren’t in drought conditions, a rain like we had would result in lots of runoff. When I walk the dogs there should be a constant background rushing sound from the many wet-weather streams draining off the mountain. After this rain, only one stream was running, and not very strongly.

I suppose that means the rain soaked in, which is good for the plants (no plants in our yard — too dry to plant them). Unfortunately, it seems that it’s too late for some of the pines on the mountain. As we walk and drive around the mountain, we see a fair number of cases where all the needles have turned brown on the pines. Here are some by our driveway.

There are several others around the yard. There are lots of others across the mountain. There is no apparent pattern, at least as far as I can tell. Most of the dead or dying pines are shortleaf, but that’s to be expected since most of the pines on the mountain are shortleaf. There are a few dead loblollies down at the bottom of the mountain, and a small stand of non-native white pines is dying, so it’s not just a shortleaf pine problem.

I don’t really know whether they are dying from drought stress or some kind of infestation, or possibly a combination of the two, or even some other cause I’m not aware of. The numbers are not huge; I estimate very roughly that it’s only around a percent of the total, maybe not even that much. But it’s enough to be noticeable.

I am also worried about the multitude of dogwoods on the mountain. Quite a few turned brown during the summer. Those have not lost their leaves as in a normal year; the dead leaves are still hanging on. It’s not my field, but I think it’s possible that the trees died before the natural process of leaf loss. I hope not. Maybe someone who knows more about it can tell me.

It will be several months before we can tell the extent of the drought effects. We ended 2016 almost a foot below average. It’s going to take a while to make up for that discrepancy.

In the meantime, I don’t expect to wake up Saturday morning to a snowy view of Rome in the distance, but I’m keeping the camera handy.

Trees

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There are really only two things to look at when I take the dogs for a walk: the dogs and the trees. Most of the hardwoods are bare now, so I can see into the woods. The bare trunks and limbs are gray spotted with patches of near white and the occasional green from moss or some kind of fungus or lichen. The ground is covered with the fallen leaves. As I walk down the road, my brain builds up a scene with the angular tree trucks contrasting with the brown surface that is hard to capture with a camera, much less my iPhone, which I have to hold with one hand as I hold the dogs’ leashes with the other.

Most of the hardwoods up on Lavender Mountain are oaks, and most of those are chestnut oaks, if my identification is correct. There are scattered poplars, hickories and some other oak varieties. Still, it’s mostly chestnut oaks, which often take not particularly pretty shapes. But I like those awkward shapes.

Lower down the mountain there is a small ridge that forms a valley with the side of the mountain that the road follows. There is a line of bare rocks that cuts downward across that ridge.

In the photo the line of rocks cuts diagonally from top left towards the lower right. It’s much harder see in the image than it is in real life.

And that, in an acorn shell, is my problem with photographing these scenes. I can never quite get what I see. I think it’s because what I “see” is not really there. I look at the scene while I’m in motion, and build up the image from a continually-changing vantage point. It’s like pasting together a series of images. I can see a particular tree from one point, but not from another point. In my mind, it’s still there. Unfortunately the camera doesn’t have that kind of memory. I also filter out everything I’m not interested in and focus in on what I am interested in. But not the camera.

No, the camera sees what’s there, not what my mind thinks is there. But I’ll keep trying.

After Christmas

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We had a very quiet Christmas. It was so quiet, in fact, that it didn’t occur to me that it actually was Christmas until I was walking the dogs down the mountain.

It was foggy, as it has been so often in the last week or so.

It had been even foggier a little earlier in the morning. I could barely see the closest trees when I looked out from the bedroom window.

For Christmas dinner we had turkey, dressing and gravy we had frozen after Thanksgiving. It still tasted pretty good to me. Neighbor John called just as we were sitting down to eat and offered us some leftover ziti that his wife had made for Christmas dinner. I declined politely.

The buyer of our old house brought her two kids and a container of sweets to our new house on Christmas Eve. They are very nice people.

One of my favorite foods for the holidays is bread pudding. Back when I was working, the company held a potluck Thanksgiving lunch. Bridgett, one of my coworkers, often brought bread pudding with two sauces, one made with rum (or some other alcoholic beverage) and one without. She assured everyone that the alcohol had cooked out, but it hadn’t. Since I retired, I don’t get bread pudding unless I make it. So I did.

I used a loaf of French bread cut into squares and toasted slightly, rather than allowed to go stale. I also used a cup of raisins soaked in rum for a couple of hours. One of the major failings of some bread pudding I have eaten is too few raisins, so I made sure I had enough. Some bread pudding is more pudding-like, but I like it more bready. This turned out pretty much just the way I like it. I also made some buttered rum sauce, using a whole lot of sugar and a quarter cup of rum, all according to the recipe. And then I added more rum.

Leah thinks I might have to make more sauce. She’s not eating bread pudding, but she is tasting the sauce a little. I think we have enough rum left. I have eaten about two thirds of the bread pudding. I’m going to miss it when it’s gone.

We strung some lights on the front porch for decorations, as you can see in the previous post. We didn’t do anything inside. Aside from the numerous Christmas trees we saw at the Biltmore estate, our closest approach to a Christmas tree was at the bar in a Mexican restaurant where we ate while in Asheville.

It some ways I miss Christmas, but it slipped away slowly, gradually over the years as grandparents died, and then aunts and uncles, and then parents.

At least we’ll have bread pudding.