Snapshots of Pastoral Joys, Round Three

More gleanings from the great disorder in my room:

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Firewood underneath Big House windows, 2005

It was ordered around June, probably for reasons of economy since fuel is not so much in demand then. It is probably fir, and after it was delivered and dumped in our driveway in a huge antheap, we would stack it in a concrete bay of sorts beside the house. Opapa and Omama made an alcove of it, by putting a grid of white wood (two by two inches or something of the sort) around it, covering it with clear plastic to shield it from the rain, but leaving it open on one side in a species of doorway.

We inherited tree stumps, on top of which one would balance the piece of wood upright, as well as the axes with which we clove the wood into kindling. Though we had a concrete surface suitable to split the wood upon, it was a jarring sort of exercise and worthless when the wood was especially knotty, whilst the softer stumps absorbed the shocks nicely and — I think — helped the grain split far better.

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Fall, 2001?

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One of our Columbia chickens, 1999 or later.

Snapshot of a Past Room-of-Mine

My bedroom, March to May 1999?

Since the teddy bear hanging on the wall basket was given to me by a classmate in Grade 8, i.e. December 1998, and the other photos of my room show that the trees visible through the windows are green but that the daylight was dark, it must be spring, in 1999 at the earliest.

As for the books, one of them is Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales (which I read more often at a younger age, though, and which I have found difficult to digest when attempting to read now and then lately), and the memoirs of Agatha Christie, and the Wizard of Oz series, and the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and a short novel, The Well, by Mildred D. Taylor.

Little Women and Good Wives, Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge are in there, too, as well as lots of Lucy Maud Montgomery's oeuvre and The Watsons, begun by Jane Austen and completed by somebody else.

As for the edition of Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, I'm not sure if I had actually read, or completely read, the book by then. (Jane Eyre was gripping enough that I read it practically in one sitting, but Shirley was slightly less approachable.) I might have kept it in my shelves because Mama gave it to me as a present.

SPEAKING of which, the silvery-gold penguin on top of the bookshelf was a Christmas present from my father; one year he gave us piggy banks: olde England-style plaster trains and the penguin. I think that was also the year where he bought a rather elegant miniature train set whose tracks we stored beside the stove for several years thereafter. And there is also a flower press designed for National Geographic in one of the bookshelves, which was Opapa's Christmas present. One tightens velcro straps around two boards, and in between those boards there are pieces of blotting paper with the flowers between them, and cardboard squares to keep the pairs apart.

Snapshots of a Past April

Since I came across a drawerful of photos from our old dominion in Canada whilst very skimpily cleaning in my room, I thought I would dive into them and post excerpts. My bad photography and my bad Photoshoppery are colliding, but practice  will hopefully make things better.

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EASTER egg basket amidst bluebells and brown horsetails (late 90s?/2000?)

Taken at the foot of our lands. One can admire the impeccably tended lawn in foreground, hoary fencepost to neighbours' property to the right, delicate waxberry hedgery, and clusters of Shasta daisy (?) leaves, as well as red clover foliage to the left corner.

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PIKO the Rooster, taken at the same time as the above. (Perhaps ironically, the septic field above and behind the big house was a well shaded, pretty spot encircled with elms and horse chestnuts and a strange dark leafy evergreen, violets and mosses on the ground, a forsythia ringed by leopard's bane or winter aconite depending on the season, rhododendron shrubs, and, in autumn, the fallen chestnuts. It is to the leftward rear in this scene; nearby, we kept a chicken enclosure for a while — we rotated it so that the earth could recover from the depredations of the fowl —, and the thin posts are hinting at its perimeter. The orange cord is likely connected to a heat lamp that kept the fledgling chickens warm even after they had been rehoused outdoors. It must have been a late Easter, since the lawn is — it seems — already cut. On the other hand, we were probably not so good at waiting until the grass was sufficiently dry.)