ring around the moon

ring around the moon

peeking through a mackerel sky -- 

rain is on the way

On a clear evening, a gibbous moon with a pink halo winks on and off as a fleet of cottonball clouds pass by. There's an old saying: "Ring around the moon means rain soon." And sure enough, the next day a long, hard rain fell for the first time in many moons.
          A dappled patch of tiny individual cloudlets at high altitude is called cirrocumulus. Sometime the little cloudlets look like fluffy fish scales, giving the appearance of a "mackerel sky." Cirrocumulus usually move from west to east and indicate unsettled weather on the way. These high clouds contain millions of tiny ice crystals and the halo around the moon is caused by light glinting from the ice crystals. 
          Like a rainbow, a lunar halo depends on the viewer's perspective. The halo you see will not be the same as the one for the person standing next to you because the particular group of ice crystals is different for each person. Since moonlight is not very bright, lunar halos are mostly colorless, though some, like this one, are reddish on the inside and bluish on the outside. Without the cloud cover, the inner edge of the halo would appear sharp and the outer edge diffuse. 
          My personal halo looks like a pink pearl inside an oyster shell. What does it look like to you?

above the golden

above the golden

leaves of the piebald sycamore,

cloud stairs leading up

Shinny up the brown 
trunk of the sycamore. 
Climb from white 
limb to white limb 
through golden leaves. 
At the top, step onto soft 
white cloud stairs. 
Ascend into azure sky.

bare necessities

bare necessities --

dancers weaving in and out 

through the weaving tunes

Another Bare Necessities weekend -- feet sore, heart soaring. On the first weekend in November every year for the past 18 years, Fairfield Folk Arts and Dance Cooperative has been hosting an English country dance featuring Bare Necessities. The Boston-based quartet, composed of Jacquelin Schwab on piano, Peter Barnes on flute, whistles and guitar, and Earl Gaddis and Mary Lea on violin and viola, is known nationwide for their improvisational performance of 17th and 18th century dance music. They are extremely inventive and playful in the way they spontaneously interweave through the tunes, trading off solos and then flowing back together again. This year, unfortunately, Mary Lea could not play due to a shoulder injury. However, the remaining trio filled the ballroom of Morningstar Studio with beautiful melodies and counter-melodies.
          Our dance instructor and caller this year is Joanna Reiner, who hails from near Philadelphia. She keeps us on our toes, physically and mentally, as she walks us through each dance. Joanna, an accomplished dancer herself, frequently descends from the mike to join a set on the floor in order to demonstrate a tricky set of moves. She begins each new dance by telling us the name of the dance and having the musicians play the first part of the tune. "This is in waltz time," she'll say, or, "For this one, you have to be able to count to nine." Sometimes she has each set of dancers review the instructions together, to exercise our memory. After a walk-through, she gives us tips to be aware of as we move through the often complicated step: "As soon as the top couple gets to the bottom of the set, the twos need to get ready to bulge out for the mirror hay," or, "Remember that in a triple minor, the role of the twos and threes changes with each turn of the dance," or, "In the grand chain the women move clockwise." As Joanna calls the dance, she watches our progress, and when it looks like we've got it, she calls less and then finally stops. Afterwards, she asks, "What did you notice?" This gives us the opportunity to reflect on our experience and share it with the other dancers. After a particularly complicated dance, one dancer says, "I learned that you have to trust that the other dancers will be in the right place at the right time." On the last morning, Joanna announces that there will be no walk-through, only a talk-through for each dance. This is a new level of challenge for many people who like to get the dance "in the body." We laugh as we flounder a bit, but we all help each other, and at the end, when we've made it through, there are lots of happy hugs.

early morning frost

early morning frost --

hairy purple-spotted toad

lilies still blooming

I am always happy and amazed to see our clump of hairy toad lilies blooming in autumn when other perennials are going dormant. Hairy toad lilies are not toads at all, but small, orchid-like flowers with purple flecks. The amphibian reference refers to the blotches on the flowers and the hirsute reference refers to the hairy or fuzzy stems and buds. The genus name, Tricyrtis, comes from the Greek for "three" and "convex," because the three outer petals have tiny swellings at the base. 
          Close inspection of the flowers reveals an exquisite design. The six outer, down-curving petals are each marked with a yellow spot at the base for attracting insects. The star-like stigma in the center is a complex arrangement of parts in threes and sixes that stands above the petals. The florets of these sturdy plants keep blooming in clusters for weeks, even after a frost. In its native Japan, Tricyrtis hirta grows on shady rocky cliffs and stream banks. Mine do fine in rich, moist soil and partial shade, multiplying each year.

on the railroad bridge

on the railroad bridge

a yellow maintenance train

huffing on the tracks

A lot of maintenance trains have been passing through our little town lately, some in convoys of single machines, others with several machines coupled together. Cheerfully bright yellow, they have much more character than the long coal cars or oil tankers. This one is stopped on the underpass bridge, huffing quietly. I pull into the KRUU parking lot with its pink flamingos on the other side of the bridge and get out to take a closer look, walking up the hill to the tracks. No one is in sight. I wonder if they've stopped for a lunch break in Fairfield, famous for its many restaurants.

At the east end, a LORAM engine, in pushing position.

In front of the engine, a gigantic pair of digger wheels with sharp teeth. The sign warns:
DANGER! 
HAZARDOUS AREA 
STAY CLEAR 
DIGGING WHEELS MAY THROW 
MATERIAL AWAY FROM THE MACHINE

In front of the digger wheels, a long chute for feeding the diggings into another car. Danger signs posted everywhere, including: 
DANGER LIVE TRACK 
DANGER MOVING MACHINERY
DANGER AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

The chute dumps into a holding car.

On the far end, a car with what looks like a conveyor belt, the end hovering over a white tanker, and then a plain yellow car at the head of the line.

As I climb back down the hill, I stop to admire the flowing tracery of a maple's black limbs and golden leaves superimposed on the bright yellow, unmoving moving machine.

windy autumn day

windy autumn day --

cattails molting, their fluffy

seeds blowing away

Wind from the south, strong, blowing my hair into snarls. I stop to admire a family of cattails residing in the no-man's-land between the highway and the cornfield. Their beautiful brown coats are molting, the "fur" blowing away in the wind. One of them looks like she is having a bad hair day. Some of the seed fluff will hang on the stem all winter, looking like bedraggled dust mops. In the spring any birds will use this fluff to line their nests. 
          Cattails like to have wet feet, thriving in marshes and the edge of ponds, so I'm glad to see that these have survived the summer drought in what is now a very dry ditch. When they have plenty of water they grow faster than fertilized corn in the field. They spread not only from the many seeds of the brown "tails" but also through their creeping rhizomes that send up new shoots quickly. Many animals use the dense cover formed by cattails, especially red-winged blackbirds, mallards, Canada geese, wild turkeys, deer, raccoons, cottontails, muskrats, frogs and fish. 
          People use cattails in a variety of ways. Native Americans prepared and ate all parts of the plant. They used the leaves to weave baskets and mats and the fluffy seeds to insulate clothes and moccasins. Pioneers used the fluff for stuffing pillows and quilts. The stems can be used to make glue and the pollen is sometimes used in fireworks. We have neighbors who have a managed wetland septic system that uses cattails to filter the runoff.  
          To me, cattails are beautiful in their sleek youth, gaining character as they age. 

A warrior, wearing a fur hat and fur-trimmed coat trimmed, carrying a lance, standing stoically, his weather-browned face turned to the wind.

Ma and Pa Kettle, Pa sporting a bristly mustache and beard, Ma wearing a stylish blonde bouffant.

An old man with a long white beard wearing a brown felt top hat, his faithful sheepdog sitting at his feet.

A clown with a bulbous nose and wide white grin leans over to get in the act.

hoisting the wind turbine

hoisting the wind turbine

into the blue sky, three blades

catching the wind

On Halloween day, the wind turbine is up at last. It's been eleven months since we purchased the Bergey GVFX3524 and three solar panels. We celebrated this trick with treats: apple cider and homemade cookies.

On the ides of December last year, the parts for the wind turbine arrived in the snow. They sat in their cardboard boxes all winter and through the extremely wet spring.

In late May John began clearing wild blackberry bushes and thorn trees from the wind turbine site southwest of our house.

All through the extremely hot, dry summer, John dug five five-foot deep holes for the guy wire footings, chipping away at the rock-hard clay with a pick ax. A cement truck came out the last week of August to pour the 3 1/2 foot concrete footings as well as the foundation for the power equipment shed. 

A week later on the first of September, a young couple came out to move a little garden shed to the wind turbine site. This shed would house the power equipment: batteries, charge controller and inverter. John cleared a path through the woods, but he forgot to measure the width of the roof, so he and the two movers had to cut branches and a few small trees to squeeze the shed through.

Sliding the shed onto the foundation on rollers was tricky and required a lot of maneuvering with a fork lift to get it straight without slipping off.

By the end of September, the guy wires and gin pole for lifting the wind turbine tower are up and the poles for the tower have been connected. The solar panels propped against the shed are conditioning the batteries. Later, they'll be mounted on permanent racks.

In October John and our neighbor, also John, raise the turbine tower without the turbine attached, to test the winch and all the guy wires. This takes 3 1/2 hours, with the two men taking turns cranking the winch with a gigantic wrench. Then it's lowered again. John puts the internal wiring in place and attaches the turbine. Then he waits for a day that's not raining or too windy for the final raising. On the last day of October, a hot Indian Summer day, John and John go to work again cranking the winch.

John has to clear some more branches as the turbine starts to go up.  

Turbine half-way up, gin pole halfway down.

This time it takes only 1 1/2 hours. Up, but not quite straight at the top!

John has to open some of the malleable wire rope clips, tighten some of the wires and loosen others until the pole is straight from bottom to top. Now the only thing left to do is the power wiring, which gets the power into and out of the batteries. This will help us get off of coal and oil, and for that we'll be able to celebrate every windy and/or sunny day.