More Snow and Ice Images: Forty-Seven Years Ago

Now that it has snowed even on coastal South Carolina, and now that the annual, ritual mocking of California softies has been chanted by our Canadian cousin, I feel obliged to point out that not all of us lotus-eaters have always been so unfamiliar with snow. In fact, some of my favorite memories are of my youthful experiences with the stuff, in Chenango County, New York, downwind of Buffalo, in the fulsome blast-path of lake effect snows.

They are "favorite" memories, of course, because they don't come with the sting of melted and re-frozen water in my jeans, or the bite of frozen snot on my upper lip. They just come with visuals, so they are greeted fondly.

Among the fondest are ones captured by my Dad's camera in February, 1962. We had a brief thaw, followed by a deep and quick freeze, which worked absolute frozen hell on the roads, which turned into ribbons of thick and slick ice. But it also worked magic on the streams and creeks in the county's glens. The brief thaw caused water to run over the rocks -- and through them, too, since most of the rocks there are shale and other sedimentaries with plentiful interstitial pathways for fine streams of water -- to trickle down toward creeks and streams. The quick plummet in temperature then froze that migration in time, producing frozen waterfalls, icy stalactites, and colorful walls of petrified water tinted by the minerals it had passed through on its way to temporary stasis.

The images below are from that event, and were taken by my Dad, Lynn Harrington. Many of them have shown up over on PicShers, my photo-a-day blog, but these are linked to much higher-resolution versions than the ones over there are. If you click on any of these images, you will be taken to Flickr, where you can view them at as high a resolution as you can stand (click on the "all sizes" magnifying glass right above the image to access other resolutions.)

In "Gorgeous Gorge," a little tributary to Thompson Creek. Our house was on the south side of the Thompson Creek Valley near Kings Settlement, New York, and this glen was directly across the valley, on its north side.

I carefully trudge between a frozen waterfall and a flash-frozen exposed pool. My walking stick is an inverted golf club, a putter if I recall correctly.

Natty Bumpo trudges over a perilous waterfall. Click here for what this idyllic place in the glen looked like in summer.

A pause in the upper part of the glen, looking south and downstream.

View from the high ridge above the glen, southward toward home. If you click on this image and view it in Flickr, you'll see a box toward the right of the frame; it indicates our little house on the south side of the Thompson Creek Valley.

After that little walk, Dad and I (and Mom, seen here in her white parka) gathered up some wood trimmings from around the property and had a little bonfire.

This photo was probably taken either the day before or the day after the above ones were. Dad's sisters Myrt and Mary lived in a hollow off the Unadilla Valley, one ridge to the east of our place off the Chenango Valley. Their house was next to a creek with a significantly deeper and more dramatic gorge than the one Dad and I walked. This image shows, dramatically, the effects of minerals and dirt entrained in the water's flow on the color of the flash-frozen curtains. (I am leaning gingerly against an ice face in the background, Mom is in her white parka again, and I think that's my cousin Marjie in the red coat.)

Waterfalls frozen in time and in fact.

(The remarkable ability of modern photo scanning technology to reconstruct images' color has made these views seem immediate, but they're not. To get a sense of how long ago they were taken, beyond the dry quantification of "47 years," consider this: Dads' sisters' house is about a hundred yards behind us from this photo's vantage point. Inside that house was a telephone, but that telephone couldn't be accessed the way we're used to. Its number was "South New Berlin 3-Y-5," which had to be spoken, not dialed or punched in, to a live operator, who would then physically cause the 'phone to ring by plugging a big connector into a hole in her switchboard and pressing a button to send current down the line, ringing all of the bells on the party line, but in a code of longs and shorts that indicated for whom the call was intended. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes the neighborhood busybody would pick up her 'phone instead.)

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Oolie, 1995 - 2009

Raul, aka Oolie the Black Freighter

The smartest, most dominant cat I have shared a home with in the past 50 years died yesterday. How he went was the last, greatest demonstration of his strength and will.

Even at the relatively advanced age of 14, he was still sleek, strong, and massive -- and, at least in his mind, the dominant member of the pride. Diane and I can't remember him ever being sick, even with a sniffle.

But, two days ago, he just seemed to stop. He didn't eat all day, and, more ominous, didn't groom himself. When the lethargy continued into yesterday morning, we called the vet, and she wanted to see him as soon as possible in the afternoon.

When we arrived, she was noticeably concerned immediately with the tautness of his abdomen -- and by the fact that he hadn't fouled his carrier on the half-hour drive to her place. He always did that. She took him directly to x-ray.

You wouldn't have to be an expert to read the film. His lungs and abdomen were crowded with tumors. His lungs, particularly, were so full of them that I am astonished that he could still breathe. He was miserable, there clearly was no path to amelioration, so the vet gently ended it for him then. Like his friend Max before him, he exhaled his last breath against my wrist.

While his last general checkup in October showed nothing awry, the cancer must have been developing for quite a while. Toward the end, it must have been severely weakening and painful -- and yet he never showed any outward manifestation. Until it overwhelmed him two days ago, that is, and he just stopped. There was never any shortage of strength and will in that cat.

His portrait above (taken in 2005) makes him look fearsome and menacing, and I'm sure that's how he thought of himself most of the time. But his favorite pastime of all, for his entire life, was to rest on his back against a human chest, purring:

Diane and Oolie on a peaceful winter day. (Max is there, too, on a pillow at the top.)

Oolie disdained almost all of the other animals in Ft. Harrington, far preferring his own company most of the time, but he made exceptions. The most noteworthy exception was Max, the quirky gray Burmese, who was his lifelong buddy until Max died two years ago. Max was three years older than Oolie, and took to him right away on the summer day that we brought Oolie into our house in Sunnyvale. After Max disappeared from his life, Oolie seemed to become even further withdrawn from the four-footed society.

The temptation to say something treacly at this point is nearly overwhelming, so I'll just say that this is probably how I will remember Oolie most frequently, and leave it at that:

Oolie (left) and Max in Summer, 2003

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It's Global [Updated February 3, 2009]

Update, February 3, 2009: The wrangling continues, the sit-in continues, and the plant is still closed -- except, tellingly, the furnace, which is being kept stoked by a skeleton crew. Two US investment groups, Clarion Capital and KPS, are evidently interested in acquiring at least the Waterford name; the former apparently would keep at least something going in Co. Waterford, while the latter is probably more interested in the brand rather than the actual product. Click here for the Irish Times' February 4th story on developments. I'll update here occasionally, but those with keen interest should establish a bookmark for the Times and check it frequently, searching on "Waterford" in its search box.

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I know many people in my town, and many people in my circle of friends, and many of my students who are either in fear of losing their jobs in this deep recession or who have already lost their jobs. I'm sure that the same can be said by just about everyone who reads this blog.

The immediacy of our friends' and our fears, and the U.S. news's concentration on the situation in our nation and continent, can tend to obscure this fact: the phenomenon is global, not just the problem of one nation.

If I needed a smack upside the head on that, it was provided by this story in the Irish Times today: the venerable glass factory in Kilbarry, Co. Waterford, has been shut down and its employees laid off.

Stunned: Waterford employees take over the cafeteria in the Visitors' Centre, an action that continues now (Saturday, January 31, 2009). Photo by P. Browne, copied from the Irish Times website.

Waterford crystal glass pieces have been among the highest-quality in the world for more than 200 years. In addition to magnificent goblets, pitchers, vases, and the like, their one-of-a-kind pieces (such as the crystal carriage at the top of this blog post) are legendary. They manufactured trophies for the world's great sporting events, for example, and the ball that drops over Times Square in New York at the stroke of midnight on every New Year was skillfully crafted in County Waterford.

But all of that stopped yesterday, when the place was shut down by its bankruptcy receiver.

Diane and I made a point to visit Waterford Glass during our trip to Ireland in 2006. We were fascinated by the processes we saw, astounded by the artistry unfolding in front of us, and charmed in a way that touched our hearts by every worker we spoke to, from the artisans to the tourguides to the clerks in the gift shop. Every one of them clearly took great pride in their employer's reputation and in their own jobs.

We don't know their names, but this fact saddens us dearly: none of the people in the pictures below will be able to report to work next Monday. (All photos taken on August 7, 2006.)

Good luck, my friends.

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Great View of the Inauguration Crowd

GeoEye, Inc., released this astonishing image from its GeoEye-1 satellite this afternoon. After you've clicked on that link, the photo you see is only part of the high-resolution image that you can (and should) download via the link on that page. More information about the image can be found here.

National Parks Meme

One of the ways to tell that your blogging has hit a flat spot is that you actually welcome a meme. Chris Clarke just tagged me with his US National Park Meme, and, rather than cursing him repeatedly for the tap, I only did so once, so I guess SherWords is at least approaching a flat spot.

Chris cut-n-pasted a list of US National Parks and bold-faced the ones he has visited in his lifetime, and invited others to do the same. The meme has a bonus question: "what’s the next National Park you’d like to visit?"

First, the list:

Acadia National Park (Maine)
National Park of American Samoa (American Samoa)
Arches National Park (Utah)
Badlands National Park (South Dakota)
Big Bend National Park (Texas)
Biscayne National Park (Florida)
Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park (Colorado)
Bryce Canyon National Park (Utah)
Canyonlands National Park (Utah)
Capitol Reef National Park (Utah)
Carlsbad Caverns National Park (New Mexico)
Channel Islands National Park (California)
Congaree National Park (South Carolina)
Crater Lake National Park (Oregon)
Cuyahoga Valley National Park (Ohio)
Death Valley National Park (California, Nevada)
Denali National Park and Preserve (Alaska)
Dry Tortugas National Park (Florida)
Everglades National Park (Florida)
Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (Alaska)
Glacier National Park (part of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park) (Montana/Alberta)
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve (Alaska)
Grand Canyon National Park (Arizona)
Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming)
Great Basin National Park (Nevada)
Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve (Colorado)
Great Smoky Mountains National Park (North Carolina, Tennessee)
Guadalupe Mountains National Park (Texas)
Haleakala National Park (Hawaii)
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (Hawaii)
Hot Springs National Park (Arkansas)
Isle Royale National Park (Michigan)
Joshua Tree National Park (California)
Katmai National Park and Preserve (Alaska)
Kenai Fjords National Park (Alaska)
Kings Canyon National Park (California)
Kobuk Valley National Park (Alaska)
Lake Clark National Park and Preserve (Alaska)
Lassen Volcanic National Park (California)
Mammoth Cave National Park (Kentucky)
Mesa Verde National Park (Colorado)
Mount Rainier National Park (Washington)
North Cascades National Park (Washington)
Olympic National Park (Washington)
Petrified Forest National Park (Arizona)
Redwood National Park (California)
Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
Saguaro National Park (Arizona)
Sequoia National Park (California)
Shenandoah National Park (Virginia)
Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Dakota)
Virgin Islands National Park (U.S. Virgin Islands)
Voyageurs National Park (Minnesota)
Wind Cave National Park (South Dakota)
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve (Alaska)
Yellowstone National Park (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming)
Yosemite National Park (California)
Zion National Park (Utah)

If you check Chris's list against mine, I think you'll be struck by the similarities. Each of ours shows surprising omissions for those who are familiar with us or our writing: his doesn't include Kings Canyon or Sequoia, for example, and Crater Lake is absent from mine despite numerous wanderings close to it. But overall, the similarities are remarkable.

As for the "bonus question" concerning the next national park I'd like to visit (and note the technicality that it doesn't specify US national park!), what Diane and I are actually planning to do is to make the following list all bold-faced instead of only two-thirds:

Ballycroy
Connemara
Glenveagh
Killarney
The Burren
Wicklow Mountains

The list is the complete roster of National Parks in the Republic of Ireland. (We almost got to Ballycroy in our 2006 visit, but didn't quite get there -- we hustled through Co. Mayo to get to Clifden from Sligo for the pony show, and didn't quite have the time we would have liked, but we'll fix that next time.) That there are only six national parks in the country seems a bit strange at first for a land so fabled for its beauty (as Diane just said to me, "The whole place is a national park!"). It's less strange when you consider that a) the whole country is almost exactly the same size as South Carolina, which has only one national park (Congaree), and b) the Republic adheres strictly to the IUCN's 1969 criteria for "national parks":

In 1969, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recommended that all governments agree to reserve the term 'National Park' to areas sharing the following characteristics:

• Where one or several ecosystems are not materially altered by human exploitation and occupation; where plant and animal species, geomorphological sites and habitats are of special scientific, educational and recreational interest or which contain a natural landscape of great beauty;
• Where the highest competent authority of the country has taken steps to prevent or eliminate as soon as possible exploitation or occupation in the whole area and to enforce effectively the respect of ecological, geomorphological or aesthetic features which have led to its establishment;
• Where visitors are allowed to enter, under special conditions, for inspirational, educational, cultural and recreational purposes.

It is the policy of the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, endorsed by successive governments, to abide by the criteria and standards for National Parks as set by the IUCN.

(Quote from the Republic's National Parks and Wildlife Service website. It's a shame, though, that the Service doesn't also abide by the proper use of serial commas.)

I actually had thought that I would do a similar bold- and not-bold list for national parks I've visited and not visited in Australia... until I did a little googling and found that the Ozzies have a staggering 516 of them. Nobody's going to read to the end of that list, and precious few of them would be bolded.

Of course, this wouldn't be a SherWords post without some bandwidth-hogging images, so here's this post's quota: my favorites from the four Irish national parks we have visited:

Connemara: the admonition to stay on the trail is familiar in US national parks; the stern "DO NOT INTERFERE WITH PONIES" is not.

Killarney: enjoying the vista from Ladies' View with one of the locals.

The Burren: Karst, karst all around, and caves beneath our feet. Also Galway Bay in the background.

Wicklow Mountains: heather and a clear, pure brook by St. Kevin's Way.

Coda: As Chris notes, "it’s not a meme unless you tap people for it," so I guess I should burden some readers by name to do their own list. But I won't. I will, though, invite any regular SherWords reader to follow up on his or her own blog, or in the comments here, to the National Park Meme: what US National Parks have you visited? What national park would you like to visit next? (And feel free to add Canada's national parks to the list, too -- or even instead of!)

Post-Coda: As Chris also rightly notes, "yes, this list reflects a certain amount of assumption of privilege in that travel costs money and time, and if you’ve been unable to do the Parks Tour thing, feel free to tell us about a local place you like, NP, National Monument, State Park, or otherwise."

For the Little, Tiny Snide Bit in All of Us...

... Chris Clarke's blog introduced me to Let Me Google That for You. I think we all can find uses for it now and then.

A Surprising Tree in a Place Where Trees Don't Surprise

This is the San Lorenzo Valley in California's Santa Cruz Mountains:

The trees you can see from this vista point along California Highway 9 are almost entirely sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwoods, and their magnificent height and abundance hides thousands of homes -- including Ft. Harrington, which is roughly in the center of this frame -- from view.

The view from this place a hundred years ago would have been very different. After the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 (which actually devastated most of the Bay Area, not just San Francisco), this land was almost entirely clear-cut to provide building materials for the great reconstruction. That means that essentially all of the trees you see in the above photo are juveniles in the reckoning of redwoods, only about a century old. Between 1920 and about 1960, as the second-growth redwoods were growing up, the shorter trees of the blanketing forest allowed some things to exist profitably that are now long gone: many swimming pools behind dams in creeks (because shorter trees allowed more sunlight to reach the ground) and even an airport (which is now the Boulder Creek Country Club's golf course), for example.

Part of a poster for the long-gone Boulder Creek drive-in movie theater from half a century ago -- when the re-growing forest was only about half as high as it is now. Two things that were snuffed out by the forest's re-growth are evident in its map: the airport and a big swimming pool. (Click on the image for a higher-resolution view.) Poster courtesy of Jeff Liebermann. Note that apostrophe abuse is not a new phenomenon.

Many of the trees in the photo at the top of this entry, when seen up close, are members of tight, circular groups. One such group is on the Ft. Harrington grounds:

The summer furniture and patio occupy the footprint of the surrounding redwoods' ancestor, the ancient giant that lives on in its offshoots.

The circle of trees in these groups are sprouts, or "suckers", from the roots of a truly ancient, mammoth, primordial redwood, which may have been thousands of years old when felled. The scale of our patio in this photo shows the trunk size of the ancestral giant. All of our neighbors in "Creepy Hollow" have at least one such circle of sprouts, and those sprouts themselves now are more than a hundred feet tall.

Hundred-foot tall trees, while they may be "juvenile," can still be a problem to those who live underneath them if they are not cared for. Redwoods tend to shed limbs as part of their growing process. Trouble is, the limbs they shed are typically as big as full-grown pine trees in other climes. (Adam, I'm sure, remembers very well how impressive such shed limbs can be when they hit the ground -- he was visiting during a winter storm in the first year or two of our living here when several of them shook the earth. The previous occupant of this place neglected her trees' care.) It's wise to have weakened limbs removed before they break off on their own. Intentionally-removed redwood limbs are called "maintenance expenses;" spontaneous fallers are called "widow-makers."

There are two different ways of thinning potential widow-makers that local arborists tend to use: selective thinning and "columnization."


The above photo shows three circles of second-growth redwoods: the one on our property whose base was shown above (left), one on our thoroughly irresponsible neighbors' property (center), and one on a good neighbor's property (right). Ours is pretty much indistinguishable from the reprobates' cluster, because our tree-caretaker's philosophy is to take only those limbs that pose a danger. His (and our) preference is to leave the trees looking as much like they naturally would as possible, and thus the appearance of our trees is pretty much like neglected ones'.

The right-hand clump shows the other way of caring for them: just shave everything up to the point where you'd better leave needles for survival. Our tree guy snortingly calls this approach "columnization," and, until two weeks ago, I never would have thought that this particular neighbor would go for that look.

But she did. Two weeks ago. Before that, her trees looked pretty much like ours.

I didn't ask her about it, because the opportunity never arose in passing, and, besides, that's the kind of thing we tend to leave each other alone about here in Creepy Hollow.

On Christmas Eve, Diane and I drove up to Pleasant Hill, a couple of hours away, to celebrate the holiday with Grace-the-Granddaughter, Adam, Adrianne, and a whole gaggle of the clan. We didn't get back until well after dark... and were then well and truly treated to what our neighbor had in mind when she had her trees "columnized." The next day, Christmas day, I took a series of photos from late afternoon to dark, that shows her plot:

Afternoon.

Evening.

Night.

What a HOOT! It's like suddenly having an illuminated Washington Monument plunked down in your little hollow! The lights extend well over a hundred feet up the tree (I know; I used a high-precision Fies Protractor for the measurement computations) and are visible throughout the neighborhood. She says that next year she may have the remaining, high-altitude branches festooned with lights, too, and I hope she does. Then it would be a hundred-foot arrow of lights pointing straight UP.

Meanwhile, the Ft. Harrington Christmas Tree was of much more modest scale:

More about Christmas will be posted here soon, but Christmas isn't really over yet. I'll leave you now with how Emma looked yesterday while presents were being opened:

Please click on the above images for higher-resolution versions, especially the ones of our neighbor's tree.

Merry Christmas and Other Things

Merry Christmas!

The sound file, linked above, was recorded by Grace in Adam's studio.

You must click here (or on the picture) and listen to the message in order to view the rest of this blog entry legally. If you do not do so, and yet continue to read the rest, then you are at risk of a visit from Raul's legal team.

2008 Christmas Tree, Ft. Harrington

Speaking of Adam and his studio, the second episode of "Gorilla in the Greenhouse" was released this month. Go check it out -- Adam (the voice of K. J., the eponymous gorilla) has only about four lines in this episode, but he delivers them with consummate professionalism. More than I can say for whoever checked the science in this episode.


This blog's good friend, Theriomorph, and her Hero Dog, Gilgamesh, have suffered a great loss recently. Please visit and condole if you wish; Nellie was an example of why we can be proud to be mammals.

Peace out, as they say, and looking forward to exchanging photons with you all in 2009.

Archbold Stadium and Number 44

Eleven-year-old Sherwood (in sporty sport coat at left) enters Syracuse University's Archbold Stadium to watch the Orangemen play the University of Pittsburgh Panthers on November 1, 1958.

Syracuse University's Archbold Stadium, now long gone, was built in the early 1900's, and was the template for the "bowl" oval stadia that dotted the big-time football map through most of the 20th century. Michigan's "Big House" probably represents the high point of that phenomenon, but other worthy successors abound: the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the Orange Bowl in Miami, all have roots to some degree to old Archbold.

Halftime, November 1, 1958.

Syracuse beat the Pitt Panthers, 16-13, in this very good year leading up to the great year of 1959. In 1959, the Orangemen won their only national championship, and their great running back, Ernie Davis, won the Heisman trophy, an honor that had eluded his predecessor, Jim Brown.

Dad was a Syracuse alum, and took me to many games at old Archbold Stadium. In front of my eyes, I saw Jim Brown play for Ben Schwartzwalder, and Ernie Davis dance through defenders, and Gerhart Schwedes invent the tight end position, and Jim Ridlon ricochet through defensive lines, and many, many others invent on the fly, and fly high.

When we didn't drive the 65 miles from Norwich to Syracuse on fall Saturdays, I was plastered to the radio, listening to Bill O'Donnell anxiously count the game clock "tick - tick - ticking" down to the end of the game.

I spent my falls enthralled.

And I learned to revere the number 44. Jim Brown wore it, and his triumphant and tragic successor, Ernie Davis, did as well. College Hall of Famer [and in February 2010 NFL Hall of Famer] Floyd Little did so later, too. The number became so iconic that Syracuse University requested -- and was granted -- a new postal zip code, 13244.

Beyond Syracuse, Henry Aaron wore #44 when he broke a cherished white man's record in baseball, and Reggie Jackson wore it in Yankee Stadium as he was strutting his brashness along with his talent.

Archbold Stadium's field is where #44 came to mean something proud for black men, and signify achievement beyond not only expectation, but beyond bounds of provincial preconceptions or stagnant comfort levels.

Last month, we Americans elected our 44th President, a black man who, we all hope, will wear the number as well as those went before him did. I wonder if he knows what "Archbold Stadium" was, or what its heroes achieved. I won't be surprised if he does.

Between the War and Me

Last week's Thanksgiving break was an unusually placid one here at Ft. Harrington. The swirl of family circumstances gave us little to do in the way of entertaining or being entertained, so Diane and I had a very peaceful stretch of four days just to ourselves and our menagerie. I wouldn't want that to happen in very many years, but it was nice for a change, and gave us time to just rest and putter.

Part of my puttering involved the slide scanner and my dad's boxes of thousands of 35mm slides. This time, I concentrated on images from the 1940's and 1950's, including a set from Mom and Dad's first year after their marriage.

They met in Atlanta during World War II. Dad, an X-Ray technician in the service, was stationed at Ft. Oglethorpe at the end of the war, and my mother was working at Grady Hospital, having put her graduate work at Emory University on hold for The Duration. They met at a roller rink, where Dad had gone to accompany one of his buddies who was courting Mom's glamorous sister. The match that actually struck at the rink, though, was ignited by Catherine Murphy and Sgt. Lynn Harrington.

Courting at the Southeastern World's Fair, Atlanta, 1945.

Before being drafted in 1942, Dad had just started his career as a teacher in a high school in Mount Upton, a tiny town along the Unadilla River in Upstate New York, and he was mustered out as close to where he had been roped in as the Army could manage in the hectic, happy days after the end of the War. Shortly after they married, he was transferred to Patchogue, New York (on Long Island), and shortly after that, he was free. He went back to the Unadilla Valley with his Georgia bride, and back to work at the Mount Upton school. That was not surprising; where they lived then was astonishing.

They settled in to an abandoned farm on the top of the western Unadilla slopes, a place they always after referred to as "the Old Farm." The plan, overly-ambitious from the get-go, was to refurbish the place into a decent homestead from its terminally dilapidated condition. Here are a few of Dad's photos from that adventure:

The farmhouse was beyond repair, rotting away. (I don't know who the people are in the above photo; Mom and Dad are certainly not among them. They're probably family members, since folks from Dad's family in Syracuse visited their project often.) Mom and Dad set up perpetual camp in one of the smaller outbuildings, and worked to transform it into a viable living space.

The kitchen, 1946.

The first bedroom.

The sleeping arrangement may look cozy, but -- familiar as I am now with the effects of moisture on straw bedding for our chickens -- if the "mattress" ever got wet, it was bad news.

Working on the roof of the living shelter, 1946.

Mom's hammer-wielding technique could use some work itself here, but there's no mistaking the determination on her face.

Proud roofer on his finished product.

Mom enjoys the view from the front yard, summer, 1946.

Visitors in the summer of '46: Dad's parents with my cousin Allen van Patten in the background.

Dad's mom passed away a year later, a month before I was born. His dad, Arthur George Harrington, was a machine-gang foreman in Syracuse during the depression, and is the child mentioned in this document from 1876.

Mom in what passed for a back yard, summer, 1946.

Visiting (or running from) neighbors, 1946.

Mom, remember, was a recently-transplanted city girl. She never did quite get used to being close to cows.

Harvesting apples from the Old Farm's land, late fall, 1946.

A fine home along the approach road to the Old Farm, winter '46-'47. The Old Farm site is up the hill behind us from this vantage point.

This sort of thing must have been an enormous shock to an Atlanta gal's system -- but she weathered 37 more Upstate winters with aplomb before they, in retirement, moved back South.

The end of one adventure, the beginning of another.

My maternal grandmother holds me in the above photo, probably the first picture ever taken of yours truly, late June, 1947. The Old Farm experiment was done, and they moved to the urban environs of Oxford, New York (population: maybe 2,000 then) one valley to the west. Dad soon took a better-paying job than the little school could afford, and worked with the Norwich Pharmacal Company, eight miles north of Oxford, for the rest of his working life; Mom re-entered the world of biochemical research with Eaton Laboratories, an arm of the same company, and she, likewise, remained employed there until retirement.

In front of our Oxford home, winter 1949.

But the Old Farm remained in them somewhere deep, and appreciation for what it meant, both historically and as part of a fundamental worldview, managed to work its way into me somehow.

This year's was a good Thanksgiving for me, all things considered. A very good one.