January 2011

I've slowed way down on this blog. Life is still good on the island, but winter still too long.

We survived the holidays, but with no visitors this year it was quiet. For a Christmas tree we set up a felled spruce outside the new room and decorated it for the birds. For garlands, we strung popcorn and cranberries. I gathered pine cones, dipped them in rendered suet, and hung them from the branches with red yarn. I also  melted down a block of suet, the kind you can buy off the shelf (warning: it really stinks), and poured it into cookie cutter molds which I also hung with red yarn. Almost immediately, the chickadees discovered the tree, and it was so fun to see them hopping around on the branches, eating the ornaments I'd made. We strung the tree with LED lights, and it was one of the prettiest trees we've ever had, complete with live birds. I think we'll do this from now on for our Christmas tree. We stacked presents by the window, beneath the tree, and it was just as good as having a tree indoors, with none of the mess.

The other day I was sitting here in the kitchen at my laptop, and saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I glanced outside and saw an animal with a bushy tail and pointy nose striding purposefully into the yard. I thought at first it was a fisher cat, it appeared to be so big, but  it turned out to be a mink. Right there in the front yard it hunted and caught a poor little vole in the snow between the tractor tire tracks. Lucky for me, the camera was handy, and I took this video of the hunt.

Outside our back door, on the new porch, we have a big wood box that Gary built, 4 feet long by 3 1/2 feet tall. To fill it, we drive the John Deere -- with a trailer attached -- to the woodpile, fill the trailer with firewood, back it up to the porch, and transfer the wood armful by armful to the wood box. It always feels so good to have a full wood box -- you feel so rich and accomplished -- and so bad when you're reaching in for the last pieces of wood lying at the bottom of the box. We've been refilling the wood box every 3 or 4 days since mid-December. We figure we'll burn through the entire wood pile -- about 5 cords -- before winter is over.

The reason I mention the firewood is because 1) I'm already looking forward to warmer weather so we don't have to depend on wood to heat the house, and 2) it's nice to know that this is an alternative lifestyle, that Gary doesn't have to put up at least 5 cords of wood every winter just to survive and we don't have to haul a trailerload of wood to the house every few days to keep from freezing to death. Our great-grandparents didn't have the option of saying 'to heck with it, we're hopping on a darn plane after Christmas and not coming back till spring.' But we do. It's a good thing winter is such a pretty season, because if it were ugly, no one would live here at all. That's my mid-January, subzero opinion.

Time to pull out the seed catalogs and start planning the garden.