Month: November 2016

The hundreds of snow geese flying in from the north this morning reminds us that it is November. The bright sunshine and warmth feel like April or May. This is the warmest November in Bow that we’ve had in our eleven years here.

This past week, nearly every morning, flocks of snow geese have flown south overhead. You can hear them coming, honking away. Ribbons of snow geese flutter across the morning skies.

Have they been flying all night? Or did they rest along the way? If so, from where and when did they take off this morning? The news reports never cover these important happenings. I’ve yet to hear a single reporter mention that the snow geese and swans are arriving.

This morning’s bread is baked. I can go work outdoors now. You can follow all sorts of recipes, but in the end, you have to develop your own way of baking bread. Each one of our hands is different. The senses in our fingers is different. Through trial and error, you need to let your hands and fingers perfect their own way of baking a perfect loaf of bread.

This morning, while prepping my sourdough starter for tomorrow’s loaf, I made an impromptu lid for the tea cup I decided to use for the starter. It turned out to be an unplanned museum piece. An unmentioned, but vital ingredient to baking a perfect loaf of bread is beauty.

If humans had evolved in the Pacific Northwest instead of Africa, we’d have webbing between our fingers and toes. When it is this wet for this much of the year, humans with webbing in their feet and hands would have survived much better than those without.

Miasa 美朝 and her chicks come looking for me when I am outside, especially if I am headed to the cabin to make tofu. They know that once I’ve wrung the soy milk out of the soybeans, that they are in for a treat. They gobble up any okara, the soybean solids left over after making soy milk, that I give them.

The fall colors keep intensifying. The wind has knocked most of the leaves off the taller trees, but the bushes and small trees are still a riot of color. They are brilliant on sunny days, but rain gives them a special, luscious look too.

The best antidote to dreary, November weather? Go outside! Enjoy life on the wild side.

I was biking home from delivering eggs to Tweets in Edison when I saw someone pointing their camera up at the sky. “What are they photographing?” I wondered. I looked up and slammed on the brakes. Oh, wow! The clouds were in full boil. The gods must be furious. We don’t think such things when we see stormy clouds, but it’s easy to imagine raging deities when you see such awesome clouds.

So go outside on these dark, dreary days. You could probably write an epic imaging what the gods are doing to make the clouds seethe so much.

Art happens all the time. On a sunny November day, turning mimosa leaves scream art as they sway in a gentle breeze.

On the way home from a run to the post office, I was stopped by a mile long, mobile art installation. At the bottom of Bow Hill is a ribbon of steel stretching from Vancouver, BC, all the way to Seattle and to cities far beyond. Hour by hour, art installations lumber by.

There is so much art to see every day, I’m surprised Burlington Northern Railroad hasn’t installed viewing stands next to the rail crossings. They could be outdoor art museums. Do you need to take a break from the day’s frustrations? Stop, and enjoy the art pieces that roll by every so often.

The variety of art pieces slipping by is impressive. They slip by too quickly to see who the artist is. Did an artist in Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco, or Los Angeles create this Octopus? The railcar carrying the Octopus was a TTX railcar, a Pennsylvania company which sends railcars all over Canada, the USA, and Mexico. The Octopus may have been painted in Veracruz! By the time the installations stop, how many people will enjoy the pieces, how many cities will the installations roll through?

At home, old Billy looks majestic on this sunny autumn day. He’s 7 ½ years old now.