The house has been keeping us busy, busy, sorry about the vast empty month. Am off to work here in a bit but wanted to say hello to everyone and post a couple of my most recent photos. The Wisconsin landscape is changing into its winter garb, which I find stunning to look at (not to mention that we've already hit 19 degrees one early morning, and its not yet November!).
Here are two shots from my workroom /studio upstairs, looking west out the rear of the house. The creek is just beyond our neighbor's bungalow, which used to be the city hospital!
The concrete stoop at the back of the house, which was cracked to begin with, gave way last week and David surfed it all the way down. This is a shot of the replacement stairs he built. Nothing that this man can't do! You can also see our woodpile- this is about 4-5 weeks supply, all red elm, oak and walnut.
Down the hill there is a footpath that local kids take to school. This is a place where taking a shortcut across a neighbors yard is as common as it was 40 years ago in the rest of the country- fences are rare here unless there's a dog to be kept at home. I'm planning to put a meditation garden at the base of the 3 big pines that mark the back edge of the lot. One trunk is visible here
We travelled back to the apple orchards at Gay's Mills last weekend to restock on McIntoshes, HoneyCrisps and tasty Amish chocolate maple walnut squares. The orchards look vastly different from the last time we were there (see the bumper crop pics in an earlier post), but the fall colors captivate the eye just as much as the harvest windfall did last month.
the seasonal changes here are dramatic, cinematic even. You never lose awareness of the life of the land and creatures all around you, squirrels, rabbit, deer, chipmunks, turkey, quail, bluejays, robins and those everpresent invaders from across the Big Pond, the English starlings. The songbirds here are fatter than I have ever seen anywhere, perhaps they know something about the coming winter we humans have not yet understood...
I haven't shared many of these, but this is also an area of working farms, dairy, corn, soy and other crops. The homesteads are storybook picturesque in this region. Here however, they're not populated by gentlemen farmers but by generations of farm families, the land and buildings hard won over years of intense labor and good business sense- or lost for a lack thereof.
One crop that's a regional secret is the uncommon corn cob tree, we have one in the yard as you can see by this final photo. This ornamental looks best with a winter red tailed squirrel perched atop the cob, a golden kernel in each rosy little fist. The squirrel's a lucky character,if not for that bushy tail there by another name would go a rat. Shrink the squirrel, add racing strips and viola, you have the chipmunk, a clever fellow not above tormenting the local tomcat by skittering about on a low fence every morning directly across from the fern garden where tom lays in the sun to warm up. 
