Dusk

Lately I've been sneaking out to the garden in the evenings to putter around while Bill is giving Joe a bath. It doesn't matter how stressful my day has been, something about spending the last few moments of sunlight out here makes everything okay. It's a mess, but it's all mine.

Iceathon 2010: The Storm

I've owed you this post for a few days now, but I've been running around enjoying hot water and lights that turn on at whim! Imagine!

The basic story is that last Thursday, our region of Oklahoma was the epicenter of an icestorm like this area has never seen before. We lost power almost immediately.

The views of the day made me feel like we'd landed on another planet.

This is not the rocky terrain of Pluto, it is our front lawn. Each blade was coated in an inch of ice. It made things really interesting for the dogs to try to do their doggie business.

 

The ice on the front of our house was so thick and heavy that our front walk is now littered with chips of stone that fell off as it melted. 

 

 

Those are some hardcore icicles. 

This is the new apple tree in the backyard. All of the trees were bowing low to the ground, and I spent the day running outside every  30 minutes or so trying to knock as much ice off of the tops of the trees as I could to keep them from snapping. I was not successful with the newest peach tree, which snapped with only 3 low-lying branches left on the trunk. 

My older peach tree, which I planted while pregnant in 2008, had me waging hand-to-hand war. 

As you can see in the pic, one branch on the right was already snapped and the branches on the left were dangerously close to breaking all day. I fought long and hard to save this tree. Everytime I started hacking at the ice, it was as if I was trying to free a flesh-and-blood friend. Something about the way I nursed this tree through it's first hot summer (all while swimming in ever-increasing pregnancy hormones) has me emotionally bonded to it forever. Happily, it did the best out of all of the trees.

After our first night in our literally freezing house, we spent a wonderfully warm day across the street with our neighbors at the One Acre Homestead, as I mentioned in the previous post. We trekked back and forth several times to stockpile our supplies. Here I am making a toilet paper run:

 

I'm planning a post about  how to prepare for such an event, having now lived through one, but in the meantime, here is some good advice. As I write this, many of my friends and family on the East Coast are snowed in with 2+feet of snow. While some are losing power, I'm fairly confident they won't have to go 7 days without it. Infrastructure for handling messy winter weather is something I sorely miss about the midatlantic region.

Snowklahoma

I started to write a long post about the Christmas Eve blizzard that shut down our state, and, not unlike the story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, threatened to shut down Christmas altogether, but it stressed me out. So, I'm going to do a picture post instead of some of the prettier moments of the extremely rare Oklahoma blizzard. It snowed again a few days later, and it looks like it may be in the forecast again for later this week.

Suffice it to say that snow on the windy prairie, especially powdery easy-to-blow snow, is considerably more dangerous than heavy snow in East Coast cities where there are plenty of windbreaks. I know lots of friends back East who laughed at our panic over a few inches of snow when they were maneuvering easily through their 2 feet of the white stuff, but when you're stuck on a highway where you can only see a foot in front of you on all sides and you never know when you may hit a 4+foot snowdrift, things get complicated. But I digress.

The pretty:

Nature Adjacent

After a whole day spent in airports/the car, I needed to get back outside and soak in some fall. There is nothing as spectacular as fall on the East Coast, where there is actually TREES and LEAVES and COOL, CRISP AIR and all those things that one traditionally associates with the autumn season. Not that I haven't enjoyed fall in Oklahoma, but it's just not the same.

We decided to take a walk around the now closed Dan River Mill. The old textile mill was the major employer of the people of Danville, VA for over 100 years. Much of the major infrastructure of the downtown area centered around the mill, like housing for mill workers, personnel offices, etc. When the textile company faced bankruptcy several years ago and subsequently was bought by an Indian chemical company, what to do with the empty mill buildings became a subject of heated debate in the community. Eventually, it was agreed to tear down the buildings and salvage as much material as possible to be used in other projects around the country.

We took a walk near the Schoolfield Mill section on Saturday, and I couldn't help but notice that throughout the various ruined structures, there were little glimpses of nature reclaiming the space.
This is the worker's parking lot across from the entrance to the mill. Besides the warping of the asphalt, the growth of grasses and weeds through the cracks is fairly impressive.

I love how the massive pine trees mirror the spacing of the old smokestacks.

This is the turnstile that workers went through every day to get to work. It also reminded me of pine tree branches.

This little tree was growing underneath the mill's electrical substation. It clearly has grown up since the mill closed, which is pretty remarkable considering it never would have been there if the substation still directed power to all of the mill buildings.

I was struck by the almost bovine colors of this rusting structure (housing for heating/cooling? I'm not an engineer, obviously):

See the holes worn into the rusted sections? I made up a little story to myself about how they were broken down by birds who now use them for shelters, but that is probably my overactive imagination again. Speaking of nests:


There were nests EVERYWHERE! I was so surprised--it's as if the people moved out and the birds moved in. I loved the way the seed pods (whirly-gigs) decorated this tree. I took some home with me to see if I can grow my own whirly-gig tree in Oklahoma.

If you look closely, you can see that this pile of bricks and structural elements (which has been there for about a year) is covered in grass. Yes, grass has literally grown up over the wreckage. Will this pile ever be moved, or will future civilizations find it after they excavate the area?

It should be said that we obviously were not able to walk throughout the site. There was a tall fence that kept me walking and positioning myself to try to come up with interesting photo angles (and, alas, hindering my efforts in most cases). I was interested in the way the fence played a role in the following two photos.

It looks as if this felled tree bough was trying to escape the mill, with half on either side of the fence. And this is my favorite:

This gorgeous little vine was growing (and blooming) along the outer fence. I could say something about hope or opening windows accompanying closed doors here, but I'll let you come to your own conclusions.

On a personal note, I snapped this picture of three generations of Cook/Thorntons (Joe, Dad & MaWat) huddled outside of the mill that sustained recent ancestors:

In a few years the rest of the mill will be torn down and our son will be grown up. Of course, I can't help but wonder what he'll find if he ever decides to return to this site.