75 Years Ago

Pheasants that have survived the winter thus far have begun to gather at the sides of the roads looking for whatever they cannot find in the fields. This is another scene I carved about twenty years ago, but why the title "75 Years Ago." This past Saturday we drove east to take something to my mother in Lisbon, eat dinner with our son and his wife in Fargo, and still leave enough to attend an 80th birthday celebration for an aunt in Fargo. In Lisbon I picked up Ma's Fargo Forum and read an article, the point of which I had heard Dad speak of often. It was the record setting string of cold temperatures that occurred in 1936: 37 straight days in Fargo when the temperature never rose above the zero mark. Langdon logged 42 days of it. I haven't seen the figures for this part of the state, but it probably does not differ a lot. I wonder how the wildlife fared in that severity. I'm not sure if it was 1936, but the opposite extreme occurred, a string of days when the thermometer registered over a hundred degrees.

Time Passes So Quickly

I looked on one of our shelves and spotted this hand carved scene of wild turkeys I had done over twenty years ago; now I don't even pick up a knife to carve others. Where did those twenty years go. Yesterday I attended another session at the Osher Institute about World War II Memories; Dr. Wilson brought his wife along to tell of her memories. She was a war bride, an English citizen whom he met while stationed there during the war. She, too, was a veteran who wore the uniform of her country's women's air force. I asked her if she returns to England for visits, and she replied that she does not often go back because she has outlived her close relatives. Her story was interesting, but sadly so much time has passed and she too grows old.

Dreaming of Spring

Mary snapped this picture last summer. It gets me to thinking, maybe those people who go to Arizona for the winter know something.

The Thinker

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This picture of The Thinker, sculpted by Auguste Rodin, has sat on my shelf for quite a few years. I finally got around to researching the significance of it and learned it depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a powerful internal struggle. However, there are other meanings associated with this sculpture. I once had a visitor, a bit pious and stodgy, who reacted as if this
were pornography. The most common reaction seems to be that he is taking care of his daily bathroom duties, or someone who can't get the superglue unstuck from his fist and face, or someone who can't decide which clothes to wear, or ... Silly, silly...

My Birthplace

Mary showed me a picture the other day which I do not ever remember seeing. It is of my birthplace, the spot from which I have my earliest memories: placing an egg in my pants pocket and having it break, a problem I tried to solve by taking Ma's broom and whisking the mess away; taking an afternoon nap and having the ceiling plaster fall on me; watching a crew thresh behind the barn and having Charlie Ufer pick me up and pretend to throw me into the feeder; being told to stay in the house while Ma went with Dad in a blizzard to load hay, and I tried to open the shanty door to follow but couldn't get it to budge. I've been told of other things: being harassed by a rooster in the yard and then picking up a stick and killing him; wandering away from home and being found two miles away in a slough only because my uncle Alfred saw the tail of my companion dog waving amongst the cattails; plus some others.

My folks wanted a new place of their own and built up a farmstead another one half mile south of this location. I was about three or four years old when we moved. Dad always referred to the old farm as the old Adams' place, and after we vacated the Kenneth Bartholomay family lived there and they were followed by the John Warner family. The buildings have all disappeared now just as the new place has to where we moved. On the three mile stretch of township road there were five farmsteads, but now only one remains.

Poetry at the Institute

In addition to WW II Memories at the Learning Institute I am enrolled in a poetry class where a recent assignment was to write a piece in the form captioned in the above picture. The model bull is of our local sports figure Little Yellow Jacket who took top honors in the rodeo world for three years.

World War II Memories

One of the sessions at the Learning Institute I've enrolled in this term is named A Veteran's Remembrances: World War II. Dr. Herbert Wilson, a retired M. D. who spent most of his career at Fort Berthold in ND, flew 31 missions in World War II in B-24's as a gunner-bombardier and serves as our instructor. I look forward to the five remaining sessions when he will bring a guest speaker. Next week he's scheduled his wife who he married in England during the war who has stories of her own.

The picture taken about a year ago is of George McGovern with me asking him a question about his piloting these B-24's for 35 missions during that war. My question: what was it like flying so many times over dangerous territory. "I was scared all the time," was his response to me.

Back Saver

Some winters this old pal doesn't have to work very hard, but others he gets called on quite often to do what he does best: throw snow. It's hard to imagine this invention didn't get developed long before it did. Scoop shovels used to be the main tool we grabbed to make narrow paths to the barn or get a car unstuck in the driveway. Some things I can do without; old John Deere isn't going to be one of them.

It's a Small World

Here I am just foolin' around. I can't wait for the snow to melt so I can take this new camera out and put it to work in various places.

Ike

Brandon and Lindsey's pet dog Ike has grown to be an armful. He's a purebred Australian Shepherd, is extremely physical, and loves people. He goes from one person to another looking for pets and scratches, but he would just as soon jump in your lap. He loves it when his master picks him up, but being he is now 65 pounds I was encouraged to hurry up and snap this picture.

We drove to Lisbon on Sunday to see my mother and celebrate her birthday which will be on the 17th when she will be 91. We usually eat at the Parkside Lutheran Home when we visit her, and Sunday we ate some great steaks. There is lots of snow in Ransom County and in the whole Sheyenne River drainage system. I'm hoping some gentle thawing takes place so that it doesn't all run off at once. A couple days of thawing really shrunk the snow here in Mandan, but with the drainage river being the Missouri I'm not too worried about flooding.

February Thaw

The temperatures finally rose around here and we have had thawing. I drove south of town today because of some battery problems with Mary's car and wanted to charge it up again. The camera sat beside me and when I got to the Veteran's Cemetery I noticed things looked differently than when I saw them last. The Christmas wreaths have been removed and the banks of snow have shrunk away from the grave markers. As for the car it took a call to AAA for a boost, and he wriggled on the cable and turned it quite freely. After giving the posts a baking soda cleaning and a good scratching with a steel brush, I had neglected to tighten the positive cable enough. Oh, well, we keep renewing the insurance and this was probably only the second time it's been used.

Mary Poses

Doin' Fun Things Now

Even as the days grow longer, winter stays very much with us. We retired folks need to find things to entertain us, and I've got plenty of them. Fooling around with photos and attaching poems or other information to them occupies a good deal of time. I purchased a digital SLR camera the other day and this photo of Little Heart Butte was one of my first subjects. My five line poem superimposed on it has previously been published in the Tanka Society of America journal "Ribbons."







This next one challenged me a bit as I used our simple point-and-shoot Nikon to take it. I like the way it turned out, though. Below the picture I composed some lines to describe the scene.



"On a recent trip to the Gettysburg Battlefield our tour bus stopped at a spot known as Little Round Top, a site where some brutal fighting took place. There, beneath the old oak trees acorns lay strewn about. How old those trees were I had no way of knowing, but I imagined the soil where they had taken root to have been soaked with the blood of those many fallen soldiers. I saved these three and keep them in a place of honor."

So it is, here in Mandan. I have another birthday next week to add on my growing total - the 69th. How that came on so fast scares me, so for the time remaining I'd better get moving and accomplish some more tasks. Emily Dickinson penned a poem that pretty well describes the future :

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling on the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

One final aside, someone figured out that you can sing this poem to the tune "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

Winter

Another edited picture

I found an editor program

Here is the veteran's cemetery picture which I posted a few days ago. Here is the same one with artistic touches. This should be fun!

Foraging Deer

It has been a rough couple of weeks here at the Bueling homestead what with illness. Mary suffered through hers and seems to be better, but I’m still battling it. That has been the main story around here. The joke seemed to be on me: about a week ago I thought I was over it so that was when I waded through the deep snow to snap the picture of the water pump in our backyard. Since it was so deep I became exhausted and began breathing gulps of cold air and then a hard relapse. Mary adds to a compost pile with scraps of veggies even now in the winter, and deer have found it, thus this picture. Here is where I wish for a better camera with telephoto capabilities. Living where we do provides a multitude of photo ops.

I’ve enjoyed watching a number of videos from this year’s Elko, NV Cowboy Poetry Gathering that are posted on the internet. Some of the performances are excellent. Interested? Go to westernfolklife.org and click on Gathering Cybercast.

Regarding deer I drove past a small herd the other day and saw them standing belly-deep in snow to reach for some dried leaves on a branch. It made me appreciate my refrigerator and pantry.

Snowfall keeps piling up. The Bismarck Tribune reported over 52 inches of it, about 23 inches above normal. We’ve still got February and March. Uff da!