Where's The Sun?

I haven’t seen the sun in four days. If I were a weatherman, I’d describe the weather lately as shitty with a thirty percent chance of rain. It has been chilly, wet, and overcast for days. That’s great for salamanders, mushrooms, and residents of the Aleutian Islands, but a little hard to take for a long time Floridian. I feel like I’m in an old black and white movie playing the role of a repressed peasant in some place like Moldavia. I’ve never been to Moldavia, but it sounds like one of those places where the sun seldom shines, people live in hovels and eat turnips, and wolves howl at night.

When I’ve been here in the past in winter, the weather fronts have moved through quickly like they do in Florida. The bad weather has lasted only a day or two and then the sun has come out. I hope that’s the typical weather pattern and that what we’re experiencing now is usual.

I can deal with the cold. It’s the absence of the sun that gets to you when you’ve lived in Florida for 40 years. Say what you will about Florida, it’s sunny most of the time. A day without at least some sunshine is unusual. Two consecutive days without the sun causes people to get grumpy. Three days without the sun and people become psychotic.

I’ve lived up north and in the Ohio River valley. In winter the clouds roll in, and the sun is seldom seen until spring. I imagine winter weather in the Midwest is much the same. I know that people can live and work under such conditions, but it’s not fun unless you’re a fungus. I think that’s a fair conclusion based on the number of people who move to the sunny states the minute they retire.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in Barrow, Alaska, where the sun stays below the horizon for 65 days in the winter. It must not be that great since Barrow’s population declined from 4,683 to 4,212 between 2000 and 2010. I think I’d rather live in Moldavia.

At any rate, I hope the sun come out soon. Until it does, I’m going to sulk in my gloomy bedroom.

I also hope that things dry out around here. I spend most of my days working outside. There’s not much you can do outside when it’s wet. The Georgia clay sticks to your boots worse than dog poop, and pretty soon you’re moving around with an extra pound or two on each foot. On the plus side, I’m developing some shapely calves. On the negative side, I haven’t seen my calves since October.

Smart phones are great things when you live in a warm place or spend most of your time indoors. Smart phones are not that convenient when you’re outdoors and it’s cold. Touch screens work by sensing the heat from your fingers. If your fingers are cold, you can poke that son of a bitch all you want, and it isn’t going to respond. If you are wearing gloves, you have to take your gloves off before using the phone or else the touch screen will not respond. If you take off your gloves, your fingers get cold after a few minutes and, you guessed it, your touch screen won’t respond. I may have to give up texting until spring or find a cell phone that has levers and pushbuttons.

The other thing about a cell phone is that there is no good place to put it when you’re working outside doing manly things in cold weather. I’m doing things like planting trees, painting a pole shed, chopping wood, and driving a tractor. (I feel like I should break into the chorus of Ol’ Man River at this point: “Tote dat barge. Lif dat bale.”)

The point is that I need to put my phone in a protected place on my body to avoid accidentally damaging it when I’m working outside. I usually put it under my coat in an inside pocket. It’s a pain in the ass to get a phone call. When the damn thing rings, I have to go through a multi-step process to answer it. I have to stop what I’m doing, take off my gloves, unbutton my coat, reach into my coat, find the cell phone, pull it out, and poke at it hoping it will detect the slightest bit of body heat in my cold index finger. Half the time, the caller has hung up before I can answer the call. When I get a phone call I look like a man who’s discovered a wasp crawling under his shirt as I frantically claw at my clothing in an attempt to answer the phone. People think I'm having a conniption fit.

Switching gears, we planted some apple trees near the fence line between our property and the neighbor’s. I was tending to the trees a couple of days ago when I had this odd feeling that I was being watched. I looked around and discovered that the neighbor’s six cows had wandered over to the fence and were standing there, motionless, staring at me intently. They were twenty feet away. Now I like to think that I’m a riveting and fascinating person and the natural center of attention in any situation, but those cows began to freak me out.

I understand that the entertainment options for a cow in a pasture are limited, but there was something creepy about the way those six cows were fixated on me. It was almost as if they wanted something. I kept waiting for them to hold up a sign to eat more chicken. The horrible thought occurred to me that maybe I represented something edible to them. What a scary vision: man-eating cows. Then I remembered that I dated a few during my college days.

As I drove the tractor back to the cabin, I looked back, and they were still there watching me. I don’t know if cows have facial expressions, but these cows appeared to be either sad and wistful or hungry and disappointed. Either way, I’m not getting near them from now on.

Thanksgiving. I had a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. My family is healthy. I’m healthy, though a bit creaky at times. The move to north Georgia has been completed successfully, and retired life has been great so far. For the first time in a long time I do not wake up angry, tense, and dreading the day ahead. I’m having a ball.

We’ve made considerable progress on the homestead. Meredith has gotten the house organized, and I’ve brought order to the workshop. I’ve had a large pole shed built. I purchased a subsoiler and a cultivator for the tractor and a heavy duty rototiller and have used them successfully to help prepare a large garden plot. In the process I have learned the intricacies of a three point tractor hitch. We have planted apple trees and blueberry bushes. Raspberries, blackberries, and nut trees are soon to follow.

I’ve learned how to sharpen handsaws, chisels, and hand plane blades, and I’ve reconditioned a number of old saws and hand planes. I’ve signed up for cheese-making classes, and pretty soon I will be making my own cheese. Meredith is learning how to make wine thanks to the urging and example of two close friends. She is tracking down sources for pork so we can start experimenting with making our own bacon, smoked hams, and sausage. I have enrolled in the Georgia Master Gardner course.

I do not believe in fate. I believe that shit happens. Sometimes it’s good shit, and sometimes it’s bad shit. I believe that a person can influence whether he or she experiences more good shit than bad shit, but ultimately what happens to you in life is largely random. Bad shit happens to good people, and good shit happens to bad people. All things being equal, I suspect that in most cases a person’s good shit and bad shit even out over a lifetime, but I am aware that every time a coin is flipped, the odds are 50-50 that it will come up tails, even if it has come up heads the prior 100 times. There’s no guarantee that a string of bad luck will be followed by a string of good luck. Thus, I am truly grateful for being on the receiving end of so much good shit this year. And that, my friends, is Yacavone’s Good Shit/Bad Shit Theory of Life.