Hunting for Mud

We’re planning to build
our first straw-bale cottage
in the spring.
This week, our friend Tom Temple,
who is designing the building
and overseeing its construction,
came to make plans for the project.
We’ll be offering a strawbale construction workshop
with instruction and hands-on experience
placing the bales
and mudding the walls inside and out.
The bales of straw from last year’s wheat harvest
are in the barn.
So now it was time
to look for the mud.
Somewhere on the farm,
we needed to find suitable clay.
We looked first in the “cliffs,”
the red and gray wall
carved out from the prairie
by Doe Creek.
There was clay,
but tiny rocks in it,
so that it would have to be sifted
before it could be used.
A labor-intensive job.
We went south
and found some clay
mixed in with top soil.
That wouldn’t make good, sticky mud.
We went further south
onto the prairie which has never been broken by a plow
and, happily, found a healthy depth of top soil.
The clay would have been too deep to excavate.
Then Tom dug on a lesser cliff
nearer the pondhouse
and there it was:
good, gray, sticky clay.
He mixed it with water and a little sand,
rolled it into a ball
and put it in the sun to dry.
We’ll see how it dries.

We are excited:
another step.
And,
we know our farm
a little better,
having looked closely
at its soils.

 

From Red-tailed Hawk, and Screech Owl

On my weekly route
these last few autumn weeks
I have noticed the red-tailed hawks.
Long have I noticed red-tailed hawks
sitting on fence posts
or dipping overhead.
But not as many as this.
In a 25-mile stretch,
23 one day.
13 another
(but I had decided it wasn’t safe to drive
and keep track of them
on the other side of the road too.)
Sitting atop the posts,
facing into the strong southern wind.
Magnificent in their strength
and silence.
Perhaps waiting for rodents.
If so many hawks are sitting on fence posts,
waiting,
I wonder if there are not many rodents.

Then,
two nights in a row,
just as night has covered us completely,
I’ve heard screeching
in my yard.
It took me a moment
to recognize the call,
so close,
of a screech owl.
Haven’t heard screech owls here
since I moved back.
Native American wisdom teaches
to listen to the animals.
And so I’m paying attention.
To Owl and Hawk.
I feel befriended
by a wise seer,
enabling me,
like Hawk,
to stand on a fence post,
watching,
facing into the wind,
ready.

 

In a Persimmon Grove

Went to the Oklahoma Centennial Botanical Gardens
for the Master Naturalist training on prairie ecosystems.
We actually learned something about two ecosystems -
the prairie
and the cross timbers.
The cross timbers and the prairie
sit side-by-side there,
seven miles northwest of Tulsa.
The cross timbers ecosystem
then curves around, covering the central part of the state.
It’s an ancient,
scrubby
deciduous woodlands.
Washington Irving,
coming upon the cross timbers
during his travels,
compared it to a sea of iron.
It’s thinned out considerably since then
and trails have been blazed through it
at the new botanical gardens.

At the edge of the cross timbers
looking out onto the prairie
is an elegant persimmon grove.

It’s an all male persimmon grove,
started by one lone persimmon seed
that somehow found its way into fertile soil.
You can see it there,
in the photograph, in the middle of the grove.
It’s shorter and knotty,
having withstood by itself
the weathering of the winds
and storms
until,
from its roots,
other male persimmon trees sprouted,
grew straight and tall alongside each other
and created a lovely grove.
No persimmons, of course.
But there are female persimmon trees
in the nearby cross timbers,
with small persimmons hanging on.
We opened the three seeds in one fruit
and found a spoon in each one.

A spoon in a persimmon seed,
I learned last year,
is a prediction of a snowy winter.
A knife predicts ice
and a fork, a warm winter.
Last year’s persimmons also contained spoons
and we did indeed have snows -
even a blizzard in the Oklahoma Panhandle,
though I don’t know if persimmons grow there.

Interesting that we can rely on a persimmon seed
to make a prediction
in such an unpredictable world.
A world in which
a lone male persimmon seed
took root amidst the tall grasses on a windswept prairie
and now
an elegant grove
of straight and tall trees
reach to the sky.