SPRING 2

THE SLEEPER WAKES

By the beginning of April, the last patches of snow had finally disappeared, the dogs were contained, and the garage roof was shored.
The loss of snow also revealed all the things that lay beneath, and it wasn't pretty. I'd begun to empty out the greenhouse's clutter, throwing the trash wood into one pile, the useable wood and flowerpots into another, and the trash into yet another. I found the Preston 'transfer station,' a rural Connecticut phenomenon our extremely high taxes support. I remember "transfer stations" in South Carolina, which were a collection of beat-up dumpsters where you tossed your trash, got chased by clouds of yellowjackets, and invariably found unwanted animals.
I dreaded taking my trash there.
The transfer stations up here are modern manned facilities that separate household, recycleable, and metal refuse. If you pay town taxes, you get a sticker and can use the facility for free, except for large and heavy items for which you are charged a fee. They are also the place you get to meet your neighbors and exchange news on Saturday.
This was truly a blessing, especially when you consider that all my outbuildings were filled waist-high with trash, old tires littered the property, and I now could begin a real clean-up.
I became a regular at the station.

                                                               Inside the machine shed

                      The item under the gray tarp is an intact wood cook stove. I did not toss this.

                          Inside the greenhouse I found a lot of antique wood as well as trash

 The barn was filled with furniture, mostly deteriorated antiques. Some pieces, especially Victorian era chairs, were worth saving.

 

                                                  Starting to clear out the greenhouse

Clearing out the machine shed. I call it this because it's where I keep my floor tools such as the drill press, band saw, and lathe. Not that I had room to use them at this point. It was trash-filled, dusty, and smelled strongly of kerosene from a leaking barrel. Note the ever-expanding hole in the barn roof to the left.

The grass began to turn from brown to green and some few plants showed buds. I raked and cut old dried stems with my weedeater for a time, but decided to park it as new plants emerged. I needed to see what perennials would come up; this was, after all, a farm.
And just as I was completing the dog fence, they all got out one last time. They found a skunk living in the barn and the Akita got a little too close. She slept outside for a couple of nights and the smell went gratefully away. I found the skunk's den, flushed it, and killed it. Others would come around.

Then there was the night I went out into the dark yard to move the truck from the barn to the side gate. I could barely see dark spots that were trash piles as I carefully navigated the yard, nearly blind in the dark. The still-frozen ground was bare of snow for the first time.
"Hmm," I said to myself in the side yard. "I don't remember there being a trash pile there." It was a smallish dark pile and I skirted it by a few feet. But as I drove the truck out of the barn driveway, a long, dark animal slunk across the road in front of me. It looked like a long, low cat with a bushy tail, and it moved like flowing water.
"There aren't any cats around here," I said. Then I gasped. "Damn! They were telling the truth!"
The guys at work had been warning me of a local creature known as a 'fisher cat.' I thought they were pulling the chain of this Arkansaw Boy. It was known to attack dogs, dig under fences to kill chickens, and even to attack small children. It kills for pleasure, often not eating but one bird after wiping out twenty chickens in a coop.
I had no doubt that the thing that slipped across the road was an example. Going back to the unexplained dark spot in the yard, I found it gone.
I'd almost stepped on the thing.

Stock photo of a fisher cat

 

                                                          Not to be tangled with

I researched the thing and found that they are of the marten family. They're actually small wolverines, if truth be told. One of the fiercest animals in this hemisphere, and right at the top of the food chain.
A week later, my neighbor saw it as well, slinking out of the same spot in my yard.
Great. Just fracking great.

I also scored a burning permit and began a weekly program of burning that which would not pollute or go to the transfer station. One of the first things to go on the fire was my collection of topiary that I cut the day after closing on the house. The bushes had to be wrested from the still-frozen ground, but they crackled nicely upon setting a match to them.

                              First burning pile; it has since been moved out of the fenced yard

Then one gray morning, rain began to fall. The temperatures broke the forties and flirted with fifty in one out of four days. A slight green flush could be seen across the land.
Spring had begun. Three weeks late, to be sure, but it was here at last.

SPRING 1 - GETTING OUT AT LAST

After dealing with the refrigerator alcove, I was pumped to do something else. Unfortunately, the snow had other ideas. It kept falling for the rest of February and a good deal of March.
By March 22nd, this was all that was left.

I ventured forth to examine the garage. I needed a place to build things and stage them for installation around the property, and the garage had the best roof and the most room.
It also had one of the most important repair issues; the adjacent greenhouse roof, which had been collapsing since I first saw the building in September of 2012.

                         First pic of the deteriorated roof rafter ends in the greenhouse; it is held up by roof decking

                                               Continued ceiling collapse two years later

First order of business; build a work table. Note the window sashes in the background. They are 18th and 19th century sashes from which I harvested glass for the Avondale Project (that will post later in my other blog, 'Architectural Vestiges' Shop Notes), and they were going to be thrown away. I intend to restore them and use them to glaze the greenhouse. Stay tuned.
So I prepared to do some rafter repair. The snow was perty much gone, the ground was still frozen solid, and I itched to do what the winter had robbed me of the opportunity of.

That was the most improper and convoluted sentence I've writ in some time. And it felt good.

The garage itself had some rotted rafter ends, and the leaking roof had destroyed the plates at the top of the cinder block wall upon which the plates sit, so I had to jack, support, and replace all the bad wood on the garage side. Afterwards I'd do the bigger roof project, The Greenhouse. Stay tuned.

                         Jacks, stiffleg, and jacking plate. Note the rafter ends have been cut off

New rafter ends sistered onto the originals, a new pressure treated plate set, and doubled up 'joists' upon which I would store long boards

 

Almost complete. The cross-like structure ties the center of the 'joists' to the roof peak to prevent joist sag once I load them with wood. Two more would follow. The rack to the right holds a messa western red cedar I scarfed from a demolition in Little Rock. I plan to reuse it, possibly as a picket fence.

THE DOG FENCE

 The first thing I did after moving into the house was build a fence around the back yard to keep in the dogs. Since  1987 I have always had at least one dog in my life, and more recently, I have always had a passel of canines. I prefer their company to most humans.
"Passel," by the way, is Arkansawyer talk for 'a lot.' Also known as "a messsa." Passel likely comes from 'parcel,' though my four dogs would make "a messa" a parcel if it was dropped through the front door.
A different meaning entirely.
My pack consists of four 'found' dogs, i.e. those that others didn't want or tossed away. The oldest, Cheese, is a thirteen year old German shepherd, and the only male. He thinks he is the Alpha. He is wrong.

 The next is Marley, a short, stocky Akita that stands less than two feet tall and weighs eighty-five pounds. She is sweet but trusts very few humans other than those she's met.

 The smallest, and by far the fiercest, is my ShitZoo Cheerio. She is also the friendliest and most playful. And yes, at fifteen pounds, she is the Alpha and will not hesitate to discipline the other dogs.

Then there is Speckle.
Speckle Rhetta King is the only one of my pack that I adopted from her actual birth mother, and I knew her father as well. He was a standard boxer that was abused and abandoned before being adopted by my neighbor in Roland, Arkansas. Speckle's mom was a beautiful German shepherd that was kept tied to a tree in the backyard of another house next door in Roland, and if there is anything I can't abide, it's a tied-up dog. She was also neglected, and I was her favorite human.

                                                            Sheba, very sad and immobile

                                               Sheba, renamed Greta, with her new Mom

Boxer Lucky (actual name Rocky) got together with G.s. Sheba (renamed Greta once I found helped find a better home for her), and six  pups were the result. Since Cheese was getting on in years, I decided to adopt the Alpha female (after finding homes for the remaining puppies) while he could still be a positive influence. I named her Speckle Rhetta.

She was so cute it hurt. She was wormy and had fleas, but I cured her and Cheerio became her Mom.
I figured she couldn't possibly get very big; Rocky was a standard forty-five pound boxer and Greta weighed about the same.
But, But, BUT!
There must have been a recessive gene somewhere, because this dog grew and grew and grew until she was eighteen feet high and weighed seventeen million pounds.
Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. But at one year old, she was almost ninety-six pounds and stood over three feet high at the shoulder.

Baby

                                                                            Adolescent

                                                 Playing with her sister at eight months

                                                            Ninety pounds at ten months

This is why I'm including her in this post.
Having a Giant Puppy presents its own problems. Speckle can almost put her head onto thw kitchen counter, so precautions must be taken. She once ate a roll of blue painters' tape, ate another the following week, and followed that with a roll of green Frogtape. She followed this with three gallons of black oil sunflower seeds and a half a bag of natural hardwood charcoal. I know this because I pick up after my dogs in the backyard; finding Speckle poop was easy when it glowed bright green.
As I said (wrote), the fence was my first priority after unloading the trailer. I've lived in the country for a lot of years, and I have never let my dogs run. One dead chicken or cat and I'll have a dead dog, an angry neighbor, and a vendetta. I wanted none of the above.
So I bought some metal T-posts, a T-post tubular banger, and two hundred feet of welded wire fence. It took me over three days, but I installed the four-foot  fence and built a gate. I let the dogs out and they seemed happy.
My first day of work at Early New England Restorations was the first day the dogs were alone at the new property, and when I returned after dark, I saw a strange dog standing in the driveway. "Jeez, it doesn't take long for the other dogs to start coming around...."
But it wasn't a strange dog; it was Cheese, and he was covered in black, stinking mud.
As were all of the others.
They had found the fence easy pickins and after trampling it, also found the pond out back. Which is filled with stinking black mud. Or perhaps it was the swamp in the deep valley across the street.
They spent the night outside (after they all came back with sheepish grins), and I repaired the fence.
This went on for weeks.
I'd leave for work, they'd get out. I'd return and scold them, then spend an hour repairing the fence.
I am not stupid, people. I watched and studied their actions, and I adapted the fence to repel their need to escape. I added wooden supports where they would jump on the wire, collapsing it. I'd bend the wire in so they couldn't get over it (right). I still came home to an empty yard and a pack of very guilty (but happy and footsore) dogs.
I added eighteen inches of OSB plywood to the top of the fence, added more wooden uprights, and all escapes stopped. The fence looked like shit and swayed a lot in the wind, but it kept the dogs in.
Mostly.

                                 Note the fence to the right of the picture; it's got the OSB

Oh, I'd come home and find Speckle in the front yard, waiting with a guilty smile. The others couldn't get out, but she could.
I looked for holes, and found none. The Akita had chewed through the welded wire a few times, but I'd patched those. How the hell was this dog getting over the fence?
Then the snow came and froze. It fell and froze and fell and froze a number of times morer. This raised the ground another two feet, making the fence practically ineffective.
I was at wit's end. It was only Speckle that was getting out now, and she was often in the front yard when I returned, but she was OUT. She seldom WENT anywhere, but that would likely end in spring. And as I said, a Traveling dog is a Dead dog.
Then one day as the snow was melting in March, I saw how she was doing it.
I came home, found something torn up, scolded her, and she ran out to the backyard. She took one leap and as quick as you can say 'knife,' she was up and over it.
The bitch never came close to touching the OSB, either. She just hunkered down and SPRANG.
I know that's not a word. But who is to be the master, the writer or the word?
'Nuff said.
I had to make sure this was her ONLY way out.
So I set up a video camera to see what happened as soon as I left. There were a few starts and false stops, but eventually I got it on tape.
MY GOD!! She could leap a SIX-and-a-half foot fence and not touch it!
It was time to end the frustration.
I went to Tractor Supply and bought about a hundred bucks' worth of electric fence. I installed one line about ten inches from the base of the wire fence and twelve inches high; that would deter the Akita from trying to eat through the base of the wire fence, which she had been wont to do. Then I strung a line about five feet high and twelve inches inside the top of the wire fence.
I tested it too.
GODDAMN!!! It hurt like hell! 110 volts running through my muscles was enough o deter ME from jumping the fence.
But would it work on Speckle?
The answer was, in a word, NO.
She jumped THROUGH the electric wire the first day, bending it and stretching it and again ending up in the front yard.
She wouldn't jump back over into the yard, though.
'Ah-HA!' I thought.
After repairing the electrical wire, I noted her reluctance to jump through it.
Then, about three days later, she did just that, taking a good deal of the wire with her.
I growled and pummpphed, then set to work.
I had been worried about her getting caught in the wire and electrocuting herself, and now I had to face the fact that this dog was really pushing the containment envelope.
I installed another wire up top and a mid-level wire below in the two places she seemed to like to jump the fence.
When I came home the next day, all dogs were inside the fence.
As they were the next day. And the next.

                   Not going near the fence, but they got braver after a while. The shutters, removed from the house the first week of my occupation of the house, were part of the fence reinforcement before electrifying it.

Oh, sure. I heard the yelps of pain when each one of them hit the wire with their noses or legs that first day. I stayed home for half a day to make sure they didn't hurt themselves. There were burned noses and bruised egos and they'd run inside and wouldn't come back out for  a half a day.
And despite the occasionally bent upper wires, after a week I knew that they wouldn't even approach the fence again. All of them eventually got to the point that they'd stay about two feet from it, and everything got back to normal.
Except Speckle. She has a prehistoric brain and so I still hear a yelp in the back yard once in a great while.
But she doesn't get out.
And I can I leave the fence off most of the time now.
It is hard for me to imagine how stressed out I was during that period.
I'm MUCH better now.