Twin Oaks in January

Twin Oaks in January.

About 4PM Wednesday, I knocked off for the day.  Most of the afternoon was spent chainsawing some branches and debris from a recent squall line that came through here.  Much of January has been unusually warm.  Temperatures in the 60's even during a couple of nights.  And a lot of rain.

Wednesday was the end of our first big cold snap of 2020.  Temperatures plummeted into the lower 20's for a few nights and never got out of the 30's a couple of days.  The wind was also relentlessly windy, two days and nights of 20 MPH gusts.  My heat pump can't cut that.  I used emergency heat and some propane.  

So, I cleaned up most of the debris from all that and knocked off about four.  It was so quiet here.  I could hear a lite amount of traffic on the state highway two miles away.  The sound of I-75 was mute.  No vehicle passed my house.  There was a dog barking way off somewhere.  Then a cow bellowed.  There was a barn owl a mile or so to the south of me. Suddenly, a man was hammering on a house that is being built on the nearby ridge.  Just one guy working with a hammer a third of a mile away.

It was a cloudless day and the sun felt warm even though the temperature was 47.  After days of gusts it was good to have all that stillness.  I was surrounded by acres and acres of pastures and woods, punctuated by a few disassociated sounds.  I opened my eyes after having closed them a long time.  I was standing in the driveway with the sun beaming on me.  I once had an epiphany on almost this exact same spot.  This time Kudo was with me.

We had worked in a run after the chainsawing.  I didn't think I'd be up for it but it felt good.  Kudo was calm like the afternoon.  Her puppy-caliber energy was temporarily satiated by being outside for much of the afternoon and going for a 3-mile run with me.  She sat there with ears perked, going nowhere.


A goldfinch interrupted the stillness with its insentient squawking.  Eck.  Eck eck eck. It wasn't so loud as it was persistent.  It was somewhere in the loropetalum and it apparently took exception to Kudo sitting under the bush, oblivious to the enraged little bird.  I finally found the it, a beautiful green with black and white wings, and admire it while it danced about in the top of the bushes trying to scare Kudo away.  The dog finally glanced up at the bird.  I called for her and she came.  That seemed to satisfy the goldfinch.  

I walked over to the carport fridge, retrieved a Foster's and faced the warm bright sun.  A plane droned, what a classic sound from years gone by, I thought.  I took several deep slow breaths.  I was grateful for the moment.  I had no regrets for absurdly thinking the whole vast space was mine alone.  I had bought my property with that in mind from the beginning.  I wanted to live in the same country world that I grew up in as a child.  I wanted my own child to be reared in it.  

But those plans were long ago.  My daughter was not only reared here but she has since moved on, forging her own life.  So, in one sense, you could say that the land and all the additional space around it has already served its purpose.  But there were other reasons for buying it, of course.  I chose to live a contemplative life (vita contemplativa) in nature, and to cultivate a sense of place like Tinker Creek.

Back in 1993, when Jennifer and I built our house here we called the place "Freebird."  The place-name was written on the architectural drawings.  We were more party minded then and the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic southern rock song was an expression of our newfound freedom, having our own place in the country.  

Over the years, the name has changed to Twin Oaks.  The alteration seemed natural enough.  We don't party that much anymore.  And we know the place much better now than we did 27 years ago.  Our driveway begins with a very old pair of twin oaks.  Like most oaks around here, they are hybrid.  In this case part willow and part water oak.  

Nearer our carport stand a second pairing of oaks.  These are more dissimilar, one is a willow oak, the other a southern red oak.  This double pairing of oaks made a impression on Jennifer and me through the years and the name "Twin Oaks" seems more appropriate to the space, to our changing lifestyles, and to our 30+ year marriage.  It is almost as if we woke up one morning and realized these trees were a part of who we were as individuals and as a couple.  

While these large trees, and others on our land like them, seem unchanging, I know that is not the case.  Subtle and even drastic changes abound on Twin Oaks.  Part of experiencing a sense of place in the country is to see the land change from season to season through an uninterrupted succession of years.  Each month, often each day brings something new and majestic or beautiful to appreciate.  This year I'm going to post more photos and short essays about what it is like living at Twin Oaks.

A look across the road near my driveway.  The view is about 80 acres here.  It has been open pasture here since I built my house.  When I was a kid it was a giant cotton field.  I would roll around and play in gigantic binds of freshly picked cotton.  Facing northwest.

Each year, the first sign of spring sprouting from the ground are these daffodils that pop up near our driveway on the bank of the road.  They are all that is left of an enormous planting of these flowers by my great-grandmother, many decades ago.  She had them arranged thickly around a rock wall that bordered the front of her house.  They were prolific each spring.  These propagated randomly on the other side of the road from her house (which is where I live) near where she used to burn her trash in a ditch by the road.  They are all that is left of a life that loved the promise of spring.

My woods in mid-January.  The grassy area through them is my lower field, the road, and the pasture in the previous photo.  Facing west-northwest.

The back yard view of my house.  I've shot this same photo several times through years and posted it on this blog.   You can see one I took on my first white Christmas here ten years ago.  The young oak shooting up is a volunteer.  We have learned through the years that plants which volunteer (come up on their own, not planted) are far easier to keep and heartier plants.  We decided not to cut this oak a couple of years ago because it is just now getting large enough to shade our den (the three windows on the side of the house) when the summer sun is rising.  Our house is designed with the sun in mind.  The southern facing is all windows, which helps warm things up this time of year.

Two more oaks in January along our driveway closer to the house.  There is a third tree, an elm, in the distance.  But the two oaks were planted together many years ago when my great-grandfather's cousin had a shack on my property.  Some tin from the old shake still sits in my woods today.  We have never moved it since building our house here.

One of the two oaks is a willow oak.

The other is a classic southern red oak.

If you shift your point of view from the three large trees to the right you are facing southwest.  That's my house with a maple that we planted a couple of years ago in the foreground.

A waning Moonrise over my house in January.

Four buzzards aloft over my lower field.

In early January, along with the daffodils down by the road, patches of ice folly daffodils that Jennifer planted start popping up.  Most of this January was warm and wet but I took this on a frosty morning. 

This is a couple of weeks later on a rainy day.  These ice folly daffodils are happy and prolific.

Mid-January, the first blossoming of the year is this stray patch of yellow daffodils near my driveway.   This gives you another look at part of my woods.  You cans see my pole barn through them.  Facing east.

My front yard.  It was originally all fescue grass but years of drought and increased heat is causing it to give way to bermuda and assorted other stuff.  This was a cow pasture in my youth.  In the distance you can see my neighbor's barn's.  We are so lucky his family chose to farm the 40 acres across from Twin Oaks.

Cows in a circle eat hay placed for them by a tractor.  In the upper right is a house being built.  The first residential construction to despoil my horizon since I "owned the view" in 1993.  Damn.

The base of the original Twin Oaks.  You can barely make out the road and my great-grandmother's old stone wall beyond.

Twin Oaks.  Both have seen a lot of years, going back beyond my great-grandfather's reckoning to whatever this was before that.

Highlights for January: First yellow daffodil blooms, ice folly daffodils and crocuses  emerge.  Seeking and finding the first daisies.  Chainsawing tree and branch damage from a severe thunderstorm. Loropetalum blooms came two months early, the blooms freezing when the fake spring weather turned back to hard winter.  Appreciating the view through my woods without leaves. Overall a mild and wet month this year.