Tag: Photos

Antique farmers’ forks

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
As a child, I was so fond of a bone-handle fork at my grandparents’ that I always got to eat with it whenever I visited. Its design is simple, the metal something other than silver or stainless steel. I still find it elegant and rightly weighted in the hand. I imagine they came to western Ohio in a Conestoga wagon from Lancaster or York county, Pennsylvania.

They’re balancing the ring in Petronella

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A style of community dance popular in New England since Colonial times, contras start out as two lines of partners facing each other and then the next couple on each side. There’s a live band and callers, and we walk through the sequence of steps before the music begins. The whole point is to have fun, and you wind up dancing with everyone in the line before the piece is finished. This example is from the  Lamprey River Band’s dance series in Dover’s city hall before the monthly event moved to a Unitarian-Universalist church in neighboring Durham. This particular dance is named Petronella.

Blessed bliss

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My novel YOGA BOOTCAMP describes group meditation as a central discipline in the daily life at Big Pumpkin’s ashram. As a real-life example, here’s a photo taken at the Poconos Ashram in mid-1972. I’m struck by how young we all look and the fact that most of us could sit in a full lotus position. Makes my knees hurt just thinking of it now!

Yes, I really lived this.

Oh, nuts! Better watch your step

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

In our neck of the woods, it’s been a hard mast, meaning hard-shelled nuts have fallen in much higher-than-normal levels.

While the uncommon profusion is attributed to an unpredictable confluence of factors, it does provide a feast for squirrels, deer, and other wildlife. Any surplus surviving the predators then has a good chance to refurbish the forests and byways.

As has been noted, nature really is promiscuous.

Lean years, in contrast, limit the animal populations and their offspring.

Mast is most notably reported as acorns, but in our house, overshadowed by a black walnut tree, the golf ball-sized orbs are hammering the kitchen roof and trashcans. We keep thinking people are knocking at our backdoor or something big has fallen over downstairs or outside or even a crazy golfer neighbor is slicing his shots and hitting our house, one-two-three. They’re even a hazard to our parked cars.

Meanwhile, our squirrels are littering the stoops, patio table and chairs, and driveway with messes of shells that stain anything underneath black – is that the origin of black in the walnut variety’s name? But that’s not the only problem.

No, the nuts are so plentiful they make venturing out into the yard a treacherous course akin to walking on ball bearings or marbles. We haven’t fallen yet, but we’ve come close.

It’s especially troublesome when I have a load of firewood in my arms.

We aren’t alone in this, are we?

The bright blue line threading upward on the right side is a garden hose, providing a size comparison for the dangerous green globes filling much of the rest of the photos. Yes, they are fallen walnuts, which are still raining down on our house.

 

Meet a Quaker

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Many of the Dover’s churches have their booths at the city’s annual Apple Harvest Day festival, and the Quaker meeting is no exception. Here we are making the most of our past to let people know we’re still thriving today. We handed out homemade cookies – 1,162 of them baked the night before – and had kids pitch in to hand-crank grains of oats into oatmeal. The Quaker Oats company, by the way, was never owned by Quakers – they just liked our reputation for honesty and quality.