Canada geese flew directly overhead, heading back home from their winter southern habitat, honking like New York City taxi cabs. Schroeder stopped dead in his tracks, just long enough to survey the skies and reassure himself that the geese weren’t planning a rest stop on the open water behind our home.
A fox flashed through the yard as we came around the corner of the garage, almost ghostlike as he entered the tall grass with a nearly silent swish.
As we walked across the crunchy, frost-laden grass, we heard birds all around, waking each other up and communicating with song, practically laughing in the new sunshine.
Several dogs were barking in the distance, from all directions, confusing Schroeder while he pranced around his yard with a sense of ownership. His return barks were a combination of greeting and warning – stay away, this is my territory!
From the grassland just beyond our grove of Norway Pines, the Sandhill Cranes trumpeted their homecoming.
Its clucking reminiscent of the tap-tap of an old Model T horn, a colorful Ring-necked Pheasant flapped its way through the nearby field. The long Minnesota winter, much of it spent foraging for food, is over, and the pheasant numbers seem to remain stable.
A slight breeze from the north carried the scent and sounds of a neighboring farm. It gently turned the blades of our squealing windmill, reminding me that one of these days I will need to climb to the top and grease its moving parts.
Another neighbor maneuvered a beefy pick-up truck down his quarter-mile-long gravel driveway, and a flock of ducks rose up out of the small pond, quacking their displeasure at being bothered.
I can feel a smile cross my face as I remember the sounds that filled the air, and can’t wait for the addition of the only missing orchestra members – the multitude of frogs, toads and crickets that will soon join the symphony as the weather warms.
Welcome spring!
In my curiosity I dug through our old papers, and found the original abstract for our property that has record of all of the previous owners, dating back to 1849. It was that year when the federal government transferred the section of land that we live on to the state as public land. As I fingered through the document, I found our parcel was first sold to a private citizen in 1893, a man named Otis Staples. Recognizing the surname from the historic building in Stillwater in which my artwork is displayed (the Isaac Staples sawmill), I spent the next hour researching to see if I could learn anything about the man who had once owned our property. I found reference to an Otis Staples, who with his wife Matilda, left Stillwater in the early 1900’s and traveled to British Columbia to form a lumber company. This is noteworthy because Isaac Staples was a very powerful lumber baron in Stillwater, until his death in 1899, and while I could not find a solid connection between the two men, I feel this is more than just a coincidence.
