Spring Water Sanctuary
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A small school of fish in the crystal clear waters of Manatee Springs, February 2008
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Pointing
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A "Fingernail Plant" growing in northern Florida
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Priorities

I've tried to think of a caption for this photo, but I can't seem to improve upon the messages on the signs...
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Blogging was an attempt at recording who I am, what matters to me, and some of the experiences that have shaped me: a sort of journal that I hoped my kids and grandson might someday look at. I wanted them to discover that I was more (I hoped) than simply "Mom" or "Grandma". I never anticipated readers, nor did I realize how much time and energy can go into being the member of a blogging community.

Like the bumper sticker says, SHIT HAPPENS. Or in my case, BLOGGING HAPPENED. Blame it on Dirk, for he was the first "stranger" to wander in here and decide that a wizened wizard might be worth visiting now and then. I followed his tracks out of the forest and began visiting some of his friends, others came here, and soon the overlapping circles caused what had been a secret path to turn well-trodden.

I met a lot of interesting people. In what I began calling "Bloggerville" there live funny folks, creative writers, artists, thoughtful people, those wrestling with enormous demons, those living unusual, wonderful, admirable lives, and just plain "everyday folks". So many of you "givers" have visited my blog, left kind comments, good advice, encouragement or greetings. I began spending more and more time trying to behave in kind, and although my trips to your sites were almost always rewarding, I never felt I could keep up with being a good community member and also live the life that matters to me in the real world.

My site meter indicates that traffic has fallen off at WizenedWizard.blogspot.com, and maybe that's a very good thing. Perhaps now I can return to my original intent, which was simply to post photos, stories or an occasional poem - just for me and maybe someday for my kids and grandson. Of course I will always be pleased to find comments from any of you who might still be reading this, but I shall be the hermit, the wizard at the end of the trail through the woods, incomunicado.
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Bye-Bye-Bloggie...

As I repeated the words, "I wish there were more hours in the day" another time (it's been my mantra for over a week), I finally realized that I need to take a break from blogging. Yeah, I know... What about that sneaky septic tank? How did she build those stone walls? If she was sterile, then where in heck did her son come from? For now (if it really matters to anyone), the answers to those questions will have to wait. There are still untold stories: Dwight the Musher, for instance. And I hope there will be many photos to take and share.

Well there it is right there: the photos... My new/old career was taking off, but then came the back injury. I've lost three months and a lot of momentum, and that's the real reason I must take a break. This week and last I have spent most of my waking hours on the computer. Technology is tyranical, and anyone who shoots a lot of serious digital images knows how much time it takes to save, edit, organize and store them. For the most part, it's something I enjoy doing, but it does take time.

There are so many things I've needed to learn about. The latest realization is that I must register copyrights for any photo I really care about, and my website needs a complete overhaul. On the creative side, there are all the techniques I learned during the workshop last fall. I need to practice them until they're ingrained and rote. Marketing is another challenge that's a lot less fun than being creative or artistic.

On Friday, I received the prints that had taken me more than a week to order. (There's no question that I am organizationally challenged). I've been matting all weekend - or at least when Grandson wasn't here.

I love blogging, and I'm sure I won't stay away very long. I'll also miss you and miss following what's going on in your lives and the stories you tell.
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I'll be back, and in the meantime, be well, laugh often and love true ~

Wiz
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Room 207

I spent a short time today in Room 207. It's just down the hall not far from the room my father spent time in; around the corner from rooms my mother occupied at one time or another; kiddy-corner from the one my friend Ed stalked out of trailing an I.V. and some choice expletives. Room 207 is directly across from where Shaman was mis-diagnosed, and it's next-door to the room where my father took his last breath, the room where I last kissed his forehead and said a final goodbye.

That's the thing about a small town. The hospital is small too, and, unlike big city medical centers, it becomes familiar. I know where to get juice (the same place the nurses would get it for you if you asked them to) and where the extra blankets are kept. Even the doctors have first names.

It was 5:00, and there was my son-in-law with his heated tray of pseudo-healthy dinner, the victim of what he called "a glorified physical" set in motion by a few sharp chest pains. He was up-beat, grandson was getting a kick out of exploring and checking out the oddities of institutional living; my daughter was cheerful. The building has seen the extremes of the human experience, and it struck me how the same set can stage everything from the comedy of ill-designed hospital gowns to the tragedy of a body giving up the fight.

Today he's home again, and thoughts of Room 207 once again fade. This time its memory will be fleeting and unremarkable, and that is a good thing.

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We interrupt regular
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programming of this blog to
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bring you breaking news:

North Country wizened wizard and
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photographer Judy Andrus Toporcer
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has received word that she is a 1st place
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winner in the 2007 Upper Canada
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Village annual photography contest.
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Notification came yesterday in an
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email:
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Congratulations Judy!

I am writing to inform you that your photograph, "Flower Among Flowers" was chosen for first prize in the "Pure History" category of our 2007 Photo Contest.

Winners [beginning with Ms. Andrus Toporcer's photo] are posted here.

(What I didn't realize until after your photo was selected and posted, is that you were a winner in last year's contest too! Just to let you know, we receive hundreds of entries each year, so you should be quite proud of yourself!)

J. S.
Upper Canada Village Marketing Officer

Contacted at her home in the forest Ms.
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Andrus Toporcer
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commented, "Yeeeeeeeee-hah!!!!!!!"
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and did the Snoopy-dance while
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exclaiming her excitement and babbling
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something about 40 years,
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careers/loves interrupted, and actually
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BEING a photographer.

And now we return you to the blog piece in progress...

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You might wonder why I’m putting this story here in the middle of a bunch of “Back to the Land” tales, but it provides some background for the post that will follow. I also ask that you accept that our actions were “noble” ones. The devil is in the details, and I hope you know me well enough by now that you can accept that there were reasons – too long and complicated to go into here – for believing that Daughter would be better off without close contact with her biological father. We also did everything humanly possible to make this transition a positive and happy one for her. Some affirmation of this came after the move: the "neutral" pediatrician involved in the court ruling sent us a personal letter containing her congratulations and best wishes for us in our new home.

A Child Lost, A New Life Begun

In the summer of 1974, after making the decision to leave the city, I put my condo apartment on the market. My wasband, exercising his rights of visitation, came to take our daughter one Saturday, and upon their return, spotted the “For Sale” sign.

Five days later, the man in the rumpled suit rang our doorbell, said my name with a question mark, I answered “Yes?” and was handed legal papers stating that I was an unfit mother, that my current husband was attempting to sabotage Wasband’s relationship with his daughter, and that the child’s father was a far more suitable custodian. After all, he had a larger income and a larger house near an elementary school. Somehow the petition omitted mention of his mental instability and drinking problem. In these papers he looked like the hero of “Father Knows Best.”

At that time I was a little more than three months pregnant. Maybe it was a bit of a rush on our part (or was it that we were just careless?), but already having a five-year-old, Husband and I were thrilled to be expecting a baby.

In divorces in those days, a biological father almost never was granted custody of a daughter of kindergarten age. It only seemed to happen in the rare case where the mother was so unfit as to be in jail or otherwise institutionalized or perhaps a known prostitute or sexual offender. The law was definitely biased toward the belief that the place for a little girl was with her mother. And yet this “rule” was not set in stone, a fact weighing on any mother facing a custody challenge. I came apart at the seams.

The custody petition was served on me on a Thursday. The next day I began to bleed, and despite bed rest and a great deal of love and reassurance from Husband, the bleeding became hemorrhagic, and our unborn child was lost. My body had traumatically aborted, unable to deal with its sudden awareness that a child loved can also be a child taken away.

We removed the “For Sale” sign and resigned ourselves to fighting the court battle ahead of us.

I’ll spare you the gory details. Six months later, on December 31, 1974, the judge – on his final day on the Family Court bench – ruled that Wasband was to pay unpaid Child Support, seek mental health counseling, and continue the responsibility of visiting the child one day of any weekend in the county of her residence wherever that might be. That last phrase was hand-written into the margin of the document on the morning the case went to court, and it was what we needed to be able to make our move to the country.

There was one problem: There is nothing to prevent a person from filing a lawsuit at any time. Had Wasband thought we were going to move, he could have filed his petition again, and we would have had to defend ourselves again. He could have stalled our plans and obtained an intolerable (to us) visitation agreement. The only way we could move without risking that was to do it under the cover of darkness. That meant keeping our plans a secret, even from Daughter.

On a Thursday less than a month later, the court denied a scheduled Saturday visit by Wasband because he had not yet complied with the order to seek mental health counseling, nor had he paid the owed child support. The next morning we explained to Daughter that we were going to move, rented a 20’ U-Haul and began loading everything we owned into it. Our friends joined in the frenzy of piling dishes, piano, toys, bedding, books, and even canned food into about 1200 cubic feet of truck. We worked well into the night, loading all of our worldly goods, leaving nothing behind, and if that truck’s storage area had been a cardboard carton, the whole thing could have been accurately labeled “MISCELLANEOUS STUFF”. The next morning we were driving east on the Thruway, on our way to a new life.

I have written about our first year in the North Country, searching for and finding land, and a couple of the trials and tribulations involved in beginning to settle on it. Most of this was a joyful time, a relief from the stress of on-going wasband battles, and it was the beginning of an adventure. There was, however, one unhappy fact. During that first year, I was having some medical problems, and in that summer of moving the trailer and putting up the pole, I was diagnosed sterile. Husband and I would have no children.

Next: Water, water everywhere...
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"First You Get Your Pole Up"

Note: this is #5 in a series of stories of settling in the North Country

There are some things we had always taken somewhat for granted: you open a tap and water flows into the sink, you flip a switch and lights go on, you flush and – well, you know. When you live in the country, you play a sizable part in obtaining those things you’re used to having the urban utility companies handle so smoothly.

Although we hoped to one day be off the grid, accomplishing that immediately was totally unrealistic and impossible. I called the power company and asked when they could hook us up.

“Have you got your pole up?”

“The electric lines are on our side of the road, and there’s a pole near the driveway about 100’ from our mobile home.” (We had quickly learned that it was a bit undignified to call your mobile home a trailer…)

The electric company representative then explained to me that we needed to purchase a utility pole and put it up within a short distance of the trailer. “Get your pole up and then call us,” she said, sounding as though there was nothing to it.

The local Agway sells poles. They’re 25 feet long and weigh, well, A LOT. We borrowed a flatbed truck, Agway loaded the pole on it, and we drove it out to the land. It was supposed to be sunk five feet into the ground, so with pick, crowbar and shovels we dug a hole the required depth some six feet from the trailer.

Now think about this: putting a flag in a flagpole holder can be tricky, especially if you can only hold onto the bottom end of the flagpole. You’ve got a lot of flagpole (and flagpole weight) waving around as you try to put one small end of it into a hole. Then think about how to do the same thing with a 25’ long 700# wooden pole. It’s a bit harder!

During our time in the North Country we have been blessed with amazing and wonderful friends. We rounded up two of them – folks who were building a log house from trees they had cut. Here maybe a couple of pictures will shorten the description:
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It drizzled off and on, and the four of us worked all day, but no matter how we tried, no matter how high we were able to prop the truck end of the pole, it would not slip into that hole. Darkness was closing in. We were hungry and tired. I used the Coleman camping stove to put a fire under some water to make spaghetti, and we decided to give it one last effort.

We built an even higher tower of cement blocks on the truck bed and leveraged the top end of the pole up as high as we could. We put a hemlock board in the hole so that the bottom of the pole might slide down it rather than get stuck in the earth and rocks of the hole’s interior wall. We tied a long rope to the top of the pole.
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On the count of 3, Husband and Joe would try to heave up on the truck end of the pole while Cathy and I would pull the rope for all we were worth. 1… 2… 3… They heaved and we pulled, the pole rose (!) and for several seconds seemed to teeter perpendicular to the ground (!) ---- and then it fell, not into the hole, but more in the general direction of the mobile home, missing it by about a foot and landing flat on the ground with a sickening thud.

No one said a word. We stared in silence, realizing both our great good fortune that the pole had not crushed our “house” or any of us, and the grim knowledge that our electric pole had now lost the advantage of being four feet above ground level. We went inside and ate our spaghetti, the silence continuing until the four of us hugged each other and said goodnight.

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So how DID we get that pole up? Well, we had a friend named Jim Brown, a man employed by the local Soil and Water Conservation District to make a soil map of the county.

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Jim happened to stop by one sunny afternoon about a week later, and Jim – almost single-handedly – put up our pole. As Bonnie Raitt sings, “You got to know how!”
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Jim was our hero. Pssst… don’t tell the power company we cut four feet off the bottom of the pole, okay?
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I called the electric company and they brought wires to the pole. One of the neighbors we had met while blocking the road with our mobile home was an electrician, and a few days later he lit up our lives.
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The Owner-built... Mobile Home??

Note: this is #4 in a series of stories of settling in the North Country

It was a Sunday morning and we were still in bed, exchanging groggy good mornings, and then Husband spoke.

“You know, maybe we could buy a trailer and live in it while we build a house.”

“You’re kidding! I was just thinking the same thing!”

And so the plan to move from town to the land was hatched. A little more than a week later we had bought a used 12’ x 60’ “mobile home” and were making arrangements to have it delivered to a small clearing we planned to call home.

Its delivery turned out to be not as easy as we expected. The wheels of the trailer were some forty feet behind the truck that was towing it, and the “driveway” had a drop-off on each side, making it impossible to cut the corner while towing it in. The trailer would have to follow the truck on a more-or-less straight line, and the situation simply didn’t allow for that.


....."I think we've got a problem, Harvey"

If the road had been wider, the driver could have made a sweeping turn and come in straight, but the road was narrow, and across the road from this driveway entrance a rock ledge rose up. A John Deere pulling a manure spreader would have had to navigate that turn carefully, but a tractor pulling a 60’ trailer didn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell, so there we were, blocking the road, kicking stones around and scratching our heads.

Soon we began to meet the neighbors. It was late afternoon, and those coming home from work found a mobile home blocking their way. Rather than turn around and take another route, they parked their pickup trucks and settled down to watch the city-slickers in their predicament. Maybe the news traveled down the road, because there soon was a group on the other side of the trailer parked and watching. Some joked about trading cars with people on the side they were trying to get to, but it was clear that this was an entertainment nobody wanted to miss.


..................Neighbors watch while Herb (lying under trailer) jacks
..................it up again - note tire "skid" marks on the road from the
..................previous landings

Country ingenuity prevailed. The delivery driver jacked up the “home” and then everybody pushed hard until it fell off the jack, thereby inching it slowly more cross-wise of the road. This was done over and over again (as we wondered how the interior could possibly survive all of the bouncing of each fall) until finally the truck was able to move forward a few feet. More jacking and pushing, and somewhat past dinnertime our new “home” was parked in the clearing.


......................The "Homette" and the Happy Homette Owner


It was July 27, 1976. We lacked electricity, water and a septic tank, but we had shelter, and it even came with some furniture, appliances and curtains. We were as happy as pigs in slop.

Next episode: "First You Get Your Pole Up"
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