Yesterday was “one of these days,” as in, “One of these days I’m going to get around to burning that brush pile.”

My north brush pile began 13 months ago when a severe thunderstorm tore down some large limbs in two of my maple trees and Abby’s 100+year-old walnut.

I had built this pile in the north pasture, quite far away from anything it might threaten, like houses, sheds, other trees, and so on, but I still wanted to burn it in a no-wind condition, and last night was perfect.

I had attempted to burn this mountain of everything from full-sized tree trunks to twigs and leaves, but found on two previous occasions that it was too wet.

Last night I tried to light a bundle of grass and hay kindling under it, but it wasn’t until I stuffed a couple of editions of The Ada News under it that I was able to get it going, after which there was no stopping it.

Now I need to vow that I will burn brush before it gets high and wide, maybe once a month.

Here are a few images of my life this week on this patch of green in Byng, Oklahoma.

There is a joke I used to tell. Robert Oppenheimer and Erico Fermi are in the bunker at the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945. After the bomb goes off, they turn to each other, high-five, and Oppenheimer says, “fission accomplished!”

I stopped telling that joke because so few people got it or laughed at it.

Flash forward to May 1, 2003 with George Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring “mission accomplished!”

Well, my most recent mission has been accomplished. After more than three weeks of cutting, pruning, sawing, and dragging, I finally got the mess of tangled branches cleaned up after a July 11 severe thunderstorm wrecked a huge number of trees in the Byng area.

As I cleaned and cut and lifted and dragged, I got into one really great rhythm after another, with my ipod shuffling song after song that made the work fun, and very good for my body. I felt strong and healthy.

On the last day or two, I got a tiny squinch of contact dermatitis on my forearms, probably from long-dead poison ivy vines that clung to high branches that fell from the walnut tree.

As I cleaned, I decided that the thunderstorm must have been in the dissipating stage, since none of the damaged branches were moved anywhere, but just forced straight down to the ground.

In a perfect finale to the clean-up, a friend of mine who does wood turning came by last night and got most of the black walnut logs that sat on the ground after the clean-up was over, giving them a good home.

Readers might recall that the town where I live, Byng, Oklahoma, was hit by a severe thunderstorm in the predawn hours of July 11.

We were fortunate that very few structures were damaged, but a huge number of trees, including some of the trees on the patch where I live, were damaged. The neighborhood is buzzing with the sound of chain saws, and the air is full of light wood smoke as we all slowly, as time permits, clean it up and burn the branches.

Here on the patch, the big, 125-year-old black walnut just north of the house got the worst of it. It didn’t look too terrible at first, but as the damaged branches turned brown, it became obvious that more than half of this huge, beautiful hardwood was damaged.

I mentioned this to a photographer friend of mine, Wes Edens, who offered to bring his three chair saws over to help cut it up so I could drag it all down the hill and burn it. When I mentioned this to my next door neighbor Mike Nipps, he offered to bring his tractor over to pull some of the biggest broken branches out of the tree, where they hung by threads and tangles.

There are a couple of very large branches that none of us could reach, and I’m not interested in hiring an expensive tree guy to get them, since they don’t threaten to fall on any structures.

Abby loved the old walnut, and she would be sad to see it so torn up. But it’s not the first time the weather has roughed up this tree, so time will tell if it can recover.

Thanks again to Mike and Wes for the manpower and the horsepower.

Readers of my newspaper and my social media friends know that Tuesday, July 11, 2023, a severe thunderstorm struck the town where I live, Byng, Oklahoma.

I don’t know if the storm was straight-line winds or a tornado, but it made a lot of noise, and did a fair amount of tree damage.

Fortunately, only a small number of structures suffered any damage. The house where I live, for instance, lost just one siding panel, which I nailed back up with no trouble at all.

Power lines across the street were taken to the ground by falling trees, and the power was off for 13 hours as a result.

The trees – mine and most of my neighbors’ – got pretty roughed up. Two maple trees along my 100-yard driveway, for example, dropped large branches onto my driveway, such that while I was trying to figure out how to clear them out of the way so I could use the driveway, my next-door neighbor Mike showed up with his tractor, attached a chain to the branches, and pulled them into the pasture, out of the way.

Those weren’t the only trees of mine that shed limbs or need further pruning, but it allowed me to get the cars out of the driveway without any off-road excursions.

The last couple of day, I’ve use my six-inch, battery-operated chain saw to dice up some of the branches into manageable sections, allowing me to drag them to the brush pile.

Marry this for a minute with the fact that our guest at Ada Sunrise Rotary Friday was Briana Coureur, who talked to us about paths to health and fitness. I told her that this activity, dragging branches across a pasture on a summer evening, was a legitimate workout, and she agreed.

I still have a way to go. My most-damaged tree is the giant black walnut on the north side of the house. One entire main branch blew down, though only mostly, since it is still hanging on by a sliver of bark. Other parts of this 125-year-old tree are damaged too. My plan is to clear out all I can by hand, then re-assess.

I am living in an uncomfortable paradox, and I am sure I am not alone. The issue: spiders, and more specifically, the paradox that spiders in my yard and garden are more than welcome, yet spiders in the house instantaneously and intensely trigger my fear response.

I shared this with a neighbor, who said his trigger is snakes.

Just tonight, I saw a beautiful Argiope, a very large spider that I often see in my garden this time of year. She hung on her web between the tomato plants, and I was so glad to see her making a living eating the bugs that would otherwise eat my tomatoes. In fact, while I was picking tomatoes tonight, I saw her ambush and wrap-up a small grasshopper.

Some people are afraid of cats, mice, rats, even dogs. But for me it’s spiders, and only in the house.

This year is my first vegetable garden since 2020. In both 2021 and 2022, my wife’s failing health took priority over getting a garden planted and attended.

I’ve had a garden most years since I moved to Byng in 2004, and it is among my very favorite things to do. The best thing about it isn’t the produce, although it is fantastic, but the beauty of being outdoors in the evening sun, tending to and caring for live plants.

For the years I was married, I would come into the house with a basket or bag full of tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe , onions, lettuce, strawberries, spinach, and bell peppers, with a huge, proud grin on my face, eager to show Abby what I had grown.

Despite her absence, I am still going to be grinning with pride when I start getting produce this year.

I also very regularly grab a camera, especially when the light is nice or when I see something unusual, like the large caterpillars I spotted recently.

Wednesday night I mowed the grass for a bit, then dug weeds in the garden. At some point, I stepped in some fire ants, but it took them a while to migrate past my shoes and socks to get to some of my leg to start biting me. And bite me they did. I know they are just doing what fire ants do, but they really do hurt. Fortunately, I am not allergic, so it’s more of a nuisance than anything else.

In addition to the fruits and vegetables I cultivate in the garden, I have a small orchard with peach, plum, and cherry trees. Some years I have unlimited peaches and plums, and some years, like this year, I have none at all, due to a late frost.

I almost always plant marigolds in the garden, ostensibly because they attract beneficial insects, but mostly because I love the look and smell of marigold flowers. When Abby was still with us, I often brought her marigolds from the garden, along with wildflowers from the pasture.

In the spring of 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic brand new and remaining largely unknown, I wrote to a friend that, “if I get the Rona and die, please tend my marigolds.”

I write this on Easter Sunday, April 9.

Friday I bought 18 Celebrity tomato plants, 6 Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato plants, 2 tomato plants of unknown type, 12 Yellow Giant pepper plants, and 24 slicing cucumber plants from the Byng FFA/Horticulture sale, the program at the high school near my home.

Yesterday I got all but the cucumbers planted.

I normally plant cucumbers from seeds, but since they had them at the sale, and they weren’t expensive, I thought it might give me a head start.

After a stressful but satisfying ten day stretch at work that found a bit of closure today when I put bed our newspaper’s contest entries, I got a bite of lunch, then looked at a forecast: clear and mild today, with a 100% chance of rain tonight.

I’ve been aiming to prune my peach and plum trees for weeks, but circumstance always had a say: too cold, too rainy, too busy at work, and so on.

So today, in the stretch of a couple of hours, I got all the pruning done.

It wasn’t an easy task, since I hadn’t really been able to do it the last two years, so there were lots of tall, thick branches that both kept fruit out of reach, and were about to reach to power line to the house.

Now it’s done, and my gripping muscles and my scissoring muscles are already complaining, since I seldom task those parts of me this strenuously. Will I even be able to make a fist tomorrow?

My plums have started to ripen. Hawken the Irish wolfhound started eating them off the ground last night, so this morning I told myself that I would pick plums this evening.

Minutes later, I heard a morning thunderstorm rolling in, and before it was finished, the ground around the trees was scattered with a couple of dozen ripe plums.

I cut them up and had them as my evening appetizer, and they were great.

In a season that seems covered in complexity, uncertainty, and sadness, I got a small piece of good news this week: the last freeze of the year apparently did not reach as far south as Byng, and my peach and plum trees appear to have abundant fruit on them.

I made time today to shoot a few of our firearms, including the NRA Special Edition Ruger Mark III 22/45 Lite I bought Abby for our 12th anniversary, my Ruger Mark III 22/45 Target pistol, and the Walther P22 I bought Abby for Christmas in 2009. I put about 140 rounds downrange, all .22LR, both to stay current and because it was an amazingly warm Christmas Eve day to be outside shooting. I had a lot of fun.

Afterwards I cleaned all three pistols. The Walther is easy to disassemble and reassemble, but the Rugers are notoriously difficult to reassemble, so much so that the Ruger Mark IV’s have been completely redesigned for one-button takedown and reassembly.

That said, getting the Mark III’s put back into working order isn’t undoable, as long as your learn and practice the tricks. You can find the full set of instructions elsewhere on the web (here, for example), though webizens have half a dozen or more slightly different versions of this. But I am here to encourage you that it’s not that hard to do. I got my pistols reassembled in just a few minutes.

Also on my Christmas radar is the early morning launch tomorrow of the James Webb Space Telescope, the next generation deep-sky space telescope that will in some ways replace the Hubble Space Telescope. I have an alarm set to get up and watch the launch at 6:20 a.m. central time.

For the past few years I have observed a mysterious puddle come and go near my orchard south of the house. I suspected it was a leak in the main water line leading from the water meter to our house, but as the years went by, it didn’t seem to be getting worse, and would sometimes disappear entirely.

Then in February, we had the worst winter storm in recent memory. A foot of snow covered the ground, and temperatures dipped below zero on two nights. We were careful to open the cabinets to allow warm air to circulate around our water pipes, and, unlike hundreds of area residents, we avoided a messy and expensive plumbing problem.

The extreme weather was not without consequence, however. The mysterious puddle at first shrank to insignificance, but in the last few days, it got much large, and I dubbed it “Lake Milligan,” after George Milligan, Abby’s first father-in-law, who installed the water line when Abby moved back to Byng in 1993.

It grew so quickly this week that it was apparent that the water line would have to be repaired, and Abby and I were certain it would take forever, and cost a fortune.

Enter Nickerson Plumbing. They were able to send out a friendly pair of young plumbers, one of whom remembered me from when I covered his Ada Cougar basketball games, and the other recalled being bitten by our neighbor’s dog last year.

The two determined that we did have a growing leak, and set out to find it. At this point, Abby and I were sure we would be leasing a backhoe for days, and this repair would completely consume our income tax refund.

Then, the Miracle on Main Street.

“We found your leak,” one of the plumbers announced after a 20-minute search. It was right where the puddle had come and gone over the years, and at this point, the leak had gotten large enough to see and hear. One of them showed me the joint that had cracked and leaked very slowly, but had, in the last few days, turned into a pinhole, then a larger hole.

They patched it up and buried it, and turned on the water. One of them had a billing app, and added it up: $204. Wow.

I know it seems a little early to be getting the garden in the ground, as in years past I have frequently dealt with mid-April frosts and freezes, but if you can get plants in the ground early, then have a little luck with the weather, you get a longer growing season, and a better yield.

I might have to replant some if we do get a freeze, but it’s only about $20 worth of plants.

My soil has gotten depleted over the years, so prior to planting, I tilled in a large bag of organic tomato/vegetable garden fertilizer.

Yesterday I planted…

• Ten Early Girl tomato plants
• Three Big Boy tomato plants
• Five red bell pepper plants
• One green bell pepper plant
• One orange bell pepper plant
• Three Sun Sugar cherry tomato plants

My variety selection was based entirely on what was available at the garden center Sunday.

That leaves cucumber, radish, and marigold seeds to plant, hopefully tonight.

My readers might be aware that I previously owned two small gasoline-powered tillers, also known as cultivators. The second one, Tilly, was purchased exactly eight years ago, worked properly most recently three years ago, meaning its useful life was five years. I consider that a complete rip-off, since that boils down to about ten hours of actual garden tilling, since I only need it once a year.

I thought about last year, when I dug the garden by hand. Not only was it slow, back-breaking work, it didn’t get the soil really chopped up like a tiller could. I am all about working hard, but I was not looking forward to another five-hour hands-and-knees session.

Local retailers had that exact model for an insulting $300, so I poked around on the interwebs and found an electric tiller for just $133, minus a small discount from rewards points. “Buy Now.”

My Sun Joe TJ604E 16-Inch 13.5 AMP Electric Garden Tiller/Cultivator arrived in just two days. It was easy to assemble and ready in minutes. The question would be one of electric vs gasoline, which is why I opted for the more robust 13.5 AMP plug-in model.

At the first turn of dirt, Tyler dug like a champ, including some very rough areas that had gone to grass several years ago. We’ll see how long it will live, but so far, the newest tiller in the family is working well.

I asked Abby what I should name it, and she said, “Tyler.”

2020 has been a difficult year, for reasons I don’t need to rehash because we’ve all been through it.

Abby and I have been lucky; we haven’t been exposed as far as we know, and we haven’t been sick.

Mother nature is somehow responding to 2020. It might be a coincidence, or it may be in response to a reduction in atmospheric, noise, and light pollution because of the pandemic, but this summer was pretty and green, and this fall ranks as among the most beautiful I can remember on our patch of green in southeastern Oklahoma.