Some of you will recall the word ‘dream’ floating about in our garden. We found a new word on a stick yesterday when we visited Nice Old Stuff in Jarvis. Can you find the two words in the garden?
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A little Friday adventure
Both Tuffy P and I had the day off work to day, so we decided to take a drive out to Jarvis Ontario (past Hagersville and before Port Dover) to visit our favourite place to find nice old stuff for the house and garden, a place called Nice Old Stuff. Nice Old Stuff is like the Tardis in Dr. Who. It doesn’t look so big from outside but once you’re in there, it seems to open up almost infinitely. You never know what you’re going to find there. It was our source for the materials for the Twenty Seventh Street Book Box, the giant fiberglass crown in the back yard, the cement choo-choo train planter out front, the word dream on a stick, and more.
Today we found an assortment of excellent items to re-purpose for the garden, including the pair of pillars you see being lashed to the Subaru.
With the car loaded up, we drove up the street to D and D’s Family Dining for an excellent fish n chip lunch before the drive back.
As the various items we came home with today find their way into the garden, I’ll post pictures. Will the oxen yoke be the base for a bird house or part of a new garden bench? We haven’t quite got all the details worked out yet.
I owe my soul to the company store…..
It’s about time I posted some Uke music around this joint. Here’s Manitoba Hal tearing up Merle Travis’ Sixteen Tons via Tennessee Ernie Ford…
The Lions of 27th Street
That’s Bruce, King of the Jungle, chillin’ on the polka dot bench….
And here are two shots of Jack Shadbolt, the cat not the late Canadian painter.
Out of the blue
Back in the 50s a young country singer named Cast King, with his band The Country Drifters, recorded a number of sides on Sun Records, but never made a huge splash.
In fact I would not have heard his music at all if not for a guy named Matt Downer, who came across Cast King living in Old Sand Mountain in Alabama, and discovered King not only still played but had numerous original tunes.
Downer recorded King, and played electric guitar along with King’s acoustic on a recording, which became Saw Mill Man, released in 2005. I stumbled upon it on a music blog shortly after it was released. The recording, stark, raw, powerful, stopped me in my tracks.
Apparently King was preparing another set of tunes, but unfortunately he died in 2007 at 81.
I often think that there is a wealth of fantastic music around we rarely get to hear. It was serendipitous that I stumbled across Cast King, just when he reappeared out of the blue with great collection of tunes. It’s already a decade since Saw Mill man was released although to me it doesn’t seem nearly so long. It’s a very personal album, rough around the edges, tough as nails. I hope you enjoy this taste.
Weird mushroom in the back yard
We have a long backyard with a wooded section at the back. I was out there stopping the woods from taking over the yard when I noticed some strange fungi beside an old maple stump. I happen to know this weird item. It’s Xylaria polymorpha, better known as Dead Man’s Fingers.
These are young specimens, pale in colour with whitish tips. As summer progresses, they will start blacken and dry out, changing quite a bit through the season. I come across these from time to time in my foraging, and they always surprise me, simply because they are so odd-looking. They’re tough, woody fungi. I don’t know if they are poisonous but certainly they are not edible.
Summer Days
Well, summer has arrived. I mostly missed spring this year, more or less couped up and healing my messed up ankle. 
In the last couple weeks I’ve been getting out into the garden, and yesterday I did my first bit of garden work. We have a barberry hedge on the south side of our property. There was one along the north property line as well, but last year we removed it and planted a garden between our property and our neighbour’s.
The hedge has been growing tall, and it’s my job to keep it under control. I was determined to do this yesterday, although I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stay on my feet long enough to do the work. As you can see I did get it trimmed. By the time I was done, I confess I was sore and my leg had swollen up some, but I’m counting this as a major accomplishment.
Barberries are red, but trimmed as radically as I did it yesterday they appear green for a while. The barberry hedges came with the house. I think the garden we have in place of the old hedge is much more attractive than the hedge ever was. That garden is sporting some additions from our friend Ruth, who had to give up a wonderful secret garden beside the building in which she lives, due to construction. 
The old barberry had started behind the fire hydrant, and the bit of the garden in the front was a huge clump of your basic orange daylilies. The daylilies were nice enough during their blooming period, after which they turned to mundane floppy greenery. I removed all I could, moved some to the back yard, and gave some away last year, but you can see to the right, a few have come back, some of them actually growinug out of a crack between the garden and the driveway.
Meanwhile, a mysterious object has appeared in the garden, a clay globe.
Of course, Tuffy P is behind this. I’m not sure where in her travels she found it, but it’s a fun object and it seems to work well in the front gardens.
This morning is cool and I’m going to try doing a little more garden work out in the back.
Here are the Brothers Lazaroff performing Bob Dylan’s Summer Days…
Indian Cowboy
Let’s head down to Texas. Here’s Joe Ely performing Indian Cowboy.
Lions of 27th Street
That’s Shadow above…. AKA The Old Man
And Gracie….
Because the internet is all about cat pictures, right?
The Goodnight Loving Trail
That is Finest Kind performing The Goodnight Loving Trail by U. Utah Phillips. It’s introduced by the late Utah Phillips himself on the second episode of his radio show, which was called Loafer’s Glory.
The Goodnight Loving Trail is a cowboy song. It refers to an actual historical trail used in cattle drives in the 1860s and it was named after Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. The trail went up through central Texas, north into New Mexico up into Colorado and eventually into Wyoming.
Goodnight and Loving had this idea that there would be enough demand for beef in the north to make huge cattle drives possible. The song, however isn’t so much about the cattle drive though, as it is about getting old. The song goes, “your old woman’s lonesome tonight”. The so-called old woman on the cattle drive was the cowboy who was “too old to wrangle or ride on the swing”, so instead he was the cook and the doctor and the camp musician too.
I know that some day I’ll be just the same,
Wearing an apron instead of a name.
There’s nothing can change it, there’s no one to blame
For the desert’s a book writ in lizards and sage,
Easy to look like an old torn out page,
Faded and cracked with the colors of age.On the Goodnight Trail, on the Loving Trail,
Our Old Woman’s lonesome tonight.
Your French harp blows like the low bawling calf.
It’s a wonder the wind don’t tear off your skin.
Get in there and blow out the light.
Earlier today, I was in the car, off to get an x-ray and ultrasound on my shoulder – 3 months on crutches were not kind to some of my muscles. As usual I had music blasting in the car. Today is was Rosalie Sorrels tribute to Utah Phillips, Stranger in Another Country, and her lovely performance of the Goodnight Loving Trail was on it, which got me thinking I should check out some other versions of the tune once again.
This song has been fairly well recorded. Some time ago I posted an Ian Tyson version that somebody had put up on YouTube (it’s gone now), along with a lovely version by Joe Ely with Joel Guzman on squeezebox. Curiously, Tom Waits also performed it once upon a time….
27th Street 