Saturday, September 25, 2004

feeling better

After having a couple of days off, I'm feeling less pain.  Yesterday I went for a three-hour ride on Blue, which is always good therapy for both him and me.  Next week (six days to work) will tell the tale on whether I can hold down my job full-time for awhile longer; if it's too painful, rather than just quit right away, I'll try the part-time schedule and see if I can stand up to that.

When we bought this place, it was the house, a couple of outbuildings, and six acres.  Then the next-door neighbor, Tim (of the winery) decided to move on to a bigger place, and split his land so we could buy what was attached to the north of our property.  That took our land up to 42 acres.  It isn't really good farm land, for most of it ends in big ditches at river-bottom levels.  But there's some prime grazing on the top of the hill, and our house sits high and dry in flood-time, too.  This river bluff we reside on is, they tell me, wind-blown soil.  Hence, any stones or flint you find here was carried here.  When Tim owned the acres in back of us, he decided to farm what could be farmed, and plowed it all up for perhaps the first time ever.  He unearthed all sorts of Indian artifacts, and allowed a co-worker to walk the exposed earth in search of such loot.  The fellow found a treasure-trove of stuff.  When Cliff plows up land to re-seed pasture, I half-heartedly walk over it after a rain hoping to find an arrowhead or two.  Mostly, I find only the chips and pieces of flint left behind by those warriors of the plains.

Several years back, I had a couple of sows and a boar (male and female hogs, for the uninitiated) and raised a few pigs.  Hogs have a powerful nose, and can root out holes big enough to lay down in.  I went out to feed the sow behind our barn and she had unearthed two wonderful Indian tools of some sort.  These are the only real prizes of Indian artifacts that I've ever found.  Here's a picture of all my finds... those big ones are what my sow found.  The largest one is probably five inches long.

I like to hold those in my hand and think about how old they really could be. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The two big ones look like they could be a spear-head and the other some kind of hatchet or axe.  They are wonderful and you should keep on looking.  You never know what will surface.

I like the idea of part-time schedules before you actually quit.  It would give your knees a bit of a rest during the week.

J

Anonymous said...

Those are neat. I hope you are still feeling better.
Celeste