Treasures in Heaven

Tonight -- dry, clear, and a teeth-chattering 17 degrees -- our area was able to enjoy the only total eclipse of the moon we will see here until 2010. This photo was taken about 20 minutes before totality. Wins my daily Oscar for best performance by the sky. Runner-up: a huge flock of Canada geese pouring eastward, sounding like woodwinds.

Comes with a Lifetime Guarantee

"A bud is an undeveloped branch, flower or inflorescence which is found at the tip of a shoot or in the angle of a leaf." - Singapore Science Center

A bud is also a guarantee -- one of the very few guarantees in this world: that spring will come. (These are buds of young hickory trees here on the property.)

What Becomes a Legend Most?

This blacksnake has lived near kitchen door for at least three years, hiding in the ivy and stones, and in winter she sleeps in warmth and peace beneath the cabin's kitchen floor and now and then eats a mouse. She has, in the past, left a magnificent three-foot shed skin for me to admire. Broken and emptied shells of creamy beige-spotted wild-turkey eggs led me to Ms. Blacksnake and this picture. She held still for a good five minutes as if to say, "I'm giving you paparazzi one chance to get a good snap, now get it, and be off." Look at her elegant costume. I call this photo "What becomes a legend most?"

I think it was one of her silver children I accidentally stepped on one night in July.

Did We Dream This?

Took this at 9:00 a.m. 100 yards up the road.

1-800-YOGI-TEA

Needles stuck out all over me, about 15 of 'em. I felt the initial jabs only in the left ankle and breastbone, but otherwise, no pain. Hands, chest, feet, crown full of needles -- for 20 minutes. I wondered: Will this work? Will I come out "balanced," as they say?

After the 2-1/2-inch needles were jabbed through my clothes, I lay looking at the ceiling, never at the needles, worrying. The legs, feet and toes of another patient got pierced. The acupuncturist apologized to her, saying that needles in the pinky toes will always hurt: "Those are the ends of the meridians." The lady wanted stress relief. We chatted and I said I was an acupuncture virgin. She told me, "Afterward, you'll wanna sleep." True!

January around here is like being wrapped in a whole roll of toilet paper, just that blinding and just that dull. Cabin fever. Fantasies, good and scary, start ruling your mind. Climbin' the cabin walls, I decided to treat myself to two new things: Any two new things. One was acupuncture. It was just okay. The other was Yogi Tea. Bought the "Daily Stress Relief Formula," from Golden Temple of Oregon (1-800-YOGI-TEA). Pricey -- but gol-darn, it really calms and centers you like one of them there yogis who got his picture on the package!

Busy Beavers

Beaver dams create deep diving pools that are inconvenient for their predators. Here's the new beaver dam on the creek, and a close-up of a slender branch they lopped and stripped with their teeth. The bark was food; the stick is building material. Back in '01 on a moonlit night a friend and I crept down to the creek and watched a beaver clan at work.

It sounds like: Crunch crunch crunch crunch, Ker-PLOOP! (that's one of the beavers diving into the creek). He or she then swims silently, along with the current, head above the water, nosing along a branch, either stripped or with bark. He or she gets it to the dam area, and the engineer beavers take over from there.

The last beaver dam here was built in 2001; it was three times this size, strong enough to walk across the creek on, and so tightly built a branch could hardly be pulled from it. The beavers of '01 felled trees a foot in diameter (crunch crunch crunch) and permanently changed the course of the creek. A torrential flash-flood destroyed their dam and they moved on, and there haven't been any more until this year. They work mostly with slender new trees, so this dam isn't quite as spectacular. A conservation guy told me not to worry about the fallen trees, because if beavers chewed them down, that was nature.

Vitamin C and Propane

Nobody will tell you the price of propane. Prices per gallon are so high that if you ask the fuel company they won't tell you. Even the deliverymen won't say. They only ask you what dollar amount you want. When they're gone, you divide it by the gallons you got. There's a $100 surcharge if you call them after you've let the gauge sink below 10 percent -- an emergency.

I am fond of my blimp-shaped silver propane tank, and fed it $600 worth last May. Sixty percent was gone by Christmas. Electric power, if I play it right, can perhaps get the remaining gas to last until March; mid-March if I'm frugal and use an electric cooking ring rather than the stove. It's so old and crusty I feel like an old Alaskan prospector -- like Sam McGee in that Robert Service poem.

Please notice that I don't whine about heating the house. Native Missourians have one bizarre quirk: They think they deserve to go barefoot in the house in January, and if that means 80 degrees, they crank it up. We from the frozen north grudgingly raise the temp to 55, put on two pairs of socks, leg-warmers, shoes, a hat, fingerless gloves, a down vest over two layers of sweats, and tie a fleece bathrobe over everything; then close off three rooms and live in two. I look like a bag lady -- but who's looking? I'm saving money and the planet!