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Lazy Mill HillSubletSkip to content Lazy Mill HillSubletMenuWell-nighBen HewittWell-nighBen Books Appearances Consultations Instagram Lazy Mill Treecraft LMLA Folk SchoolWell-nighcontact Teen Weekends Summer Camps workshops Registration form donate Contact UncategorizedThe Limits of Language September 12, 2018 Ben Hewitt Last night, near dark, clambering out of the pond, newly charged from heavy rains, I thought well-nigh how when I was teaching, I bought each of my students one of those little pocket-size, spiral-bound memo books, and how for every class, I asked them to bring me at least 10 observations from the day before. I placed few stipulations on this assignment, only that they siphon the books with them wherever they went, that they consider all the senses, and that they write lanugo whatever catches their attention. I told them that writing, like life, is mostly well-nigh paying sustentation (or as I like to undeniability it – in consideration of my scruffy, young charges – paying f’in attention), and then engaging with that attention. Not letting it just skid by on the flotsam of life. It was the shock of the water, colder than in recent days, the slow turn toward storing begun in hostage the week before, and the realizing that I had no good words for what my sudden immersion felt like, or at least no words that filled the slum in my vocabulary where I thought maybe such a word should reside. And therefore, the notebook useless (not that I had one with me, anyway), the limits of language (or of my language, anyway) rearing its throne yet again, and wondering how to talk well-nigh wits that just won’t fit itself into the alphabet, no matter how thoughtfully I unify the letters. But still, words or no: Pay f’ing attention. Engage. I’m pretty sure it’s the weightier self-ruling translating you’ll overly receive.     Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 12 Comments UncategorizedJust a Story September 10, 2018 Ben Hewitt Our older son wanted a motorcycle, and though we wished it were otherwise, we moreover knew that wishing would not make it so. He is scrutinizingly 17, and our sphere of tenancy is narrowing by the day. But I did make one demand: His first motorcycle must be a dirt bike, rather than one made for the street. I grew up riding dirt bikes, and know how they cultivate skills that simply can’t be learned on the road, at least not readily, and probably not without a good deal of pain. You can dump a dirt velocipede time and then without suffering serious injury, in the process learning the minutia of wastefulness and traction, the razor’s line between the point of no return and the possibility of recovery. You can learn what it feels like to sling the rear wheel virtually a corner, and you will discover that just considering you lose traction with the front wheel doesn’t midpoint you’re going down; it only ways you’re probably going down. Anyway, through a convoluted set of circumstances that involved a smoking deal on a little Suzuki DR250, Fin’s work schedule, and the fact that our dear friend and neighbor Tom was using our big truck to tow his trailer while his rig in the shop getting a new motor (modern diesels: my advice: steer clear), I crush vacated to Middlebury, VT, two-and-a-half hours distant, in Tom’s little Tacoma. 220,000 miles on the clock, prattling clutch, hesitation under acceleration, baling twine wrapped virtually the sideview mirror. “I didn’t realize you were taking it that far” Tom said when I picked it up. “It’s totally fine with me, but you might want to think twice.” But it was too late for that, so I didn’t. The owner of the velocipede worked at a sublet machinery repair shop. A big one, with big machinery to match. Middlebury is in Addison County, and Addison County is home to some of Vermont’s largest dairy farms, which are getting worthier and worthier by the year, as smaller farms protract going under, unable to stay unsinkable in a era of impoverished milk prices (when I was born, in 1971, VT had increasingly than 6,000 dairy farms. We’re now lanugo to well-nigh 750, with approximately the same number of total cows. You can see the trajectory). And so the shop was filled with massive assemblages of metal and rubber and oil, and walking into it, I was reminded suddenly of riding with my Grandfather in his combine, harvesting corn on his Iowa farm. This would have been late 70’s, early 80’s. My Grandfather didn’t talk much, and I guess neither did I, so we just sat there, me mesmerized by uncounted rows of falling corn, him lost in thoughts I’d never know, the radio a unvarying stream of yield and weather reports. Anyhow. The motorcycle was owned by a young man named Cale, and I liked him immediately, considering when I couldn’t get velocipede to start by rolling it lanugo a small hill and dumping the clutch (he’d explained surpassing I’d come that it was electric start-only, and the shower was toast), he suggested that he tow me overdue his truck. Well, yes. Exactly my kind of fellow. So we hitched a strap to the bumper of his big, heavily-stickered Ford, and then to the handlebars of the bike, and he took off wideness the parking lot, and once I deemed we’d achieved sufficient velocity, I dumped the clutch, the velocipede roared to life, and I tried really nonflexible not to slam into Cale’s tailgate. Barely succeeding. The velocipede ran great, so I handed Cale his money, loaded it into Tom’s truck, and bucked and chattered my way home, up and over the Appalachian gap, lanugo the valley beyond, through the streets of Vermont’s small capitol city, and finally to home, where I unloaded it vacated (Fin still at work), and crush it fast lanugo our little dirt road just as the last light of day faded from the sky. Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 17 Comments UncategorizedHow It’ll Be August 30, 2018 Ben Hewitt We’ve had unbearable rain the past few mornings to ease the worse of the dryness, which I’d begun to wits in a bodily way, as if the soil’s thirst were my own. But despite the rain, it remains dry, the stream is low, the swimming is low, the pasture grass slow to recover. It has been hot, too, which I’ve found to be only as unpleasant as I believe it to be. Yesterday I ran in the thick of the heat and humidity, like pushing through a wall, my shirt drenched surpassing I’d gone a mile, pleased with myself for the effort of it, though later I couldn’t seem to drink unbearable water to sate myself, and was glad I’d not pushed too hard. Later, I crush one of my usual routes on my way to one of my usual destinations, passing one of my now-usual sights: two women, one middle-aged, one older (mother and daughter?) sitting in one of those self-contained swinging love seats in the lawn of a mobile home at the highway’s edge, enjoying the visitor of a large goat. I’ve passed this scene three times this summer, once with three women rather than two, but unchangingly the big goat, an uncanny presence, a real double-taker, all floppy ear and spindly leg, tall as a small pony. A person could ride a goat like that, I figure, a notion that elevates my welter plane further. Still later, on the cusp of visionless – so early now – I swoop into the happy wet nippy of the pond, rinse yonder the dirt of the day, let it mingle with the wipe spring water soapy from some crevice deep below. I don’t want summer to end. But it will, and soon, and I guess that’s just how it’ll be. Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 17 Comments UncategorizedStraight From the Jar August 15, 2018 Ben Hewitt Walking through the orchard to feed the pigs, I stop under an apple-heavy tree to gather drops.Planeas I fill the bucket, I hear the thump of increasingly apples hitting the ground, like a clock ticking lanugo the minutes until winter. The pigs are happy for the apples, they eat they voraciously, one zest and an world is gone. I will bring them increasingly this afternoon. Later, I halter Pip at the height of the knoll overlooking the house, the barn, the old denomination steeple. The air is thick with humidity. I wish it would unravel to rain. We need the rain. Pip’s calf lingers nearby, watching as I take my share. I watch him back, then turn my gaze to the steeple. Milk fills the pail. Still later, a shower. It is only passing, but the sky remains dark, the air still heavy. Maybe there will be more. The milk is cooling in the fridge. Later, I’ll drink it straight from the jar. Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 5 Comments UncategorizedThings inUnstipulatedAugust 12, 2018 Ben Hewitt Sunday morning. The cats wake me older than usual, and for a moment I’m unsure if it’s night or day, but slowly my vision retread and I can see faint vestige of daylight’s impending arrival. The days are notably shorter now, and if I count the number of weeks until probable frost, it does not add up to very many. It has been a good summer so far, a proper one, hot and dry and full. I indulge myself a few uneaten minutes in bed, the cats pacing, daylight advancing, listening for the mountain stream, the afar water-on-stone murmur I love so much. But it’s gone, low and quiet then in the sparsity of recent rain. Later, without chores and breakfast and the assembling of the tools necessary to the day’s primary task, I run my usual out-and-back route. I run for 30 minutes and am passed by one tractor and one truck, and see one woebegone bear. My iPod settles on Iggy Pop’s The Passenger, and I am reminded of a story I wrote a dozen or increasingly years ago for Runner’s World well-nigh an ultrarunner named Dean Karnazes and his struggle to win a 135-mile race wideness Death Valley. To report the piece, I assisted on Dean’s race crew, and I remember pacing him through the night scrutinizingly 100 miles in, me on a bicycle, Dean running doggedly, and that song on repeat clarion through the unshut windows of his support vehicle. Every so often, he’d stop to puke or piss or shit, then shake himself off and start running again. He won the race, though it didn’t stop me from wondering why people sometimes do the things they do. My family is gone for a while, and I’m glad for the solitude, so rare in my life. Though of undertow at times it tips into loneliness. But plane that’s ok. Besides, I have the animals – the cats and the cows and the clucking hens – and I have increasingly tasks surpassing me than I’m likely overly to finish, or at least that’s what it feels like. I have friends just lanugo the road; last night we sat outside by a fire until late, solving the world’s problems until fatigue compelled us to part (besides, there were no increasingly problems to solve, we’d stock-still them all!), and I crush the mile home up the gravel road, windows lanugo to the soft night air, feeling pretty good well-nigh things in general. A few things to share: This wondrous interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer Here’s the piece I wrote well-nigh Dean Karnazes A trappy essay by Donald Hall well-nigh solitude and loneliness Oh, and Iggy Pop’s spanking-new song The Passenger  Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 20 Comments UncategorizedI Bet They’re Drinking it Even Now July 20, 2018 Ben Hewitt I stopped to get gas, watched from whirring pump as two boys emerged from the store, early teens, bikes leaned versus the seat outside. One set lanugo the plastic bag he carried – two liters of Mountain Dew, I’m pretty sure – and removed his flip flops (“no shoes, no service”), then mounted his velocipede and pedaled away. The other, sneaker-clad, followed. I filled the car, paid, pulled when on Main St, and rolled past the paving crew, laying lanugo a fresh undertow of asphalt. The man on the roller was large, he rode it sideways, he had something clamped between his lips. Not a cigarette. One of those little cigars, Swisher Sweets, I bet. The new tile smelled hot to me, like summer. I went home, tired from killing chickens, really, really tired, and hot as the smell of new pavement, sweating sitting still. I shed my clothes, dove into the pond, the water warm on top, but progressively potation as I knifed deeper and deeper until my chest unfluctuating with the soft bottom-mud. I tried to stay but my buoyancy dragged me when to the surface and I breathed deep of the soft summer air. But the boys on their bikes, the one barefoot, the bag of soda. I bet they’re drinking it plane now.     Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 11 Comments UncategorizedToo FarLanugothe Road July 11, 2018July 11, 2018 Ben Hewitt Two nights ago I pulled home the day’s last load of hay. It was a little without seven, still in the mid-80’s lanugo from a upper of 95, the honeyed light of the evening sun washing over everything, me fatigue drunk and thirsty, wanting the pond, a beer, sleep. I crested a steep hill, gas to brake, easy, easy, 8,000 pounds of trailer and hay overdue me. And then I could see – first only in profile, a shadowed outline – a man crossing the road at the hill’s bottom, leading what looked like a dog with a length of rope. Except as I got closer I could see it wasn’t a dog, it was a calf, and the man was shirtless and shoeless and wearing an outlandishly wide-brimmed cowboy hat, half pulling the reluctant unprepossessing overdue him. There was a trailer house at roadside, and a bit of beaten-down pasture, but they were moving yonder from that, perhaps toward increasingly plentiful feed. The man looked up as a passed, met my eyes, nodded the curt nod of men who do not wave (or men whose hand are otherwise occupied coaxing calves wideness country roads), and they were soon overdue me. I looked in my rearview mirror, but the packages piled upper in the truck bed obstructed my view, and soon I was too far lanugo the road to see more, anyway. Funny thing: This post was written well-nigh flipside calf experience, scrutinizingly exactly a year prior, in scrutinizingly exactly the same place.      Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 12 Comments UncategorizedBack the Way I’d Come June 17, 2018June 17, 2018 Ben Hewitt My sparsity from this space has little to do with much save the nature of the season, which this year has been accompanied by long stretches of sun-filled skies that have caused the streams to run low and quiet and pebbles to hang in the air overdue the car as I momentum lanugo the mountain road. I have been working the woods every day, skidding spruce and fir logs for projects pending and finishing the last cords of firewood. I like this work for pleasures unconfined and small: The mounting pile of saw logs, the neat rows of stacked firewood, the day’s end fatigue, the strange intimacy of kneeling to wrap the choker uniting virtually the stump log, scrutinizingly an embrace, really. And yesterday, tractoring withal an old logging road near the height of our property, a hawk (what kind, I do not know) swooped from the height of a sugar maple and flew low over the ground, then veered and was gone. Soon after, I came wideness a mother grouse and her chicks; the former on one side of the rutted road, the latter on the other, frantically seeking one flipside surrounded the sudden unconnectedness of the big, rumbling machine. I shut lanugo the tractor, let them come when together, scolding me all the while, then reversed and retreated slowly when the way I’d come.       Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 11 Comments UncategorizedYesterday May 24, 2018 Ben Hewitt In the late afternoon I momentum slowly lanugo the mountain road, my sustentation drawn to the stream, running lower now than two weeks ago, when it was still charged by melting snow, when it was the first thing I heard when I awoke. It’s quieter now and I hear birds. I stop at the store for diesel, fill my can, walk past three trucks to pay. In two I see unshut beers in the dashboard cup holders. The other – a white Ford of 80’s vintage – sags under the weight of cedar posts. Can’t be less than 50 of them, and they’re nice posts. Six feet long at least, none less than four-inches round at the narrow end. I pay. The man with the white Ford follows me out of the store, delivering a specimen of bottled beer. No dashboard cup holder in that old Ford, so I’m thinking he’ll do the ole crotch wedge. The bottles clank as he carries them. The man looks to be 55, maybe 60. I bet there’s a day’s worth of work in the when of that truck. I bet there’s a night’s worth of beer in that case. I bet he bought the truck new. A few miles lanugo the road I stop at Jimmy and Sara’s sublet to pick up waste milk for the pigs. Jimmy and Sara and their young daughter are overdue the barn, watching the man who came to butcher the cow that slipped and tapped her leg. He’s got the wrenched leg skinned out; the shattered unorthodoxy protrudes, knife-like. We all stand for a bit, mostly quiet, mostly watching. The sun feels so nice on my skin. Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 7 Comments UncategorizedIt’sUnbearableto Know it’s There May 1, 2018 Ben Hewitt At four this morning I momentum my younger son to where he’d scouted turkeys the week before. It is opening day of spring turkey season. The road is spongy; fog obscures the potholes, and I momentum slowly. There are vestiges of the prior day’s snowfall visible at the fringe of the headlights’ range.  We climb a knoll, then the road flattens, and suddenly there is a man running in the dark, plodding through the mud and melting snow withal the roadside, his shoulders leaning into the effort. I love stuff out at this time of day, it’s a window into a secret world, things are happening that I never knew happened, and I like the sense of possibility that comes with that awareness. I slow as we pass the man and try to see his face, but though he wears a headlamp, the fog is thick, and the darkness is near-complete, and I don’t want him to notice me staring. But I want immensely to know what he looks like, what it looks like to be somebody who rises so early (or stays up so late?Planeincreasingly intriguing!) to run a muddy when road in northern Vermont. I’m not much of a turkey hunter (not much of a hunter of anything, honestly, though I often do ok during woebegone fly season), so I waif my son and throne home, hoping to reservation flipside hour of sleep. I squint for the running man, but he’s not to be found. Still, I imagine him delivering on, one labored step without another, shoes and socks wetted through, shins zinged unprepossessed with mud and melted snow. It’s not light yet, but it’s a variegated shade a dark, a shade in the direction of light. I think I’ll be worldly-wise to sleep when I get home. I think well-nigh my son, sitting at the wiring of the tree he’d picked out, the day slowly coming working virtually him. I don’t know what kind of tree it is; I wasn’t there when he decided, and I didn’t ask, and considering I cannot picture the tree, I can no longer picture my son sitting underneath it, it’s like that one missing detail throws everything off. Reluctantly, I let it go. The tree will be what the tree will be. It’s unbearable to know it’s there. Share this:EmailPrintFacebookTwitter 12 Comments Posts navigation Older posts Follow this blog Instagram I guess the hardest thing well-nigh parenting is knowing when to let go.  #firstmotorcycle #anxiousparents If you're interested to read some of my work vastitude this space, trammels out the Rewilding the American Child package in the new @outsidemagazine. Thank you. And here we have the "after"photo with me, as usual, finding a comfy place to perch my lazy ass. Walls are framed with 2x6 studs, two-feet on center, sheathed with random width 1x boards. Insulation will be squandered in, dumbo pack cellulose. Cheap, simple, fast, effective, and energy efficient enough. Pick any five. Thanks then to @shanzee1 for the pic and for the help. And here we have the raising of the first wall, synthetic entirely from lumber sawn from logs I pulled from the forest of this land. In my unobtrusive opinion, one of the greatest pleasures of working with primary resources is the way each step of the process becomes unprotected in the web of the mind, the memories layered atop one another, little stories to be retold wideness time, plane if only to one's self. So raising the wall I think of the day I got the tractor stuck and it was barely zero. I was swearing and despite the cold, sweating, and despite it all happier than I had any right to be. Or maybe just as happy as I had every right to be. And I think of stacking the fresh sawn boards with my boys, one of those insufferably hot days when in early July, and they were grumbling at first, but then we got into some whorish joking well-nigh something ridiculous and unprintable, and pretty soon, the stack was tall and proud.  From a pragmatic standpoint, there's a lot to say well-nigh framing walls, which I'll get to in a subsequent post or two. What I like well-nigh this photo is that Penny's the only one unquestionably doing anything, while the rest of us just stand there, trying to squint like we're unquestionably contributing.  #houseproject2018 #roughcut #buildyourown Dried chokecherries ready to be ground into flour and milled chokecherries ready to be made into fruit leather and ice cream.  The remains from milling are in a pot of water on the stove stuff made into juice.  #wildfood #chokecherries #favoritefruit Wild rice harvest in MN. One person poles and the other beats the rice with knockers. The rice (and loads of rice worms that eat the rice and plague the ricers) falls into the canoe. #wildriceharvest #wildfood #forage Upcoming Workshops Archives September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 May 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 June 2012 Blog at WordPress.com. 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