Wayback Machine

 I spent an afternoon recently looking at photo albums from my time spent living on Honeypot Road in Candor.  We had a big garden, built a cabin, worked with horses and were much younger.

Our first horse was Duchess, a Belgian that knew about as much as we did what a draft horse was supposed to do.  Carol and I did ride her a bit without incident, but Jim and I are lucky to still be alive after some of the mishaps working with her. 

My parents visited once when we were building the log cabin.

Karl came up the road quite often on his skateboard, pulled by two dogs.  Dylan was always happy to show him the latest additions to his baseball card collection.

Who's the young guy with the beard and bowl haircut?  The stone boat he's standing on once flipped over, slid up his leg and torso and went flying over his head.  Nothing broken, but lots of skin removed.

The guy with the arrow through the head?  That would be Jim, who retired from teaching in Queens a couple years ago and is about to move to Ithaca.

The cabin was pretty cozy.  I lived in it for about 10 years.

Proof that rope belts are bullshit and just about image.  Jim still needed suspenders to keep his pants up.  Not sure what kept my pants up, it wasn't hips.  I still have that t-shirt, or what's left of it, folded neatly on my dresser. It's from the Chautauqua Overland Ski Marathon which was my intro to cross country skiing.

We grew a bit of garlic.

We had this crazy notion that Duchess would settle down if her sister, Salty, joined her. 

Salty was the largest horse in the barn when we invited our friend, Peter, to bring his herd of 11 Belgians and join us.  The white horse was King, a Percheron.  We traded him for Duchess when we decided we wanted to avoid broken bones or death. 

Blizzard of '93.  Matt went sledding off the roof of the milk house.

Just about every summer we'd throw enough hay out the back doors of the barn for the kids to jump into.  An iconic photo of Dylan.

That time Matt attended the Police Academy.

Salty had a foal on a cold, wet December day.  We creatively named her Winter.  She wouldn't nurse when she was born so I had to milk Salty for a couple days and bottle feed Winter.