We're getting the wind and rain we were promised, but so far the rain has not been as heavy as we were told it might be.  Of course, this weather system is not going to be out of here for several more hours, so there's time left for things to develop.  We're getting a south and southeast wind, and so far the strongest registered on my wind gauge has been about 15mph.  I'm sure if we were up on Cabot Plain, or even at the top of the ridge behind our house, we'd have a much higher reading.  All is good for now - we have a pail of water in the bathtub so in case the electricity goes out, we can still flush the toilet, and there's a supply of fresh drinking water in the fridge, and we can cook on the wood stove if we need to.  Bring it on, Mother Nature!

Just before lunch I had a call from Margaret Fitts letting me know Homer was out of the operating room and doing very well.  She said his operation took about three hours, but when she was able to see him he was wide awake and chipper as ever, with no pain.  Of course, we know how that can be - it's like this storm, there may be more later on.  We have been thinking of both Homer and Margaret this morning, and like their other friends and acquaintances, we're glad everything went so well.  There will be lots of physical therapy for a few weeks, but having pain-free knees in his future will keep Homer working hard at it, I'm sure.

As I was filing some of the clippings I mentioned this weekend and yesterday, I came across an article written by the late Betty Hatch, in Walden.  It was about Cheever Hollow Falls on Joe's Brook.  She wrote that there was a mill on the brook, built in 1849 and operating until 1887.  It was described as a "slow working" sawmill, meaning it took literally hours to saw from one end of a log to the other.  Apparently it was an up and down saw, and Betty said in the article that the amount of water used to run the saw would likely influence how fast the saw worked.  I was curious, so I did a little research and came up with this demonstration of an up and down saw.

 When I finished watching the video, I noticed there was also one about an "old circular saw mill."  I couldn't leave the site without watching that.  We had a sawmill on the farm.  My dad bought one that was going out of business and brought all the parts, saw, carriage, belts, pulleys - everything - and trucked it all to Cabot Plain.  He built a fairly crude building to accommodate it and spent hours after chores every night plotting and planning how it was all going to go together.  There were a few trials and errors, but he got good advice from sawyers who had experience, and learned from them.  The power came from an old Ford truck - the one we'd used for years to haul hay.  The body and frame of the truck were ready for the dump, but the motor, with some tinkering and adaptations, made an excellent power source.  Once the mill was running well, Dad sawed not only whatever lumber was needed on the farm, but sawed for all our neighbors, too.  It was wonderful to hear that old saw whining its way through those big logs.  And the sawdust smelled so good.  The mill was in our back yard, so I got to see every aspect of the process, from the logs piled ready to be loaded onto the carriage, to the fragrant sawdust blowing into a pile outside the mill and the growing pile of newly sawed boards at the end of the mill, stacked with spacers to let it dry.  

The top picture is the back of the mill where the scraps and slabs were piled.  The picture on the right is how the logs were piled so they could be loaded onto the long carriage.  It took lots of man power to move the logs around, but once they were on the carriage, it was just a matter of turning them to square the sides and with each run of the carriage, the log was systematically sliced into inch boards, 2x4s or 4x4s - or whatever size got the most lumber out of each log.

This is a picture of our friend, Hazel Anderson, a WAC, when she was on furlough.  Hazel had taught school in West Danville when my mother taught there, and they became good friends.  During WWII, she enlisted, and after this furlough, probably around 1941 or 42, we didn't see her again.  She got married and moved to Ohio.  We had a few letters, but over time, lost track of her.  She was great fun and we enjoyed knowing her.

The picture below is of my grandfather McAllan and my father sitting on the roof of the mill.  Under all that snow is a pile of logs, the result of a winter's work in the woods.  This was probably a nice spring day and my father had been working on the mill, tuning it up ready to begin sawing as soon as some of the snow melted.  My grandfather McAllan was a blacksmith who came from Scotland to work in the Barre quarries.  He taught my father some basic welding and smithing techniques and together they fashioned some of the iron work needed for the mill, plus their skill came in handy when something on the farm broke and they couldn't get parts or if they needed a special tool to fix something.  We had a little forge in our basement, designed and built by the two of them.

This video is of a somewhat more modern or perhaps a better description is "more polished" than the mill my father built, but it's enough like it to bring back lots of wonderful memories.  The mill has been gone for many years, and even the farm, as I knew it, has changed.  That's the nice thing about memories - they often turn out to be better than reality.