Christine Thomas

In 1972, I married a farmer. Women with farm experience warned me against this. One of those women was a former roommate from the “thumb” area of Michigan.
“You will spend the rest of your life picking rocks,” she warned, her eyes filling with tears as her childhood memories flooded in. My first farm experience was not positive. An aunt and uncle whom I barely knew picked me up when my mother went into labor with my younger sister.

“Once we stopped treating our Hobies as kayaks and started treating them like the boats they are, this whole thing went much better,” my daughter, Shannon Honl, stated as we headed for the Blue Heron boat landing on the Wisconsin River in Portage County.
She was right about that.

“Did you open the door to the outhouse when you had Major out to the little cabin for a run yesterday?” I inquired of Stan when we were headed back from a trip to Appleton.
He had not. I was curious about this as I had encountered a new phenomenon in the outhouse a couple of weeks ago. I was out to the little cabin with our Airedale, Major. I do this many afternoons if I do not have other obligations.

“My ashes can become wildflowers, the bunnies will eat the flowers, the foxes will eat the bunnies, and I too can become a fox,” Professor Irv Korth lectured when I took Integrated Resource Management from him at the UW-Stevens Point (UW-SP) College of Natural Resources (CNR) in 1978.
UW-SP CNR alums will remember this tall, thin man with a dry sense of humor as the guy who collected outhouse photos and lectured on them (a subject for another article).

The exterminator was shaking his head before he even left the truck. I knew this was not going to be good news.
This problem started early this year when I began seeing wood chips piled on the floor in front of the sofa in the little cabin. The many issues with the little cabin structure likely started long before it was built, when some of the logs came from other buildings and likely brought their various maladies with them.

In my last column, I described bird banding activities at the little cabin. The UW-Stevens Point student chapter of the Wildlife Society had been out banding songbirds two early mornings in May. We had a great variety of birds in our nets.

Prof. Riddle is the Douglas R. Stephens Chair in Wildlife, UW-Extension Wildlife Specialist, and the director of the Wisconsin Center for Wildlife at the UW-Stevens Point College of Natural Resources.