It's a slippery slope, research. It sends you into some pretty strange places, even without a high-speed internet connection. Here are a couple of gems that I MUST share. Full disclosure: I am trying to erase them from my brain by scraping them off on anyone else.  Thanks for stopping by.

I'm not alone in this one: after a radical re-arrangement of furniture, I found myself walking to where my clothes had been kept  -- even though I knew with my rational brain that the chest-of-drawers had already been relocated to a different zip code. 

Despite understanding the whereabouts of my wardrobe, I could not give up the sense -- the conviction even -- that the clothing was still there. Day after day, I'd stomp into the empty room, reach into empty space and be shocked. And a few hours later, I'd do it all again. 

It was a piece of insight into how my grand-mother Mimi struggled in her later years. Having spent decades shuttling between summer and winter houses with the station-wagon loaded to the gills, she fixed on the idea of a specific set of blue dishes that she just KNEW were on the top shelf of a closet.  She had hauled lamps and vases and pictures from one end to the other of her orbit of the Eastern Seaboard for years, but it was THIS set of dishes that gave her phantom pain.  

In those last few years, stopping by Mimi's meant climbing up into the closet and emptying the shelves for Mimi's disappointed inspection. Sometimes twice on a visit. She never stopped believing, I think, even despite every evidence of her senses, that those blue dishes were up there there on that shelf. 

Maybe in some parallel universe they still are. Where else could they be?

Fact #1: the cost of solar power has come down a lot in the past ten years. 
Fact #2: plenty of not-too-expensive kits look pretty cinchy to set up. 
And what else do we know about solar? Fact #3: not much. 

Is that the sort of thing that will stop us? Heck no. 

I browsed the library, but the resources seemed either incomprehensible or too vague. So as is my habit, I signed up for a class. This one is an on-line course through EdX. Free for auditors. Classmates on every continent...

An eight-week course might be overkill, to be bitterly frank. 

But talk about new neural pathways --!  1 over the cosine of theta. Terawatts. Polycrystalline silicon cells. Diamond lattice crystalline structures...And "band gaps," which, in the Dutch accent of Professor Smets sounds just like "band camps." Making his discussion of how molecular bonds affect the BAND CAMP pretty darned entertaining.

Aside from having those stray three or four brain cells that remembered anything about Calculus go super-nova during the first homework assignment, I think it's going to be fine.  

It's not exactly unique. At some point during the day, you find yourself standing in a room looking around with a certain sense of urgency. You may think, "What did I come in here for?" Or maybe, "What was I going to do?" 

Perhaps you mentally tick through a list of the errands or chores that might have sent you into this room at this moment. Sometimes you draw a blank.

It happens to Lilly. 

Especially as her hearing has grown -- ahem -- less acute, I sometimes find her frozen in place, as if cast adrift in the back bedroom. I haven't been able to watch very long -- her determined little form plucks at my tenderized heartstrings. I clap or call her name, or stomp to get her attention, and she turns with an expression of relief so sincere that it's with difficulty that I resist the temptation to pick her up and squeeze her.  

She is an elderly dog, after all, and has never enjoyed being separated from the solid ground, regardless of my little firestorms of affection.  

Joy. What IS that stuff? Ineffable mood? Attitude? 
 
Describing what joy brings to any activity is like trying to answer, "Why Jell-o shots?" "Who would do Parkour?" or "What happened to the undercarriage of your grandfather's car?" 

That is, you can answer, but you can never really explain. And like many another, it's a quality easily identifiable at ten paces.

As an illustration, take a look at this strangely joyless rendition of the goofiest, happiest of dances:

It's easy to imagine these people are on their last legs, and that the Chicken Dance is the only part remaining of their memory of life above ground. 

This flying lawnmower (yes, I know this video has been around for ages. And yes, I understand how they did it. Don't be a buzzkill, bro) on the other hand, is utterly joyous:

Unless they go bad in the heart, apple-trees can live a very long time.  
They'll turn wild, their branches winding around one another like tangled arms, rubbing raw spots through the bark when the wind blows. The trunks sprout suckers that reach for the sky and multiply weak joints. 

Left to their own devices, apple orchards will gradually slurp up the available minerals from the soil. Then they'll muddle on without them. They spend their energy on a multitude of tiny apples, the fruits progressively shrinking. As years pass, the trees come to resemble undernourished miner's children, squinting and wormy and bowed with rickets. 

A commercial grower, looking at the 30+ trees on the first rocky knob of our would-be farm might suggest pulling them out and starting over. Or better yet, just begin someplace else –– and make it someplace where the rock base is a few inches deeper below the soil. 

If that same commercial grower could be lured to the second knob and its even more neglected trees, he might suggest burning it clear.

But we are in this apple-growing scheme for curiosity, for the beauty, and for new neural pathways. We are not going to start over. Not yet. We are going to revive the orchards.

It should come as no surprise –– since apples have been long cultivated and long revered and (given the nature of human nature) quite often abandoned –– that there's a traditional process for renovating neglected orchards.  (Here's the New York Times' take on how-to.)

On a frosty November morning we start our renovation. I carry blackboard chalk and loppers, while Jeff totes the new Tanaka chainsaw and fuel. The seasonal sounds of gunfire (duck- and deer-season) crack across the long valleys and ridges in the chilly distance. 

All the leaves are down*, revealing the witchy-fingered profile of apple-tree after apple-tree in our new-found groves. (*Not: "...all the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray-ay" but close.)

I chalk unlucky young intruder trees with an X so Jeff and the two-stroke Angel of Death shall not pass over them.  Then I step away to a safe distance to begin the individual fruit-tree makeovers. 

It's a battle to reach the trunks, but by lopping and snapping off deadwood, I Stanley-Livingstone my way under each tree's canopy. I circle the main trunk once, twice, more, ducking and sometimes backtracking as branches snag my knitted hat. 

I'm trying to gauge which water-sucker –– the branches that go straight up like a pipe, hogging the sunlight and branching far higher than I want to climb for fruit -- should go first, and how much barky macrame can be removed.  

Sensible tradition says to trim no more than a third of the tree in a year, so it's a question of picking the worst bits to edit away. I leave more chalk X's, and snip-snip at the weakest-looking forks of the long-spreading branches. It becomes a meditative practice, and I hear myself repeating under my breath something I must have read: "favor width over height, privilege strength over volume."

Six solid hours later, and we have not finished the first grove. 

Paul Bunyon's chainsaw blade is dull from use. We've made a dozen rough brush piles and stacks of applewood logs. Good orchard management suggests that the trim would be burned right away, but we are going to leave it for the wildlife over the winter. 

After all, the deer and the rabbits and the ruffled grouse and who knows what else has been making a good living in this orchard. They kept the thorn-apple and most of the invasive brush at bay for decades. Let them have the twigs for shelter. The logs will be just as fragrant in the spring. 

The week of work goes very quickly. It feels paradoxically as if there is more left to do at the end of our time than there had been at the beginning. Classic example of the universal law of chore multiplication (tasks multiply to overfill the time allotment). 

New neural pathways: thanks to a local pal, KD, Jeff learned the valuable knack of sharpening the chainsaw blades. The apple-tree husbandry that crammed my brain to capacity got exercised, at least briefly. We met some neighbors and spotted some wildlife. 

We leave knowing there's more pruning to do, but it will mostly wait for next fall. In the spring, the blossoms will want thinning and the groves will need a judicious feeding. There's brush to burn and paths to clear. 

At the end of next summer, if it's been a decent growing season, we'll be figuring out what kinds of apples these are. And gauging whether the renovation is worth continuing.

Like many a fool before us, we bought land on a whim. It might have been a whimsey of long standing, but the purchase cannot really be described as sensible. 

A hundred and some acres of former dairy farm, a ramble with only the rusted ghosts of barbed-wire fences and a tumbledown house to show for it. The property boasts hardwood and piney woods, vast stretches of thorny underbrush, meadows blithely reverting to marsh, deer-hunting stands of uncertain provenance, and a choice assortment of random boulders and sheer granite rock-faces. 

But a lovely path meanders from the road at the front of the property to the pond at the far end. The path curves through the strips of meadow and upland woods like an invitation. And the pond, ringed with sharp stumps (like huge mute pencils stuck into the soil eraser-end first), has more than one active beaver lodge. 

We picked the land for beauty and for the potential of future use. It's no less sensible an investment, look at it from another view, than purchasing art or a fancy-schmancy car. No car, even this one, comes standard with porcupines and kingfishers.

It begs the question of why: Why buy land so far from where we live and where we plan to continue living? Why not someplace within easy drive of home?  If we meant to spend time with the northern relatives, why not get a summer cottage instead of what the tax office so flatly describes as "wasteland"? 

In a word: apples. 

It's perhaps the single thing I miss by living south of the 38th parallel, and one of those crops that might -- just might -- thrive without a year-round caretaker. We spotted a handful of old trees on the land on our first reconnaissance sorties, so there was potential. Plus, you know, new neural pathways. 

If a person want to remain relatively sprightly, so the research is showing, she should start early by making new neural pathways in her brain. Move house, start dance lessons, take up fresh hobbies, forge new connections to the world, and put your muscles to work in unexpected ways.

Thus was I thinking: maybe start with a dozen apple trees. Get saplings in the spring. Carefully shielded from the deer and the voles, planted in the best-looking stretch of meadow, now THAT's a nice new neural path. 
 
The chicken-and-egg quandary about when to sink a well and when to pipe in electricity to pump water out of the well to give the baby trees a drink? Delicious question, because after all, our very own orchard!

The neighborly dudes down the road agreed to mow our overgrown pastureland in exchange for the right to hunt over the winter. A sailing friend in the Finger Lakes raises apples; when asked, he agreed to share some insight. And I started taking farming classes through the Cornell University Cooperative Extension. 

Ask any wee sleekit cowr'in beastie, and he'll tell you: Plans. Bah! Aft gang agley, plans.

Those handful of gnarled old apple-trees that we'd seen while scouting the land? Just the start. 

Scrambling up and down the ridges, checking the property lines, Jeff and I found two groves of 30+ mature trees -- untouched, I think, by human hand for decades -- and dozens of full-grown volunteers all over the place.  In total, perhaps 100 trees. 

Which has led to the purchase of our first piece of farm equipment: a chainsaw. 

Does the color blue taste like dirty laundry? Like SweetTarts? Like beef jerky? Like mud?

Synesthesia is a brain condition that creates just this sort of sensory crossover.  Some synthesthetes “smell” colors or “taste” words. For these people, sounds can be cold or damp or spiked, and scents may have distinct textures.  

It's a condition that runs in families, and might affect as many as one in every two dozen people.  The crossover is not universal (not everyone tastes green as mint, but there is some overlap from person to person...) Oh -- and the condition sometimes visits the brain with help from traumatic brain injury, seizure disorder, psychedelic drugs.

Vladimir Nabokov, famously, had one of the most common forms of this condition called grapheme-synthesthesia or “color reading.” Both he and his wife Vera associated colors with various letters. In his memoir, Speak Memory, he writes that the “V” of his own name is “quartz pink” and the number 5 is red. Regardless the typographical convention, the Arabic numeral 5 was red to him.