Trip through the valley

We took another one of those trips to Saginaw VA today. It is an overcast day, with the sun occasionally breaking through, not terribly hot but muggy. The flat fields in the Saginaw valley look like they got planted a bit sooner than some around here and the crops are coming up. I particularly noticed two things today as we passed old the old German- Dutch farms. One was the beautiful clematis that many had in bloom. Even small plants seemed to be blooming and unlike the common purple Jackamani variety I have blooming, these seemed to be mostly a large pink flowered variety. It was like they had passed starts of that vine from person to person. Maybe they had or maybe it’s an old variety that the German- Dutch farmers preferred. Many yards had few other flowers but they had a pink clematis climbing something. Peonies were in bloom too and those were common sights around the old farms.

The second thing I noticed today was that many of the old farm houses had very narrow porches, porches where you could sit in a straight chair against the house wall and rest your feet on the porch rail. Some of the porches curved around 2 or more sides of the house, some were just across the front. I guess this was economy of building, why make a porch any wider than a place to sit? This too must be some kind of custom from the homelands.

I love the big old barns, on most of these places they are well kept and painted either red or green with white trim. There are lots of small buildings around these old farms too, I can recognize the typical chicken house but many of the buildings I can’t place a use for. I would love to have a wealth of small buildings like these, perfect for a couple pigs or a few turkeys or separating big chickens from young chickens- which may be the uses the buildings were built for. My husband laughs at my interest in barns and out buildings. He says it’s a good thing I don’t have a lot of them as I would fill them with animals.

I do love the ride through the Saginaw valley on a nice day. The terrain is so flat you can see for miles. Then as you travel east to the Kingston area the terrain gets to be rolling hills, closer to where we live. There are heavily wooded areas, ponds and farms with more livestock than crops, mostly beef cattle. But if you keep going east toward Sandusky you get back to the flat, level crop lands. A trip across the thumb with all its interesting points, and roads with telling names like French Line, English Road and Germania. Everyone should take such a trip from time to time, from the Saginaw Bay to Port Sanilac.