Blackboard Wisdom

 

So TIred

 

19 November 2025

 

Though it's November, wintry weather has arrived on Crandall Hill. Captured this morning - freezing fog after a little burst of snow. Now the eaves are dripping in the sunshine, a breeze stirring the trees as always.

Welcome and Unwelcome

The prompt for my writing practice was "weeds sprout overnight." This is my effort - pictures added later.

Left to its own devices, it will carpet the soil with leafy foliage, some variegated milky green, some just green. The roots run everywhere, eventually shooting up stems that flower, broadcasting seeds far and wide to begin again.

Last summer I dug and I mulched and still this spring, there it was again, and now, the calendar turned to August, I’ve dug and pulled and still new colonies everywhere. I should just give up and let it go. 

But still, I try to resurrect some semblance of beauty from this flower bed, tucked up against the house. There’s an oak leaf hydrangea purchased at a half price sale to complement the old fashioned ones that flank the front porch, planted so many years ago by other hands. It took years for it to thrive - perhaps it was the actions of the woodchuck trying to burrow under its roots and into the foundation that kicked it into survival mode. Now it is lush and puts out lots of the blossoms that dry beautifully for fall flower arranging.

And the lilies - the orange ditch lilies and yellow stello d’oro and the deep burgundy ones that Marybeth gave me. 

There are a few lupines and orange poppies and bachelor buttons and forget me nots and random foxglove in pink and deep pink and white.

And this year, after a hiatus, there are hollyhocks. Years ago, Grandma Metzger had hollyhocks marching along that side of the house - those old fashioned flowers in pink and white and purple. They bloom only every other year, the first year putting out foliage and then the next year the tall blooms, which if left to go to seed, spread those seeds for the next year’s plants. It was with great delight that I spotted the distinctive foliage this year. I await their blooms as the summer begins to fade.

Weeds sprout overnight. In the hoop house, self-seeded calendula and marigolds and nasturtiums and dill and cilantro are almost weedlike in their habits but I cannot bear to just tear them out - opting rather to relocate to bare spots elsewhere like my flower boxes and the holes in the stumps left behind when two maple trees had to be cut. A riot of color for late summer.

Even a few sunflowers grow tall in the hoop house every year and I leave them for the birds, hoping they'll leave enough seeds behind for next year.

More About Apples

I sometimes find the long-ago voices* tell a delightful story. While the words are from another, the photos are my own!

They are wonderful things, these apples: packages put up in convenient size, just about right for a lunch. Their sparkling pulp is spotlessly clean, "untouched by human hands"; filled with its delicious and refreshing juice, yet packed so it does not spill when the container is opened. Solid enough to stand handling well, yet soft enough to open readily and yield its delights to the pressure of the teeth.

They are "non refillable bottles"; their contents germ-free, pure and sanitary. They are cased in waterproof covers, that do not soil readily and are easily cleaned. They are smooth and cool, beautiful decorated with color. Lastly they are given a touch of perfume, delicate, elusive, but irresistible; and then, pleasing to the sight,  the sense of smell, the touch, the taste and the appetite, they are given clearance papers by the 'factory' and are ready for market.

A dozen, a hundred styles and flavors, a full line, for all tastes and for every month in the year, yet every style is a uniform quality, year after, from one or thousands of 'factories' in mass production,

What a marvelous thing it is for trees to do! A tiny seed sprouts in the earth, grows a stem and bears leaves and lets them fall.

For six years or ten, it does this, and then from the bare twigs of winter, from hard wood and bitter bark, the secret which it held deep in its heart from the beginning comes to birth: pink pearls with their crimson flame, that spread into the glory of fragrant bloom, pink and white and lavender, and in them another secret, only to be revealed in months to come.

Bees come and go, and warblers flutter and sing; the petals fall; and the tree that never moves from its place, with only sunshine and rain and summer winds and bits of rock to work with, and the patience of a few short months, gives us such lovely gifts as these!

*These are the words of J.C. Galloway, described as a 'student of nature, well versed in the flora and fauna of the local area'. Mr. Galloway wrote "Nature Notes" for the Port Allegany Reporter newspaper for many a year and was a good friend of my newspaperman grandfather, who often published Galloway's essays in The Potter Enterprise. I shared Galloway's study of buckwheat back in 2022.

Milkweed

May 24, 2025
Milkweed growing in the hoop house
has a head start on the outdoor ones!
 

We let milkweed grow in select spaces in the hoop house as an attractant for butterflies. But it's edible too. My newspaperman Grandfather, W.D. Fish, refers to himself as Golly in his weekly newspaper column, widely read - even by the Metzgers and Mattesons who lived here before this present generation.

He writes in 1965:

Ever eat milkweed greens? If not you missed something good. At any rate, 'way back about 1885, when this old timer was ten years old, we had some. We'll tell the story and some readers may be interested.

Our family lived about a mile from Whitesville in a small one-story cottage at the mouth of Hazletine Gully. A tiny stream ran down the gully but it was so small it would run out of water in a dry season. There were three other families that lived nearby. One was Calvin Jones. 

Neighbor Jones had fenced in about one acre of land along the stream for pasture for two or three calves. During one summer there were no calves and milkweeds thrived.

Golly's mother – bless her kindly heart, gathered the new and tender ends of the plants. Where a tender stem was broken off a new growth would quickly appear. This meant a consistent supply of greens for weeks or maybe for months. How mother prepared and cooked the milkweed Golly was too young to remember, but they were excellent food

The greens cost nothing. mother made our bread – salt rising of course – eggs were 10 to 12 cents per dozen and butter was 10 to 12 cents a pound.

At the head of the gully was the Hazletine farm. Ed Hazletine had a large orchard with many varieties of apples. He kindly would give all the apples you could use. We believe the man would have been insulted if you had offered to pay for them.

He had a box mounted on the fence bordering the orchard with large letters "Hungry Box." When early apples became ripe, the box was filled. They were free as the air we breathe.

Some folks scoff at the words, "the good old days" but there were some good old days almost 100 years ago. Golly knows!

Golly, so old he lives much with his memories, recalls his mother telling, after he was of adult age, of my awakening her in the dead of night and demanding that she sing "Minnie." It was a real task but dear, kind mother did it. Now we can remember neither tune nor words.

Interested in trying to forage milkweed? Up-to-date information can be found here.  And I'll have to keep looking for "Minnie" but I'll save that for my personal blog. 

Apple Evaporator

As the apple blossoms flutter to the ground in our Pennsylvania orchard, we wonder will there be apples in the fall - will the fruit set, avoid insects and disease, and the ravages of unpredictable weather?

My newspaperman grandfather, plying his trade in Coudersport from the 1920s until his death in 1969, wrote often of his experiences as a youth in nearby Whitesville, N.Y. This remembrance of the apple industry of the late 19th Century deserves to be shared.

W.D. "Golly" Fish writes:

Are there apple evaporators in this year of the 1965! I doubt it. Who would want dried apples in these days? And could anybody be so hungry he would eat dried apple pie?

Every farmer had an apple orchard a half century or so ago but there are few orchards in this area at present. The old trees are gone and young trees have not been planted. It is probable that if small trees were planted now deer would eat and ruin them. If they were in a valley, if the deer did not destroy them the beavers would.

I had a job in the evaporator at Whitesville about 1895. It was built by Merz Brothers of Webster, N.Y. Since it was a boost for the village, volunteer help was solicited. It was sort of understood that those who lent a hand in erecting the building, some 30 x 72 feet, would be favored in employment when apple drying started.

Golly, a youth, anxious for a job, worked ten hours a day, one week, for nothing and boarded at home when he did get the job. He worked nights, keeping the furnaces hot, and three or four times a night he had to go to the second floor and turn the apple slices that they might dry evenly. The pay – memory fails but it was about one dollar per night. A dollar was real money in those days!

A building I imagine to be similar to the
Merz Brothers structure in Whitesville

In his youth, Golly worked at a variety of jobs – farm hand, sawmill worker, made honey boxes, worked in a cheese box factory, shoveled earth in gas line ditch and many other activities – but printing intrigued and fascinated him above all else.

The old apple dry house disappeared years ago and apple orchards are scanty in Whitesville area. They have departed with the blacksmith shops and the sawmills.

Change! Change! Change!

Farming From The Interstate

Whizzing by on the interstate, I can grab only a brief moment, my phone pointed out the window, to capture farming nuance in this vast and troubled country. But the pictures tell a story of struggle and success, even in the same frame. 

... and from Ohio, this tribute to Rutherford B. Hayes, America's 19th President, painted on the side of a barn:

"The bold enterprises are the successful ones. Take counsel of hopes rather than fears to win in this business."

Hayes served as chief executive at the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the modern industrial age. He was well suited to the task, having earned a steadfast reputation for integrity throughout his career as a soldier and a statesman. Upstanding, moral, and honest, Hayes was ironically elected after one of the most lengthy, bitterly disputed, and corrupt presidential elections in American history.

One can only hope that an upstanding, moral and honest person will rise up to end this bitterly disputed and corrupt period of history we're enduring in 2025.

 

Slide Rock Apple Orchards

Orchard Tractors from the 1950s

We packed up and headed west a couple of weeks ago for a visit with daughter Kate's family in the mountains of Arizona. Always drawn to Farmers' Markets while traveling (we visited Flagstaff's on Sunday), we also seem to find our way to farms. 

Slide Rock State Park was our target that day with plans to soak up the sunshine, hike and bask in that cosmic energy unique to the red rocks of Sedona. And so it was that we discovered the Pendley Homestead.

 

Frank and Jane Pendley's offspring carried on their family's farming heritage until the mid-1980s when they sold the orchard to the state of Arizona and it became Slide Rock State Park, incorporating a popular swimming spot (in the Coconino National Forest where our daughter is Watershed Program Manager) with natural water slides and icy-cold water even in the height of summer.

Reimagined sites, with their carefully crafted descriptions and found objects pieced together send me on a journey to know more, to really imagine with my own sensibilities, the lives lived and lost in those spaces. Twenty-first century research tools at my fingertips can offer me a glimpse of the trials and tribulations of a family making their way in the early twentieth century - making their way in a western landscape so very different from our gently rolling Potter County hills.

But they faced the same kinds of vicissitudes of farming as we do, even with our 'modern' methods. Hailstorms, late spring freezes, deer damage, insect damage, injury, accidents, finding markets for the fruit - it's all there in the records of old newspapers from the era.

From 1970,  the headline screams "Oak Creek Fruit Crop Wiped Out By Cold Snap" and the story goes on to report: "What appeared to be one of the largest deciduous fruit crops in many years in Oak Creek Canyon is now only a dream."

1934: "An experiment in Oak Creek Canyon to help control insect pests was underway by the agriculture experimental station of the University of Arizona. Frank Pendley, prominent fruit grower in the district, asked for help with reference to the wooly aphis in his orchard." 

This from 1963: "What would you do if you had a thousand boxes of apples and nowhere to sell them? That's the position in which Tom Pendley finds himself in this fall and he frankly is at a loss as to what to do about it." And in 1971, it was "Oak Creek Orchard Men Battling Deer ... Antlered Invaders Love Fruit." 

The Pendley home today

With a backdrop of the red rocks, fruit trees along Oak Creek

Read more about the Pendley Homestead here.

A Warm Welcome

 

What fun to share this old farmstead with old friends - that is friends who shared the journey through the 12 years in the Coudersport Area Schools!

We hosted Jane's class reunion last Saturday afternoon, scrambling to accommodate everyone if rain promised by the weather folks came to pass. But after on and off showers in the morning, the skies cleared for the afternoon reunion and 70-somethings enjoyed catching up and laughing and remembering the good old days.

Classmates David Schaub and Tom Shirey, remembering their glory days on Metzger* Field (next to the high school), posed questions about the origin of the old football field to Coudersport Library Director Teri McDowell and she was off and running.

Her well-researched presentation about the history of football in Coudersport and the athletic fields in the community was a highlight of a delightful afternoon. 

It was only after everyone had departed and the rains came and went that the sign on the barn changed to this!

*While the athletic field bears the name Metzger, the benefactor was distantly related to these Metzgers! 

From 1907

 

1907

"The industry is one of the most important in the community because it purchases the grain of the farmers in this section, always paying the best market price for it. Industries of this nature are indispensable help in the commercial upbuilding of our community."

From The Potter Enterprise, 1907:

"At the corner of Main and Chestnut streets stands one of the most completely equipped and successfully operated flour and feed mills in this section of the state. Their location is very advantageous owing to the fact that the railway switch used by them is in direct connections with the C & PA Railroad,  so direct in fact that is is but the work of a minute to swing the cars either loaded or unloaded upon the main track, thus avoiding the confusion and loss of time attendant upon a long period of switching."

"At the right of the switch projects the elevator opening from the mill.... Two men shoveling the grain from the car into the elevator can empty a car in exactly two and one half hours. A few steps to the right and a trap opening disclosed the belt elevator that was conveying the wheat to the machine that was to give it the first process in becoming flour."

"Seven hundred bushels per hour are carried by this smoothly running and comparatively noiseless elevator to a very ingenious machine called a separator which takes out the roughest dirt. ... Just the width of an elevator shaft separated the "cleaner" from the polishing machine containing six double rollers made of the finest quality of chilled steel and revolving in different directions with varying degrees of speed..."

"Another turn, a walk of about 20 feet and perhaps the most marvelous machine stands. Underneath are numerous canvas tubes that extend to every elevator in the building except the outside one.  Mr. Guilden opened the top and then the flour as it came from the various machines through the elevators sifted by this wonderful machine into the various brands of flour."

"The plant has a capacity of one hundred and fifty barrels of flour per day. Owing to the fact that the company has plenty of fine storage room, they are not under the necessity of sacking their flour as fast as they mill it. They produce fifty tons of feed in 24 hours, The complete storage capacity of the plant is forty thousand bushels."

"A fine grade of buckwheat flour put out by this concern is creating a demand for itself throughout the country. Corn meal is also an important output, Some of the brand of flour manufactured are Gold Eagle, Special Patent, Choice Patent and Fancy Blended."

"The Eulalia Milling Company was established in 1905 by D.W. Van Wegen of this place and Miles Johnson of Cross Fork. Both are these men are far sighted and progressive business men who are always ready to do all within the scope of their influence for the advancement of Coudersport."

Remembering

Yesterday was the birthdate of Arthur Eugene Metzger. Were he still alive, he would be 100 years old.

His fierce love for this farm - these pieces of land stitched together by the Dingman Run Road - defined him in so many ways. It was this love that was planted in the man I married, the man who carries the name, often these days with the Jr. suffix omitted as the Senior Arthur has been gone for more than 40 years.

Polio - infantile paralysis - struck on this farm in the summer of 1944, days before Arthur and Wanda Gooch had planned to be married. 

From The Potter Enterprise, August 10, 1944

Arthur, with Wanda by his side, spent months in the hospital in Sayre and later at a rehabilitation facility in West Virginia.

Potter Enterprise, 1946

'Never fully recovered,' the newspaper story says. But the man I first met in 1970 had recovered and built (with Wanda always at his side) a fulfilling life - a much different life than the one he had dreamed of on this farm. He walked with the assistance of leg braces and crutches, his broad shoulders and strong arms a testament to his strength and determination. They had been a part of his life since that fateful summer.

Farming - especially in the days before air-conditioned mega tractors and gps guided equipment - demanded great physical strength and, while the whole family supported the effort, it was too much. By this time, he was raising two children, and his parents sharing farming responsibilities while caring for the older generation and raising a young daughter, were stretched to their limits. He knew his farming dream wouldn't support the needs of a growing family. The whole family pitched in to make it work as he set off to college at nearby St. Bonaventure and graduating magna cum laude in 1961.

His career as an accountant with the Federal Government took the family from the farm to locations in New York, the Harrisburg area and then northeastern Pennsylvania. Nearly every weekend and every hunting season, they packed up the station wagon traveled back to the farm.

He and Wanda planned their future together here, a time when they could retire. They fixed up the old horse barn, built a new workshop when the old one was destroyed by fire, and made some modern updates in the old farmhouse.

Memories are blurry sometimes, much like the picture at the top of this post. Though I've heard pieces of this story from many perspectives over the years, it's not my story to tell. Perhaps some day those who carry the memories - his sister Dawn, his daughter Carol and his son, Arthur, will tell their own stories.

I like to think of him as a grandfather, for the birth of our daughter Kate changed him, softened what I perceived as a hard, protective shell and brought him great joy. In fact, they delighted in one another.

By the time Joey was born four years later, Arthur Sr. was ill and returning to this farm in retirement was just a dream. He died in this house in the early summer of 1983.

We all miss him.

with grandson Joseph Arthur, February 1982

 

Walk The Line

February 26, 2024

A beautiful afternoon - way too warm for typical February but what's typical as we adapt to climate change? We walked along the borders of our property under blue skies, geese honking above on their northward migration. Both of us using trek poles on the uneven ground, over our own hills and dales, checking in with the fluttering orange surveyor's tape marking the iron stakes pounded into the ground so very many years ago.

Nestled just a foot above the ground in the brush, this engineering marvel, caught my eye.

Ground Hog Day

 It's early morning on February 2 and those hardy souls in Punxsutawney are ready for their moment in the bright glare of television lights with their beloved Phil waiting in his burrow.

That first year Arthur and his family had moved away from the beloved family farm, he spent some time in Children's Hospital in Utica, N.Y. Potter County friends and neighbors showered him with cards and letters and, seeing it was in February, Valentines too - many handmade by his former classmates in Mrs. Dewey's room at the Coudersport Elementary School.

His mother, Wanda, had saved these letters and some time later passed them on to him and, being the sentimental one he is, they went into a box into the attic.

I pulled that box out last week and this fell from one of the envelopes along with a card and letter from Aunt Margie Gooch.

  

Salt Rising Bread

I am convinced there lingers in this old farmhouse a ghostly whiff of salt rising bread. This cold January morning, it joins the fresh aroma from bread we tucked into our cooler when we departed our daughter's Arizona home Wednesday morning. 

Kate has taken up salt rising bread mantle in our family, the recipe passed to her by her great-aunt Dawn Metzger Newton, who learned from her mother in this same farmhouse kitchen where we toasted Kate's bread as special treat for breakfast today.

Salt rising bread carries its own mystique in these parts. These days, the bread from local bakeries (particularly the Giant Market in Wellsville or the Angelica version sold in some stores) is popular and delicious, but for those who grew up with the old-fashioned variety, it's not the same.

It took me a long time to enjoy salt rising bread. My grandfather, newspaperman W.D. "Golly" Fish, loved salt rising bread and I can still see him reaching for a thick slice from the bread plate which accompanied every meal at my grandparents' home. I thought it was disgusting, mostly from its odor. which might be described as dirty gym socks or worse. 

He was a connoisseur of salt rising bread and often wrote about it in his weekly column.

This from November 1967:

"Salt Rising Bread.  It was just about 100 years ago when Golly's parents were united in marriage. Mother had learned as a young girl the art of making salt rising bread. She lived to be 85 years. All that time she baked salt rising and no other kind of bread. All his life it has been Golly's staff of life. Maybe this accounts for the longevity of this scribe."

He wrote so often about his love affair with the bread that readers began bringing him their offerings - both from home kitchens or from local and far-flung bakeries.

As a matter of fact, I remember my future grandmother-in-law, Thelma Metzger, soon after I made her acquaintance, telling me that my grandfather once pronounced her salt rising bread the best he'd had since his mother was living.

Making salt rising bread is not as simple as putting together a yeasted bread. It involves temperature control to grow the sponge. Cookbook author James Beard writes in "Beard on Bread:"

"Salt rising bread is one of the oldest breads in this country, It has delicious and unusual flavor and a very smooth texture. In fact, it is one of the most remarkable of all breads. It does present one great difficulty for the bread maker. It is unpredictable. You may try the same recipe three or four times without success to find that it works the fifth time."

And from the New York Times in an article from 2020, as the world turned to sour dough during the Covid Pandemic:

"... the delegation of bakers who make salt rising bread agree: You want to wake up to it! You want it to hit you the second you walk into the kitchen because it's the auspicious whiff of a successful salt rising starter, the first sign that efficient bacteria have been working hard all night, metabolizing protein in a fast, wild fermentation filling the starter with hydrogen sulfide and other gasses. It's a promise that within several hours, if all goes well, a flat-topped, fine crumbed loaf will come out a rich, yellow gold from the oven."

Kate's recipe, bearing some water spots and other stains, was typed on a computer, each step carefully detailed and described by Aunt Dawn to help insure success. Kate even had a hands-on lesson before she perfected her own technique that involves a yogurt maker and ways of turning off and on an electric oven to maintain the perfect temperature. And even then, there are occasional failures.

While I've never ventured into the world of salt rising bread making, perhaps this will be winter that I do, summoning the friendly ghosts who set their starter in this very kitchen.

And to answer the question as to why it's salt-rising bread? I read today that pioneer women always kept a bag of rock salt by the fire where they cooked. When they would make the starter, they would tuck it down into the warm bag of rock salt which kept it at the right temperature.

From Potter Enterprise, 1949

From Potter Enterprise, 1938

Autumn

My barn boots leave a path through the dew-heavy grass on the way to the high tunnel these autumn mornings - a path that disappears as the sun moves higher in the sky.

When we arrive at October, everything looks tired in there save the August lettuce planting, still bright and cheerful just inside the door.

There are a few tomato vines tethered to their strings with fruit still ripening - especially the rangy bright yellow Sun Golds.  Warm sunny weather brought us a couple more zucchinis and brave flowers under the mildewy leaves still attract bees - bumblebees mostly as the honeybees prefer working the fields of goldenrod.

 

My penchant for leaving once-cultivated flowers to self seed yields bountiful crops of calendula, nasturtiums, marigolds and sunflowers growing in random places throughout the tunnel, leaving seed heads that keep the chickadees and goldfinches happy before we fill the bird feeders.

But the star of the show is the trellis with Fortex snap beans still putting out blossoms and each day handfuls of  lovely green beans!

My goal is to have the cleanup complete and most beds cleared of their spent plants, vines and weeds before the killing freeze sends the temperatures into the 20s.and ends growing time even under the soaring plastic cover.

Kale, chard and the few carrots will stand the killing freeze that's coming soon and I'll soon stretch floating row cover over their beds in hopes of keeping something green on the table into the winter.

Effects Of Climate Change?

In other years this would be the time of year we're wandering through the apple orchard, looking for those first ripening early season apples - Yellow Transparent , Zestar, Williams Pride or the famed Duchess of Oldenburg.

But it's not to be in 2023 for a late season freeze (21 degrees) in May dashed our hopes for a bountiful harvest.

Therefore, we won't be offering our spectacular organic apple cider this fall and there won't be a farmstand opening in the former horse barn.

Here's a report from Greg Peck (Cornell University) and Scott Ramsey (New York Cider Association), published on July 17 of this year that tells the sad story.

"For cider apple growers in New York, 2023 was set up to be a banner year. Many orchards that had been planted over the past 10 years were finally expected to be in full production... There was a tremendous bloom on cider apple trees in 2023.

Unfortunately, cold temperature returned with a vengeance on 18 May. Most region experienced temperature below freezing, with some locations getting into the mid-20s. Trees in bloom or with small fruitlets experience a range of damage from outright crop failure to varying levels of fruit loss and fruit peel damage...."

You can learn more about the frost/freeze event by visiting https://data.nysipm.org/weather-events/20230518/map.html

And Pennsylvania DEP has gathered information about Climate Change here.

Milkweed

 

I've been keeping my eyes on the milkweed plants that have taken root in the high tunnel, waiting for this annual event.

Larva of the Monarch Butterfly - I spotted 10 in various instar stages last week when I carried my phone with me for my morning check-in.

This morning it's kinda chilly - 49 degrees - and I'm sitting in the living room with a second cup of coffee. But I'll don the fleece soon and pull on my barn boots and visit the milkweed patch to check on the caterpillars. 

I read this article this morning to refresh my memory about the life stages of the monarch. Now I know that I won't find the chrysalis on the milkweed but will perhaps they'll be hidden nearby.

Stay tuned!

Potato Time Again

There are potatoes sending out sprouts in our garden space - at least I think they're growing. The climate-change weather pattern brought us above-normal temperatures then below-normal temperatures and now heat and lack of precipitation.

Arthur, seduced by the offerings of our favorite organic seed potato purveyors, ordered way more seed potatoes that we want or need to plant this spring. We have extras safely stored in the cellar waiting to go to someone who is looking for variety and deliciousness and wholesomeness - for they are certified organic certified seed potatoes.

Send an email (metzgerfarm@gmail.com) or call the home phone (814-274-8004) if you're interested - time's a-wastin'!

Soon there will be acres and acres of potatoes growing in the fields on this old farm. As a matter of fact, my olfactory senses tell me there's some manure involved this sunny day.

Carol Metzger (Wilkerson) and
Dawn Metzger (Newton) among the
potatoes "by the sugar bush".
July 1950

and from the same roll of film,
this one says "over to Sheldon's"
See the tractor near the horizon?