June 14, 2009

• Of calves, snakes, roses and other sundries

  

  Mary-Kate’s heifer Hectic had a calf this past week.  Unfortunately it was a bull calf.  My apologies to you men out there, but in the bovine world an excess of males is a bad thing.  Before he was sold, however, her friend Arie managed to name him Horatio.  Where do they come up with these names?  Is this a foretaste of things to come?  I pity their children.

  

  It seems that we have a snake population boom around here.  I startled a total of five snakes the other day.  Or the same snake five times in five different places.  Whatever!  I don’t really care for snakes but these are garter snakes and they eat bugs so I don’t mind having them around as long as they keep their distance.

  

  Yesterday Ian left to play soldier for two weeks.  Being just like his obsessive compulsive mother he spent the last few evenings getting last minute things done before he left.  He learned the wisdom of the saying, “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”

  

  While mowing along the side of the road and around the guard posts, which he had fixed that day at work, he managed to catch on with the mower deck and break it off.  The rest of the people on the highway department that he works with are going to be a little annoyed to find they have to fix another post on Indian Town road, again.  Thank you, Ian.  He knows that’s part of the mowing job I won’t do because that bank is steep and scares me. 

  

  I walked out Friday morning after the downpours that we had in the night to find that my rose bushes are beginning to bloom.  There is something so hopeful about the sight of a rose in full bloom.  The bushes that Doug bought me sixteen years ago after our daughter died are in bloom too.  Their scent is in the air all around when the sun warms up the flowers.  The wild roses are in bloom down in the valley and you can smell them too.  What a heady fragrance they give off.  It is my favorite time of year to sit on the deck of an evening and just close my eyes and drink in the scents and sounds of summer.

  

  Even though the temperatures are warm and the sun stays up for longer and longer times, cold weather is never far from our minds around here.  The canning frenzy has begun in earnest.  I spent all of Saturday making jam.  One of my families favorites, three fruit jam.  This one I will make several times throughout the summer until the rhubarb is exhausted.  This particular session yielded 26 quarts.

  

  Last week Matthew and I did a fix up job on the shed and Mary-Kate gave it a much needed coat of paint.  We are trying to do a lot of work around here that needs doing without spending a lot of money so we only used what paint we had laying around.  The results were surprisingly nice.  Then on Friday Mary-Kate decided to paint a smiley face on the garden side of the shed to replace the old one that I used to have in the garden.  It ended up looking strangely like Wilson, Tom Hanks friend from the movie Castaway.  It makes me happy to see it out there smiling down on the vegetable plants.

  • 10:09 am
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