He can’t play the guitar. He can’t do chores. He can’t help me clean the cafe to get it ready to open. Then we remembered how we used to spend those final, restless days of winter, when the sun would shine one moment, and ice, hail and rain would fall from the sky the next, […]
Poor guy.
Yes. I got a lovely poem for my birthday. The other part of the story was that we got to spend the weekend in the ER after Bob fell on the ice while doing chores. He broke his arm in two places. He typed that poem up anyhow, even though his arm was blown up […]
Every Day
Turned 50 on Monday. Woke up to this beside my bed, my gift from Bob: Every day, we sit with the stream. As the spark of Venus fades into the wakening embers of dawn over the field, we turn to the path that takes us into the woods, threading through the trees, crossing rows of […]
Oh my oh my…
Who says a great Christmas gift can’t also be a tax write-off? For years, Dad wanted an ultrasonic pregnancy tester for the pigs and sheep. Mom fought him on it. “We don’t need to check for pregnancy when we can just see if they come back into heat!” Admittedly, that frugal perspective has kept this […]
Kitchen Serenade
This is just a moment. It’s an ordinary ….and yet extraordinary moment. And I want to capture it here. I’m standing in the kitchen cooking dinner, listening to some jazz. Bob hears a song he likes, and picks up his guitar to play along. I’m so taken with this. With him. It’s so easy to […]
Fashion Forward Farmers
We couldn’t send our fashion-loving daughters down to NYC for a month to study clothing design and construction without taking a few field trips into the depths of one of the fashion savviest metropolises in the world. New York doesn’t just do new fashion. It does what Saoirse and Ula love best, which is second-hand, or vintage, […]
Everyone Else’s Expectations
It was the hardest lesson I had to learn as a writer. If people who never met me liked something I wrote, they somehow got it in their heads that I was….well…likable and admirable. But every person has different qualities that they find likable and admirable. And I couldn’t possibly have all those qualities. So when […]
Worth It.
Every year I forget. I think, when the cafe closes, life will slow down. I’ll have time to work on my novel. I’ll have time to work on the interview transcripts I have of Mom and Dad talking about how and why we’ve done things on the farm. I’ll have time to rest. I’ll have […]
How the Sausage Gets Made
No. This is not pornography. This is artificial insemination. Winter is a time of intimacies….and not just for humans. This week we separated the rams from the ewes, their breeding cycle complete. And we’ve been monitoring the pigs for when they come into heat so that we can artificially inseminate them. In January, my […]
Red Sky at Morning
Photo by Pixabay “You can’t miss it if you don’t know it’s gone.” Mom remains her pragmatic, equanimous self as we sit by the tree on Christmas morning after doing chores. She lost a chunk of her memories after a major heart surgery back in 2016. This fall, she’s been in and out of […]
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