Farm chores are messier on rainy days.  There’s the mud.  There’s the wet underbrush you have to run through and the rising creek you wade through while chasing escaped calves back through the hole in the fence.  You get soaked to the knees if you’re lucky, and to the waist if you’re not.  Eight or ten hours later,
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Sometimes, on busy days in busy weeks, when there’s too much to do and too much bad news, it’s soothing to just pull off the road and take a moment to look at the sky. Focus first on the large, cottony clouds as they drift across the blue background, reshaping themselves into new forms.    Follow
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In case you haven’t heard, today is Earth Day 2010.  The first organized Earth Day celebration was forty years ago on April 22, 1970.  I was in elementary school then, and really don’t remember hearing about it.  The politics of conservation weren’t much on my mind back then.  I was more concerned about kittens, spelling tests,
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I’m back from a rare weekend spent away from family and the farm, and with one more full night of sleep, I might be recovered.  Each April, I journey north for a weekend writer’s retreat, and it is one of the highlights of my spring.  As much as I love my life here on the farm, sometimes I crave the
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Two small, spring-fed creeks flow past the fencelines onto our farm, then merge into one not far from the house.  The upper branch drains a larger area and sometimes floods out of its banks, but its spring isn’t as strong.  It rarely flows steadily once summer heat sets in.  It is, however, the more interesting of the two
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Mother Nature played quite a prank on us Saturday, which was the Vernal Equinox aka the first day of spring.   We got nine, or ten, or twelve inches of snow, depending on who in the neighborhood you asked and how many spots they measured before averaging the results to guess at the total snowfall.  It
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While I was looking through the digital photos on my hard drive, I came across a couple of photos I took on the way home from my son’s wedding. I’d say it’s a Southern thing, but I know a few people in the Midwest who’d put the National Bird Dog Museum under the must-see column on their vacation
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Sometimes I have to get away from the house . . . the office . . .  and the phone . . . and email . . . the internet . . . and the overflowing inbox and long to-do list .   Sometimes I need more room to breathe.  To think.  To slow down the frantic
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The passage of the seasons seems more dramatic in certain places.  One such place lies some ten miles up the road from the farm.  There, steps lead down the steep slope to a cliff’s edge.    I stop there often and follow the cliff path down to a stone bench set into the wall.  From there, 
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The office cat loves snowy weather.  She sits at the window for hours, though not because she wants to play outside.  She’s there for the influx of wild birds drawn to the feeders.   Granted, the birds come other days, too, but just a few, now and then.  When snow blankets their world, hiding much of
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