Here a little, there a little

Oh, look! My father- and mother-in-loves' house is so very scrumptious. Just pulling in to their farm for a family reunion makes a person happy.

A close second in the world of wonderful is that pie sign at the county fair. I didn't even have to eat any to get a sense of sweet satisfaction.

While we were in the great county of Humboldt we fed the pigeons in Eureka Old Town.
This was a first for my farm children.

 

They loved it.

Little ol' Victorian Ferndale is our favorite. The Mercantile, the Meat Market, the hat and shoe stores. It's like a Hollywood movie version of a small town but for real, because everyone there knows one another and stops to chat. And to figure out which of my husband's bajillion first cousins they went to high school with.

Yes, little Ferndale is our favorite. Unless it's littler Scotia with its big history, bigger timber and tiny houses all in a row.

 

The town of Scotia, as of this writing no longer a "company town" but not yet incorporated as a city, is a storybook of swept streets and pastel bungalows. My husband grew up here when everything was owned by the legendary (some say infamous now) Pacific Lumber Company.

 

Inside the Winema Theatre at Scotia is a staggering amount of unfinished, massive redwood timber framing and trim work. We wandered around in the cool and dark for 20 minutes, feeling like time travelers. Also feeling a little like trespassers because we had merely accidentally followed a paid tour group whose guide did not lock up. Or close the doors. Oops. And hey.

Back home the sunflowers didn't miss us at all.

                                   

 

Gee it was nice to come home again.

Tomatoes and green beans are heaping up waiting their turn in the canner as I type. I've said it before and brace yourselves because I'm going to say it again:

Is there anything sweeter than coming home again?

No, nothing sweeter than coming home again when the whole valley smells like a blackberry pie and the memories you just made will carry you through a lot of days of standing over the pressure canner, a lot of days of driving to ballet, a lot of days of your oldest child starting high school (!) and your others teaching the 3-year-old to read when you're not looking so then you have to put down the green beans and cry because that's your baby.

We take the sweet with the tart now and then. We move through our own history like we know it won't always be swept streets and pastel house fronts; sometimes it's carpool and craziness but it's, as they say, all good.

Simple shoe organizer

Do you trip over your children's shoes when you kiss them goodnight? (When you kiss the children, that is, not the shoes.)

Me too.

I used to see shoe bags in the stores. Back when I went to stores. I even have one hanging in the girls' bathroom. But it has a job holding hair ribbons and styling products. Also it is floral, and Madeleine and Sarah are so over a floral bedroom. (Good thing I can still inflict my Laura Ashley sensibilities on the younger two girls.)

So. I measured the bathroom hair ribbon holder and lo and behold decided after that exhausting research that I could sew a shoe holder for the big girls' Saltwater sandals and Converse sneakers, thus saving my toes from bumping into random objects on their floor at night.

(Your obligatory Suite aside: Boots, in this household, are another matter entirely. The Western boots we Suite girls collect basically need their own room. And even if you never, ever click over, you should click on that first one. It's all about me growing a pair. A-hem.)

Without further ado I started hacking up some feedsacks from the abundance of horse feed we go through around here. The colors work with the big girls' room and the theme is certainly appropriate. In case you've not run across this type of feedsack, I'm also known to sew grocery sacks and bookbags from it. It has the feel of oilcloth, it's washable and wipable, and the colors are very vibrant. Also, it's free. First I cut strips twice the width of the vintage pillowcase that I used for the back of the whole shebang. I could have used another feedsack but the girls liked the way this looked together.

Then I pinned the strips down the left and right side in mostly even rows. I sewed using a zig zag stitch for strength.

Then I found the center of each strip and pinned it down. I sewed one long row from top of the shoe holder to the bottom, right down the middle. This left me with big loopy pieces of feedsack strip to the left and right. I I found the center of those and pinned them down, repeating the long row of stitches from top to bottom.

For the final steps I had to make the horizontal rows of feedsack strips into pockets. To do this I pleated and pinned the bottoms only of each row, leaving the tops open to accept shoes.

The hardest part was the pleating. And don't get me wrong: it's not that hard. I started out by measuring and pinning but ended up, in my usual degage way, just eyeballing the pocket pleats. It worked out fine.

I don't have a grommet thingamajig so I used some heavy-duty webbing, sewn in place in smallish loops. Then I hung it from over-the-door hooks.

I think I'll go do a happy dance in the middle of their floor. Right after I find a solution for the boots.

i

All Things Bright and Beautiful

Grace with a dropped blossom.

A nest of dried grass and lint and wool.

I think they want to make friends.

***

New neighbor update:

I do think I ought not fume and post, people. It's just never a good idea.

They're still there. Their large blue-and-chrome motor home perpetually in my view as I garden, their Pit Bull barking as I garden in the beds beside my front porch, their parking job changing the traffic of the school bus and their existence changing the way I think about my rural life.

How blessed am I to have a home, to have dirt of my own to plant tomatoes and chard, to be able to lock my doors at night and call my harmless and goofy Retriever in from the yard? How blessed am I to know that I will have a next meal (or 90) at the same table, changing tablecloths to match the flowers my girls brought in? The working showers, the stuffed bookcases, the mommy time-outs.

The new (temporary) neighbors initially made my skin burn as though I were covered in fire ants. But that's moving on as surely as they will. They've brought a new element to the road. I think I'll call it gratefulness.

Rabbit Run

Careful with the hex wire. By the way, did you know that all the progressive feed stores no longer advertise "chicken wire" at all? It's "hex wire" thankyouverymuch. I wonder if there was some sort of fowl play with the naming conventions.

...Anywhat...

Wrap the hex wire around the legs of an available outdoor table. Be careful not to wrap up your baby sister in there.

Just kidding! Laura was merely on the outside looking in. Actually, she was trying to entice the bunnies with blades of grass poked through the wire. Because rabbits are well known to abandon all the grass under their hoppy little feet for some hand-picked exotic grass blade offered from baby sweet hands. I guess.

Let's not think about the best-laid plans today.

Let's think about something else instead. Like lavender. And barely visible in that photo? Last year's mint mojito recipe on a skewer. Why is it outside? In case I need a mojito while weeding. That's why.

While I Was Sewing

Cute block, huh?

A few more hints here.

That was the view distracting me at my quilting retreat.

And that was the sassy and sweet welcome home I received!

I had a marvelous weekend of stitchery and fun. I only missed my girls every other minute, but I know they had so much fun. My husband took them to the Grange for a potluck and a showing of Princess Bride. He also took them to a basketball game to even out the foof factor. The girls don't show any ill effects of my absence, so I might have to do it all again soon.

Our hostess at the retreat definitely gets my vote for homesteading woman of the year. Together with her four children and her husband (who has a full-time job outside the home) she quilts, makes yogurt and cheese including cheddar and parmesan, sells dozens of eggs and 80 gallons a month of raw milk, works their garden and woodlot, runs regularly, and in general makes me feel inspired to do more and do better.

She is a lovely woman I am so glad to have met. And, hurray! She lives just three miles from me and yet I'd never met her. I finished my quilt top; it's lovely and I shall update you with photos as I continue work on the pieced fussy-cut borders. I finished a truly beautiful quilt top and I made some new friends. But more importantly I returned home refreshed and ready for the day-to-day of it all.

I think seeing the beauty in that dailiness is the window of opportunity we're all so fervently seeking. For some reason I remember a momentary encounter of eight and a half years ago. I was driving through Kentucky Fried Chicken (such a flattering part of the memory, I know), having snuck out of bedrest with tiny Madeleine in her carseat in my beat-up Volvo station wagon.

My hugely pregnant self was wedged in so my never-long legs could reach the pedals while still allowing the steering wheel clearance to turn. My craving for a biscuit I can still feel intensely. I can even still hear the untintelligible voice from the drive-through speaker on that hot July day. I remember the difficulty I had rolling the window back up with a hand crank only to have to roll it down again when I reached the biscuit delivery moment.

On that day, along with my biscuit I received some advice that I have frankly not thought about between then and now.

"It's none of it work," said the grandmotherly woman who took my dollars and handed me my food. She looked meaningfully at my sleeping toddler (and probably at my pregancy-weary expression) before repeating herself. "It's none of it work."

"You just enjoy these years like they're never coming back. You hear?"

Big Bad Booger

Alright, it's a bad picture. I was driving past at 55 miles per hour. But go ahead and click on it if you'd like to get a clearer view of the utter horror and humiliation in that horse's eye. None of the other guys have to wear their hoods, Mom. I'll look like such a dork.

Super Sarah saves the day.

Sometimes she's Sleuthing Sarah, the mostly invisible and incredibly stealthy sister of Super Sarah.

And now, for this post's sponsoring moment, brought to you by Grace Hannah, who has a certain way with words. And play dough.

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First you should know that we're not that big on the booger talk around here. I swear. But we've had a few outbreaks --outbursts?-- of the snotty variety lately.

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The first sign of booger danger happened over the holidays. Grace became inexplicably bonded with a set of crayons that came free with the kiddie menu at a diner. She named them Bonnie Blue, Racing Red and Snot Green. Yes, I'm aware she dropped the alliteration. But she's 4. So enamored was she of the three free crayons that she clutched them across state lines and throughout several family get-togethers. She talked to them. She introduced them to her finger friends. (You know you want to click. And BONUS, I just did, only to realize there's ANOTHER booger-related Gracism. You gotta click.) And of course she wailed inconsolably when she lost Snot Green in the gutter during an ill-fated bathroom stop.

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You've not lived until you've heard my husband promising, to the amazement of random passers-by, to buy her another Snot Green just the minute we get home. But Daddy! They only have Snot Green at Denny's! In Calee-forneea! And Snot was SPECIAL.

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Our second brush with the tissue issue was a little stranger. And by that I mean a mite more odd, not a small person whom we've never met. (Don't talk to that short snot! she exclaimed. Not really. I might be overtired. Don't mind me.) This second foray into the realm of snot fascination occurred when I was chauferring a client just last week. I happened to have Grace and Laura in the Suburban at the time and my client was remarking how well-behaved my preschooler and baby were. (Why thank you so much.) Directly after her compliments Grace shouted out that Laura, whose carseat was still rear-facing, had mastered a great new skill. "Mom! Mommy! Laura can pick her own nose now!" (Mmm.Hmm. Incredibly well-behaved. Just not bribed-slash-threatened thoroughly enough before entertaining clients.)

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And finally, finally, we come to today's most embarrassing moment.

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You know, I used to say that my children were placed on this Earth to mortify me. I wonder why ever I stopped saying this. Also, at what point did I start laughing uncontrollably instead of feeling the blush? Does this mean I've "lost it" or "found it?" Anyone?

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Oh, yeah. Today.

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Today Grace and I were listening to a little vintage Wynonna Judd in the Suburban while the big girls were in computer class. I usually borrow the homeschool co-op's WiFi to catch up on email (and the odd tv show -- don't tell anyone) while the baby naps and Grace works on her numbers or plays Legos. But today we were rocking out and eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches on homemade wheat bread. Yum. The song was playing loud, the sun was shining, life was ... snotty.

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Because Grace was still belting out the swing-style "Big Bang Boogie" as we walked in to the schoolroom. In perfect tune, with the wrong lyrics: "Big Ba-aad Booger... A Big Ba-aad Booger."

I just looked at the other homeschool parents and shrugged. Whataya gonna do?

Panic Sets In

We spent a quiet weekend on the hobby farm.

My husband woke up late Saturday morning after working nearly 'round the clock all week on a big project. I woke up early Saturday morning after holding down the fort nearly single-handledly all week.

I tiptoed past the girls' rooms like a teenager sneaking out of the house at night, avoiding the creaky floorboards and barely breathing. The baby could sense me passing. I froze in place and waited for the quiet rustle of turning over in her crib.

I just wanted to putter in my kitchen, walk around the frosted farmyard with a steaming cup of coffee as the sun came up, check on my seedlings, and get my sewing machine warmed up. I had a little Valentine dress in store for Gracie and Laura, not to mention the quilting retreat of next weekend.

The puttering went fine. I reorganized my baking center. I bleached out the sinks. I dug through the bread box and gave the chickens a Saturday feast of crumbs and bread heels.

The frosty sunrise walk was as though I'd pushed a re-set button on my weekend. The garden is mostly still blanketed in mulch. My cold frame with garlic and salad seedlings is cute as can be. The horses followed me along the fenceline between garden and paddock, nickering for breakfast and pawing at the frozen ground for emphasis. I was sure the house was ready for breakfast as well but it was hard to go back inside.

I just knew there'd be something wrong with my sewing machine.

I've been quilting for almost 20 years. I started machine-piecing blocks in college as a way to avoid studying for finals. I moved on through strip quilting (hah hah hah... sounds like I was wild in college... anyway, for non-quilters: this means quilting with strips of fabric, not removing one's clothing to quilt) and hand applique. I flirted around with machine quilting for a while but wasn't really pleased with the results.

Almost every aspect of quilting is relaxing to me. I love the fabrics. I love the repetitive steps of piecing a block. I love arranging the blocks differently to see the quilt's potential finished beauty. I love the magic of a finished top emerging from the machine, shaken out and left on the back of the couch to admire before the work of making a quilt sandwich for backing and batting and binding.

So when a friend invited me to a hush-hush, exclusive quilters' retreat for this coming weekend, I knew something would go wrong.

First I was worried that I'd get uninvited after I lost my friend's 4-year-old child (however briefly).

Then I started losing sleep in earnest when I received the six pages of instructions. It's a mystery quilt, an original design by the famous quilter who hosts the retreat. I am instructed to buy certain yardages of certain color values in three separate color groupings and cut them into specific widths. I am instructed to burn the instructions after reading (just kidding).

The retreat is next weekend. I am sworn to secrecy, which of course means I'm gonna try to sneak my camera in and beg for blogging permission. I can tell you this: All quilters will arrive Friday with their sewing machines, rotary mats, fabric. All quilters will leave Saturday night with a finished quilt top.

Crikey. That doesn't sound remotely relaxing.

The brochure (book) even has scheduled time for walks in the woods and meals and snacks and chatting. Are they KIDDING?

I'm going to arrive with no clue of the quilt's design and LEAVE WITH IT FINISHED?

Panic sets in. The meditative walk at dawn, the quiet kitchen organization, was all for naught. When it got time to get the sewing machine out, I just knew. something. would. go. wrong.

There's no truth to that self-fulfilling prophecy idea, is there? For a full hour on Saturday I was sure my feed dogs (sewing machine part that feeds the fabric through at prescribed speed) wouldn't go back up. I flipped the switch. I consulted the manual. I unplugged the machine. I cried. I even wielded a screwdriver in my frantic state. No sewing machine, no retreat. My husband actually asked me to leave the room, such was my anxiety level.

Um. Did you know that feed dogs go up and down in a rotating motion as they feed the material? So they might actually be "up" and ready to work, even if they appear to be "down" ....

Well, friends, bear with me in my starstruck crafty freakouts. I'll try to sneak you some pictures.

Brave Little Celery

Brr... cold.



We have been experiencing a dry, cold January in our little farm village.



The power outages have been minimal compared to the other winters we've spent in this house, but as remote as we are, we are always prepared. The five-gallon containers of water are in storage. The generator stands ready to hum away the chilly blues. What else might we need for survival, my husband asked the girls one wintry day.

I give you Madeleine's "MacGyver List," second edition. Her first edition included the Suburban, her teddy bear and a cooler full of food.

She didn't exactly get the essence of minimalist survival embodied by MacGyver: You know, the list of what to carry in your pockets in case you're locked in a basement or cargo boat hold and need the end of a matchstick and a paperclip to secure your safety. Her second go-around was hardly more compact; in fact it got bigger and more complex. Because that's how we edit around here.

Magivers Kit
Things we'll need:
flashlight batterys
hot hands [these are chemical hand warmer pouches my husband takes to football games when the girls go along]
bottled gas (generator car + things)
matches [double underlined]
candles
flashlight in every room incase of emergency
homad bread (before power goes out)
check propane ? for gas stove CHECK
hot cocoa mix, powdered milk, sugar, choclat powder [she's my daughter alright]
bottled water
buckets of water
board games
SURVIVE [with an illustration of a mountain climbing stick figure on a snowy peak that sprouts out of the "U."]






That's what the celery is doing under its thick layer of mulch.

Roller Coaster, Check; SeeSaw, Check; Pendulum, CHECK

Oh, the back-and-forth of country life.

A couple of weeks ago, I shoveled up hens with my neighbor and lamented the not knowing to whom those bad chicken-eating dogs belonged.

Then, a week and a half ago, I met the kind and sweet owners of those bloodthirsty dogs and we commisserated on the whole tragedy. Promises and phone numbers were exchanged, people. Their kennel was to be shored up; our chickens were to be safe evermore.

KL gave me new hens, and, lo, they were nicer than the ones who went to chicken heaven. They started laying. All was good. For a day and a half.

Of course, the bad dogs kept coming back. They sniffed around the chicken yard and laughed at the memories of the big party they'd had. I kept the hens locked inside.

I spoke to the neighbors again. They threw up their hands in despair. The dogs are escape artists! They can't be contained! And we have to go to work every once in a while. But look! They're so sweet. We'll make the kennel FORT KNOX, we swear.

I swear, too. But only when pushed to the very limit.

Dog break-in number four occurred this morning at 10:00 in direct view of my kitchen window. I was unpacking from our four-day trip. The girls were all studying and the hens were all sunning themselves to kick off December properly.

Little did the feathered ones know how thin that winter sunshine really is. Nay, even the DOGS had no idea. Because this chicky had HAD it.

She hurt her healing hip with the wrestling of an injured hen OUT OF THE MOUTH of the worst dog. Then she tripped while throwing the bad dogs into her kennel. She cussed up a storm (sharky! criminy! like that) remembering that she had locked those dogs in there before and it did exactly no good. So then she further wrenched herself out of whack and into real pain by tying the dogs to the back deck.

Oh, yes, she did.

Then she called the nice neighbors. Who, of course, were not home. Then she called the nice sheriff.

And the pendulum swung a little bit toward normal.

Did you notice how I had to slip into the third person there? It was too grisly to have been me, I think.

Speaking of grisly, we have a mostly featherless but live hen in a towel-lined box our laundry room. Anyone know what to do about that?

The Broken Butt Roundup

There's just something wrong with that title.

And yet... there's no other way to say it.

How have y'all been spending the last week or so? I've missed you like the Dickens. (Where did that saying come from? Certainly not from, you know, a yearning to be reading Charles Dickens. Let's think for a minute....

Okay. Enough thinking.)

I can't wait to catch up on blog reading. I can't believe I can sit upright and type. I can't believe I have SO MANY blog posts in my brain just bursting to be, um, posted, and meanwhile I'm writing about my broken hiney and issues thereabout.

So let's get it over with: I'm too young for a hip replacement, or it's apparently not beyond hope of healing, or my doctor is into cruel and unusual punishment of my wild youth (I used to babysit my doctor's kids when I was a teenager. He knows too much.), or... my pain threshold is epic and I am paying the price of being too long too tough.

Who knows. What I DO KNOW is that I can walk today! Just like leaving a Benny Hin revival. (Only partly joking. And nobody smacked me on the forehead. I just laid in bed with a fever that killed a lot of brain cells and forced me not to move around much, that's all. God does work in mysterious ways. And it shouldn't take deathlike symptoms to keep me resting, now should it?)

Consider the parenthetical statements on, friends. I have so much to tell you and no way to categorize it all.

Of course we should start with the farm news:

This morning one of the rotten chicken-shredding dogs was baa-aack! I kid you not, the little monster (insert other, stronger word if you must -- my kids are in the room) had the nerve to come around looking for seconds.

Unluckily, as it happened, Sarah had already done her morning chores and the new little sweet hens were pecking around their yard like appetizers for the mongrel.

The rooster (of course, he's one of the formerly loathed cuckoo morons, but we can't put him in the crockpot now, not after his brush with death brought out his finer quality: lone survival) crowed a warning! Madeleine leapt to attention! We recognized the muddy furry beast as not one of our farmyard! We quickly dialed Daddy's cell phone!

Daddy u-turned his car and chased off the threat with a big stick and not a soft word! The girls closed the hens (and their protecting moron) into the safety of the henhouse! All was well!

But wait! No sooner did Daddy go back to the necessary commute but the DOG DID RETURN! (The nerve of him!)

We ran out of exclamation points!

I gimped myself out there because the horrid creature was actually IN the chicken yard after tunneling under the fence. This was obviously too big a job for the girls alone. He was snorfling around the hen's little sliding door and trying to work his way in to the ever-replenishing (Thank you, KL, for the new hens) breakfast buffet. And here's the bummer: He looked like a perfectly nice dog.

Oy.

I hauled him out of the chicken yard and of course called my husband. What to do? A nice little (albeit blood-hungry) dog whose owners are (darn it all anyway) nice neighbors of ours.

Chicken-hunting dogs. You can't live with 'em. You can't shoot 'em.

So I locked him in our kennel (Thanks, Carolyn, for the loan of your boys to put that together.) and the girls blocked the henhouse door with bricks. It was an exciting, and oh-so-typical welcome back to the walking life.

Thankful Tree

Somehow I messed up NaBloPoMo. Blogger wouldn't post my scheduled items, I couldn't log in as me to fix it for two days, my chickens were pulled limb from limb by stupid dogs, I broke my hip, the whole comma splice thing is annoying me already. Moving on.

It's really okay with me that I failed NaBloPoMo. Because I must tell you about my new favorite thing.

It's a Thankful Tree, shamelessly stolen from Margaret at our church. I am so in love with it that it might not be fair to my family. All that love aimed at an object. But trust me, you'll love it like that too.

All you have to do to create your own Thankful Tree is choose a branch from your backyard and embed it in sand or pebbles or a little Quickcrete. I am using a beautiful Manzanita branch that I once had on the wall as sculpture. I also chose one of my most gorgeously mossy terra cotta pots. But any old bucket will do.

Then have your children (or do this yourself if you are OCD like me) trace Oak and Maple and Ginko leaves onto construction paper in appropriate fall colors. Russet sounds good, doesn't it? The church has used real leaves before, but then they are no good for saving for.ev.er. As I might be wont to do. You too?

Then punch a little hole in the hundreds of leaves your children (or OCD you; remember, you're never too old to control the crafts) cut out. Thread some raffia or pretty ribbon through each hole.

Display them prettily on your sideboard in a pottery bowl next to the tree with a Sharpie marker or two.

As your Thanksgiving guests arrive, let them know they are welcome to fill out a Thankful Leaf. Or force them, if they are stodgy about it.

After the leaves are filled out (we encourage pre-writers to draw a picture), have them tie their leaves to the tree.

It is my favorite thing about Thanksgiving. Thanks, Margaret.

***

And, in case you're keeping score at home, I can't take any pictures at this time as I am currently unable to walk. Standing up, sitting down, transitioning between the two: none of them any good. This should be fun.

When I Woke Up Today I Had A Neighbor

There's gold in them there hills.

Not far from our home is a hill filled with gold. It's been mined for nearly 100 years by methods high- and low-tech alike. Once a year we attend a small-town summer festival commemorating local mining history. We pay $5 or $6 for each girl to sift through a colander of dirt to "find" some gold nuggets. Then a man in grubby Levis will use calloused hands to deposit the gold flakes into a tiny vial of water that's exactly like perfume samples used to be on my neighbor lady's Avon catalogs. Only not stinky.

The girls keep track of their gold nuggets for a while, but the experience of sifting through the sand and gravel and dirt to find something shiny and valuable is living history. They hang on to that for longer, I hope.

I've been living some of that history over the past several months. And as I drive the back roads (way too much), I sift over and over the dirt and the gravel of disappointment in hopes that I'll have a nugget to display. Or to deposit in my bank of faith in humanity. I may need to draw on that account every once in a while.

Neighbors are problematic. Neighbors are just so -- human. To tell you the truth, so am I.

We moved to this idyllic, storybook setting more than two years ago after years of dreaming of living not just in the country, but right here. Our community is legendarily desirable. The land is gorgeous, the commute is decent, and the people are incredibly diverse in the best possible meaning of that word. We live side by side with ranchers and fiber artists and loggers and yoga teachers.

The Grange is the epicenter of a rural arts society where I can learn wreath making and woodworking and quilting ... and where we can watch films on a snowy winter evening during a potluck. The church reaches out to our area's families with sweetheart dinners and free babysitting services. The school hosts a spring carnival that draws all 400 people in a 10-mile radius... and some from further away... to play games that have no electronics in sight.

Nurseries and vineyards and community-supported agriculture are all within shouting distance of our old church-turned-farmhouse. And it's so very quiet here. On any given day, I swear the loudest noises are children playing a mile away and Canada geese honking in the next valley. Because there's no other noise. No traffic, no media, no hustle of commerce.

But the trade-off that comes with all this utopian village life is that we are all up in one another's business. We all know whether the bed-and-breakfast owners like horses (or not), whether the new gal on the road picks her kids up at school on time (or not), whether those other neighbors' dog slaughtered my chickens in broad daylight (oh, he did).

We all get to live side by side. The big front-porch movement in urban planning over the past decades? It's exactly based on our village, I'm pretty sure. We watch our neighbors walk on fine evenings. We ride our horses on the lane and wave to others sipping iced tea on their porches. We help when a widow needs a new foundation (literally, we dig under the piers with a dozen shovels and as many local men replacing concrete blocks at their own expense and while the big game's on to boot). We mow the elderly folks' pastures and we bring food when someone's sick. Oh, man, do we know how to bring the food.

But then, on the less-picturesque flip side, we know intimately who's been drinking too much. Who lost their temper one too many times. Who feeds their cattle moldy hay. All the togetherness turns judgmental and mean sometimes. I hate that part. I hate feeling scrutinized and I certainly don't want to sit in a judgment seat or the gossip booth. Ever.

Yesterday, when those dogs massacred my hens, the neighbor voted least likely to like me came and helped me in the rain to scoop up all seven. She refused to listen to my protestations that I could handle the job alone (I don't know how I could have). She ushered my children inside as we arrived home because she had witnessed the end of the tragedy and didn't want them to see the carnage. And then she helped me with one of the worst farmgirl chores I have ever had to do. She was gracious, and kind, and a gleaming example of the best of country life. Or neighborliness -- anywhere. I am humbled.

Yesterday my neighbor helped me. I feel a little as though I've been through a barn fire, and the chaff of personal opinions and prejudices burned away to reveal this nugget of truth.

Yesterday my neighbor helped me. And all the dirt and grit of a couple of years sifted away, washed away, to reveal a new porch in the neighborhood. A stunning deposit in my faith in humanity account.

National Scrabble Day

I just made that up.

Is anyone aware of an actual National Scrabble Day? Because that's a nonsense holiday I could get behind.

Here's something else to get behind:

My 9-year-old is driving. This weekend she learned to drive the lawn tractor and she had the audacity to do it when I was inside. I just barely hustled myself out there in time for a photo.



It's good to know that even though she's driving, she's still firmly planted in childhood:
Oh, yeah, and the dog thinks falling leaves are a huge threat to Suite security. An actual threat is greeted with a lot of slobber, but the leaves get a full fang treatment.

The rest of our weekend on the farm was a little bit tradition and a little bit groundbreaking.

For the traditional part, we made chocolate chip cookie dough:

As soon as the dough was done, Sarah, of course, had to ask: "Are you going to make cookies too?"

Madeleine said it was against the law to eat cookie dough. Then she revised her statement upon realizing how easily that could be refuted. She said that she had meant that it was unhealthy. Sheesh.

For the groundbreaking part, Madeleine had her first-ever competitive sports event.

I'm going to pause a moment for some well-earned tears over the passage of time. You go right ahead reading.

One Day At A Time

We had some rare fairy sightings at the farm this week.

I don't think fairies worry about the future much.

Napping in the kitchen sunlight is cure for whatever concerns they might have.

A few wings.

I think this will fly.

Fairies appreciate a little wardrobe help every once in a while. Grape and Big Leaf Maples are some favorite fall choices.

Ahoy there! We have discovered a likely scenario for the indoor fairy festival. Madeleine and her trusty sidekick Zoe discovered a PIRATE HEAD in Fairyland. The fairies evidently took care of the threat but then retreated in the farmhouse for good measure.

Just a little Laura telling the cats not to bother the fairies either.

That's right, shake a stick (leaf) at your problems.

That's where the fairies live most of the time. We were surprised by the visit, but so glad to be reminded of the fleeting magic that is all around us.

Who needs to worry about tomorrow?