at the end of a Sunday

Ed, please, you have to get up and wash off before dinner.

It’s Sunday evening. A quiet time, a lovely time, a time for family coming to the farmhouse for the evening meal.

With an hour more of evening daylight, I cook as folds of sunlight come through the window.





How can you not love spring?!


But Ed and I both need to scrub big time before food preparation. We’ve been working all day outside and it shows.

The farmette appears especially vast when you realize that there is never a portion of it that doesn’t need work. In the wee hours, we zip over to Walmart to pick up a better rake. And glyphosate (think Round-up)  for the honeysuckle stubs. Walmart is not the place where any serious person would buy a rake, but once again, it trumps all by virtue of its proximity.

On our way there, we see that the truck farmers (who farm the land just east of us) are already planting.  We wave. It's good to see them stir up bits of unfrozen soil.





Shopping done. I hold the rake to the side as Ed weaves his motorbike deftly along county roads.

Home now. I rake with pent up winter energy. We don’t bother to do this in the fall, but now, any place that has plants, bulbs, grasses – needs to be free of encumbrance, of spent leaves, free to take in the sun (even as it is a little disconcerting to be spotting new growth this early in the season).






And then we return to the honeysuckle in the prairie out back. Muscles tense as we chop, snap, and haul the heavy limbs of this menacing plant. Where do we haul it? Well, to another corner of the property. Sometime soon we’ll have to do a controlled fire here. Not today though. We’re already pushing our limits.





I know we don't yet deserve days like this quite this early in the season. Sure, I realize that there will be weeks when I need a scarf, a cap, gloves. That's another day's worry. If you live in the Midwest, I hope, like me, you were riding high on the burst of good weather. And I hope you loved it as much as I did.