I had an epiphany on my morning walk. You know, that stroll around the barn and into the young orchard.
It struck me that if Ed and I followed each others wishes and sprinkled our ashes on farmette lands, within a few years there would be a development here and we would be mixed into the foundation of a garage, or maybe underneath a basement full of someone's stuff. Ed hates stuff.
And so, during breakfast, out on the porch, on this cold but otherwise pleasant morning...
... We revised our plan. A new ash sprinkling idea emerged: our beloved prairie in our county park! So that dragon flies can swirl over Ed and swallows can dive for bugs over me! A terrific idea, don't you think?
Today is the last of the warmish days. With tomorrow comes a cold air blast and that cold air will stay with us until.... April! I have to move temperature sensitive orchids, geraniums and herb plants inside. This, to me, is one true marker of the arrival of the cold season. (I have this tendency to divide the year in two -- the cold and the warm. In south central Wisconsin, the cold begins sometime in October and the warm begins sometime around my birthday in April.)
And because we're plunging by some twenty degrees tomorrow, I know that if I'm to enjoy outdoor work (rather than trudge grudgingly through it), I better get to it today. And so I do. Weeding, snipping, preparing. More hostas, cimicifungas, and other shade loving plants to dig out and move elsewhere.
Once the new area is cleared of good plants, I have weeds to consider. And it becomes clear that there are just too many. I can't just dig them out. I have Ed haul out the rototiller. It's small and very wimpy, but if you run it over a spot of soil repeatedly, it will bring up the weeds. And so I till while Ed rakes.
There's so much shaking and pushing involved in tilling that I don't even notice the FitBit going wild with excitement over my 10,000 goal! Honestly, I feel I did twice that amount of work.
I am very happy to stop the hard work and drive over to Snowdrop's home for a late afternoon distanced masked visit.
("oops! forgot the mask!")
Yes, she is wearing shorts. For most of our time together she insists she is not cold. Me, I'm sitting with a sweatshirt and wondering if I should fetch the blanket from the car.
Well yeah! A sleeping bag is warranted! (She comes prepared for all eventualities.)
Evening. There's a tiny drizzle. Enough for Ed to postpone his Wednesday biking. We return to the patch of weeds. I till, Ed slices the trunk of the fallen tree into discs. I could use some to make another path...
It is very late before I start in on dinner: isn't it a fine time to bake a frittata? Onions, garlic, mushrooms from the funghi farmers, broccoli and potatoes from the CSA, eggs from the cheepers. I'm sure you've missed my ever-the-same frittata photo!
It is such a perfect transition to a quiet evening of popcorn and our current series on TV, but, some small detail of my photo storage application isn't working. Boom! We lose our moments of peace and instead spend many hours searching the internet for ways to fix the upload problem. It's very late now, but all is well. Today's issues -- fixed. Ready for tomorrow's batch!
