FARM

Ah, the mystery of life! Especially the mysterious life cycle of the Monarch Butterfly.

Our good neighbors, Mike & Lida, have been busy raising Monarchs all summer and we were invited to be foster parents to a bunch of caterpillars.

The Monarch caterpillar is a very picky eater. They only dine on milkweed. There are many varieties of milkweed, like Whorled, Common and Swamp, and the plants like to grow in open meadows and on the margins of woods. But these are also the places that are heavily subjected to herbicides, and so there’s a severe decline in wild milkweed and hence the butterflies. Where goeth the milkweed, so goeth the Monarch. No milkweed, no Monarch.

It’s been storming for a month now. Big, rolling storms that ride in from the southwest on fast moving fronts. These late summer storms can be dangerous, spawning tornadoes and fierce winds. Makes you keep a wary eye on the sky.

Usually by now the weather has dried out a bit and we can slow down our endless mowing chores. But this year has been exceptionally wet and steamy and the grass is still growing tall, practically overnight.

We have very slow internet at the farm. When we moved out here there was only one option to connect to the world wide web and that was by Pony Express. Oops, I mean satellite dish.  

Not that I want to name names (Dish) but smoke signals would be faster than the internet service provided by this unnamed company (Dish). 

Definition of Garage Band : an amateur rock band typically holding its rehearsals in a garage and usually having only a local audience.

The calendar says it’s Spring but we seem to be stuck in an eternal cycle of Winter that just won’t break loose. Just about every week a thick throw of snow has been laid down, only to disappear the next day as the temperature climbs.

I’ve been fooling around with pipes lately. Tobacco pipes? Bagpipes? Nope, plumbing pipes.

We built a log cabin at the farm some 20 years ago and the plumbing system has been a constant source of failure. Pipes leaked, faucets didn’t work, water lines froze. All these problems were the result of doing the plumbing ourselves. We’re really bad at it. No skill at all. Add that to the non-standard, we-made-it-up-as-we-went-along indoor plumbing system and you get two decades of failures.

Winter at the Farm

The sun sets low between the knobs this time of year. From the back deck I can mark the progress of the seasons as Old Sol marches southward from his summer resting place. At the peak of August, he lingers long behind the hill to the northwest, lively and showy with color, reluctant to allow Evening her turn. But by January, Sol seems weary and retires with a thin and hurried sunset far to the southwest, as if the effort is all too much.