right now

 

Right now we are:

*Sorting and re-sorting all the candy from the Independence Day parade.  You might know we don’t eat a lot of candy around here.  So when we came home with 4 pounds of it (!) I was delighted when the girls really just wanted to sort it.  It was pretty addictive (the sorting that is).  Iris had to tell me several times “Mama, please just let us do this!”  All those colors and shapes and sizes, what fun!  A couple days of sorting and the candy is old news, tucked away, forgotten.  Whew. 

*Finding anywhere and everywhere to stay cool.

*Playing t-ball and watching games.  “Iris, how do you like t-ball?”  “It’s o.k., kind of just a lot of standing around and watching the ball”   Or, not watching the ball, as the case may be.  She is her mother’s daughter!

*Bringing in the sheaves.  After last year’s pigs tilled a small field for us, Andy planted it in wheat.  We hope to use some as animal feed, some for fresh ground flour and the leftovers for straw mulch.  We’ve never planted, scythed, reaped, threshed, winnowed, or ground wheat before.  But we seem to like a challenge around here, so why not?  Andy sharpened up his scythe and managed to chop down most of the wheat (however an early spring rainstorm had knocked the wheat flat so that added challenge to the challenge).  Bundling wheat that is laying every which way on the ground is, well, challenging.  But he managed to get them into something resembling sheaves (he does not want you to look closely at his work).  Threshing will come next.  That’s when you lay the sheaves on a flat surface and hit the seed heads with something hard (maybe a baseball bat?) to knock the seeds loose.  Then we’ll attempt to separate the seeds from the chaff (winnowing).  I think that involves throwing the wheat up into the air while the wind carries away the chaff and the wheat settles back to the ground in a little neat pile.  If there is not too much chaff in my eyes, I’ll be sure to try and get some photos.

* Listening to this band and loving it.

* Still chicken catching.  It just never gets old.

* Thinking, dreaming, dancing for rain.  Pretty much everyone east of the Mississippi is experiencing record-breaking heat.  Our pastures are as dry as we’ve ever seen them.  Crispy dry.  The sweet smelling red clover that usually fills our hilly meadows are just brown little heads bobbing in a sea of dry grass.  No point in cutting hay this month.  Our little stream is dry most of the way down our valley, there is still water at the top where the seeps are usually strong, but without rain I doubt it will hold much longer.  With a snow-less winter, spring warm up that started in early March, and now this heat and drought it’s hard to not worry about climate change (not to mention crop shortages).  And worry I do.  I’m not the only one.  These good folks continue to bring voice to this issue we just can’t ignore.  If you haven’t read this book, I still recommend it wholeheartedly.