Screaming Mistress Wind

The day started off so nicely.  It was not warm  but the calm was nice. The animals woke up slowly. 

But soon after breakfast Mistress Wind arrived – her black cape flapping – unpacked her bag of demon daughters and they let loose with a terrible wind that blew like hell itself for the whole day.  I had already put the goats and calves out into the fields but with all that wind I did a Mary Poppins (but in fast forward) my feet barely touching the ground and brought them all back in again.  It is not even warm. Every night for the next week we go down around freezing. Sigh.

The wind makes me anxious. I think it kind of deafens a person as it buffets you so you don’t feel quite in touch with your surroundings. And no-one likes to feel unsteady on their feet.  I never feel quite sure of my body or its place in the surroundings  in the big winds.  The dogs and I hunker down, tucking our chins into our chests and move as fast as possible from one sheltered spot to the next.  And I wanted to work on the Fellowship Forest yesterday.  

Where we live out here in the Midwest, Illinois, the county sells bunch lots of trees cheaply to the farmers in an effort to reforest the land. They have a great prairie land program too that I am looking into. The day before yesterday I collected my trees (the black walnuts, the wild plum and the red stemmed dogwood) but I cannot plant them in this wind, so they are still waiting damply in their bags. This kind of wind makes it hard to stand up let alone dig in a slight stick of a tree.

So the wind gave me the opportunity to work on our second fellowship Book – Letters for my Baby Girl.  The letters are in and being collated and now I am calling for recipes, handy tips, anecdotes,  etc. Short and succinct. These will be on every other page (I hope) weaving in and out of our stories and will make this book even more memorable and useful. So if you have a recipe of your own, that you would like to hand down. Or a method. Or even a non recipe for making an old family treat. Or how to get red wine stains out of the carpet.  How to pick up dropped stitches.  How to plant out cabbages. How to make one pound of ground beef feed Twelve. The perfect pasta recipe.  How to make Hokey Pokey.  How to potty train a toddler. How to grow sunflowers. Things like that. Stuff that ordinary women and men will find useful. Please send them to me at celima.g.7@gmail.com. Set them out  IN AN EMAIL the way you want them printed and don’t forget to put your name or your pseudonym and the date and the country you are writing from.  This is so exciting.  This will be a great book for our daughters and their daughters.

Good morning. The Old Codger is pleased to hear we are planting Black Walnuts. He said they were a very popular tree in his day and everyone had huge Walnut trees on their properties. Evidently they are great in brownies. I said he can do the nut cracking.

I hope you have a lovely day,

Your friend on the farm,

celi