It’s Been So Long

I am popping in to test things out today and share a few photographs with you.

I had a wee problem with a few trollers on the blog. They made everything sour. So I went quiet for a while hoping they would get bored. Now I am being careful. Poking my wooly head around the corner.

During all this time I have been in my work-triangle of mill to farm to bed. Head down. An apple a day. Lots of water. Getting on with it. Baking on the weekends. Saving. All that ordinary stuff.

If you are on Instagram you are welcome to join me over there. I will post pictures there more often but I miss telling the stories of the farm. Of course in the winter I never see it. I leave at 5 am and get home around 6pm. In the dark both ways.

Let’s hope the trolls did not hear me say I am on Instagram but I have been dying to invite you there I so am willing to risk it. You can work out the name I use- to post over there – that should sort the bastard mink out from the goats. Stay in touch.

The rain came last week. Torrential like rainy season in the tropics. At one point we had 2 inches in 10 minutes and again and again and in the end the rain gauge floated away and I stopped counting. The rivers and creeks and ditches rose, there was nowhere for the water to drain to – we are so flat and low. And the landscape went downhill fast. There was a fault in the ditch bank and the water made good use of it.

I have developed a fascination for clouds lately. Now that things are opening up and we are relaxing a little I feel my head turning upwards more.

If I could paint – I would get a krink in my neck painting these clouds. Watercolors I think.

Because I don’t have a lot of time to garden I have created an entire garden out of old pots on the porch. I am growing good food and tons of herbs on my little green belt.

Just as well because John’s big tomato garden got a good drowning after 6 days of solid rain. Do you see the strings up the back – I am growing tomatoes up those, as the tomato vines get higher and I begin to pick, I just drop the line a little every few days curling the vine down onto the top of the pot so the fruit is always within reach. An old glass house trick.

In the end Tia was not pregnant and as Aunty Del died softly in the night a wee while ago, ( which broke my already Sheila-broken heart) I brought Tia a couple of orphan calves for company. They will stay a few years and get fat in the fields.

Though the hay fields are underwater too. Hmm. That Champagne calf is a Charolais. Lovely animal. I won’t get attached.

The floodwaters are slowly draining now. They smell kind of brackish, dark and ominous. I dreamed the other night a crocodile came up out of the floodwaters. But they don’t have crocodiles here – alligators but not in Illinois. But anything could be washing through that big hole in the bank. Once the ditch, that was once a creek, goes down, the men will fix the breach in the bank and we will see what nature decides to bring next.

I hope you are all well. It was lovely dropping in! See you all again soon.

Have a great holiday weekend.

Talk soon.

Miss C