SPRING, MAYBE?

“There’s a perfect example of the difference between us,” Larry says. We’re walking to the car from the hardware store.
“What? My boots?”
“Yes. They have chickens on them. I would never wear something like that.”
“Of course not. You’re a guy.”
“Even if I were a woman I wouldn’t wear them.”

Okay, this is coming from outer space. I’ve been wanting simple rubber boots for mucking about in the mud and there they were. A nice lady helped me, and these yellow ones were the only pair in my size. Even with my new understanding of gender fluidity, I still maintain that he can’t know what he would or wouldn’t wear, as a woman. As a farm woman.

“I think they’re cute,” I say.
“You hate chickens.”
“These aren’t real chickens. They’re representations of chickens. Anyway, I don’t hate chickens any more.”
“We should have shopped at Home Depot. They’d have a better selection.”

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Happily squabbling, we head for home.

So what else has been going on? First, the lovely Gordon Davis is back at work helping us. We plan to have a shelf in the dining room, and Gordon has a good idea. Which he’ll execute. This involves selecting a plank from the reclaimed lumber warehouse in Salem and turning it over to Denali, a furniture manufacturing place Gordon knows about in Portland. Larry and Gordon both love poking around in moldy old warehouses, apparently, so one Saturday morning they headed down and picked out three candidate planks for my approval. The following Thursday, Larry and I stopped and chose the best one:

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This is not a photo of the best one, just an example to show you the sort of think we’re looking for. Gordon, meanwhile, has been manufacturing the brackets which will hold the plank onto the wall. I’ll post a photo when complete.

And spring has finally arrived in the valley. The wild flowers are carpeting the oak copse. These are fawn lilies. Don’t know the name of the little blue ones.

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Spring has meant bulbs, these last few years, provided by Kate Bryant, who has turned our rooftop in Portland into a real garden. She phoned to say she’d deliver this year’s tulips and daffodils, except, oops. Our rooftop has become a demolition site, courtesy of a leak in the apartment below us. No place to put the spring flowers, so I asked if we could have the pots at the farm this year instead. Happened that she had a reason to be in Corvallis anyway, and would deliver the flowers in the following week. So when we arrived this Thursday, here’s what we saw:

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Almost looking like someone lives here. Still only mud around the house, of course, but beyond the fence, the oats are at least an honest green.

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Don’t think there’s enough for a cow to eat, so we probably won’t have the funny calves for another month, if at all. We have a new fence along Llewellyn, we have an engineer planning a watering system using the old well, so I suppose they’ll arrive in good time. If I’ve learned anything this year, it is how to wait for it!

2 thoughts on “SPRING, MAYBE?”

  1. Love the flowers. You can really enjoy your boots with all that wonderful land.
    We’re you able the to see the photo of your house on Sandhurst that I sent.

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