I sit at my desk, working through the conservation plan draft Steve has asked us to address. It’s late, we’ve been at the farm all day, but it’s clear nothing will happen until we get this document edited and back to Steve and Jarod.

“I’ll do it,” I tell Larry. Among his skills, please do not imagine typing with any proficiency. He claims it’s the result of being left-handed, and when I’m not convinced, adds that he’s also color blind. These two things are true, if, in my opinion, unrelated to typing. But the administrative work of this project should be mine anyway if it’s he, for example, who will do the sawing and weed-whacking.

And while we wait for governmental approval and assistance, sawing and weed-whacking are about all there are to do on the farm just now. So, after sowing the clover seed in the orchard, a task of about 10 minutes total, Larry straps on the harness and attacks the weeds growing alongside the driveway.

So what am I supposed to do? I walk down to the barn from the house site, and the fields are beginning to show the first green. Birds are busy, but as yet no sign of turning color by the oaks. The berries are spent, now, and it occurs to me that my job today should be to take care of Bob.

Bob has become a de-facto rolling storage shed, the back seats cluttered with everything from a screwdriver to the weed-whacker itself. There’s a very bad smell, suggesting a mouse body somewhere in the upholstery.In the bed of the truck, bags of left-over mulch, assorted sprays and oils, shovels, etc. Okay, this situation definitely needs attention, but we can’t keep everything in the new shed up by the house while it’s still under construction. I think about the barn and the small stalls. I fear they were used for raising veal, but Shirley, Mike-the-Sheep-Guy’s wife, says no, they were used by a dairy operation.

We all know that dairy cows need to be “freshened” periodically to keep the milk flowing, the by-product of which is a supply of calves. They keep the girl-calves, or some of them, but the boys? I haven’t been able to determine their fate, but it can’t be happy. Anyway, the little stalls apparently housed these babies for some portion of their lives.

The stalls are carpeted with 3-4 inches of cow poop and straw, settled together over the course of years into solidified sludge, which I propose to remove. I’ll turn them into storage for our tools!

This is not easy. The “stuff” is heavy and the shovels I have to use are not suited for the task. There are perhaps 15 of these little stalls, and while they are the most-thickly compacted, the entire barn floor is similarly carpeted. The walls and windows are thick with sheep wool clinging to spider webbery, dead insects, and the detritus of years. I don’t know what it will take to clean these walls, but the broom I have to hand is certainly not adequate.

Nevertheless, I make my slow progress. Gather all the tools and whatnot into the bed of the truck to be sorted. We have purchased some plastic bins to contain the small things like gloves, instruction manuals, clippers, and, very importantly, a supply of toilet paper, paper towels, soap, sun screen, plastic glasses and silverware. Just collecting these items in a designated bin has improved Bob’s burdens impressively.

I help myself to some nails from the house site, and using a mallet Larry has found somewhere, find a way to hang some of the garden tools and saws. This thing is looking pretty good!

I know, “good” is relative. Let’s just say better. And, the storage must be temporary until Tyrone can get to the barn doors, which can happen only after the house is closed in. I’m newly sensitive to thievery after discovering Saturday morning that someone bashed in the rear window of my car, parked in the Crane Building garage, and stole some of my music electronics, my pick-up mic, pre-amp, and all the cords. Didn’t take the amplifier itself, probably too heavy, but it’s all a reminder that tools in an open barn are surely tempting fate. Remember what I said about not being stupid?

So I take my photo, disassemble my little tableau and go to watch Larry. Mike has arrived on his little Gator to herd his mama-cows and calves into the correct field. A passer-by has stopped to tell Larry that these 4 have been seen wandering along Llewellyn and we must do something! “Something” means calling Mike, of course.

But this interruption has been enough for Larry to quit for the day. Mike has said, in the kind way he has of not appearing to be telling us what we ought to know already, that we should just spray the road-side weeds. Well, yeah. If we had that tractor, the spray rig, the . . .

We don’t care. We like to go there and do our small chores. Happy Labor Day! P.S., I never found the dead mouse.