New Life Old Farmers

Truthfully, we didn’t like it from the first time we saw it.  This tree blocked both our view and light coming into the house.  Two trees planted many, many years ago, but as the famous gardening book’s title ‘Right Plant, Right Place’ this tree ceased to be right for either one.  The second tree was filled with dead wood and in dire need of a clean up.  As I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the couch this summer, that tree just about drove me crazy(er).  I must have mentioned daily how I couldn’t wait to get it cleaned up.

Enter Young Bucks tree removal….good bye tree.

They started with a tree in the dog yard, that will end up too close to the house when we remodel the kitchen and add a mud room.  The wind was blowing hard, so they could not put it down toward the field.  They managed to put the tree down right through the small open gate!  It was truly impressive.

One down…

All the excitement stopped as their 150 foot lift wouldn’t work.  We had to look at that darn tree for one more day.  They were back the next day with their bucket truck.  The truck can only go up 75 feet, so bringing the tree down between the fence, the power lines and the house was no easy task.I had a little bit of ‘bucket truck envy’ as I thought of all the jobs I could get done, if I had a tool like that!

They went as high as they could, then tied the tree in two places and sawed in between.  It was something to watch and listen too!  Only two fence rails were taken out in the process.Young Bucks worked all day.  If you need any tree work down, we highly recommend them.Sawing and cleaning and moving large rounds.They cleaned all the dead wood out of the remaining tree and trimmed it away from the house.

It remains for the birds, the bees and the kids.

Our new view from the family room.

The view of our home from the road…

Our home is lighter, brighter and prettier…and yes, we are blessed.

PS: We also have a high-powered log splitter and a bit of work to do.

We’ve heard the geese honking (taunting My Loving Spouse), meaning that fall is on the way.

Some snapshots of these last summer days….

Gunner and mud go hand in hand, especially if his favorite ball happens to be in it.

You’d be surprised at what one can buy at a garage sale in the country.  Big Red is practically new and grooms the croquet field well and has brakes that work, sort of a plus, as we all know.The ducklings My Loving Spouse bought have grown into a comical pair.  They are politically correct, black and white.  They are never one without the other.
As ducks do not use mirrors, we assume that they each believe that they look like the other.  However, Aflac waddles and the Charlie Chan the Chocolate Runner runs or as Z said,

“Hey, what’s wrong with your duck?  It has no butt!”It has taken awhile, but I’ve returned to my sewing machine…finishing a quilt for our room.I made a lot of errors when I was quilting it, as I was thinking of my brother.  It is hard to live so far away, when one you love is not well.  You’d have to be a quilter to find the mistakes, but I’ve decided to think of them as a connection to him.My Loving Spouse LOVES this new quilt…the colors…the style…the lightness of sleeping under it.  This pleases me so…I added some new pillow shams and since I didn’t have buttons or ties, I used diaper snaps to finish them off.In case you are wondering….the pumpkin patch is doing great!  I have 14 that are growing outside the garden, so who knows how many are growing inside.  I’m guessing at least another 40!Joy and sadness…

life in full session…

and I am still blessed.

The Shack in the back is coming down.  This will be the biggest project we’ll tackle.  Painting the house will seem like a small transformation compared to the Shack coming down.  The Shack is the last bit of old farmhouse, that was just tacked on to this home. 

It has no foundation and is basically a dog room with a glorified closet.  3 dead ends, which we try to use to the best of our ability.However, sometimes it is truly a catch-all of CR*P.The kitchen with 4 doors will be reworked from a walk through to nowhere to a warm and inviting eating space.

We will replace the Shack space, adding a few additional feet to create a better functioning kitchen and add a much-needed mud room. We plan to reuse as many cabinets as possible, so My Loving Spouse built a model of the new space.  I worked with paper cut outs of our existing cabinets to design our new space.  We are very, very excited to get this underway…..

and yes, we are very blessed.

Croquet season got off to a late start, but believe me, it is in FULL swing!  (All puns intended!)

We are blessed with friends and family, that LOVE to play!  A few of our newbies are learning, that it is not always easy to keep your hat on in the wind, not spill your beverage or loose your mallet.Rocking THE pink hat….and learning to keep his eye on the ball.

In this extremely competitive croquet league (of one) every point is important!  No real player has ever given up the straw hat point!  

Number Four Son coming off of a big win from the last game sporting a family favorite, Grandma Diane’s Wedding Hat from The Royal Wedding.

Glory Farm Croquet. the only sport that is feisty, funny, competitive and relaxing….

In the golfing world, the Masters at Augusta, Georgia has the coveted Green Jacket.  We have…THE Green Bandanna.We have just a few season winners and only 1 has won the honor twice.

Playing together lets us share our life and home and simply put, brings us joy.

This most amazing picture was painted by The Croquet Artist and gifted to us as a surprise. She captured not only our home, but our life as well….

….and yes, we are truly blessed.

It started out simply enough.  I was mowing a few noxious weeds around the pond on The John Deere Mower or as My Loving Spouse refers to it, The Little Green Illegitimate Child (those might not exactly be the word he uses), but we are keeping it clean.

I was on the narrow side of the pond, which borders the irrigation ditch.  I could not get around the pond to mow, as the water from the pond to the ditch has a leak and it was too wet to drive through and not get stuck.  We all know what happens when I drive into areas that are too wet…there ends up being a very funny story about “My wife and the tractor“, except I am, obviously not the one who tells it.  In an effort to avoid any more of those stories, I put The Little Green B in reverse to leave the pond, however, when I put on the brake nothing happened….and I mean nothing.

I was on a short hill with nothing behind me, but high grass and the irrigation ditch.  I calmly, yet loudly (as I was sliding quickly toward the deep ditch) called for assistance from My Loving Spouse who was nearby, as I slammed on the brakes.  We each have a memory difference of this incident as he remembers it as a loud ‘caterwauling!’  By the time he looked up, I was gone.

“Where are you?”

‘In the ditch!’

Luckily for me, the mowing deck on The Little Green B had caught on the edge of the embankment and my backward progress was momentarily stopped.  My Loving Spouse finally came to my rescue, but not before laughing and snapping pictures.  I’d gone under the electric fence, knocked my hat off and was surprised to find that I was still dry.The laughter lasted longer than the rescue.
Blue had the mower out in no time.
For the rest of the day, My Loving Spouse was sending pictures to The Family, under headings of “look what she’s done now”.  A certain Son’s comment was, “Well, at least she didn’t set anything on fire this time!”

Someone was still laughing at dinner, when I commented that I don’t think “The John Deere’s brakes work very well.”

‘Oh, yes’, said Mr. Smarty Pants (My Loving Spouse), ‘I’ve needed to adjust them.’

There are two constants for every summer here at Glory Farm…watering and weeding.  We will never get all the weeds, but we do try to get a lot of them.  Ignore the weeds and they quickly take over.  Due to my surgery, My Loving Spouse has weeded more this year than ever, at least in the vegetable garden.  He has been commenting on how fast the weeds have grown this year.

My newly built flower garden has been a labor of creative love.  However, shortly after returning from the hospital, it was ‘in the weeds’ and there was little I could do.The truth is, there is very little we truly do alone.  Three friends have shown up more than once, armed with trowels, buckets and a willingness to pull our weeds.  Rescuing my flower garden….Teaching me, that love comes in many forms and that cows like to eat weeds.

My Iris’ have taken off and have needed to be moved about.  I put them too close to the fence and learned one night, that the cows liked to eat those too!  It seems that the only thing they won’t eat are ‘noxious weeds’, it figures! Noxious weeds like thistles are thorny, problematic, annoying and must be removed, mowed, cleared, killed…and then they tend to return the next year.  The trick is to get them mowed down before the Noxious Weed Board shows up to tell you, ‘you have noxious weeds…remove them’.

(Seriously, this is a true job.  It makes me laugh a bit, as I’ve known people who would excel at going around and pointing out what is wrong with someone else’s garden…. I get it, it is a farming community, we need to remove noxious weeds.)

I kind of like that word….noxious.

Okay, I’ve done little so far this summer, but rest.  However, my garden is blooming.

and I am blessed.

(….and Gunner likes mud.)

Forth of July was the perfect time to Christen the boat My Loving Spouse built for the pond.  The Wean (Scottish for ‘wee one’) pronounced ‘wee-in’, was built from 2 pieces of quarter inch ply wood. It’s been said before, he is ‘as handy as pockets’.

The inspiration for the boat comes from his Grandfather’s heart.It is a small boat for our small people to enjoy our small pond.We have a ‘wee’ pond, so the boat needed to be small as well.Amazing what can be done with a few pieces of flimsy plywood.I was instructed to buy any clamps I might see, while I was out at garage sales.  He used everyone he had.

The only time he said The Bad British word was when he was building the oars.  He declared, he’d never build those bloody things again!

It was starting to really look like a boat.

More clamps please….

He built a keel, so it would row straight.

Which was fairly optimistic with how small (wee) our pond is.

My Loving Spouse starts adding fancy details to the seats and painted it a bright happy blue.  It is a beautiful wee boat.

We got out the Champagne (actually it was a bottle we had been given, that a friend said, they weren’t sure it was any good) and Christen the boat.  I said those important words,

“I name this ship the Wean.  God bless her and all who float in her.”

Then we smashed the champagne.  I’d like to say, that those where the moments our friends will remember.

However….

it is a small boat for small people.  So, if you are not a small person and you happen to be in the small boat, you might want to remember to not rock the boat, or you may be looking for your glasses, like My Loving Spouse is as they are currently on the bottom of our small pond, as he lost them when he flipped the Wean over and dumped himself into the pond.

My Loving Spouse, making boats…making memories.

Stop by for a row on the pond, just don’t rock the boat!

Family reunions take some planning and ours was in the works long before I got sick.  No matter what, I was going to be there!  My Loving Spouse thinks I am stubborn, no Sweetie, that is called ‘tenacious’.  I was not going to miss the opportunity to give/get a lot of hugs.  From 3 states and many airplanes, we gathered in San Diego with all of my sisters, brothers, sons and grandchildren. 
My Loving Spouse and I were invited to join Number One Son and family to the world famous San Diego Zoo.  The only problem, was how slow I was moving and how little energy I still had.  Hmmm, my pride versus the opportunity to go to the zoo with THE Grandchildren.  THE Grandchildren easily won and I rented a mobility scooter to get around, which amused Number One to no end.I revved up that baby and did a couple of reverse donuts in high (ha ha) speed, just to show him, that I’ve still got ‘it’.

I did get tired.  I wasn’t any help to my brother and his wife who opened their home to 26 of us for the weekend.

I had prayed before I left for a humble heart and a loving mouth.  I think that is a pretty powerful prayer.

I got tired often, but the time together…precious. I marveled as cousins played together.  Cousins are one of God’s wonderful creations.  

Seeing my nephews’ with new eyes.  One nephew who’s outstanding distinction, last family reunion was running the mini-bike straight into the refreshment table, left me with a sweet new memory as he patiently ‘played’ soccer with 2 toddlers.

Some shenanigans were planned as the three eldest members were closely celebrating their birthdays.  150 or so birthday candles were lit.The conflagration was blown out and the layer of wax scraped off of the cake.  Believe me, I’ve never seen anything like it!

‘Someone’ left his good (extremely good/expensive) bottle of wine in the wrong cabinet and it got opened.  ‘Someone’ was not amused, but I did hear that it was really, really good.  Wish I’d had a glass.

THE Grandson got in a lot of pool time.

The best hugs came from these four.  My  brothers, my sisters.One of them is fighting cancer.  I could say, that is ‘his’ story, however, when it is someone you love, your brother, it cannot help but be apart of your story too.

I sat with a nephew and listened as he told me all the ways he was loving his dad.  Attempting to bring him the things that give him joy.  Helping him to get wet in the ocean, with his family.

As hot air balloons rose over us….The younger boys chased it up and over the yard…assisting the little ones, so they could be one of the cousin gang.

I left with hugs and tears…  We sat by the ocean for a bit before heading to the airport.

Grateful for the laughter and the love, for relating to family members in new ways, extremely difficult to say goodbye.

Blessed indeed, to have had the chance to make some more memories… all together.

I never pray for patience.  I know enough, that you do not ‘get‘ patience delivered to your door in a tidy non-fragile box.  You get the ‘opportunity’ to practice patience, thereby growing your ‘patience muscles’. (Yea, I hate that.)

I have mostly been a good patient, during this recovery phase of my surgery.  However, there have been a few times where toddler-worthy tantrums were thrown, complete with frustration and tears.  If you ask My Loving Spouse about those, his eyes will get as big as saucers and he may say a few Bad British Words.

I could probably be more patient, if this recovery didn’t take so long….

It is what it is.

With all of my laying about, I am taking the opportunity to practice lettering.  I’ve bought a collection of pens, paper and read a few blogs.  The bottom line…it takes practice.  It is mostly about muscle memory.I am also practicing prayer.  It too is muscle memory, turning to God.  My prayers are fairly simplistic, but I’m pretty sure, that God doesn’t really care.  Praying for others when I cannot sleep.  Praying when I have no energy to do anything else, but rest…

and I am blessed.

PS: If you like, I will pray for you.