A Day

I'm sick. I'm setting up with a cup of honey and ginseng tea with about a 1/3 cup of brown liquor topped off with hot water and trying to get rid of this nagging cough so I can get to sleep. Busy day today (actually yesterday). I set my alarm for 6:00 a.m. and hit the snooze until 7:00, mixing prayer in with light sleep and birdsong in through the open window. Someone convince me it wasn't heaven. I dressed and drank some coffee with Les and was out burning precious gasoline through the rear-tine tiller by 8:10. Leslie and I have some new friends and we're doing a garden with them. Well, its more like a little farm. We're planting a 1/2 acre this year. Yes, a 1/2 acre, 85 feet by 267 feet! I'm still only getting paid for 24 hours a week while my company tries to set itself right after a winter of no real good paying work. I contend that we're more content than we've ever been. The girls haven't seen their allowance in a couple months but never mention it, they are very frugal and I'm so humbled by their understanding of the circumstances. We've never been wealthy but they've never really wanted for all that much either. We got rid of satellite television and we talk a lot more - hence the contentment.

We're waiting patiently for our chicks to arrive. Mike Havens and I are in the middle of building a coop from scrap lumber but the chicks will have to be brooded indoors for a few weeks before they need the coop. The kids ask us every day when the chicks will be here.

Tomorrow (today) we'll plant most of the garden. We're planting everything we eat and many things we don't. Some things sell so well at the produce auction that we're planting for an abundance with the hopes of putting some money into an account for maybe building a greenhouse or adding a few meat goats to the mix. Pickling cucumbers are the big money-maker, easy to grow and hardy - they will be the big money-maker. We're also transplanting some raspberry bushes and will put in a strawberry patch in early autumn.

I went to a wedding earlier today. Now I'm really getting a sense of my generation. Kevan's daughter got married. It seems only a few months ago that I was standing and watching Kevan and his brother kill ants with rubber bands while his mother and my mother chatted on Mrs. James' two-track drive. Hers was the only drive I knew that had violets growing down the middle, between the tire tracks. We met the Smiths in the shade of a huge White Pine and the ants were plentiful along that sand drive. "Kevan, you know Sam from school don't you?" and he replied "nope, don't know him" and he was lying through his teeth which was easy because he didn't have but one on top and that one only half way in. And now his daughter is married. The twins thoroughly enjoyed the festivities. They were running around hitting each other with balloons and grabbing watermelon chunks out of the fruit salad with dirty hands. Had I been at any other place I might have felt the need to curtail that but here, among the Smiths, it was not only accepted but expected and maybe even encouraged. Kevan's sister Brenda Kaye threw mints across the room for me to catch in my mouth and embarassed her 16 yr. old son completely by hammering on the table until the groom would lean over with a mouth full of food and kiss his new bride on the lips. The staunch Nazarenes got up and went outside after eating so they didn't have to sit through the PDA and the noise. God bless that people and that couple. I pray they worship you in freedom and in grace all the days of their life, no, all the days!

shalom, the cough is gone and my heart is full.