many words few snaps

 

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. `Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.
`Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, `and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'                                              

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

Writing a blog post after a gap is tricky, because I've got to start somewhere. Every couple of days in July and August (until my laptop died and doing anything online became a faint memory) I started to compose a post, then thought I'd "better wait" until something: an interesting discovery, an item checked off the task list, a happy event. If not a Beginning, I wanted at least a Middle and an Ending. And I was determined not to write about the relentlessly unpleasant weather, because it was already getting far too much airplay in my head every single day.

Yet here I finally am, on a borrowed laptop, writing about weather, because...it's raining today, and it rained yesterday, real rain, hours of rain, for the first time in many weeks. Huzzah!

I am choosing to look at this rainy weekend as an Ending to a very long, too-hot, too-dry, too-humid Middle. So I am writing. Trying to write. Is anyone reading? If so, please wave in the comments. It's been a lonely Middle.

In retrospect, there was a lot of repair work undertaken in July and August, much of it physical, some of it planned. Time spent with the eye surgeon, the dentist, the veterinarian. There were basically two kinds of challenges: expected and unexpected. Here's one example:

Expected challenge: cataract surgery in July. I did as much prep as I could, because I knew there would be several weeks of post-surgical limitations such as never leaning down and never lifting anything over 15 pounds.

Unexpected challenge: not having my Occasional Helper here at all during the cataract recovery period to do any of the necessary leaning and lifting. (Actually, he's been unavailable through much of the Spring and Summer, for various unforeseen reasons.) In desperation - and having a strong inclination to keep my goats alive - I called friends who sent their own Helper over one afternoon to shift feed sacks for me. Bonus: now I've met someone else I can hire - when available between his other jobs - as a backup to the Occasional Helper. So there's a Happy Ending of sorts.

Violet waiting for someone - anyone - to move feed sacks. 

A few days before the eye surgery my neighbor AM came with his tractor for the next step in a project that's been in the works for over a year: a new Very Raised Bed built along the landing at the top of the driveway. Starting way back with the barn salvage in April 2024, a lot of work had gone into the new bed, constructing the lower layers of timber, brush, and shavings. But the top layer was to be the decomposing hay and manure that I've been curating for several years under one of the goats' roundtops. The decision to rebuild the barn meant that this roundtop could be dismantled, and AM and his tractor could scrape up load after load of that enriched material and carry it over to the landing. That was a mucky, sweaty, dirty job, but the day before my surgery I was out watering and planting that new raised bed. Late for planting? Yep. Planted anyway. Winter squash and sunflowers. And since planting=leaning, it had to be finished before the surgery. This has been a dreadful year for gardening, and if there was even a chance of seeing something green and growing, I was not going to let it pass for lack of effort. This was the kind of Ending that is also a Beginning.

squash blossom just before the rain yesterday

How is everything in your neck of the woods?

I hope your July and August have been lovely.

~~~~~