I remember trying to explain midwestern crawl to my friend Kendall when we lived in the mountains of Colorado—how you are always cutting things back or it will become overgrown in a heartbeat. I told her of houses that would disappear in a summer, the result of abandonment and a few invasive vines and bushes. She really couldn’t believe it.
Colorado is a land where your grass must be watered if it expects to be mowed, and water is a restricted resource.
We have an abundance of water and sunshine here. I still can’t believe our good fortune—God has sprinkled Miracle-Gro on every part of life and made it explode with good things (except not Miracle-Gro, probably, as my mother reminds me it only makes the foliage bigger and not the actual blossoms or fruit. Doggone you, Miracle-Gro).
We spent a week at bluegrass camp (video here) and came back to real summer, the kind where you wish you’d put a swimming pool in the backyard instead of a garden. I think Thoreau said something about life being better lived standing up than sitting down writing about it, and we’ve been doing lots of standing up.
I learned how to edit videos and sync audio and it took a blessed forever. But it’ll probably come in handy so I’m glad to have a little sound system and Adobe skills in my back pocket.
The quiet kind of un-farming life I pictured has been replaced with an elementary music teacher position, so I am scrambling to become a person I never dreamed becoming; that is, a legit public school teacher. (One who needs to know more music theory than a person such as I knows.) The advantages are as follows: it is a country school, I know slightly more than the previous teacher, I have a certificate, and I can get kids to sing. If all else fails, I can pull my seventh grader from class to help. I’ll probably elaborate on this career change over on The Average Pearl when I get some more quiet time to think about what it all entails. I’ve already fallen a month behind on that blog, too, but these things happen.
onhoneycreek.com 