It’s November and we expect a storm. Princess and I haul hoses and lawn chairs to storage sheds and dig more carrots, beets and turnips. The promised cold advances.
She keeps bringing me rocks she suddenly loves and I tuck them into my ski pants’ pockets so she can add them to her “rock election.”
Overhead are geese in formation, frantic to get moving, loud and close together.
Where do you think they’re going? I ask her.
“They’re flying all the way to July,” she tells me.
I love that. It almost makes me cry; it’s that beautiful. Perhaps that’s how the geese see it.
Last week I drove past a slough completely frozen over except for a tiny patch in which two swans wet their bottoms. They were getting the message too.
Then it came with all the fan fair of Christmas: a nice white dump of snow that made chores a more aerobic workout and covered the roads.
I stayed put four consecutive days, (meaning I didn’t leave the yard). That isn’t a record but it is one of the most glorious things a person can do with a weekend: stay home.
We made cookies (two batches), built monsters with playdough, washed vegetables pail by pail that Princess and I had gathered, and made kale chips. There was homemade soup and cinnamon buns too, even a couple apple pies. I canned the last of the tomatoes from boxes upstairs, making pizza sauce this time, and my son invented a new game we played together.
Maybe some people want to take the whole family to Disneyland but a snowed-in weekend is a far better deal for me. Every once in a while Princess would go to the dining room window and remark at how beautiful it looked outside. Farmer couldn’t agree with her on that one, but even his bagged up eyes got some rest out of the weekend.
We didn’t buy anything, watched little TV and when the kids went outside to roll in the fresh white this afternoon, they played like snow was a new invention.
A blanket of snow over dry prairie and time to reconnect: I think Mother Nature knew exactly what she was doing and there wasn’t another place on earth I’d rather have been: home.
Bring on the storms and snuggle up. We’re finally living from the farm.
