on borrowed time

My life was serendipitously planned by Big Ernie to be spent here on the farm with my somewhat eccentric but totally lovable family. My ex and I raised our BG complete with horses and tractors and a trampoline out front working our asses off all the while teaching her what we had learned as aging baby boomers. We usually worked different shifts so we took turns being parent-in-charge. She stayed with Mom and Daddy a lot until she turned into that surly teenager who hates everybody and you're next. There were lots of slammed doors and lying during those years which totally pissed me off because I thought that I could control every.damn.thing. Only the strong right survive, right?

My parents moved out here when I was a year old into the red log cabin where they still live fifty four years later, give or take. I was absent for about a decade when I went off to the big city for college and made my own life down the street from the sawmill. We moved back out here when BG was a four year old. She's almost 26 now...ya'll do the math on renting the old house on top of Pecan Lane. My best guess is that I've paid about 80K in rent and one katrillion in utilities to call this house my home. The summer after I got my first divorce, I mowed the entire thing with a push mower and never got done until first frost. Of course I was much younger then.

The yard is an eclectic collection of every flowering thing that I've ever thought was pretty, including riverbed ferns and grapevine. Thanks to last night's rain it's all green. My favorite spot is the back shade garden because it's cooler on a hot summer afternoon. That's where the herbs grow in pots and plants from friends frame the stones that I've picked up for a half-assed patio with a borrowed grill perched on 2x4s. That's where mr. snake usually hangs out because it's damp. Come July, we'll see some hideous shed skin hanging from the maple, sure as the world.

I think the great Forked Deer flood of 2010 killed the farmer's sweet corn so I reckon I'll have to go the farmer's market downtown and buy some. And some purple hull peas and green 'maters too. The only thing I planted was those little salad ones, in a concrete block. So far so good!

^j^