the reckoning

Something hit me today like a ton of bricks.  I am 45 minutes away from my daughter and my grandchild and they both really need me to be more regular with my visits.  We have fun and play for a couple of hours.  Then it's snuggle time.  Yet I am not a part of her life in a real way.  We skype and talk on speaker and she usually screams and whines because Mama's on the phone.  There is nothing to keep me from moving closer.  Jackson is a way cool place and has a lot of nice bedroom communities like Medina.  Unless I find a job real soon it will be back to the basics.  My friend has urged me not to see cost as a factor but I'm not quite there yet.  I've put in a lot of years on this farm and it's in my blood.  Never owned a thing on it, ever.  Daddy was a modern day sharecropper which is what he learned from HIS father.  That was his second job in addition to USDA.  My Pawpaw was the manager of the property when Mom and Daddy got married.  He took the job in 1956.

Both of them worked not only at the day job but in the garden.  Daddy grew it and she canned it.  This gave me a keen appreciation of growing your own in order to eat.  We had chickens but not for long.  There were cattle every freakin' where surrounded by rusty barbed wire fences falling off the posts.  The cows were his hobby after retirement and he chased them 'til the end.  The small herd went to a local vet eventually. Two years later the P.H. White cattle rub came down.

Sometimes I miss the sound of their moos.  I suppose I should go to a safari park and talk to the animals.  I hear it's good therapy.  I received a very powerful totem yesterday in the form of a hawk.  This wasn't just your usual hawk scoping out small animals to eat.  He was perched with wings spread on the tree right next to my front porch.  And of course there's the red winged blackbird.  And the full moon ^j^