While the dogs were outside yesterday, I let Naomi have the run of my office while I attempted to work on book illustrations. I discovered she has NO RESPECT for my art! (And being me, I took pictures instead of shooing her off!) She gets away with this because she's adorable. And has clean paws.
On another note, the farmer who rents our land started harvesting his soybeans yesterday.
Here's the front field, with its lone tree. The former owners told me what kind of tree it is, and I wrote it down somewhere, and now I forget. I like that it has been preserved all these years, in the middle of the field:
And here you can see the swath Dave has cut around the field to start:
And there he is, with my little camera zoomed to the max!
Bye bye soybeans!
The beans are off to Japan to become tofu for human consumption. Eventually we hope to turn all of our land organic, one way or another, but for now, Dave does a good job of looking after the land while he rents it.
My parents had a similar situation. when my dad retired we ... just my mother, dad and I moved back to the family farm in Missouri. It was not big as real producing farms go ... 300 and some acres, but in alternating years the guy who farmed it and who had been farming it since my grandfather's time .. he was a very young guy then, ok anyway, he would plant corn around the house one year and soybeans the next. It was really nice those years with the corn because it got to about eight or nine feet high .. higher? and the house was walled in by corn .. very cool. but then eventually it would all be harvested. and so it goes.
ReplyDeleteI loved it there, having grown up in a train-less suburb of Detroit, but unfortunately by the time we actually moved there ... as opposed to semi-annual visits, I was a DUMB teenager and could not fully appreciate the farmlife... ok to be fair to myself there were extenuating circumstances, but in the end I did not live there very long.
ohhhh for the country life now. Actually the best thing was the Santa Fe railroad that was visible from my bedroom window.
Which by the way reminds me, I believe you have a rail line running close to your farm. Is that right, or have I got that confused with the other farm runners-up? Anyway if so, can you hear the trains?
I remember many, many years ago when my Justin c*t walked across my huge pencil drawing. He left a bit of red Georgia clay with his prints. To this day, the piece still shows a faint footprint. I love it because he is remembered that way.
ReplyDeleteI love your snake, or what you have completed of it.
We nearly bought a farm that had a train line across the very back, but instead there is a train line across the back of the farms across the street from us! I don't mind it at all. I grew up very near one of largest trainyards in Toronto, and I grew up loving trains. You can hear their horns and faint rumble if you're inside with the windows shut, but they aren't terribly frequent.
ReplyDeleteAnd the corn gets darn tall around here!!
Robin, I love you Justin-kitty story. That's a nice little memento. :)))