Best Day Ever

I know its pretty cliché to say that your wedding day was the best day ever, but mine really was.  It was perfect because of so many things.  We got married at the 4-H Camp that I went to for 13+ years as a kid and on into my early 20's.  We got married on a Sunday in September and almost everyone who we wanted to be there could be and was there.  I wore cowboy boots (you can see a tiny bit of them in the picture).   My dad wore cowboy boots. Kevin did not wear cowboy boots (not his style). We didn't spent a crap ton of money and we still had a nice afternoon picnic style reception.  This is one of the funniest pictures from that day (and probably a pretty genuine one too). My mom made those quilts in the background (!)

But the best part of all was the end result - we are married.  I know it sounds ridiculous and so many people that are free spirit types wave away the notion of marriage.  But I really do think that it means something symbolic.  It says to the other person "hey, I'm here for the long haul" like nothing else could.  My husband and I have a story that starts out kind of funny (I tell people he was having sex with one of my college roommates and then he became one of my college roommates), grows into a great friendship (which sometimes backfires on me because my husband got to witness the best years of my life....ok not really, but he sure as hell got to see more than one morning-after-a-good-night-out, and also is more than aware of my class cutting habits in college), and then some time down the road turns into something more.  About the time college was allllllmost over, and I realized that if I didn't do something, he was going back to his hometown (three hours from mine) probably never to be seen or heard from again aside from a random email or two.  And that wasnt going to cut it for me.

So, the boy and the girl in a little canoe (haha corny 4H camp song lyric) had a typical nice early relationship like most couples do.  Then college was over for both of them, it was time to buy a house (that cost $10,000.00, and you can imagine the shape it was in), live in said house that was a construction zone, while studying for the bar exam and not living on a lot of cash.  Needless to say, the relationship hit some serious troubled water, I moved out and back home for awhile.  But around the time I decided I might like to let someone else be close to me and know things about me, even as  a friend, I put the brakes on it because I realized no one knows me like Husband does.  And no one ever will.  And I don't want someone to.  It took years for us to build up what we had, and I came so close to breaking it down and throwing it away. Don't get me wrong, some of it was broken and needed some TLC and repairing, and some of it we never really did get back, but that's OK. Needless to say, the road to wedded bliss was not smooth paved blacktop, but its OUR road to travel on TOGETHER.  For the long haul.   Marriage certainly hasn't fixed all of life's woes, and the road past wedded bliss hasn't been perfect either.  But who needs perfect?  We are happy with each other and happy with our life together.  So what else matters? 

So many songs make me think of Husband.  Here are a few.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPd1GIwjRFM  we are fragile, but I'm glad he's taken the chance on me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncxNQaYwY-c (forgive the cheesy video taping of the song, but this one had to be a video of him singing it live....this is one of the very few concerts we have ever gone to together and it was so fun)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rueDR8J5gjE  LOVE this one too.



 

What Matters

The past few days I have been 300 miles from home at a conference for work. Thinking about the events in Boston yesterday made me realize none of this matters. While I am fortunate enough to like my job and to like my colleagues, at the end if the day none of what I'm doing here matters. What matters is my family and my farm. Not the money I make, not the important people I might know, not the clothes I wear or the car I drive.

This article led to my Facebook post today.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/15/opinion/granderson-boston-safety/index.html

My Facebook post linked to this article and this is what I said. Because of our greed and push into the global economy, we have forgotten to take care of what is at home. We have lost our sense of community and of place. This isn't something that happened overnight. It has been a gradual transition from a country with a sense of community to a country of people who don't care about each other. Maybe I'm jaded because I was a privileged child. And I'm still privileged. But not in the way you might think. I was raised by parents who instilled hard work, responsibility for myself and discipline. I lived in a rural community where I had a sense of place and belonging. I know at least 1/3 of the population of our county, if not more. If we had a problem we had people to call, just the same as if we had a joyful event we had people to share it with. Do people still have that?? Or are we so wrapped up in our careers, our moneymaking, our kids soccer/dance/band/football/baseball/soccer/ whatever else it is that kids do that gets in the way if being a kid that we have forgotten how to be a community? How to support each other and take care of each other and feel joy and sorrow for each other?

All I know is things aren't they way they used to be, and it happened fast, within my short 32 year lifetime. It's not the fault of the current administration though some might find a way to argue it is. We can only search people so much, and keep things like guns away from people to only a certain degree, and we can't put all the bad guys in jail. We HAVE to do something.....but what will it be? How can we get back to the America my parents knew? The idyllic 1950s pre Vietnam Leave it to Beaver society we once knew? Or is it too late?

Have your pets spayed or neutered

There is a very sweet cat who has been visiting our house for some time now (really she comes to sit under my bird feeder and stare, but I pretend she's coming to visit us).  She is a friendly kitty, and loves to be petted. She seemed well conditioned, not starving, but I would give her some food when she game to visit just the same. I was entertaining the idea of getting a playmate for our rambunctious kitten, and figured it might be a good idea to let my kitty meet the outside kitty (who's name is Pebbles, but we'll get to that).  So I held Marmalade (our kitty...though she's not very smart and doesn't know that's her name) and opened the back door a crack so she and Pebbles could say "hi".  It went well - nobody growled or bared teeth.  So every now and then I would let them say "hi" at the back door in that manner.  I told husband that I was thinking of letting Pebbles in (I broke the news while he was on the road for work, so if I did let Pebbles in there wasn't much he could do about it anyway).  But in the back of my mind I kept thinking for as sweet and friendly with people as she was, and for as good of condition as she was in for winter, she had to be someone's pet.  I saw her several times two streets over by another house and began to speculate as to who her owner was.  Sure enough, one day husband and I were driving by her owner's house and there she was, being played with by two elementary school age kids. I stopped by and asked them if that was their cat and sure enough she was.  About then their mom came out of the house and I told her how Pebbles comes to visit.  She replied that we weren't the only ones Pebbles visits, she'd heard that before.  So, being that Pebbles was someone's PET I was under the impression that she was taken care of. She was obviously being fed and loved, so I assumed that she was also vaccinated and spayed.  I hadn't seen Pebbles much the last few weeks, but she came to visit again today.  And I think she is PREGNANT.  She is a petite little cat but is now sporting this large belly, sort of like a burro.  I might be imagining it, but I swear I can feel kittens (!).  I feel sorry for her now, because I know her owners are obviously too dumb to spay their cat, so maybe they don't even notice she is pregnant?? And maybe she'll have trouble having her babies or have them somewhere awful and cold where the babies don't make it!  My husband suggested we tie a note to her that says "I'm Pregnant" and send her back to her own house.  I'm doing my best to incentivize her to stay by our house (feeding her mainly, though I did put a box with a towel in it on the back step).  I let her inside for five minutes today too. Marmalade just sniffed her, and she just wandered around my kitchen. Its really a shame that Pebbles is going to have babies. We have a feral cat problem as it is in our town.  People always try to say that it costs to much to take pets to the vet, but there are many, many programs for low income people that will help with the cost of spaying or neutering a pet. If you know of someone who owns a pet that isn't fixed, encourage them to contact their local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), Humane Society (HSUS) or animal shelter and ask if there are any programs in their area to help with the cost of spaying or neutering.

 

Spring is coming

 

On March 20, the first day of spring, I received the notification that my order from Stark Brothers Nursery shipped. When I returned home last evening from a work trip to Charleston, there they were, nicely packed in two large cardboard boxes on my front porch, shipped for free.  Two blueberry bushes, three grape plants, asparagus starts, two huge rhubarb roots, horseradish, and six fruit trees about 3 1/2 feet high and as big around as my thumb.  Its a tiny bit too cold here right now in the evenings, so the trees and plants will live in our cold, shut off spare room by night, and spend some time on the front deck hardening off by day.  We are off to plant the roots this evening.  While it might not seem like it on a cold snowy day, spring is coming.  The days are getting longer and if you pay attention to the tiniest clues, spring is here!