"Thus We Play the Fool..."

Hey There !

Dave from McElhoes Family Farm/Belmont here.

Ok. First off, what is up with the weather? It has been so cold, wet and windy as to be almost unbearable (I admit to be overly dramatic here). I hear the bigger grain and feed farmers are also way behind in planting. Except for a couple of hot and spectacularly hazy days when we made one small cutting of hay, which we dry, gather and put up loosely by hand for winter treats. The rest of our pastures will have to have the seedheads cut to simply allow whatever sun we are given to reach the smaller more nutritious blades struggling underneath. A waste of time and resources. Plus, I hate to just cut grass. Making hay is wonderful, but, to me, lawn is a drudge.

Last Thursday, we discovered Bitsy, our newest baby goat was missing. Katie and I dropped everything, despite being behind and busy, to look for her. We spent and hour walking up and down every hill, to all of our open pastures. Calling and looking in the waist deep grass, pushing aside brush, doubling back to do it over again. All the while, Betty, her mom, walked and called and looked and cried frantically. After a while we had to give up and went back to work, only to have Betty cry and beg us to try again. Several times throughout the, largely wasted, day, we repeated the process to no avail. Finally, I went in to cook supper, and Katie hit the showers.

As I started to wash the potatoes to boil, I heard a faint cry. I rushed out and there stood Bitsy, demanding to be fed. She had apparently spent the day under a peach tree amongst the comfrey and had either slept through or ignored the half dozen separate times Katie had gone by calling for her not five feet from her hidey hole. It is in an alley between pastures, and I, too, had gone past her a similar number of times calling, and Betty had done so probably double that number of times.

Kids.

Speaking of which, the grandson was out for a visit over the weekend. He is just walking, and is smart and determined. It was a joy to watch my lovely wife happily running after him. Even his "Aunt Kate", now a hands off teenager, got into the action, as he climbed up and collapsed on her for his only real nap of the weekend. She sat there, cross-legged until her feet were numb, and he got his needed rest.

"The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory."
--J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World

Although summer, and life itself, may be fleeting, I believe we are defined by the debts we are able to pay to those who came before us, and part of the way we pay those debts is by what we pass down to those who come after us.

Well, I gotta get out and work in the rain now.

Thanks for Listening!

Dave

"Thus we play the fool with time and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us." ~ William Shakespeare