Labor Day

At the farm we like to take a sunset stroll past the barn, past the pasture, in between the corn and soybean fields.

Then we walk on the "minimum maintenance road" down to Hillview Road.

This walk takes us past the school house - worn beyond repair.

And if it's cool out, we might take a blanket off a chair to keep warm.

We found a burl on a maple down by the lake.

On Monday, Labor Day, we thought we would take it easy.  After breakfast we sat outside for a few minutes.  I saw some scrapers and thought it might be fun to scrape some of the paint off the house.  Plans are made for the house to be painted later this month. So scraping some paint flecks off now might be helpful in the long run. We started by the main door and, geez Louise, paint flecks were flying everywhere.  It was just so darn satisfying to scrape the boards.  I've scraped other houses before and I didn't get nearly so much paint off as I did on this farm house.  It was like the paint was begging to come off.  Soon it looked like I had a horrible case of dandruff.  The grass was flecked with paint and the spiderwebs were adorned with paint flakes.  We only scraped what we could reach from standing on the ground but we went all the way around and were done in a couple hours.  Scraping satisfies some kind of destructive and sensory need in me.  After that I mowed the lawn.  My Dad has a Cadillac of riding lawn mowers.  I borrowed his sun hat and started out doing my favorite part - the path down to the old school house.  There are two long stretches to mow - to the school house and down to the road.  I always make sure I have plenty of gas when I do those stretches because I don't want to haul a heavy gas can too far away from the barn.  The rest is easy to mow, just back and forth, back and forth.  I find it relaxing to concentrate on making the most efficient work of it.  I don't want to overlap at all and I don't want to go back and fix what I have missed.  I had to duck low beneath the crab apple, apple and pear trees.  Offspring #2 made lunch for us.  After that I found a half gallon of primer so I used that up on the outside of the house.  More nephews came up for the day to practice archery and to check their trail cameras for signs of deer or turkey.  We rode along to collect the memory cards and review the results.  I would really like to get one of those trail cameras for myself.  I would be interested in knowing what all goes into my garden to eat all my vegetables.  Now that we knew where the cameras were hidden, I was really tempted to go back on my own and moon them.  My actions would be caught on camera and shared so that really isn't a good thing to do.  What I could do is be creative.  I could paste a horn on my forehead like a unicorn and prance across the field in front of the camera.  How about Big Foot or the Lock Ness Monster?  Trail cameras open up a whole new world of practical jokes for me.  In reviewing the results of the past two weeks, we saw many deer, many turkey, several raccoons, a tractor, and lots of weeds blowing in the wind.  We walked in the forest down to the lake.  I was in search of ginseng which I heard grew down here.  And whaddya know?  Offspring #2 found some.  We found a spot where lots of ginseng was growing and dug one up.  We also took a sample of Jack in the Pulpit to plant back at home.  We searched the woods for deer trails. We found lots of trails.  We also found evidence of a turkey incident.  One turkey lost quite a few tail feathers.  As we hiked up the hill, we saw more turkey feathers strewn about.  At the end of the turkey trail, only downy turkey feathers were found.  I suspect that turkey survived the incident.  I had fun being in the woods with my family deciphering nature signs and doing turkey crime scene investigation.