The weeklong stretch of winter we had has been replaced by a weeklong stretch of fine fall weather. The turn in the weather gave me the opportunity to get all my winter preparation work done in record time.
That included: picking and shelling all the dry beans, storing their trellises and putting all the dead vines on the compost pile; pulling a nice crop of new radishes (the fourth radish crop of the season — a record for me); digging a nice little surprise second crop of new potatoes that had grown up volunteer in the green beans I planted after the first potato crop.
Then I salvaged the raised potato/green bean raised beds and then tilled that site and the site of the adjoining okra plants and planted in their place the last of my fall wildlife food plots. I’m still waiting on the first plot plantings from a week ago to emerge. I might have not had enuf rain to get them growing, but I’m still hopeful.
I gathered up and drained all the irrigation hoses and stashed them away for the winter. Then I rolled up all the temporary garden fencing and stored them away.
***
Some friends who needed firewood came and cut down three worthless mulberry trees and a dead elm and a dead hackberry. I just had them stack the cut branches and then I used the tractor and front-end loader to push the branches to my burn pile.
***
A middle-aged farm wife wuz grocery shopping and, getting ready to leave the store, checked her pocket for her car keys and couldn’t find them. She knew she must have left them in her SUV. Frantically, she headed for the parking lot — with a sinking feeling in her gut because her husband had scolded her several times before for leaving her keys in the ignition.
As she looked around the parking lot for my SUV, it wuz no where to be seen. Clearly, someone had stolen her vehicle. Rather than call her husband, she called the local police, gave them her location. When they arrived, she confessed that she’d left the keys in her SUV and that some thief had helped themselves to it.
It wuz only then that she made the most difficult call of all to her husband.
“I left my keys in the SUV and it’s been stolen,” she sobbed.
There wuz such a long moment of silence that she thought she’d been disconnected, but then her hubby replied, “Are you kidding me? Don’t you remember I dropped you off to buy groceries while I went to the farm store for supplies?”
Then it wuz the wife’s turn to be silent, but then she said, “Well, this is embarrassing. Will you come get me?”
“Well, I will just as soon as I convince the sheriff that I didn’t steal your danged SUV,” he retorted.
***
A financially hard-pressed Flint Hills rancher decided that he should turn to prayer to seek a solution to his financial troubles.
So, he rode his best horse to the top of the highest Flint Hills summit on his ranch, dismounted, and figgered it wuz the best place to do his prayer. So, he looked up into the sky and started his to talk to God.
He asked the Lord, “God, what does a million years mean to you?”
He happily heard the Lord clearly and distinctly reply, “A minute.”
Then the rancher continued, “And what does a million dollars mean to you?”
The Lord replied, “A penny.”
The rancher then hopefully requested, “Lord, I’m my ranch is in financial trouble, so could you spare me a single penny?”
The Lord boomed back, “In a minute.”
***
Well, when I’m writing this column, it’s two days after the national election and our next president still has not been announced. Regardless of the outcome, it’s obvious as the nose on our faces, that the good ol’ USA is about as divided politically as it it possible to be.
That’s why an e-mail that I received from a friend is appropro to describe our political impasse. Here’s what it said:
“If you go into the desert southwest and catch 100 red fire ants and another 100 big black ants and put them in a jar, at first nothing will happen.
“However, if you violently shake up the jar and them dump the ants out on the ground, the ants will immediately launch into a pitched fight-to-the-death battle. They will kill each other and neither side will win. Both lose big-time.
“The reality is the red ants think the black ant are the enemy and the black ants think the red ants are the enemy, when the actual enemy is the person who caught them and shook up the jar.
“That is precisely what’s happening in America to day: liberal versus conservative, black versus white, mask versus un-mask, rural versus urban.
“All this ‘them against us’ stuff needs to stop. We need to start asking the question, ‘who’s shaking the jar and why?’”
***
Those are wise words for the week — not mine, but wise words nonetheless.
Have a good ‘un.
