When I began this blog late last winter, I would have been offended by the suggestion that I would have only completed half a dozen blog posts by Christmas. But, here we are. I would have expected my gut reaction to be, “What the hell happened? Did I really schedule weekly writing time and fail to post for months on end?” However, I know what happened.
Summer.
At first, I found rural life conducive to both writing and farming. I get to farm sunup to sundown (give or take an hour) and then write after dark because, let’s be honest, there’s not too much else going on out here. Having spent much of my previous years in an office or in school, I somehow neglected the fact that the sun doesn’t work in 8-hour shifts.
At one point I got so fed up with being behind on my story telling that I intended to simply write a blog post about how physically draining I found farming to be in my first season. I knew coming in that even being an avid runner, an outdoorsman, and a fan of physical labor, that this year would be a new challenge altogether. The levels of tiredness that I experienced this year were altogether new, though. I wanted to write about how I learned a person could sweat so much in a single day that you wake up feeling like you have the all time worst hangover…except you haven’t touched alcohol in a week and had even contemplated the limits of your well with the amount of water you imbibed the day before. That blog post was never written though…because I was tired. I was tired and then the next day I had a repeat of the conditions that made me tired in the first place. And then that happened for a month. I was so tired, I couldn’t begin to write about how tired I was. I was so tired, I failed to chronicle a number of blog posts that occurred to me to write. Blog posts like:
-The time I captured a possum in my bathroom at 5:00 in the morning using only a hockey stick and a cat carrier
-All of the stray dogs that came through our house this Spring (6 at last count)
-Learning that dog gestation is 62 days on the 60th day of my chief livestock dog’s pregnancy (and having the puppies born the first real evening I took off farm)
-Processing the first laying hens that moved with us from Memphis to the farm
-The anarchy of loading my first set of pigs onto the trailer the day of slaughter
-Managing to get two flat tires on my way to the pig processor the second time around
-Somehow deciding that trimming trees constitutes ‘light work’ on a day that our AC is out and it is 100+ degrees
-An appreciation for my dark sense of humor upon finding out my feed supplier has burned down
-Righteous fury at the pork processor for losing two whole hams followed by disappointed resignation two months later when the same processor loses a bunch of bacon
-My comical attempt to make a chart of potential alternative careers (and learning not to make life decisions in August)
It is only now, in December, that I feel like I have the mental capacity (and time!) to sit down and give some of these stories the attention that they deserve. Stay tuned. I’m looking to make up for lost time and get these stories out quickly so that I can make room in my head for new ones in 2016.