if you're not a penguin...shut it - Floating My OWN Boat v.2

(since we're in the 'making up words' mode)

This afternoon it struck me how much my weekend life has settled into the rhythm of long and physically taxing days at the farm.

Life here is separate from the world 'out there' and I've found that time moves in it's own way.

Up with the roosters in the morning, Stef's out to feed the animals and free the various day-roaming critters. By 7 am I've already been woken up by Mr. Starey McPat-a-Face at least five times, jumped up my own heart rate trying to shock him into compliance by getting right up in his face and shouting - before finally giving in, getting up to feed and free my particular free-roaming spawn of Satan upon the unsuspecting population before crawling back into bed for a couple more hours of defiant sleep.

Days here are full of furious activity punctuated by short,deep rest periods and so later, waking up to hammering and chainsaws as Stef works on her new deck, I put laundrey in before staggering back home to rest with a few cups of coffee and a slightly more accomodating cat on my lap.

As a load of fill arrives and all converge in the heat of the day to push mounds of dirt around, I spring into action myself and sprint five feet to the car to head into town to pick up some movies and, at a loss as to what to do with that slowly rotting lime in my fridge - a six pack of Corona.

Nothing goes to waste here on the farm. I return home proud of my ingenuity.

From my pool of afternoon sunlight, chilled Corona in hand, on my own little deck, I watch Stef spraypaint floats (some sort of geese training device) and, as exhaustion threatens to overcome me, pick up the laundrey and deposit it unfolded in the bedroom for another day. Staggering back outside hauling my three pounds of goose down comforter for airing, I take the opportunity to collapse into my deck chair with a book for a well deserved rest.

As the sun starts to set I watch from a distance as Stef wields large cutting implements in an effort to prevent the blackberry bushes along the driveway from hemming us in and contemplate my own set of plant life.

The lettuce, the geraniums, a bunch of things I know not what they are and the miniature rose bush at the corner of the canopy. The day after Matt left I came home to find it perched on my doorstep with a note from Stef. Over the next 6 months inside the fifth wheel it flourished... until my mother the plant lady came and chastised me for keeping it in the house because it's an outdoor plant and we live in 'paradise'.

Needless to say she guilted me into putting it outside and over the last two months it's grown in a slope with most of it's leaves stunted and sporting holes. The pre-outdoor thrice weekly blooms now struggle to a half-hearted opening once every 10 days.

Lethargic with the heat, I struggle with the guilt awhile before flipping convention the finger and toting the poor thing back inside.

God forbid that something else that came out of that relationship should be allowed to accept defeat. We do what we can, you know?

A hard days work complete, I head inside to watch a movie before returning to the deck to write to you. 'My' laptop - a godsend - a couple of covered candles, some low level lights around the canopy, the cat sleeps in his own chair across from me. I can hear Stef out in the barn as I slice a piece of my warm peach into my glass of wine, lean back in my chair to check out the stars, content in the knowledge of a day's hard work well done before shooing away the moths from the screen, closing the laptop and giving Cabot back his rightful place on my lap.