“Come over here and see what I found,” my mother said.
She was squatted next to the back porch steps weeding around her flowers while my brother Billy and I played in the yard. We both ran over to her.
“See it? Right there,” she pointed, “it’s a garter snake.” Continue reading
At some point my husband Steve decided that having our two kids raise lambs would be a good idea. He thought that it would be a good experience for the kids and that the lambs would help to keep the weeds down in the back yard. And so the plan was hatched. I wasn’t convinced that raising lambs for six months only to sell them at the livestock auction was that great of a plan to hatch but of course when Steve mentioned it to the kids, they were all in. Continue reading
For several weeks my German Shepherd, Kelly, had been acting strange in the evenings, pacing from room to room and looking out of the open windows. After pacing and checking windows for about thirty minutes she’d stop and go lie down. Her behavior was odd enough that over the course of those few weeks, I walked to the windows and looked out myself wondering what she was smelling or looking at, but I never saw a thing out there. Continue reading
The first house my husband and I purchased was an old two-story farmhouse that was over 100 years old. Like many older homes, it had its idiosyncrasies, including a small hand dug basement that a tiny creek ran through every spring, window panes with old warped glass that made the outside world look wavy and wonderful, and lots and lots of tiny cracks and crevices for the field mice to enter. Continue reading
Every evening, just before dusk, the mockingbird would land on the roof outside of our bedroom window and sing. When he first began showing up, he only sang bird calls. He sang a variety of them, repeating each a few times, always in the same order. After visiting our roof, he would fly to the neighbor’s barn roof and do the same bird songs in the same order before flying off again. Continue reading
I awoke to a beautiful summer day made even better by the fact that unlike my husband Steve, I didn’t have to go to work. I got out of bed and headed downstairs and saw that the kids were already awake and playing a video game in the back room. We lived in an old two-story home and the back room was actually what had been the home’s summer kitchen, once upon a time. Continue reading
Splendippity 