Starling just brought me a mouse that she'd shooed one of the cats away from. "Can I keep it in the cage with Mette's hamster?" she plead. "It isn't dead! It's still kind of alive!" And then, with panic rising in her voice as she sensed my revulsion and rushed to curb my coming refusal, "Please! Can I just keep it in a jar for a while?"
That "kind of alive" description took quite a stretch of the imagination (and brought to mind the old "I'm not quite dead yet" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail as well as "It just so happens he's only mostly dead" from The Princess Bride). And I had to insist that the only possible way it might ever continue kind of alive would be if she took it to a nice patch of dirt and weeds immediately. Very immediately.
Shudder.
I am still not quite as accustomed to this farm life as I sometimes think I am.
But! I am accustomed to this:
Fog!
And another morning even foggier than the last:
Walking down the driveway to the bus. (I love that the bus now picks my kids up just right at the end of our very own driveway.)
(Starling's clothing looking very Starlingish as usual.)
Walking back up the drive to the house. (I had to press onward towards it on faith alone.)
Halfway up the drive and you can still barely make out its ghostly outline.
We don't get as much fog as we did in Young Ward, but, waking to it so thick here this week, my soul felt like a child discovering that Christmas morning still came--even after a move to a new house and a worry that Santa wouldn't know where to find me.
(A friend told me her daughter lived up here and couldn't bear it. The fog made her feel claustrophobic. Interestingly enough, I actually do suffer quite badly from claustrophobia, but not with fog for heaven's sake! It so mysterious and lovely that it makes me feel ... well ... I hardly know! Only, driving between here and Mendon on a foggy morning you alternate passing between thick, hazy patches of fog and clear, distinct strips and streaks; it lifts itself off of the ponds and riverways like thick steam; it hovers and drifts--it moves--low over the grasses; and the ethereal beauty of it has, in actual fact, reduced me to tears on more than one occasion.)
But. What else?
Ah.
Mike recently told me that it's always a bit awkward for him when he meets someone who knows him solely from my blog. He's not quite sure just who they expect him to be, but he suspects it is some sort of ... oh, I don't know ... very nice ... farmer-ish fellow.
Well.
That is unfair of me--to have inadvertently burdened him with such expectations through my portrayals. (Particularly when he would greatly prefer to never be portrayed at all and is only subject to it by the fact that I have never yet figured how to write about life ... without him.)
But in truth he has done very little farming these many years (and only recently developed the habit of acquiring livestock). (Though even he can't deny he has had a penchant for doing things like renting piglets and goats for the kids' Spring Breaks and coming home with baby chicks--which doings lend themselves to farmer-ish interpretation.)
And as for the nice business? I've only painted him as I've seen him. And I don't know that he can truly refute that. (And I hope that I have also painted him as strong, ridiculously capable, and full of integrity.) But, for his sake, I will try to paint him no further. (Nonsense. I won't try that for a minute.)
I will, however, momentarily divert attention from him by pulling things back to the house and farm.
Look at this picture Jesse took the other evening. Even without the fog it is still tolerable!
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