It’s mid-October. The CSA is over for the year, both vegetable and flower. The drought is also over for the year, though too late to save the CSA. Garlic is planted, gladiolus are dug and dried, what seeds can be saved have been saved, and the hens are going through their fall moult. Which is disgusting. Have you ever seen a chicken mid-moult? It’s nearly pornographic in its nakedness. Just gaping patches of raw chicken skin showing at neck and back and head.

One time, one of the ladies went through such a hard moult that she was utterly nude from her comb on down. Imagine your Sunday dinner running around the barnyard, this ridiculous, featherless chicken. And then, when her feathers started coming back in, she went from laughable to horrifying. Something about seeing feathers ooze from chicken pores, all straight and uniform and hard looking makes my skin crawl and a sense of panic rise up in my throat. Irrational. And gruesome.

All this to say, things are slowing down here on the farm, which always means my urge to start writing again picks up. Last fall, I thought maybe I had another book in me. That maybe enough time had passed that I could forget just how hard it is to write a book, let alone one that won’t embarrass you to death when you’re holding the finished product in your hands, when new friends that you meet years after the book is published learn of its existence and then tell you they’ve read it. Maybe I’d forgotten enough so that a new book could lumber its way out of me. So I started writing. I hammered out two full chapters and three partial snatches of nascent chapters before the unyielding tyrant of seed starting season returned to the farm.

Once you open that first package of seeds, once you press potting medium into your flat of 50 or 72 cells, once you dust off the heat mats and coax the grow lights back on, it’s all over. All your spare time, and some of the time already earmarked for other things, is pressed into service for the farm and all the stories you have in your chest will either have to be shared with the fields and the soil, or just boxed up until fall comes, until frost comes, until you sense the land has gone to sleep for a while, and you can come back inside and write down your stories.

My old blog is gone. Swallowed up in some technological void. Over a decade documenting my domestic church: the babies, the birthdays, the daily slurry of newborns and toddlers and adolescents and anniversaries and road trips and recipes and deep thoughts and brain candy. Gone. Facebook has been dead for years and years, now only a duty I have to perform each spring to answer questions for the farm. Instagram went and pissed me right off today, overreaching in its parental censorship, and I don’t want to visit there anymore.

Someone suggested this place. I thought I’d check it out. If nothing else, maybe getting back in the habit of daily posting will help with the other writing project. God knows I was (accurately) accused of pulling large sections from my blog for content in my first book. Maybe I’ll be so lucky again.

Anyway, here’s a picture of a gladiolus korm I took today while dividing and drying this year’s bounty. The fact that this precise shade of pink exists in nature makes me irrationally happy.

Maybe it’ll make you happy too, imagined, unknown reader.

Trees of the Field

Hay Stories, Berry Stories, Wire Stories