Browsing Category: Journal Pages

        You can tell when a storm is near—even unseen in sky.  Temperature change, by body shivers in constant of tractor’s cab.  I turn the heater on, 86 degrees outside—winter-breeze moment before’s 92.           There are shadows to the southwest, haze of not-formed cloud.  From this, cloud becomes.  There shadow streaks beneath, contrails of rain’s […]

        I plant the last of our first-crop fields, our only west of town.  It is different country, as near as it is to the rest, and I feel an adventure and sense of levity as I drive into rolling hills of open land.  Black-eyed Susan’s and day lilies line the ditches of the narrow, […]

        They are just a few notes, same chords all play—but they are different from certain hands and certain souls, and you feel it right away.  It’s something I can’t do, no matter how I’ve tried.  Such is not my medium for affecting and touching souls, but when I hear it, I know it’s magic […]

        I replant the field.  Most-ideal of a non-ideal situation—it didn’t work.  Looking over field post-emergence, you can see the slopes and seeps and holds where water keeps—all of them were drowned, blank spots in stand of corn.           July, I plant beans.  Money for the nitrogen is lost; but decomposition of the ground […]

        Wide open pasture, I keep to the path worn by habited hooves.  It is easier, no grass or forage to catch and drag feet through; bare, solid ground, heading straight to destination I know—the drinker I turned off to encourage cattle to corral where I’ve worked them; treating and cleaning eyes because they […]

               There is never enough time for everything, even when time is all you have; so make time for what you can.  Prioritize as you see.                There’s much to do, but first I breathe.  I look, assess—how to be most efficient—and then I waste time.                 I waste time in the garden, as some […]

June 29, 2025:                We are still behind in the fields.  I worked late.  I will start early, but before I do, missing Mass, I want to read what it is that will be spoken in Mass I miss.                 It is a confusing time in the Church.  I don’t mean that in some soul-searching, […]

        I stop at Walmart on return from the field.  I buy fish and laundry detergent.  We are out of both.           Home, I sit on the porch as a storm rolls in: flashes of lightning and thunder to north where I know tractor and planter rest, dead and idle in the field.  I’m […]

        I didn’t get stuck in mud on a hillside—though I nearly did three times.  I nearly ran out of gas—before the funeral time—but fuel was delivered to the field.         And so I ran.           I did not go the funeral where I knew that I should be.     […]

        It doesn’t look like I’ll make it to the funeral.  I’m not sure how I feel about it—or maybe I do but don’t like what it says.         I know the fields are running.  I know that we’re behind.  But what are a couple hours with respect to a life in full?     […]