Denouement

Every new beginning starts from some other beginning's end.

-Closing Time

Semisonic

Writing these blog posts is a little more of a challenge on the farm, because P's not in the operating room at 7 a.m. and we like to take our coffee together on the porch before I dive into the day. Up in New York she's out the door at 6:15 after I fix a quick breakfast, then I read the paper online for a few minutes, then spend a little time drafting this. The pace is a little more harried this morning, as P is just now pulling away in the pickup to drive to Tallahassee and pick up a couple paintings I bought her for her birthday.

This morning our coffee on the porch was interrupted by bellowing from the pasture.

We've (okay I've) learned that cattle don't just walk around mooing and hollering--if they do it more than twice in a few seconds, something's up and you ought to go out there and take a look. We have had calves get through the fence and separated from their mothers, neighbor dogs loose among them, water troughs disconnected. This time I slipped on my boots in my pajama bottoms and walked out to find Skeletor Junior, born in January and a good looking little girl (we think), standing alone and carrying on for no obvious reason.

Then I noticed Skeletor herself was standing in the next pasture by herself. When she saw I was in conversation with her calf, she lumbered through the gate and toward us, revealing that she was as wide as she was tall. Pregnant again? How can that be, when Junior was born only five months ago? And very, very pregnant at that. We may be witnessing something of a miracle here. I'll have to ask a friend of ours who grew up on a dairy farm, one of the two or three who read this blog, if that's even possible.

We were also startled out of our reverie when the deer feeder next to the pond sprang to life, spraying cracked corn in every direction to the delight of the ducks and geese. We had questioned whether the battery died while we were gone. Apparently not.

Those are whistling ducks you see around the feeder--they've hung around since we left over the winter, and I counted thirty-one in the pond this weekend. They are delightful to have around, curious and beautiful and a foil to our paunchy, domesticated Pekings.

One thing that may be driving them here is the drought that has drawn down every body of water in these parts. Our pond is the lowest it's been since George fixed the pump in 2019.

We have had to leave the pump off since we got back, because the cattle knocked off a faucet head and flooded the area around the now-abandoned chicken pen. Peg's supposed to buy me a PVC cap and some glue while she's in town today, and we'll get that fixed and turn on the pump to start re-filling the pond tomorrow.

The first part of this week we were in Panama City, flying over there in around 35 minutes on Monday morning thanks to a brisk tailwind.

[I had more to say this morning, but I just got a text that an old friend of mine, one of the kindest, biggest-hearted folks in my profession, died of Covid overnight. I don't really know what to say at this point.]