Salad Days

Things have changed. I’m different now. But still the same. Nothing new there.

Oh yeah, I’m a lucky man. I shed skin like the seasons. I dream and I follow those dreams. I get hung up and I move on. It’s better that way.

But some things stay the same: Wife, daughter, farm, and the joy of saying good morning to the possible. Like I said, I’m a lucky man.

Lately, I’ve found myself deep in what Gary Snyder called the “real work.” It’s summer, you know. And that means getting ahead on the woodpile, getting the hay in for the horses (660 bales last week), dancing and romancing in a garden that sings soothingly to me that everything is going to be alright, and finding one swimming hole after another to leap into, float and wash away the grime of an honest day’s work and the ninny thoughts of this and that.

This, my friends, is how it should be.

I’m a lucky man. I don’t do anything special, really. I just dream. And I refuse to buy the company plan. It doesn’t make me rich. But it gives me freedom. And hope. Priceless.

You’ve got one time around. Use it. I am.

[About the photos below: That’s my niece, Laurel, and me on the tractor last night. She’s been visiting for the week with her mother, Jen, my wife’s sister. When I asked her if she wanted me to go hook up the horse to the cart for a ride she said she’d rather learn how to drive a tractor. And so it was. And there she goes. She’s from Berkeley, California. Not many tractors in that neighborhood. And I can still hear her screaming. Later, she asked if they (she and my daughter, Bel) could ride in the bucket. Why the hell not? Anything to terrify the mothers, right? Especially when I “dumped” them on top of the lumber pile.]