Enough to drive you buggy!

Short posting today. We're hot and tired. The tractor's oil and filter have been changed, despite what some have suggested may be John Deere's intention to make it doable only by their trained mechanics. It has all reminded us of our junior and senior years in high school when Mom was hung ho about us going to medical school after college and we we hung ho about hanging around with the guys at the gas station so we could save a few bucks servicing our old but new to us car ourselves. At least in those days one didn't need a computer science degree nor a set of metric wrenches to work on "a car."

dragonflies

Photo by J. Harrington

The most fun part of today's exercise occurred when the dragonfly briefly landed on our hand as were reinstalling the mower deck. After the deck was back on the tractor we took a quick test drive and mowed a bit more of the all grass behind the house. We were accompanied by squadrons of dragonflies while mowing, probably because we were flushing bugs for dragonflies' lunch. In the process, we noticed that this season's first hatch of deer flies has occurred. So, an alternative way to describe Minnesota's two seasons might be: deer flies and dead flies, or dragonflies and no flies.

"barn" spider (not today's)

Photo by J. Harrington

Final note for the day: as we washed up at the kitchen sink after the wild change on mowing exercise, we suddenly noticed what looked like a 40 pound barn spider on the rim of the sink. All of the reading we've been doing on taoism must be having an effect because, rather that grab a gun, we picked up our bug catch and release set, put the cup over the spider, slid the heavy paper under the rim of the cup, went out on the deck and watched the spider land in some of the tall grass we haven't yet cut. If taoism can help us develop compassion for large spiders, maybe some day we may even feel a little compassion for Republicans?

Anyway, to finish off for now, here's one of my all time favorite poems that almost matches today's post.

The Prose Poem

Campbell McGrath

On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row. To the right, a field of wheat, a field of hay, young grasses breaking the soil, filling their allotted land with the rich, slow-waving spectacle of their grain. As for the farmers, they are, for the most part, indistinguishable: here the tractor is red, there yellow; here a pair of dirty hands, there a pair of dirty hands. They are cultivators of the soil. They grow crops by pattern, by acre, by foresight, by habit. What corn is to one, wheat is to the other, and though to some eyes the similarities outweigh the differences it would be as unthinkable for the second to commence planting corn as for the first to switch over to wheat. What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs, they say, so long as the plough stays out, the weeds stay in the ditch where they belong, though anyone would notice the wind-sewn cornstalks poking up their shaggy ears like young lovers run off into the bushes, and the kinship of these wild grasses with those the farmer cultivates is too obvious to mention, sage and dun-colored stalks hanging their noble heads, hoarding exotic burrs and seeds, and yet it is neither corn nor wheat that truly flourishes there, nor some jackalopian hybrid of the two. What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected, even in winter, when the wind hangs icicles from the skeletons of briars and small tracks cross the snow in search of forgotten grain; in the spring the little trickle of water swells to welcome frogs and minnows, a muskrat, a family of turtles, nesting doves in the verdant grass; in summer it is a thoroughfare for raccoons and opossums, field mice, swallows and black birds, migrating egrets, a passing fox; in autumn the geese avoid its abundance, seeking out windrows of toppled stalks, fatter grain more quickly discerned, more easily digested. Of those that travel the local road, few pay that fertile hollow any mind, even those with an eye for what blossoms, vetch and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the rabbit running for cover, the hawk’s descent from the lightning-struck tree. You’ve passed this way yourself many times, and can tell me, if you would, do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?

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