I love winter because I can build a roaring fire in the fireplace, get out my laptop and write, while sometimes looking to the flames letting my mind flow. But spring, spring means chores, planting the garden, tending the garden, mowing the lawn, and about every four weeks, depending on rain fall, bush hogging the fields.
Okay, ridding a tractor dragging around a bush hog or ridding a lawnmower is not hard work, and it does give me time to work out plots and characters, it’s not where I want to be nor doing what I want to do.
Having said that, once I get started, I do enjoy it. There is something about lining up the swaths with a bush hog so that the last pass up the middle of the lower field matches the rest of the cuts, making it look as though I knew what I was doing with all the nice straight rows.
As spring gives way to summer and fall, the Pine Martins will sometimes join me out on the lower field, diving and spinning, as they eat the flies, butterflies and grasshoppers my activity in the field stirs up. Sometimes I will find myself ducking as the Martins, in there aerial ballet get too close to me and the tractor.
A Cooper’s Hawk along with a Red Tailed Hawk have taken up hunting the tree line along the creek over the past winter, and it is my hope they join the Pine Martins in the hunt. I do see a lot of field mice as I mow. Little brown balls of fur, scurrying for the protection of the rows of cut grass, Queen’s Ann Lace, Red and White Clover and Vetch, that the mower lays over on each pass.
And I get to think as I watch this natures dance play out before me. So maybe spring and summer are not so bad for my writing as I originally thought.
I must remember to come back and read this post occasionally, as there will be times when I will do almost anything not to go out and hook up the bush hog to the tractor and get started.