Autumn Harvest and Waldorf Homecoming

I wonder if how people are jerked by the heartstrings while driving along during fall harvest. I drove from home to Forest City, Iowa and back on Saturday for Waldorf Homecoming. On the way down, I passed too many combines to count. The first field I passed where there were trucks and wagons lined up along the end rows almost stopped my heart. I love the smell and sounds and sight of a golden field ripe and being picked. And I miss getting to drive a tractor or a truck to help--or to do the chores at home so my dad and brother could stay in the field. I loved fall on the farm.

 

 I was in somewhat of a hurry (imagine that!) so I didn't stop to take pictures. I just snapped these two on the go. I also had about a six-mile detour on gravel. Since I live on a gravel road, it didn't faze me until I heard a familiar rattle and roar that I haven't heard close up for a couple decades. Tears started running down my face. It was simply the roar of corn being augered into a grain bin, but the sound is so much ingrained in my being that hearing it made me miss my dad and being on the farm to the point of tears.

 As I drove on, instead of being sad, I felt grateful that I had loved my growing up years on the farm so much that such a thing as the sound of corn augering could make me cry.  And I loved every minute of driving through the midwestern fields, lush and golden, in spite of the drought we've had this year.   
Here's the Scarville Lutheran Cemetery sign. I had to snap a picture of that, too. The pastor at Fjeldberg Lutheran Church in the late seventies, Rev. Norris, came from Scarville to Huxley. His daughter Barb ended up in my dorm at Waldorf and was a friend of mine. It felt serendipitous to drive past this cemetery on the way to the reunion.

I didn't take enough pictures....but I had a blast with friends  I hadn't seen for over thirty years. I sold some books at an alumni craft sale in Salveson Hall in the afternoon...but the best part was getting to see Jeneen (here), Bev, Pam, Carol, Sue, Liz, Diane, Nancy, Kathy, Kris, Mark, Ron, Mike, Bruce, Gary, and many more. I'm waiting for more pictures from more friends, and maybe I'll post a few more.

Balance and living in the moment

Yesterday was a strange mixture of joy and trauma.

Got up and volunteered at the North Mankato Triathlon with my friend Barb. We had fun, cheered on the cyclists (many of them good friends) from our appointed spot on Judson Bottom Road, and then I went to the finish and saw lots more friends I hadn't even recognized as they zipped past us in their aero tucks.

It made me miss running, but made me glad that I can ride hard and sometimes fast.

Wrote for awhile, and then mowed and trimmed and weed-ate and had an idea for one of my characters, so I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote some more.

I was putting everything away, all cleaned up, and when I pulled the garage door shut, a big piece of the door fell off (the door is old and has been falling apart since I bought the place), and one big window came crashing out, and splintered into a million pieces on the cement. There I stood, surrounded by glass.

Here's where balance comes in: I can be disgruntled by the broken door (which I am), I can be frustrated by the mess of broken glass (which I am), because I'm tired from all the mowing and trimming, or I can be happy that the glass shooting out of the door in a sheet didn't hit me in the jugular or the shin or even a toe. I can be glad one pane of glass is still hanging there, to be removed without shattering. I can be glad Freya was up by the deck, watching. I can be highly irritated that the slivers of glass even bounced into her wading pool (because they did) and that I need to clean about 32 square feet of glass shards (which I do) or I can be grateful that Freya is pooped, too, and is showing no interest in trying to get into her wading pool at this moment (which she could be doing). I can also be irritated that now I can't close what's left of the door (which I am), or I can assess it (which I do) and climb up to figure out a way to get it to stay in its tracks so I can shut enough to keep most animals out over night (which I do and which takes some careful figuring and a big of hammering and longer than I had anticipated but it works).

Here's the balance: it's easy to fly off the handle (which I do often enough), but when I'm all alone at my own home and some small disaster like this happens, I know I have reliable Tom whom I can call, who can fix anything. OR I can look at the problem and figure out my own solution. After all, it was my own choice to buy an old farm place and live here alone with my dog. I'm not stupid. I can figure stuff out if I don't get too frustrated and just take time to look at how things work. And it feels good in the long run to feel somewhat or mostly self-reliant.

I closed the garage door, and when I turned around, fireflies filled the corn field. It seemed as if they turned their lights on while I was messing with the garage door, as if to say, see, even in the disasters, there's beauty when you look for it. Now, a garage door drama is not much of a disaster. It's small in the scope of the world's pain. SMALL. But when stuff like that happens, it's our world. It's what we're doing at the moment and it feels big. It's good to remember that it's not.

So as I tried to snap a picture of the sunset (and this is what I got), I thought about how the key is always to do what you're doing, even when it's an interruption, and not always what you want to be doing--it's what is right in front of you at this moment, and if you focus on that task, you live in the present, and that's what makes life a good place to live.

June in bloom

I love Bridal Wreath because it reminds me of my mom and my grandma. We had bushes like these at home. I should trim them in the fall, but it feels like butchery to cut them back. This year, it'll be necessary, I guess.

cardinal in the window

The birds are so much fun to watch this time of year. I feel sorry for them most of the time, though, so I try to keep my feeders stocked.

Just snapped this photo of a cardinal through my kitchen window, screen and all. It looks like a toy or an ornament or something. It's real, though.

Now: writers' retreat at my house this afternoon--hunkering down to get some work done!