Another Day in the Country
Clickety-clickety-click
© Another Day in the Country
If you want to remember a perfect day, write about it! Scribble notes on the back of an envelope and stick it in a bill drawer. Or write it on a piece of paper and fold it into a photo album that you keep. You do keep photo albums, don’t you?
How will you remember all the perfect days you’ve enjoyed if you don’t keep track? I suppose you could also take pictures — clickety-clickety-click.
It’s 9 o’clock in the morning in my hometown, and the wind isn’t blowing. That’s memorable right there. Springtime equals windy days on the prairie, and we’ve had more than our share this spring.
Monday morning, however, there was only a soft breeze — enough of a breeze to make wind chimes tinkle and flags flutter. That’s my favorite kind of breeze.
Everything was quiet except for chippies chirping and bunnies hopping in the yard. (Someone must have “offed” a fox because bunnies are everywhere this season.)
There were two bunnies — still babies about 8 inches long — playing tag. At one point they were running around and around a cedar tree we brought all the way from Mom and Dad’s retirement farmette in Oregon 20-some years ago.
Around and around the bunnies went until one figured out a shortcut — under the tree — and the game was over.
When I was mowing last week, I found pink columbines blooming under that tree, their long stems stretching for more sunshine. Where did they come from?
There’s also a honeysuckle vine that came up volunteer in that tree, and I haven’t the heart to cut it out because it smells so good.
I can hear doves calling to each other and I’m wondering whether they are going to build one of their flimsy nests in that big bald cyprus in my front yard. How their nests hold together for a season is beyond me.
“This is a perfect day,” I say to myself — 70 degrees and counting on up to 80, the weatherman predicted.
An old wheelbarrow in my front yard is filled with spring flowers — deceptive because they are all plastic. I’ll store those fakes away until next year after Memorial Day and I’ve gleaned funeral flowers that my relatives leave at the cemetery.
“Take them home later,” they tell me, and I do.
I’ve already watered my garden box — which I admonished the bunnies to stay away from — and zinnia seedlings that have come up in flower beds.
Last week I purchased little sticks of fertilizer to put around my young tomato plants, but I got too zealous.
“If two were recommended, three might be better.”
This morning I discovered the leaves curled up in revolt. They self-destructed.
This reminded me of my father, whose motto was, “if a little fertilizer is good, more should be better.”
Sound familiar?
“You know better than that,” my mother would admonish him, but he never learned.
I guess I’m a chip off the old block.
On this perfect morning, I’m eating perfectly scrambled eggs and an English muffin with strawberry jam that I made.
“Remember what it’s like to eat scrambled eggs that were laid a few hours ago by your very own hens,” I say to myself,
To boot, they are pale blue eggs, which delights the artistic child in me when I gather them from the nest box.
I came outside to eat breakfast at a brightly painted table I started redoing last fall.
It needs to be coated with several layers of Polycrylic, but that project has had to wait because I’ve had all the children in my art class at Centre Elementary School painting chairs that needed to be clear-coated, too.
Try painting acrylic coating on 30 chairs. By the time you’re done you will have forgotten whatever projects you started at home. Enough is enough.
While I ate breakfast on my very own porch at my half-painted table with a perfect breeze teasing the flag, I heard a train call out that it was coming from Herington and soon would be at the Ramona crossing.
In the distance, another train answered. It was coming from Tampa and had stopped at a siding outside of town, giving right-of-way. I don’t need to see this exchange. I can hear it happening.
“Clickety-click-click,” go the wheels. “Clickety-click-click.”
There’s another long blast of the horn and a shifting of steel against steel as high commerce passes through town, leaving us in peace, on another day in the country.