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Summoned by the Queen
Sometimes something as simple as answering the phone can change your ho-hum day into the most perfect one. It is in those moments that a beam of sun is somehow interjected into the drabness of a winter’s afternoon.
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And so it begins........
Okay, first things first. Some of you asked me to post my goal board, so I wanted to make sure that I did that. It has been fun going back over the pictures and taking stock. I can’t believe where I am compared to where I was two years ago as far as meeting my dreams and goals.
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New Year, New Possibilities
I have yet to decide how I feel about New Year’s resolutions. Yes, I think we should be decisive about how we want our lives to go, and it seems that the first of each year is the perfect time to do so. Yet, I have given up on making plans to do things I know that I probably won’t really do…resolutions I’ll feel guilty about when I’ve already let them go within a week.
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An Old-fashioned Christmas for an Old-Fashioned Girl
I am just an old-fashioned girl that is for sure, especially around the holidays. I love sloshing through the snow to find the perfect tree, taking sleigh rides, driving around viewing all the lighted homes, and sitting around the fireplace drinking hot chocolate.
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Pull up a bench and sit a spell
Maybe it is the time of year, or maybe it is just me needing a rest, but I have been noticing chairs and benches lately, each of them coaxing me to come on over and sit a spell. I cannot even say that I am thinking while enjoy their respite; at least I cannot recall anything that I was thinking about while there. It is rather magical to be able to plant yourself in the middle of a scene and contemplate, well, nothing.
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The Gift that keeps on Giving
I have been haunted the last few days by an email I received from one of the farmgirls. Not haunted in a way that compels you to flee, but rather in a way that begs you to stay and sit with it a while, facing those things that we all too often would rather not face.
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Hello. Anyone there?
Do you remember when children would make a phone by taking two tin cans and tying them to the opposite ends of some string? I recall doing this in elementary science class. We took two large paper cups or tin cans, punched a hole in the bottom center of each can or cup, then cut about 100 feet of kite string, pulled the string through both cups and tied it down. The key, of course, was to keep the string pulled tight, allowing the sound waves to travel across the string and into the other cup.
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Who could ask for more?
In today’s world it may not be politically correct, but I grew up playing that childhood game of cowgirls and Indians, knowing full well that if you were to mix in a little gypsy girl with the cowgirl and the Indian, shake it, then bake it, you would have me: a rural farmgirl. I, like many of my farmgirl friends, do not really “fit” into any one mold. I am as eclectic in my thinking and in my interests as I am in the blood that runs through me.
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The plot thickens
Family has been on my mind a lot lately. Perhaps it is because my two oldest sons, who have been out of country, are home for their first visit in nearly a year. Maybe it is because the holiday season seems to be approaching like a runaway locomotive that no one can slow down. Or just maybe it is the farm tours and the pumpkin patches and apple cider festivals that I have attended on the last few weekends that have me feeling all warm, fuzzy, and reflective.
(Thomas now 22, Lucas 21)Read all of The plot thickens
More Precious than Gold
Although there have been other places I have visited that have taken me back to days gone by, none compare to my recent trip to Idaho City, Idaho. The old timers there would tell you that the wealth traveled off the mountain during the gold mining days in the mid- to late 1800s. But as a self-proclaimed writer, I would argue that fact. For me, the wealth of that little mining town is in its residents, who not only keep the history alive in the care and keeping of the physical needs of their city but also in the telling of the stories.
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René Groom
is a down-home “MaryJane Farmgirl” who lives in Washington state’s wine country, where her husband is a carrot farmer. She grew up in the dry-land wheat fields of Eastern Washington, where learning to drive the family truck and tractors, along with “snipe hunting,” were rites of passage. She has dirt under her nails and in her veins. In true farmgirl fashion, she struggles to balance home, business, children, and marriage. Her passions include gardening, backyard chickens, canning, and redwork embroidery.
“Being a part of MaryJane’s farmgirls helps me recreate that sense of small-town community that I knew so well growing up—that place where neighbors would knock on your door for a cup of sugar or get together to make sausage. There is no place on Earth I would rather be than on the farm.”
E-mail René.
The Rural Farmgirl Blog columns copyright © 2009–2010 René Groom. All rights reserved.
Farmgirl
is a condition
of the heart.
