Monday, August 11, 2008

Dramatic Skies Over Vermont; and Is My Dog A Druid?

Never fear, I am mentally stockpiling Blog Posts of Substance, but no time now for gassing on at length about anything in particular. Just a couple of pictures.

We have had rain, rain, rain, here on the Vermont/Quebec border. Inbetween downpours, we have periods of clearing that feature great, towering thunderheads sharing the sky with wispy cotton-candy tear-aways. I haven't had my camera handy when I have noticed them previously, but tonight after dinner I snapped this one, with WHusband, in his new mosquito repellent Lawrence-of-Arabia headgear, in the distance. We have had better clouds than this lately but these were still pretty nice.



No red skies tonight, indicating "a sailor's delight" - i.e., good weather the next day. (Back in law school a friend -- one of the smartest women I have ever known -- tried to persuade me that the saying was, "red sky at night, sailor take fright." Physics degree or no, she was wrong. We all know it's "red sky at morning, sailor take warning," and that a red sky at night is a sailor's delight but I digress). More rain is in the forecast for tomorrow.

One thing that makes our farm a good place for actual farming is that it has almost no stones on it. A river, the Missisquoi, runs through our back field and I think the whole place was a lake bottom during the last Ice Age. (We rent the land to our friendly local organic entrepreneur for a little more than a dollar a year - the only farming our family does is in a weedy garden, unless you count lawn mowing; we do lots of that).

A few stones turn up here and there, however. Most came from a stony load of manure our farmer brought a few years back. Whusband found these in an area of grass that we mow and made this little stack, which always puts me in mind of a wee Celtic deity. Maisy was demonstrating a strange interest in these this evening and it makes me wonder if she has druidical tendencies. Hmm. We can't possibly have a pagan dog.



Funny, one day my good little seven-year-old Catholic School boy called me into the backyard to see this little construction - all completely his own work and his idea. Did someone say pagan?



The flowers and leaves look like an offering.

This temple or altar or whatever was well-constructed and it stood on the roadway down to the back fields until the farmer knocked it over with some piece of farm equipment. I could tell that he had really tried to avoid it, however. It survived many passes of the tractor and the cutter bar before it went down. He is an organic farmer, after all, and therefore no doubt the next thing to a druid. I'd better keep him away from Maisy.