| | We had a good day yesterday; at least we felt like we were able to do things important to us. I awakened early enough to read and edit a chapter for a book that Bruce Maylath and I are working on. It is a collection of papers given at the Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota a couple years ago. They all work with memory or memorial or amnesia in some way. I have to write the introduction, so I am rereading the chapters and doing the preliminary editing. Bruce is doing the finish editing. To write the intro, I decided I needed to become familiar with the literature on memory, especially in sociological, literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies. Obviously I don't have time to master the literature, but I am getting into it now and beginning to discern the lines of coversation, the topoi, of the discussion.
Then we read the Psalms for the day together and a chapter out of Exodus. We finished Revelation a few weeks ago and decided to go back to Genesis and work our way through again.
After that we moved stuff around in the basement, got out the putty knives, and scraped the peeling paint off the floor in the new laundry area and in the kitchen area. Once the floor was prepared, we painted the laundry area with a tan colored epoxy paint that you can then throw paint chips on to camouflage flaws in the surface. That took us until about 12:30, a little longer than we wanted.
We had planned to go out to the "Day at the Farm" around 11 or 12, but we didn't get there until 1:30 or so, just a half hour before it was officially over and the farmers' market began. The event is at Noreen and Lee Thomas's farm northeast of town about 15 miles. It's a pleasure. We arrived in time to follow Steve Dahlberg around with about 15 other folk, sampling mallow leaves, stinging nettles, lambs quarter, and so on. A lamb decided he liked the company so he came along, sometimes leading the group in pursuit of Steve and occassionally suggesting by example that we try a few leaves from plants Steve had ignored. The lamb is one of Matt Carlson's lambs. He is a curious little guy, named Sprite, whom, Sheryl says, would be very difficult to send to slaughter. I guess it's a good thing we didn't meet the lamb we bought from Matt last year until it came to us cut up and frozen.
The Thomas farm is a real farm in the organic mode. In other words, its a throwback (in many ways) to the years before WW II and the farming-by-chemical era. We drive out Sunday evenings to pick up whole milk, and when we do, we drive into a farm yard where several hens are busily pecking around the yard and driveway, where a couple pigmy goats turn to eye us curiously, where the old yellow lab mix ambles our way to greet us, where Christy (the cow) greets us with a moo. Last week, no one was at the house, so we just picked up the milk and left the money. Christy was wandering around the farm yard instead of being behind a fence. It was getting near milking time, and she evidently thought Sheryl and I would do just as well as Karsten. There was a stainless steel bucket standing on the sidewalk, so she walked up to it, straddled it, and let her utters hang down right over the bucket. When we walked by with our gallon jars of milk without stopping to help Christy out, she bellowed and stamped away with evident disappointment.
It's a lesson in cooperation. The farm seems to be a place where everyone says, "We're all in this together, so I'll help you out if you help me out."
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| | Posted 6/14/2009 6:49 AM - 7 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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