Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world....
Though I don't agree with the heart of Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," those lines have the right feel for my day.
Our well is, as far as we can tell, restored. We didn't need a plumber to come: simply shutting off all water hydrants entirely for a night allowed the well reserves to recharge. We are thankful.
We have prayed for rain. A lovely rain fell much of the day.
A quarter of the comfrey cuttings are up. I hadn't anticipated any sprouting for a few months, so to have so many sprout in a few weeks is really pleasing.
Phil and his helpers worked hard Saturday and managed to get the form work finished by Saturday afternoon. They have a little back filling to finish, and then they'll be ready to pour.
Saturday night we went to the house of our friends, and were restored and refreshed. The dirty dishes in the sink remained, but overall I had finished what I needed to for the week. Phil was physically exhausted from 14 hours days of demanding labor, but pleased with the accomplishments of the week.
Sunday evening, I started the dishes. This is the summer, and since it had been four full days since I last did dishes, there were plenty of maggots in the sink and dishwater. It's disgusting, but the flypaper only catches so many flies; the rest feel the need to reproduce, all over the food bits left on plates.
But that wasn't so bad.
I bent to put a bottle in the cupboard, when the strong, unmistakable smell of mouse hit my nose. My Mom had intimated that there may be a mouse problem when she was visiting, but other than a single rare mouse dropping, I hadn't noticed mouse evidence. (There were so many droppings in the barn before the cats came, I wondered if those single bits had migrated somehow.)
Back to the cupboard. All but one of the items stored are in glass jars or tins, difficult for a mouse to consume. But I had put a small bag of granola in there about a month back: all but the millet was consumed, the bag in shreds.
So I started a thorough kitchen clean out. Most drawers had one or two droppings, way at the bottom. Clearly not horribly About midnight, I quit for the evening.
Isaiah wasn't feeling good. He was in my spot in the bed, so I spent the night fighting for space on our full sized bed between feverish Isaiah, thrashing Joe, and Phil. Finally I went up to Isaiah's bed up near the ceiling.
My first thought on waking was to go and a morning chore routine: feed the chicks, water the plants I didn't water yesterday evening. A bit later, when I headed outside, I again thought I should feed the chicks, but the boys needed breakfast, and the mouse-dropping, maggoty kitchen still needed several hours of attention. The chicks have a plaintive cheep when they need food, and they were quiet and content.
Phil woke up with a sore throat. He went over to move the cows, only to find that they had had a mass paddock break. They weren't grazing at the neighbors, just hanging out down by the creek, but they had jumped ahead several days of grazing, and needed to be corralled. The chicks were not on his mind. He rarely checks the chicks. It isn't really anyone's job, on anyone's chore list. If I hear them cheeping, I feed them, or send a boy to do so.
The boys visit the chicks regularly, too, but today turned rainy a little after 10am, and they stayed indoors.
When I finally went to check on the chicks, late in the afternoon, I found that the box around their light, that they shelter under at night, had fallen off the light. Twenty-eight of the chicks were trapped inside. Without food and water, none survived.
This was upsetting, but it was more upsetting when I realized that I had had two strong impressions to check those chicks, and had not paid attention. Whether that was the prompting of the Holy Spirit (as I would call it), or simply intuition, those chicks did not have to die today. But they did.
It stinks.
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