The cousins had played happily together.
On the flight home, I made good progress toward finishing one of my presents, the fascinating Perennial Vegetables. Other than asparagus and rhubarb, it's hard to think of vegetables that I would plant once and enjoy for more than three years. The book details about 100. I have a very weedy patch of asparagus and a few plants of stinging nettle. I suppose that is about 2%, which is more than nothing. But I'm interested to see what more I can add. It's an interesting, attractive idea!
During our week in Colorado, Phil had joined us for an unexpected overnight, as a client needed some help. The last leg of his return flight was cancelled, which meant that he got home some four or five hours later than expected, after renting a car and driving the final 77 miles from Dulles to Charlottesville (the cows, after all, needed a farmer to be there). But other than basic survival for animal and man, not much had happened around the farm.
It didn't help that we arrived in a downpour. A downpour Phil said had lasted the better part of the last two days. He had brought us all boots, so we managed to get from van to trailer without too many mud puddles and too much grossness.
By morning, the land was spongy under 2" or so of rain. There's little to do on the farm under a heavy layer of water, with a busted (but slowly healing!) finger. Even just delivering hay from the top of the driveway to the bottom almost got the tractor stuck.
As I got back to work, I did what the homeopath had suggested: I delegated. Phil made breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When the cows got out, the older two boys went to help round them up. After dinner, the older two went to do the dishes. This was like a minivacation for me: a day to read and get a bit of extra sleep, trying to catch up on both.
I was happy to find, on my return, a James Thurber book I remembered from childhood: Many Moons, about an ill princess who wants the moon so she can get better. The jester figures out that she believes the moon is smaller than her thumbnail, as she can cover it up, and sometimes gets caught in the top of the tree. She knows it's made of gold. She gets a gold moon and recovers, but, as Abraham asked, "What happens the next night when the moon rises again?"
Exactly the question in the book. But the princess knows that the moon's return in the sky is the like the tooth or the flower that regrows, and so she falls asleep, gold moon around her neck, real moon in the sky.
Illustrated by Marc Simont, who also illustrated the Nate the Greats (the wonderful Dashiell Hammett-type detective series for early readers), the boys listened and laughed out loud. If you have children under ten, and don't mind if a bumbling wizard makes an appearance, check it out!
No comments:
Post a Comment