Monday morning

I am trying to catch up with pictures from this weekend. There are so many visual delights and memories out at the Farm, it's a lot of ground to cover.

This is a tiny old family plot that sits by the side of the road between the asphalt and the crops, soybeans right now I think.

When I was little I would beg Dad to stop the Red truck on the way out to Steve's so I could hop out and push the weeds aside to read the markers. If memory serves me, they were all from around the Civil War a.k.a. the War of Northern Aggression. There were some tiny miniature ones for babies. Babies, not that that doesn't still happen today but certainly not in the numbers suffered throughout history. Walk through any old cemetery and you'll find numerous headstones with markers that have dates with beginnings and endings too close together; anywhere from a few precious years apart to the same day.

I have always had an affinity for old cemeteries. Mom says I get it from her grandmother, Granny Jeffcoat. I love them because they are beautiful, they have historical and sociological significance and I love all the different headstones and monuments. What's not to like? I also love reading all the names. It's nice for someone who died so long ago to have their name on someone's lips all these years later. I sit or stand and ponder; who was he, what was her family like, what did they love most about their life?
My dream house is an old white clapboard farm house with a tin roof, big Cedars all around, rolling hilly pastures (for the horses and the white mule) and back behind the house, a short horse ride away a small family plot surrounded by an iron fence with a big gate. That's my version of Heaven on Earth.



Within the pump house's miniature environment is this "sign". An old Miller Lite can. Of course it's the official beer of the Farm and probably came from our fridge, but I still wonder what it's doing in there. I miss when the cans looked like this; now they're all blue and modern looking.

Two shots of the smaller fenced in area to the left of the house. Dad planted the pines and a few cedars and oaks when I was little. Now look how they've grown! I didn't like the "boring" neat geometric rowshe planted them in when I was a kid. Now I love looking down a neat row of the tall pines; they are very park-like. I read once that settlers always planted orchards of fruit bearing trees where ever they could. All of that fighting nature and all its inherent disasters, trying to tame the wilderness; they would have really enjoyed having a space where nature was neat and orderly, where they put it.

These trees are all where Dad put them twenty something years ago.

Of course my camera batteries died by the time I got to the Visualite, so I stole this picture from a friend's post on facebook (or as call it Crackbook).

Here is me and Aaron Jacks. He and his wife went all out in 70s dress. Aaron's copious chest hair finally paid off in this polyester shirt!

I had a great time watching Jay, Dave, Aaron, both Bobs and various others goofing off just like they did when we were in high school. And they are good at it too. I miss all of them. I miss being 19 and having my whole adult life ahead of me, not knowing where it will take me...

I could hardly get to sleep with all the memories a storm in my brain. I won't even try to scrape that surface here, wouldn't know where to start.

The night made me very nostalgic and sentimental for my old friends and the old days. And they certainly weren't all that long ago! Why does it feel so distant?

Where the Hell did the last five years go? And it's only going to go by faster as time speeds up each year.

So I better get started making the most of it!