Posts Tagged ‘nice weather’
Good Life
We woke yesterday morning with a glee hangover from our amazing David Byrne show Monday night, and it lingered throughout the day. Blessed with a fabulous climate-warmed summery-feeling November morning, we danced our way through the woods with Asher before approaching the barn to feed the horses.
We found the mares luxuriating in the emerging sunlight and mellow as ever. It got me thinking about how they stand so stoically to endure the miserable conditions when the weather is gruesome, as if they are aware that it never lasts, and that there will eventually be rewarding days like this as compensation.
Lately, mornings as nice as this one was –when the horses are calmly munching their feed and the natural world is as peaceful as ever– serve as a balm, soothing and comforting us. Coming on the heels of our evening of super special entertainment, it felt like we were getting a double dose of feel-good medicine.
Asher seemed to be enjoying the unusually nice weather as well, and it had him romping playfully all over the place. When I decided to try raking some leaves, he behaved like I was making piles for him to race through and kick all over the place.
For what I hope is the last time this year (never say never), I got out the riding mower to mulch the leaves in the backyard grass. Most of the trees that drop leaves have finished doing that, so it seemed like a reasonable time to finish tending to the grass in back.
When I put the mower back in the garage, I moved the ATV to the front and parked the mower behind it, a symbolic gesture in anticipation of the change from mowing season to snowplowing season.
After that, I started picking off little nuisance tasks that had been nagging at me for a while. I drove my car to the shop garage to put air in the tires. Then I brought our three most-used wheelbarrows up from the barn to inflate tires on those. I attached a recently purchased battery manager to the diesel tractor battery. It instantly kicked into “charging” mode. That tractor doesn’t get driven enough to keep the battery charged.
Cyndie cleaned and mended horse blankets. I moved a fresh batch of hay bales from the shed into the barn. We moved her picnic “door table” and chairs from beneath the big oak tree in the woods into the barn for winter storage.
Working outdoors felt like we’d been given a gift to accomplish all these things on such a pleasant weather day. With all of our animals showing irrepressible joy and contentment, it felt like we were living the (really) good life.
If only I could train my brain to retain the sense of this goodness with more weight than it does with the challenging days of harsh weather and difficult problems, I would be ever so grateful. That would be living an even better life.
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Very Summery
No complaints from us with the weather pattern we have been enjoying this week. Warm and sunny during the day and cool and comfortable overnight.
Here are some scenes reflecting the bliss:
A butterfly on our lilac bush and the four horses out grazing in the hay field as the sunlight was about to disappear below the horizon.
One summer trait the horses are not enjoying is the harassment by flies. We put out a fan to provide a minor assist in blowing the pests away.
Swings tends to claim that spot as her own and the others need to ingratiate themselves with her to earn an adjacent position that she will tolerate. I saw Light squeezed in there for a little while earlier in the day.
I claimed a few hours of the warm sunshine for a bike ride through our “Driftless” terrain, which means I sped down some fast descents and struggled to climb up the other side.
I made it out to Elmwood and back, but I wasn’t successful in my quest to ride the entire distance unsupported by battery assist. Honestly, I would have needed to call Cyndie to come pick me up if I didn’t have the motor to help me deal with the last ten miles. I’d lost track of how many river valleys remained and faced an unexpected steep climb that almost broke my spirit.
However, I survived and did so under some of the best weather at the best time of year our latitude has to offer. We live in a very beautiful topography that provides wonderful vistas of rolling farm fields peppered with wooded valleys and gorgeous trout streams where whitetail deer romp and fly fishermen cast their lines.
Very summery, indeed.
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Another Staycation
We were able to getaway in town this weekend, leaving Jackie to take care of animals at home. Cyndie and I went off to spend a couple of nights at her parents’ house in Edina. Fred and Marie were headed for a cruise in Germany with friends of theirs, and we provided transportation to the airport yesterday.
Before that, we snuck out for a convertible cruise through our old Eden Prairie stomping grounds. The fabulous September sunshine provided ideal conditions. We stopped by a park to visit folks gathered for an EP fundraising event and enjoyed live music performed by Wondercure, some life-long friends.
After leaving the airport, we headed past an even older neighborhood of ours in south Minneapolis to hook up with more EP friends. We strolled with Paul and Beth along the Linden Hills streets for dinner near Lake Harriet.
Back at their house, we were treated with other-worldly dessert creations from a nearby bakery.
It all feels so cosmopolitan!
How did we come to deserve such richness of life, friends, and food.
It is not lost on me how much the remarkable warm September sunshine and blue skies contribute to making a day seem so positively regal.
Our experiences would have been much different had it been cool, gray, and wet.
I’m just sayin’.
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Relative Something 