Storms, Cookies, Gardens, Dirty Feet, Hamster Bites (Amen.)

1.  It hit me today while looking out the back window:  What your heart knows and what your hands are willing to do, this is what your land becomes.  Because this is a working farm (corn, beans and hogs), there's always lots of machinery coming in and out, so I wanted to be sure I had a space for Nora, one that would give me at least a 30 second lead should she decide to run.  So the original garden was split in two, turning one half into a fenced in area for Nora and the other half becoming a grand experiment I didn't know at the time would grow me into something I needed desperately to become but didn't know yet--someone who speaks little, digs a lot, and believes in small things with secrets written into them.  And when I looked out the window, there it was, my heart and my assigned work right there in a rectangle in the middle of Nebraska, in the middle of the universe.

2.  When you live in the country far from sirens, you need one of these.  Today it blinked red warning, which sent me running out to the garden with every container I could find, covering the fragile starters I'd planted earlier.  The weather moves in and out, heats up, cools down, rains and doesn't rain, hails and blows.  I usually beat myself up for saving stuff I shouldn't, but today I was glad for the two most consumed beverages in our house:  milk and coffee.

3.  And the storm passed and we pulled up the shelters and Nora ran barefoot up and down the garden singing garden songs and weather songs and songs of summer vacation.  And she picked the mud off the bottom of my shoes mixing grass to make worms and warning the cats:  "Don't hurt these, okay?  These are very special.  Don't destroy a creation.  Watch where your tail is, okay?  Okay."

4.  And we make cookies using whatever we can find plus some bad bananas and we eat them with, you guessed it, coffee and milk.

5.  Storms, mud, hamster bite to the index finger, bad bananas.  Still a good day.  A great day.