Still Missing Girls

The girls spent another day in town with Rebecca and I spent another day forgetting what all I need to do.

Thinking about an old "assignment" from Friday gathering a "this I believe" sort of thing we were all supposed to be doing but only Phil has done so far.

What I was thinking was that community is a really big thing with God and is one of those Spiritual Law things much like gravity.

Well I haven't formulated much at the moment to share with you . Maybe when the girls get home they can take a picture of me at the top of my new sixteen foot shinny aluminum orchard ladder and I can figure out how I want to say what is rolling around in my brain.

Missing Girls

Martin (the Warrior Slayer of Rats) and I are having a sad day. I'm all alone today and missing my girls terribly, he is a mopey little dog today missing his Bet girl smooch his nose, Janie misses Anna and is hiding upstairs. The girls went into town yesterday with me and stayed over night to help Rebecca get ready for Mike's parents to come for a month long visit. I am sorry to miss out on their helpfulness to me today but I am more pleased to be able to loan a good friend good help.

They are a real blessing to us, as their older sisters were and still are. I am very thankful to God that years ago he showed Dirt and I that children did not need to go through a teenage stage, that a person could become a normal adult without having to go through an eye-rolling, snarking talking, isolationistic, disrepecting time where the only people they care to related to are their peers and the only work they do is for money and someone else. Our girls are twenty-six, twenty-two, (the older two have been married since each were eighteen) seventeen, and fifteen (almost) and none of them were ever sullen teenagers.

Buttcha know I am supposed to be writing a book about our parenting adventure of having brought four girls to maturity and marriage without dragging them through rebellion, dating, and the ilk. My friends don't bug me very much about it, the book, like they used to, but the day before yesterday my husband brought it up, quite unexpectedly and quite affirmatively. I can't say that I would necessarily be the writer because while I am the one who types it out and works the words around to say what we mean, Phil is always right there when I write out stuff, whether he actually is and is verbally saying his input or if his voice and principles just play in my head while he is off at work. Did I mention how much I love him and depend on him?

So maybe I'll get started on that,

just as soon as my girls get home.

Beautiful Day

Oh it is exquisite out again today!

The cherries on the big tree are so red I can see them from the house.

I just hope the birds can't see them today.

I think I am going to talk the girls into buying a 16 foot orchard ladder from McLendon's today and tie it to the top of the car. We have reached the limit of my dad's old wooden 10 foot orchard ladder.

A new ladder will also be welcome this winter for pruning the "Widower Maker".

And I know one dear reader who will be thankful we are not climbing to the top of a 50 year old ladder reinforced by duct tape.

Perhaps Grandpa Erb's ladder can be retired to something genteel like hanging pots of flowers off of it.

Crumb, But My Girl's Are Fun To Hang With

I am not supposed to be up this late. But Terry is doing VBS so I don't have to exercise in the am and when Dirt and I got home my girls begged me to come and watch something they thought was very funny on the TV. And who can refuse girls who shoot vermin and then skin them. Here is their latest, shot by Bet, skinned by Anna......

...Nah I can't bring myself to put in that picture, it is pretty gruesome. Stop by someday and they will show you their collection of skins.

One might think that with their new bent of killing off the marauders around the farm and then skinning them out that they are destined to marry some boys from Arkansas.

Hope they're walking here.

Ta Da, The Grape Is Draped

I did it and in less than an hour!

It will definitely need better arranging this fall or winter when I can manage the vines better without greenery on them but for now it works.

I can actually tell I have a dining room window.

Off to my next job.

I'm Up, I'm Up

Up earlier than usual but right about what I planned. Need to get stuff done before the sun gets too bright. Going to tackle the grapes first and then some weeding and planting. Looking forward to a great and beautiful day listening to the Holy Spirit's leading.

Second Story Grape Arbor

We finally put in the arbor over the upstairs windows so that the grape vine has something to guide it. We know, grapes vines shouldn't go out that far from the main trunk, but we have come to appreciate the shade for the back of the house that the grapes provide, especially now that our back yard is treeless. Amazingly enough even though we don't tend our vine like we should, Dirt harvests 96 bottles of wine from our one vine each year. All that wine and we still get some to eat fresh at the table.

Dirt is really into the wine making thing, Jim, Kathy's husband, got him started and encouraged him along the way. He makes a terrific raspberry wine for our raspberries that are not exactly good fresh but the wine is great. The apples he turns into something akin to an appletini, a little stiff to be just a wine!

He also has made wine from our precious huckleberries that we get each year up at Burley Mountain. But the consensus is that huckleberry pie is better. We can't wait to go up each year, play in the Cispus river, cook great food around the campfire with great friends- family really, and drive a crazy drive up to the huckleberry fields at the 4,000 foot level on a road barely wide enough to hold one vehicle.

But all that is for another post, I am just excited to have my arbor up so that tomorrow before the sun gets to hot I can see if the grape vine will disentangle so I can get it on the arbor headed up to the window.