Adventure Day

The day dawned bright, clear, and glorious on our farm. I rolled out of bed about 6:30 a.m. and tried to think of the most unpleasant project I could possibly tackle. And I found it.

One of the less attractive features of our farmlet was a small stand of burning barrels centrally located between the house, driveway, grainery, and barns. It is actually right in the middle of the west lawn. I have thought for a long time that they needed to be removed, and so today I did it.

You need to understand that these are not small bins or even the size of garbage cans. These are 55-gallon drums, rusting and full-to-the-brim with ash. Hundreds of pounds of trash ash, probably. Those of you that know me know that I stand about 6 feet tall but weigh only about 150 on a good day... not enough personal mass to heft these barrels around. So I am reduced to shoveling the ash into more manageable containers until there's only about 100 pounds left in the barrel. Then I'm able to drag the remains onto the trailer and drive it out to the burning pile in the southwestern corner of the property. So this I did from about 7:30 to 10:00 this morning.

And Toby helped me.

As you know, Toby is three, which makes him an amazing mixture of insightful, innocent, and idiotic. And Toby is also completely immersed in the stage where he asks "why" about EVERYTHING.

Toby: Dad, why are ya loading that stuff on the twailer?

Me: Well, Toby, these rusty barrels of ash don't look very nice on the yard, so we're going to move them to the burning pile in back.

Toby: Why d'you wanna move them to the burning pile in the back?

Me: The burning pile already has lots of ash. These barrels will fit right in there.

Toby: Why will the barrels fit in there?

Though arguably Toby and I are the easiest personality mix of me and any of my children, after an hour and a half of this I am ready to help him become one with the ash in the barrels.

About this time Tara comes home from garage saling in two of the small towns near us, and she bears the exciting news that she has found two riding mowers for sale. She sends me ("Get in your car now and...") to check out the mowers with the full intention of having me buy one. So I oblige her. It is a green and yellow Yard Man 15-horse rider with a bagging attachment. Sadly enough it is from the estate sale of one Mike M. who was only in his 50's. If he did not know the Lord, it is his own fault, since he lived a block from a Baptist church with biblical messages on the outside of the building.

His colors were horrible (orange kitchen, green bedroom, blue (I think) living room) but the quality of the painting was good. Sort of like a great vocalist singing a horrible song.

I could tell you more, but my arms hurt a lot from all the shoveling and other physical labor we've done today.

By the way, it looks like the house might sell. Our friends Jay and Emily want to move to the country and this suits them. They visited today and we tried to "unsell" it to them... make sure that they aren't just infatuated with a house. But no, I think they like it.