I'm sitting in the kitchen with my laptop thinking of all the things still to do tonight. It's been a good day, a bittersweet day, and a thought-provoking day.
This morning I noticed a truck parked on the road. Around 8am a guy finally got out, swinging his machete in a haphazard manner through the path the surveyors had cut late last year. By 8:30am there were more trucks and surveyors in our yard. We now have stakes up marking our property line (two of my crepe myrtles are past the the stakes, but my chicken pen is on the right side!!!), a small bobcat in the field, and a port-a-john on the side of the road in front of our neighbor Arrin's house. In the last 17 years I've watched this property go from a nicely mowed pasture, to a poorly kept horse corral (where the horses often got out and ruined more than one of our trees), to an overgrown field. We've watched foxes, coyotes, dogs, deer, and my chickens create paths; listened to teenagers party in the weeds on the weekend. And now, in two more days, nature will give way to machines and become a monstrous three story elementary school. I know that change always comes, and there's no reason why it shouldn't happen in my lifetime instead of someone else's. But a small part of me will always ponder what could have been. And that, we will never know.
After the freezing ice storm from two weekends ago, this was an absolutely beautiful day. I spent most of the morning inside, waiting on a phone call that never came, cleaning light fixtures that I never got around to cleaning last month. (That was my January project...halfway done now!) By afternoon we spent some time outside starting clean-up on the debris from the ice storm. It doesn't look like I got much done, unless you go out in the woods and see the pile I made there. I'll need some extra hands to get some of the branches out of the pond/off the slopes, but that will have to wait until another week. As always, we talked more about how we'd love to clean that area out (as I'm dumping more limbs and brush into it) all the way to the property line. I'm not sure that will ever happen, though. I spent all my free time one summer cleaning one small section, and then DOT came through and took that entire section for road frontage.
Today we received word that a dear friend found out his cancer has returned. My heart hurts so bad for this family. There's never a convenient time to be sick, but a sickness of this magnitude is truly life-altering.
And life moves on. February is bringing for us another hospital stay, election classes (both me teaching and some me being the student), church activities, and life in general. I am so thankful that the Creator who made the world around us and blesses us with wisdom and friends and salvation is the same God who sustains through every minute of our life. That's truly an amazing thought, especially when everything around us is so fragile.
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