SUNDAY: For a change, the weather forecast was not wrong. We woke up this morning to heavy, wet snow, and it is still snowing lightly. We are only a few days away from getting all our fall chores done, but we may be thwarted by the forecast for the rest of the week: Cold, cold, cold and not much sun. This snow will hang around all week, I suspect, and we will have to face the reality that our days of sixty degrees are gone for some months.
In the meantime, we will keep the fires going, as Joe has cut and split eleven full cords of wood both for our house and for The Solitude Inn. It’s a gigantic effort, and one that never ends. He and I will feed the outdoor furnaces all winter, and piece-by-piece, all his work will go up in smoke. Then, come late summer, after the new logs have seasoned somewhat, he will begin the process of cutting splitting, loading the wood on the wagon, delivering it to the houses, unloading, and stacking it.
Our work around The Farm changes with each season, and there is still always too much to do. A few days ago, Joe was pulling the brush hog behind the tractor mowing fields around stands of newly planted Fraser Fir trees. Today, he’s on the John Deere plowing snow. Some winter, we’ll put our feet up. Who am I kidding? As long as we’re on The Farm, we’ll never put our feet up, and we don’t even want to. Here’s to the end of our autumn chores and the months of winter work ahead.
