Walking in fields with cows
March is usually a miserable prick of a month in Missouri. The wind! It never ends. It presses against the windows with the fists of invisible…
Container lettuce
Miss Pax is a skeptic of container vegetable gardens. Can you tell? She probably inherited it from me. I have no justifiable excuse for this. There’s…
Sister sheets
Last Christmas, or maybe the Christmas before that, I gave a copy of Dog Songs by Mary Oliver to a friend of mine who devotes her…
Breaking Ground
I’ve been exiled. Jon says he needs my old garden plot for hay-making this season. To be honest, I don’t mind the relocation. The last garden…
The Us in Trust
When Jon is gone I allow the dog into bed, though he never believes me. I don’t do it for her; she doesn’t care. She sleeps…
Peepshow
Context: We have a farm but we don’t live on it. The one house there is full of snakes and looks haunted. So instead, we live…
Pax and the Cows
All summer long, Jon has been talking about moving our camping trailer out to the center of the farm for us to stay. I’ll be honest…
Dog Days
There are some days when the best company you get is your dog, and there’s nothing shameful in that at all.
Driving Slow on Country Roads
Pax is the most graceless border collie I’ve ever known. She stumbles, she falls. I’ve seen her slip through cattle guards and staircases. When I first…
A Pastoral Occasion
“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.” — Pablo Neruda Jon came back from Baja a day…
the flying farmers 