May

Last week our farm proletariat created our own Maypole, a giant bamboo pole with a tuft of leaves on top, tucked into a cable spool.  After dark, there was semi-organized dancing, wrapping the streamers around the pole, and semi-organized music, and semi-organized potlucking.  All good, although the adorable quotient was certainly well below Martha Stewart threshhold.

This week is the first square dance of the season, T-Claw calling.  Plan was to build a dance-floor, but marine plywood is very very expensive, so options are being discussed.  Around a late lunch table, as it happens, with Eric, Rachel, Heather, Scott, Loren, Dylan, Andy, Ayla, and I don't know who all. 

Tom picked out a black-and-white houndly mutt as a second farm dog (Balthazar Jack, whose schizoid moniker reflects unresolvable conflict in the family), and then came home with a third dog, the adorable but very destructive Thelma.  The farm crew wanted to see her flying over a cliff in her convertible Caddy, but our good neighbor Jim has taken her on, to see her through her puppyhood.  Into a grave and philosophical middle-age, we presume.

Our frighteningly changeable climate has, this spring, been perfection for truck farming, and the gardens are perfectly beautiful: onions, tomatoes, peppers, okra, rhubarb, and lettuces all crisp and shining.   Tom has temporarily retired the spader for repairs.  I've weeded the driveway bed and called in reinforcements to beat the pool bed into some semblance of horticultural order. 

There is no other news.  Oh, wait--Tom, Keith, Jim, and Joe put up the huge posts you can see down at the corner--the first part of our new Scottsboro/Bells Bend sign.  Can't wait.  We're so proud!