Our day off

We went to the homeplace to relax this past Sunday. I took along a picnic lunch and his guitar and my dulcimer. Little Addie Bell loves the homeplace and plays some of her best music there (especially when she's tuned to DAC).

We were there a short while, and Honey was playing his fey music. He lays on his back -- this time on the camper bed -- and puts the guitar on his chest and plays his music and travels out on the sound -- a traveling meditiation as the music, all original and in the moment, tells stories without words. Oh, the things you can hear in Fey song.

It was our day off, so we were not to work one whit --just enjoy the place.

After a bit, I noticed weeds taking space between my milkweed plants (aka: butterfly weed). I love the smell of milkweed when s/he blooms and so do the flutterbys. So I couldn't help but go and pull the weeds -- (which, of course are not weeds at all, but still...) I pulled poison ivy and locust trees trying to start and I even pulled the asters and ragweed and my lovely joepye (Queen of the meado) at this point because they have their own space elsewhere and don't need to crowd in to the milkweeds here. I left any queen anne's lace I saw and I left the sorrel -- all else went.

Well, then I couldn't help myself -- I wanted to get the herbal 4-square set up and to do that I needed to dig into the hillside and gather rocks for the bottom part of it so it would be level. I ran into some stubborn roots from former tennants (mulitflora and autum olive). Some of those roots took awhile. And while this was going on, I didn't notice Honey sneaking out the can of paint and heading for the newly built bathroom to give the walls their second coat.

The 4-square set up in its place, I moseyed around and looked at things and listened to the wind in the trees and the creek in the woods and then... noticed that the pile of metal needing carted off was not in its best place to wait for the trucking out. So I moved it and then worked to bring more debris from below the rock (the rock has been the cutoff point for this year -- in hauling out things like washing machine parts and car parts that have been dumped there by people too lazy to discard their junk through proper channels and definately too lazy to recycle). The man who is going to haul all the metal to the recyle place in Birch River wanted it seperated into types. So I spread out the old mine belt I'd found (to keep weeds from growing through the junk) and made two distinct piles -- one alluminum and the other mostly iron. I boxed and then bagged all glass and sharp cornered items.

While this was going on, Honey had moseyed along with a bit of the wood needing stacked. He has to watch what he does, so the wood is two pieces at a time and he has to lower himself carefully to pick it up and then stand slowly and he really does have mosey. But the woodpile was shaping up.

I clipped some brush near the recycle pile and then noticed more and more that needed clipped and eventually I was down on the woods path and saw the best bunch of elderberry bushes -- so I started clipping my way through multiflora and poison ivy to make a good path to them and around them.

Back at the clearing, Honey spread straw over the rest of the area we'd cleared a few days before. Both of us got the picnic idea at the same time and headed to the picnic table to spread our feast. Sitting in the shade down late in the evening of our day off, we were both wiping sweat and happy for the breeze.