.

A Beautiful late Winter Day

                A glittering blue sky today and a temperature pleasant enough to make you start thinking about spring sanctified us here today at Big Creek. After all the cold temperatures snow and ice, a day like today feels and looks like a gift from God. Or, if you do not believe in God it was a delightful bequest from Mother Nature. I suppose if you don’t believe in Mother Nature you could bless the meteorologist on which ever station you watch on television. It was a squinty sunshiny, gentle breeze kind of day that makes me start hunting my shovel and other garden implements that have secreted themselves somewhere unknown since I used them back in the diminishing fall days of 2013.

                 Checking whether or not I have fertilizer for the garden and thinking about the rotor-tiller and wondering whether or not it is going to crank this spring has occupied much of my time today. As I walk past the now rusty tiller down by the chicken house I give it a furtive glance. I speak gently in its direction, soothing tones meant to placate the gods of rusty tillers, hoping to start a kindly, pleasant and humane relationship with it for spring of 2014. This may or may not happen. Sometimes it cranks on the first or second pull after adding a gallon of fresh gasoline and a cocktail of new oil, sometimes not. Occasionally since the battery no longer works, I have to pull the cord till my arm aches while fouling the air purple with profanities, all to no avail. Like a stubborn mule it coughs and sputters but will not cooperate at all. The tiller is a Troy Built machine and worked for fifteen or twenty years, diligently cranking by turning a switch hooked up to a battery every single time, every single time for years and years. It is just like everything else it ages and cannot do what it once could. There is no way I am considering buying another one because of the cost and aggravation of everything involved in replacing it. While it is detrimental to my blood pressure and my eternal soul I will have to continue in this love hate relationship with my tiller and tolerate whatever harm it causes to my health and soul. But for today rather than hassle with the lost garden tools, the tiller, the gasoline, the fresh oil, the shovel and everything else perhaps it might be wiser to go into the house and have a short nap before happy hour gets here.

Besides in just a few days it will again be freezing ass cold and all these thoughts will be for nothing.

                                                                                                                                                                                               tbd