If you think Sunday is a day of rest, you have never owned a farm with rental cottages! Mind you, this is not a complaint, as my life is rich and robust . . . and busy. (Especially busy as my son and his new wife of a couple of weeks are currently off exploring New Zealand for a month-long honeymoon.)
After rising with the sun, I went out on the farm to feed the chickens, ducks, cats and rabbits. This is a quiet time, chatting with the animals as the sun slowly bathes the farm in that magical dawn light
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I then made my weekly trek to the market to get the Sunday New York Times, which out here on this tiny island in the Pacific costs a small fortune. I know. I know. I can read it online. And I do — every day but Sunday. This is my treat. My East Coast girl habit.
Coffee finished and a decent stab at the crossword puzzle and it was outside to plant seed trays. Each and every week I plant over 1,000 little cells. Today I did so while listening to NPR, my other news source. I mixed a big tub with potting mix and some new granular soil amendment my farmer friend promised me will boost our gardens, which have been slow to recover from the 2015 summer from hell. While we have a formula for what vegetables to plant each week, it is pleasurable to decide just what combination to select this week. Shall I do 10 rows of magenta lettuce or 12 this week? Red oakleaf or red romaine? Tuscan kale or curly kale? Ah, the little things. All the while I’m planting, I am rotating the watering of the gardens, turning this sprinkler on, that one off. Setting my phone’s timer, as I have in the past spaced out on changing them and gotten small creeks down the aisles between beds!
After tucking all those seeds into the trays and watering them in, my dear nephew shows up to help with a project I have had on the never-ending list for over a year!!! —- a new top for the start table. Together we remove the old one and set the new one in place, marveling that the old one held up for over 20 years! It is as testimony to the art of prioritizing that this relatively simple job, which took maybe an hour and a half, kept getting moved around on the massive to-do list for so long. Other things just took priority.
Onward to laundry— two loads of laundry from the farm stay cottages washed and hung on the laundry line. Somehow, seeing laundry hanging on the line makes me smile. I often wonder if the guests appreciate the fresh smell of their sheets and towels or do they bemoan the fact that the towels are crisp and not fluffy?
The shed was then swept out and emails checked and responses composed. I think it is time for a quick dip in the ocean. Then back to take that laundry off the line, fold it and put it away, late afternoon round of feeding the animals and then . . . lucky me – it’s off to dinner at a dear friends house.
Not a day of rest exactly, but a full and fine one, all the same.