Passing the days, picking, stuck fast

Working from home has its blessings, but it also has its downfalls. One of the things that I struggle with is fitting my work into Mama’s daily life. In Mama’s world being in sight means I am available for chores, for conversation, for company in general. That is not always the case. She has adapted well enough to my constantly being around as she tries to give me space and some semblance of quiet while she goes about her day. One of the primary struggles on my part is having to share her phone conversations – whether I want to or not. Mama never takes a private call. All her calls are taken on “speaker”. The volume is usually maxed out and she responds to that volume in kind during her part of the conversation. With the calls she gets from our children and the calls she has to make for her business, it can be very distracting. She tries to tone things down, but it is still a challenge to work through those conversations. Then there are the times when she starts a conversation with me as I am working, concentrating on the writing I am working on, and I have to stop and find out my part of the conversation. I don’t really mind. Mama is my life’s most pleasant distraction but I still like to focus on the fact that I am actually working.

Mostly though, the days simply pass by uneventfully. As uneventful as things can be at the farm. I help Mama with the morning feeding almost daily. The calf is a bit much for her to feed since she has grown bigger. All bottle babies butt the bottle as you feed them. Our little one does so with a vengeance. I am often surprised that her nose is not bruised after each bottle. We give her only one bottle now. A morning feeding, for which I have been available for almost the entire time we have had her. That has been a blessing to Mama even though it shortchanges her on her steps for the day.

Tonight will be our last extra service this week. Tomorrow evening will be catch-up at the farm. Mama and I have enjoyed the extra preaching. I hesitate to call the extra services a revival. I do not sense a revival within our members, or within myself. Maybe I am not ready or willing to be anything more than is minimally necessary in my service to the Lord. Maybe I am too distracted or perhaps over-committed in areas of my life that make it difficult to allow the Lord to use me as purposefully as He would like, but I am willing to ask where those issues are and corral them to have more time for the Lord. All too often the personal constraint required to pull back from our commitments is emotionally taxing. An uncomfortable rearranging of priorities that displace or entirely replace familiar, comfortable activities. That is where the extra services help. If it is difficult to make the time to go to church for a couple of extra services, it only shows how little I am able to accommodate the things of God in my life. Sad.

Very quickly before church last night I picked the ripe blackberries from the wild bush in the fence line along the driveway. It was too loaded to let the opportunity pass. I was able to fill a bowl with the ripe berries. For now, Mama and I are freezing the berries to save them for cobblers or smoothies. So far, we have seven quarts of blackberries in the freezer. It has been worth the extra effort. In only a few days we will be picking peaches. Our little tree is loaded to the point that some of the branches are bent down dangerously. I am not sure if they will make it to ripening but there is no way to help them support the weight of the ripening fruit. I will prune the tree heavily this winter to see if I can get the tree to thicken those branches in case the tree does as well next year.

On the way home from church, we got a call from Alex. He and Leslie and their friend Andy had gone fishing at the quarry lake yesterday evening. Trying to find a more accessible spot to access the small upper lake, Alex had driven into a ditch and was stuck fast. He sent Mama a picture of the truck. Since my tractor is not operational right now all I had to offer was the truck. Unfortunately, he was stuck so badly that my truck could not budge his truck. As I looked more closely, I found that his truck was sitting with its frame on the ground because the ditch he had driven into was that deep. The sides of that ditch were straight up and down. I am not sure my tractor would have been able to pull him up and out of that situation. Darkness was falling fast so we abandoned the truck and I took the three fishermen home.

Mama called Ricky, the property owner, to let him know we had left the truck on his property and he offered to pull Alex out in the morning. He has two large tractors available to get the job done. Hopefully, they will work out the timing this morning. If I had know last night that the tractors had the keys in them I could have used one of them to pull the truck out, but it is better to have that done in the daylight in case there are issues in putting that much strain on the front end of the truck.

We will know how it all worked out later this morning.