Slim Pickings

This Asian lily, like the green in the fields, is but a memory now.  The vineyards are lush and verdant, but brown is the predominant color around here once the rains stopped coming.

Toilet paper and cat litter are two things one must never, ever run out of.  Frank and Pearl were indoor-outdoor cats so litter was not an issue.  They only used the box on rainy days and for emergencies.  Ralph and Celeste are indoor kitties and I clean that box no less than six times a day.  Sometimes they use the box in tandem.  I never go in the bathroom alone; one or the other always comes with and leaves an offering in the box.  All this pottying necessitated a flying trip to town yesterday as there is no substitute for cat litter.  When ya gotta go, ya gotta go, whether it be to town or the box.

I wish I had more pictures of my dad.  He hated being photographed, and I have only one photo where he's smiling.  One of eleven kids, Daddy was a sharecropper's son and worked hard as a child in east Texas in cotton and corn fields.  His hands were testimony to his past, gnarled and scarred.  He put himself through business school, determined never to do farm work again.  In the army in WWI, he was sent to France, the only one of his brothers to join the service.  A civilian again, the country suffered the Great Depression.  Desperate to leave Texas, Daddy "rode the rails" in a boxcar to California.  You'd have to have known my dad to appreciate that, in his baggage, he carried what was then called an "ice cream" suit; white flannel and quite spiffy.  It went with his straw boater hat.  In all my years, I think Daddy owned only one sport shirt.  He always dressed in suit and tie and always wore a hat, either felt or straw depending on the season.  He worked hard to improve himself and give my mother and me a comfortable life, sending me to a private school for a better education.  I often wonder what he would think of me now, dressed in bibbies and shoveling manure.  It's not just on Father's Day that I think of my father.

What with the trip to town, there's not much to report on Farview from yesterday; pretty slim pickings.