Order Restored

The planets and stars must have gotten back in alignment because all the animals returned to their normal behavior (or as normal as that ever gets).  Inga, as predicted, was as full as a tick.  It took five-hundred twenty squeezes to empty her bag.  To put that in perspective, it is the equivalent of one-thousand forty soft lemons (one for each hand), each one to be squeezed dry in one squeeze.  That's a lot of lemons.  That's a lot of milk.

For several days now, there's been a wagon full of weeds just off the front porch, as well as the piles of pulled weeds in the lavender bed, and I'd looked at them long enough.  Going out to pull the wagon to empty down the hill, I was struck with the thought that, if it were a burn day, I could just burn the darned weeds and be done with them.  Usually by this time of year burning is suspended, but I made the call and, yes, 'twas a burn day!  I'll be honest.  Setting off the burn pile scares me silly, but it had to be done sooner or later, and I had all these weeds to dispose of.  I put Bess back in the house for safety, dragged the garden hose over to the pile, and struck the match.  Holy Toledo!!  In seconds the flames were twenty feet high, with a roaring noise and so much heat I couldn't get within ten yards of the pile.  My heart just pounding, I used the hose to wet down the ground all around the conflagration, praying that the fire wouldn't get out of hand.  The burn pile, which had been eight or ten feet square and about five feet or more high, didn't take more than fifteen minutes to burn to the ground, it was that fast and furious.  I started pulling branches out of the brush pile and dragging them over to the coals.  I pulled as much from the brush pile as had been in the original burn pile, and, even so, it hardly made a dent in the brush.  Another job for another day.

The sun was going down and I decided it was beer o'clock.  Bess and I sat on the front porch, well satisfied that the burn had gone safely.  There is something so ineffably peaceful about early evening on the mountain at this time of year.  It must be dinnertime, because all is quiet.  The hens come out for a desultory foray, nothing like the morning rush for bugs and goodies, and they scratch and cluck softly in the herb garden.  A cooling breeze rustles the leaves in the oak trees, and the cats take turns sitting by a vole hole, but not with any intensity.  Order has been restored, and all's right in my world.