Marching forward, hoping for Spring!

March 11, 2010 by Debbie.

The weather  seemed to have tempered some, at least no further arctic cold fronts have blasted through. This is enough to give me hope Spring is here to (maybe) stay. ‘Course, Easter is in April so there’s always a chance of a late freeze or even a late snow fall. It’s a catch-22. An early Easter, in mid March or so, is always too cold or wet or both, for the grandkids to go outside to hunt Easter eggs. A late Easter almost always brings a late freeze. I’m hoping a April 4th Easter will be early enough to stave off the cold yet late enough to be warm. I want the best of both worlds.

We harvested our second Chinese Cabbage this weekend. Ignore the onions laying on top of the ground …. I never did crawl in the cold frame to set them to rights after one of the floods. The short, little broccoli plants have quarter sized heads forming and I think I distinguished two of the cauliflower plants from the broccoli. One good thing about a garden is time will tell out. Even when I wished it didn’t!

Here’s a picture of  homesteading friends’ goat house. I love the design and the simplicity of the house, yet it’s fully functional. If that back roof line was a glass window it would make a great green house also.

Another one of our dogs died this week. Heide was 15+ years old. I knew she was getting close to her heavenly retirement days  and wasn’t surprised when her body started shutting down on Monday. I had prayed for months that when it was time for her to die, I wanted her to just die quietly without any suffering. I’m sick of taking my dogs in to the vets to be put to sleep when their pain is too great. Thank God, he heard and answered my prayers. Heide slipped into Heaven quietly from a semi-comatose state on Tuesday about 1:30 pm. It was amazing to watch Bud; how he could sense and smell the changes taking place. I had pulled the recliner back and had dozed off for about an hour when I heard Bud pacing (clicky-clack toe nails on the cement floors) around Heide. He had sensed her dying moments and came in the living room with us.   It’s also amazing how quiet the room got when Heide’s spirit left her body.

How  fragile life is! How marvelous, also, that even the life of a dog can be felt as it leaves our world.

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