March on the Farmstead

We had one of the warmest Februarys on record but March has brought a return of winter-like weather.  Our two oldest grandsons, above, have both had colds but that didn't stop them from being outside and getting to know this friendly Hereford heifer. The photo credit goes to the boys' dad; I would have been saying "Oh don't get so close!!"

I've included a photo of the roast chicken we had for supper the other night because it was so easy and good.  It is America Test Kitchen's Weeknight Roast Chicken - no brining or complicated prep.  I did go ahead and make the pan sauce and was glad I did. I used lemon juice and fresh rosemary rather than the vinegar and fresh thyme the recipe calls for, and we loved it.  Another plus is that the recipe link includes a video--I didn't even have to read the recipe (but be certain to test the internal temperature -- I must've had a bigger bird, had to roast it longer to get to the requisite temperature)!

We live near a wind farm, and after some trepidation over the size of these machines--the towers alone are over 300 feet high, and each wing is about 185 feet long--I've come to enjoy photographing them. Our Kansas skies have provided a beautiful backdrop for trees and turbines of late.

By the way, Farmer John is feeling much better than at the time of my last blogpost--but is a little poorer for having had to pay for a root canal.

Hope your March is blessed!

February on the Farm

My blogger friends from Maine are "hunkered down" waiting out a blizzard that has deposited several feet of snow, but here in Kansas we have had almost spring-like weather.  This morning's temperatures were a bit more in tune with the date on the calendar; it was 32ºF as I started out on my walk this morning about 9 a.m.

It was a blessing to be outside, walking.  I have just come through an arthritis/fibromyalgia attack that was the worst I've experienced. I kept remembering my grandmother talking about "the rheumatiz" and I wonder whether she suffered something like this. It was so uncomfortable that just turning over in bed was an ordeal; the weight of the blankets was painful to lift and rearrange.

But--I'm better!  And I walked up the hill across from our house this morning!

Farmer John was feeding cattle, and stopped to open the wire gate for me.  He is not a happy camper today; he has a cold AND a toothache. He is the hale and hearty member of our partnership, the cinch pin that holds our family together. Our adult kids call me with prayer requests, but John fields all other needs for his elderly parents and for all of us (driving to appointments/moving furniture/mechanic work/help with projects/etc.).  Even beyond my empathy and prayers for him there is just an uneasy feeling when he isn't well because we all depend on him so. Here he is, opening the gate and holding his aching jaw; please say a little prayer for Farmer John (dental appointment this afternoon!).

Our big, goofy dog Moose has always been an escape artist. No fence could hold him, and so he had to leave his home with our daughter's family in town and come to the country to live with us.  But he somehow instinctively knew the way back, and would travel over 4 miles back to their yard.  And so we spent $300--yes, THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS-- on a perimeter collar for this beast.  And it worked.  He became trained, we thought, and we stopped making him wear it.  This was a mistake.  He ran away this past weekend and we spent two anxious days searching for him.  He has to wear the collar once more.  But need I say it--I am SO glad to have him back.  I don't know why I love him but I do!

Finally, here are a couple of shadow photos of Moose and me from our walk this morning...Happy February everyone, no matter the weather in your neck of the woods:  

And one more January photo...

This photo was taken just west of the little yellow house on January 6.  Love our Kansas sunsets.  

Super Bowl Chili Recipe

Someone once said that The Children Are Tender was perhaps "....sort of how you wish things would have been."

Well, no.  I would not have wished for Abby to have to quit her job to take care of her mother with scarcely a blink of the eye on behalf of folks who ought to have been sorry to see her go.  I would never have wished for a little boy to be spirited away in the night by a birth mother who did not have legal custody, and for that boy's teacher never to see that child again.  And I certainly would not have wished for Jeffrey to risk a shocking experience as he did in chapter one.

However, having said that, I must also say that January here in our real-life version of my fictional community of Karola has contained elements I wouldn't include in a book that, while is intended to spur empathy and action on behalf of innocent children who suffer, is also intended to leave readers with a sense of hope for the future.  But for the Lord, I'd not have felt much hope at the end of our difficult January.  

I'll quickly list the struggles we've faced: life threatening conditions that caused hospitalizations for both my husband's parents, several financial surprises of the sort that made our hearts sink and our minds go numb (did anyone else's insurance premiums double?), and last and albeit least, our dog ran away.  Not a banner month.  

I'm happy to report that as of February 1, my in-laws have recovered, we've adapted to our financial status quo, and today, the dog came home. And, last Sunday afternoon I won a chili cook-off at our church!  

You read that right.  God does have a sense of humor!  I've just completed a book on Christian weight loss, but during this stressful January I have spent an inordinate amount of time cooking and...well...I did not lose weight this month.  But I by golly won a chili cook-off. 

The recipe, as near as I can remember (I don't measure ingredients when I cook) is printed below the photo of me with my beautiful gold-spray-painted-tin-can trophy.  And by the way, that book isn't really about losing weight so much as it is about putting Christ first in everything, which will release us from the power of whatever ails us.  You can have a look at it here:  One Hundred Days to Freedom.  

Meantime, try a savory pot of chili for the Super Bowl this weekend.  

Chili, brown sugar/maple cupcakes, and chicken and noodles are some of the comfort food dishes I prepared during this dreary January.  '

Kid-pleasing Chili

(named on the spot to justify all that brown sugar when I was asked the name of my recipe). 

4 pounds ground beef

2 medium onions finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, crushed or finely minced

3 teaspoons salt (less if chicken stock is salty)

2 packages (for four pounds of meat) Williams Chili Seasoning Mix

1 28 ounce can crushed Tomatoes

About 3 Tablespoons tomato paste

About 3 cups or so chicken stock—add it gradually until chili seems the right consistency. 

About 3 Tablespoons red wine vinegar

About 2 Tablespoons soy sauce

About ½ teaspoon or so liquid smoke—go easy, it can make things bitter

¾ to 1 cup brown sugar

1 can cannellini beans (white kidney beans), drained and rinsed

1 can seasoned black beans, drained and rinsed

2 cans dark red kidney beans, drained and rinsed

Tabasco sauce to taste—I like about 4 drops per pound of meat...

Brown the beef with the chopped onion, drain most of the juices/fat.  Stir in the garlic, salt, and Williams Chili Seasoning Mix.  Add all remaining ingredients except beans, stir well. Simmer about 10 minutes to let flavors blend.  Adjust seasonings—too bland?  Add more salt, Tabasco, and/or red wine vinegar.  Can you taste the smoke at all? You can add a little more. Now you’ll probably want to add the last ¼ cup brown sugar if you didn’t earlier.  Add beans, simmer a few minutes longer, stir, can add more stock as you prefer for consistency. 

Grandboys and Hay Bales

It was an early November afternoon of this unusually green, unusually warm fall, and the remaining leaves on the hedge trees were backlit with gold.  Two little boys, big round bales, a big goofy yellow lab, and November sunshine--it doesn't get any better than this!  Logan, age 4, took the photo at lower left as I was trying to get him to return my phone/camera to me.  He is quite the photographer.

November

This has been a gentle fall, lacking the riotous color of other years--but beautiful just the same. These photos were taken November 1.

Fall Roundup

In mid-October we bring 45 cow/calf pairs from a rented pasture to the home pasture, a trip of about 2.5 miles including an always-tense passage over an interstate highway overpass.  Things went well this year and none of the critters decided to balk at the highway noise and strange surface underfoot. See Farmer John exhibiting trust in my driving, hanging on by just one hand while issuing instructions to the other cowboys via cell phone (lower right). 

A Matter of Perspective

My big yellow lab is standing 8 or 10 feet behind this plant, and that makes the plant appear huge! 

Perspective is important,whether in a photo, or in life. In the picture above, my dog, Moose, appears to be standing just behind a bloom of wooly verbena. If so, I should contact the Guinness Book of World Records for having found a verbena plant that is 10 feet tall. However, the plant is actually only about 18 inches high. Moose is standing further away than the photo reveals.

When I wrote The Children Are Tender, a friend said she enjoyed learning more about my life. And then she smiled at me and said, "Or...perhaps your life as you would have liked it to have been?" She missed the mark just a bit; focusing on what is beautiful is not the same as saying there is no ugliness. As I say in the introduction, the characters and settings are fictionalized, but what is absolutely true is my love for my home, family, and profession.

I focus upon the beauty of Kansas as the setting of my book, and allow the beauty in the heart of children to drive the story. There isn't a lack of conflict; although there aren't many accounts of the petty carping and pointless conflicts that sometimes do happen even in the best of workplaces. I don't include discord unless it is important to the storyline. I write of a heartbreaking incident of racial prejudice and I describe the pathos of a child who is spirited away in the middle of the night, never to be seen again by his teachers. I describe the enforced early retirement of a good teacher whose leavetaking is treated with more of relief than regret by budget-cutting administrators, a mother who calls the public school a setting for the emotional massacre of children, and a highly qualified teacher who is demoted to the level of a test administrator. Most of these things happened to me during the course of my teaching career, and trust me, they do not represent my professional life as I wish it had been. But I do focus on love: the love of a teacher for her students, of husband and wife, and the  of the beauty of a place called "home." Whatever we focus upon does tend to loom large in our memories and hearts, and so perhaps my friend feels that no one's non-fiction life could have been so blessed as that of the main character in my novel. In that, she is mistaken.

My blessings may not be so large as they appear to me, but then, it's a matter of chosen perspective.

Who Says I Don't Get Around?

This photo wasn't taken in Spain's third largest metropolitan area. Nor is it on the Orange Coast, and the area pictured does not boast a temperate climate and wafting breezes from the Mediterranean Sea.  Despite the proud proclamation of the sign above, this photo displays the lush grasses and green foliage of late spring in Kansas. 

This morning it was time to move the combine to a neighbor's field in preparation for wheat harvest. Farmer John drove the fuel truck, and I followed in order to give him a ride back to the shop where his monstrous red combine had been readied for action.  When we reached the turn-off marked by the road sign above, I giggled a bit.

In fact, I always smile when I see this sign. Perhaps someone on the county commission had been to Spain. Or maybe a commission member's love of geography got the best of him or her. Whatever the reason, on the day the Osage County, Kansas powers-that-be assigned a name to this single lane gravel road that bisects one of the most lushly wooded sections of our area, they decided to call it "Valencia."

It was a beautiful morning, though hot, and I stopped twice to take photos.  Farmer John was patient, but the third time I braked, enthralled by a huge cluster of sweet-scented, purple-blossomed milkweed in bloom, he mentioned very politely that at some point, he needed to combine wheat.  So the road sign photo above and the lacy Johnson grass picture below were the only two I had time to snap.  I would like to have shared the thick stands of evening primrose that line the road as though they had been planted as borders, and the lacy miniature daisies that bear the ignominious name of Annual Fleabane.

I know Valencia, Spain is lovely because the descriptions on Wikipedia tell me so, but Valencia Road in Osage County, Kansas, has beauty that, in my eyes, is unrivaled.

Johnson grass is so pretty, with its lacy, Christmas tree shaped seed heads. 

Early June

The large photo at left is a view of our east yard, crab grass beautified by morning light, and the rock garden where our grandsons set up mock battles with their plastic soldiers (they nixed the idea of gnome and elves figurines).  Upper right: a cloud formation, the majesty of which I was unable to capture with this phone photo.  Right middle: noonday sunlight bounces off the bright white porch railing, just installed by farmer John.  Right bottom: evening primroses in the road ditch across from the house.  

I always remember my Art History professor, fresh from a summer's sabbatical to France, saying that the countryside in Kansas is very much like that of France. "Something about the light," he said. Years later my nephew traveled to France and returned home to field my many questions about his trip. "Does the countryside look like Kansas?" I asked.  

He laughed and said, "Definitely. We joked that they hadn't really taken us to Europe at all, but that we'd just circled around the ocean and had come back to Kansas.  Everything looked very familiar."  

'These things affirm my deeply held conviction that the beauty of our state is underrated.  The photos above, taken with my 6 year old iPhone, are a case in point: beauty isn't difficult to find here.    And there are all the things my lack of skill with a camera can't capture: cottonwood fluff raining in ethereal, erratic paths against the dark green canopy of late spring foliage; the full scope and majesty of thunderheads piling up ahead of a spring storm; the depth of color of our sunsets...words can't describe it, and my fledgling skill as a photographer can't capture them.  

You're going to have to take my word for it or come see for yourself: Kansas is beautiful in each season!