It Was The Perfect Weekend

If this wasn't the perfect weekend for me then I don't know what the perfect weekend would be.
And right here I feel I need to apologize to one of the world's most popular bloggers, Pioneer Wife, because I commented once on her blog saying that I just didn't get it. The woman posts pictures of her kids and her cows and her horses and her husband (whom she calls The Marlboro Man) and although her pictures are beautiful, I don't understand how she gets the traffic she does. I mean, each and every one of her posts gets like ten thousand comments.
I'm serious.
And boy, did I get jumped on. Not by Pioneer Wife. But by her faithful readers, some of whom checked out my blog and said things like, "Maybe if you'd quit drinking vodka, you'd understand."
Well. That could be true.

Anyway, here I am, so excited I could pee in my pants because my chickens, my six little mutt chickens, are finally in their big run.
And I'm posting pictures and I'm taking about it and let's face it- my pictures aren't nearly as beautiful as Pioneer Wife's and I don't even do recipes that often and she lives on a RANCH.
So- Pioneer Wife- I'm sorry.
(I still don't quite get it, but I'm sorry.)

All weekend Mr. Moon and I worked outside. He on the coop and me in the garden. I finished up my rows of beans (two of soy and two of green) and then my neighbor and I went blackberry picking while her husband and mine finished up the chicken's new palace. They built a door and got everything tidied up and ready and when we got back with our blackberries, Mr. Moon unscrewed the board he'd had in place to keep the chicks in their little hallway run.


"Are you going to take my picture," he asked?
Well, of course.
The chickens seemed to know what was about to happen. They were lined up, ready to proceed into The Big Space.

And then, the door was removed and here they came:


Suzie first, of course, shy little Betty back in the rear.
They were in wonderment. They flapped and flew and immediately started scratching and wallerin' and hunting and pecking.


Dolly (Yes, we have a dog named Dolly but now we have a chicken named that too for Dolly Parton because this chicken has huge breasts. I mean, she has chicken cleavage) found a frog and chaos ensued. All the rest of the chickens chased her all around the new space and back into the old and she was frantic to keep that frog in her mouth. Finally, they all got bored and let her eat her frog in piece.
Score, Dolly!

Yes. It was a moment of joy out here in Lloyd. I dumped all my weeds from the weekend's work into their pen and they're out there right now, scratching in it, finding bugs and tender greens.
My left hand is numb as I write this because I have some sort of neurological pinch, I suppose, and the ripping of weeds from the earth exacerbates the problem but I don't care. I pulled the weeds and I made the rows and I planted the beans and the chickens are playing in the weeds.

Last night I made us a supper of squash croquettes and new potatoes and black-eyed peas with venison sausage and peppers and onions and a blackberry cobbler.
The blackberries this year are the best I've seen in five seasons. Some of them are as big as the nipples on a big-tittied woman and it's addicting when you hit a good patch, carefully reaching in to delicately take the berries from their thorny nest.

And I don't know but it seems to me that every day I feel more at home here on this tiny patch of ground. Who knew that my heart's desire was to become an old Florida woman, sweating in the black dirt, thrilling at the squash blooms, married to a man who can build a chicken coop?
I used to think guitar players were the coolest. Uh-huh. The way they'd throw their heads back and close their eyes and sing of passion.
Well, that was fine for then. Now I'd rather have a man with a nail apron who constantly reminds me to please sew around the place where his overalls hook because it's coming loose.

When my neighbor and I were on our blackberry-picking trip, she said, "Mary, you're going to have the best grandmother's house in the world. They'll never be bored at your house."
And I agreed. I told her that if they were bored, I'd smack 'em and make 'em go play outside.
I was in that sort of rusty old character mode. I'd been practicing with Harley that afternoon already, the darling three-year old from next door. We'd checked out his butternut squash, transplanted from a pot where he and his mama started the seed and we'd fed the goats next door the invasive potato vine, ripped up and accepted gratefully by the critters.
"They're nibbling!" he kept saying, and then he'd run off to pull up more potato vine.

I think I live in a magical kingdom. And I hope my grandchildren think it is too. I'll let them feed the chickens and I'll take them to pick berries and I'll let them pick beans and then I'll cook for them. I'll read them stories and I'll tuck them into the spare bed and I'll tell them stories about when their mama was a child. Mr. Moon will take them down to the lake and show them how to fish and maybe he'll build them a playhouse. Or perhaps this place will be their play house.

I don't know.
All I know is that my heart is full with what all I have here.

Soon the chickens will decide which are roosters and which are hens. The roosters will begin to learn to crow, a scratchy adolescent crow at first, and then a full-blown cock-a-doodle-do when the sun comes up and I think I might learn to crow too.
The hens will learn to lay eggs and they'll make that triumphant clucking when they do and I'll go out and steal their eggs.
I'm not a pioneer woman but I am a woman who lives where pioneer women lived. I do some of the things they did. I have it a thousand times easier, but my sweat, like theirs, is part of this place now.

It was a perfect weekend.
I live a perfectly incredible life. For me.
And the miracle of it is that I have found it and I have realized it.

My life isn't a bowl of cherries. It's a bowl of blackberries, picked from thorny bushes and when I come back with my bounty, I am tattoed on my arms from those thorns, which only makes the berries sweeter to me. So sweet I have to add a little lemon peel and juice to them when I mix them up for cobbler.

I don't think there's much more to say than that.

Good-morning, y'all.
Good morning.