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Heel low:
So this week Rick and I celebrate 33 years...truly it don't seem that long...must be having fun eh?
I do have a smugness though as I remember in our first years of marriage, that Rick said we would not last 7 years!!
Well by golly, we are more than FOUR times those seven years. It brings to mind, the story of Jacob (who my sheep breed is named after) heel catcher (funny to have the Heelers, eh?), and one who is known in regards to Jacob's Ladder. My point here is not to dwell on historical tales but make note that Jacob worked in sets of seven years. He wanted to marry Laban's daughter and was deceived into marrying the older one after seven years of work, but SEVEN years was ... "but a few days, for the love he had for her," so he worked another SEVEN years for the hand of Rachel, the woman with whom he fell instantly in love with at first sight. Jacob was paid for his work by his father in law, with all the speckled, brown, and spotted goats and sheep which is where the name of my sheep breed came from.
Jacob Sheep
For anyone interested on how I address the questions on gender linked...here is a link to that...most interesting and thought provoking. I am still soaking and digesting this all up! KazJaps, Marvin and Henk (the one who made the chicken calculator) all have insightful comments...a good read.
http://www.the-coop.org/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=113625&page=1
So 33 years has flown by. I really don't feel we are older...but in truth, I do feel like we love each other more and more every day. I know, it sounds gitchy and silly but it's real.
We went out last night to Chinese Smorg...Rick has been working wicked hours again and not had a day off in weeks now. So he had a short job to do, came home, had a nap, did some snow removal, I did up the night chores to tuck everyone in and off we went. Rick stopped to wash the truck (yes indeed, it is unseasonably warm right now) and I called the kid to touch base with him as we have not spoken in a bit. He was at home with his pets playing his guitars. He said to me, "You guys are like the old couples that don't happen very much!" and I suppose that is true enough.
It is very easy to love someone when things are rosy, when love is new and things are just fine and dandy.
It is when things go astray, that stuff gets ugly...you can turn on each other and lay blame that this predicament is the other's fault...it is easy to love when times are GOOD...but as with all time in life living, the good has to go bad so you may appreciate the good times when they happen again. Easy to love youthful persons, in the prime of our lives, strong and healthy, productive and in our peak of perfection...probably explains the wedding vows of "in sickness and in health" eh!
I love many of the C&W song lyrics and one of my favs is Alan's Living on Love...here it is...
Livin' on Love
Alan Eugene Jackson:
So this week Rick and I celebrate 33 years...truly it don't seem that long...must be having fun eh?
I do have a smugness though as I remember in our first years of marriage, that Rick said we would not last 7 years!!
Well by golly, we are more than FOUR times those seven years. It brings to mind, the story of Jacob (who my sheep breed is named after) heel catcher (funny to have the Heelers, eh?), and one who is known in regards to Jacob's Ladder. My point here is not to dwell on historical tales but make note that Jacob worked in sets of seven years. He wanted to marry Laban's daughter and was deceived into marrying the older one after seven years of work, but SEVEN years was ... "but a few days, for the love he had for her," so he worked another SEVEN years for the hand of Rachel, the woman with whom he fell instantly in love with at first sight. Jacob was paid for his work by his father in law, with all the speckled, brown, and spotted goats and sheep which is where the name of my sheep breed came from.
Jacob Sheep
For anyone interested on how I address the questions on gender linked...here is a link to that...most interesting and thought provoking. I am still soaking and digesting this all up! KazJaps, Marvin and Henk (the one who made the chicken calculator) all have insightful comments...a good read.
http://www.the-coop.org/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=113625&page=1
So 33 years has flown by. I really don't feel we are older...but in truth, I do feel like we love each other more and more every day. I know, it sounds gitchy and silly but it's real.
We went out last night to Chinese Smorg...Rick has been working wicked hours again and not had a day off in weeks now. So he had a short job to do, came home, had a nap, did some snow removal, I did up the night chores to tuck everyone in and off we went. Rick stopped to wash the truck (yes indeed, it is unseasonably warm right now) and I called the kid to touch base with him as we have not spoken in a bit. He was at home with his pets playing his guitars. He said to me, "You guys are like the old couples that don't happen very much!" and I suppose that is true enough.
It is very easy to love someone when things are rosy, when love is new and things are just fine and dandy.
It is when things go astray, that stuff gets ugly...you can turn on each other and lay blame that this predicament is the other's fault...it is easy to love when times are GOOD...but as with all time in life living, the good has to go bad so you may appreciate the good times when they happen again. Easy to love youthful persons, in the prime of our lives, strong and healthy, productive and in our peak of perfection...probably explains the wedding vows of "in sickness and in health" eh!
I love many of the C&W song lyrics and one of my favs is Alan's Living on Love...here it is...
Livin' on Love
Alan Eugene Jackson:
The Chanteclers took the buzzing of the helicopters in stride...sorta like an episode of M*A*S*H!And then the opposite to the fires would be the FLOODS...sewers backed up because the builder never installed safety values when we first lived together in an apartment complex, then here the 2005 Father's Day the epic 150 year flood saw a wet spring turn to a six day deluge of 5 to 6 inches of rain falling each day and then the tide of three feet of water gurgling up from the very ground--looked like a coffee pot perking! Now in the spring or with the snows from last year...we often ponder...is this another flood year...will we have to endure the wet to an extreme. I know we got it in us to persevere but do I want us to work that hard to well, uh...work that hard to be just were we were at BEFORE the floods...yeh, useless work to see you running on the spot in the same status you were... I think people that have gone thru natural disasters can relate. ALL that disasters mean is a whole lotta work to be right were you HAD been before it happened! Agh...now if you never had nothing, well that sure is FREEDOM, now ain't it...freedom's nothing more than "nothing left to lose!" Hilarious ironic. If you never acquire nothing and bop around like a grasshopper, you never lose nothing....you don't have comforts but then no ties to bind!
And being in Alberta...Rick said you always planted yer garden and knew, it was a hit and miss endeavour...hit by HAIL er not.
Several times now some decent hail hits over the years here...we got hit in 2005 after the flood...picture Rick and I having worked our buns off recovering from the deluge of the flood and round about two weeks later, we are sitting there shoveling food in our gobs and the skies open up and pound us thoroughly with hail. Rick and I were pretty exhausted and dejected and we just looked at each other and never missed a stroke shovelling food...after the hit of hail, we went out and surveyed the damage, grabbed up leaf rakes and started raking up the leaves...not a good year for happy WEATHER!
Greenhouse tenplast sides..."Play BALL!"
Then a few yeara later, hail as big as small baseballs hit and punched holes in my greenhouse. Rick changed it out to a metal roof and HA..."Take that weather...we got you beat there...hit us ... I dares you!"
Greenhouse being roofed in METAL!
I planted my veg garden this year and jest like all years when you put one in...knowing full well we could get hit. All that needs to happen is a bout of hot weather and we do look to the skies and ponder..."Hmmm...will it hail now to wreck this?"
August 1, 2014 at midnight
The hail was not big in size, but what the pea sized hail lacked, it made up in length (about half an hour of it drilling down like sandblasters) and amounts that came down.
But yah know, four days later, the sun shining and the birds singing...it was OK...OK here in Pear-A-Dice...
Shredded Romaine the next morning
The romaine started on back up, grew into decent harvestable heads...like a hair cut I guess...it continues onwards.
August 5, 2014
One thing about weather...it does what it does. It don't pick on any one person--it is good or bad to each and every one of us and the luck of the draw with weather is you pick yourself up and get back in the game. It is only a veg garden and I already know if I plant, then I run the risk of weather ruining it. If I don't plant, no challenge and yet, no reward of a bounty of produce either!
Now past the clashes with weather, we have had all our possessions threatened to be taken...fought governments, companies bound on making an example of us when we never did anything wrong. Sure we won when we took it up legally (hate that...be nice eh, don't make us legal up, eh!) and we have kept most of our stuff, if we did not lose a bit of our marbles and certainly our naiveness on what people or companies are capable of. One time we fought a provincial government for seven years (why the number keeps coming up...ha ha) and when it was all said and done...we got exactly what we claimed was owed to us...not a penny more or less than our initial request...but seven years in turmoil is hard on you. You never come out of those fights quite like the way you go in. It makes you wise, it makes you aware of what gumption one has as a couple that is capable of standing side by each for the fight but really... Personally we would rather not have been tested on our perseverance to see wrongs righted. Sometimes now we contemplate the costs of a battle and turn on our heels completely satisfied that the fight is not worth the scars. All about learning when it is best to walk away instead of waging war...even if you are right and you should prove that--but at what cost, eh?
How did Rick propose to me...he was in the tub after a bad week at work...it was Friday night and all week he had kept having good thoughts about me but would come home and something outside our life had rained on our parade...so he asked me how the day was and I replied in truth, "Not so great!" and he too replied when I asked him, "And how was your day?" So he pops the question...him in the tub and me sitting on the throne (nope, not using it, but sitting and reflecting on the day)..."Let's get married on Monday!" and so we did. We had done canned music for several years by then...seen people married and then remarried after divorces...and oh the money spent and efforts on the ceremony...to me if they had spent one quarter the energies ON their relationships, well the marriages mighta had a shot at succeeding...but no matter. I saw big weddings as nothing more than a waste...
The couple usually was exhausted by the time they said their vows and the tug and pull of all the hafta's blew my mind. Who indeed is the wedding about...the couple...and rarely did I see the couple having a very good time...I would have none of that I figured...keep the wedding shenanigans outta my life, eh. That was never gonna be MY style at all. Yuck!
So this way we married, it was ever so fun...my mother had no time to get any of the funky things going...no flowers, no invitations, no hall rentals, no people travelling great lengths, no nothing...put on some clean clothes (wore an outfit I had sewn and Rick put on his going to meetin' suit), then off to the JP's with two witnesses on the Monday, out for dinner for Chinese with the wedding party, and the deed was done! Knot was tied and we were hitched! Man alive did I have fun that week when people we knew asked, "How's it going?" "Rick and I got married on Monday..."
There ain't nothing special about couples that stay together...the special parts are the work in keeping up the union...the itty bitty things that make life resoundingly exceptional. Finding fun in daily living...the regularness, the often mundane...just living, just loving, just enjoying the ride for what it is...itty bitty in the whole realm of the great big world that exists...eh?
Little Bitty
Songwriter Tom Hall
Sung by Alan Eugene Jackson:
It is not about the colour of someone's hair, their physical body's form, their youth or appearances, it is all about their souls, their internal virtues, their ability to love and receive, to give and to take graciously. It is about them being them. Liking the person that they are in all our virtues and faults. No perfect persons indeed...
Arabian Proverb:
knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it,
keep what is worth keeping and with the breath of kindness,
blow the rest away.
The one thing I do know about love...that true love is when you have something bad happen and the first thing that crosses your mind is not how you feel about this, but how your partner is going to react to this hit of badness. When you measure up life in how happy your partner is...that you thrive in their enjoyments over your own...that a true partnership that will last and last has transpired. I live thru Rick and he thru me. And we laugh...in the past week he has told me that "I waddle like a duck"...that "I use an oar to eat my wonton soup," that these observations mean I must be some heck of a catch, eh...he don't care if I get dressed up, put on the battle makeup, that I just jump in the truck and we go...that we enjoy each other in silence and in conversation, that we go out and we look at our days and recount when we are apart, and we live thru each other as we go about the brambly paths and life and joys and hiccups...no matter.
May all find their partner & soul mates, the one that brings years of happiness to each other and laughter...oh and the ability to laugh... even if I walk like a duck after my chores and use an oar to eat my soup...wah wah wah...Agh!
Doggone & Chicken UP!
Tara Lee Higgins
Higgins Rat Ranch Conservation Farm, Alberta, Canada
