All Day

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All ears

Storms rolled in last evening, fast and heavy, washing away the oppressive heat, and this morning the air feels almost silken. I walked outside at first light and climbed the small hill that overlooks our house and barn, and further in the distance, the town hall and old church, both now obscured by new leaves. All quiet but the breeze and bird song and the distant clucking of our chickens, scratching and strutting about, pecking apart last winter’s cow droppings. Such easy contentment.

I think about this space more than I visit it these days, often in the form of random thoughts or images I want to share. Like yesterday, driving into a small town not far from here, just before the storms, and watching as a big John Deere tractor towing a manure spreader pulled into the recently-constructed Dollar General, the farmer presumably needing to pick up something on his way home from spreading a field. And the incongruity of it – the old and the new, the solid mass of the tractor and cow shit and what feels to me like the flimsy, ephemeral nature of the store, with its faux-brick siding and neon yellow signage. There was a lot of debate when the store was announced – over the building site, mostly, but also the nature of its commerce, and whether it might draw business from the town’s small-but-vibrant main street. A lot of people didn’t want the new store. A lot of people did. It’s been open a couple of years now; I’ve passed it a hundred times or more, and I can’t say it doesn’t please me to note how often the parking lot is empty, or nearly so. If nothing else, the store is straight-up ugly, a blighted box, though I suppose even that is open to debate.

Today I work down the road on the digger, doing drainage work, mostly, but also loading a dump truck with mounds of steaming compost. I like digging in the compost; I like the smell of it, rich and on the verge of sweet, and variable depending on the age of the material. It’s the middle-age piles that smell best to me, the ones that are still ripening, right in the thick of transformation. I could dig those piles all day.