Laughing through the deep freeze
If
there's one thing you can depend on about our weather, it's that the
weather's always changing. After a very harsh November, December was
remarkably mild, but January is coming in with a vengeance. We enjoyed a
spring-like day in which I didn't even bother to light a fire, but then
roaring winds up above the hills (which I can hear but not feel) marked
the beginning of the end of the warm weather. By Tuesday, the low is
forecast to drop to 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which could be -4 here in our
frost pocket. I guess the bees won't come out flying again this week!
Mark
and I pondered whether we should be doing anything special to prepare
for the deep freeze, but we're used to winter cold by now and don't
foresee many difficulties. Our water line will freeze, so we'll stock up
on a pail of water in the kitchen, and we'll make sure to have extra waterers for goats and chickens inside and ready to take out during cold mornings. I'll probably take the carrots in from our fridge root cellar
since we're down to the last quarter bushel, but I have high hopes that
residual warmth in the ground will prevent this cold spell from doing
too much damage to living things in the garden.
In other news, the
Laughing Buddha that my father bought for me when I was in high school,
recently relocated to our farm, doesn't seem fazed by the forecast cold.
Both of his hands broke off long ago, but he just keeps smiling and
dancing --- how can we do anything but emulate his mirth?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I used to have a laughing buddha who looked a lot like that I liked to rub his chubby belly and imagine all that fat
A revered piece of humanity in so many cultures - that tub roll down to his fanny
Plump pludgy blubbery podgy roly-poly lard
No need to get a tummy tuck his laughter was so hard!