Accentuate the Positive

The Crankies know that you can seriously mess up your karma by gloating about a successful (or not awful) farming endeavor. Casually mention at the coffee shop that you sold your wheat at $5, and you've won the instant loathing of the folks at the other table who sold at $2.45 and paid major storage fees. Acknowledging the need for tact and delicacy, Meta Cranky will casually mention, then, that the wheat harvest at Cranky Girls' Farm was completed yesterday. That small miracle was followed by another: the hay baler fairy worked all night to turn rows of swathed hay into tidy bales of alfalfa. Wait for it: and then it rained this morning.


There's plenty more grain to cut at Uncle Sid's and Uncle Michael's. But still, it's satisfying to have one item marked off the list without an asterisk that means a field of grain has been  *flooded, *set on fire by welding torch, *damaged by late frost so the yield is cut in half, or *pounded into the ground by hail. Think these are hypothetical examples? Think again. 


So, before the inevitable screwup happens, MC chooses to accentuate the positive. Let's talk about roses, shall we? These roses came from Mrs. Wymore's house, which is in the general neighborhood of Hazel's place. MC never saw Mrs. Wymore's house when it wasn't a ruin, but it was a destination in the mid-1930s. Hot, hot. People went there to dance and to buy drink-ables that were friendly and not especially legal. Mrs. W. seems to have been a very busy woman. Friend Marvin,  Major Cranky's friend, recalls having Mrs. W. flag him down as he walked home from school to call out, "Tell your mother I weaned Baby W. today!" Mrs. W. was not slowed down by lactation.

But the roses. One spring about a dozen years ago, MC and Uncle M came upon the remains of Mrs. W's house and found it surrounded by rose bush. This was not just exuberant growth. We're talking an acre or two of prickly pink shrubbery. It doesn't get more heritage rose than Mrs. W.'s forgotten roses, which had been making a living all by themselves for 60 years or so. MC dug up a sample, took it home, and planted it in the wrong spot. Mrs. W.'s roses had put up with drought, flood, grasshoppers, and straying cattle, but they had no experience with shade. Year after year, they languished by the fence under an oak tree, until Uncle Sid decided to replace the corral. MC had to move the rose bush, and about damn time. That's all they were waiting for. 


 William Wordsworth came upon a field of daffodils and described them as such: "Ten thousand saw I at a glance / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance." The sandhills are much less forgiving than the Lake Country; if that Romantic poet had wandered upon Mrs. W.'s rosebush, he would have had to pick stickers out of his shoelaces. Still, the Romantics understood prickly charm, and the Poet Laureate certainly would have appreciated Mrs. W's illegal intoxicants. MC's heart with pleasure fills.
--MC