One of the dangerous things about blogs is that they can potentially show only the highlights of life and perhaps not give a true representation of what it is really like over here. But once in awhile, the side it shows is really how it is! Take Saturday for instance....
My husband sat down when the day was over and said to me, "I wish I could just bottle my life and sell it....." He had had a fantastic day! It sure wasn't a typical Saturday, compared to how we used to spend our Saturdays.
It started with us standing in the kitchen around 8:30 am or so looking outside at the all the snow falling, watching how slow the cars drove by. I noticed one car, driving particularly slowly and even mentioned it, "Look at how slow that car is going. Wow, it's going so slow it looks like it might actually stop and turn around. No wait, it's pulling in our driveway. Someone's here!" It was our neighbour, hadn't recognized the car. I think we get watched waaaay more than we realize. "Did you know your horse was out, the blondie?" "No! Thanks! How did she do that?!" Off she went, leaving us to deal with a loose horse.
Fortunately this horse is very docile, unlike the bad minis we have, and she didn't even run away when RM approached her. We had the fence turned off and she figured that out. In fact, she may have had that figured out for awhile as there had been evidence of her doing this before, but we wrote it off in our minds thinking, "Couldn't be...." Sure enough, later on that day, we actually watched how she did it - caught her red-hoofed! She lifts the top wire with her nose, then she steps carefully out with one hoof after another and ducks under the fence. RM saw her out later on that day and as she caught his eye, she literally looked nervous knowing she was in trouble and that's when he saw how she got back in! Funny horse. Needless to say, the fence is back on. That was just in the first hour of waking up, no coffee even yet!
Shortly after that, I stuffed some breakfast in him and the older boys and off they went to load a trailer full of hay, 50 bales to a customer about 15 minutes away. This is part of the reason he loves living here - it gets him outside and active. He gets to work hard alongside his boys. When he worked in Toronto at a desk, he suffered. I think his health would have seriously deteriorated if he had stayed there. Even though he does have arthritis in a toe joint or two, getting out there, being active has helped him so much.
He left the boys with me thinking he'd be able to handle the actual delivery on his own, but it ended up being quite the experience. After he got back, he walked in and with a loud voice said, "Would anyone like to know how my day has been??!!!! Someone needs to ask me how my day was???!!!" "Uh, yes, Daddy, how was your day?" "Thank you for asking. Let me tell you about it!" He was red and sweaty and clearly things hadn't gone as smoothly as he hoped. Horse people, it turns out, aren't very helpful when it comes to delivery hay. They expect it delivered right into their barn, even if they could help lift it, they don't. And if you get your truck and trailer stuck, they tend to stand around and watch. That's what happened. Finally some grandpa who lived there helped him out with a tractor, but he would have been stuck there all day if he hadn't done most of it himself. It was quite the ordeal. But get this, he loved it. He said he loves going to see other people's farms and how they organize them, the lay out, etc. Even pushing his trailer around surprised himself as his strength has definitely improved since we moved here. I do admire a lot more muscles around here......
The day was only half over. At 2 pm we were expecting a family to come over to train us on how to prune the grapes. We've made the crazy decision to not rent out the grapes to our neighbour this year. He pays us diddly-squat (great word) and it won't hurt us in the slightest even if we do nothing with them. But the grapes need pruning and trust me, we have no idea what we're doing. It just so happens we have a friend who had a grape farm when he was growing up and when we asked his wife if he could train us, she was certain he would love to show us what to do. So his whole family came over and, with all the pruners, off they went - in the snow! All the pruning has to be done in either the fall or the dead of winter before the buds come. We're already getting a little close to March, so snow couldn't deter us. This will be one of the ventures we take on this summer at the farmer's markets, selling grapes, or possibly a u-pick or even selling to a grape buyer. We'll see. It'll take one person a full day to prune one row and we have 23 rows, so we're easily looking at the next month before it's done with all the kids helping. Should be interesting!
The men and older kids were out there for several hours learning how to do this. So many Biblical thoughts ran through my mind all day as they are pruning the plant so that it will produce more fruit. They cut back so far it looks like it couldn't possibly ever come back, but it does. God's pruning, as we all know, is just like that - it hurts so much yet it always produces fruit, doesn't it?
After a long while in the cold, they came back in looking for dinner. We all ate and then visited until late into the night. Our friends didn't know RM and my daughter still had music practice ahead of them! Once they left, he picked up his guitar and "S" went to the piano and they quickly did a short practice (as they were leading worship together the next day) before he flopped back on the couch and that's when he said he wanted to bottle his life! My dad called in the middle of all this and probably thought he'd find us getting ready for bed. I heard my husband say to him, "You have no idea all the balls I've been juggling today."
It was one busy day. But he loved every active minute of it. Of course the challenges of life still exist and I'll still make sure to write about those things, too, but I'm noticing that even the challenges can be positives (like being stuck in the snow - he found out he was no weakling!). It really is up to me to keep my outlook forever turned heavenwards. Then, the challenges we have during the day are immediately seen for what they are meant to develop in us - perseverance, endurance, patience...all that fruit we wish could come without the pruning! Perhaps we won't be able to bottle his life. We don't have to. Each one of us has this same fulfilling life right where we are.
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