A farm country almanac

I think it is real this time, this turn towards spring. People who know better than I – the farmers who live in and around this village – are becoming active. On the twenty-minute walk to the school to pick up the Small Boy from Kindergarten, Boychen and I saw four tractors driving down the main road and two more on the way home. Then there is the one my brother-in-law cleaned today behind the barn, hosing everything down, tuning up the engine. In the afternoon he paced off the fields for plowing. The pace of life has very suddenly quickened in this farming community.

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I am digging up more rocks, making another flower bed, this one on the other side of the kitchen door. Boychen brings the smaller ones to the rock pile next to the barn in his wheel-barrow, three soft-ball sized rocks at a time. It is slow, but heart-wrenchingly adorable.

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The boys save their chicken bones for the fox that lives in the woods next to our house. Its den is right next to the foot path we take to the duck pond, and the boys and my mother-in-law have protected it from the many dogs that get walked in these woods by criss-crossing downed branches over the entrance. This is the fox that made quick work of five of eight ducklings last summer, something Small Boy knows very well, but he loves it anyway.

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Yesterday I strapped The Boychen into his bike-on-a-stick and ran him up and down the hills on the mountain bike course in the woods. He now thinks I am the coolest. mama. ever! 

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It was a long winter. Much, much too long. The farmers are out; half the gardens in the neighborhood are showing freshly turned dirt. The bees have found my crocuses. It was a long winter, but I think we’re turning the corner.

Filed under In the moment, Life in the Swiss countryside | Comments (2)