• Julie


"Winter seemed to last forever.

But one day a change came over the woods and the pond. Warm air, soft and kind, blew through the trees. The ice, which had softened during the night, began to melt. Patches of open water appeared. All the creatures that lived in the pond and in the woods were glad to feel warmth. They heard and felt the breath of spring, and they stirred with new life and hope. There was a good new smell in the air, a smell of earth waking after its long sleep."


We are on the loose, laying in soggy fields and kicking newly thawed Last Year's Shit like the two-legged manure spreaders we pride ourselves to be. Already Craig is saying, we've had so much spinach lately.. And the good wife I am responds, eat up eat up eat up.

Gus and I set eyes on our first skein of geese yesterday morning. The nettles I planted last year are up but our chives are dormant yet. Like a good little hermit, I set our unreliable incubator with goose eggs and self sabotaged our Vermont for Spring Break plans. At least for now, it seems. Only time and an egg candling or two will tell.

The sheep are in such a way that I wondered aloud to Craig, exactly how big can a vulva get before a lamb just falls out of the thing? And also, do sheep have hysterical pregnancies? They're either all bred, or all vulvically fat. Logic assumes the former but what little I know is summed up in a poem I penned a few weeks ago while thinking of Luella:


Everything I've Learned, Thus Far.

How I make sure the cow's bred?


she is not.

How I make sure she isn't?


she is.


While we're sharing poems (or are they just notes..?) of questionable quality..


To Whom It May Concern

Be advised that I have used one of the two blue sponges in the sink to remove a layer of chicken shit from the big, black enamel pot. It's sparkling, see? (The pot.)

Choose your scrubbing implement wisely

(What it's like to live with me.)


Tell me you'll buy my someday book.


In the evenings Gus and I are rereading The Trumpet of the Swan by natural light and he's telling me,

Mom, you don't have to talk like that.

Still unable to produce something like the simple and refined prose of E.B. White in my own writing, my best imitation of E.B.'s New Yorker cum Mainer accent is my chosen compromise. Being a Tennessean cum New Englander, it's as entrancing as cats in heat.

Eventually the child relents, as does my aural assault, as does the sun.

Day is done, spring is come. On and on and on.


"Sam sat on his log, hardly moving a muscle. He was spellbound at the sight of the swans. They were the biggest water birds he had ever seen. He had heard their trumpeting and had searched the woods and swamps until he had found the pond and located the nest. Sam knew enough about birds to know that these were Trumpeters. Sam always felt happy when he was in a wild place among wild creatures. Sitting on his log, watching the swans, he had the same good feeling some people get when they are sitting in church."

both excerpts by E.B. White from The Trumpet of the Swan


Welcome to this humble journal.

Grab a strong cuppa and settle in.

I'm so glad you're here.