Life in an old farmhouse out on the prairie follows the seasons. During winter, quiet days and long, snow filled nights fill up the calendar. We bundle up and hunker down around the fire to enjoy a good book and a cup of cocoa. We don't travel very far or very fast. Spring days are just the opposite though. The sun shines longer and warmer every day spurring us to get busy again. Spring has definitely sprung around here lately.
I just love the greening of the prairie when Spring finally arrives. I don't, however, love all the work that accompanies it. This year has been especially hectic. Last spring we were gearing up for our "faux" move. The spring before that we were actually moving. For the past 2 years, our lives have been in such turmoil that many things have gone undone. The warmer weather is allowing me to begin tackling some long awaited projects.
In the spring I always like to give everything a good cleaning. In addition to the house, I thoroughly clean my barn. That means dragging everything out of the barn, washing and disinfecting everything possible. I even wipe down and spray the walls of the barn.
We have also been cleaning out the flower beds which apparently had not been done for years. The mowing has begun. That is a real chore. Our yard is more than an acre, and I am having to mow it with a push mower! Hopefully the riding mower will be working again soon. (That is a funny story I will save for another day.)
I have started trying to clean out the garage too. I am ashamed to admit that it is packed so tightly that it is almost impassable. When my husband finally returned home last fall after his cross-country work tour last summer, he brought back everything we had in storage. We put most of the boxes in the garage. Unfortunately it was soon too cold to unpack them, so they sat there all winter. I am now trying to unpack all of them. What boxes we didn't put in the garage, we put on the sunporch, which is also a mass of boxes now. I am trying to get those unpacked and sorted as well.
Recently we opened up the second floor of the house and moved our bedroom there from the first floor. That entailed the two of us carrying all our bedroom furniture back up a tiny flight of stairs. There was lots of grunting and groaning, and even a little yelling near the end, but we finally got it done.
And as if all that wasn't enough to keep me busy, I have also been trying to get enrolled in school for the fall semester. I am looking forward to finishing what I started oh so long ago.
The long, dull days of winter are certainly over. I am on the go practically from dawn to dusk now. For the moment, I am enjoying the renewed pace of life. Pretty soon though, I will probably be longing to return to those lazy winter days of warm fires and good books.
Hope your fields are filled with flowers. Blessings.
