We have a fine combination of work and play in our lives these days. Our goal is to spend every other weekend at the cabin for building or projects prepping for our move to there this fall. We stay for Sunday. Our services at GBC are live streamed so we don’t miss that. The fellowship is missed, of course. But then we get to rest or recreate and hopefully get a visit in with our close neighbors. Not all of this always happens but its a goal.
Sunday afternoon is also explore time for us. We have often taken the pickup to drive for miles on woods roads an hour from home, finding hidden lakes, rugged terrain on almost impassable trails, or places to remember to come for a picnic sometime. Once, we found a vast swamp with DNR boardwalks laid out across it. I guess it was a wild life refuge and we have pictures in the archives somewhere of when Clark’s went with us. A month ago on another of our explorations we wondered just where this place is and do not remember. Clark could help us out on this I think.
Anyway, our own acreage in the woods up north is a great place to hike. We walked around to the other side of the the stair-stepped beaver ponds last Sunday. The picture below is taken from the other side of the pond near our cabin. We were tired from our three mile hike but we didn’t want to wade up to our knees in muddy, slippery, swamp water to get over there, so we were obliged to walk back to the road and around to home.
One of the places we hike to is to the top of the mountain right behind our cabin. From there the lake is clearly visible along with the Wisconsin shoreline. On our way up last time, we saw moose tracks on the trail. Brad says he’d rather meet a bear than to encounter a moose. I don’t know. I trust Elv as my safety person … he always carries his beloved gun. And we talk and make racket thrashing along. Any animal in its right mind is probably high tailing it for the next township for all of our noise. I get pictures of flowers and scenery at least.
Minnesota wildflowers are plenteous and various. I can’t resist grabbing photos of them always. I have many, many wild flower pictures already, yet I keep collecting them.
- Blue-eyed Grass
- Marsh marigolds otherwise know as cow slips to my dad
- Spring beauties
- Bluebells
- Wild strawberries
These are just a few I saw. I noticed that the lupine foliage is up and growing. Lupines are the best. Someday I’m going to seed the whole swamp shore with them. The roadways and meadows are lovely with them.
It is 30 feet by 5 feet full of twigs, upside-down clay filled topsoil, and several top inches of barnyard compost. Elv build it and I planted it last Saturday. Brad dug a water hole that I was able to dip the watering can into to water the baby squash and petunia plants. Then we put up the electric fence and Elv plugged it into a solar fencer. Now we shall see if we will get crops. Next on the list is to mulch it deeply in wheat straw. And again we shall see what we shall see. I’m envisioning crops.
Prayer Meeting Adventures
Our church is very small. And our prayer meetings are even smaller. I like prayer meeting. Oh, I know, it is a pain to stop everything mid-stride, mid-week and go to church. But I like it because I get to see people and have sharing time and pray around the room with my friends. And not everyone likes to “share” woes and praises with everyone in a verbal way like I do. This is understandable, too. But really, praying is an awesome mid-stride, mid-week thing to engage in because it give us a chance again to remember that God is in control even though whole world seems to bent on proving this otherwise.
All that to say that since we can, we do meet outside around a campfire and the children play in the freshly mowed lawn and along the woods until we actually settle down for praying. So this is fun. But so is meeting inside and splitting up into men’s and women’s groups for our sharing and praying time. I miss that when it doesn’t happen for one reason or the other for awhile. Dumping our cares and joys in the presence of those we love and are loved by, is good. Hearing them praying and praising in prayer those things we have shared gives them value in the right ways. Burdens are lighter, then, somehow.
I was going to comment on the submerging of Covid-19 into the troubled waters of rioting in the streets of most of our cities across this land. What strange times these have become. When are we going to stop the drama? Who even noticed that one of the richest, smartest guys around actually launched a space craft?! Elon Musk, some of us did notice. It was a breathe of fresh air in the news, to be honest.
I finally asked Elv. 2020 isn’t election year after-all, or what? Virtually nothing is happening or being reported on about that. No noises about who is running, and who should be, and who shouldn’t be for scandalous reasons. Nothing. Silence. I finally looked it up, finding a concise article about who is running and who all dropped out already so that currently we have two: Democratic Joe Biden, and Republican President Donald Trump. That’s it. Evidently there is an election in the offing. Well, that makes it easy. Yes, these be very strange times.
Stone House Scribblings 