Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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Archives for February 2022

late winter bliss list

It’s been a while since I have written a Bliss List, and as I sat down to remedy that I doubted my timing.

Russia has invaded Ukraine, I have friends and loved ones in crisis, and Jocelyn is still gone.  Life in general has plenty of heartache and shadows, so as usual I wrestle with the guilt of celebrating, well, anything.

And yet, what always wins that internal wrestling match is the knowledge that counting blessings matters. Giving time and attention to the goodness in our lives only allows it to multiply. Letting God know that we see and appreciate the answers He has already sent us keeps us on the lookout for the answers still coming.

  • Early in January I reflected on a full bodied, joyful holiday season, giving thanks for time with loved ones and the ability to celebrate in our favorite ways. We really had a magical Thanksgiving and Christmas season. Bliss to keep traditions the way we do and make note of the memories.
  • Clearing out the Christmas décor more thoughtfully than ever, taking time to scour the storage space and organize it all by season and holiday. Walking space!! Donations! Law and Order in the attic! Bliss to finally have that mammoth job done.
  • Tender moments with our friend who lost her Mom in January. A memorable sunset the night she passed moving funeral that honestly left us both inspired to live in quieter, more meaningful ways, and a glorious sunny day the afternoon of her burial. Sad, yes, but also bliss to experience that depth of love, even peripherally.
  • Innumerable long, loving conversations with Jess every week. Constant contact and ongoing closeness with her and Alex. A few surprise visits and always fun with the pups! Laika had a little surgery and Bean stayed at the farm for a few days. Bliss to share life with them in such natural, easy ways. Bliss to witness their love story and their growth as people.
  • I baked a snowflake cinnamon bread for Cara, one final holiday baking effort! And that same day Jessica and I went fabric shopping for her new aprons. I absolutely love seeing her thirst for color and flavor, both in the kitchen and in life. Bliss to be out in the world with my girl, to see a friend, and to share some creative energy.
  • In late January, my husband and I celebrated his mom Judy’s birthday, just the two of us. We had a long delayed meal at Saltgrass, the last restaurant she wanted to take us to before she died suddenly. I wrote her a long letter to her, trying to update her on the life events has missed since her passing, an impossible feat, but the act of trying was good for us, and we may have sparked a new tradition. Another sad day, but also, bliss to conjure up her spirit and to share our hushed grief a little bit.
  • Blood donation! This appointment had been rescheduled for many weeks due to weather, covid exposure, and other life complications; so it felt like a major accomplishment to get back on track. My blood pressure was super low that day, but still my left arm sprayed nearly black blood like a fountain all over the chair next to me. Bliss to be healthy enough to do this, to sit still for half an hour reading a book, and then to eat snacks all afternoon, ha.
  • We enjoyed a new Outreach project that fueled and motivated us for several weeks. A single mom and her twelve year old daughter had just arrived in Oklahoma after a long, treacherous journey fleeing wildfires and homelessness in California. We were inundated with donations from friends then went shopping to make sure their new home was well furnished and comfy. Meeting these sweet people after chatting for a few weeks, to prepare, was almost too much. Very emotional. Bliss to connect with strangers and have a small hand in helping them feel at home in our state.
  • Running has felt great the past few months, a gift for which I am so thankful. I have reminded myself that a speed workout once or twice per week is safe and fun. I have built mileage steadily, happily. And I have managed to resist exterior pressures about expensive races. Bliss to run better and on my own terms.
  • Two massive arctic storms, both of which could have been much more destructive, came and went since the holidays. We are so thankful for healthy, safe animals and for continual electricity. One of the storms brought heaps and heaps of gorgeous snow, which was really fun. This most recent storm that brought mostly sleet and ice was still pretty, and I am so thankful that Jess and BW and our other local loved ones stayed safe on the roads. Bliss to survive weird winter weather in Oklahoma.
  • Both Chanta and Dusty had health scares this past month, between the winter storms, and both of them turned out okay. I am so thankful for their health, so thankful for the thick blankets they wear during arctic blasts, so thankful for every happy year we enjoy with them. Bliss to see them walking and eating comfortably.
  • Surprise quality time with our friends Lynn and Jimmy Dale, time to laugh and dream and pray for all of our kids. Time to normalize parenting difficulties and heartaches, then laugh some more. Plus they let us try out their performance stilts! Bliss to enjoy easy, spontaneous quality time with friends.
  • Birthday gifts shipped to siblings in Los Angeles and Spain. Feeling better connected to them than ever before, despite the miles that separate us. Also daydreaming about trips to both places! Bliss to nurture adult friendship with my siblings.
  • It really makes me happy to have a loafing shed stuffed with giant round bales of hay. It’s as good a feeling, maybe better, as having the grocery shopping done a week before a major holiday. Bliss to be well prepared and secure.
  • Book discussion Zooms with friends in faraway places, personal prayerful video conference with two respected and beloved women, and a much needed Zoom with my sisters. I need these connections, and I am thankful for them. Bliss to connect with people in meaningful ways.
  • So many great books this winter! Since Thanksgiving I have already read more creative fiction than I did all of the previous year, and I am enjoying it. My spirit has needed it, this pleasure of reading books I want to read and reading books that stimulate my storytelling mind. Bliss to read slowly and deeply.
  • A few weeks ago I started shaping and amending soil for a brand new pizza garden! Oh my gosh, it’s so exciting. Bliss to wear thin gloves and let my body take over from memory, to feel my spade crunch through the sleeping earth, bliss to watch the blank circle emerge from the snow and mud. Bliss to work the compost, too.
  • We finally watched The Art of Racing in the Rain with Jess! Family pizza night. Good, relatable cry. Great laughs. Many cuddles with Klaus and Bean. Bliss in every way.
  • A couple of days in a row during a warm spell, we spent some quality time with our neighbors and new friends Rex and Cathy. They are so fun and easy to talk to, so rich in life experiences and so steeped in Love, being in their company is the best feeling. Bliss to have neighbors we love and enjoy so much.
  • I spent a few hours here and there with buckets of hot water, cleaning solutions, and scrub brushes, and I loved it. Bliss to get a head start on spring cleaning.
  • Another sweet and quiet Valentine’s Day, our traditional heart-shaped rib eye meal at home, and some very good romance, all of it like a warm and sexy quilt. Bliss.
  • Shortly after Valentine’s, we had one fiery marital disagreement that definitely hurt both of our feelings, one of those Clash of the Titans-style conflicts that thankfully doesn’t happen very often. But we both managed to express ourselves fully and honestly, then we reconciled in a few precious, unforgettable moments. Bliss to feel that authentic reconnection and deep peace.
  • We have a handful of small farm events coming up right around the corner, and planning them is a lot of fun. Bliss to anticipate gathering our people and to plan how to feed them and how we can set the stage for memory making.
  • One day this past week we fired up the yurt heater, ready with a pail of water for the sauna rocks, and luxuriated in a 150 degree room for probably too long, ha. Bliss to feel that deep, full body sweat in the dead of winter.
  • On the afternoon we were set to deliver a trailer stuffed with furniture, appliances, and home supplies to our Outreach family, our truck had some mechanical trouble. Dennis, Brandon, and Adam showed up, though, and saved the day. The guys are always there to help, and we don’t know what we would do without them. Bliss to have friends who always make a stressful situation more fun, and who always help.
  • Yesterday my sweet, smart husband sat with me for about two hours and answered dozens of layered questions for a brand new interview project. He indulged my curiosity, shared his heart, and made me fall in love with him all over again. Bliss to know your spouse of twenty years in ever deepening ways.

Choose joy. Inventory your pleasures and sensations. List your bliss. Allow and encourage light to overtake the darkness.

“Our daily noble pursuits make us human.
War awakens the preciousness of life
and reminds us to live each moment
to the glory of God.”
~Timothy Willard
XOXOXOXO

a close call with Dusty and a story about the leaf blower guy

The other day we had a scare with one of our horses, Dusty, the squatty, deep voiced grey and white cutie pie who has grown up with our girls. He is fine now, everything turned out great, but it was a tense and scary few hours.

Dusty in his younger, slimmer, fashion model days xoxo

In the middle of a hectic morning at work, my husband rushed home to help, and after an hour or so of watching and evaluating, we felt comfortable enough with Dusty’s progress to drive up the road to Tractor Supply Co for electrolytes and probiotic chews.

Tuesday was a warm and bright, violently windy day. The weather was beginning to turn, with both straight-line gusts and the twirling, circular kind of wind that creates sudden little leaf-and-stick tornadoes.

As we drove the few miles north, we passed a man tending his lawn with a leaf blower. In Oklahoma. On a wind advisory day.

He was really bundled up, as if the temperatures were actually about thirty degrees colder. He was wearing a thermal hat and massive gloves and jeans and boots, plus a substantial brown canvas coat, no doubt thickly insulated. I registered all of this plus his solemn expression. Then I marveled at the tedious attention he was paying to his leaf blower chore.

The dried oak leaves flew slightly away from his mechanical dismissal then spiraled back on him, then scattered sideways, then blew ahead of him in short, straight bursts, then flew wildly again, caught in another random gust. They flew up and away and directly over his hat. He was in the middle of a late winter ticker tape parade, like a cash tornado for people who believe that decomposing organic matter is black gold (these people are correct).

He was making exactly zero progress, but still he gripped that power tool with an air of focus and calm determination. He remained bent over his incomprehensible task. He walked slowly across the curved concrete driveway, pointing himself and his apparatus at each next area of chaos, and he never looked up or ahead of his immediate steps.

I have so many questions for him.

Maybe he was commanded by a spouse or an employer to do this job, regardless of weather, and dared not argue.

Maybe he recently received this leaf blower as a gift and thought a windy day would make for a fun maiden voyage.

Maybe he was in shock from some catastrophic family news and needed a rote, mind numbing activity to distract him, to help him gather his strength.

Maybe he was in covid-19 quarantine and needed to be outdoors for his mental health but couldn’t allow himself to just sit still.

Maybe he was an environmental scientist studying wind shears, but on, like, a really small scale.

Maybe he was a gardener desperate for some kind of gardening activity but couldn’t find his shovel.

Did he think he was helping something, serving some purpose? Was he having fun? Was that even his house, his leaf blower, his heavy coat? Maybe he was a shape shifter or an alien invader occupying Choctaw, Oklahoma, mimicking human behavior without really understanding the hilarity of the situation. (Forgive me, we have been watching lots of vintage X-Files.)

We drove past this man in the briefest moment, but he made such in impression on me. After we purchased the horse medicine at TSC and drove back south toward the farm, I looked for him. He was gone by then, but the leaves on his property (or on the property where the aliens had recently landed or where he is being held captive by a weird, mind-games playing taskmaster) were still swirling and thrusting against nothing with wild energy.

Maybe I had imagined him, except that I think my husband had seen him, too.

May be an image of 1 person, horse, nature and grass
We are so very thankful this boy is healthy and happy again!

Dusty continued to make progress all day, eventually acting exactly like his normal sweet, spicy self, eager to rejoin the bachelor herd and eat a late breakfast. I gave thanks constantly (gosh I love this horse) and thought too much about the things we do for animals, the care we try to provide, the good habits we try to maintain, the love we try to show. I thought about the prayers we whisper urgently when none of that seems to add up to enough.

I marveled at how little control we have over some things.

About as much control as the leaf blower guy.

XOXOXOXO

winter wake up call

For the past few years, I have noticed a moment late in winter when I worry whether I can do it all again. Somewhere past the holidays and even past the worst of the cold but too far from true warmth for even an optimist to declare an early spring, I just feel so deeply exhausted. Or, if not exhausted, then supremely comfortable. I work steadily and contentedly through the short daylight hours of January and February, mostly a very quiet farm life, and wonder whether I will have the energy for another series of busy, warm weather months.

After the final thaw and first true green up, my life will be filled with gardening and traveling, entertaining and big project wrangling, animals and farm expansion, and more. This time of year I am again deciding between a focused marathon training cycle and feeling good in a bikini. (These two goals are not necessarily compatible, which is one of life’s biggest surprises, ha!) This time of year my husband has legislative season layered on top of his normal Commish duties, which are already voluminous, so his energy drains away completely day after day, and this depletion becomes mine in many ways. I become protective of our available time and energy, forgetting that effort begets effort and energy begets energy.

None of this is a complaint! I choose every bit of it and more. This is a beautiful, complex life we have designed and which I love in great detail. And yet, gosh my mind and my body, my actual spirit, are fairly bankrupt by late winter. Sallow, like my skin.

So I worry a little, am I up to the task again? I have just recently convinced myself it was okay to read books in the late afternoon and cook dinner already showered for bed and definitely wearing pajamas. I really love our cozy living room with white twinkle lights and our stacks of fuzzy blankets, and these many consecutive nights of luxurious, gold star sleeping hours are so so so nice.

Very soon, the quiet, often starry black sky we inhale during that first cup of coffee will be noisy with roosters and already Technicolor, already gleaming with daybreak and bursting with wild potential. Soon, instead of letting me take my time waiting for first light, the farm will be antsy while I stretch awake, and every task outdoors will compete for first attention. The days will be crammed full, so full I never finish everything on The List, and I will be lucky to have showered by sunset, much less before cooking dinner, ha. I yawn against these thoughts and doubt my stamina.

I look for the snooze button on seasons.

But then…

Then it happens. We are gifted with a few extraordinarily warm, gentle afternoons, a few skies that pulse that familiar childhood shade of blue, and that intoxicating scent of freshness everywhere. Can you smell photosynthesis, or chlorophyll? Can you hear roots shimmy underground, coming back to life? The newness grows and expands gently, every day, even when a cold snap reminds me it’s still winter. It all accrues slowly along with the lengthening days, and, thankfully, my energy does too. Just a little bit at a time.

Around the days I see the first daffodil sprouts emerge from the sleepy garden beds, I begin to think that my daily routine has been too much about easy maintenance. I naturally crave traction, progress, and creation. Coasting feels stale. Resting begins to feel wasteful. My hands itch for gardening gloves instead of cozy ones, skin also longing for the silkiness of warm soil. My legs flex involuntarily when I think of crunching a spade into raw earth or forking over the compost heaps. My eyes are desperate for new colors, no longer content with all the sepia. I begin to obsessively check the horses for signs of shedding.

Gradually, my body responds to more tasks and more opportunities, especially outdoors. I feel excited again for the longer days and everything they bring along.

Nature and all her interlocking cycles inch forward without our permission and unheeding of our understanding. Ready or not, the seasons make progress. Thankfully, we are more than passengers; we are part of nature. Our energies are all intimately connected, and as the outside world moves through changes, so do we. Trust that.

If you are feeling too tired or very comfy and maybe reluctant to think of doing much more than you have been doing, take heart. Your inner resources can expand greatly as the days lengthen and the temperatures rise. The sun and the moon are your allies. You are part of nature, and this recent season of hibernation was good and necessary. What’s coming next is good and necessary, too.

I am ready. Are you?

“If you want to make your dreams come true,
the first thing you have to do is wake up.”
~J.M. Power
XOXOXO

little lady marigold xoxo

Little Lady Marigold is the precious, diminutive, wild sheep I have always wanted. She is opinionated, lucid, brave, and full of energy.

She got her fancy name by two strokes of beautiful timing. First, I asked Handsome and Jessica separately for name ideas, and within an hour of each other they both texted, “Little Lady.” Then I added “Marigold” because the day she arrived here at our farm was the first day my French marigolds bloomed that spring. So she became Little Lady Marigold, LLM for short.

Little Lady Marigold is a Shetland sheep, diminutive in stature but bold in spirit. Her fleece is mostly white or white adjacent, dirty after many months of growing free and wild, and her face and legs are coal black. Lovely. I cannot get enough of gazing into her domed eyes and slotted pupils.

LLM is lightning fast and agile, able to glide and bolt low and quick, in and around both trees and horse legs alike. She is skeptical and fussy and makes you earn her trust, which I respect. When Klaus is being just too much, she raises one of her stiffened front legs, tiny black hoof shining with anger, and bows her forehead as if to warn him of a good noggin ramming (which, in fact, she is very able to deliver). We call this warning the Stick Leg Treatment. It looks like a great, fluffy praying mantis preparing to do battle, and it almost always shoos Klaus and any other nearby animal, including her huge pasture mate Romulus the King of Llamas, right away. On the rare occasion that the Stick Leg Treatment does not work, she squares off, keeps that woolly head lowered, and charges forward in mean, fearless thrusts until her opponent is properly humiliated and retreats. No one has bested her yet, and she is the tiniest of all our animals, save the cats and chickens.

Nephews Greg and Connor wanted her way too much.
She can smell it. She eschews sincere desire.

Marigold was borderline feral when we first brought her here. It took many weeks of slow, quiet movements and cautious approaches to convince her to eat sweet grain out of my hands, and now she practically climbs my leg when I swing it over the gate to her enclosure. I love scruffing her pretty face and stroking her slender, knobby legs. Her hooves are unbelievably tiny! And that wool, you guys, oof!! It is voluminous and full of mystery (also sticks and dried leaves). If I have a lucky day and get to handle her enough, my hands feel oily and a bit slick from the lanolin. She is usually pretty content having the heaps of gray and white wool on her back scruffed. Or, perhaps this is the truth, there is so much there that she cannot always feel me scruffing her?

Speaking of that massive woolly burden, our Shetland sweetie is destined for a spring shearing this year, so I have begun desensitizing her to a halter, noisy with metal buckles, during hand feeding. I wear it on my wrist like a bracelet, making it necessary for her face to be almost up against it while she nibbles grain from my palm. Occasionally I jingle the buckle and flip the straps, so she gets used to seeing and hearing it while staying safe. She absolutely hates it, ha! But if this slow, steady process works, it will lead to her next level of elegance and domesticity and to my next life accomplishment. I’ll keep you posted.

Little Lady Marigold’s favorite song is Norwegian Wood by The Beatles, followed closely by Never Gonna Gove You Up by Rick Astlee, if I have just left the duck pond and chicken coop.  Soft songs. Easy words. Pretty things that cool her hot temper. She sleeps either beneath a wild cedar tree near the pond-facing hill or in her little shed. Also in the hay! Rather than calmly eat from the outer surface of a large hay bale, she burrows deeply in it, snoot forward, then naps in the tunnel she has eaten away. Upon waking she emerges with an ill balanced hay bonnet. I love this more than words can say. Which is another song she might like. I’ll try it.

Little Lady enjoyed a good, healthy, stress free week of winter here, for which we are so thankful. She is spicy and personable, and I just love her so much. If you ever visit the farm and want to meet her, don’t be shy! I’ll take you over and make the proper introductions. Just know that so far, my little sister Genevieve is the only other person who has successfully hand fed this animal. I think the secret is that Gen didn’t care that much. She lacked the stench of desperation most visitors emit, ha.

Okay that’s it for today! I just wanted to share some of my sheep love.

I hope you’re having a beautiful weekend filled with everything that refreshes your soul. Remember you are deeply and wildly loved, your potential is untapped, and your emotions and imagination have actual creative power in this world.

“Patience is passion tamed.”
~Lyman Abbott
XOXOXOXO

P.S. President Roosevelt also kept Shetland sheep, but one of his rams attacked several people and killed a small boy, so he had to relocate them all to Monticello. The End.