Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I went up to the spring tonight after putting the animals up to get a few gallons of spring water.

It's a PVC pipe sticking out of the side of the hill in front of the old abandoned Thompson Branch Baptist Church on Hall's Top Road. Scott tells me that the old fellow who was pastor here used to hold services for years to an empty church. This has only been a few years back. The mountain is already busy taking over the little lot.

It's wonderful water. It tastes like what the bottled spring waters are supposed to taste like. It's hard to describe if you've never had it, but it is sort of sweet. It comes out of the mountain ice cold on the hottest days of the year. My own water was like this before the pump fiasco and hopefully will be again once all the charred plastic taste has faded from my pipes.

This is the spring that Caidy, in my story, Bone Soup, that I'm writing would have walked by on her way to and from school. She might have stopped to have a drink or wash her face on a hot day.

I'm enjoying a tall glass of this water right now. Wish you could join me.

I went off-farm today to get fudge making supplies in town and to return my library books. It's been very hazy today and is now threatening rain. I love it when it rains after a hazy day. The shoots of steam rise up off the mountains like wisps of souls escaping the earth.

The forsythias and daffodils went into full bloom without me knowing. My own poor daffies are little munched upon bits of green just clearing the ground. Goats love landscaping. Nothing seems quite as tasty as something planted by Momma's hand and lovingly tended. My lemon balm is coming up. This is, at least, one plant that the goats won't touch, but I love very dearly. I love the smell it leaves on my hands when I touch it in passing.

I'm looking forward to my first cups of lemon balm tea. I ran out of all of my dried tea sometime in mid-winter. I'm a big tea drinker. I hope the tiny wild mint that came up so prolifically last summer comes back. It's odd, but each year we have different wild mints. One summer we has do much horsemint that I could barely keep up with drying it for teas and making mint sauce with it. That tiny mint was much better for teas than the big leafed horsemint. It hides, close to the ground, and sometimes the aroma will engulf you when you are working the ground, but if you try to find it, you can't. It's like a fairy mint.

Vi-vi's eye corrected itself. So I suppose it was just a spastic entropion brought on by some small injury. She's back in the field with everyone else now. Her time with me has gentled her and she is now following the kid pack up to the porch for snacks in the morning and evening. Since she would not take the bottle, I had to hold Maggie and Pearlie for her to nurse. Mother goats don't take too kindly to strange kids nursing them. But now, Vi-vi feels quite entitled to nurse on whosoever she pleases. She follows me at milking time because she knows I'll hold the other mothers so she can take a long drink. Because of this, she has shot up in growth.

I now am working on Blanche and Rose. They will need to come and spend some time on the porch as well. Then my entire little doe kid pack will be gentled. Blinkin's triplets do not have the instinctual love of tummy rubs that the purely dairy bred girls do. This is something they will need to be taught so that they will enjoy being milked when they are big girls.

With Vi-vi off of the porch, I spent all of yesterday cleaning and de-goatifying the back porch. It was a relief to not have a sick goat back there screaming at me for once. I spent the entire day cloroxing and scrubbing down all of the wood and cleaning the dog crates out.

Unfortunately, I came down this morning to find it once more splattered with goat vomit. It was Phoebe's turn to be sick. She and BossyToe like to sleep back there. Phoebe doesn't seem to have it too badly. I mixed some maalox in her bottle and gave it to her to settle her tummy. Then hosed off the porch this morning. Again. I am distressed to find that a google search of "goat vomit" brings my blog up as the fifth entry. At least Fias Co farms has me beat in that respect.

But, I'm grateful to welcome springtime to the mountains. As I drove down the mountain I saw many gardens had already been tilled and disced. A bunch of new comers were doing some early planting. They had plowed up their kudzu patch and were planting something there. I didn't have the heart to tell them that the kudzu would overtake their little garden in only another month or so. The plowing would only break the roots and make more kudzu. Goats can control it, but they would need pigs to eradicate it.

Ah, well. Let them dream of new potatoes.

It will soon be time for me to do much the same.

I went out to the porch tonight to grab a stick of wood. Not that it is terribly needed, but I like to keep the woodstove going on low since the mornings can be chilly. And I heard a rumor that we were getting snow at some point tonight. Not bloody likely with the temps all day in the 60's. It's only fallen to 55 right now.

That is when I heard it. Frogsong.

It's the first sign of spring. The bull frogs awakening to lay their eggs. The song they sing from the frog pond was loud and clear.

And evidently confused.

It's the 15th of January. They awoke on the 15th of February last year. March 15th the year before that. I know these things since I pay close attention to the signs of change here.

During the winter, the mountains are silent. The frogs are the first in a long list of natural cacophonies that start up in the spring and then fall silent in the late fall. The next sound will be the whip 'or will. Then all hell breaks loose with hawk cries, cicadas, crickets, birds and buzzing insects. It gets really loud here. But it's a different sort of loud. A nice loud.

This is too early. I worry that we will have a killing snow and frost that will kill the tadpoles. The water level in the pond has been quite low and it doesn't take much to freeze it solid.

My neighbors excitedly murmur about "The End Times." This is not unusual. They see "The End Times" all the time. The signs. The Rapture. It's coming.

Problem is...I think they might be right this time.

The frogs don't lie.