In the morning time

After a weekend spent outside raising garden beds and planting seeds (as well as a billion other things!) it feels odd to return to our everyday life.  The season seems to be shifting quickly from spring to summer and I’m ready for our rhythm to change once more, though I haven’t quite decided what that will look like yet!  I certainly feel it’s time for us to move to a  different beat as the sunshine draws us outside and the farm demands more of our time.

So this morning we’ll be heading off the library, returning a batch of books that were our reading for the spring, looking forward to the new inspiration we’ll find there for the weeks and months ahead.  The boys, who went out to do ‘chores’ and are still outside, seem to have forgotten entirely that there may be such a thing as school and I don’t blame them.  The sunshine beckons and outside is now warmer and lovelier than in.

I am lingering, in the quiet of a morning that began with rush and begins a full day; my tea is warm and my snack sweet and delicious, just like the kiss of the morning sun outside. As always there is plenty to do, eggs to sort for customers, stock bubbling away (roasted pork bones this time), lard waiting to be rendered and a fridge full of milk demanding my attention.  This afternoon we’ll head across town for our homeschool gym class to bounce around in the sunshine with friends.

So while my boy who “fell in mud” gets changed and the other disappears into a corner somewhere to build or think or read, I snap a few moments of this lull, this quiet space between going here or there.  There is always enough work to go around in this busy springtime on the farm, always more than we think we can manage yet somehow it gets done.  But the lulls, the quiet moments that creep across an hour or a minute, they are precious and to be treasured.  So often they are gone before you can really sink into them and so I hope to snatch it in my net and soak it up before the tasks once more fill up the space.

And now, as I write this, I feel the day tugging at me once more.  The last sips of tea are gulped rather than sipped, the voices of boys are raised and ready to go, the clock glows at me, reminding me that there are only so many minutes in a morning and that we must make good use of them.  So off I go again friends, into this beautiful day, this morning; I will carry with me this lull, this little corner of peace and know I’m lucky to have had it, and lucky for all the rest too.