I hate having to wear winter boots. It’s not really the wearing that I dislike, it is the exertion that I abort just putting them on which divorces enchantment.
For some reason, the floor which I previously had no problem reaching, always seems to be about three inches beyond my arm’s length. I never seem to be able to reach quite far enough to do what has to be done. I kind of suspect it is an age-related problem. I can remember scooping up a dropped penny on the run in harder times and a much younger year.
Dating me also is the fact that each time as I struggle to put them on, an expletive-tinged hillbilly tune, popular in my teenage years, keeps flashing back to my mind. Though I do recollect that it had several variations to multiple verses, only the words, that I suspect to be the chorus, keep deliriously echoing in the area between my eardrums.
You’ll never know the great favour that I am doing each and every one of you in not attempting to sing it to you, but the song’s title, as I recollect, was “Putting the Shoes on Willie,” and in higher or lower octaves. With explorative expletives discarded, I recall that it went in the general direction of this:
“We gotta put the shoes on Willie; we gotta put them on somehow. It took his uncles and his aunts to put him into pants, and we gotta get the shoes on now somehow, we gotta get the shoes on now!”
I have tried to sing this way-back ditty with grunts and groans to our house dog Foxy, as she waits to accompany me outside, but she apparently will tolerate my grunting and groaning as the shoes go on, but she refuses outright to listen to my attempts of putting anything to off key song.
Without fail, she will go back to her cozy front room blanket and wait out of earshot, and I suspect, with her front paws up over her ears. When she senses that I have clicked the latch to open the door, and knowing she can escape far beyond, she comes rushing out to enjoy the pleasures of the great outdoors.
She gallops off in 20-foot bounds and checks out, by sniffing and snuffing, the comings and goings of the night creatures. Thereafter she follows me wherever I happen to wander.
Shunning the indiscriminate killing of unknown creatures by poison, we have chosen to set a couple of live traps to take care of the mice and rats.
This is one of Foxy’s joyful rewards. Almost every third or fourth morning either a mouse or rat gets trapped. Foxy excitedly waits until I release it out in the centre of the parking lot. Then, in less time than it takes me to tell you about it, one shake of her head and said captured creature has been dispatched to rodent heaven.
She will toss it in the air and play with it for perhaps a minute or less then she will take it, as trained, and drop it out in one of the open fields. In time, much less than a half hour, a high flying raven will spot it and swoop down to carry it off for its lunch.
You see folks, everything possible is recycled here at the farm.
Take care, ‘cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105