It was a very sunny day. I think the hottest day this year. I could walk outside in my t-shirt; I caught myself covering my head from the sun’s heat and thinking that it is actually a summer day. But we still have some snow in our field. It should melt and in a few days it will all be muddy dirt.
It was good to be outside again. I am doing two things outside right now, pruning and building a hoop house. There is a few apple trees at our yard, old, big trees like Prairie Spy, but also some young ones. It is the second year I have been pruning. I read about it, went to a lecture, I even took a lesson from my friend Kevin Cane from Cane’s Orchard in Hixton, WI. I worked for him one summer when I was a student and came for the first time to America for a while. It was a good way to learn about America, nice employers, decent pay, normal hours, fresh air, exchanging cultural tidbits in conversations and free apples. I loved that job. Maybe I started thinking about farming then, hard to say.
Pruning is a ‘hard to start’ type of work. When you walk to the tree and see so many branches, look for sick ones, or those which grow in the wrong direction – straight up or down, or crisscross. But it sucks you in after a few cuts and then you just want this tree to be see-through, with some air and sun, and you can even imagine it a few months later, with leaves, apples and some noisy bugs in them.
My second project, hoop house construction, is very time consuming. I studied this topic for almost the whole winter, but in theory it is always easier to study something than actually do it. That’s why I admire all play and screen play writers, it has to be very hard to switch from the written text to real action–from thinking of what one actor could do–to– to having him do it. But so far one hoop house is getting ready, and it isn’t a one actor play thankfully, so with a little help from my friends and family, it will be covered with plastic and have – very important – sidewall vents in a few days.
All this daily work outside has a soundtrack which is wild geese flying over and honking. Every day there are dozens of them going north west (I feel sorry for North West Airlines, because it might be a pretty busy route now), once in a while there is a couple or just one flying back, south east, which is a big mystery for me, just a single goose flying back and honking, why? Where?
