Colorful Rocks
The Wee Farm is currently beaming, sporting all the colors of spring on this land Farmer Rick (my long-suffering husband, lol) and I love so much. The knockout roses are actually showing off with bright reds and pinks bursting all over this place.
Here’s an interesting observation from a Goat Girl Gone Cat Crazy (that would be me…I nickname everyone on or associated with the Wee Farm Musings).
I am not a natural nature girl, preferring the indoor comfort where flying insects and atrocious heat will not zap me. I was also raised by an Italian father who poured concrete for a living with my brothers. I really didn’t have to worry about dirt so much because my Little Daddy (the nickname I always called my sweet daddy) loved pouring concrete on anything flat. We just usually hosed off the backyard and Mom planted flowers and tomatoes in pots.
Dirt, fields, all these animals making noises and looking at me from fences butting up to our farm were the very things that would fill my nightmares as a young girl. I would have never dreamed of living in the conditions I live in now, but that was the old me, the one raised in the city in my early years, and the one who lived in Nashville proper for 31 years after I moved away from home where, in both places, I would leave the air conditioner on ice and have the nerve to complain if a fly made it into the house.
The new me has had to overcome countless fears to make the Wee Farm my beloved dwelling. I’ve had to accept the fact that I’m only a visitor to the things that have called this place home far longer than me. That would include an assortment of snakes, lizards and insects who look like they want to take me out of the game of sanity…whew.
Over the 9 years we’ve called these acres home, I have healed myself of such phobias just through sheer exhaustion and the willingness to give up worrying as a result and guess what? Nothing here is so intent on bothering me. These creepy crawlies, these winged fleets of terror, they’re just trying to get to the next day like I am. I don’t swat at them, and they don’t dive-bomb me; we live in relative peace…until cicadas and horseflies come around…that’s when I run in screaming.
One of the miracles of embracing farm living is the quiet contemplation and elementary study of things that catch my eye and heart these last years. All the color popping up in strange places here leaves me in an incredible state of wonder.
Sometimes the back 6 acres will be covered up in yellow flowers, and they are gorgeous. I made the mistake once of running through them as if it were a slow-motion, sappy scene with my arms outstretched and twirling around in a flowy dress while imagining the track of The Sound of Music. The romance of that run ended horribly when Farmer Rick had to spend the better part of an hour pulling ticks off of me as I tried hard not to faint.
Another part of each year the back three acres turn into what looks like an ocean of white caps where, on closer inspection, tiny white flowers take over the tall grasses waving in the wind. I did manage to get my farm darling to snap a few pictures of me there in our lovely field. Of course, that cost me too because I found out what chiggers were…disaster struck again. I got them in places where chiggers should never roam, and I was so freaked out I could hardly function until they were gone.
Oh, and this Wee Farm is riddled with slabs of limestone deposited here and there. The first time we walked the land while we were in the process of buying it, I noticed the flat stones were covered in purple flowers with flat, waxen greenery underneath. In fact, the rocks looked like this colorful ground cover was crawling across the tops and adding eye candy to these ancient stones as it brought great joy to me…again, an unexpected beauty.
Of course, my logical and mountain-raised husband, Farmer Rick, tells me all these flowers are just weeds.
Weeds! What?
Then I remembered once when my Little Daddy chose to give a huge pig roast on his lovely place in Virginia and invite, oh, about 300 or 400 folks, give or take. Little Daddy and I had the best time coming up with decor. We went to his farmer friend and got lots of bales of hay to decorate the stage that would hold a sassy local bluegrass band. Then he laid out wood on the grass and made a large dance floor for a hired group called The Flatland Cloggers to perform their dances.
For the tents and large building holding all the food and tables, we used newspaper as tablecloths and mason jars filled with (now I know but I didn’t at the time) WEEDS! Little Daddy and I took the earliest part of the morning the day of the party to pluck hundreds from fields near his place. We might have trespassed and borrowed the flowers, sniff. We had the funniest time ever, giggling as we filled our baskets up with purple and white and yellow.
I thought they were wildflowers…sigh.
I loved our tables. They were perfect. After my cousin told me they were weeds and deflated my decorating efforts, I got to thinking, beauty is really in the eye of the beholder, and I think some weeds are downright beautiful. Thinking even deeper, God must have loved the weeds enough to make them pretty, and He topped them up with gentle color!
There, me and God love colorful weeds.
When Farmer Rick took me to meet his Clinch Mountain grandmother for the first time (he uses the endearing term, “Mamaw”), we traversed scary, curvy mountain roads with no guardrails to stop us from careening off into the unknown…but, after much screaming on my part, we got there.
Once I caught my breath, and we pulled up to this old farmhouse, I spied a woman navigating a HUGE boulder to the left of her home. It took my breath away. For there stood this gray rock as tall as a house with the prettiest, most vibrant display of flowers spreading over it and this slight woman with a precious apple face and a shock of white hair waving frantically at us from among all the colors.
Yep, Mamaw made a flower garden right there on that granite and worked it daily. I was blown away. So blown away I had to write about it.
She would always tell us, “Don’t bring no store-bought flowers to my funeral! Go find me some wild Queen Anne’s Lace and lay it over my grave!”
Mamaw loved the weeds, too! She loved all the wild mountain flowers and would fill up baskets of them to add delicate life to the hard living on top of that mountain.
Well, it’s all now recorded in a song called “Are You Pickin’ Flowers Now” by yours truly!
Don’t let weeds fool ya! They come with their own brand of beauty, a sign that you can never judge something from the surface, but you can certainly appreciate what you see.
Color me a happy girl who picks the field flowers as she dances through the weeds.
Until next time…
Donna Ulisse
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