Spring Day

At daybreak a perfect half moon looks as if somebody chopped it off like a slice of silver cheese....A blazing sunrise, colors changing like a cinema, now peach, now tangerine, then cotton candy, clean bright white on to the blinding blue of noonday.

At sunset, pink sheep clouds nibbling their way across the heifer hill horizon, shepherded along towards evening by the tugging of the breeze. It snaps the laundry on the line and ruffles the border collie's fur as it passes. It is the kindest wind of the year, refreshing, sweet, and softly scented, with green earth and cow and clean, smooth water on its breath.

In between the day's bright ends, cleaning pens and moving heifers, fixing and filling and planning the planting. Heifers on Saturday, heifers on Monday. Salesmen and electric fences, shovels, wheelbarrows full of baleage (when is somebody going to straighten that bent axle and find some grease I want to know?) skirling skid steer, singing songbirds, snarling river, snaking brown Schoharie...it is spring in the valley, sit up and take notice.