Sledding!

That is, until the plow comes….

Augustin came to visit us for lunch today with his mom, former staff goddess Vicki.

Having spent his in utero life in our office, he was quite at ease here and made a beeline for the Flower Essences.

After we helped him sample some appropriate Essences- Sweet Pea for better quality naps and Pink Baby’s Breath for teething- he managed to finesse a ball out of May May’s grasp.

Too soon, it was time for him to go test out the Sweet Pea during his afternoon nap. As Vicki helped him put on his coat and hat, May May (in lower right hand corner) waited for Augustin let go of that ball.

No one loves a ball more than a one year old, except maybe a dog.

A beloved Green Hope friend has written me about how the Laws of Attraction are working for her. This friend has a book in the publishing hopper, a magazine article at newstands now, and holiday plans that begin in the big apple and finish off with New Year’s Eve in the high Andes of Peru. To sum up, she should be writing this blog, not me.

However, not being the best person for a job hasn’t stopped me from diving in before ( and certainly didn’t stop me today when the Laws of Attraction whirled into motion). So here is what I have noticed about the Laws of Attraction in my life, what I absolutely know to be true.

MOLLY’S LAWS OF ATTRACTION

If I have a large shipment of something arriving at the farm,

Rule #1) No matter when I order the shipment, said shipment will always arrive during extremely bad weather. There will either be driving rain, heavy snow falling, extreme sub zero cold occurring, pitch black night time conditions prevailing, or all of the above.

2) Several feet of snow, massive quantities of crusty ice, a pile of fifty hay bales, or a newly dumped load of firewood will always be blocking the path to the barn where the inventory needs to be stored.

3) Inside the barn, there is never quite enough room to ease the newly arriving inventory into place without having to move half of the current inventory.
4) The call to alert me to the arrival of the large shipment will always occur under these conditions

a) Jim will just be disappearing down the hill to go to work and will be out of the loop during all stages of the delivery process.
b) There will be nobody else at the farm. Deliveries only occur after the staff has left or on days when I am here by myself.
c) I mean all by myself.

5) Given the extreme weather conditions, when a trucking company calls to schedule delivery, my first two three six conversations with the truck driver to give him directions to the farm will involve me unsuccessfully trying to convince said driver that he can make our hill and pull up to the door of our barn.

Famous lines used by me include

a) The hill is not as steep as it looks.
b) Many other truck drivers have gotten their rigs up and then off our hill. Really.
c) Ignore that soft grass, snowdrifts, and/or muddy ruts in front of the barn and just back her in. I promise you won’t get stuck.
d) We have no loading dock, but really, I am very strong and will unload everything. I will NOT depend on your back.

Despite these brilliant enticements to the many tractor trailer drivers that have brought palettes of boxes, bottles, and dropper caps to us, drivers up and down the east coast seem to KNOW about our hill even before they get here and see it rear its profile in their windshield like a Himalayan peak looming over Darjeeling.

To sum up, these men routinely say NO to door to door service. This means I meet a lot of truck drivers at the bottom of our hill. I unload palettes in driving rain, onto snowdrifts and the like, and then take these loads up to the farm by myself after the always nice, but always firm in their refusal to go up our hill truck drivers have dropped the load, gotten me to sign the delivery slip, and have sped away into the stormy night.

6) Our small farm pickup truck will never be at the farm when I need it for moving a shipment. I will always be using the wrong vehicle for the job.

Let’s go through today’s surprise delivery to see how the various aspects of my Laws of Attraction played out.

The phone rang this morning at 7:11 am just as Jim rolled over the top of the hill in our small Toyota truck to go to his sixth grade classroom (rule #4 parts a, b and c in play).

It was a trucking company calling to say they needed to deliver a load of 50,000 dropper caps to us today, before the next snowstorm. This order was placed a small eternity ago, when the grass was green and we were still frollicking barefoot in the gardens. This morning it was about 4 degrees out and our driveway was not yet plowed from last night’s snow (rule 1 in play).

As I saw Jim roll out of sight ( can rule # 4 ever be mentioned enough?), I tried to convince the truck driver he could make our hill. He was not biting (rule #5).

I trotted out new lines. Why the town truck had just sanded the road just five minutes before. Really. If there ever was a moment when it would be possible to make our hill in winter, this was it. Really. These lines will now be retired to the same place all the other unsuccessful lines have gone.

To sum up, by conversation number two, the truck driver and I had agreed to meet at the bottom of the hill.

Per specifics of rule # 6, I had the wrong vehicle for the job which meant loading up the car, driving it up the hill, unloading it as fast as I could before sliding down the hill for another load, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum.

The new folks who live at the corner where all this commerce goes on seemed a bit mystified, even miffed by all the activity. This, of course, is because they don’t ever drive up the hill and find out what those of us who live up here know. The hill is a bear. We can send people to the moon, but sometimes no vehicle can get up this hill. Sometimes even the plows in town don’t make this hill. Really.

Having lived at the top of this hill for twenty years now, I know that come winter there is almost always going to be one or two vehicles abandoned at Flag Farm on snowy nights. There are just so many fruitless attempts to get up to the top of the hill and just so many wild slides back down to the bottom that you can do before calling it a day and hiking to the top of the hill on foot.

And there are also just so many lines we can use with our nice UPS driver John about it being a good day on the hill despite the freezing rain. He has already gone off the hill into a ditch once this month and lately he isn’t even open to negotiation.

Fact is, more winter afternoons than not, we arrange to meet the UPS truck at Flag Farm to launch packages. And since several other people do this as well, often it looks a bit like we are all buying and selling hot merchandise off the back of a truck. It is amazing our new neighbors haven’t called the police.

Maybe its the fact we sometimes have to bring the packages down the hill on the kids’ sleds that has helped them let down their guard. This old time flavor of sleds has probably soothed their worries. Now, as they look out their window at the used car lot at the bottom of their driveway and the cluster of folks at the back of the UPS truck, they can tell themselves, “The neighbors aren’t buying hot merchandise in our yard, they are just crazy!”

Here today’s very nice driver unwraps a palette of boxes for me to begin loading into my vehicle.

Here I am halfway through unloading one trip’s worth of boxes into an enormous stack in the middle of the office. Because of rule #3, I have got to reorganize the inventory before I can move all these boxes into their rightful storage place.

Maybe I will have a Law of Attraction breakthrough and Jim will be able to help me with that tomorrow. After all, it is Saturday tomorrow. But then again, given Molly’s Laws of Attraction, he probably will have an unexpected but urgent school function he HAS to go to. Or maybe he’ll have a sudden need to go to Kohl’s for a 4 am doorbuster special and be there all day.

And who can blame the poor guy? We would all do just about anything to avoid moving that inventory around the barn again!

It’s gray out there and snowing hard.

When I went to get this action shot of snow falling, a group of wild turkeys took off from under the bird feeders.

Because there is a layer of ice underneath today’s new snow, our lunch time walk saw us sliding around, flapping our arms with about the same enthusiasm, but considerably less grace than the turkeys.

Winter has only just begun and already, I need encouragement to keep on shoveling. I look for support from Paul, Therese, Agathe, and F.J.

Feeling much better now. Ready to shovel.

Thank you Paul Neyron Rose, Therese Bugnet Rose, Agathe Incarnata Rose, and F.J. Grootendorst Rose.

With nothing to plant, weed, or harvest I have lots of time for very important matters, like deciding if my favorite gardening clothes can last another growing season.

These were on the way to the dustbin, but putting out in the snow like that sort of perked up my enthusiasm for getting them through another growing season.

And my boots?

Oh they have YEARS of wear left in them.