I have been sick with a bad cold which I caught from Mark who caught it from Jamey last week.  Today was the first day I felt well enough to leave the house.  

The first thing we did was get me registered to vote.  Our primaries are tomorrow.  It was interesting that when I went in to register, the woman gave me some instructions and told me to tell my husband too.  Mark had stayed out in the truck so I asked her how she knew who my husband is.  She said that when he came in a few days ago to register, he told her I would be coming in.  That’s one of the nice things about living in a small community.  Everybody knows who you are!

Then we went to the firehouse to get a burn permit.  We are overwhelmed with piles of branches so we decided to have a bonfire today.

I tell you, when you’ve been sick at home for a few days, the world is so beautiful when you get outside again.  As we were running these errands, Mark was driving down back country roads and I couldn’t help but say, “Thank You, Lord, for letting us live here!”  There is perfume in the air from all sorts of flowering things and everything is greening up quite nicely!

I have some before and after pictures to show:

Before…

…and after. You can see that the remaining tree is a little stunted on the left side where the big tree was, but hopefully it will fill out with time.

My front walkway is full of lush green ferns and lily of the valley.

When we bought this house, we knew that part of the back deck was dangerous. Mark pulled it out last year and lately he’s been rebuilding it. It just needs to be stained now.

Before:  This was what our back meadow looked like after we did a bunch of pruning last year.

This is why we got the burn permit this morning.

We spent the afternoon burning branches in the back yard.  We made sure to keep the fire under control by spraying the area around it every so often.  It was a warm afternoon to begin with and bringing armloads of branches to throw on the fire was hot work.  At one point, Mark told me to go inside and cool off.

I guess he thought I was getting a little overheated.

There are still a bunch of piles of branches left.  I hated to stop, but Mark said we’ll have to work on it for several weekends to get them all burned.

I was also washing laundry and the day was so nice, I hung it out to dry. Mark got me some new clothesline today because I was down to one old string.

A lot of things keep breaking or falling apart in this house, but I am still so happy and at peace here.  I love everything about living here… except for the bugs!