Lightning Bug Reminders By Linda Stowe
Sometimes in the evening I open the sliding door to the back porch and breathe in the fresh air. Even though the weather has been balmy, the scent of the evening air is a nice change of pace. Last night I saw a lightning bug. I haven’t seen a lightning bug for years and seeing it took me back to my childhood on the farm.
Our farm was like any of the other small farms in our neighborhood. It had all the basic stuff: family house, chicken house, and any number of out buildings designed for handling livestock, storing hay and straw, housing the tractor, hay baler, plow, and other implements needed to run a farm. The grass was always mowed, and things were put away. Everything looked tidy except for the board pile located near the chicken house.
On warm summer evenings I would lie in my second-floor bedroom trying to find a cool place in my bed. The window would be wide open letting in the night air and the musty smell of corn growing in the field . I could hear the crickets chirp and the soothing sound of my parents sitting on the glider below my window watching lightning bugs and talking about their day.
Wordle guess words: about, board, basic, balmy, baler
~~~~~~~
Polly here. Linda’s writing is beautiful, once again. It is interesting to think about our lives and how we all grew into who we are on this very day. May we appreciate all the good moments from our past.
And.
This is from my Wordle words, for the same day:
I grew up in the city. For most of my young life, I never considered how a cow or a horse might be fed. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind, even once, how food might reach livestock.
Everything I knew came from a store. I thought it was the way of the world. If anyone needed anything, they could simply go to the store.
As an adult, I learned that people grew things to feed their animals. They’d plant fields and fields of hay. They’d wait for it to grow. And when things were just right, they’d go to the barn and break out the baler.
The first time I saw a baler, I had to ask what was happening there. I was probably around 25 years old.
Wordle words: store, reach, break, baler
