Just a Tiny Bit

Here's a question for you!  How does one write about the Things I get to do today when there are so many delicious activities lined up waiting?  Shall I wrap presents and put chicken feathers in the bows? Shall I make Rosemary Olive Oil for gifts?  Shall I create a wowy-zinger salt scrub with the help of my Giant Sequoia tree?

Shall I create seed packets for sharing from those Honeymooning Lettuce plants left alone just long enough in the garden last fall?  Shall I create fun and interesting labels for the salt scrub?







OR shall I go visit my chickens?  Shall I turn them out into the yard since it's not pouring rain for the first time in 48 hours?  Shall I enclose the coop with protection against the elements to make it more cozy for featherless hens?

OR perhaps I'll jot you all this brief note, be grateful that I have eyes that see and fingers that move to do my bidding, and go to bed early.  It would be easy to go circular, just a tiny bit.

The Box-Car Babe

Does it look too easy?  Everyday I post about something wonderful.  Sometimes it's nature, and nature is always easy.  Some of these posts are about plarking and creating stuff for around the house, the yard and the chickens.  But I don't want to deceive you about the effort.

As a child I read a wonderful book called The Box-Car Children, by Gertrude C. Warner.  I was inspired to the depths of my little soul by the ingenuity of these orphan children, Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny (and Watch, their dog) who made a delightful home in an abandoned box car.  They knew how to make things lovely with hardly anything.  Years later when I had my own daughter, I read the book to her.  It had an amazing effect.  She somehow thought that no matter what project she wanted to accomplish, she could just state it and it would all come together as imagined moments later just as it did in the book.  This trait showed up with enough frequency during her childhood that we began referring to it as "Henry."  What you really need, we would say, is a Henry.

Henry lives between these pages.

So here I am, Handy Henrietta, the Box-Car Babe, making things happen at the speed of thought. My concern is that you might expect the various projects, should you choose to undertake them yourself, and I recommend it highly and certainly hope you do, to take about the same length of time as reading "Things I get to do today".  That is not true.  A few of them take less, but most have fermented on the back burner of my stove of creativity for weeks or more--90% inspiration and 10% perspiration.  That's the easiest way.

Finally, here's a rhetorical question that I always inscribe on my list of "Things I get to do today":  "Why is everything so easy?"  A good Henry just never dies.  We can be so thankful.