Rain, Music and Old Jackets

It has been a good week. A solid five inches of rain fell on our farm early in the week and we received another inch last night. Maybe not enough to break the drought. But it is enough to give us hope.barn-jacket

It was a week that also ended with an impromptu jam session, after dinner last night, at a neighboring farm. Our epic version of Ring of Fire was definitely one for the record books: with Cindy on the trap-set, Russ on the recorder and bongo, Tim leading on the guitar and harmonica, our northern Alberta volunteer, Stephanie, on banjo, and yours truly, anchoring it all with a steady beat on the wash-tub bass.

That night had capped a day of hard work hauling logs and repairing fencing. It was a cold day with all of us bundled up to stay warm. I wore my old barn jacket. A jacket that is now a veteran of 17 winters on this farm, witness to chicken and hog butcherings, the birth of calves and lambs, occasional falls in muck, and work in the worst weather.

It is not yet ready for retirement.

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Gods, Wasps and Stranglers: the secret history and redemptive future of fig trees, by Mike Shanahan. 

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10 thoughts on “Rain, Music and Old Jackets

  1. I’m still wearing one with my peasant attire that I used to wear in school.
    It’s great to wear ragged clothes in public. People look at you, realize they apparently have nothing in common with you, and you disapper from view.
    If only they’d disappear from mine, too 🙂

    Re retirement: I heard that word from someone today who, for the moment at least, seems to have lost his little fight among the red-hot hierarchy wars of our late-empire public service.

    Yay for rain!

  2. I’m thinking in another three years you might consider your barn coat officially broken in. It’s likely pretty comfortable by now, and the little patch below the pocket makes me think its a Carhartt. Given the Tennessee winter, you might have another 17 years left in it. Ahh, but given your youngster status (still quite shy of 60) you may well need to buy another down the road. Are there rules in the valley about how one goes about getting the next barn coat?

    • Yep, I’m afraid walking around in new duds and I might be mistaken as a newbie. I might come home with a pot-bellied pig. Or, horrors, I might start putting gas in my diesel tractors.

      • I was thinking more along the line of deliberately abusing a new coat so that it wouldn’t appear to be so new…

        While in grad school out in Nebraska I worked with a guy who received a new coat from his wife for Christmas. It was meant to be a work coat such as your barn coat. But the “new” on it was too much for Les. While stopped at a coffee shop on our way north to a research plot he managed to “accidentally” spill half a cup of coffee down one side of the coat. We all made the oooh and shucks noises… and Les even seemed pretty upset. Then I noticed that little imp sparkle in his eye and I knew he was just christening the coat for its roll in life.

        And about those diesel tractor(s)… there is more than one??

        • Is a pot-bellied pig something you need one of those micro-farms for, or something far worse?

          Carhartt has become douchebag fashion de rigueur over here (as it may have in the urban US); not a speck of dirt on any of it of course, and you have to cut the holes into the accompanying trousers in your spare time.

          • This jacket is actually a “Dickie”. Similar in style to Carhartt but cheaper. They really should pay me to wear it at this stage,

            Micro-farms and micro-bacon.

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